Progress & Phenomenology // Pt. 0
Progress & Phenomenology // Pt. 0
A Vitality Theory of Value
Hi, I’m Oshan. This newsletter explores topics around emancipatory social science, consciousness studies, and together, the worlds they might weave. This is the introduction to three installments from my larger essay, Progress and Phenomenology: A Vitality Theory of Value.
Part 0: The Introduction (👈 you are here).
Part I: Value Is Vitality
Part II: Markets Underinvest in Vitality
Part III: A Road to Value Is Unconditionality
Part IV: Some Conclusions
Hello, fellow humans.
Today, I’m thrilled to publish an essay I’ve lived with for many months:
Progress and Phenomenology: A Vitality Theory of Value.
If the digital era has left your attention span long and intact, and an exploration of value theory that reaches from cognitive science to economic policy intrigues you, then you can go straight to the essay.
But if, like me, your attention span has grown quick and jagged, I’ll be serializing the essay into three, more focused installments. I’ll carve the essay into three pieces, sand the torn joints so each can stand alone, and send out one per week. Today, just an introduction. Next, the installments to come:
Revaluing Value: Value Is Vitality
How Over-Reliance on Markets Constrain Value
A Road to Value Is Unconditionality
If I were to boil the essay down into three sentences, it would read:
Value is the positive flow of vitality into a living system. Over-reliance on markets is undermining the production of value. A strategy of ‘unconditionality’ can help realign progress with the production of real value.
But there is much more to say. Nearly 10,000 words more, in fact, and that hardly breaks the surface of things.
Writing this has been both exhausting and exhilarating. I feel I’ve opened more questions than I’ve answered. But widened questions are full of treasures. I hope that, as readers, you might join me in asking them, and together, finding what remains unseen.
Progress and Phenomenology: The Introduction
Something is awry in the relationship between progress and phenomenology. Progress is becoming a technological quest, searching for greater longevity, increased productivity, and wider frontiers. But along the way, we’ve lost critical, complementary focus on what these new, technologically augmented ways of living feel like. We’re designing a world irrespective of the phenomenologies it fosters. Is life, as an experience, growing increasingly worth living? Is it growing richer not only in material terms, but experiential terms?
I call this the The Pessoa Problem. The poet Fernando Pessoa once wrote that life “all comes down to trying to experience tedium in a way that does not hurt.” Now, Pessoa wasn’t a cheery guy, and we shouldn’t read him as representative of today's majority mood. But I do think that his line can be read as a warning. A harbinger of where, without careful recalibration, we may be heading. The Pessoa Problem is both a critique of, and concern for, the trajectory of modern phenomenology.
Good artists are usually ahead of wider cultural phenomena. The Pessoa Problem gestures towards a quiet crisis surging just out of sight. Left unaddressed, it may not crash upon us and wipe us out, but worse. It may leave us as a society of Pessoas. Alive, but merely enduring. Existing, but vacantly. Instead of ebullience at the marvel of being alive, there would merely be the tedium life entails. This is not progress.
I’ve tried thinking about this problem from numerous directions, all of which wind up feeling partial, and ultimately insufficient. Philosophy of mind, cognitive science, psychology, and literature are all helpful in elaborating the problem, but short on solutions that can reach beyond individual responsibility. Economics, critical theory, systems theory, even ‘progress studies’ offer scalable courses of action, but lack a normative foundation to guide them. But finally, It feels like I’ve found an approach, a tradition, that with some tweaking, can both square us up to the problem, and orient us towards an appropriate response.
What I have in mind is “value theory”. And if you’ve never heard of it, that’s sort of the point. Once a centerpiece of sociopolitical discourse, today, value theory is nowhere to be found, and we’re paying the price.
In its simplest terms, value theory asks what value is, and how we might cultivate more of it. Or, as one group of academics put it, value theory “is about how, [in] a living natural world, human beings and societal institutions co-create satisfying ways of living.” To my mind, value theory is about how not to become a society of Pessoas.
Instead, it can help guide us in producing a form of wealth that shows up in our direct experience of the world. It’s about how we navigate the question of what kinds of humans we wish to become, and what kinds of structures we design to propel us in that direction. Value theory is a matter of becoming, concerning the questions of what we wish to become, what we are becoming, and how institutions structure that process.
The anthropologist David Graeber puts this explicitly, writing of ‘value’ as the social process of drawing possibilities down from the space of what could exist, into the realized world of what does exist. Value, he writes, is the coordinated social embodiment of creative potentiality:
“However elusive, creative potential is everything. One could even argue that it is in a sense the ultimate social reality … social both because they are the result of an ongoing process whereby structures of relation with others come to be internalized into the very fabric of our being, and even more, because this potential cannot realize itself—at least, not in any particularly significant way—except in coordination with others. It is only thus that powers turn into value.”
Value debate has not exactly disappeared. Instead, there was a victor, and the alternatives were banished to the shadows. The problem is that the reigning theory of value – marginal utility theory, though what many people call ‘neoliberalism’ works too, as indicative of an economic paradigm that equates value with price – points us precisely in the Pessoan direction. It is a theory of value (prices) that undermines the actual stuff of value (phenomenology).
The philosopher Martin Hägglund writes that today’s reigning theory of value is “inimical to the actualization of freedom”, that we have created a form of progress that achieves its opposite:
“The very calculation of value under capitalism, then, is inimical to the actualization of freedom. Indeed, the deepest contradiction of capitalism resides in its own measure of value. Capitalism employs the measure of value that is operative in the realm of necessity [means] and treats it as though it were a measure of freedom [ends]. Capitalism is therefore bound to increase the realm of necessity and decreases the realm of freedom."
Hägglund’s own interrogation of value theory led him to advocate for a transition from capitalism to a form of democratic socialism that values 'socially available free time'. For Graeber, value theory provides a starting point “if one is looking for alternatives to what might be called the philosophy of neoliberalism”.
On my view, value theory provides a helpful schema to navigate the paradox of progress undermining phenomenology.
This essay steps in that direction, proposing a theory of value that begins in biology, through cognitive science, and extends all the way into economic policy. It provides both a theory of what creative potentials we ought to bring into the world, and the associated strategy for how.
My thesis, in brief:
Value is the positive flow of vitality into a living system. Over-reliance on markets is undermining the production of value. A strategy of ‘unconditionality’ can help realign progress with the production of real value.
In particular, I’m interested in tracking how value has grown overdetermined by markets, undermining the vitality of all sentient life. But inversely, this suggests a way forward. Through a strategy I will describe as unconditionality, or the sustainable, unconditional provision of a growing baseline of resources to all citizens, we can introduce a cleavage between markets and value. These cracks are directly proportional to a realignment of the production of value with vitality, of progress with phenomenology.
As Leonard Cohen chants, these cracks are “how the light gets in.”
…
The remainder of this essay covers three main areas:
I) First, I'll define a form of wealth that can map onto ideas in cognitive science, and construct a theory of value with "vitality" at its core.
II) Second, I'll use this new form of value to explore how over-reliance on markets, which drives the reduction of value to price, undermines more expansive value production.
III) Third, I elaborate the strategy I call “unconditionality”, and how it provides a method of re-coupling economic progress with the production of value (plus a survey of some important critiques).
…
~ End of part 0 ~
As a reminder, this was part 0 of a 3-part serialization of the full essay, which you can find here (thank you to Kate, Stephanie, and Marcus for excellent feedback on earlier drafts).
And if you missed it: my recent podcast with David Sloan Wilson on an evolutionary economic paradigm, or how to manage cultural evolution so as to scale up the cooperative glue that grows our social organism.
Until next time,
Oshan.