Spectres of Value

Value: what is it? What institutions enable and protect it? What kinds of social power course through it? Is there any human life to be lived outside its fiercely guarded, violently contested precincts? John Frow, Australia’s most eminent scholar of value, has spent most of his life pondering such questions. In a string of brilliantly researched publications dating back forty years, Frow has undertaken one of the most thoroughgoing forays into the theory of value (in its broadest sense) in the Anglophone world; and in his most recent publication, succinctly entitled On Value and Valuation, he brings this long journey to a conclusion of sorts. It ought to be very widely read.

For the most part, Frow has engaged value as a general anthropological tendency towards prizing certain phenomena as worthy of esteem, while others are dismissed as negligible or disposable. Value is what he calls at the start of this new book a declaration of ‘intrinsic worth or desirability or importance, corresponding to no external measure’. In this sense, value can adhere to an immense spectrum of phenomena: clean air, potable water, a particular pronunciation of a consonant, a rare trading card, a wide and varied friendship group, access to a club, a well-toned instrument, a healthy gut biome, a national anthem, the appearance of Halley’s comet, a non-fungible digital token, and so on. Anything that activates and sustains the investment of human attention, with some kind of existential reward, might be said to have value.

What then tends to happen, in any organised social formation, is that such values become regulated and subject to various kinds of restriction. Value is thus institutionalised, stamped by the impress of gatekeepers, initiates, experts, and so on, whose monopolisation of access to social values accrues to them power and influence. As Frow wrote in his first book, Marxism and Literary History (1986), it’s a process that pertains to literature, ‘the concept of [which] designates not the given totality of all writings but rather a privileged order of values, defined and realized within various institutional discourses’. Over and against the material profusion of printed texts, there arises this semi-autonomous ‘order of values’ sustained by experts, which restricts the promiscuous flows of literary signification and reward within certain well-defined channels. Value thus becomes a political and contested social dynamic, reaping more in the way of social acquiescence than sheer force, but stimulating, with its engineered scarcities, ever-renewed modes of resistance.

Yet, coming as something of a shock to this finely calibrated, complex ethnological sense of value, there is the dominant meaning of value as an economic fact. In economics, value is just that mysterious ‘something’ that allows unlike things to be traded at market as though they were secretly alike, as if it were a substance they shared, a kind of identity amidst the most radical difference. My woollen coat and your case of champagne have nothing actual in common, no shared material property, and yet we exchange them legally according to contracts that declare them equivalent. Sometimes, too, value is what attaches to things such that I get more out of their sale at market than I spend on their production: value, or here surplus value, is the goose’s golden egg on which our whole way of life – capitalism – is founded.

But when did we start speaking of value in each of these two senses? A borrowing from Old French – where it meant ‘material worth, price’ (c.1180) and ‘fair equivalent’ (c.1210) before being stretched to accommodate the senses of reputation and personal merit in the mid-thirteenth century – ‘value’ in Anglo-Norman Middle English followed the same course. Its oldest, early fourteenth-century, sense is economic: ‘The material or monetary worth of something; the amount at which something may be estimated in terms of a medium of exchange, as money or goods, or some other similar standard.’ Only a century later does an apparently derived, subsidiary, metaphorical meaning begin to develop: ‘The relative worth, usefulness, or importance of a thing or (occasionally) a person; the estimation in which a thing is held according to its real or supposed desirability or utility.’ It is much the same history as that of the term ‘worth’ (from the Middle Low German: wert).

European languages show the priority of ‘value’ as a measure of the abstract exchangeability of goods and money; and a subsequent semantic derivation to indicate more impalpable kinds of prizing. The problem then always arises, as Shakespeare’s Timon bitterly observes, of the fateful reversal of this derivation back to its metallic source:

Every value, even the most absolute and sacrosanct, is dangerously subject to the topsy-turvy transvaluations of the money form. To say ‘value’ is inescapably to say all of this, to utter the crude truth of even our most venerated modes of esteem, that they can be priced after all; and that our very tendency to hold them apart from the market is an impulse underwritten by the market itself, which like the postman always rings twice to present the bill.

