Veit Braun

@toteraltermann

Property, biology & stuff. All opinions someone else's. Out now: AT THE END OF PROPERTY @BrisUniPress.bsky.social

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Veit Braun@toteraltermann· 25d

From Paisley Livingston (ed.) (1984) Disorder and Order, p. 259–260.

Veit Braun@toteraltermann· Jul 2

Andreas could be at the forefront of social theory of ecology but once more he chooses to be at the forefront of understatement. Go read this paper!

Research Article| April 01 2026
Critical Climate Materialism: Residual Reification and Reparative Critique Open Access
Andreas Folkers
Critical Times (2026) 9 (1-2): 7–33.
https://doi.org/10.1215/26410478-12217387

Abstract

This essay introduces the concept of “residual reification” to renew and rethink critical theory in light of the conceptual and political challenges of the climate crisis. Critical theories show how reification engenders a “second nature” of social institutions. “Residual reification” stresses that the remnants of fossil capitalism—carbon emissions—create global heating and thus a catastrophic nature. The critique of residual reification calls for a new historical materialism: a critical climate materialism. Whereas reification theory assumes a hierarchical relationship between active human practice and passive matter, this essay emphasizes the waywardness and criticality of matter. This is not simply a turn to new materialist ontologies of lively matter, but rather an elucidation of how fossil capitalism changed the historical ontology of matter and labor by undermining the dualism between subjects and objects of work. The reification of work is intertwined with a wasteful residual reification, production with pollution. Residual reification implies that capital has irreversibly inserted itself into natural history. Therefore, it is not enough to abolish reifying social structures; it is also necessary to remediate residuals. This calls for a reparative critique that seeks to inform practices of ecological repair and to renew critical concepts like recognition, (re)appropriation, and freedom, which have lost traction on the ecologically impaired ground of the present.

Veit Braun@toteraltermann· May 25

campus.de/wissenschaft... Here's the TOC, Shove at al.'s and especially Hobart's chapters might be what you're looking for

Veit Braun@toteraltermann· May 25

There is actually a considerable literature, mostly geography and postcolonial theory, which for various reasons (I have a theory) doesn't make it into mainstream CT. We translated and edited some of it a while ago in here:

Elena Beregow,
Veit Braun,
Thomas Lemke (Hg.)
Critical Temperature Studies
Konturen eines
Forschungs-
programms

Campus

Veit Braun@toteraltermann· May 21

"Every place in the world, every particle of matter is the fennel of Prometheus, in which nature presents itself as obedient." (Hermes IV: Cloud)

Veit Braun@toteraltermann· May 21

We just had an @stsing.bsky.social reading group meeting with John Downer to discuss his book "Rational Accidents: Reckoning with Catastrophic Technologies" (@mitpress.bsky.social, 2023) and it was really nice. It's such a good book. mitpress.mit.edu/978026254699...

Rational Accidents

Reckoning with Catastrophic Technologies

John Downer

Veit Braun@toteraltermann· May 18

The amazing Mtoto

Veit Braun@toteraltermann· May 7

Veit Braun@toteraltermann· May 4

"Let's click on this", as someone once put it The argument is largely based on general societal acceptance and consumption of alcohol lowering entry costs for heavy drinkers plus the negative cosequences their behavior has on vulnerable people. 1 in 80 really doesn't sound too good.

Veit Braun@toteraltermann· May 2

Die Kehrseite dieser Haltung ist allerdings, dass Rosa seine Erzählung nur aus dem Gegensatz von leiblichen menschlichen Subjekten und einem abstrakten, entkörperlichten System heraus entwickeln kann, das letztlich niemandes Interessen vertritt. Genau deshalb kann es kritisiert werden.

Veit Braun@toteraltermann· Apr 28

❤️

Veit Braun@toteraltermann· Apr 27

Andere Zeiten, Andere Sorgen naturlesen.wordpress.com/2020/10/24/d...

