Through examining Marx's methods of critique and abstraction, this book presents a series of problems in conventional social thought and the alternatives Marx's approach poses. It demonstrates how sound social science abstraction cannot but have political, often radical, implications.
This edited volume brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore the traces of the idea of “Real Abstraction” in Marx’s thought from the early to late writings, as well as the theoretical and practical consequences of this notion in the capitalist social system. Divided into two main parts, Part One reconstructs Marx’s notion of “Real Abstraction” and the influences of earlier thinkers (Berkley, Petty, Franklin, Feuerbach, Hegel) on his thoughts, as well as the further elaborations of this concept in later Marxist thinkers (Sohn-Rethel, Lukács, Lefebvre, Adorno and Postone). Part Two then considers the reverberations of the notion in the field of critical theory from a more abstract critique of capitalist social relations, to a more concrete understanding of historical movements. Taken together, the chapters in this volume offer a focused look at the concept of “Real Abstraction” in Marx.
Many scholars see science and politics as mutually exclusive realms, where the latter's influence contaminates former's purity. Karl Marx's critics often interpret him within this framework, where his value-laden judgments render his analysis of capitalism moot. Though defenders argue that Marx rejects an objective-subjective dichotomy, this book offers a different interpretation. Through the method of critique Marx examines problems and biases in putatively neutral forms of scientific knowledge, specifically models that fail to capture the relations of power and knowledge dominant in capitalist society. By incorporating these relations into his abstractions and tracing their historical movement, Marx's corrective to malformed approaches to scientific knowledge more readily lays bare capitalist society’s exploitative and distortive nature. This book demonstrates these principles and applies them to conventional sociological methods, theories of religion, and class analysis.
Artists and critics explore the concept of Real Abstraction to help understand contemporary cultural production In the Mind, But Not From There: Real Abstraction and Contemporary Art considers how the Marxian concept of Real Abstraction--originally developed by Alfred Sohn Rethel, and recently updated by Alberto Toscano--might help to define the economic, social, political, and cultural complexities of our contemporary moment. In doing so, this volume brings together noted contemporary artists, literary critics, curators, historians, and social theorists who connect the concept of Real Abstraction with contemporary cultural production. Theoretical and artistic contributions from Benjamin Noys, Paul Chan, Joao Enxuto and Erica Love, Marina Vishmidt, Sven Lütticken, and many others help to map out the relationship between political economy and artistic production in the realm of contemporary, globalized cultural exchange. This anthology places economic and social analyses alongside creative projects and visual essays to consider the many angles of contemporary art, and how inquiry into the the production of abstraction through material and social processes can be used to better understand, and hopefully change, the conditions under which art is made, seen, and circulated today. Published in collaboration with [NAME] publications.
Presents an analysis of what justice is, the transcendental theory of justice and its drawbacks, and a persuasive argument for a comparative perspective on justice that can guide us in the choice between alternatives.
The book presents an integral Marxist conception of the dialectics and methodology of scientific theoretical cognition, of the dialectical interrelation between the abstract and the concrete, of the unity of the historical and the logical, of the correlat
Christian Lotz argues that Immanuel Kant’s idea of a mental schematism, which gives the human mind access to a stable reality, can be interpreted as a social concept, which, using Karl Marx, the author identifies as money. Money and its “fluid” form, capital, constitute sociality in capitalism and make access to social reality possible. Money, in other words, makes life in capitalism meaningful and frames all social relations. Following Marx, Lotz argues that money is the true Universal of modern life and that, as such, we are increasingly subjected to its control. As money and capital are closely linked to time, Lotz argues that in capitalism money also constitutes past and future “social horizons” by turning both into “monetized” horizons. Everything becomes faster, global, and more abstract. Our lives, as a consequence, become more mobile, “fluid,” unstable, and precarious. Lotz presents analyses of credit, debt, and finance as examples of how money determines the meaning of future and past, imagination, and memory, and that this results in individuals becoming increasingly integrated into and dependent upon the capitalist world. This integration and dependence increases with the event of electronics industries and brain-science industries that channel all human desires towards profits, growth, and money. In this way, the book offers a critical extension of Theodor Adorno’s analysis of exchange and the culture industry as the basis of modern societies. Lotz argues—paradoxically with and against Adorno—that we should return to the basic insights of Marx’s philosophy, given that the principle of exchange is only possible on the basis of more fundamental social and economic categories, such as money.
The Long 1980s could be summed up handily in the annals of U.S. cultural history with the enduring markers of Ronald Reagan's presidency, Oliver Stone's film Wall Street, and Dire Straits's hit single "Money for Nothing." Despite their vast differences, each serves to underscore the confidence, jingoism, and optimism that powered the U.S. economy throughout the decade. Mining a wide range of literature, film, and financial print journalism, Scandals and Abstraction chronicles how American society's increasing concern with finance found expression in a large array of cultural materials that ultimately became synonymous with postmodernism. The ever-present credit cards, monetary transactions, and ATMs in Don De Lillo's White Noise open this study as they serve as touchstones for its protagonist's sense of white masculinity and ground the novel's narrative form. Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities and Oliver Stone's Wall Street animate a subsequent chapter, as each is considered in light of the 1987 stock market crash and held up as a harbinger of a radical new realism that claimed a narrative monopoly on representing an emergent financial era. These works give way to the pornographic excess and violence of Bret Easton Ellis's epochal American Psycho, which is read alongside the popular 1980s genre of the financial autobiography. With a series of trenchant readings, La Berge argues that Ellis's novel can be best understood when examined alongside Ivan Boesky's Merger Mania, Donald Trump's The Art of the Deal, and T. Boone Pickens's Boone. A look at Jane Smiley's Good Faith and its plot surrounding the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, concludes the study, and considers how financial reportage became a template for much of our current writing about of finance. Drawing on a diverse archive of novels, films, autobiographies, and journalism, Scandals and Abstraction provides a timely study of the economy's influence on fiction, and outlines a feedback loop whereby postmodernism became more canonical, realism became more postmodern, and finance became a distinct cultural object.