Capital measures everything
Sohn-Rethel and negative geography
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 13111417 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Gerald M Meier (0009-0003-8262-6241, The Graduate Center, CUNY, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Publication date | 2025-11-24 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Environment and Planning C Politics and Space (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2399-6544 • E-ISSN: 2399-6552 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/23996544251398331 |
| OpenAlex | W4416583198 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 43 |
Why is everyday life under capitalism socially experienced through predetermined quantums that are, at once, abstract and concrete, sensuous and algebraic, in flux and subject to strict mathematical determination? How does space come to appear as the objective container for human and extra-human activity? And why do machines, economic theorems, and maps seem to effectuate themselves on the world when individuals are unable to do so? Alred Sohn-Rethel, a fellow traveller of the Frankfurt School, presages these questions in his critique of epistemology, yet his uptake in critical theory and, more recently, radical geography, leaves the question of measure, and the prospects of its abolition, unresolved. I reconstruct Sohn-Rethel’s conception of spatio-temporality and, against the grain of Marxist geography’s own value theory, posit measure as the shape of capitalist space and the process by which capital relates to itself. Measure is the key to understanding how capital manifests itself in the production of space, how bodies of knowledge like natural science, mathematics, and philosophy come to share common dualisms, and how capital is a misrecognition of how life and social experience might be organized differently. In this, I pose a challenge to Sohn-Rethel’s uptake in spatial thought, elaborate on the encounter between critical theory and Marxist geography, and contribute to the project of a negative geography aimed squarely at material emplacement as abolition of capitalist society in its totality
Capital (architecture · Capitalism · Critical geography · Everyday life · Human geography · Marxist philosophy · Social reproduction · Subject (documents · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Historical Geography and Geographical Thought · Spatial and Cultural Studies
The Deadly Life of Logistics
Time, Labor, and Social Domination
Uneven Development
Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor
Space as a Keyword
The Critique of Real Abstraction
The Circulation of Capital
Intellectual and Manual Labour
Theory of the Gimmick
The Mismeasure of Wealth
Bodies and Artefacts
Assetization and the ‘new asset geographies’
Marx's critique of political economy in economic geography
Time, Space, and Money in Capitalism and Communism
Sohn-Rethel’s Unity of the Critique of Society and the Critique of Epistemology, and his Theoretical Blind Spot
Towards a “Unified Field Theory” of Uneven Development
Abstraction Beyond a ‘Law of Thought’
The Open Secret of Real Abstraction
Reification and the Dictatorship of the Water Meter
Freedom of Negativity
A Negative Geography of Necessity
Equation and Adequation
Petrochemical Empire
Oil in parallax
Negative Research
Value, (use) values, and the ecologies of capital
Materialism without matter
Revitalizing science and technology studies
Introduction
Violent Geographical Abstractions
Debating abstract labour
Temperature and Capital
The Capitalocene, Part I
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |