8 Theodor Adorno Quotes on Identity

Theodor Adorno quotes on identity

1. 'In general they are intoxicated by the fame of mass culture, a fame which the latter knows how to manipulate; they could just as well get together in clubs for worshipping film stars or for collecting autographs. What is important to them is the sense of belonging as such, identification, without paying particular attention to its content. As girls, they have trained themselves to faint upon hearing the voice of a 'crooner'. Their applause, cued in by a light-signal, is transmitted directly on the popular radio programmes they are permitted to attend. They call themselves 'jitter-bugs', bugs which carry out reflex movements, performers of their own ecstasy. Merely to be carried away by anything at all, to have something of their own, compensates for their impoverished and barren existence. The gesture of adolescence, which raves for this or that on one day with the ever-present possibility of damning it as idiocy on the next, is now socialized.'

28. 'For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.'

34. 'He who integrates is lost.'

46. 'In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.'

81. 'That all men are alike is exactly what society would like to hear. It considers actual or imagined differences as stigmas indicating that not enough has yet been done; that something has still been left outside its machinery, not quite determined by its totality.'

94. 'The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.'

97. 'The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.'

136. 'Kafka: the solipcist without ipseity.'