A Political Economy of the Senses: Neoliberalism, Reification, Critique

1. See for example Žižek, Butler, and Laclau, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. I am aware of the dangers of categorizing theorists as diverse as these under one broad designation. Connolly, for example, has certainly explored issues of capitalist domination in his work, see for example Connolly, Capitalism and Christianity, American Style. However, even in that work Connolly does not delve into an analysis of political economy. My point is not to elide the subtle differences between these theorists, but rather to indicate a broad methodological divide that characterizes political theory on the left. I explore this debate further in chapters 1 and 3.

2. Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.”

3. See Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour.

4. Hardt and Negri, Empire.

5. To be clear, though I am arguing that reification critique is particularly salient in the context of neoliberalism, I am not suggesting that prior forms of capitalism are somehow less dominating than neoliberal capitalism. Prior forms of capitalism, as György Lukács highlights, were indeed also pervaded by reification. My analysis intends to highlight, however, that changes in the nature of labor, as well as accompanying transformations in subjects’ forms of engagement with labor in the context of neoliberalism, demand a shift in our understanding of what reification entails in contemporary context. The issue, to my mind, is one of appreciating the historicity of forms of capitalist domination.

6. See Rancière, Disagreement; Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.

7. Read, The Micro-Politics of Capital.

8. The experiential critique of capitalism has also been explored by other Marxists, most notably E. P. Thompson and, of course, to some degree by Marx himself. My theory of a political economy of the senses is envisioned as a fulfillment of key notions of Marxian critique, which however have been historically updated and have also been reconstructed in light of contemporary debates between radical democratic thinkers and contemporary Marxists, as well as in light of contemporary political and aesthetic movements. This historical update, reconstruction, and synthesis constitutes the novelty of my intervention.

9. Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” 110–48.

10. I treat the relationship between scholarly critique and the structure of capitalism further in chapter 1 through a discussion of Boltanski and Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism.

11. On “ethicized capitalism,” see Hartmann and Honneth, “Paradoxes of Capitalism”; see also Zambrana, “Paradoxes of Neoliberalism.”

12. See Dorian Warren’s study of labor organizing against the expansion of Walmart in Chicago for an example of the ways in which neoliberalism complicates the relationship between economic interest and other markers of social difference. Warren, “Wal-Mart Surrounded.”

13. The term is Lambert Zuidervaart’s. See Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, 88.

1. On Obama’s instrumental role in creating the disillusion that ultimately was key to generating the Occupy movement, see Graeber, The Democracy Project, 91–97.

2. See St. Clair and Frank, Hopeless.

3. On “postneoliberalism,” see, for example, the essays in Brand and Sekler, “Postneoliberalism”; Peck, Theodore, and Brenner, “Postneoliberalism and Its Malcontents”; and, relatedly, Duménil and Lévy, The Crisis of Neoliberalism.

4. On the political transformations and forms of domination associated with neoliberalism, see Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception; Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies; Brown, “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy”; Martin, Financialization of Daily Life; Duggan, The Twilight of Equality?; Apostolidis, Breaks in the Chain; Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism; Bauman, Consuming Life; Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment.

5. In my argument regarding the neoliberal inversion of liberalism, I am strongly influenced by Foucault’s account in his lectures on neoliberalism, though, as I will discuss, I will take issue with key aspects of his methodology. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics.

6. For a detailed study of this dynamic in neoliberalism that has influenced the argument here, see Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis.

7. By theorists of radical democracy, I refer broadly to political theorists approaching politics from the perspective of an autonomous conception of politics. Many, though not all, of these thinkers could also be categorized as “post-Marxists,” however I prefer to use the term radical democracy because I think the issues entailed go beyond debates that are internal to Marxism. See for example, Rancière, Disagreement; Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy; Laclau, Emancipation(s); Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought; Keenan, Democracy in Question; Lummis, Radical Democracy.

8. Rüstow, Das Versagen des Wirtschaftsliberalismus; Eucken and Hutchison, The Foundations of Economics; Hayek, The Road to Serfdom.

