How does society construct its subjects...The answer is through its arts. (CG)
Partly, but the majority share of this construction is sheer historical necessity: one must learn, go to school, work, etc. Art is a response to this situation, it's the attempt by the subject to grapple with its historical situation. (DR)
I thought about this, but consider what is taught and learned. It can be answered that the construction of the subject is through social relations and custom. And my response is that the content of those relations amount to some form of culture, transmitted through the mediation of a social relation, say as language. It's not that I disagree with the idea that the construction is either a relation or historical necessity. Rather, I have an ulterior motive.
I want to find a way to objectify the construction of the subject for the purpose of examination. I mean we can't actually deal with the mysterious interiority of subjectivity except to reflect on our own, so the next best thing is to consider the product of its expression, which in turn amounts to considering symbolic forms in language and culture, i.e. the arts. This may not be philosophically very defensible, since the problem becomes one of characterizing and interpreting symbolic forms. But at least the forms are visible, audible, and public, that is accessible to comparative argument, while the subject per se is not. The argument against this idea, which I can almost hear Adorno make (via an Hegelian model), is that there can not be an identity between the subject and its expressions. To which I answer, since I can not know the subject in any form as itself, I will just have to take my chances with its objective expressions. However, notice that objective expression can be quite comprehensive, since this amounts to the totality of communication through language and body. It is easily forgotten that language or voice and body are primary art forms--say as poetry, song, dance, mimicry, etc--not to mention, the apparently un-artful ordinary conversation.
On the next part, that art is a response to historical conditions. Yes, but. Art or let's say more generally, cultural forms also compose a medium of social relations and therefore part of the historical conditions themselves. That is, I think these forms are a multipurpose utility, as it were. While we invent them, occasionally out of nothing and also in response to historical conditions, these forms are also symbolic constructions which are utilized as a learning medium, which in turn perpetuate particular social relations and symbolic constructions.
I have another agenda also, which is to get around the problem of Hegel's phenomenology of mind (to a limited extent, I think this was what Adorno was after too--but I could easily be wrong, since I haven't read enough of him to know). Hegel's ontological and epistemological solutions to questions about the nature of phenomenon was to construe the phenomenon of the world as identical to the phenomenon of the mind, to make them somehow interchangeable (through some very fancy linguistic tricks of dialectical reason). But these are not identical and not interchangeable.
On the other hand, almost all of Hegel's discussions can be transferred from applying to the world at large, and restricted to applying to culture, society, and the specifically `human' world. This is, as opposed to, say the world of physical phenomenon, like those considered in physical science. I think historically this has been done almost by habit and is why Hegel seems like such a basic foundation to almost all the subsequent philosophies of culture and society (outside of the anglo-american empirical branches).
Anyway this is a detour from Adorno, but it applies to his turn to Freud as a means to discussing the construction of subject and subjectivity.
On the other points, Schoenberg v Stravinsky, and the where and how of a critique of the bourgeois, I'll have to put together tonight after work..
I also need to finish ND (not to mention the rest of Hegel, your thesis, and a huge pile of other things). At the moment, in ND I am in between sections `On the dialectics of identity' and `cognitative self-reflection'.
Chuck Grimes