Alternatively, the "subject", as knower of the object, as the ground of knowledge, the speaker of the subject of a sentence referent to a substance, is a reflex of its knowledge, of the object itself, such that the subject constantly passes over into its object, reifying itself and recoiling from its self-reification, as precisely not what it is, hence existing only in and as its perpetual self-alienation. Hence alienation and reification are merely artefacts of metaphysical subjectivism.

Now I don't think that that is wholely the case, that the notions of alienation and reification can be wished away in the name of the givenness of the world. But perhaps these notions can be only properly recuperated by dissolving the notion of the subject, (which is exclusively referent to the "rational animal" as knower), in favor of a conception of human selves/agents existing only through their (social) relations with one another, initially in really embedded, practically oriented conditions.

What gets reified is the non-subjective human relationships subtending the transactions with the object world between them, (which are formative for the "folding" of agency-sustained selves), blocking off social recognitions and dissociating the contextual "point" of transactions between them, in favor of the adoption of an objectifying stance indifferently toward others and toward the world. The splitting-off of the conflictual tensions between such selves/agents by means of an objectified, consensual "reality" dissociated from its practical-relational contexts and any expression of need, would be the very alienation by which the "subject" perpetually is constituted in its "autonomy". Hence abstracted statements about objective states-of-affairs would constantly miss their "point", bypassing both the human relationships/interactions that contextualize them and the world in which they occur.

Deconstructing the "subject" would be of little avail, if its criteria of "autonomy" and worldlessness would remain untouched, but rather would simply deliver such a "subject" unto the reification of the sheer givenness of the world and objective knowledge of it. What is needed is rather a shifting of the ground on which both human existence and the world are to be conceived. A micrological account of reification and alienation, as the dissociation of relational communication under the force of circumstances, would then underpin and re-enforce a macrological, socio-structural account of alienation and reification.

John,
the post was a bit one sided. Molt does emphasis that for Adorno, the subject is always an object itself, and is on equal level with the objects. She says that it is this
that allows Adorno to establish a relationship between subjects and the world that is not necessarily one of appropriation.

For Adorno the role of the object becomes just as important as that of the subjects. The subject still remains active to the extent that it must begin the relationship to the object, even by means of classification. However, it must then become 'fearlessly passive' to the object, and the object show sides that reveal its non-identity with the original classification. At the same time the original classification may reveal sides of the object where the object is insufficient. .

She adds that the important thing to remember about Adorno's subject, however, is that it must not absolutize itself and its concepts: it must remain to open be corrected by the objects.

John,
The Molt text is primarily concerned with how accurate is Habermas’s claim that Adorno’s philosophy is still anchored in the philosophy of consciousness. She says that it is clear that Adorno departs from within the conceptual framework of the philosophy of subject and object.

She also adds that Adorno has deconstructed the traditional meaning of these terms: 'he has shown how they depend on each other, how one cannot be given priority over the other in the sense of being more important, how the traditional hierarchy of the terms is mistaken.'

She goes on to say that there are problems with Adorno deconstruction:

There is Honneth and Habermas’s point that Adorno’s philosophy leaves no route to political praxis. For this I will only indicate here that Adorno can be seen as advancing a different type of practice. This type of practice is one that leaves behind the traditional division between theory and practice, one that focuses on subjective experience and the power of subjective thought, but in which the subject must recognize its own objectivity.

What is not explored is the subject in the world created by instrumental reason. As I understand it Adorno appeals to autonomy.

Yeah, well, I was wandering about there, between Adorno, Habermas, and Heidegger, mixing in some of the alchemical potions that go into my home brew,- (you know some of my ingredients by now, Wittgenstein, Levinas, Whitehead, Gadamer/Arendt). I was picking up on my long since dissatisfaction with Habermas, while recurring to an early notion of his that he seems to have abandoned: namely, ideology as systematically distorted communication. He seems to have taken that in a systematic and procedural direction, with the "ideal speech situation", which is always counterfactual and never quite instantiated or institutionally specified, losing hold of all "concreteness" through an excessive cognitivism that privileges discursive abstraction and gains "access" to the realms of practice only by sociologizing it and focusing on a version of epistemic "certainty" qua security of consensus, for both "political" and epistemic reasons.

So my basic proposal was to understand the notion of "reification" in ongoing processes of communicative interaction in initially really embedded, practically oriented conditions, which generate worldly "meaning", micrologically as, in speech-act terms, the dissociation of propositional contents from illocutionary force, whereby the modal-relational and contextual elements of meaning-constitution are suppressed and split-off, while, at the same time, distorting, uprooting, and overextending the meaning/application of the propositional contents of cognitive claims. On the one hand, that would describe a "quality" of local interactions with their self-reifiying tendencies that would instantiate and give rise to more "global" socio-structural reifying tendencies, while the latter would re-enforce the former. On the other hand, that would begin to account for an exclusive pre-dominance of an objectifying, cognitive-instrumental conception of "reason" to the detriment of all else, and for the (de-)formation of selves/agents as "subjects", who are at once complicit in and alienated from objectifying cognition, of which they are nonetheless and even "rightly" the bearers. This, at least, would "capture" some of Adorno's stigmatization of "communication", which Habermas challenges and repudiates, as partaking of the inevitable functionalization of reified "society".

