Animism had endowed things with souls; industrialism makes
souls into things. On its own account, even in advance of total planning,
the economic apparatus endows commodities with the values which decide the
behavior of people. Since, with the ending of free exchange, commodities
have forfeited all economic qualities except their fetish character, this
character has spread like a cataract across the life of society in all its
aspects. The countless agencies of mass production and its culture impress
standardized behavior on the individual as the only natural, decent and
rational one. Their criterion is self-preservation, successful or
unsuccessful adaptation to the objectivity of their function and the
schemata assigned to it. Everything which is different, from the idea to
criminality, is exposed to the force of the collective, which keeps watch
from the classroom to the trade union. Yet even the threatening collective
is merely a part of the deceptive surface, beneath which are concealed the
powers which manipulate the collective as an agent of violence. Its
brutality, which keeps the individual up to the mark, no more represents
the true quality of people than value represents that of commodities. The
demonically distorted form which things and human beings have taken on in
the clear light of unprejudiced knowledge points back to domination, to
the principle which already impaired the qualities of mana to
spirits and deities and trapped the human gaze in the fakery of sorcerers
and medicine men. The fatalism by which incomprehensible death was
sanctioned in primeval times has now passed over into utterly
comprehensible life. The noonday panic fear in which nature suddenly
appeared to humans as an all-encompassing power has found its
counterpart in the panic which is ready to break out at any moment today:
human beings expect the world, which is without issue, to be set ablaze by
a universal power which they themselves are and over which they are
powerless.
Below, a video of Adorno from a German documentary. Narrated in German,
Adorno's remarks themselves, which begin about 55 seconds into the clip,
are subtitled in English:
