Relational Value under the Symbolic Crisis

Phenomenon. Under consumer capital, desire was long produced through the signifier, building lack in symbolic form and driving the movement of desire. As the reproduction of signifiers is cheapened, creation and labor are cheapened with it, and the older work of producing lack through the signifier becomes difficult. Value moves toward what signifiers cannot reproduce, which is relation. Diagnosis. Relation lies near the constitutive lack around which desire turns, and capital captures relational value through the same structure of desire it once worked through the signifier, rerouting desire to a substitute object and drawing off value at each rerouting. Claims. (1) Relation is the residual scarce value in an economy of cheapened signifiers, and a relational form of value and practice, here called relational divinity, answers the symbolic limit. (2) The capture of relational value follows a formal chain that strips a relational property, reifies it, and binds it to a commodity, driven by the necessary failure of the object of desire. (3) The justice of a relational circuit is decided at its origin, its field, and within its circulation, and the reality of the relation settles none of them. (4) The turn of capital to relation is real and advanced and constitutively exploitative at once, its limit a weakness of the capital form itself. (5) Whether a good cycle can be sustained turns on ownership, on whom the surplus and the field belong to, a question the paper poses and leaves with the reader. Cases. Three specimens are read against a criterion of generative justice, each failing at a different point. The lifestyle claim is unjust at the origin, manufacturing a lack and gating relation by purchase. The platform is unjust at the field, monopolizing the ground on which relation becomes possible. The AKB48 model is the dialectical case, just at its origin yet captured within its circulation, an advance and a limit together. Contribution. The paper offers a Lacanian reading of relational value, joining an account of its capture to a criterion for the good cycle, and makes explicit the place of ownership. It advances no proposal, and leaves to the reader the recognition of where, in a given case, the relation stands.