"In the commodity fetishists of the new model, in the ‘sado-masochistic character’, in those receptive to today’s mass art, the same thing shows itself in many ways. The masochistic culture is the necessary manifestation of almighty production itself. When the feelings seize on exchange value it is no mystical transubstantiation. It corresponds to the behavior of the prisoner who loves his cell because he has been left nothing else to love. The sacrifice of individuality, which accommodates itself to the regularity of the successful, the doing of what everybody else does, follows from the basic fact that in broad areas the same thing is offered to everybody by the standardized production of consumption goods. But the commercial necessary of connecting this identity leads to the manipulation of taste and the official culture’s pretense of individualism which necessarily increases in proportion to the liquidation of the individual. Even in the realm of the superstructure, the appearance is not merely the concealment of the essence, but proceeds of necessity from the essence itself. The identical character of goods which everyone must buy hides itself behind the rigor of universally compulsory style. The fiction of the relation between supply and demand survives in the fictitiously individual nuances."