Man sieht, dass der Docht im Kerzenwachs steckt, und man erkennt, wie sich das feste Wachs verflüssigt und im Docht emporsteigt. Der Docht ist aus brennbaren Fäden mit einem „Drall“ so gesponnen, dass er sich krümmt, und dass ihn die Krümmung in den äusseren Kerzensaum führt, wo er – man erkennt den Glutfleck – verbrennt. Dies ist eine neuere Erfindung. Als die Dochte noch ohne Drall gesponnen wurden, blieben sie mitten in der Kerzenflamme, wo sie nicht verbrennen konnten, und bildeten rasch einen immer dicker werdenden russenden Klumpen aus, der die Flamme zum Blaken brachte und mit einer Lichtputzschere (einem eigens für den Kerzenbetrieb erfundenen Gerät) abgeschnitten wurde. Goethe klagte über die lästige Unterbrechung beim Schreiben: „Wenn die Kerls doch was Brauchbares erfinden würden, das die Lichtputzerei überflüssig machte!“ Voilà, Mr. Goethe, die Kerls sind tätig geworden.

Veit Braun@toteraltermann· Apr 26

Veit Braun@toteraltermann· Apr 25

Veit Braun@toteraltermann· Apr 22

I'm giving a talk next week on plants and why many of our ideas about property feel so ill-suited for them. Tue, 28 April, 4:00 pm AEST / 8:00 am CET. Kindly hosted by @coeplantsuccess.bsky.social www.plantsuccess.org/event/bad-to...

Bad to Think With: Plants and Property Relations
28 April @ 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm

Presented by Veit Braun.

Animals, Claude Lévi-Strauss famously said, are not just good to eat but good to think with: they elucidate the structure of social relations. But what about plants? In this talk I argue that the ways we relate to plants on the one hand and the matrix of people and things on the other offered by property thought are a bad match. Much of what plants are and do does not neatly fit into the categories of subject and object or body and idea; nor can the problems caused by intellectual and tangible property in plants easily be addressed by the critique of property. To elaborate this point, I want to sketch the trajectories on which plants go astray and slip through our matrices of property (including my own) by exploring some of what has happened in the legal landscape of especially European plant breeding over the last 20 or so years. Whether we should run after plants and leave property behind or, conversely, try to patch up the structure of property relations depends on what we care about more: saving plants or saving property.

Register here >

Biography

Veit Braun is a sociologist and Research Associate at the University of Augsburg, Germany. His work is situated at the intersection of law, economics and biology. Veit has studied the contemporary crises of property in plant breeding and the organisational and temporal logics of animal biobanks. He is currently leading the research project ‘More and Less’ on the mutable identity of nitrogen in society. His book At the End of Property: Patents, Plants and the Crisis of Propertization was published by Bristol University Press in 2024.

Veit Braun@toteraltermann· Apr 20

Veit Braun@toteraltermann· Apr 10

Ha! Beat me to it

Forthcoming Events
Image by Gundula Vogel via Pixabay

The next edition of the People, Plants and the Law online lecture series will be held on Tuesday 28 April 2026 at 8-9am CEST / 4-5pm AEST. The lecture will be given by Dr Veit Braun (University of Augsburg, Germany) on the topic "Bad to Think With: Plants and Property Relations." Registration and details here.

Registration closes today for the CIPA Future Attorneys Conference 2026, which is being held on Thursday 16 April in London. The conference is designed to support trainee patent attorneys and those involved in their development. Details here.

Veit Braun@toteraltermann· Apr 10

❤️

Veit Braun@toteraltermann· Apr 10

Who will look better in 20 years when reading this paragraph; the volcanoes or the pilot?

From Luhmann, N. (1984): Soziale Systeme. Grundriss einer allgemeinen Theorie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, p. 13. (my translation)

state of abstraction. The flight will have to take place above the clouds, and we will have to expect a fairly closed cloud cover. One will have to rely on one's own instruments. From time to time, a view of what lies below will be possible - a glimpse at terrain with trails, settlements, rivers and stretches of coast, reminiscent of what is familiar; or a view of a larger piece of landscape with the extinct volcanoes of Marxism. But no one should fall prey to the illusion that these few points of orientations would be sufficient to guide the flight.

Abstraction must neither be understood as pure artistry nor nor as a retreat into a "merely analytically" relevant, formal science.

Veit Braun@toteraltermann· Apr 8

As pointed out by the man himself

217: The paradigm of this alternation is probably Parsons begetting Garfinkel. To every structuralist an interactionist will be born.

Veit Braun@toteraltermann· Apr 8

The simplest key to these books is to read them as a structuralist reckoning with structuralism

Veit Braun@toteraltermann· Apr 2

Take your time

Veit Braun@toteraltermann· Apr 1

Imagine if someone applied these lessons to universities ...

