1

a synkar review

1

wholesale! assembly-line fiction & synthetic contingency by eugénie desmedt

a synkar review

the text sets up the argument about novelty through german thinkers bense and moles, arguing five things, four of which are correctly situated as seeing art as defined by decomposability into elementary signs, viewing aesthetic value as modeled as a ratio of complexity to order, interpreting aesthetic information as improbability and surprise, and seeing that art produces order against entropy or what bense calls aesthetic negentropy. i do have a small comment on its use of improbability and surprise, mainly that it kind of syphons lovelace into the point about surprise, when bense would argue something much closer to the idea that technical objects cant possibly be derivative if they are unsurprising, but that they are transformative when they question existential ontology but only seen through the lens of meaning rather than unexpectedness, when they cant be situated as technical objects. this is because when technical evaluative standards cease and categorization isnt possible, thats when novelty becomes an ontological confrontation for bense.moving onto the key issue i have with this section, and the only issue i have really with this entire text, desmedt situates moles and bense by giving a sort of academically steryotypical view of objectivity by setting them up as arguing against subjectivism in artistic interpretation and orienting them around objectivity, measurement and scientism, tying them to shannons cyberneticism. this on its own is correctly framed, but it implicitly misframes benson - maybe not intentionally but maybe due to lack of argumentative density - as arguing that information quantity, density or categoricity is related to aesthetic judgement, when in fact for him, experience cant be situated through positivism but depends strictly on relationality as a deeper semiotic judgement, something not entirely reducable to cybernetics or mathematics, but very much in fact dependent on human experience that isnt subjective but is very much relatively justifiable in its interpretative volume and excess.bense's argument about experience can be seen in works like technical existence, which argue in a technorealist fashion that technics itself can no longer be interpreted through theology or mythology, because of the way the technical artwork is meta-surreal in the way that it doesnt portray technicality but orchestrates it, requiring a more semiotic understanding of relationality within art, even albeit an objectively schematicized configuration.this is also where i think the whole problem with desmedt's undertaking lies, i believe she fails to consider the way in which human mediation actually enables the relationality that can arise as a result of automated generation. this is maybe even partially because bense himself is very ready to discard of the impact and influence of art way too early if the piece isnt immediately transgressive, which is because he largely believes that the techncial domain is uniquely hyperreal in its consequences to our own lives. however, desmedt doesnt have her own counter-thesis on mediation currently, and, as you will see now, she doesnt even tackle bense's own conclusions on this issue.desmedt's text argues that we would find it difficult to figure out what bense would have made of the conditions of ordering that has structurally spawned the way we understand and work towards improving ai output. but the text rushes too quickly and doesnt stop to comprehend how the answer already sits within the text, or the ways in which an answer can be derived from it with a slight amount more effort. decomposability as a term is only mentioned twice in the text, and the passage that mentions it doesnt cover ordering in as much as it does aesthetic analysis, which bense argues that is primarily semiotic and interpretative in nature.this means that for bense, intensities, relations, topological coincidences and configurations are driven through our experience of a piece as a subjective inward analysis of its meaning but an objective outward perception of its contents, whereas categories within an analysis are every other form of self-conceived ontic analysis that attempts to withdraw meaning from what it thinks is significatory but really is a total essential marker that serves no purpose to be considered outside of the very subtle layer of meaning imposed on by our experience of the latent artwork, or in simpler terms, that categorization is a form of descriptive and literal (realistic) signification that never reaches the aesthetic territory.as such, analysis of ai artworks shouldnt be literalized as self-surreal due to their ontic composition as the text mentions the famous ai artwork of a jesus shrimp, but