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Gift of Value

Something only humans can do; to confer value; to make ‘sacred’. A thought, a word (verbal utterance) becomes part of reality. Subjective belief becomes objective fact. Subjunctive wish becomes indicative of an actuality – a ‘fact on the ground’. At once desire for and description of an accomplished fact (at least in the eyes of the person making the statement, and most probably in the minds of the community of speakers witnessing the utterance and believing such to be the case…). A performative act involving only (!) the act of decision… and then the practice of life, the treatment of things and people, as implied by that act of valuing, that decision to render (as if) sacred… (And in fact the parenthesis, or speech marks, or indeed any other marks of qualification as redundant; in this sphere of human behaviour, perhaps alone in all spheres of human endeavor, if we believe it I be so, so it is…).

Subject and object united at last, but only in and through this (subjective) first person aspect (the objective aspect also gives a kind of unity from its side, as the description of a given behaviour from the outside, as third person knowledge).

Yet this is a decision that is more than just an act. A performance (and so a ritual) the effect, while believed in by the speaker and the attendant community, while believed in by others and passed on to further generations (as a tradition, a culture), is something in existence in perpetuity (until the belief ceases). An act of value which persists, protecting, ands sustaining (calling forth an obligation to serve and sustain) the object, or place or practice so designated… a habit which constructs a kind of world.

An timely example is the taking of the decision of whether or not to value the environment. As evinced by a desire to protect from urbanization, modernization or development, that is from the further intrusion of the realm of the commodity and rational utility into natural or semi-natural spaces. Such forms of preservation (of landscape, trees, parks and other spaces) are theorisable as the result of (the gift of) a sacrificial… or gift relation. A putting aside … aside from the dominant economic modes of exchange or (more precisely) aside from commodity circuits and rationalised forms of appropriation (such as the presence or survival of a public park in a high price real estate zone or where a road or car park would alleviate traffic related problems, or a wood on arable land, or the corner of a small room given over to aesthetic, memorializing, or shrine-type material…). Echoes in the present of objects and territory put aside by tribal forms of society (but not only these). Put aside from the everyday and reserved for special events and times - usually of a ritual nature.

That is: non-functional, non-rational, non-paying, non-exchangeable in terms of the dominant forms of these relations. So pointing the way to another from of exchange; one often based upon identity, collective alliances, and recognition – one no doubt combinable with the dominant forms such as in the case of identity and fashion… (in reality there is no absolute escape from a society’s dominant or given exchange relations; identity or belief forms of exchange always coexist with the other modes of exchange of people, signs and things).The pure opposition of an ‘outside’ to an inside is symptomatic only of ideology (in the bad sense) and is never an accurate reflection of current practice.

Such practices are present above all in the case of the personification of matter as a mode of valuing. Designating things or places as like ‘Us’ or ‘super-us’ is a mode of conferring value to things and places. Genius loci, ‘the spirit of the place’, now present as a strategy rather than a superstition. Our ‘primitive’ mode of valuing as one key to preserving today’s endangered spaces and life forms. Pre-requirement of protection of any kind…

A truly human relation. Magically simple. The very simplest of philosopher’s stones. Obviating the need for specialist technology, for complex production techniques. For something to be valuable we only need to believe it… For something to be the case we only need to believe it to be so (but of course restricted in application to our relationship with whatever is in question, to things, others, ourselves…). If I value something it is valued (by at least one person).The act of valuing is the production of a valued object (or person). As a first step anyway, the transvaluation of values appears to be a purely personal affair… A question of attitude. Transformations do not come any cheaper…

A question of what we (wish to) believe to be the case…

Applicable therefore to all human relations. To human rights, civil rights, law, justice, and the sense of fairness, indeed of ‘fair-play’ and so to persons, to human interrelations as well as to objects and places… So no longer conceivable as natural, or god-given (even if some would wish them so), but as human-given, given by societies and the communities that adopt them… argument for, as argument for belief in such, its proclamation at once its fact… (a performative relation; if we say it is so: so it is…).