9. On ordoliberalism, see Bonefeld, “Democracy and Dictatorship”; Blyth, Austerity; Thomas Biebricher, “Europe and the Political Philosophy of Neoliberalism,” Contemporary Political Theory 12 (November 2013): 338–75; Hien, “The Ordoliberalism That Never Was”; Mirowski and Plehwe, The Road from Mont Pelerin.

10. Rüstow, “Freie Wirtschaft – Starker Staat”; for a nuanced ideological analysis of the early neoliberals, see Jackson, “At the Origins of Neo-Liberalism.” Jackson points out that it was Andrew Gamble who later made Rüstow’s slogan “The free economy and the strong state” popular. See Gamble, The Free Economy and the Strong State.

11. Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? 12.

12. Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, 184.

13. Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? 1–21.

14. Offe, Disorganized Capitalism, 6.

15. Albena Azmanova, “Social Justice and Varieties of Capitalism: An Immanent Critique,” New Political Economy 17, no. 4 (2012): 452, doi:10.1080/13563467.2011.606902.

16. While the first dimension of neoliberalism refers to neoliberalism as a set of ideas and discourses about the relationship between state and economy pioneered by intellectuals in the mid twentieth century, the second and third facets of neoliberalism focus on neoliberalism as a set of practices. I emphasize that all three facets of neoliberalism should be kept in view in order to grasp the specific ways in which neoliberalism has transformed the relationship between the economy and politics in the twenty-first century. In contrast to a number of accounts of neoliberalism in the field of political theory that tend to focus on neoliberalism as a discourse or set of ideas about the state’s relationship to the economy, I stress that neoliberalism is both a theory about the relationship between the economy and politics as well as a material set of practices that produce the relationship between the economy and politics. Neoliberal forms of domination are produced both by means of specific governmental processes as well as through more abstract dynamics of political economy.

17. Foster and Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis, 63–90; for an alternative account that challenges the stagnation thesis on key points, see McNally, Global Slump.

18. On the biopolitical consequences of finance and debt, see Marazzi, The Violence of Financial Capitalism; Lazzarato and Jordan, The Making of the Indebted Man; Berardi, The Uprising; Graeber, Debt.

19. On this point see Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis.

20. Duménil, Lévy, and Jeffers, Capital Resurgent; Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism.

21. Duménil, Lévy, and Jeffers, Capital Resurgent, 16.

22. Martin, “Wait, So There Might Be an Occupy Visa Card?”

23. Duménil and Lévy, The Crisis of Neoliberalism, 17.

24. Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, 10–18.

26. Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, 15.

27. Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossession, 39.

28. See Gibson-Graham, Cameron, and Healy, Take Back the Economy and Gibson-Graham, A Postcapitalist Politics for work that reframes political action in terms of a diverse understanding of the economy in neoliberalism.

29. Marx, “From the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” “On the Jewish Question,” and Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.

30. Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, 31.

31. See for example Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception; Comaroff, Comaroff, and Weller, Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism.

32. Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? xii.

33. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 11.

34. Ruggie, “International Regimes, Transactions, and Change”; Blyth, Great Transformations.

35. Duménil, Lévy, and Jeffers, Capital Resurgent, 15.

36. Cerny, “Paradoxes of the Competition State,” 258.

37. Majone, “The Rise of the Regulatory State in Europe, n.p.”

39. Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis; on the legitimation crisis of the state in the 1970s context and its theoretical implications, see Habermas, Legitimation Crisis.

40. Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis, 108.

41. Krippner, “The Making of U.S. Monetary Policy,” 477.

42. Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis, 144.

44. Daniel Mertens and Wolfgang Streeck, “Public Finance and the Decline of State Capacity in Democratic Capitalism,” 27.

45. Crouch, “From Markets Versus States to Corporations Versus Civil Society?” 221.

49. Offe, “Participatory Inequality in the Austerity State,” 212.

51. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics.

54. Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 17.

55. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 120.