for bense, through the contextual apparatus that flags the composition itself as an establishment of forms that are subtle and provocative when considered philosophically and not strictly technically. even though the politics behind ai generation is self-limited as the text correctly and succintly argues, it entirely throws away the idea of ai's impact and influence on our own supposedly accidental and deliberate, novelty-producing creations.in this sense, it doesnt see it as an extension but a regression of our thought, which, fair on its own, doesnt realize that functionally this is already happening even if polemically the way it influences our own novelty in the long run may and likely does have negative influence over our deliberation. therefore, the answer to how bense would view ai art isnt through derivativity or surprise strictly speaking, but through its inability to propose existentially risky works specifically because of the fact that their pre-built hierarchization resists technical transgression if it is influenced and built entirely by the interior world of technical regulativity.this really is my whole point of contest with desmedt's work, it isnt so much that any of her framing is wrong, but that it categorically lacks developed lines of thinking for any of the philosophers, moving in a very narrow path of thinking that disables the nuance that actually confronts the ways in which human-generative orientations also would produce ontologically meaningful works, a problem i will deal with later.returning to lovelace now, the text uses her to argue roughly that machines cannot cause origination or surprise as meaningful variables, that originality is not just output novelty but ontological status of thought, and in this sense, the text correctly identifies bense through lovelace, but fails to account for why this is the case exactly, and quite literally states that it isnt sure of how to situate this aspect of things.desmedt's text uses knipe's grammatization most accurately as a metaphor, arguing that industrial-scale automata in the form of ai produce endless artifacts as a side effect of the digital economy and the way in which it influences consumer consensus. even though aptly this is true on its own, bense would argue that most human-developed artifacts also fall below this line, albeit he would concede that ai-generated artworks due to their objectively weak developmental rng simply cant have a transgressive nature which does work in desmedt's favour. she also further uses him correctly to argue her actual main point, which is that the structural exclusion of ambuigity in objectivist standards does in fact lead to an inability to create structurally innovative artworks.lovelace does literally argue that representation has no ontological novelty, and desmedt does even
pose the big problem with this in her own text, stating that it isnt exactly clear how lovelace's mathematically representational perfectionism currently aligns with the representatively derivative ai creative direction. her use of tyche also blends all of this together, correctly conceiving of an automaton as a structurally impotent form of creative deliniation under the boundaries that she herself puts forward. however, and this finally is my critique, it isnt clear in this text the way in which originality, surprise, representation, evaluation and decomposability actually serve to co-exist within human-generative contexts outside of its general criticism of the de-ontologization of ai, which is banally true and correctly argued for.the problem with the general line of thinking is the following: a machine through its constituve developments can surprise us ontologically in so far as our own subjective evaluation itself can be thought of as objectively connecting to technicalizaed schematics that arent artistically experiential in nature but under the line of the influence of derivative influence, allow us to produce deliberate and decomposable pieces.the text ends on the argument that the paradox of controllable creation is the real libidinal charge and simultaneously frustration behind ai-generated content rather than some fantasy of computational originality. even if it is trivially true that sorting chaos into order can be defined as complexity, and even if desmedt's critique is about the limits of machines rather than the way machine-mediated regimes influence our own undertaking, the critique she launches is still a staunchly framed political struggle against a perceived automaton's possibility to exist and create supposedly derivative works, all the while the non-derivative ontology of beings themselves is never posited in the text, nor is the overlap of influence (positive or negative) between automation and ordered human transgressive accidental work of art

