Alfred Sohn-Rethel Research Articles

Looping Nature

The following paper attempts to articulate a distinctly materialist notion of ideology by way of re-visiting two texts that have been considered oddities, if not embarrassments, by the subsequent developments of their respective disciplines: Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology and Engels’ Dialectic of Nature. Both text are strikingly similar in their speculative engagement with the natural sciences and in their potential to inform a renewed engagement with the question of the relation between technology and life. What I want to propose here is that these texts can enrich our understand of a Marxist notion of ideology if read through recent philosophical thinking on new technological developments (Bernard Stiegler, Catherine Malabou) and the concept of recursivity (Yuk Hui). This approach will allow for a properly materialist footing of a critique of ideology — namely by performing a turn from a critique that is primarily concern with the question of how we can penetrate false appearances towards a materialist account of how (“false”) appearances, something like “real abstractions” (Alfred Sohn-Rethel), can emerge out of the “flat plane” of matter.

Sign systems of lust and slavery

Money is real. Few other objects are perceived with comparable attention. At the same time, its content, its mystery, evaporates behind its physical form. For every commodity producing human society money has been a steady companion since it emerged. (Compare Hanappi 2013a) Money forms, the way in which money took on its material cloth, have changed a lot. Money forms, the blood running through almost all social interaction, have been a mirror, a reflection of the essence of a society’s working. This paper is an attempt to look behind the veil that money forms as sign systems for social value produce. Thus, two concepts are the starting point for the investigation: sign systems and social value. Sign systems are directly coupled to the perceptions of human individuals. More precisely, they are connected to a society’s communication processes, including self-communication, i.e., personal thought. The mystic force of money forms, its resemblance to sexual attraction, derives from its root in direct and blunt relevance for each human individual in a fully developed commodity producing society. It can be redemption, it can be disgust. “Money speaks, wealth whispers” expresses this interface between individual and society and distinguishes how the force of the money form is transmitted. (This part can build on important work done by Alfred Sohn-Rethel 1978, 1990, compare also Ausubel 1968) The first part of the paper will develop a sketch of a theory of this interface, of sign systems as social systems. The second part will then focus on the concept “social value.” The perspective will be changed: what is beneficial from the point of view of the species will be the starting point for a discussion on how it materializes in certain money forms. It turns out that money forms follow an evolutionary trajectory, (Compare Hanappi and Scholz-Wäckerle 2017) leading through alternating stages of contributing to the stabilization of a mode of production and then actively destroying it in revolutionary turning points—just to give birth to a new form of representation of social value. (It is, of course, only a question of naming if this new form should be called a new “money form.”.) Finally, a third part shall provide ideas on the connection between the first two parts: How is desire and pain injected in personal perceptions by the interference of social value loaded money forms and how are vice versa these passions and grievances shaping the potential constellation of social value regulating institutionalized forms in revolutionary times? In conclusion this part will also present some immediate consequences of the theoretical results on contemporary global economic policy.(Compare also Hanappi 2020).

Real Abstraction, Materialist Social Synthesis, and the Transcendental Regime in the Capitalist Mode of Production

The article addresses how Immanuel Kant, Theodor Adorno, and Alain Badiou can come surprisingly close, provided we invoke Marx's value form at the centre of commodity exchange. We will argue for a complementary elaboration to the ‘capitalist schematisation' (Christian Lotz via Alfred Sohn-Rethel), while at the same time probing into the material basis of Badiou's transcendental organization—investigating whether the transcendental regime of appearing is always already a product of a determinate mode of production. We will be guided by two premises: (1) The pure conceptual unfolding understood as an inner-logical consequently produces the non-conceptual, an external result, immanent to such unfolding, hence real abstraction, which retroactively imposes itself on understanding as a conceptual abstraction. (2) The inversion of objective/subjective into objective-subjective synthesis, which is both real and social. Overall, the article seeks to scrutinize an alternative social synthesis through a Badiou-inspired reconstruction of Marx’s value form and posed as a potential category of social synthesis that entails the real abstraction, namely money with commodities, alongside the object labour in a single, unified structure.