58. For a related critique of Foucault and studies of neoliberalism influenced by his approach, see Jabko, “Re-Problematizing Neoliberalism,” 359. Jabko argues that “even Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics … unhelpfully blurs the line between the original doctrine and its contemporary avatars and applications. The difficulty is that critiques that adopt a stance of radical exteriority vis-à-vis the object of criticism are so blunt that they generally miss their target. Neoliberalism is misleadingly understood as out there, flowing directly from the ideas of a few prophetic theorists. Yet neoliberalism is making progress first and foremost not as a discrete economic philosophy, but as a broad way of seeing the world” (359).

59. Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, 45–46.

60. Berlant, Cruel Optimism.

61. For approaches influenced by Foucault’s work on neoliberalism, see the articles in “Neoliberal Governmentality,” Foucault Studies (special issue) no. 6 (February 2009); Lemke, “‘The Birth of Bio-politics’”; McNay, “Self as Enterprise”; see also Wendy Brown’s articles on neoliberalism for an account that makes use of Foucault’s lectures yet moves against the grain of Foucault’s predominantly discursive approach to neoliberalism with the notion of neoliberalism as a “political rationality.” Brown, “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy” and “American Nightmare.”

62. Fraser, “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History.”

64. Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism.

68. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 199.

70. On “lateral politics,” see Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 261–63.

72. Brown, States of Injury, 141.

73. For a critical definition of liberalism that has influenced this account, see ibid., 141–43.

74. The quintessential critique of formalism that my account draws upon is Lukács’s, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in History and Class Consciousness, particularly the section entitled, “The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought”; for a recent critique of formalism also influenced by Lukács, see Meszaros, Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness, vols. 1 and 2: The Social Determination of Method and The Dialectic of Structure and History.

75. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.

79. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution.

80. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 88.

81. Brown, “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” sec. 540.

82. See Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy, 8.

84. See the essays in the collection by Agamben et al., Democracy in What State? Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. See Wendy Brown’s contribution to this collection for a critique of radical democratic theories of the political, Brown, “We Are All Democrats Now …”; for a related critique see also her “Sovereignty and the Return of the Repressed.”

85. Althusser, Reading Capital; See also Rancière, Althusser’s Lesson. Himself a student of Althusser, Rancière broke with his teacher over Althusser’s position on the 1968 student revolts.

86. Rancière, Disagreement. See particularly Rancière’s discussion of metapolitics, which contains his critique of Marxism as a mode of political theory and practice (81–93).

87. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, ix.

88. Ibid., see especially chapter 2.

89. Mouffe, Agonistics, 8–9.

90. Mouffe, On the Political, 31–33.

91. On the ontological status of the political, see Mouffe, On the Political, 8–9; Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought and “Politics and the Ontological Difference,” 62–64; Chambers, The Lessons of Rancière. According to Chambers, Rancière has explicitly argued against an ontological reading of his conception of politics, and Chambers provides an extensive defense of Rancière’s rejection of the ontological interpretation of his work (The Lessons of Rancière, 17–21). My critique of Rancière centers around formalism rather than ontology. For Mouffe, the status of the distinction between politics and the political is explicitly ontological (On the Political, 9). The critique of formalism, I would argue, applies to all three thinkers, irrespective of their position on the ontological status of the political.

92. Rancière, Disagreement, 101.

94. This could also be phrased as the distinction between politics and “the political.” On this distinction, see Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” 11; Mouffe, On the Political, 9; Rancière, Disagreement, 28–32. In the case of Laclau, the distinction between politics and the political is largely implicit. Oliver Marchart and Benjamin Arditi make a strong case for the presence of this distinction in Laclau’s work, see Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought, 142–53; Benjamin Arditi, “Tracing the Political,” Angelaki 1, no. 3 (1996): 15–28. In Laclau and Mouffe’s early work, this distinction manifests itself as the distinction between the logics of openness and closure, see Keenan, Democracy in Question, 102–43. Connolly, who I think one might well include in the radical democratic camp, though I do not discuss his work here, arguably also autonomizes “the political,” though in a much more complicated way. Wendy Brown makes a perceptive and subtle case for the existence of the autonomy of the political in Connolly’s theory. See Brown, “Sovereignty and the Return of the Repressed.”