substrates unbound by laura tripaldi

a synkar review

coming off her work parallel minds translated three years ago by urbanomic, as well as an italian piece titled gender tech, both of which i intend to review soon, nyu shanghai fellow laura tripaldi has released her first work for benjamin bratton's journal antikythera titled substrates unbound.now, the article is nearly the lenght of a small book, given that works in this publisher tend to extend into historicizational scaffolding quite a lot and pre-ground every claim heavily. which on one hand, can ocassionally come off as insufferable, but on the good side of things, it does in fact successfully prevent journal entires from feeling phoned in, and it creates new curiosities for readers who may not read natural sciences on the side.the work is also partially intended as a response to blaise aguera's what is intelligence, and it follows the naturalistic metaphors it already sits in conversation with, at one point directly confronting its substance. what is a little dissapointing is that in parallel minds, which serves as the big breakthrough for laura, not only has the better ontological writing, but in this very work she suggests that we refer to parallel minds instead for understanding concepts like the interface.the real dissapointing thing is that, not only is the concept interface exclusively developed in the intro to the work and almost entirely left unmentioned for the entirety of the writing, but also, if you only read this article, you would more or less be able to guess exactly everything she says about interfaces in parallel minds. the only thing that does make this situation better is that her work on interfaces in minds is extensive to a degree, and sets up scaffolded variations of the concept, being one of if not the best treatments of it in contemporary times aside from antikythera's own bratton, who treats the concept through a sociological rather than a material viewpoint.tripaldi's main argument is that contemporary tech collapses the nature/artifice split by materially hybridizing organisms and machines; this exposes the hidden assumption that substrates are passive carriers of universal functions, which causes two dominant paradigms to fail: technomorphism, a contemporary theorist being arcas, which argues that functions are universal and substrates are interchangeable, and biomimesis, a contemporary theorist being searle, which argues that functions are bound to privileged natural substrates.tripaldi argues that both of these collapse the agency of a stratum itself, which has plenty of implicit functions that cant be emulated, but that this is great for ontological hybridity and biotech as a field, where substrate ontologies emerge as creative forces of material interfaces.now, there are three problems with this piece, luckily none of which ruin the structure, pacing or believability of the text given they are all self-limiting. the first is that all of the references, concepts and terms are self-limiting and only serve to reinforce the narrative. keller, parisi and newman serve a majority of the weight in concepts, and then hui and fitch are also added in for additional concepts such as technodiversity and nanointentionality. their philosophies mostly are read through a minor-academic lens and as such dont actually carry the text forward, whereas the main references do feel a bit more implicitly present in the text, such as newman who is mentioned on two largely distant chunks of the text, but still feel largely secondary to it.what does carry the text is the genealogy that tripaldi neatly stages throughout it, where the chatpers are neatly divided, know exactly how long to stay on the topic, and are grounded empirically well enough that not only justify her point but raise additional curiosities surrounding the topics themselves, especially around her understanding of alchemy and ontology.however, the concepts themselves are also slightly underdeveloped due to the lack of conceptual scaffolding. all her working terms such as interface, agency and substrate ontology only appear in one single chunk of the text. for the lack of conceptual weight, and the genre-intended lack of polemical weight, she does however present us with a neat narrative scaffolding, where the text at multiple different times folds back into the previous points it brings upbut this does ensure that her text reads quite much safer than what it could be if she decided to take more risks. for all the grandeur she sets up, the three main things she really tackles, which go on the order of: the alchemy