Adorno’s Account of the Anthropological Crisis and the New Type of Human

Abstract

‘To think that the individual is being neck and crop liquidated is over-optimistic’ (Adorno, 2005, §88; see also Schweppenhäuser, 1971). Theodor W. Adorno’s assertive statement sounds not only overly pessimistic but also elitist. One could imagine Adorno as the last representative of a declining critical tradition contemplating the decay of Western culture. This perspective changes, however, if we consider Adorno not a witness to but a part of the horizon he was sketching out. Without any form of the hypostasisation of human nature, Adorno poses the question of the crisis of the individual in terms of the individual’s recent transformation within the capitalist relations of production and reproduction. Adorno assumes the Marxian category of the organic composition of capital and translates it into an anthropological context by inventing the concept of the ‘organic composition of man’. This seemingly marginal concept is particularly useful if we want to understand, beyond postmodern enthusiasm and romantic whining, the new possibilities that open anytime certain human skills seem to be absorbed by capital and reproduced in collective form and objectified in machines. Rereading Adorno’s conception of the liquidation of the individual against the backdrop of Marx’s idea of the new subject that arises within the capitalist form of production allows us to ask ourselves, on the one hand, whether the golden age of the individual ever really existed and, on the other, what the causes and the results of that liquidation might be.