Manufactured objects encode impersonal directives that strip users of individuality

Evidence

What is particularly striking about the comparison between Sartre’s two versions of this idea is that even the Sartre of the earlier work immediately links the experience of the we-subject to that of manufactured objects. There is, we might say, no personal way of opening a can, of punching a time card, of turning on a faucet: each of these objects has built into it an impersonal directive, a set of instructions as to the way in which “anybody” must use them, so that in doing so, we lose our own personal individuality and become mere delegates of that “undifferentiated transcendance” which is the we-subject. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 504

Categorization

• XREF: This alienated-object reading of everyday commodities should connect to Lukács’s reification chapter in History and Class Consciousness, and to Heidegger’s handiness/equipment analysis — the ‘for anyone’ structure of tools is essentially Zuhandenheit, and Jameson is deriving a Frankfurt-School-sympathetic Marxian reading of it. — connects to: Using manufactured objects places the user in the presence of others; Categorical abstraction suspends the ethical rules of personal interaction; False identity means apparent individuality itself is the manufactured illusion — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 24 (+5 more)
• DEFINE: Clarifies the Sartrean ‘we-subject’ by grounding it in the mundane experience of using mass-produced objects — anonymity via the impersonal object’s built-in instructions.

Broader Connections

• Categorical abstraction suspends the ethical rules of personal interaction #expands (0.80)
• Using manufactured objects places the user in the presence of others #qualifies (0.75)
• False identity means apparent individuality itself is the manufactured illusion #corroborates (0.75) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 24
• Abject traces of prior owners complicate the impersonality of commodity exchange #complicates (0.75) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 257
• The exchange sphere masks exploitative production relations and produces the illusion of isolated individuals #expands (0.72)
• Data extraction infrastructures deform the self that autonomy and freedom depend on #expands (0.72) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 148