Identity Thinking

Identity thinking is the cognitive operation that treats the particular as an instance of the general, the individual as a case of the universal, the specific as an example of the type. It proceeds by classification: this is a chair, this is a worker, this is grief. The classification is necessary—without it, thought and communication become impossible. But the classification also does violence, because the particular is never exhausted by the concept. This chair has a specific history, a particular grain, a way of bearing weight that no general concept "chair" can capture. This worker has hopes, fears, and a biography that the category "worker" erases. Identity thinking treats the concept as adequate to the thing, the map as equivalent to the territory, and in doing so, systematically eliminates the non-identical—the specificities, irregularities, and resistances that make the particular what it irreducibly is. Adorno's entire philosophical project is a defense of the non-identical against identity thinking's smoothing operations.