“For every person, with all his functions, society has a stand-in ready, to whom the former is in any case no more than an intrusive occupier of his workplace” (Adorno)
The increase in ideologies of ‘individuality’ and ‘individual expression’ is inversely proportional to the actual possibilities for such individuality within society. One might even say that the existence of the former is a symptom of the disappearance of the latter, that the emergence of the signifier (‘individuality’) is like an epitaph for its signified.
Not untypically, one’s ‘individuality’ mimics that of the commodity. The commodity must differentiate itself from other commodities by whatever means. Each must have its quirky tic, style, unique symbolic attachment etc in order to make it different. Its individuality is therefore the secondary effect of competition and bears no qualitative or expressive relation to the object itself. It ‘expresses’ nothing but the empty fact of differentiation.
Similarly the ‘individual’ today must quickly assume some trick or style with which to signify his individuality in the contemporary bazaar of individualities. Again, this is no more than a surface effect which exists only through differentiation and beneath which true individuality is smothered.
21/8 n.b. Lenin (this one, but probably the other one as well) is right that the very idea of the 'individual' needs to be interrogated and re-thought. For a start, see Raymond Williams here.