But the first paragraph of my above first comment was addressing the potential criticism that "reification" and "alienation" are merely artefacts of the subjectivist metaphysics encoded into Hegelian-Marxism, whether from an "objectivist" point-of-view, such as positivism or Popperian "scientific realism" or from an Heideggerian perspective. The latter case is, of course, the more complicated one, since it raises something of the same concerns and issues, (hence its rivalry). But, aside from concerns as to whether "Dasein" really manages to break-out of the subjectivist idealism it excoriates, and as to whether it adequately conceives of the constitutive role of "the other" in its quest for otherness, and as to whether it de-differentiates crucial distinctions between nature and socio-historical reality and between "ontological truth" and intra-worldly empirical learning, and as to whether it just stuffs the "transcendental subject" back into the empirical one and thus at once over-inflates and "ontologizes" the latter, while extending the aporia of "transcendental constitution", the alienation of "modern man" qua "subject" is traced to a forgetfulness/withdrawal of "Being", which itself is said to be a "destining" of "Being", which renders the "alienation" of the "subject at once inevitable, irremediable and negligible. It's not for "nothing" that Horkheimer in the 1930's already styled "authoritarian metaphysics",- (no need to name names),- as "the reified transcendance of reification".

But the problem that I was espying in Adorno concerns whether his "deconstruction" of the subject-object relation, aside from the fact that those two terms are already over-generalizations, and though the connection/relation between the two is mutually "constitutive" and hence "fundamental", actually breaks out of its constrictions, as rooted in inherited epistemological problematics, and achieves any "new ground" in relation the practice, or whether, hypostatizing a kind of negative Neo-Kantian critique of knowledge, as per his academic "origins", whereby the only practice that is acknowledged is that of knowledge professionals, which merely reflects and re-enforces the allegedly total reification of "society", in the manner of "we have met the enemy and it is us", he reifies the very terms he critiques, leaving any "shifting of ground" to the place-holder of cognitivized aesthetic experience/production, as the quasi-eschatological locus of split-off "experience" and absent "communication". The problem is not just a missing relation to practice, but a missing tertiam datur of any context of "worldliness", by which the notion of "mediation" could be applied. (There, of course, is also the problem of his conflating an inadequate economics and an unconceived politics into the image of a "totally administered society").

Doesn't Adorno just circle about the aporias of the subject-object relation without proffering or allowing for any reformulation of conceptions by which the indicted impasse might be broken or dissolved? (The Adornian response would presumably be that any such conceptual reformulation would be subject to the same reifying "forces" deriving from the material "infrastructure" that the "original" conceptions reflected). But the further point is that the subject-object relation remains tied to the entitative thinking of "metaphysics", to which the notion of non-objectifying thinking takes objection, and, by focusing on the "non-identity" of the "object", it misses the otherness of the other, which is the root of any moral, if not political, resistance to unrestrictedly instrumentalized practice. It's only and even in the "face" of the other that the "mournfulness" of suffering nature takes hold and becomes amenable to any possible practice.

There are further complicated issues here of what any "deconstruction" amounts to as a critical procedure and what "fruits" it might bear, let alone how it might relate to possible or actual practices or political "programs" that would organize the latter. But I've poured out my libations for tonight.

It occurs to me that I forgot to get to the issue that set of my last screed here, which was that Adorno makes an apparant appeal to "autonomy" in opposition to the "world" of entirely instrumentalized reason. While it's true that Adorno's contention that "the wrong life can not be rightly lived" seems to imply an ethic of resistance, perhaps even, as Bernstein would have it, a kind of "fugitive" version of "virtue" ethics, nonetheless the appeal to "autonomy", rooted in the Kantian side of Adorno's thinking, is, in fact, tied to the deepest roots of metaphysical thinking from its Greek inception, including especially the whole notion of philosophical theory, and can be of little avail in finding a way out of the quandary, but, to the contrary, is one of the matters that is most eminently in need of "deconstruction". (Each and every irreducibly particular human being is existentially separate from each and every other human being, but such existential separateness is the the same as "autonomy", and the notion of "freedom" as self-determination needs to take into account the fundamental dependency of human beings on relatedness with others to even come to be ing as a self/agent and their inevitable intrication in elementary social groups, which, rather than "individuals", would form the basic unit of social analysis).