95. Oliver Marchart makes this distinction between politics and the political central to his account of theorists of “political difference,” which includes to varying degrees Jean-Luc Nancy, Claude Lefort, Badiou, Laclau, Mouffe, Rancière, and Wolin; Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought. Marchart’s categorization of these diverse theorists as thinkers of political difference is, by some accounts, controversial, and Chambers, among others, has criticized the applicability of this designation to Rancière through a patient examination of the source (or lack thereof) of this distinction in Rancière’s texts. See Chambers, The Lessons of Rancière, 51–52. Contra Chambers, I see Rancière as illustrating the autonomy of the political thesis in its clearest form, as I go on to show, through his distinction between “politics” and “police.”

96. Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought, 165.

97. Ibid., 8; on the “Machiavellian moment” see also Abensour, Democracy Against the State.

98. Tønder and Thomassen, “Radical Democracy”; see also Marchart, “The Absence at the Heart of Presence.”

99. Chambers, The Lessons of Rancière, 50–57, 18–20.

100. Marchart writes,

the different predicates given to the political by theorists as diverse as Schmitt, Ricoeur, Wolin, Mouffe, Nancy, Badiou, Rancière, and others are of secondary nature when compared to what they share: these theorists see the necessity to split the notion of politics from within. … On the one hand, politics—at the ontic level—remains a specific discursive regime, a particular social system, a certain form of action; while on the other hand—at the ontological level –the political assumes the role of something which is of an entirely different nature: the principle of autonomy of politics, or the moment of institution of society.

(Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought, 8)

101. Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, 58.

102. Rancière, Disagreement, 29.

103. Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, 7–15, Disagreement, 21–42.

104. Rancière, Disagreement, chapter 2.

107. In The Politics of Aesthetics, Rancière defines the “distribution of the sensible” as “the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it. This apportionment of parts and positions is based on a distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity that determines the very manner in which something in common lends itself to participation and in what way various individuals have a part in this distribution” (12).

108. Chambers, “Jacques Rancière and the Problem of Pure Politics,” 305.

109. Though there are many differences between Rancière’s theory and Hannah Arendt’s, political theorist Hannah Pitkin’s critique of Arendt’s theory of the social as the “attack of the blob” would seem to pertain to Rancière as well. See Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob.

110. Rancière and Rockhill, The Politics of Aesthetics, 13.

111. Gibson-Graham, A Postcapitalist Politics, chapter 3.

113. Joseph, How Much Is Enough?

114. For a critique of Rancière along these lines, see Žižek’s “The Lessons of Rancière.”

115. Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 371.

116. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 203.

1. See, for example, Story, “As Companies Seek Tax Deals.”

2. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 226.

3. Honneth, Reification and Freedom’s Right.

4. Hartmann and Honneth, “Paradoxes of Capitalism,” 46.

6. Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From Women’s Liberation to Identity Politics to Anti-Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2013), 235–36.

7. Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?

8. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, xii.

9. Honneth, “Redistribution as Recognition,” 132.

11. Honneth, “The Point of Recognition,” 250–51.

12. Beyond Honneth’s critique of Lukács’s supposed economism, Honneth’s approach rests on his diagnosis of a fundamental problem in Lukács’s usage of an ontology of practice to explain precisely why reification is a form of domination. For Lukács, reification appears to be problematic, and thereby subject to critique, insofar as it violates certain ontological presuppositions of human activity. As such, Honneth claims that Lukács measures pathological, reified practice against the standard of a nonreified form of practice, a fundamental, originary, active form of interaction between the human being and the world. Insofar as we relate to the world passively—or, as Lukács called it, contemplatively—we deviate from the form of practice that is proper to the rationality of our form of life. In this sense, Honneth argues that Lukács’s critique of reification is insufficiently justified by his social-ontological critique: reified forms of practice merit critique not primarily because they contradict certain descriptive elements of social ontology but rather because they violate certain moral principles. For a discussion of “social-ontological” critique, see Honneth, “Pathologies of the Social.”

