Ecological aesthetics has tended either to presume the holism of traditional nature aesthetics or to approach disharmony and crisis through thematic representations of environmental destruction. This talk prepares an alternative by examining figurations of disrupted Stoffwechsel (metabolism) in Marx and Büchner. Originating as a physiological term for the turnover of matter necessary to sustain life, Stoffwechsel came to crystallize Marx’s longstanding concern with the environmental dimension of social contradictions. For the mature Marx, society reproduces itself through an interchange of matter with nature that is mediated by labor and disrupted by capitalist production, which draws on natural cycles faster than they can be restored, opening what he calls an “irreparable rift” in the social metabolism. Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, written in the milieu in which the term took shape, gives such disruptions a body. Paid to subsist on peas for a scientific experiment, its protagonist suffers social dispossession as the ruination of his metabolism. Read alongside Marx, Büchner’s drama of social domination becomes legible as one of creaturely and ecological depletion, in which body and soil are drained by the same emerging order. These exploratory readings lay the groundwork for a critical aesthetics of ecological crisis that extends a speculative claim of Critical Theory—that artworks manifest social contradictions in their form—to capital’s metabolic rifts. Rather than asking how artworks depict the nonhuman world, this approach asks how they register strains in the historically specific ways societies organize their metabolism with nature.
About the Speaker:
Johannes Wankhammer, Associate Professor of German at Princeton University, works on eighteenth-century aesthetics, the cultural history of attention, and the environmental humanities. He is the author of Creatures of Attention (Cornell UP, 2024).
The talk will be followed by a light reception.
