Daniel Krier

Trophies of Surplus Enjoyment

Megaspectacles are theorized as markets for a special economic object: trophies of surplus enjoyment. Attendees at megaspectacles were found to focus their activity upon trophy markets, trophy hunting and anticipated trophy display rather than spontaneous enjoyment of the staged event. Veblen’s theory of trophies as invidious objects, and insights from Goffman, Lacan and Žižek, are used to explain these counterintuitive findings. Trophies function as distorting mirrors, reflective surfaces in which viewers misrecognize the trophy owner’s apparent experience of legendary pleasures as their own dispossessed surplus enjoyment. Megaspectacles produce and sustain envy inducing legends and ritually load trophies with three forms of potential envy: status trophies (envy of symbolic prowess), action trophies (envy of imaginary risk taking) and trophies of jouissance (envious yet repressed desire for libidinal pleasure). Megaspectacles do not directly pleasure their attendees, but provide them with trophies of surplus enjoyment to disturb and disrupt the pleasure of others.

Critical Theory and the Limits of Academic Economics: Resolving the Political in Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century

This essay assesses the central arguments of Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. We note Piketty’s limited engagement with and active distancing from the writings of Marx. Piketty’s location within the disciplinary boundaries of academic economics seems to have profoundly shaped his surprisingly apolitical analysis. Engagement with the political dimensions of capital is further constrained to increase the book’s influence upon policy. We analyze important limitations to Piketty’s work that result from these disciplinary constraints. Important politically implicated concepts, problems, and approaches that relate to Piketty’s substantial empirical work are: labor process studies, research on speculative capitalism, and literature highlighting institutional and political determinants among varieties of capitalism.

Speculative Profit Fetishism in the Age of Finance Capital

This article tracks the rise of a new speculative form of ‘profit fetishism’ in the American stock market in the late 20th century as the control of American corporations shifted decisively from production-oriented managers to earning-oriented stockholders. During these years, speculative capitalists made the trading price of corporate stock the primary focus of corporate management. The heightened focus upon stock price coincided with a convergence of stock market actors upon the capitalized earnings model as the primary frame used to value corporate stock, displacing two formerly dominant frames, which focused (respectively) on hard assets and dividend payouts. Despite the notoriously unreliable and unstable nature of speculative accounting with respect to projected future earnings, such accounting profits have become the fetish of an age of speculative finance capital.

On Rereading Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies

Klaus Theweleits Male Fantasies has generated broad interest in the literature of several academic disciplines. His analysis of the symbolic and gender dynamics of the leaders of the German Freikorps (German paramilitary mercenary units of the period 1918-1923) has been widely generalized into a theory of modern masculinity. Two issues inadequately explored in Theweleits work nonetheless must be read through more recent empirical and theoretical work in history and sociology: (1) the formative role of colonial military experience in the careers of the German Freikorps officers who provide the material for his analysis and (2) the complex historical problem of the facticity of rape in Freikorps activity.

Atopia Awaits! A Critical Sociological Analysis of Marx’s Political Imaginary

Marx’s (1844) estranged labor manuscript maps processes that stultify spontaneous human relations under the division of labor in the regime of capital accumulation. For Marx, negating absolutes would put ‘Man’ back on its natural trajectory toward positive freedom. Such evacuation of mediating ‘substances’ results in either frivolity or pragmatic barbarism rather than positive freedom. Marx’s political imaginary rejected philosophical mysticism but overlooked finer points of Hegel’s dialectic that contribute to an immanent critique of Marxist political ideology. Missing from Marx’s thought is the logic of post-capitalist mediation and a trace of the subjective modalities that correspond with the objective forms of alienation. Lacking an adequate psychology, Marx did not see that he had constructed a communism that mirrored the subjective spirit of bourgeois society. We draw upon philosophical, sociological, and psychoanalytic currents to remap the genome of Marxist political philosophy with a Whitmanesque imaginary congenial to free, poetic social mediation.

The Commodification of Spectacle: Spectators, Sponsors and the Outlaw Biker Diegesis at Sturgis:

This article conceptualizes economies of spectatorship through a case study of the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally (SMR). Economies of spectatorship produce spectacular diegeses as commodities sold to spectators and sponsors. They develop through a dialectical process of progressive decontextualization as their diegeses are cross-marketed with discrepant products and services to reach new markets. Progressive decontextualization leads to diegetic incoherence that threatens the realization of profit. As an economy of spectatorship, the SMR produced an outlaw biker themed diegesis replete with vicarious action and consumable character gambles. The SMR progressively decontextualized as it cross-marketed its outlaw diegesis with establishment corporate, religious and political themes. The resulting diegetic incoherence threatened profits and required the SMR’s producers to make significant investments in order to stabilize its flow of spectators and sponsors. Conceptualizing such inherently negating processes is critical to understanding the commodification of spectacle in mature capitalism.