The debate over rights is here, individual, group, human, animal, environmental, not elsewhere, even if their spokesmen and supporters must feel they must root them elsewhere… To say a right is ‘natural’ is only to say that one believes that it is such, that one believes in such…

Such universals (always part to imaginary whole - perhaps like all identity statements encompassing humans in the plural) are themselves such creations, such inventions of our creative ability to value… Part of our apparatus of valuation, with its individual as well as collective moment, of conferring value…

Evolved as part of our apparatus of survival: valuing something larger than the self, a means of coherence, of place as investment of our future, of imaginary entities as focal point representing such requirements…

Surviving now in us as the means to help others survive. To help others (to help other places) survive our territorialisation of all we touch. A alternative territorialisation. Leaving territory intact.

Applicable to all arguments where the need is to apply to, to call upon (in fact call up, or all out of nothing) to call up from ‘the other side’, the calling up of entities and priorities, laws and regulations, which have no basis in the physical aspects of this world (and are not wanted as such owing to their resulting exposure to the corrosive, entropic force of temporal mutability). But also having no basis elsewhere, as there is no elsewhere except in the imagination; again a human creation, our beyond or outside is product of our inside, other as truly ours… Calling up, creating ex-nihilo… of what is most valuable to us. As that which is beyond, beyond alterations, so ‘always’ eternally valuable… what is sacred. Nothing is, therefore we must recreate it; by saying so… fiat lux. A question of making value (for all time; temporally; temporarily) as one of (eternally true; here and now) belief in laws and rights, morals and values, including the place of their guarantee (the nowhere, non-place of eternity). Except that the later, apart from its persistence as a mental habit or psychological function, is no any longer credible, not an outside place, but an inside place - which belief robs it of the power of belief… so leaving the act of value-conferral to stand alone…

Something out of ‘nothing’… recognition, naming, calling (apostrophe, prosopopoeia, locative voice). To give value: to give meaning.

Ex-nihilo.

Fiat lux.

First there was the Word. All the powers we had demurred, deferred to the gods (or else abrogated as god-like, dictatorial) forgetting they are only our own. So not the infantile delusion of god-like super powers, or the ego-trip of being the centre of the world (phenomenologically or experientially true, but empirically, or socially, false), or else the finding of ourselves a the conversational confidant of the gods, ‘the Man’ (sic) with the ‘hot line’. But the very real ability to value something and then act accordingly…

All Law comes from this, as do all our cherished Rights… our ‘Natural’ Rights, our Bills of Rights, Constitutions, conferred or guaranteed, indeed, by States and their institutions, but first by communities (one foundation for the notion of the ‘Social Contract’), and prior to them decided upon by individuals… Indeed the basis of ‘the ‘imaginary’ constitution of society’… itself. So also home and human origin of State’s Rights, International Rights, and International Law…

Natural Rights all, as we would like to believe they are, pace Locke and friends. Hobbes and others thought otherwise, believing these to be State-given, indeed requiring a ‘strong State’ to enforce them, but we should not damn them too quickly for this… their politics being a negative expression of the constructionism of these ‘rights’ as a step to consensus, or its replacement. As a replacement for the lack of consensus over the ‘naturalness’ of these rights, a ‘naturalness’ which vanishes as soon as war or other conflicts break out. As well as a reflection of the violence of their times and the desperate desire for stable government.

Natural Rights: if only… alas there is no objective basis for this in physiology or physics, but only in our psychology, our thinking, our belief (they are only ‘as if’ natural, if we believe they are so). And so we return to our performative moment. Our decision to value something, to ‘give the right to’… to say: ‘It has the right to exist’.

And so it does.

This exists: I believe it to be so…

A statement which somehow always seems to place itself, to base itself… outside. At least in our imagination (so outside of the object or relation in question). An act of placing outside, beyond (mere earthly economies). In fact at the service of other arguments and reasons, other economies. Gift-like perhaps, sacrificial certainly; in terms of their other, in terms of a rational calculus (that excludes identity). Until we include other values as part of the calculus, values more ‘general’. (While always resisting the temptations of the ‘external’, or ‘god’, view.) Forced at once to give ourselves our own commandments and to attempt to place them beyond reach…

Placed ‘outside’. Eternity’s door. Gift of the Word. Gift to the World. Set apart. Foundational.

Copyright Peter Nesteruk, 2010