From Fetish to Totality

Abstract This essay argues that the artwork’s opacity and purposively purposeless quality are a tacit refusal of the compulsory division between intellectual and manual labor, which afford the artwork a unique capacity to access an otherwise occluded totality. By analyzing conceptual work by the artist duo Claire Fontaine—who deploy Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s notion of market exchangism in their work—in relation to twentieth-century intellectual debates around representation, abstraction, and social synthesis, the essay develops a model of totality in a descriptive rather than prescriptive register. At issue is the artwork’s potential for dereification, whereby a given work of art may provide perceptual experience of the transactional logic that underpins and structures the social field.

The Digital Calculus of Racial Capitalism

The Digital Calculus of Racial Capitalism

Last Philosophy: the Metaphysics of Capital from Sohn-Rethel to Žižek

Abstract Beginning with his engagement with Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s seminal treatment of ‘real abstraction’, Intellectual and Manual Labour, Slavoj Žižek has repeatedly thematised and excavated the proposition that capitalism is innervated by a kind of actually-existing metaphysics, the scandal of an abstract form external to human cognition. This essay investigates Žižek’s use and criticism of Sohn-Rethel and outlines some of the developments and contradictions in his effort to confront capital’s challenge to philosophy’s self-sufficiency. It problematizes Žižek’s tendency to elide a model of abstraction as a hollowing-out or evacuation of social content (rooted in The Communist Manifesto) with a much more promising conception of real abstraction as its re-articulation or re-functioning, while querying Žižek’s recent efforts to transcend the purported limitations of Marx’s conceptualisation of capital in the direction of a (‘Lacanised’) Hegel.

Returning Marx to Kant?

Abstract Christian Lotz’s book, The Capitalist Schema: Time, Money, and the Culture of Abstraction, seeks to reconcile Marx’s logic of conceptual determination with Kant’s logic of constitution. It is in this context that Lotz reconfigures Kant’s transcendental schema as money and understands money as an a priori determination that makes the world accessible and meaningful to individuals. Furthermore the book’s point of departure is Adorno’s Kant interpretation, and in foregrounding money Lotz also wishes to ‘reconnect Adorno’s Critical Theory to Marx’. The review engages with both endeavours, discusses the, so to speak, temporal impossibility of such a reconciliation project and revisits a previous attempt to bring Kant and Marx together: Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s theory of real abstraction.

Objective meaning: The formation of self in Mead and Sohn-Rethel

This analysis of the work of George Herbert Mead and Alfred Sohn-Rethel compares their respective accounts of the formation of the self. The analysis proceeds from two important similarities: the effort to understand self-consciousness not as primordial but as the product of social processes, and the view that these processes form a circuit: the self arises from consciousness’ return to itself, concluding a movement whereby consciousness is first externalized onto objects and then internalized, taking on the insular shape of self-consciousness. What sets the two accounts apart is the site from whence the self returns: objects. In Mead, the self returns from meaningful objects, and this same (intersubjective) meaning is entangled with the process of self-formation. In contrast, for Sohn-Rethel, the self returns from objects whose meaning is not established intersubjectively but objectively: the self is the unintended consequence of commodity exchange. In Mead, interaction among people affords meaning to objects and thus evokes the self; in Sohn-Rethel, interaction among commodities evokes an objective meaning that renders people as selves. Interpretative sociology should attend to the objectively and unconsciously meaningful forms analyzed by Sohn-Rethel. To illustrate this conclusion, reference is made to a certain experience of the social under neoliberalism.

Self-Preservation and Exchange: Two Ways of Historicizing Kant's Concept of Synthesis and their Epistemological Implications

This article discusses two critical attempts to historicize Kant’s concept of synthesis: Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s theory that the basis of cognitive synthesis is the social synthesis through commodity exchange and Theodor W. Adorno’s considerations on the role of synthesis in the domination of nature. As is pointed out in the first section, Sohn-Rethel’s approach has certain relativist implications whereas Adorno’s is, to some extent, inevitably realist. In section 2 the author first analyzes Adorno’s agreement with Sohn-Rethel’s social synthesis and then demonstrates how the opposing epistemological implications are reconciled. In the final section the resulting continuity between self-preservation and exchange is found to be epistemologically promising although it carries the danger of naturalizing capitalism.