It is unfortunate that Raymond Williams’ Keywords does not include an entry on the concept of value, because it would be good to have a scholarly history of the relative use of the two antagonistic meanings of this term. As late as the 1940s, Theodor Adorno was complaining that, in the rising frequency of the term ‘values’ in debates over cultural significance, the ‘echo of commercial language is by no means accidental’; as he put it in ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’ (1949), the ‘“eternal values” of which cultural criticism is so fond reflect the perennial catastrophe’. Up until the outbreak of World War II, ‘values’ were perhaps not the preferred way of speaking of transcendental human goods. A Google Ngram comparison between the terms ‘value’ and ‘values’ shows ‘value’ peaking around the Great Depression and then falling away; while ‘values’, relatively nowhere until 1945, begins a steep incline thereafter. This suggests that ‘values’ arrives late as a postwar euphemism for cultural and artistic goods – a euphemism that encrypts the primordial DNA of the economic value-form in our public perception of the ‘priceless’.

John Frow has built his career out of sustained, erudite, and theoretically heterodox inquisitions into the nature of value, not as an Absolute or transcendental property, but an institutionalised practice. Coming of age as he did in the era immediately following Adorno’s mandarin despair at the withering away of shared and consistent criteria of spiritual worth, and confronting a cultural landscape carved up as never before into a multiplicity of what he called ‘orders of value’, Frow put to work all the advantageous intellectual equipment developed by the post-structuralists to make sense of this new, ‘postmodern’ topography of multidimensional fields of value. As he wrote in Cultural Studies and Cultural Value (1995), bringing the history of twentieth-century anthropologies of value to bear on the crisis:

Witnessing the proliferation of niche markets, subcultures, minority tastes, privatised and personalised forms of esteem, Frow reached for a way beyond the sociological relativism of Cultural Studies. If ‘in our world the boundaries of communities are always porous, since most people belong to many valuing communities simultaneously; since communities overlap; and since they’re heterogeneous’, what methodological solutions might there be for resisting the slide into absolute relativism?

Arjun Appadurai’s concept of the ‘regime of value’ was Frow’s best bet:

But note the fateful shift from anthropological to economic languages in Frow’s defence of the concept: equivalence and exchange, the selfish genes of the commodity form, emerge as the inevitable ‘equalisers’ that permit us (for instance) to discuss ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural regimes of value, or ‘queer London subcultures’ and ‘Q-Anon chat groups’, as though they were interanimating parts of broader semiotic networks, perpetuating very similar ‘ideological effects of cultural distinction’. What scholars like Frow were able to show is how the ‘cultural capital’ or ‘distinction’ accrued in one regime of value could be traded for a privileged place in another, very different one. The transformation of various left-wing intellectuals into ‘Third Way’ statesmen and neocons in the 1980s and 90s is a vivid case in point; Pete Hegseth’s metempsychosis from Fox TV weekend host to Secretary of War, another.

Looking at the publications – from Cultural Studies and Cultural Value, through Time and Commodity Culture, to The Practice of Value – that advanced and enriched his case for ‘the complex and systemic nature of value formation’,  we can make out the thrust of Frow’s argument by attending to his privileged sources. Given his enviable powers of summary and explication, it is usually by way of lucid and economical ‘readings’ of others that Frow has advanced his own positions. The nexus of Georges Bataille, Marcel Mauss, Bronisław Malinowski, and Thorstein Veblen underscores one crucial component of his method; as does the later anthropological work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, Nicholas Thomas, and Marilyn Strathern. From the world of ‘Theory’, Jean Baudrillard was once important to him, along with Jacques Derrida; though he tended more toward the legal and sociological end of this formation: Zygmunt Bauman, Michel de Certeau, Scott Lash & John Urry, Roberto Unger, and Gianni Vattimo. But the main line of Frow’s thought can best be traced in a tradition that runs from Georg Simmel through Michel Foucault to Pierre Bourdieu, with critical pit stops in Antonio Gramsci, Sigmund Freud, and Williams. In pursuit of something approximating a total social theory of value, his eye is generally positioned high above the cultural landscape rather than immersed in fine-grained cultural-anthropological case studies. The Cultural Studies formation, especially the work of Stuart Hall, John Guillory, and Meaghan Morris, rounds out his position in the contemporary space. Karl Marx figures, of course, but principally the Marx of the ‘commodity fetishism’ chapters of Capital and a few passages from the Grundrisse.

