hamed mohavedi, new normativity and the normativity of the new in adorno — review
a text that makes adorno look more ambitious than he actually is, and one that captures in its structure the level of frustration you'd derive from actually reading him
as for movahedi himself, the mcgill professor has been busy publishing articles almost exclusively on deleuze's thoughts on leibniz, and has recently even published a book on the topic. his forray into adorno however isn't entirely unexpected, given that adorno and deleuze scholarship unexpectedly bleed into eachother quite often in the field outside of the fact that one is a heavy ethico-ontological positivist and the other a heavy ethico-political negativist, partially due to the way that both thinkers sit on the fringes not just on topics such as art, science and politics, but also when it comes to their piercing de-normativizing qualities. mohavedi himself is aware of this, writing on page 168, "adorno and deleuze, despite their differences, are seeking a way to surpass the identity of the concept, the former through nonidentity and the latter through difference."
in the text, movahedi positions himself as not just faithful to adorno's dialectical process, but as axiologically close to his style of thinking. movahedi makes this act easy, because he starts off the work by basing his theory against that honneth, a scholar who cultivates a historical reconstruction and classification of the frankfurt school's method of critique in the midst of criticisms by rorty and walzer, who argue that critique must draw on a society’s existing moral culture rather than appealing to external universal principles, which they argue are detached, totalizing and often emerging from within an "elitist" frame.
honneth reconstructs adorno's ivory tower positioning as a form of reconstructive, left-hegelian critique, where he positions adorno as arguing that critique must arise from norms embedded in historical reality that geneologically test themselves for signs of hollowing out or distortion, rationally and suspiciously evaluating their own principles on top of the actual critique they set out to overcome. movahedi on the other hand argues that honneth fails to see that adorno’s immanent critique does not affirm the society’s axiological horizon, where adorno in a more basic sense denies hegelian rationalization of history, and also that sees historical rationalization itself as dominating.
movahedi then upon a close reading of adorno's problems of moral philosophy, essentially positions adorno as something of an apophatic theologue but about bourgeoise morality, which has contagiously captured all forms of worldly order. in page 168 of adorno's work this is clearly stated, where right under what mohavedi quotes from him, it can be seen that he argues against even the simple visit to a cinema. adorno's paranoia about hegemony in this work is at an all time high, and is very far from any type of rational reconstruction that honneth may argue he possesses. it is also aptly true as movahedi mentions that adorno could never accept society's axological horizon, but i think its worth a mention that honneth's classification in and of itself, albeit largely inaccurate about the extent of adorno's axiology, still correctly captures adorno's understanding of how domination influences norm-formation, even if his conclusion entirely misplaces the extent of adorno's negativity.
as we will see later, movahedi's actual concern isnt in the way that honneth argues about the way that the frankfurt school treats normativity (although he doesnt like this either) but in the basic idea that critique destabilizes standpoints rather than grounding them. this isnt just about how negativist adorno was or whether he believed that domination could be challenged, but about the very positivist idea of having a productive view on emerging social realities as positioned through the lens of progress itself. even though movahedi hints at standpoints in page 146, he only finally juxtaposes his interpretation of adorno against honneth in regards to the idea of dialectics being about immanence on page 167. that being said, other than a single quotation where movahedi compliments honneth for a correct reading of adorno's views on suffering as it pertains to negativity (which in the footnotes of, he actually criticizes honneth again for jumping at the false promise of adorno's slightly empathic staging of childhood nostalgia as justified positive normation) he mostly still only uses his critique as a jumping point to a more accurate reconstruction of adorno's theory.
mohavedi's concern around the correct reading of adorno is scholaristically nearly unbeatable, due to the fact he's simultaneously juggling false analytical readings of it, a historicizing that accurately positions him in the time period, and a conceptual uncovering of his actual epistemological articulation, however, it's very easy to notice how movahedi's own reading of adorno doesn't actually make use of adorno's method. of course, this isn't just a challenge for movahedi but for nearly the entire cathedral as a whole, the academic-complex doesn't have the ability to argue immanently about anything since it's stuck in a standpoint complex as a totality, however, and this is important, there are certain figures, especially precisely ones like adorno and deleuze, upon which such a rigorous epistemic operation is actually more insulting than the average academic discourse.
a lot of analytic philosophy is actually built off a certain idea of epistemic permission, the idea that approaching minor subdiscourses is allowed within that field. and then, a lot of continental feminist discourses, fighting for institutional authority actually mimic the idea of epistemic permission backwards by framing it precisely through the re-ethicalization of standpoints, such as their ironically named standpoint theory, itself an ethical standpoint rather than an immanent critique. i wouldn't go so far as to say that movahedi is wasting his time being so precise about adorno, but i would go as far as to say that such scholarly material could never surpass a certain stage of allowance if movahedi or anyone in his place, after realizing the extent of the almost proto-religious apophatic imagination of their inspired thinker, doesn't at least try to follow in their footsteps, even if they continue to write such texts. on movahedi's website, no such immanent critique can currently be found.
after the problem staging, the text passes through the rejection of foundations, staging the idea that there's no right life in the wrong one presented in minima moralia on the fifth page, then into kant and the idea that concepts must be dissolved immanently and that bourgeoise morality creates an ideal of autonomy that poorly reflects historical norm formation, and into the idea that enlightenment emancipation carries repression, as seen in adorno's work with horkheimer. finally, the text arrives at adorno's determinate negation of reality, where only contradictions can expose the domination behind norms, and lived experience cannot actually be seperated from what is called practical philosophy.
