> 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.
It gets even more complicated, because one of Adorno's points is that the subject refers not just to individuals but organized collectives of all sorts (a political party, a corporation, a bank, or what have you). These collective subjects of history are as complicated and contradictory as biological individuals. In a strange kind of way, the closer to the subject you get, the more the subjectivity in question turns into a mask, a socialized object (thus in Marx, the entrepreneur turns out to be merely the incarnation of larger social forces); the closer to the object-form you get, i.e. the commodity, the more subjectively-mediated it becomes (i.e. is linked to mass culture, consumerism, etc.). Dialectics is a bear, eh?
-- Dennis