Paradoxical Contradictions of Digital Expressiveness

This article shows that the Honnethian category of “paradoxes of capitalist modernization”, as analysed in the sphere of “qualitative individualism”, in particular, offers valuable resources for the study of digital social environments. This category enables us to account for the dimension of “expressiveness” that defines online interactions, while setting it in the historical perspective of the evolution of capitalist societies. It thus opens new directions that invite us to analyse relations of recognition outside of their strictly inter-subjective framework, and thus represents a powerful tool for broadening the theory of recognition.