First just a general clarification that, when I’m writing about an author, I tend on a first pass to try as well as I can to immerse myself in their voice and in the logic of their argument – even if I think that argument is quite flawed. So, when I’m flagging sections with statements like “Adorno’s account suggests”, this generally signals that we haven’t gotten yet to what I think… ;-) So it may be that some of the things that are worrying you about Adorno might also worry me – but I try to lay out the claims before I knock ‘em down… ;-)

Adorno, of course, wouldn’t be so naive as to assume that revenge is a modern phenomenon: he would, though question (and here I would agree with him), whether a concept like “revenge” makes sense as a primary explanatory category for dealing with movements that articulate specifically powerless populations as though such populations are somehow an overarching threat. The movements targeting such populations certainly might understand themselves as engaging in acts of revenge – but to Adorno that would just be part of the puzzle, rather than a solution to it…

He is also trying to understand a particular element of fascism that might not apply to the examples you are mentioning (you would know far more about this than I, though…) – which doesn’t necessarily mean Adorno is right to make this distinction – perhaps it would be better to group such things and come up with an overarching explanation, etc. But just to clarify what Adorno is trying to do: he finds it a particular puzzle (and he’s certainly not alone in this) how social movements arise that appear to attribute enormous power and threat to groups that have long been in specific positions of social vulnerability.

Adorno’s account, I should also stress, actually is specifically concerned with class domination – and with what he regards as the displacement of rage over class domination onto targets who are not themselves in a dominating position. I didn’t emphasise this point here, but I have mentioned in it other blog entries (among other things, because I am critical of Adorno’s focus on class – so here your criticism probably does apply to me, but probably not to Adorno…).

Adorno does not, however, think it makes sense to argue that class envy provides a plausible psychological explanation, when the groups being targeted are more marginalised than the groups doing the targeting… He’s asking, in a sense, why violence was directed downward, rather than toward groups that actually possess greater social power – specifically because this situation is extremely puzzling from the standpoint of more traditional Marxist theory.

On the issue of whether revolutions are likely to occur: again, remember that my account is intended to be at least somewhat immanently voiced – I am personally extremely critical of what tends to get called the thesis of “one dimensionality” (the notion that society no longer has any internal contradictions that would generate any kind of non-linear, non-replicating historical dynamics) – critical to the degree that a major focus of my theoretical work involves a critique of this thesis.

But, whether I’m happy with his conclusions or not, Adorno does believe that capitalism has become “one dimensional” – and his work can be seen, on one level, as a working through of the disappointment with classical Marxist theories that placed such faith in the notion that capitalism would lead to socialism in some quasi-automatic way. Adorno (and other members of the Frankfurt School) look on the early 20th century as something like the horrific realisation of the early Marxist prediction: they believe that the conflict between the forces and relations of production has been overcome – and the result is totalitarian. I think the horror of this conclusion needs to be kept in sight when assessing work from this theoretical tradition… But I obviously don’t believe they were correct in asserting that society had become one-dimensional – that it had no intrinsic structural conflicts that suggested the potential for emancipatory transformation.

Moving more back to my personal position: yes, yes, Virginia, there is a revolution… ;-P An ongoing one – which is, in fact, what I understand to be specifically definitive of capitalism. I’ve written quite critically on attempts to define capitalism in terms of class relations, ownership of private property, markets, or other essentially static and concrete social institutions: what I think is specifically definitive of capitalism is a dynamic and non-linear pattern of historical transformation. So, yes, your bemusement would indeed be well-placed, if my post caused you to wonder how I could have overlooked such a thing… ;-P

Revolutionary movements – in the sense of conscious attempts to transform the social environment with an eye to political emancipation – are, of course, a slightly different thing from pointing out that capitalism itself tends to be characterised by an ongoing process of structural transformation. And yes, I’m also interested in those – although, depending on the movement, I may evaluate it far more critically than other folks interested in critical theory might: one of my long-standing interests is the ways in which movements that regard themselves as revolutionary, somehow manage so often to facilitate capitalism’s own structural transformations… This is one of the points I take LM to have been picking up on from my work. But this issue may be a bit too complicated to pick up adequately here…

