COMMUNICATION AND THE POLITICS OF VALUE: LIBERALISM, SOCIAL MEDIATION, AND THE VALUE-FORM

This dissertation concerns the concept of value and its relation to social and political life. In the interpretation I offer, “value” describes a specific form of social mediation – a form in which the exchange of goods mediates interdependencies between people. Given its objective, impersonal, and quasi-automatic character, I describe this as a form of “non-communicative mediation.” Although the concept of value touches on economic questions, these are not understood to be its ultimate referent. Instead, I develop a theoretical account of value that centers the social, cultural, and political dimensions of the category. Of particular concern are the ways in which collective action is structured when we are linked together through the exchange of things (that is, when social relations between people are mediated by value relations between things). These relations, I argue, shape the nature and organization of our activity. They impact what we can do together, and how we can do it – this is one sense in which the concept of value has political salience. This understanding of value is elaborated via the reconstruction of two distinct intellectual and political contexts. The first is associated with the development of early modern liberalism. There, I argue, ideas about value in commercial life shaped how political legitimacy was understood. The second intellectual context is that of Marxian critical theory. Within the latter, the category of value not only orients a descriptive discourse on the inner workings of capital, but also (and perhaps more importantly) a normative discourse on freedom and domination. In analyzing these discursive contexts, I contrast the kinds of social interaction described via the concept of value with those typically depicted under the rubric of “communication.” In so doing, I situate “communication” among other categories that have been deployed to analyze modernity and the social relations that characterize it.