13. Honneth, Reification, 24.

14. The Heideggerian inflection of Honneth’s reading of Lukács is noteworthy, although I will not deal with this theme in this chapter. In addition to Honneth’s chapter (chapter 2) on Heidegger and Dewey in Reification, see Goldmann, Lukács and Heidegger.

15. Honneth, Reification, 27.

20. On this point see Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia.

21. See Rees, The Algebra of Revolution; Löwy, Georg Lukács.

22. Pollock, “State Capitalism.”

23. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment.

24. See Benhabib, “The Origins of Defetishizing Critique.”

25. Habermas, “Excursus on the Obsolescence of the Production Paradigm,” 82.

26. On the distinction between labor and interaction, see Habermas, “Labor and Interaction,” 267–68; Arendt, “Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political Thought.”

27. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 1:xxxii.

28. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2:322.

29. Honneth, “The Point of Recognition,” 242.

30. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 1:358.

31. On the concept of the lifeworld, see ibid., part 6.

32. Honneth, “The Point of Recognition,” 256.

33. Honneth, Reification, 79.

35. See especially Honneth, “Der Vorrang der Anerkennung” and the Struggle for Recognition.

36. On this point see Deranty and Renault, “Politicizing Honneth’s Ethics of Recognition.” They note that “Honneth makes a conscious effort to avoid referring to it [his theory] as a politics of recognition,” and that while “his reluctance to discuss the political and his focus on the ethical has good reasons within his theory,” his avoidance of the political “is symptomatic of a weakness” (92).

37. Honneth, “The Point of Recognition,” 254; See also Hartmann and Honneth, “Paradoxes of Capitalism.”

38. See both of Nancy Fraser’s contributions to Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? for a discussion of this criticism. For a thorough treatment of the way in which Honneth’s theory constitutes a response to the shortcomings of “historical materialism,” which nevertheless tends to overcompensate for these shortcomings and thereby to “repress the material mediations” with which intersubjective interactions are mediated, see Deranty, “Repressed Materiality”; see also his “Les horizons marxistes de l’éthique de la reconnaissance.”

39. While I concur with Fraser’s critique, I disagree with her earlier argument that a two-front strategy that combines analysis of recognition and redistribution into one normative model suffices to solve the problem. In my framework reification undercuts the binary between redistribution and recognition, which remains trapped within the framework of a liberal democratic politics.

40. Honneth, “The Point of Recognition,” 254.

43. For a discussion of this point, see Balibar, “Three Concepts of Politics.”

44. See Rancière, Disagreement. For Rancière’s own discussion of the relation of his theory to the theory of recognition, see Blechman, Chari, and Hasan, “Democracy, Dissensus and the Aesthetics of Class Struggle.” See also Deranty, “Jacques Rancière’s Contribution to the Ethics of Recognition.”

45. Hartmann and Honneth, “Paradoxes of Capitalism,” 46.

46. See Weeks, The Problem with Work, especially chapter 1, “Mapping the Work Ethic” (37–78), for a nuanced discussion of what I have described as surplus normativity, particularly with respect to the neoliberal work ethic and its effects upon political and economic subjectivity.

47. Honneth, Freedom’s Right, sec. 6.2.2.

48. Yet it’s not at all clear why a turn toward the notion of a moral economy requires a rejection of key Marxian concepts that elaborate the structural logics of capitalism. After all, it was the Marxist historian E. P. Thompson who first popularized the concept, although Honneth might find its conceptual roots in Hegel and Durkheim.

49. Honneth, Freedom’s Right, 196.

50. Hartmann and Honneth, “Paradoxes of Capitalism,” 47.

51. Zambrana, “Paradoxes of Neoliberalism and the Tasks of Critical Theory,” 105.

52. On the centrality of transfiguration of capitalist society to the project of critical theory, see Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia.

