reification

The reification of art and religion, a symptom of their historical obsolescence, takes the form of their instrumentalization, their reduction to a mere use value. At this point they become ‘cultural goods’, writes Adorno, and ‘are no longer taken quite seriously by anybody.’

Contrary to Java, C++ and C# implement generics via reification, meaning that each specific version of a generic class, like List is converted into a concrete class, either at compile time (C++) or at runtime (C#).