I haven’t gotten to all your questions – but I’ve got to do some of that kind of work that pays the bills… ;-P Please do raise any unanswered (or, what is also likely, inadequately answered) questions again, and I’ll try to follow up when I’ve had more sleep and have more time… ;-)

I hold a theory which is ‘optimistic’ – not in relation to a general regard for people, society, etc., but in relation to having ’succeeded in self-reflexively grounding its own critical ideals’. So out of a set of concepts put into operation within my theory – out of these alone – ‘emancipatory ideals’ can be realised. Yet I might hold that the possibility for these ideals *being* realised, by way of revolution, is still very slim. Classical Marxism, met with the ongoing empirical resistance of capitalism to its logic, might come to such a conclusion – the revolution can still happen on the basis of capitalist society’s embedded discontents, but also may not. Adorno’s position, via N Pepperell, suggests that the revolution can still happen – but not via any posited concepts within his theory which determine it.

That revolutions happen *empirically* all the time does not particularly matter for a given theory in this sense – it is more a question whether such revolutions, firstly, achieve some emancipatory ideals, and secondly, whether they are determined by the unfolding of the logic of the theory. For Adorno, at least in my limited reading, neither is the case… The concepts don’t ‘produce’, deterministically, revolutions for the theory (hence its theoretical pessimism), and revolutions, such as they are, generally don’t ‘produce’ the kinds of emancipation the theory hopes for (hence the more pervasive historical pessimism often read into Adorno, which echo that of the hypothetical theorist in N Pepperell’s comment – that ‘revolution [or the emancipatory kind] is extraordinarily unlikely’).

“Adorno argues…that much of what Freud took to be innate psychological structure derives, instead, from the violence of socialisation into such a context, from the scars inflicted by the ego on itself when, confronted with its own powerlessness, it responds by repressing conscious awareness of potentials for transformation, and driving emancipatory impulses into the unconscious realm.”

I am not knowledgable of Adorno’s work in relation to Freud. But N Pepperell seems to be saying that Adorno’s interpretation of Freud’s ‘death instinct’ is that the ‘death instinct’ is born out of our repression of the possibilities of emancipatory change? Is this correct?

But then N Pepperell goes on to say, and I find this point interesting in that there is perhaps some evidence for its application to the revolutionary circumstance in Cambodia, which I am familiar with. N Pepperell states:

“Adorno’s account thus suggests that widespread desires for destruction or self-destruction might be “typical” – particularly in moments when individual powerlessness comes to be experienced as particularly acute. While fuelled in some sense by an experience of transformative potentials, these destructive desires are not, within Adorno’s framework, masks for utopian longing, but blind rage and pain at sacrifices unjustly imposed – a rage and pain that…can sometimes try to “rationalise” its own sacrifices through the destructive imposition of equivalent sacrifices on others.”

I am in no way inclined to agree with any statement that Cambodia was a revolutionary circumstance in a Marxist sense, nor was the society formed communist in any way other than a label and was a totalitarian society with the moral conservativism of Buddhist cultural influences. Now that I have my position clear.

Certainly this theory suits the violence of revenge that the peasantry took upon the city dwellers, due to unjust sacrifices imposed on them by the new totalitarian DK regime. But while part this revenge was due to the violence of a particular sort of socialisation of the peasantry in relation to the corrupt cities, it was also to do with a peculiar Khmer notion of ‘Kum’, which means to take revenge far greater than the original act that inspired the revenge in the first place.

What am I trying to say? The desire for ‘revenge’ seems like it is very much part of all people, due to the injury to ego experienced in everyday life. And is certainly not purely a cultural phenomena, but certainly is greatly influenced (and this I think is my main point) by the culture and politics of the society that it is able to manifest a material form.

The position that N Peperell takes also seems to evacuate any class antagonisms, which no doubt have the potential to manifest themselves in revolutionary circumstances as acts of revenge, such class antagonisms seem to be an underlying (psychological) basis for Marxist emancipatory revolutionary change. Hence could be criticised as being actually devoid of an actual politics to do with class.