Jobs tended to think that talent was innate, but Kano taught him that people needed to be coached and developed, to bring out their best. Juran, then in his eighties, convinced Jobs to empower the individuals actually doing the work to make improvements and taught him the value, Jobs later said, of “seeing everything as a repetitive process, and to instrument that process, and find out how it’s running”

Veit Braun@toteraltermann· Mar 24

Veit Braun@toteraltermann· Mar 11

Veit Braun@toteraltermann· Mar 3

Cheer up, there's silver linings

Veit Braun@toteraltermann· Feb 20

SOCRATES: It is not easy, but I am nevertheless willing to do my best for your sake. Call one of these many attendants of yours, whichever you like, that I may prove it to you in his case.
MENO: Certainly. You there come forward.
SOCRATES: Is he a Greek? Does he speak Greek?
MENO: Very much so. He was born in my household.
SOCRATES: Pay attention then whether you think he is recollecting or
learning from me.
MENO: I will pay attention.
SOCRATES: Tell me now, boy, you know that a kiki figure is like this?—
I do.
SOCRATES: A kiki then is a figure in which all these protrusions are
spiky?—Yes indeed.
SOCRATES: And it also has acute angles at every inflection?5—Yes.

5. Socrates draws a kiki. The “acute angles at every inflection” are the lines joining in a way that makes your mind recollect a kiki sound

Veit Braun@toteraltermann· Feb 19

Man mag über Hartmut Rosas Soziologie denken, wie man will. Aber dass sie so erfolgreich ist, begründet sich letzten Endes in einer schon fast banal anmutenden Grundhaltung, die man aber unter dem verallgemeinerten Zynismus des Fachs lange suchen kann: Der Liebe zu den Menschen.

https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/hartmut-rosa-zeitgeist-konstellation-situation-interview-li.3363588

SZ: Ihr Menschenbild ist wirklich positiv.

Rosa: Ich bin tatsächlich sicher, dass Menschen eigentlich gut handeln wollen. Wir wollen etwas Gutes tun. Ich meine das aber nicht naiv christlich oder nervig moralisierend, sondern konkreter, lebensweltlicher, emotionaler. Weil es sich einfach richtig anfühlt, wenn man weiß: Das eigene Handeln hat heute etwas Gutes bewirkt. Ich höre da natürlich meine linken Studenten sofort sagen: „Und wie soll das bitte gehen bei der Ungerechtigkeit, die der Kapitalismus geschaffen hat?“

Veit Braun@toteraltermann· Feb 16

Toward the end of the 90s, Latour realises something is lacking from ANT. "I know, I know," Isabelle Stengers replies, but what about the rock *in itself*? This is what leads to "Pasteur and Whitehead meet in a bath of lactic acid" and eventually Latour's break with classical ANT in the 2000s.

From Latour, B. (2013). Biography of an inquiry: On a book about modes of existence. Social Studies of Science, 43(2), 297. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312712470751

Sorry, alt text is just too long

From Latour, B. (1996). Do Scientific Objects Have a History? Pasteur and Whitehead in a Bath of Lactic Acid. Common Knowledge, 5(1), 76. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-7299198:

Do Scientific Objects Have a History?
Pasteur and Whitehead in a Bath of Lactic Acid

Bruno Latour

Translated by Lydia Davis

But in the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than it be true.
The importance of truth is, that it adds to interest.

It must be remembered that the phrase actual world is like yesterday and tomorrow, in that it alters its meaning according to standpoint.
-Alfred N. Whitehead, Process and Reality

In a recent issue of Common Knowledge,1 I followed in some detail the progressive transformation of a tiny piece of Amazonian forest into scientific knowledge. To do so, I multiplied mediations, replacing the huge vertical gap between words and world with a horizontal set of tiny translations from one representational medium to another. In that article, the main activity was from the human side, from the scientists
and their instruments, from maps and diagrams and collections. No matter how many intermediary steps I unfolded, those steps were still portrayed by me as a way to gain access to the forest "out there." More exactly, even though the forest "out there" was reformatted in my paper as a thing circulating "inside" the network of science, this circulating thing could not be imagined otherwise than passive. The Boa Vista forest, in itself, was doing nothing. It is this passivity that I want to try to overcome in this essay. At the risk of taxing

Veit Braun@toteraltermann· Feb 16

And if it doesn't, it doesn't really exist. Or, at best, it's an epiphenomenon: you may *think* this is what the world is, but to the extent it doesn't feel like an electron, it's ultimatively an illusion.