Constitutions of Value An Introduction

Practices of value production and valuation shape and make worlds. They also unmake worlds, have severe destructive effects and lie at the heart of contemporary interlocking crises characterized by violence, extraction and destruction. Against the background of an analysis of the worldmaking and unmaking effects of value, this book pursues a better understanding of how value and valuation are socially and materially – and in particular legally – constructed, on which basis to prepare the ground for proposals for institutional experimentation and re-design to reshape practices of value production and valuation. We call our endeavour a constitutional study of value. We use the adjective “constitutional” as we seek to explore the practices and institutions at the core of value production, its hardware, its central constitutive elements, with a focus on law as a significant building-block, while attending to further constitutive forces, including politics, economics, technology and science. Our project is not one of constitutionalization understood as a project of restraining the excesses of value production by a top-down legal framework. Equally, instead of building on a neoclassical understanding of value, this volume observes value to be anchored in particular societal and material configurations and practices, and in doing so, its contributions draw on renewed relational conceptions of economic value. Thereby, we explore value as a product of collective societal organization for the purpose of reconfiguring, redesigning and revaluing value in social and institutional context today.

In this introductory chapter, we focus on commoning and a reinvigoration of commons as concrete guidance for institutional design and experimentation, and as an ambitious program to revalue value. The register of commoning privileges vernacular knowledge, practice, and bottom-up law-making over abstract values and top-down prescriptions. While commoning aims at deprivatization, decommodification, and provisioning based on solidarity, responding to desire and need, it also affirms a unique surplus value, keyed to thriving, and an abundance of vitality and lived experience. In this introductory chapter, commoning serves as a practical example of goals that the various contributions to this book help to make possible.