How Legends Become Brands: The Culture Industry in the Second Enclosure Movement

Abstract Purpose Capital increasingly takes the form of intangible assets, especially trademarked corporate brands. Further, contemporary capitalism increasingly accumulates through commodification of iconic cultural images and legendary narratives constituting a “second enclosure movement” (Boyle, 2008). This paper develops a critical theory of brands, branding, and brand management within economies of spectacle. Methodology/approach A case study of the consumer culture surrounding large displacement motorcycling is used to critique the central premise of consumer culture theory (marketing professionals create brands that become valuable icons) and develop an alternative view using concepts from critical theory, especially spectacle (Debord, 1967) and culture industry (Adorno, 1991). Findings After initial enclosure, legends were managed by Crossmarketing Licensing Networks (CMLN), coalitions of corporate and state actors, each possessing a piece of the legendary pie. The Sturgis CMLN was organized into two political divisions, rally profiteers and civic leaders, with overlapping but differentiated interests and approaches to the management of the Sturgis legend. The CMLN intervened in the cultural commons to overcome legendary degradations (banality, incoherence, undesirability) surrounding the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. Originality/value Brands are capitalized culture created by enclosures, a form of primitive accumulation. Under current conditions of immaterial production, CMLN’s engage in ongoing cultural production to maintain the capitalized value of their brands. Brands are not only hunted in the wilds of culture, but also increasingly domesticated and fattened when herded through legendary commons.

The Constellation of Social Ontology: Walter Benjamin, Eduard Fuchs, and the Body of History

“The Constellation of Social Ontology” says that Walter Benjamin, best known among scholars for his work on “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” in which he argues that all visual art, including its modern emanations like film, has always been constituted through modes not just of production, but also of reproduction. Relatively unknown, however, is that these claims about art and reproduction took shape as part of a larger set of arguments about the nature of historical knowledge and the ways that knowledge emerges and derives from embodied, corporeal practices. Benjamin made these arguments in his essay on “Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian” (1937). This essay and its history further show that Benjamin’s thought belongs at the center of the Frankfurt School’s emergent Critical Theory in the mid-1930s, and reveals significant institutional and methodological links between Fuchs, Benjamin, and the major figures of the Frankfurt School like Max Horkheimer. More broadly, Benjamin’s work on Fuchs can be seen as a methodological attempt to demonstrate how critical methods that do justice to the material of history by attending successfully to the forgotten remnants of social, political, and economic life can create the possibility of concrete social ontology in the present.

The Social Ontology of Capitalism: An Introduction

This book emerged from the 2015 Symposium for New Directions in Critical Social Theory at Iowa State University, May 11–12. The original idea for the Symposium was proposed at an April 2007 meeting of the Midwest Sociological Society in Chicago and was put into motion the next year as a biennial gathering of a handful of sociologists, Germanists, and philosophers in Ames, Iowa, with the goal of surveying the state of critical social theory in hopes of establishing vectors for future interdisciplinary research. As of June 2016, the Symposium has grown into a larger and more formally structured workshop incorporating several days of sessions devoted to the reinvention of critical social theory and critical sociology. Revised and thematically integrated papers from the 2014 meeting were published in 2016 as Capitalism’s Future: Alienation, Emancipation and Critique, edited by Daniel Krier and Mark P. Worrell, as Volume 85 of the Studies in Critical Social Sciences (Brill). The present volume is dedicated to an exploration of the ontology of capitalist society.

The Body Ontology of Capitalism

Critical social theory powerfully negates symbolic structures of political economy and imaginary projections of ideological culture but never quite knows what to do with corporeal bodies. “The Body Ontology of Capitalism” reviews Marx’s account of body ontology in his post-1859 writings (especially Capital, Vol. 1), in which value (abstract labor) is extracted from the concrete bodies of laborers caught in capital’s grasp. Body ontology is analyzed in Marx’s work as well as Lacan’s psychoanalytic social theory, exploring the relationship between structurally wounded bodies and imaginary projections. Zižek’s embodied account of wounded subjects of sublime ideological objects is also used to interpret the body fantasies of late capitalism (undead, cyborg, armored subjects). Following Marx and psychoanalytic theorists, Krier and Amidon conclude that body ontology is necessary to adequately comprehend and critique symbolic and imaginary productions of capital.