only ten pages later does mohavedi actually arrive at the stated goal of the essay introduced in the beginning, of reformulating adorno's negativity through conceptual merging. except he doesnt, because he then spends another five pages restaging an already staged adorno through lukacs, benjamin and pensky, around the concept of the dialectic between nature and history. interestingly enough though, it appears that precisely these five pages actually matter for the essay, because the only unique conceptual development that mohavedi produces on this topic appears right after this staging, showing how the first fifteen pages stage normativity through adorno's existing thought, only to appear as a preamble that merely describes exactly the justifications behind adorno's negativity and pretty much nothing else, given that normativity is very poorly reintroduced at the very end of the text, and doesnt actually have any stake in the merging of transcience and suffering that mohavedi produces.
mohavedi takes “transience” from adorno’s 1932 lecture “the idea of natural history,” read through lukács (second nature) and benjamin (allegory in origin of the german mourning play), and then ties suffering into transcience by taking the concept from negative dialectics, more specifically the part where adorno argues that “things ought to be different.” he frames adorno's concept of immanent pain as the motor of dialectical thinking, and suffering as the somatic index of non-identity that carries the alienation forward.
without going into the way mohavedi stages the argument itself, the cruical question that determines the legibility of this essay, given that mohavedi is constructing this theory from seperate inferences of adorno's thought rather than joint ones, is if movahedi speaks of a “new normativity” grounded in the process of suffering/transience, does this remain a purely negative, anti-foundational impulse (consistent with adorno), or does it become axiological — i.e. does “the new” or “transition” begin to function as a value, as mohavedi claims it does?
mohavedi uses four instances to turn adorno's "ought not" into the question of a window into speculative possibility that determines the field of suffering as the sight of a potential gnostic world-denying yet secretly affirmative stage of new normativity, in the essay "nihilism" where the glance of an eye in a concentration camp and the tail wagging of a dog create an immersive immediacy that postpones externally imposed narrative suffering, the very idea adorno expresses that suffering itself posits the "ought not", an indirect quotation from bernstein that argues that artworks create a super-naturalized "ought" through their gnostic distance from the world, and in adorno's reference to kafka in negative dialectics “in the breaks that belie identity, entity is still pervaded by the ever-broken pledges of that otherness.".
what is noticable here is that mohavedi's formulation itself carries a latent positive charge when it comes to axiology intertwining with normativity. the normative charge in adorno is staunchly negative, his world-defying will is parodically compared by himself in the problems of moral philosophy with the restraint of priests, and the only examples that stage normative possibility as positively charged even on speculative grounds dont even come from adorno himself but either from secondary readings or adorno's secondary readings of other figures. the only time he does stage positivity isn't even in possibility, but in impossibility, highlighted by the fact that he stages his examples in the midst of a concentration camp, which is a final end that mimics the final end of transcience's pull towards death rather than something like deleuze's virtuality, literally infinite with possibility in comparison to adorno's almost exactly opposite viewpoint.
it is staunchly clear that adorno in "nihilism" simply denies the very term the ability to subsume nothingness, but nothing in the work hints at this new normative moment in the experience of suffering as intrinsically positive. rather its the exact opposite, adorno classifies nihilists as gnostics which seek to repudiate the entirety of the current world only to reconstruct it in their mind in the empty category of the concept of nothing, which he only views as the paradoxical hypocrisy of "never having been" or "nirvana as a positive experience of the negative". what adorno actually seems to be staging in the text is the idea that negativity itself is a weight, something that has a presence, not an axiological one but a determinate one that doesn't require the vengeful fantasy of a gnostic, or what he calls a nihilist.
in the chapter prior to nihilism, on waiting in vain, adorno stages “metaphysical experience” as the promise of a happiness that never fully arrives, echoing proust’s villages, or the idea that any experience of aliveness contains a surplus, a more-than-what-is that is basically never fulfilled. in the text immediately prior to this one, titled "dying today", adorno again creates a complementary "negativity is both not nihilistically overdeterminate nor anything positive in particular or even in general" by arguing through genocide against the idea that death is the ultimate, by arguing that the vision of the ultimate is totalizing, and as such everything around us would be nothing at all or rather more specifically simply wouldnt be true of itself in the form that it is, if it were all related inferiorly to the idea of absolute death.
in this sense, mohavedi's text can be seen less as staging that adorno himself would require a new normativity, and more as staging that through a reading of kafka's recognition of otherness, proust and pensky's appeals to memory, bernstein's affirmative views on art, and lukács complicated view of reficiation as a historical unfolding targetting experience, mohavedi himself may (should) build up a theory of transcience in conjunction with suffering that adorno neither is doing nor could have really done.
this article is extremely long and burdensome to read, totaling at sixty thousand characters, its an extensive study of adorno. the weakest structural link can be found in its association, even though the text is functionally correct about its criticisms, the narrative it builds up actually appears inconsistent with the literature itself, might i even say handpicked, due to the way in which it weaponizes some of adorno's own views to construct a narrative about his intentions. it's kind of odd because simultaneously, its extremely precise and even systematic in evaluating adorno's views on other thinkers, and in evaluating secondary interpretations on adorno himself, but fails when it comes to building a view on adorno's thought directly. on top of that, there are issues with the framing and consistency, where the framing suffers a large contextual loss that i will discuss in a second, built around the purpose of the text in conjunction with adorno's own philosophy, whereas the consistency suffers from an unusually large and somewhat pointless introductory page. nonetheless, the sheer amount of concepts and elucidations saves this text from a low rating.