Vice-President by Theodor Adorno
The most powerful person is he who is able to do least himself and burden others most with the things for which he lends his name and pockets the credit.
As part of our September student reading, we're publishing an excerpt from Theodor Adorno's beloved collection Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life every day until the end of the month.
All books are 40% off as part of our Student Reading Sale. Ends September 30 at 11:59PM EST. See all our student reading lists here.
Vice-President
Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you. The fungibility of all services and people, and the resultant belief that everyone must be able to do everything, prove, in the existing order, fetters. The egalitarian ideal of interchangeability is a fraud when not backed by the principle of revocability and responsibility to the rank and file. The most powerful person is he who is able to do least himself and burden others most with the things for which he lends his name and pockets the credit. This seems like collectivism, yet amounts only to a feeling of superiority, of exemption from work by the power to control others. In material production, admittedly, interchangeability has an objective basis. The quantification of work processes tends to diminish the difference between the duties of managing director and petrol-pump attendant. It is a wretched ideology which postulates that more intelligence, experience, even training is needed to run a trust under present conditions than to read a pressure-gauge. But while this ideology is obstinately upheld in material production, the intellect is subjected to its opposite. The is the doctrine, now gone to the dogs, of the universitas literarum, of the equality of all in the republic of scholarship, which not only employs everybody as overseers of everybody, but is supposed to qualify everybody to do everybody else's work equally well. Interchangeability subjects ideas to the same procedure as exchange imposes on things. The incommensurable is eliminated. But while the first task of thought is to criticize the all-embracing commensurability that stems from exchange relationships, this commensurability constitutes the intellectual relations of production which turn against the forces of production. In the material realm interchangeability is what is already possible, and non-interchangeability the pretext for preventing it; in theory, which ought properly to see through this kind of quid pro quo, interchangeability serves to allow the mechanism to propagate itself even where its objective antithesis is to be found. Non-interchangeability alone could arrest the incorporation of mind into the ranks of employment. The demand, presented as obvious, that every intellectual achievement should be performable by every qualified member of an organization, make the most blinkered academic technician the measure of intellect: where is this very man to find the ability to criticize his own technification?
Thus the economy effects the levelling process that then calls after itself in anger "Stop thief!" In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew. While the individual, like all individualistic processes of production, has fallen behind the state of technology and become historically obsolete, he becomes the custodian of truth, as the condemned against the victor. For the individual alone preserves, in however distorted a form, a trace of that which legitimizes all technification, and yet to which the latter blinds itself. Because unbridled progress exhibits no immediate identity with that of mankind, its antithesis can give true progress shelter. A pencil and rubber are of more use to thought than a battalion of assistants. Those who neither give themselves up wholly to the individualism of intellectual production nor are prepared to pitch themselves headlong into the collectivism of egalitarian interchangeability, with its inherent contempt for man, must fall back on free collaboration and solidarity, with shared responsibility. Anything else sells off the intellect to forms of business and therefore finally to the latter's interests.
All books are 40% off as part of our Student Reading Sale. Ends September 30 at 11:59PM EST. See all our student reading lists here.
