Christian Lotz

Is Capital a Thing? Remarks on Piketty’s Concept of Capital

The thesis of my remarks is that Piketty’s overall position understands capital as something that exists within society, whereas I submit (on the grounds of Marx’s theory of society) that capital is the main category that determines the existence of capitalist society. Put differently, capital in the form of valorized labor determines the specific social form of capitalist society. Whereas Piketty’s position is built upon a positivistic concept of capital, I argue that capital is not ‘some-thing’; rather, capital is the central category of capitalist social reproduction. Capital, in other words, must describe the functioning of a social totality as a whole and cannot be related to a single aspect of it. Accordingly, though the focus on inequality is important, it tends to hide the real social organization of capitalist society.

Alienation, Private Property, and Democracy: Why Worrell and Krier Raise Questions in the Clouds

In this article, I argue that Marx’s philosophy does not commit us to Worrell and Krier’s claim that a post-capitalist society will be a social formation in which all social relations appear unmediated to their agents. Quite the opposite is true: given his Hegelian background, which Marx never gives up, social relations are in principle to be mediated by the results of human productive acts, and although a socialist society no longer is mediated by capital, it still cannot be thought without a legal, ethical, and political form of these relations. Those meditations (which Worrell and Krier do not separate clearly from social-economic aspects) will be universal. Accordingly, the authors’ claim that Marx is opposed to the concept of the universal is baseless. In addition, I demonstrate that Worrell and Krier’s interpretation of Marx’s concept of alienation as a romantic concept is misguided and, instead, that we would do well to focus on the concept of private property. Finally, I show that they do not properly grasp Marx’s concepts of democracy and communism.

Representing Capital: Mimesis, Realism, and Contemporary Photography

“The (In)Visibility of Capital. Reflections on Film, Lukacs, and Contemporary Critical Realism” presents critical reflections on the possibility of a contemporary concept of aesthetic realism in connection with two photo artists and filmmakers, Edward Burtynsky and Allan Sekula, both concerned with globalization, the exploitation of the earth, labor, and global capital in their work. The basic question connected with their work is whether it is possible to represent the real abstractions of capital and the effects of global capital in images, photography, and other works of art. Lotz argues that Burtynsky’s work ultimately mystifies reality and falls back onto a subjective aesthetical position and discusses the possibility of renewing Lukacs’ concept of realism and mimesis for contemporary critical aesthetics.

Gegenständlichkeit-from marx to Lukács and back again

As one of very few authors in the Anglo-American tradition, Andrew Feenberg, has pointed out, the early development of critical theory and Lukacs’ philosophy cannot be understood without reflecting on the historically rich network between phenomenology, Neo-Kantianism, and social theory. Moreover, in contradistinction to many contemporary critical theorists, Feenberg, following Lukacs, is not hostile to epistemological and ontological questions in social theory. In this vein, the main term that Feenberg introduces in his interpretation of Lukacs is Gegenstandlichkeit (objectivity). Although I agree with Feenberg’s claim that this term is central for understanding Lukacs’ understanding of social entities as culturally meaningful entities, I argue that we can find this broader social meaning of entities already foreshadowed in Chap. 1 of Marx’s Capital if we read Capital as a theory of society. Unfortunately, traditional Marxist discourses tend to reduce Capital to an “economic” theory and Feenberg seems to follow this tradition, that is, he seems to dismiss the critique of political economy as the primary horizon for a critical theory of society. However, as I will demonstrate, Marx’s project cannot be reduced to a labor theory of value and, instead, it should, from the beginning, be understood as a social theory based on social categories; and Gegenstandlichkeit serves as the central element for translating epistemological concepts into social concepts.

Fritz Kaufmann (1891–1958)

In his short but brilliant “Art and Phenomenology” (1940) Kaufmann gives a comprehensive overview of the relation between phenomenology and art. He was concerned with finding a way that combines elements of edmund husserl’s phenomenology, e.g., transcendental reduction, and elements that can only be uncovered by a hermeneutics of facticity, such as the wholeness of one’s life and existential affectivity. In his Freiburg lectures, martin heidegger, as a follower of Dilthey, tried to develop a hermeneutics of life that understands all phenomena as rooted in one’s concrete historical life-project and its coherency, which is produced by care, trouble, and temporality.