1062021, issue 2
Knock Knock
Henry W. Pickford
The individual owes his crystallization to the forms of political economy,
particularly to those of the urban market. Even as the opponent of the pressure
of societization [Vergesellschaftung] he remains the latter’s ownmost product
and its likeness. What enables him to resist, that streak of independence in him,
springs from monadological individual interest and its precipitate, character.
The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained societal law of
exploitation, however much mediated. This means too, however, that his
decay in the present phase must itself not be deduced individualistically, but
from the societal tendency which prevails by means of individuation and not
merely as its enemy.(§ 971)
Adorno’s “urban market” has become today’s digital domain, and its forms of political
economy and ubiquitously reticulated “veil of technology” mark a new phase in the
decay of the individual. “Bourgeois walking” (§ 102) has been eclipsed by the coarse
gestures of scrolling, swiping, and hitting, requiring only the four compass points of left/
right, up/down and target buttons: with these gestures ‘users’ consume content (a mass
noun) and choose people and wares alike in a similar mode of solipsistic distrac tion that
blithely and mercilessly caricatures Walter Benjamin’s now seemingly wistful collectiv-
ist vision. One is dispersed phenomenologically before one is reconsti tuted virtually.
Each person is delivered products – screeds and stories, toothpaste and pharma adverts,
candidate pets and sexual partners – “chosen just for you” with more speed and less
answerability each day. Pseudo-individuation – “have it your way” – has advanced to the
point where the almost innumerable harvested data points for each singleton “end-user”
ensure the delivery of a mixed concoction of mass-produced mediocrity with planned
obsolescence that is perfectly suited to his “prole,” a term that tellingly reduces the
human being to a silhouette. The neness of the grid’s mesh by which our authenticity
is packaged and sold to us preempts genuine experience and growth more than any
self-help book ever could: “werde, was du klickst” and “to thine own bot be true.”
But a qualitative reversal has taken place. The exchange principle remains in
force, of course, but now reaches further into the subject, transforming him into a
social object, for the user-prole is the actual commodity that is traded in the “digital
handshake.” The individual is dissolved –“rendered” –into a set of data points, input
for Markov-chain algorithms, “black box” routines that yield behavioral expectations
for each data set. Individual autonomy and interiority, the process of weighing goals
and conicting values that animates the Kantian picture of the will, seems now as
quaint and kitschy as a creaking Black Forest cuckoo clock. Individual subjectivity is
epiphenomenal; idiosyncratic deviation, ambivalence and inner struggle, conscience, are
statistically insignicant; the algorithmically aggregated is nowadays the rational, and
only it is the real. The bearer of an ‘ethics of conviction’ is a mere screen-memory of
an earlier phase of capitalism, the afterglow of a device permanently powering down.
“Through this dissolution of all the mediating elements within the individual himself,
1072021, issue 2
by virtue of which he was, in spite of everything, also a part of the societal subject, he
regresses, impoverished and coarsened, to the state of a mere societal object” (§ 97).
A primal phenomenon of “the social principium individuationis” is the further
dissolution of an integrated self as theorized by Freud. Alongside making each individ-
ual the executor of repression of his impulses, including those impulses required for any
genuine happiness, neo-liberalist ideology elevated each individual’s rational ego into
the manager of his own assets: natural talents, and the acquired skills and credentials
that insidiously constrict and subordinate his realm of possible experience to the logic
of return on investment. At the same time, this ideology insinuated that each individ-
ual was wholly responsible for his economic fate, rather than the systemic “laws of
motion” that constitute an increasingly overwhelming second nature confronting him.
The cruelty and aggression that one inicted upon oneself for being a “loser’” could
easily be redirected, by charismatic self-promoting “winners,” onto any out-group:
immigrants, elites, political opponents. Part of the psychic regression is precisely this
reduction of others into friend or foe (§ 85). Anonymity online, the use of pseudonyms
or avatars, raties the disintegration of the self; the autonomization [Verselbständigung] of
semblance in online “screen identities” both masks and reveals the autonomization of
unchecked, unrepressed impulses IRL: countless Underground Men impotently seeth-
ing within the Crystal Palace.
In this development the capacity of people to speak with each other is further
degraded, not only by the atrophying of “experience worth communicating” but also
because the means of expression are being replaced “by a societally prepared mech-
anism” (§ 90). Adorno, who castigated the use of slogans, catchphrases, and so on as
symptoms of reied thought, also foresaw the further development into what bears the
deceptively harmless, infantilized name of “emoji.” “The omnipresent images are none,
because they present the wholly general, the average, the standard model, as something
unique or special, and so at the same time deride it. The abolition of the particular is
turned insidiously into something particular. The desire for particularity has already
sedimented in need, and is reproduced on all sides by mass culture, on the pattern of the
comic strip [Funnies]” (§ 92). Emojis are the death masks of the comic strip, frozen rigor
mortis in the service of utmost eciency in the simplest communication, the quickest
means to signal good and bad, friend and foe.
And yet as all language has a double character, so too this picture language
contains within it what might transcend it (§ 97). Underneath the anodyne image
personifying the rationalized signal as stripped of noise as possible, the labored smile of
the salesman heeding the command to “always be selling,” the cartoon-like images at
the same time suggest the reassuring imago of the child’s world as a room full of toys;
they at once evoke and mockingly betray the delicate intimation of what it would feel
like to be genuinely at home, bei sich im anderen, in a sheltered space where a self
still in statu nascendi can wondrously lose and nd itself within an artful second nature
populated by playful possibilities.
1082021, issue 2
All quotations, often modified by me, are from
T. W. A d or n o, Minima Moralia, translated by E.F.N.
Jephcott. London: Verso, 1974.
Henry W. Pickford is Professor of German and
Philosophy at Duke University. He is the author of
The Sense of Semblance: Philosophical Analyses of
Holocaust Art (Fordham University Press); Thinking
with Tolstoy and Wittgenstein: Expression, Emotion, and
Art (Northwestern University Press; forthcoming
in Russian translation with Academic Studies Press);
co-author of In Defense of Intuitions: A New Rationalist
Manifesto (Palgrave Macmillan); co-editor of Der
aufrechte Gang im windschiefen Kapitalismus: Modelle
kritischen Denkens (Springer Verlag); editor and
translator of Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models:
Interventions and Catchwords (Columbia University
Press) and Selected Early Poems of Lev Loseff
(Spuytenduyvil Press); and author of over twenty-
five articles and book chapters. He is currently
co-authoring the book Adorno: A Critical Life and
co-editing the Oxford Handbook to Adorno. More
information about his work can be found on
academia.edu.
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Notes Biography