53. See both of Nancy Fraser’s contributions to Redistribution or Recognition? for a discussion of this criticism.

54. Honneth, “The Point of Recognition,” 254.

55. Fraser, “Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics,” 29.

57. Fraser, “Between Marketization and Social Protection,” 235–36.

58. Polanyi, The Great Transformation.

59. Fraser, “Between Marketization and Social Protection,” 233.

62. Zambrana, “Paradoxes of Neoliberalism and the Tasks of Critical Theory,” 105.

63. Ibid., 116–17.

1. Rancière, Disagreement, 69.

2. Žižek, “The Lesson of Rancière,” 75.

3. Karatani, Transcritique, 152–61.

4. Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, 1–39.

5. See Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives.

6. Kouvelakis, Philosophy and Revolution; Abensour, Democracy Against the State; Balibar and Raulet, Marx Democrate; Rancière, Disagreement.

7. Harvey, The Enigma of Capital; Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination.

8. Kouvelakis, Philosophy and Revolution.

9. For example, Postone argues that “Marx’s discussion of alienated labor in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 indicates that he has not yet fully worked out the basis for his own analysis. … His argument regarding alienation is only fully worked out later, on the basis of his conception of the twofold character of labor in capitalism.” Time, Labor and Social Domination, 160. While Lucio Colletti agrees that the Manuscripts, far from mere juvenilia, are undervalued, he believes they are of central importance because “all of historical materialism is here [in the Manuscripts] in nuce.” Colletti, Marxism and Hegel, 228. Colletti’s study focuses on the philosophical dimensions of Marx’s departure from Hegel, particularly Marx’s transposition of “the entire preceding philosophic problematic to the new terrain of the concept and analysis of the ‘social relations of production’” (248). While Colletti’s study has practical, political implications, he does not bring them into relief.

10. Kouvelakis, Philosophy and Revolution.

11. This critique is implied by post-Marxist radical democrats such as Laclau and Mouffe, as well as by Hannah Arendt in “Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political Thought” and The Human Condition. Even Herbert Marcuse offers a version of this critique of the Marxian theory of alienation from a Freudian perspective in Eros and Civilization, when he rejects the notion that real laboring activity in the production process could be anything other than alienating. The best possible thing, Marcuse claims, would be to eliminate “surplus repression” minimizing labor to make time for truly free activity, such as art (37).

12. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 112.

15. Marx, “From the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” 1–27 and “On the Jewish Question.”

16. Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” 34.

17. Marx, “From the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy Right,” 9.

20. Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” 50.

21. Marx, “From the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” 10.

22. It is in this sense that we could take Ernst Bloch’s proposal that Marx’s work represents the culmination of a “left-wing Aristotelian” tradition of thought. See Bloch et al., The Principle of Hope.

23. Balibar, “Three Concepts of Politics,” 11.

24. See Badiou on the subtractive relation of politics to historical determinants in the essays in Abrégé de Métapolitique. For another conception of politics that theorizes the political in its complete heterogeneity to the economic, see also Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy and Rancière, Disagreement.

25. Žižek, “The Lesson of Rancière,” 75

26. On the concept of the “mode of production,” see chapter 1 of Read, The Micro-Politics of Capital, 19–60.

27. Marx, Capital, 125.

28. This analysis of Marx is informed by Postone’s analysis of abstract labor in part 2, chapter 4 of Time, Labor, and Social Domination.

29. See for example Abensour, Democracy Against the State.

1. On the philosophy of praxis, see Feenberg, Lukács, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory and The Philosophy of Praxis.

2. It is important to note that autonomist Marxists such as Berardi and Lazzarato, among others, have made this link between economy and forms of subjectivity central to their project. See for example, Lazzarato and Jordan, The Making of the Indebted Man; Berardi, The Soul at Work and The Uprising.

3. Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.” For a survey of the concept of reification, see Bronner, “Philosophical Anticipations”; Bewes, Reification; Cerutti et al., Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein Heute; Dannemann, Georg Lukács zur Einführung; Floyd, The Reification of Desire; Honneth, Reification; Rose, “The Lament Over Reification”; Goldmann, Lukács and Heidegger; Jameson, The Political Unconscious; Agnes Heller, “Lukács’s Later Philosophy,” in Heller, Lukács Reappraised; Steven Vogel, chapter 1, “The Problem of Nature in Lukacs,” 13–22, and chapter 2, “Nature and Reification,” 33–50 of Against Nature.

