Machine-required gestures physically train people in Fascist brutality.

Evidence

Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men. It expels from movements all hesitation, deliberation, civility. It subjects them to the implacable, as it were ahistorical demands of objects. Thus the ability is lost, for example, to close a door quietly and discreetly, yet firmly. Those of cars and refrigerators have to be slammed, others have the tendency to snap shut by themselves, imposing on those entering the bad manners of not looking behind them, not shielding the interior of the house which receives them. … What does it mean for the subject that there are no more casement windows to open, but only sliding frames to shove, no gentle latches but turnable handles, no forecourt, no doorstep before the street, no wall around the garden? And which driver is not tempted, merely by the power of his engine, to wipe out the vermin of the street, pedestrians, children and cyclists? The movements machines demand of their users already have the violent, hard-hitting, unresting jerkiness of Fascist maltreatment. Not least to blame for the withering of experience is the fact that things, under the law of pure functionality, assume a form that limits contact with them to mere operation, and tolerates no surplus, either in freedom of conduct or in autonomy of things, which would survive as the core of experience, because it is not consumed by the moment of action. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 35

Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men. It expels from movements all hesitation, deliberation, civility … Thus the ability is lost, for example, to close a door quietly and discreetly, yet firmly. Those of cars and refrigerators have to be slammed, others have the tendency to snap shut by themselves, imposing on those entering the bad manners of not looking behind them, not shielding the interior of the house which receives them … What does it mean for the subject that there are no more casement windows to open, but only sliding frames to shove, no gentle latches but turnable handles, no forecourt, no doorstep before the street, no wall around the garden? And which driver is not tempted, merely by the power of his engine, to wipe out the vermin of the street, pedestrians, children and cyclists? The movements machines demand of their users already have the violent, hard-hitting, unresting jerkiness of Fascist maltreatment. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2184

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that everyday objects — door handles, windows, engines — sculpt the subject’s innervation toward maltreatment is Adorno’s micro-mechanism of fascism at its most penetrating; the causal chain from object form to gesture to character to politics.
• ADDENDUM: Directly extends the ‘trees as infrastructure’ essay’s interest in how material environments shape human conduct — here the built object-world literally trains Fascist bodies; a darker complement to living-root bridges and tamarisk shade.
• SHARE: The door-slam thesis — unselfconscious door-shutting as political somatics — is the kind of detail a design-minded or phenomenologically-inclined friend would argue with delightedly.
• XREF: Connects to the book’s running nature-domination thesis and to the chapter’s earlier claims about technology and self-preservation — also resonates with Adorno’s broader critique of technical rationality. — connects to: Fascist oratory weaponizes the sounds of human pain into technique — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 142
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 35; Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2184