Greek metaphysical thinking began with the realization of the transcendence of Being, that Being is beyond any thing said or done about it, which, in turn, gave rise to the recognition of a quasi-systematic implicature by means of which the order of beings could be arrayed and understood. That amounted to an emergence from mythic enmeshment in and subjection to the "powers" of nature, which emergence also contained a trauma of separation. But the counterpart to the transcendence of Being was the "rational soul", which recognized it, which raised itself up into the bliss of theoretic contemplation, as the balm and compensation for its new-found trauma, which, in turn, founded a new ethic of self-mastery, of self-governance on the model of the cosmic order, which aristocratic ethos of "autonomy", self-law, was closely tied to the pre-eminence of theoria.

Now it should be apparent that Adorno's critique of social domination and the complicity of conceptual thought and knowledge in it can not rest upon such a "foundation", but such an appeal to "autonomy" can only be indicative of the impasse of his thinking and paradoxical. (Indeed, his whole appeal to "autonomous" artworks as resistent to reified society and as a model of an alternative non-identical mode of thinking and knowing is based on the fact that such artworks are not really "autonomous"). But this oddity perhaps connects up with another one: Adorno's incessant denunciation of "exchange society", by which he presumably means the prevasive instrumentalization of all social relations in a society dominated by commodity production (and the over-riding imperative to reproduce and accumulate capital). The oddity here is that all societies are based on exchange, namely, symbolic exhange, not just for their organization, but for the very "humanness", as well. (This goes back to Marx and his incomplete critique and separation from his German Idealist sources: is the "free association of the producers" an atomistic or a communitarian conception?) Indeed, this goes to what I said above about a "negative Neo-Knatian critique of knowledge, for one of Adorno's basic claims is that the "transcendental subject" is false and illusory, but that this illusion is correlate to the "exchange society" with its irresolvable antagonisms and divisions, as the alleged "constitution" of the "truth" of knowledge as a whole, in denial of those antagonisms and divisions, and this illusion of "transcendental constitution" will persist so long as the "exchange society" does. (The simliarity to and difference from Wittgenstein's critical dissolution of epistemology is noteworthy). "Autonomy", then, is really a placeholder for something else, not for an unbridled realization of individual "freedom", but for a collective transformation of society/political community as a whole, for a new form of life, based on an altered conception and distribution of "goods".

I think the clue here is in the notion of alienation itself. For Adorno's vision of the "reconciled" condition is one where the alien is no longer compulsively assimilated and suborned to "identity thinking", but is let be, in its proximity and distance, no longer perceived as something threatening. It's not that alienation should or even can be utterly irradicated or abolished, for a certain baseline of alienness belongs to being a separate self. And alienation is to some measure a "positive value, for, to speak with Hegel, as passing over into otherness, the individual rises above his narrow, particularistic, and egotistic self-interestedness to participate in publicness, "the universal", and, to speak with Levinas, the relation to the other is constitutive for becoming a genuine self, for its "inspiration". It's rather the incapacity to experience alienation that is politically dangerous, the adaption and assimilation of alienated selves to the false satisfaction of an entirely commodified world. The alternative condition would be a life in common of fruitful activity in relation to others, wherein our particular and separate embodied existence would no longer be experienced as a degrading objectification, giving rise to fantasy of being a "transcendental subject".

(I had a time-out scare there so I posted without proof-reading or quite finishing).

The matter for (re)thinking, then, how to conceive of selfhood/agency, "freedom", in ways that take account of its fundamental sociality and of the constitutive role of relatedness to others, and of self-determination, as the capacity to make fundamental choices with self-formative implications in ways conducive to particular embodiment without being coercive toward mutual needs, otherwise than in the traditional terms of domineering, self-mastering "autonomy", exclusive of both others and the world. That would at least seem a preliminary consideration to any attempt at the organization of collective praxis toward the releasement of mortal political communities from their reifying and antagonistic tendencies.

John,
I've posted your comments to this post as a post on philosophical conversations.

I agree with you that:

Adorno makes an apparent appeal to "autonomy" in opposition to the "world" of entirely instrumentalized reason. While it's true that Adorno's contention that "the wrong life can not be rightly lived" seems to imply an ethic of resistance, perhaps even, as Bernstein would have it, a kind of "fugitive" version of "virtue" ethics

I would add a nihilistic world.

I also agree that Adorno appeal to "autonomy", rooted in the Kantian; it operates as a touchstone. But why autonomy rather than Hegel's ethics of 'self-realization'? Was there an argument for this? I presume that autonomy is understood to be a virtue in the damaged life of liberal capitalist societies. Presumably autonomy cannot be the property of individuals, given Adorno's analysis of the effects of liberal capitalist societies on the individual in terms of the loss of individual autonomy in a world where there is no outside to techno-capitalist rationality.