Join us for Registering the Rift: Stoffwechsel in Marx and Büchner - a talk with Johannes Wankhammer (Princeton University).
About the event:
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).
*Image by Alberto Macone