Violent Geographical Abstractions

This paper historicises the emergence (and subsequent power) of geographical abstractions. Following Karl Marx in the Grundrisse, I argue that one of the central features of modern capitalist society is rule by abstractions. As both Derek Sayer and Henri Lefebvre argue, such abstractions enact forms of violence within the societies subjected to their rule. The three geographical abstractions I consider are space, nature, and scale. Whilst I argue that some forms of abstraction are transhistorical, my interest is more in how these transhistorical abstractions rub up against new forms specific to capitalist societies. In particular, following Alfred Sohn-Rethel, I am interested in the role played by the exchange abstraction in producing distinctive spatial relations, a commoditised nature, and new forms of scalar hierarchy. The paper sheds light on the utility of a historical–geographical materialist approach for situating the production of violent geographical abstractions and envisaging a world free from their domination.

Materialism without matter: abstraction, absence and social form

In light of the contemporary theoretical infatuation with ‘new’ materialisms, matter and materiality, this essay revisits the heterodox Marxian thesis according to which materialism may, in Étienne Balibar's formulation, have ‘nothing to do with a reference to matter’. The article explores variants of this materialism without matter: Antonio Gramsci's objections to Bukharin's ‘Marxist sociology’, Theodor W. Adorno and Alfred Sohn-Rethel's critiques of epistemology, and Isaak Illich Rubin's elucidation of the categories of Marx's value-analysis. It foregrounds a shift in this counter-intuitive materialism from subjective praxis to the categories of capital, in which ‘not one atom of matter enters’ (Marx). This recovery of an understanding of materialism as the critical analysis of real, social abstractions concludes with a reconsideration of Louis Althusser's ‘aesthetic’ reflections on the materialism of absence, as featured in his philosophical appreciation of the paintings of Leonardo Cremonini.

The commodity form in cognitive capitalism

We revisit the Marxist debate on the commodity form. By following the thought of Alfred Sohn-Rethel and Slavoj Žižek, we attempt to understand the commodity form through the Kantian categories a priori. Sohn-Rethel explores the proposition that there can be no cognition independent of its historical and social conditions and puts forward the daring conclusion of an ontological unity between knowledge and commodity exchange. We suggest that Sohn-Rethel's thought finds new relevance nowadays, under the prevalence of a cognitive capitalism. We discuss the reformulation of relations of production and consumption under cognitive capitalism and show how knowledge-led immaterial and affective labour adds a higher value to the commodities into which it is embodied. Above all, the commodity form in cognitive capitalism becomes biopolitical.

Monetisation and the Genesis of the Western Subject

AbstractThis paper searches early Greek texts (Homer, Herakleitos, Parmenides, Plato) for the genesis of the idea of the individual mind or soul as a unitary site of consciousness, and explores the relation of this genesis to the first monetisation in history. Money simultaneously promotes the isolated autonomy of the individual and provides a model (the unification of diversity by semi-abstract substance) that shapes both the unity of individual consciousness and the presocratic conception of the cosmos as constituted by a single semi-abstract substance. The argument confirms and develops the importance accorded by Alfred Sohn-Rethel to the ‘real abstraction’ of commodity-exchange in the origins of Greek philosophy.

The Open Secret of Real Abstraction

This article revisits the Marxist debate on ‘real abstraction’ in order to evaluate the relevance of this concept to a period marked by the rise of cognitive capitalism and a proliferation of discourses on abstraction in social theory. The article touches on the interpretive debates around Marx's 1857 Introduction and tries to identify the tensions and contradictions at work in the distinctive contributions of Louis Althusser, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, and Roberto Finelli to thinking on the specific status of abstraction, in terms of both the methodology of Marxism and the logic and ontology of capitalism. These foundational debates are then contrasted with attempts by Paolo Virno and Lorenzo Cillario to think the contemporary figures of abstraction in terms of its politicization, on the one hand, and its operational role in the labor process, on the other.