question, the ontology question, and their interconnectedness, only her ontology is developed in a way that makes me feel as if there isnt an absence in commentary by her on the topic itself, and makes me keep wanting to look back to parallel minds to try to scout a more developed ontology. but it is also true that this text is intended as a reference to her more thorough work, and as a response to some more recent developments in the field, and in that sense it doesnt make me feel like it underserves its welcome.it is problematic that nowhere in this article does tripaldi even begin to consider how its not just that alchemy and its mythological undertoning didn't have the "technical" engineering development to disregard the technics-nature split by working through substrates as ontologically codefining (inbetween mutability and interchangability) by epistemological co-construction (creation) and ontological integrative production (engineering), but that alchemy was primarily concerned with a pseudo-computational paradigm with the goal of predicting the future of machinic phyla as co-producing.it may be that it produced ontological artifacts that emanate or "belong" as categorically multi-interfacing, but these may have been semantic tools that withdrew back into social assemblages as viruses of language or experience (correlationism - body and mind are tied) rather than underdeveloped technical devices.alchemy's purely natural call may not install continuity between naturality and artificality but may simply be a theologically underpinned concept of deep structure as revelation through a lack of matter - that something in the simulation is a complex yet simple pre-engineered form (that narratives precede all concepts as intuitive events).the article’s continuity thesis leans on newman’s contrast with the mechanical tradition. but “purely natural” might mean “aligned with providential order” rather than “continuous with technical reality.” continuity could be theological continuity, where nature is already technical because creation is structured rather than agential-material continuity.the text engages in a sort of geneological overreach by treating the lineage from alchemy to synthetic biology via material replication as tied to the production of substrate-sensitive technological artifacts, all whilst never mentioning the political dimension behind alchemy as a type of authority and preservation of cultural artifacts in the form of rituals that work from a purely symbolic pov.tripaldi, against her best intentions, through her reorientation of alchemy and her use of newman in fact lets us know that alchemy failed its argument, all it did was entertain already empirical processes that were waiting to be discovered, such as fermentations and the extended temporality of chemical substances, substitutions and cultivations of new forms of liquids and so on that led to the creation of the lab.the article’s continuity thesis leans on newman’s contrast with the mechanical tradition. but “purely natural” might mean “aligned with providential order” rather than “continuous with technical reality.”as such, alchemists definitely didnt become chemists in the secular sense, chemists are simply scientists or rather physicists for alchemicality. alchemicality however is still at a standby, because it wants something entirely different.the real contemporary form of alchemy is actually biotech and not chemistry - because only biotech can allow alchemy to work with new physical matter in the form of technical implants and machinic hyla.
tripaldi actually proves the fact that all alchemy did was invent an epistemic frame, the orientation necessary for the idea that matter can be something whose internal transformations could be staged, accelerated, delayed, and recomposed.all the engineering attempts of alchemists were complete failures, and we even scoff at them and memeticize them for producing more cultural fragments than they ever were able to create lasting scientifically-technicized cultural fragments.tripladi does make one thing much clearer and useful for us, and that is that if the alchemical goal of creating new substrata still wants to exist, it has to pass through biotech in a way that requires semiotic metaphor to create new epistemic grounds. by criticizing technomorphism, she does re-enable philosophy and therefore language to act as as a valid and yet-productive mediator between the physical world and speculative generation, rather than its silly byproduct.there is also one more, even bigger problem with the alchemical twist on top of bio-tech engineering