Capital measures everything: Sohn-Rethel and negative geography

Abstract

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.