4. For a discussion of the relation of Lukács’s theory of reification to the problem of knowledge in German idealism, see Feenberg, Lukács, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory.

5. Marx, Capital, 164.

6. When Lukács refers to “bourgeois philosophy,” he is referring primarily to the German idealists, and I am simply adopting his usage of the term.

7. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A84–130, B116–69.

8. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 111.

11. See Hegel, “Über die wissenschaftlichen Behandlungsarten des Naturrechts.”

12. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 89.

13. For an elaboration of this argument, see the essays in Laclau, Emancipation(s).

14. Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia, 347.

15. For a critical interpretation of Lukács’s concept of totality, see Martin Jay, “Georg Lukács and the Origins of the Western Marxist Paradigm.”

16. Postone, “Lukács and the Dialectical Critique of Capitalism,” 83.

17. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 137.

18. See Lukács, “Subject-Object Relationship in Art,” 1–39.

19. For a discussion of Schillers’s work as a “political hermeneutic,” see Jameson, Marxism and Form, 83–115.

20. Ibid., 189–90.

21. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 157.

24. Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, 31.

25. On Taylorism, a management discourse that interpellated the worker as passive and machinelike, see Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital.

26. On the neoliberal transformation of management discourse, see Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism.

27. See Ho, Liquidated.

28. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness.

32. Hardt and Negri, Empire; Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” 133–47.

33. On this transformation, see Shiomi and Wada, Fordism Transformed.

34. Bonachich, with Hardie, “Walmart and the Logistics Revolution.”

35. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 293–297. Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” 133–47.

36. See Ong, “A Biocartography.”

37. Read, The Micro-Politics of Capital, 136.

38. Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” 143.

39. Hardt and Negri, Empire.

40. Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, 98. When I speak of this shift, I speak of an ideological shift in the way that subjects are expected and compelled to involve themselves in labor. I am well aware that even under Taylorist conditions the individual was never actually “passive” with respect to the processes of production, but I take Boltanski and Chiapello to be pointing to an ideological shift that has important material effects on how capitalist production operates. This shift concerns changes in the involvement of subjectivity in production.

41. Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, 23.

43. Brown, “Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” section 15.

44. From an Interview with Emilie Conrad at http://motionpotion.blogspot.com/2005/03/fluid-play-emilie-conrad-and-continuum.html. See also Conrad, Life on Land.

45. Connolly, The Fragility of Things. Indeed, I would justify my perhaps idiosyncratic turn to Conrad and somatic studies in light of Connolly’s critique of political economists’ lack of engagement with what he calls neoliberal “ecology.” Connolly himself looks to an unruly band of characters to make his argument, including thinkers as diverse as Bergson, Whitehead, and Ilya Prigogine, the last having been very influential in somatic studies and in Emilie Conrad’s work in particular.

46. For an excellent critique of Lukács in terms of a Marcusean emphasis on the body, see Floyd, The Reification of Desire, 121.

47. To be clear, I do not intend to attribute this hasty caricature to Hegel himself.

48. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 165.

50. Ibid., 165–66.

52. To clarify, although I am using the terminology of base/superstructure here, I do not intend to reinscribe a reductionist version of the base/superstructure distinction. However I find the terms analytically useful to reference issues in the history of Marxism and I would hold with Frederic Jameson that “everything changes when you grasp base-and-superstructure not as a full-fledged theory in its own right, but rather as the name for a problem whose solution is always a unique ad hoc invention,” as he argues in Late Marxism (46).

1. Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, 88.

