Abstract:

How should we think about individual responsibility when social structures shape not only what agents can do, but also what they perceive as relevant, possible, or as their responsibility in the first place? Starting from Adorno’s notion of bourgeois coldness, this paper develops the concept of structural indifference: a socially organized form of relationlessness in which the consequences of our practices for others—and our own participation in reproducing the conditions that generate them—disappear from practical view.

To clarify this idea, I develop a practice-theoretical account of social structure. Structures are neither external forces determining individual action nor aggregates of individual choices, but sedimented ensembles of social practices: they condition action while being continuously reproduced through it. This recursive relation gives rise to two dimensions of responsibility: responsibility within  structures and responsibility for their reproduction.

Structural indifference, I argue, is a pathological form of this relation. Understood as a form of alienation—a “relation of relationlessness”—it renders actually existing social connections practically invisible. Resistance, accordingly, involves more than an individual refusal to comply: it can make these connections visible, interrupt established practices, and transform the conditions of their reproduction.