The uncanny quality of mass-produced objects springs from repeating the unrepeatable

Evidence

It is not the standardization as such which makes these houses from the nineteenth century look so uncanny today as much as the relentless repetition of the unrepeatable, all those pillars and bay windows, little stairs and turrets. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 126

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Walter Benjamin’s aura and mechanical reproduction; also the uncanny as repetition of the same — Freud’s unheimlich. — connects to: Perfect technical reproduction makes any intended meaning in film sound false — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 164; Generic hesitation itself can produce the uncanny in a film — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 439
• SHARE: Good for someone interested in kitsch/vernacular architecture — the observation that standardizing claims to uniqueness (each Victorian house a ‘villa of its own’) is what makes them uncanny.

Related

• Mass culture perfects its technical presentation while the content remains fatuous and standardized (similarity 0.81)