I find that this chapter provides an interesting turn. What I think Adorno is alluding to with the discussion of how a child learns through language, is the deep relationship of dependence between the child and caregiver which extends even prior to the learning of language. He could have gone further to describe how the mother nurses the baby, and in prebirth the child is dependent in a more absolute way. But he starts with the use of words. Language forms the medium, in a relationship which had been immediate in its earlier phases. As the child separates from its mother, becoming independent, language comes in between, to fill that gap.
I would say that it’s all about the words. the child is learning to talk, and things are just accessories to this, or play toys, “action-objects” which one doesn’t need to talk about. So when it pesters “its mother with the embarrassing problem of why the bench is called a bench”, I would say that the child is learning it’s new relationship, as somewhat independent from its mother, and this is “culture”.
So when Adorno say that this is prior to any separation between meaning and truth, and that sort of “objectivity” hasn’t even entered the consciousness of the child, I think we need to respect that what is first and foremost to the child’s consciousness is learning the words themselves. This is a matter of how to hear them, and how to say them. And that is prior to any sort of learning of-------- meaning.
So if there is a fetishism as Adorno says, it involves the words themselves, as objects, in an “unreflective nominalism”. And this demonstrates that rather than truth being within language, as what is signified by it, language is in truth, as taking part in it. Since language only shares in truth, there is no identity principle.
From reflection comes the separation between thing and expression, the power of language. “Truth” enters consciousness due to the apprehension of falsity “non-identity”. Heidegger does not accept the importance of reflection, and assigns the power of language to a “ritual of naming” which is not consistent with the reality of secularized languages. The ritual naming would have to be based in trust in God, but the objectivity of secularized languages is based in intransigence.
The word is more than just a sign, it gains signatory “power”, when it “most exactly and densely holds what is meant”. However, “It is, only insofar as it becomes, in the continuous confrontation of expression and thing”. And Heidegger’s treatment of historical languages as attributes of 'being", serve to destroy doubt and philosophical radicalism in a way which is itself illusory.