Every theory tends to harden into a reified object and must be perpetually dismantled

Evidence

Such thought therefore aims at maintaining contact with the concrete, painfully continuing a process of thinking about the world itself, at the same time that it rectifies its own inevitable falsifications at every moment, thus appearing to unravel everything it had been able to achieve. Yet not altogether: for the genuine content acquired remains, albeit in what Hegel would have called a canceled and transcended fashion; and negative dialectics does not result in an empty formalism, but rather in a thoroughgoing critique of forms, in a painstaking and well-nigh permanent destruction of every possible hypostasis of the various moments of thinking itself. For it is inevitable that every theory about the world, in its very moment of formation, tends to become an object for the mind and to be itself invested with all the prestige and permanency of a real thing in its own right, thus effacing the very dialectical process from which it emerged: and it is this optical illusion of the substantiality of thought itself which negative dialectics is designed to dispel. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 120

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains why negative dialectics must be a ‘permanent destruction’ of hypostases: thought reifies automatically at the moment of formation, so critique must be continuous.
• XREF: The ‘optical illusion of the substantiality of thought’ is the dialectical account of reification/Lukács; connects the reader’s totality theme to Adorno’s method. — connects to: Practice undermines theory from within as a destructive element — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1100; Conceptualization inevitably imposes form on formless life — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 1018

Broader Connections

• Practice undermines theory from within as a destructive element #corroborates (0.75) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1100
• Conceptualization inevitably imposes form on formless life #expands (0.70) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 1018