Long hiatus. Sorry. I’m back though and I’m in this Sociological Theory class right now and we’ve been reading a ton of classic stuff that I’ve lied about having read for years (Marx, Durkheim, etc.) and this week we’re reading Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics which is not really about value, but at one point he says something that brought about a distinction for me in my head that I think is almost so obvious as to be never clarified typically in conversations: where real value actually exists.
Saussure’s sense of value in the world is one that’s ecological, economic, contextual—in other words, sociological.
Values always involve:
1. Something dissimilar which can be exchanged for the item whose value is under consideration or
2. similar things which can be compared with the item whose value is under consideration.
A quarter coin, for instance, has value either because it can be exchanged for something dissimilar (i.e. bread) or because it can be compared to something similar, say, a dollar or a penny. And yet, what about the bread?
The bread has value not because it can be sold for a quarter or because it can be traded for a cup of soup, but because it nourishes. Bread has value because without it the mitochondria in the cells of the human eater would cease to respire, to generate ATP so that, say, the muscles in that same human body can literally move or say, that the sodium channels in the neuronal cell membranes might reconfigure in order to generate the electric potential necessary to fire and fire and fire and pass some series of signals along a chain of one another so that the eater and thinker may consider the market value of that same loaf of bread.
In other words, without eating the loaf of bread one cannot conceive of the loaf of bread. Which is to say: market value cannot exist without real value, for humans social capital cannot exist without clean water.
A silly example of this playing out is codified in the saying “pics or it didn’t happen.” Which is to say, unless experience is translated into a form that may be valued by the social capitalist free market, it has no value. This is aligned with the sense of value and valuation that Saussure is all about and is the lens through which we are all in the culture I grew up in taught to see: to see ourselves as valuable only through comparison, especially comparison with others who more closely resemble ourselves. Always in competition because the value of our life, whether it is meaningful, depends on it.
And yet, bread and clean water and clean air nourish. They have real value, in the biological sense. If we apply the sort of capitalist approach here it may suggest that having more bread and more water and the most clean air is thus better, but it is not. Why? Because value does not exist in the abstract. Value is a relationship.
Real value is an experience. It happens when bread hits the small intestine or when air hits the alveoli or when one bacteria engulfs a tiny food particle. Real value happens at the real interface between a being and its environment—and real pleasure in the embodied response thereafter. This is not limited to food and water and air, but also social life.
For instance, having status abstractly might portend real value, but real value occurs when one gets a standing ovation for their achievements and smiles or is brought to tears or when one realizes that friends have planned a surprise birthday party. Real value happens within the flow of life, not in the abstracting chaotic mental structures of valuation and hypothesis.
To exist in a constant state of abstract comparative valuation of self or belongings is uh, bad. It’s unhealthy. Real value happens here now. It is food and water and air and in some cases supplements and drugs and beer and wine and applause and jokes and feeling your body moving through the mountains or using your eyes to watch a spectacular film or being told “thanks so much for your help” or seeing bacteria for the first time through a microscope or diving into a cold pond or feeling gravity as you carve through the water on a surfboard or hug someone. Real value is a relationship in real time and space between self and non-self.
Which is not to say that status and market value are wrong theoretical ideas, that relating theoretical selves to theoretical structures is not smart or useful or doesn’t in some cases imply material outcomes. But it is a speculative practice. But it seems like this abstraction and confusion cuts somewhere deep near the roots of our current societal crisis.