99 theses on the revaluation of value: A postcapitalist manifesto

153 Pages·2018·1.623 MB·English

by  Massumi, Brian

99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value
A Postcapitalist Manifesto
Brian Massumi
99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value
Other Books by Brian Massumi
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
Architectures of the Unforeseen: Essays in the Occurrent Arts
Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience
Erin Manning and Brian Massumi
The Politics of Everyday Fear
Brian Massumi, Editor
99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value
A Postcapitalist Manifesto
Brian Massumi
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
Copyright 2018 by Brian Massumi
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Contents
1 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value:
A Postcapitalist Manifesto
137 Bibliography

99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value
A Postcapitalist Manifesto

T1
It is time to take back value. For many, value has long been dis-
missed as a concept so thoroughly compromised, so soaked in
normative strictures and stained by complicity with capitalist
power, as to be unredeemable. This has only abandoned value to
purveyors of normativity and apologists of economic oppression.
Value is too valuable to be left in those hands.
T2
In the absence of a strong alternative conception of value, it is all
too easy for normative gestures to slip back in. Priorities are still
weighed, orientations favored, directions followed. Without a con-
cept of value, by what standards are these choices made? Usually
none that are enunciated. Standards of judgment are simply al-
lowed to operate implicitly. Normativity is not avoided. It becomes
a sneak. This can prove to be just as oppressive.
T3
To take back value is not to reimpose standards of judgment pro-
viding a normative yardstick. That would do little other than to
make the oppressiveness explicit again.