#use-value

[monasticcellphone]

‘Thinking’, Hannah Arendt noted in The Human Condition, became ‘the handmaiden of doing as it had been the ... handmaiden of contemplating divine truth in medieval philosophy’. With the rise of useful or practical knowledge (of trade, for example, or production processes), the contemplation of eternally given truth was to lose its epistemological prerogative.

Feldner and Vighi, Critical Theory and the Crisis of Contemporary Capitalism

[baroquespiral]

OK I finally have my hot take on this: the right wing reading (R/Kondo) is "bluh bluh bourgeois asceticism bluh bluh books only matter as fetishes healing you with their auras bluh bluh". the left wing reading (L/Kondo) should be "stop enclosing books as abstract property once you've exhausted their use-value. the amount of books you will return to so regularly that they're worth monopolizing as an individual or holding ransom to exchange-value is probably no more than 30. the rest you can read at public libraries. if reading qua reading matters to you support your local library, or if you don't want your books to be subject to bullshit budgetary constraints under the austerity state anyway, scan and upload them to libgen or build grassroots proletarian book sharing collectives. take as many books out of market circulation or private enclosure as possible"

[hblumer]

[adornography]

In his purposeless activity the child, by a subterfuge, sides with use-value against exchange value. Just because he deprives the things with which he plays of their mediated usefulness, he seeks to rescue in them what is benign towards men and not what subserves the exchange relation that equally deforms men and things. The little trucks travel nowhere and the tiny barrels on them are empty; yet they remain true to their destiny by not performing, not participating in the process of abstraction that levels down that destiny, but instead abide as allegories of what they are specifically for.

Adorno, Minima Moralia III.146: "Toy shop." Translated by E.F.N. Jephcott.

[feelingpolitical]

The usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value. But this usefulness does not dangle in mid-air. It is conditioned by the physical properties of the commodity, and has no existence apart from the latter.

Marx, Capital, Vol. I: Ch. 1, Pt. 1: The Commodity - The Two Factors of the Commodity

[athousandgateaux]

The flâneur's last journey: death. Its goal: novelty. 'To the depths of the unknown to finding something new' ... Novelty is a quality which does not depend on the use-value of the commodity. It is the source of the illusion which belongs inalienably to the images which the collective unconscious engenders. It is the quintessence of false consciousness, of which fashion is the tireless agent. This illusion of novelty is reflected,like one mirror in another, in the illusion of infinite sameness. The product of this reflection is the phantasmagoria of 'cultural history' in which the bourgeoisie enjoyed its false consciousness to the full. Art, which begins to have doubts about its function, and ceases to be 'inséparable de l'utilité' (Baudelaire), is forced to make novelty its highest value. Its arbiter novarum rerum becomes the snob. He is for art what the dandy is for fashion.

Walter Benjamin, Paris—The Capital of the 19th Century pg. 172

[protoslacker]

I do not see two separate cultures here. Not one bit. I think we are all dwelling in the culmination of what Heidegger called the technological understanding-of-being. Accordingly, in viewing the world as only in terms of utility, everything becomes a resource to be used efficiently--even our own lives are judged in these terms (how can I be the best me I can be?) In such a world, greater good, stakeholder claims, social justice, and cultural achievements--along with other medievalisms-- have gone by the wayside. And that is not all. For this is also something being actively exported by the global elite.

Leanne Ogasawara at 3Quarks Daily. IF I WERE SLAVOJ ZIŽEK