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

according to which any one individual is just as good as any other so long as they can
expend an equal amount of labor power, which means that any one individual can be
replaced by any other without regard for individual particularities. The alleged equality of
individuals thus has an aspect of truth, only not in a qualitatively equal dignity of
personhood, but rather in a purely quantitative exchangeability of one individual’s worth
for another’s, and in an equal emptiness of substantial (qualitative) content.
Adorno calls this phenomenon the rule of “equivalence.” 129 The phenomenon is
not only restricted to the way individuals are socially valued and how they view one
another but also how they view themselves. Adorno claims that in this process the
individual eventually comes to measure her own worth in terms of the abstract market
value of her skills. She thus becomes self-alienated. And, moreover, by accepting the
measure given by the market for her own self-worth, the individual begins to mold her
whole identity in order to adapt to the economic apparatus, thus succumbing to total
control by the external forces of the market. “Je weiter aber der Prozeß der
Selbsterhaltung durch bürgerliche Arbeitsteilung geleistet wird, um so mehr erzwingt er
die Selbstentäußerung der Individuen, die sich an Leib und Seele nach der technischen
Apparatur zu formen haben.” 130
Thus, for Adorno, although the social realm of exchange does indeed have an
aspect by which it equalizes all individuals, it is not in a way that promotes the
constitution of a substantial individuality, as it is for Hegel, but rather in a way that strips
129 See Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung, in Max Horkheimer: Gesammelte
Schriften, Vol. 5 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1997), 30.
130 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung, in Max Horkheimer: Gesammelte
Schriften, Vol. 5 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1997), 52. “[T]he more the process of
self-preservation is promoted by the bourgeois division of labor, the more it enforces the self-alienation of
individuals, who must shape themselves body and soul in accordance with the apparatus.”
121