that tripaldi incidentally raises and where you can note that her refusal of biomimesis still situates her way closer to a technomorphist than she'd like to admit: if silicon and neuron aren't interchangeable, but simultaneously as strata are dependant on both epistemic construction and phylical engineering, what can we make of the fact that, since neurons at least in regards to their material foundation are neither conceived of nor engineered, this technically implicates them as fundamentally alien matter when in comparison to how easy it was for us to create electric-based intelligence?its possible that syntheticity as a concept is being re-technicized by tripaldi by way of inference, meaning the narrative itself cant defend the idea that biotech is both posteriori yet virtual, or that in its essentiality its co-relational but yet still produced through a substrate that has its own preordained interface.before we get into computation and intentionality, tripaldi does briefly mention her thoughts on simulation, by questioning the map as territory problem and the openworm project's insistence on the functional equivalence between a worm and its fully predictable simulated physiology.the amount of potential problems with simulations are massive, for one, the epistemic problems we can retain between arcane experience and simulated re-articulation are among the following: the existence of meta-layers of simulation that produce ambiental entropy, higher glitch amounts and the existence of the glitch as hyperreal rather than disruptive, accidentally recallable past history-as-sudden-issue, or necessity as sudden necessity.on the ontological side, further problems arise, such as a sudden random decrease of complexity, a pooling of arcaneity in aguera's technomorphological example that only lifeforms that have all their past within themselves in fully contained inner self-replicating form can self-replicate further without loss of complexity.even though arcas claims that any computer can emulate any other, this doesnt mean that emulation itself is a perfect copy of the original, given that virtual simulations of a given property may actually be leaving behind cultural and material residues that arent fully genetically encoded.the key issue tripaldi may be brushing up against is that substrate plasticity itself may be not just shaped on developmental genealogies but beholden by their slow historical rise as segmentary of higher functional possibility.all of this also precludes a minor but very important worry for the human sciences, and that is over the discipline that antikythera is trying to lean towards, or more conceretely, whether synthetic biology and computational topologies are here to help aid language as symbolic rather than as functional prosper, or whether they are here to bypass the correlationist layer of mediation entirely, to aid the triumph against the symbol entirely?the reason i ask this question is because tripaldi by the ending of her article-book, in her quest to define interfaces as a stepping stone that should finally and rightfully destroy the hierarchies that spawn from the natural-synthetic dichotomy, doesnt put into consideration the difference between artifactal steps (fabricated components, protocols, electrodes, stimulation algorithms) and non-artifactal determinants (cellular self-organization, developmental priors, evolutionary constraints, culture drift). a step doesnt have to become a determinant, alchemy has already made that very clear.the big issue with the ambition for neo-ontology is that the world-interior of capital, our replacement for metaphysics, already stripped away from the beauty of language as symbolic mediator, may never get to witness the day where biotechnological beings are anything more than augmented.however, at the very least, we can thank theorists like tripaldi for navigating critical theory towards a domain where it can at the very least try to turn words back into law again, even if it wasnt exactly the way priests from theologians to alchemists had originally imagined it would go, and apparently still isnt exactly the way tripaldi herself imagines it.even for its few shortcomings, this text is positioned in the right direction not just in its ambition but in its research and defenses, and for this reason, i have high hopes that in the future, tripaldi wont regress into studying ever greater amounts of neural lab work and ever lesser amount of alchemical rhetorics, but can actually give some of these optimistic worm scientists the reorientation they need to push us ever closer towards god.