Literature and the Renewal of the Public Sphere by Susan VanZanten Gallagher , M. D. Walhout (review)

MLR, 97.4, 2002 1053 thesis: its literary references range from Matthias Claudius to Lion Feuchtwanger (in one sentence), and from the Middle Ages to contemporary Berlin. It occasionally gives itself up to the luxury of an extended analysis of an individual text, as in the case of Keller's Die mifibrauchtenLiebesbriefe, and the Fortunatus story is an appropriate leitmotif throughout, as is the turning point marked by the Mephistophelean introduction of paper money in Faust II. Horisch also explores in detail and with historical and philological differentiation the way money is a (curiously speechless) signifying system (the poetics of money), and in one of the most compelling chapters, 'What Counts: Money and Validity', he expounds and extols Alfred Sohn-Rethel's extraordinary theory of the economic substructure to Kantian epistemology. It is hard to pick holes in cultural and literary discourse of such sustained brilliance, nor would one wish to, so rich and stimulating are the insights on nearly every page, but the ludic disavowal of the grand narrative that the book actually relies on is tricky in several ways. One is that the book, in all its marvellous variety,attacking the issue from so many angles in such quick succession, threatens to dissolve its own topic and undermine itself. This is partly intended, no doubt: it is the tribute paid to the postmodern condition, in order to oppose it. However, it is a risk, and the very basic relay of ontosemiologies that makes the analyses possible is at the same time selfevidently an oversimplification, itself a kind of game. Furthermore, it is in the nature of Horisch's anti-authoritarian attitude that the book is not conceived as a treatise, but is in fact compiled from previously published essays, each on a differentcomplex theme. This leads to repetition and an exasperating lack of focus. Horisch's intellectual style also leads to insuperable difBculties for a translator. The book simply does not read in English as it reads in German. The translator is to be greatly admired for taking on and completing the task, with often excellent results. Nevertheless, Horisch cannot be rendered without oversimplification on the one hand or clumsiness on the other. Either solution will detract substantially from the all-important performance. How can one render the range of 'Tiefsinn' in one word? 'Melancholy' certainly won't do on its own, but what would? Sometimes the perpetual play of Horisch's style threatens to make it impossible to judge whether a translation is right or not. Can 'daB wir nicht kommunizieren konnen' (p. 267) really be rendered as 'that we cannot not communicate' (p. 220, my emphasis)? The factthat either would mean something in the context is testimony to the threat of arbitrariness throughout Horisch's work. This does seem to constitute a valid criticism of this book as well as of Horisch's others (although it should be said that he is quite capable of being an effective polemical journalist in the appropriate circumstances). Yet it seems more just to recall that the presence of this threat is not itself arbitrary: it is historically given, and both the author and his translator do much in word and deed to withstand it. Jesus College, Cambridge Michael Minden Literature and the Renewal of the Public Sphere. Ed. by Susan VanZanten Gallagher and M. D. Walhout. London: Palgrave. 2000. x + 247 pp. ?42.50. The acknowledgements section of this book explains how, following annual discussions between a group of scholars on the relationship between literature and Christianity ,this collection of essays on Habermas's concept of the public sphere gradually came into being, with the help of funding from the Calvin Centre forChristian Scholarship in the United States. Despite the extended dialogue behind the essays in this volume, the overall result lacks unity and coherence. While this is a criticism often levelled against multi-author collections, it is exacerbated in this case by a number of problems. 1054 Reviews According to Habermas, 'a robust civil society' requires a healthy public sphere which mediates between individual interests, and political and economic systems. The chief concern of this book is to reflectupon the nature of that public sphere, with particular reference...

Washington Square: Styles of Money (review)

