CONTRADICTION, CRITIQUE, AND DIALECTIC IN ADORNO A ...

Adorno sees the modern individual as a formal and thin self whose psychological
contents and the meaning of whose world are almost fully determined by something
beyond herself, something that is beyond her cognitive grasp and her practical control,
which is derived from the economic structure of society, and which gives rise to a totality
of social norms and modes of thinking that the individual encounters as ready-made,
rigid, and seemingly natural. In today's social reality, the relations of production and the
imperatives of consumption (as well as the associated modes of self-understanding,
rational calculation, and models for social relations) confront individuals as if they were
necessary and eternal structures, structures that constitute the experience and contents of
the empirical subject.
With this point, we get the theoretical contradiction of the conception of
subjectivity that attempts to conceive the subject in terms of the individual, concrete and
living self. The problem with this conception is that, when we look at the individual and
try to understanding it in terms of itself alone, we find nothing but a decimated and
indeterminate I. The form and content of this I is in fact intelligible only by appealing to
the supra-individual structure of the socio-economic order. The concept of the
empirical, individual subject is thus insufficient for understanding the modern subject; it
need only be slightly extended to see that they converge in the insight that the concrete serves for
nothing better than that something, by being in some way distinct, can be identified, possessed,
and sold. The marrow of experience has been sucked out; there is none, not even that apparently
set at a remove from commerce, that has not been gnawed away. At the heart of the economy is a
process of concentration and centralization that has the power to absorb what is scattered. It
leaves traces of independent existences only for professional statistics and permeates the most
subtle spiritual innervations often without its being possible to perceive the mediations. The
mendacious personalization of politics and the blather about ‘man in the age of inhumanity’ are
appropriate to the objective pesudoindividualization; but this becomes an unbearable burden for
art because there is no art without individuation.
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