So perhaps the biggest immediate surprise of his new book concerns the notes and bibliography, where those familiar names cede position to a new constellation of sources and references: David Graeber, Michael Heinrich, Don MacKenzie, Celia Lury, Timothy Mitchell, Moishe Postone, Nick Srnicek, Tiziana Terranova, Carlo Vercellone – and above all, the complete works of Marx. This much-delayed full encounter with the originator of the ‘critique of political economy’ is the main feature of On Value and Valuation, and signals a determined critical shift into the knotty and somewhat scholastic domain of value-form theory – not as a convert, to be sure, but very much as the disabused sage and Vergillian guide into this arid and yet surprisingly active front in contemporary value theory. Perhaps the most enduring quality of Frow’s work has been the crystalline consistency of a style, which we might admire in the way that Frow admires the work of J. M. Coetzee: ‘He writes prose which is luminously clear and yet deeply complex; he thinks outside conventional categories.’ Even in the heyday of the poststructuralist paradigm, Frow’s deployment of the categories was dry and exact, never giving way to excesses of rhetorical self-aggrandisement. And here, the welcome, steady arm extended to steer us past the reefs and shoals of value theory has never been more desperately needed.

Frow’s belated rapprochement with Marx conjures up the spectre of Derrida’s, over thirty years ago, but there all similarities end; that loose and figural reading of the Manifesto is supplanted by Frow’s rigorous critical engagement with the three volumes of Capital, the Grundrisse, and the deluge of commentary on them. What occasioned this shift? We might consider an entry on ‘Value’ by Joshua Clover and Christopher Nealon in the Frow-edited Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory, first published online in 2017. This commissioned piece, which Frow refers to in On Value and Valuation, argues that there is no ‘opposition between two different kinds of value, two autonomous regimes locked in some ageless conflict. Rather, they are expressions of a dynamic that is immanent to capital itself.’ This is a premonition of the direction On Value and Valuation takes, though, in some senses, Frow’s book pushes back against the more doctrinaire value-form Marxism on show in the Clover-Nealon piece. Frow’s case will be that, however important to understanding contemporary capitalism the Marxian account of value is, it is radically insufficient to explain the full spectrum of values that now characterises its protracted lifespan.

The mission of On Value and Valuation, then, is to bridge the divide between Frow’s existing anthropo-sociological critical apparatus for treating evaluative frameworks, and the Marxist account of economic value-formation under capitalism. Unsurprisingly, we will find that in many ways the former strives to subsume the latter, which is deemed impracticable for a full and contemporary methodological treatment of value (though, as we’ll see, things aren’t really that easy). But the real gain of the encounter lies in the new edge it has given to Frow’s increasingly intolerant assessment of the sheer poverty of intellectual means available for a settling of accounts with the dominant regime of value and its many cretinous agents and instruments. His book is ‘committed to the systematic understanding of this moment,’ an understanding which is ‘a precondition of any political action that seeks […] to work towards the decommodification of the world.’ The book is offered so that we may learn how ‘to begin to imagine a world without’ capitalist value and so regain some measure of control over the things we most treasure.

What Frow draws from the work of Graeber, Mitchell, and Nathalie Heinich, as well as Bourdieu, Gary Becker, Simmel, and even Gabriel Tarde, is that lingering impulse to synthesise the two opposing senses of value, without handing the laurel to either side. But as Frow writes, ‘the degree to which the logic of capital accumulation does indeed relentlessly push against the non-commodified domains within which it is embedded’ makes it very difficult to set any hard and fast borders between the economic and the anthropological today. For whatever is deemed ‘of value’ in the latter sense rapidly falls prey to the colonising predations of the commodity-form: water, solar energy, traditional medicines, DNA, brand names, images, the accumulated stores of wisdom and practical knowledge known as the ‘general intellect’, and even our own private search and posting habits online – all are captured and rendered internal to the irresistible machinery of capitalist privatisation and valuation. Frow’s book is organised around these categories and forms to show how weak the anthropological sense of value has been rendered in the face of rampant economic subsumption.

