In his “Gloss on Personality” from Critical Models, published first in 1963 as Eingriffe: Neun kritische Modelle, Theodor Adorno briefly considers some recent etymological changes reshaping the word personality, taking a special interest in this particular change of circumstances: whereas we once might have spoken of a person having a personality, at some point we came instead to think and to speak of a person being a personality. The state of ‘being’ a ‘personality’ appears to confer upon someone the strength, power, and related attributes associated with distinctive status. The OED first links the English form of this word to Anglo Norman and Latin roots (personalité, personalities), when “personality” still described the three persons of God; from this departure point the word in the seventeenth century came to mean the quality of being a person (as opposed to an animal). The eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of personality as relating to the individual and often admirable characteristics that a person might possess, whereas the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries oversaw the change that Adorno calls out above, whereby personality typically comes to designate a powerful person whose very identity is put in service to the “bourgeois religion of success” (Adorno 163).

And so, struggling against the hegemony of conformity in his own time, a time not unlike our own in this respect, Adorno traces the history of the notion of personality from Kant’s idea that people can have—but not be—a personality, to the ‘personalities’ of the early twentieth century who capitalize, often financially, on their status as celebrity personalities. The revised meaning of personality connotes strength and power and is subsumed by “individual persons who, according to Kant’s own distinction, define themselves more by their price than by their dignity” (Adorno 162). The force of Adorno’s “Gloss,” however, comes from its identification of the even more recent disinterest in personality based on individual, even eccentric, characteristics; Adorno recalls how being called “quite a character” is no longer in any way a compliment, but a derogatory jab at “those who resist the omnipresent mechanisms of conformity,” those who “are no longer considered to be the more capable persons” (163). To restore as principal denotation for the word
“personality” the most common sense of personality from the late eighteenth-century—a person’s individual and distinctive character—is no doubt a lost cause; however, Adorno urges the reader that something of this formerly-common sense of the word must be saved: the “critical consciousness” of personality’s “intrinsic force of I”—which Adorno describes as “the strength of the individual not to entrust himself to what blindly sweeps down upon him,” and the will to resist “blindly” coming to “resemble” the wave that sweeps down (165). Taken to idiosyncratic extreme, this “force of I” runs the risk of becoming blindly entrenched in the personal and taking on a relentless, potentially solipsistic self-expression that in its idiolect enables but also limits stylistic play. The impersonal by contrast forces one outside of oneself, to a sort of “out of place-ness." (from "Coetzee, Blanchot and the Work of Writing: The Impersonality of Childhood" forthcoming in MediaTropes December 2014.