I also find the statement that revolutions are unlikely to occur somewhat bemusing. There are a great number of ‘revolutions’ that occured in the 20th century, yet none of them were emancipatory in a Marxist or perhaps socialist sense. N Pepperell would obviously be aware of at least a dozen. For me there seems little doubt that revolutions do occur, and relatively frequently, however the question seems to be what happens next? Is the revolution emancipatory or does it turn to revenge and consequently violence? The problem seems to be to me part of understanding the very human desire for revenge and being able to exorcise that without it persisting during the continuous revolution that would have to occur afterwards for human emancipation to occur.

Have I got N Pepperell’s thoughts all wrong? And have performed a certain reading that does not reflect what is there?

As a technical term, theoretical pessimism relates to whether – and how – the theoretical approach has met the criterion of self-reflexivity. A non-pessimistic critical theory has succeeded in self-reflexively grounding its own critical ideals – showing why these ideals have become available as forms of subjecitivity and doing so in a way that demonstrates that the existence of these forms of subjecitivity has a determinate relationship to specific vulnerabilities within the social context. Theoretical pessimism, in this context, means the theorist has lost the ability to connect their emancipatory ideals with a determinate potential for structural transformation. As a result, their critique has become (to mention two other everyday terms that have technical meanings in this context) abstract – or utopian.

No one owns the phrase “theoretical pessimism”, of course – and you see the phrase routinely used in far looser senses, with no harm done. I mention this narrower definition here only because it’s the specific meaning I generally have in mind when I call someone “pessmistic” – so I may well regard someone as “pessimistic” in this sense, even if they clearly believe that transformation might still be possible – if their theoretical approach can no longer grasp the potential for transformation in a determinate way.

So yes, you’re right: Adorno never denies that revolution is possible, and he actively asserts that the traumatised and scarred psyche characteristic of the modern era is not natural. It’s just that his theory isn’t able to specify how the situation might change due to factors internal to the society he is analysing.

By the same token, someone can put forward a theory that is not “pessimistic” in this technical sense, but still believe, e.g., that revolution is extraordinarily unlikely: so it’s possible to think the odds of an emancipatory tranformation of existing society are terribly low, for example, or to be very personally depressed about the political climate, while not engaging in pessimistic theory… ;-)

In terms of the original discussion, to be honest I was very unsure of the standpoints and the theoretical and political motives of the various positions expressed – this was why I had originally been reluctant to write on the topic. Jodi’s post, for example, seemed to me to contain several strands: a notion of nostalgic reclamation of the past (which would be, in the terms I’ve just outlined above, a form of “theoretical pessimism”, but not a pessmistic position in the everyday sense of the term); a worry that we may have reached a stasis point in our own history; a reference to what you’ve called absurd resistance, but in a form where I wasn’t sure whether Jodi was speaking in her own voice here, or just noting the possibility for this position to exist; and some criticisms of other participants for going too far in a pessimistic direction, in the everyday meaning of the term… I wasn’t completely sure what the primary position was – or whether each of the positions articulated do fit together, in a way that I lack the background to appreciate… I should note that I’m not at all saying this to be critical – just confessing that I was confused…

On another topic entirely: I enjoyed your “ivory webpage” post – lovely title – and am meaning to pick up on it here when I have a bit of time…

It is reasonable to be concerned about the tormented psyche, and the danger its fantasies might pose. It is certainly capable of being co-opted by fascism, or by fascistic elements in a mixed society. However, I am fundamentally sympathetic both to the fantasy of destruction as a constructive fantasy of “making room,” and to the fantasy of the apocalypse as a means of recognizing real social, political, and environmental dangers, and beginning to formulate a Beckett-like or Camus-like theory of absurd resistance.

Jodi’s post leans towards absurd resistance, but also gets caught up in the pure rhetoric of the “impossibility” of imagining anything besides capitalism, and the statement “the world has already ended,” which takes us much too far from the everydayness of our lives.