millimetres. The peculiarity of the self is a monopoly commodity determined by
society; it is falsely represented as natural. It is no more than the moustache, the
French accent, the deep voice of the woman of the world, the Lubitsch touch: finger
prints on identity cards which are otherwise exactly the same, and into which the
lives and faces of every single person are transformed by the power of the generality.
Pseudo-individuality is the prerequisite for comprehending tragedy and removing
its poison: only because individuals have ceased to be themselves and are now
merely centres where the general tendencies meet, is it possible to receive them
again, whole and entire, into the generality. In this way mass culture discloses the
fictitious character of the ‘individual’ in the bourgeois era, and is merely unjust in
boasting on account of this dreary harmony of general and particular. The principle
of individuality was always full of contradiction. Individuation has never really
been achieved. Self-preservation in the shape of class has kept everyone at the stage
of a mere species being. Every bourgeois characteristic, in spite of its deviation and
indeed because of it, expressed the same thing: the harshness of the competitive
society. The individual who supported society bore its disfiguring mark; seemingly
free, he was actually the product of its economic and social apparatus. Power based
itself on the prevailing conditions of power when it sought the approval of persons
affected by it. As it progressed, bourgeois society did also develop the individual.
Against the will of its leaders, technology has changed human beings from children
into persons. However, every advance in individuation of this kind took place at the
expense of the individuality in whose name it occurred, so that nothing was left but
the resolve to pursue one’s own particular purpose. The bourgeois whose existence
is split into a business and a private life, whose private life is split into keeping up
his public image and intimacy, whose intimacy is split into the surly partnership of
marriage and the bitter comfort of being quite alone, at odds with himself and
everybody else, is already virtually a Nazi, replete both with enthusiasm and abuse;
or a modern citydweller who can now imagine friendship only as a ‘social contact’:
that is, as being in social contact with others with whom he has no inward contact.
The only reason why the culture industry can deal so successfully with individuality
is that the latter has always reproduced the fragility of society. On the faces of
private individuals and movie heroes put together according to the patterns on
magazine covers vanishes a pretence in which no one now believes; the popularity
of the hero models comes partly from a secret satisfaction that the effort to achieve
individuation has at last been replaced by the effort to imitate, which is admittedly
more breathless. It is idle to hope that this self-contradictory, disintegrating
‘person’ will not last for generations, that the system must collapse because of such
a psychological split, or that the deceitful substitution of the stereotype for the
individual will of itself become unbearable for mankind. Since Shakespeare’s
Hamlet, the unity of the personality has been seen through as a pretence.
Synthetically produced physiognomies show that the people of today have already
forgotten that there was ever a notion of what human life was. For centuries society
has been preparing for Victor Mature and Mickey Rooney. By destroying they come
to fulfil.