property by ulrike bergermann

a synkar review

bergermann has had a long career as a professor in media studies in hamburg, releasing articles in german dating all the way back to 2002, with the oldest title i could find being "hollywood's reproductions: mothers, clones, aliens". her work in studies surrounding power discourses have more themtically expansive titles than the usual themes evaluated in this field, which makes for some interesting thematic expansion, more specifically, in 2023 she released an article called "deep empire" which is about how dinosaurs (and fossils more broadly) were made meaningful in modern science and culture, and how that process is tied to european/american imperial history, racism, and masculinist “explorer” myths.this topic of western hero myths actually extends to this work as well, where she explicitly argues against the way in which colonial expansion and its violent history wasnt only covered up by hero myths, but through expansionist rhetoric actually covered up the way in which colonial proprietors themselves were constantly anxious and often times themselves harmed through their violent overthrowing of existing clans, and in a state of constant self-induced procarity.this reflexivity toward institutional heroism is increasingly visible even outside academic discourse, where visitors of museums are more likely to question the placement of dinosaurs as a sign of conquest or the way in which early cavemen are archetypally portrayed.in the first chapter "primal scenes of property", bergermann connects loss prevention with property acquisition both externally and internally, where property is both the loss of communal practices + the loss of property is a constant self-iniating fear that removes any benefit you can get from it anyways. bergermann ties property with logistics (economic regulation) through fred and moten, haunting (phantom loss), raciality through bhandar and radin and intersectionality with ownership and violent loss (rot), or the idea that property and commodities are deeply tied and contain historically contingent rather than fixed origins, and ownership through property as an inherently racialized and gendered construct.the chapter begins through its conceptualization of rousseau, hobbes, grotius, locke and kant in this order as progenitors of the concept of property, thinkers who not only conceptualized it but built and justified it through their own experiences in ownership and possession. the arguments flow extremely continously and are embedded correctly at this point, but the conceptual exploration of their terms is mostly polemical (and by that of course i mean that the structure is intentionally seperating condition from formation so that it can correctly advance a rhetoric, and is not a comment on style or tone). the inner dynamics of enlightenment thinkers arent fully discovered, but some more than curious remarks are justifiably made. the association between their private exploits and philosophy is argued smoothly, where hobbes, kant and locke are all exposed in more or less equal amounts. that isnt to say that she doesnt treat their philosophy retrospectively at all, but that the amount leans towards explicating their exploits unevenly compared to the arguments they make.at one point the referentiality passes from locke to savoy to federici and into moten with no middle-men in between, retrospecting well known theorists, well understood anthropological accounts and minor theoretical literature that doesnt necessarily conflict with bergermann's posited narrative, a narrative that is dissapointingly entirely emptied of an inner voice specifically when it comes to her prioritizing of theoretical aggregation over conceptual intervention, except in minor historicizings, which bergermann is partially voicing herself, but which unfortunately present the least amount of stakes on the narrative itself. the tone is however appropriately self-assured given the discipline its in, but still feels slightly depersonalized compared to some contemporaries like tia trafford who explicates the same ideas with far more polemical originality, like for example in "property is a plantation" where locke's signing of the constitution of the carolinas follows two seperate paragraphs where trafford personally and with an inner voice lays out how safeguarding property is legitimized by an arbitrary juxtaposition against a state of nature. she also uses goodell to show how bodily rights simultaneously dont hold and are yet for slaves nonetheless punished as responsible conduct, an argument similar to bergermann's own, where she uses loick, patel and moore for similarly pointing at the contradiction between conceptual philosophy and historical formulation, but without the personal style.as for the structure, there is little to no cross-explication between the subchapters, which present us with one concept each. there is however an implicit conceptual interlinking, where as discussed earlier, the narrative force of property is delianted through the rebuking of savagery, and only then into the muddying of natural and civil law, raciality comes before the problematizing of ownership which is also correct, and then into phantom loss experienced by the bourgeoise as they feel the counterweight of their own force, and only then into whiteness as the defining signifier, which feels right on time when compared with the opposite idea - where whiteness would have arrived early if it was introduced before the hauntology could already contaminate and corrupt white stakes on property posession and law.bergermann does offer us a very finely placed meta-historical account, successfully managing to explicate the idea that natural and civil law are attached or detached from the flow of history based on both colonial regimes and their developments and the intrinsic intentions of economists that react to historical developments in real time, imposing how the law reacts to property depending on the way sovereignity interacts with bodies, and on the way in which new regimes reappropriate concepts based on convinience rather than pertinance.von redecker is the primary force when it comes to the way imposition relates to sovereignity, where she is used quite heavily as a reference because she helps to problematize concepts ranging from kant's racist exclusion of anthropological accounts to how colonial uses of christian debates on property reassimilated closed jurisdictionary roman debates on law, and even problematizing the witch hunts and how property relates intrinsically to rape, where lack of property itself was an exclusionary feature, where propertyless white men were allowed to discharge their lack of status onto powerless subjects who could never even gain property to begin with. redecker's arguments are suprisingly broad and surprisingly sharp, but bergermann, even in the notes which half of the time take up half the page, still only manages to graze the few essential points of the theory, making it so that both the main narrative and notes chapter only follow one conceptual development at a time, usually both seperate from one another, and usually both introductory in tone, muddying the conviction slightly, but with the latent benefit of being both extremely easy to read and pleasantly insightful.this chapter is definitely weakest when it comes to association, a lot of the historicizing happens to sit not outside the theory but besides it, or in other terms, the conceptual relay between historical scene and theoretical claim is occasionally underarticulated. for example in "racial regimes of ownership", bergermann shows how possession and property contradict ownership rhetoric due to the way in which race depends on economic ideologies that make it contingent on existing property relations and later racially re-assimilates these constructs as givens, transposing bhandar and lowe against locke and hobbes correclty, but then following it up with radin's thoughts on personhood and appropriation, which are seperate concepts, and although they do fit into the conceptual evolution of the narrative, none of the four previously mentioned theorists actually fit into the discussion or have anything to say about the new concepts in the piece, the subchapter simply ends just as fast and abruptly as it beings to develop a seperate conceptual development.

new normativity and the normativity of the new in adorno by hamed mohavedi

a synkar review

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, 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.