One of Frow’s chief concerns in this book is the nature of ‘the market’ itself. If it is not going to be exchanged, a thing cannot enter the abstract realm of equivalency that stamps it with the value-form. And for the very possibility of an exchange to arise, the thing must already be prized in a basic human way: it must answer to a need, contribute to a use, meet the form of some desire. In Frow’s estimation, this is the element of capitalist value that Marx left relatively underdeveloped – partly because he only properly finished the first of four projected volumes of Capital, the part exclusively concerned with production. The market is that component of the theory of value that sits closest to the model Frow has been developing all these years: the arena in which real social needs and human wants, elevated into perceived goods, are negotiated and arbitrated through established institutional frames, measurements, calculations, laws, regulations, and conventions. Markets are cybernetic ‘calculative devices’ made possible by

It is understandable why this perspectival emphasis should characterise Frow’s analysis. For it has been via the colossal expansion of the capitalist market through all interstices of the global economy, and its embedding in an ever-proliferating nexus of technological, material, organic, and molecular structures, that value has been kept alive despite the relative decline of the industrial sector and the vitiation of labour-power as the primary source of valuation.

Frow’s opening chapter on the nature of consumer attachment (to brands, for example) inhabits a congeries of spaces where many different kinds of value are calculated and calibrated in real time; to show us how value is never simply set inside the factory, but is filtered through volatile social dynamics both prior to the act of purchase and often even afterward – in the market for collectibles, for instance. A residual logic of the gift economy tessellates with a dominant commodity form; ‘invaluable’ singularities and luxury items mesh with ranking systems and cognitive monopolies in an information-rich landscape; everywhere ‘diverse regimes of valuation’ are exerting centrifugal forces that are only partially recaptured by a ‘common space for both agreement and conflict over value’. Frow engages the work of Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre to haul into view the temporal logic of valuation as a speculative narrative economy of signs and objects. The chapter hinges on the fluctuating nature of attachment (a pathic and affective intensity cathecting some ‘singularity’) relative to an incessant, distributed machinery of valuation, in which ‘human needs’ cease to have any firm natural ground.

The chapter on Marx sings with a prodigious intellectual effort to wrestle a powerful critical tradition into a usable language with some hold on our collective imagination. For the first time, the famed ‘post-Marxist’ takes a proper inventory of many of the concepts and discourses that constitute Marxism today, even though one may seem to hear Marx’s own complaint (‘I am not a Marxist!’) murmuring in the margins here. For it is only a sickly shadow of the great nineteenth-century master-critic that we find in the assembled works of the ‘value-form theorists’ active over the past thirty years or so, the featured sidebar of this chapter’s encounter with the Marx of Capital. What has been evaporated from this anaemic scholasticism is any real thought of the global working class, their collective interests, or the political vector of their struggle against the capital-relation. Such work presents a brittle and bloodless face of what today passes for ‘Marxism’, this defensive grouping of salaried scholars hell-bent on defining value as a ‘substance’. Frow’s critique of its ‘substance theory’ of value is justified. As Capital says unequivocally, ‘Not an atom of matter enters into the objectivity of commodities as values’, and as Frow himself asserts, ‘Marx’s central categories are purely relational’ and describe ‘a system of relations rather than grounding that system ontologically’. That the dominant ‘Marxist’ conception of value today hypostasises it as a kind of substance attaching to commodities is a chronic intellectualist illness afflicting what remains of the critique of political economy, compromising the work of over 150 years tracking the exploitative basis of capitalism.

As for the labour-theory of value itself, Frow is equivocal. On the one hand, he knows how vital labour-power (the commodified form of labour that enters the production process as aliquot parts of socially necessary labour time) remains to the creation of surplus value under contemporary capitalism: 212,000,000 people working in China’s manufacturing sector added $4.67 trillion of value in 2024 alone. On the other, he is at pains to show that value today comes principally from places other than the shop floors of industrial factories. ‘The category of abstract or socially necessary labour’ is, according to Frow, ‘neither conceptually nor practically adequate to the task of defining the self-multiplication of capital in isolation from the complex of social relations, regimes of value, and directly and indirectly productive and reproductive forces that make up a capitalist economy’. Frow wants to show that a differentiated and historicised monism of powers, all the various ‘natures’ (human and otherwise) that enter the machine of capitalist productivity, is deeply relevant to the ethical and political judgement of this mode of production today; all of it has value in his deeper sense. What is exciting is how that deeper sense and the more pointed economic sense have come into each other’s orbit, in a mutually deranging way. Here is unveiled a seam of political possibility that Frow does not directly engage, but which enlivens the analysis with a frisson of new anti-systemic energy.

