Okay, this is a very clear description--this does help, thanks! And I understand more clearly now that you were mentioning the Frankfurt School folks and others not for the reason I had thought.

However, I think there's a problem: these ideas have been surpassed by the Enlightenment-driven scientific endeavor long ago.

The model of individuals as individuals is robustly supported by biology (mind is a product of brain, brain is within individuals, and while we are social creatures with sensitivity to context from other individuals, we are our own selves). We can quantify and explore how different factors of our social context can alter our own views (e.g. fear of ostracism, pairing with something desirable, etc. etc.), making precise the nature of the "whirlpool" yet without altering the fundamental conceptualization of the individual. We can measure the stability of outlooks over time, explore how outlook changes when people's context changes, look for critical periods during development, and so on. A lot of this knowledge has come in the last few decades--especially exploration of the typical limitations of rational thought to control our behavior and systems-everything to help tie things together with sufficient precision to sometimes even be instructive.

So individuation is not such a bad idea, but like a lot of ideas from that long ago, it's very dated, and probably not terribly useful except as history (and intellectual poetry--which can be important for aligning our intuitions!). It might be more useful than intersectionality, but as I pointed out, that was outdated before it even started. Lawyers seem rather averse to mathematics, so maybe things like that are/were specifically needed to guide law in the right direction.

Horkheimer wrote--I forget where; maybe it was in Traditional and Critical Theory?--a list of things that the modern scientific method could never achieve and which Critical Theory would be needed for. It's quite hilarious, in retrospect, that almost to an item, it all was accomplished by simply taking the Enlightenment to heart more fully, following the traditional scientific method more fully. The idea of rights for all, the idea of basing belief on evidence (here's where the empiricists' victory over the rationalists is relevant), and so on.

So the reason I don't view yours as a particularly compelling argument critiquing individuality is that it uses a framework that seems okay as far as it goes, but makes empirical claims that have not been validated with evidence, while a lot of other things have accumulated a lot of evidence (or counter-evidence and been discarded) in the past fifty years.