Book Reviews 221 The focus on private homes (and the traveler's donnée to them) is sharply extended in "Casa Alvisi," James's final essay on Venice, written as a preface to Katherine Bronson's memoirs. Here the emphasis is no longer on "discovering" the city, but on the human connections that the city enables. Bronson's virtue was to enable the traveler and the expatriate to meet on the grounds of a "perfect tenderness for Venice " ( 105 ). This "true principle of fusion " enabled Bronson and her associations to create in her home the sense "of a friendly private-box at the constant operatic show" (103). A similar progression from spectacle to private theater marks the Rome cycle, and James's ethics of vision evolve in these essays from a tourist's view from nowhere to an engaged intersubjectivity in which the traveler's "practiced groping gaze" no longer aims at discovering the city, but at forging relations with his friends in "odd happy passages of communication and response" (95). Fred Kaplan's edition organizes James's Italian essays in a fashion useful to the scholar and pleasant for the general reader. The inclusion of excerpts from James's correspondence makes the volume invaluable: the reader's only complaint of this rich resource is the wish to have yet more. Ian F. A. Bell. Washington Square: Styles of Money. New York: Twayne, 1993. 165 pp. $22.95; pb $7.95. By Janet Gabler-Hover, Georgia State University Ian F. A. Bell's Washington Square: Styles of Money proves the "complex ordinariness" of Washington Square to be far from ordinary (13). I would add that only James could mute his style and subdue his characterization to such an effect of intensity and purposiveness. Such ordinariness, according to Bell, is the appropriate medium for James's inquiry into American nineteenth-century bourgeois politics. Bell contends for the social historicity of James's Washington Square (1880) and, for point of comparison, of its companion-piece The Europeans (1878): "Washington Square is about history, about the ways in which economics and commercial practices structure human relationships, and about the ways in which history may be represented in fictional forms" (23). Bell argues his points gracefully with a masterful use of the traditional Twayne format. Bell argues that the 1840s setting of Washington Square in the nascence of commercial expansion obliquely implicates the fully industrialized American marketplace of the 1870s. This fluidity of boundary reveals the process, glossed by Roland Barthes, Thorstein Veblin, and Alfred Sohn-Rethel, by which bourgeois capitalism seeks to mystify and disguise "its production, the memory of its 222 The Henry James Review own manufacture" (51-52) so as to foreclose "the imagining of alternatives" (31) to its own structure of economic policy and social relation. Bell further argues early in his "Reading" that James found in Balzacian realism and Hawthornian Romance like imprints of stasis and fluidity, respectively, that he recomposed in his own work as a paradoxical interaction between oppositional necessities: Balzacian reification of "fact" and Hawthornian imaginative "latitude." Professor Bell explains that aesthetics and economics share the same ability to disguise the process of their making. In "Time, Place, and Balance" (chapter five), Bell shows how Sloper resists change; the physical solidity of Sloper's house parallels his choice of Washington Square as the last geographical bastion from New York's commercial district. He also employs a "balance" that represses opposition; even his elitist yet practical profession—physician—neutralizes the increasing division between manual and intellectual labor occurring in nineteenth -century corporate practice. Scientific rhetoric complements the "fixed" nature of the marketplace and the alienation of people/things from their usefulness , whether that "thing" is an item in a shop window or Sloper's daughter Catherine. Bell argues additionally that the fallacy of marketplace value is represented by the controversy between soft and hard money during the Jacksonian and Reconstruction eras. Bell's discussion (53-65) inevitably brings to mind Walter Benn Michaels's The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (1987). Both Michaels and Bell expose the fallacy in the argument that one form of money, gold...

Toward a Semantic Notion of Space

1) Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Geistige und Koerperliche A rbeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970). Despite the claim of traditional functionalism, rarely is form entirely derivable from function. Both conscious and subconscious ideas about space play important roles in designers' conceptions of products, including their intended forms, functions, and meanings in the physical environment. Unable to directly penetrate this subconsciousness, we start with ordinary language the language by which people describe what they are designing, buying, using, and discarding, as well as what sense such objects make in their lives. From there we proceed to a way of designing semantically intelligible products. Although Alfred Sohn-Rethel was not concerned with either design or language, his distinction between physical and mental abstractions1 is important. Both abstractions describe processes of conceptualization but have fundamentally different consequences. Physical (material or real) abstractions begin with observerindependent physical qualities and proceed to accounts of increasingly general commonalities, none of which refer to those who accomplish the abstracting. In contrast, mental abstractions begin with perceptions and proceed to increasingly deeper levels of understanding. We agree with Sohn-Rethel's distinction and, as applied to space, associate the physical with a geometric model and the mental with a semantic model, which we wish to develop. Evidence for both models is found in language.