In two later chapters, Frow presses back against the orthodox Marxist idea that value does not flow from the ‘natural bounty’ on offer from the knowledge-store of the general intellect (all the accumulated, unprivatised understandings of the world that inform new improvements in productivity), or the ‘free gifts’ of natural energy. It is his concern to show that knowledge, even the freely available kind, might indeed contribute more than its share to the creation of contemporary value; and that natural powers, newly exposed in their scarcity and precarity, also generate value for the commodities produced via their agency. The nature and meaning of rent is critically re-examined here to help account for both the accrual of commodity value from the tithing of IP and the surcharge on monopolised access to water, gas, and other kinds of natural bounty: patented DNA, traditional remedies, and so on. Rent is today so fundamental to the nature of capital accumulation as to inspire new concepts like Yanis Varoufakis’ ‘technofeudalism’ – with which Frow has no truck. Meanwhile, a prolonged analysis of the nature of carbon mitigation as a medium of valuation within the contemporary economy is a Frow set-piece exposing the counterfactual, hypothetical, purely reified kind of value being traded here: a logic that makes perfect sense to capitalism, but no sense at all to ecology or the well-being of the planet.

The final substantive chapter, on the ‘platform economy’, then considers our own ineluctable conscription as toilers in the mines of contemporary value formation, by way of the lucrative market in the information we daily produce as online purveyors and inventors of our own digital habitus. Exploring ‘the valorization of digital selfhood in a world of data derivatives’, Frow pushes himself into the brave new world of values untethered from the gravity of the natural world. The ‘assets’ we produce through our online interactivity are essentially cost-free to the oligarchical platform-accumulators (whom Varoufakis calls the ‘cloudalists’) of the value earned on their trade, thus fixing a potentially infinite ratio of cost to return, a limitless financial windfall, in the platform economy. Entirely new modes of personhood – distributed, data-shaped, shadowy, yet still named and legally answerable – are inserted within the dizzying new affordances of value-formation sustained by platform capitalism; modes that tend to strip me of older kinds of autonomy and extra-economic recourse, since none of them is exactly ‘me’, though I remain responsible for them. It becomes increasingly difficult to imagine how I might begin to agitate politically, or through direct economic action, for the material improvement of my condition as a producer of value in today’s regime as compared to historical modes of extracting surplus value from the exploitation of labour-power. The digital doppelganger does it all for us, and we seem to be left hanging around like historical residues of an older world.

Frow’s wonderfully dextrous, multidimensional account of the nature of value today is salutary for a contemporary Left either wallowing in sentimental emotivism or wedded to a blind economistic orthodoxy. His final words are bracing and essential for all of us looking for a way out, beyond value and exploitation:

That very powerful statement – wrapping up a book-long critical analysis of the extent to which economic value today is enmeshed with the older anthropological practices of valuation that have been, as it were, fully subsumed within the commodity form – reminds us again of the once consequential opposition between these two kinds of value. And it tells us that, finally, the game is up for any sense of value that pretends to stand outside the monstrous ‘regime of value’ here described.

To continue to speak of value as if it resisted the value form of economic coercion and destruction is to fall into a trap from which we may never escape. The ‘value of the Humanities’, the ‘value of the arts’, the ‘value of literary studies’: what are these but dead ends for critical thought and practice, surrendering our mana in advance to an enemy who can transmute it into integers on the bottom line? Frow’s book has led me to imagine that the beginnings of a world without value might spring from a testy refusal to accept the term itself as applied to anything we want to rescue from domination. Let us declare a moratorium on any use of ‘value’ that pertains to ‘the relations of kinship, affinity, and friendship that make us human, the language and the symbolic order that map our relation to the living and the dead, the cosmos of our self-understanding’.

Instead, I find myself rehearsing Ezra Pound’s bold affirmation in Canto 81: ‘What thou lovest well remains, / the rest is dross.’ To love a thing, a situation, a person, a place, or a happening is to declare a powerful affective affinity with it, and a fidelity to what it brings about in us. To love it well is to adopt a fighting stance in relation to its avowal. It makes, I think, the conscious shift in register from a pale and Kantian concept (‘value’) to a militantly espoused concrete universality. To love something is always to insist that it is equivalent to nothing. Every affirmation of it, every word in its defence, every gesture of devoted solidarity is an act of resistance against the general declaration that it is ultimately no different from anything else. Values engender little passionate intensity – only, at best, a kind of muted agreement. Love, on the other hand, might just inspire that ‘political action that seeks […] to work towards the decommodification of the world’.