2. Rose, The Melancholy Science, 43. See also Jameson, Late Marxism, 177–81.

3. Adorno, Negative Dialectics.

5. Adorno, “The Actuality of Philosophy,” 23–39.

6. Ibid., 146 (translation amended). Regarding the change in translation: I prefer to translate urverwandt as “originally related,” as opposed to Ashton’s “Fundamentally akin” because this translation suggests a closer connection between the identity principle and exchange. In English, akin has a weaker connotation than I think Adorno meant to suggest, and the prefix ur means something like “original or primary.” Ashton’s translation, which is the standard translation to date, is infamous for its effacement of the Marxist dimensions of the text. On this point regarding translation, see Jameson, Late Marxism, ix–x.

7. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 146–47.

8. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 8.

9. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 374–75.

10. Benjamin, Illuminations, 234.

11. Adorno, “On the Fetish Character of Music.”

12. On this point see Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, 88.

13. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 237.

14. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment.

16. Marx, Capital. 1:163–77. Vol. 1, 163–177.

17. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 277.

20. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 190.

21. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 5.

23. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 57.

24. See, by contrast, Jacques Rancière’s radical political aesthetics. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics.

25. Henderson, Value in Marx, 144.

1. On the concept of totality, see Jay, Marxism and Totality.

2. Adorno, Negative Dialectics.

3. I am indebted to Rocío Zambrana for her ideas on the issue of normative ambivalence.

4. Brown, “Neo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy.”

5. On issues of perception and connoisseurship that differs from my approach, see Bourdieu, “Outline of a Sociological Theory of Art Perception.”

6. On the critique of narratocracy, see Panagia, The Political Life of Sensation.

7. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 21, 236.

8. Katrib and McDonough, Claire Fontaine.

9. Claire Fontaine, cited ibid., 10.

10. For my reflections on a later iteration of Redemptions, see Chari, “Crisis and Redemption,” 365–75.

11. My discussion of this work is indebted to conversations with Ira Allen.

12. On the “V-effect,” see Jameson, Brecht and Method, 35–42.

13. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.

14. Thanks to Keally McBride for directing me to this work.

15. Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 15.

16. Interestingly, this element was eliminated from the second exhibition of the work at the San Francisco Jewish Museum.

17. Thanks to Ira Allen for this point

18. Berlant, Cruel Optimism.

19. Adorno, “On the Fetish Character of Music.”

20. Illouz, Cold Intimacies.

21. Ibid., chapter 1.

1. Berrett, “Intellectual Roots of Wall St. Protest Lie in Academe.”

2. Cited in Writers for the 99%, Occupying Wall Street, 10.

3. See Joel Olson’s work on the democratic effects of “fanaticism,” which pulls politics away from the center. Olson, “The Freshness of Fanaticism.”

4. Graeber, “Occupy Wall Street’s Anarchist Roots,” 144.

5. See Taylor and Gessen, Occupy! Many of the essays in this collection address the issue of the exclusionary and class-specific character of the movement, especially those by Sunaura Taylor, Audrea Lim, Kung Li, and Nikil Saval, though all from a perspective that is in solidarity with the movement.

6. Graeber, “Some Remarks on Consensus.”

8. Jacques Rancière (Interviewed by Pavler Correto), “Jacques Rancière Interview: ‘Democracy is not, to begin with, a Form of State,” trans. unknown (January 21, 2012).

9. Dean, “Claiming a Division, Naming a Wrong,” 90. Where I would disagree with Dean is on her critique of the “democratization” interpretation of Occupy. She argues that “occupation is not a democratic strategy; it is a militant divisive tactic that expresses the fundamental division on which capitalism depends,” whereas I would argue that the democratic dimensions of the movement are fundamental and cannot be separated from Occupy’s critique of political economy. Grasping both of these dimensions as possible in one movement is key to challenging the impasse between the critique of political economy and notions of radical democracy that I highlighted in chapters 1 and 3. Indeed, I would even go so far as to argue that Occupy’s deployment of democratic discourse is itself a version of the “defetishizing fetish” strategy that I’ve been focusing on throughout this book. Democracy serves at one and the same time as a fetish and as an emancipatory discourse. I would argue this in contrast to Dean and Badiou, both of whom have rejected the discourse of democracy as emancipatory. Both overlook the necessity of democratic discourse to an immanent critique of neoliberalism.