We begin to free ourselves from this power – and to step away from mimetic forms of thought, and toward abstract universalism – as our objective mastery over nature increases. In his account, though, this mastery was historically achieved via the imposition of a “second nature” of class relations – which then cloaked themselves in the aura of “nature”, asserting themselves as timeless, inevitable, essential. This second nature (and the psychological dynamics associated with it) then reacted back on our perception of “first nature” – causing us to lose the mimetic appreciation of the non-universal in the natural world, and flatten our perception of the natural world into the search for lawlike, repetitive behaviour – modelled on the lawlike, repetitive, mechanistic reassertion that characterises the reproduction of social domination…

Adorno seems to think that we can untie this knot – that we can dissolve both the forms of social domination, and their associated forms of thought and perception of the natural world – and reinstate something like a transcended mimesis: a form of perception and thought capable of recognising contingency and diversity, but without this being coerced, as it were, by our abject vulnerability to nature…

It’s difficult to say whether Adorno would articulate this in terms of a different form of universalism – I suspect he would avoid the term, and my impulse is also to conceptualise his sense of an alternative – of some form of transcendent mimesis – as a “pessimistic” position in the technical sense: I don’t think he grounds this potential in any kind of social analysis.

I have myself, though, played around with the idea of alternative conceptions of universals – I’ve used the phrase “historical universal”, in fact. My sense would be that we’ve coercively demonstrated to ourselves, often in quite ugly ways, that certain things might be possible – and that critique can understand itself, at least in part, as a process of extracting these insights from the alienated forms in which they were historically achieved… Not that I can develop this sort of position here… But just to flag that it’s an issue that interests me.

I started to answer your final question on sacrifices, but felt my answer was getting vast and starting to crawl up its own tail… ;-P Basically: yes – I think it would mean different sacrifices. I’m more leery about quantitative comparisons – but we can make comparisons perhaps in terms of sacrifices we might rather make – sacrifices that don’t impose the kinds of costs we’re imposing on ourselves now…

But I have so much work to do on Adorno – even to convince myself that the sort of reading I keep tossing out here in fits and starts is accurate. The difficulty is that central lines within Adorno’s historical argument, for example, stand in tension with more prescriptive statements about what critical theory “ought” to do – and there are also much more socially specific theories lurking around in his text – theories that, I think, he can’t properly develop, because he is committed to understanding modernity primarily in terms of class relations, and I think this prevents him from picking up on the implications of some of what he does write… But I always worry that, on the next re-read, I’ll change my mind completely…

On the late response: please don’t worry about that – I can’t tell you how many things I have stacked up that I want to reply to, but just haven’t had the time lately… And, by the same token, apologies that this is so scattered – the beginning of the term (particularly the beginning of this term ;-P) is not great for… er… abstract conceptual thought – and sadly not for any transformative reasons…

What are your thoughts on this? Sorry for the late response, the post was absorbing reading and I’ve had it flagged for awhile now.

The slide into old age, I suspect, is going to be quite easy…

Edited to add: Ack! The second one you did see – and commented on, no less! Sorry Ed – my brain clearly isn’t functioning tonight… Nevertheless, I think the first post might be new to you… (and, if not… well… that’ll give you some sense of the level of lecture I’m probably about to write…)