3.4.5. The Individual and the Species-Being
Adorno (1998) reflects on the dialectics of structure and agency and individual and social knowledge in his article On Subject and Object, where he speaks of a dialectic of the individual subject and the human species-being as subject:
No concept of the subject can have the element of individual humanity […] separated from it in thought; without any reference to it, subject would lose all significance. Conversely, the particular human individual, as soon as one reflects upon it under the guise of the universality of its concept, which does not signify merely something particular being hic et nunc, is already transformed into a universal, similar to what was expressed in the idealist concept of the subject; even the expression ‘particular person’ requires the concept of species simply in order to be meaningful (Adorno 1998, 245).
The dependence of ‘cognitive subjects upon space, time, and forms of thought marks their dependence on the species’ (Adorno 1998, 252). Adorno comments on the dialectic of the universal and the particular: ‘Neither one can exist without the other, the particular only as determined and this universal, the universal only as the determination of a particular and thus itself particular. Both of them are and are not. This is one of the strongest motives of a nonidealist dialectics’ (Adorno 1998, 257). So for Adorno, the human being is universal and particular at the same time: it can only be an individual by being a social species-being and only social by also being individual. There is a dialectic of the individual and the social.
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Critical Theory of Communication