Text Sushi by Alf Rehn

I. 
Umami is not a spice, but a taste. In fact, it is the fairly unknown fifth basic taste, a complement to the better-known versions of sweet, sour, bitter and salt. It is sometimes described as “savoriness”. And although it seems to have been well-known in the praxis of cuisine for a long, long time, the scientific understanding of this taste has only recently caught up. Now, basic tastes are usually defined on the grounds of a specific biological fact – that our tongues have receptors for them. For quite a while science thought that the tongue contained four kinds of receptors, each roughly corresponding to one taste. Recently a fifth receptor, one that reacts to umami, has been discovered. This was clearly not the kind of information that headlines news broadcasts, and consequently most people seem not to be aware of the existence of this fifth basic taste. Seeing that umami is a very versatile taste, one that can enhance any other taste, this is a shame. However, professional chefs – particularly those proficient in brands of Asian cuisine – are well-aware of how umami can be used and consequently have developed a number of ways to titillate our taste-buds with this sensation. But what is most interesting here is the latter, rather than the former, fact. Umami, special and fairly unknown as it is, is merely a stimulating agent and can only make sense in a context of meaning. Without a specific neurological platform it can never achieve a place in culture, where meaning is then imbued into it. And it is this instrument of contextualization, this biological device of sensemaking, that is the subject here.

II.

Human life is still bestially concentrated in the mouth. Georges Bataille

The tongue represents all that is abhorrent to the studies of management and economy. This field, which sings the praises of the defined and the absolute, has its own peculiar relationship to that amorphous thing that Lacan called the Real – the thing which we do not wish to think, or which we cannot think. The tongue, slithering and moist, is instead both real and Real, for even though its physical reality is obvious and uncontested, its place in economy is something that traditionalist thinking of the economic would wish to hide away. The tongue simply does not fit the dry and ordered thinking of academic discourse, particularly not in the fields that want to talk of economy. It is fleshy, slick, and mucous – sponge-like and wriggling, not quite a muscle and not quite an organ. It is an uneven surface, all pocks and ridges, and occupies many positions. This capacity for being many things, of not being reducible to a single, simple essence, is of course what makes it repugnant to an academic field obsessed with order and the well-structured. The tongue of a lover, kissing and caressing, has little in common with the sharp rapier of the practicing trial lawyer. It can speak, kiss, scathe. Switching contexts pose no problem – the tongue can engage in business dealings or be used in sexual communion. Stuck grotesquely out of the mouth is turns into a taunt, used in a measured way it becomes the very image of control. The same tongue can go from sensuously licking the earlobe of a beloved to pragmatically testing the heat and viscosity of a dish being prepared. Tasting, testing and transforming, the tongue is an active part of the border of a human, a dweller in the borderlands between I and thou, I and the world outside. The ambiguous nature of this fleshy appendage, with its connections to both genitalia and intellectual faculties, makes it a truly fearsome thing for the reductive and trivial positions one can find in much inquiry into the economic.

A child, in forming her approach to the problem of an outside world, will constantly make use of her mouth and tongue. The sensitivity of the tongue, something which is a direct result of the amorphous makeup of this organ, makes it an excellent epistemological tool, a way to manage the problem of the subject in the world. Probing the borders of the world, a process later replicated by the onset of sexuality (by any other name) in the probing of the borders between oneself and others, the tongue assists the child in making sense of how a communication, an exchange, can take place. A baby slobbering over a toy is engaging in an exchange with the same – even though this communication is characterized by what Michel Serres has called bruit, the noise. Interactions between the tongue and objects is not a question of simply transferring information. Saliva, the manifold surface of the tongue, the play of the mouth cavity, all take part in trying to communicate with the wooden block the child gnaws and tastes. There is a flow of information, but this is not a question of information A going to taste-bud B, but a real flow, with eddies and turbulence and saliva and the multitude of wasteful, redundant flux that exists in any information transfer in the real world – Serres’s noise. Now, the tongue is in fact an extremely well developed device for handling this kind of “noise”.

In fact, tastes may even be understood as such noise, as fundamentally unnecessary information. Even though people sometime claim that certain tastes exist as signals – bitter denotes poison, sweet denotes quickly acting carbohydrates – this explanation seems contrived. Even though it may be true that early man learned to realize that the sensations derived from certain berries could be linked to positive effects, such information is obviously a case of creating meaning rather than a case of efficient transfer of information. Honey is sweet, and gives quick energy, but the energy effect would still hold true even if we found sweet tastes fundamentally revolting. What we can see here is a very complex problem: Divorcing the actual, biological tastes from their culturally ascribed meanings is tasking. For instance, both nightshade and ethylene glycol (an ingredient in anti-freeze) are sweet-tasting and fatally poisonous. Quite a number of roots and berries taste bitter, but are still highly nutritious. Still, as a culture we have taken to reacting with pleasure to sweet tastes and some wariness to bitter ones, and one suggested reason for this is because children seem to enjoy simple, sweet tastes more than complex bitter ones. This observation is however in marked contrast with other ways we view “good” taste. The complex taste of a Chateau Lafite 1971 and a well-matured Camembert, for example, stand as an example of tastes that children assumedly would not enjoy. All the while, when our tongues are confronted with such multifaceted tastes, we react with pleasure. Here, the noise becomes evident. For the simple signals of sweet, sour, bitter and salt (oh, and umami) in fact exist only in our simplified models of the world. For although this structure, this organization of taste, drummed into our minds from childhood on, is elegant in its simplicity, it actually says little of how taste functions. A simple lump of sugar, dissolving on a tongue, sends wave upon wave of information into the tongue, for even though the main receptors to react are those hardwired to “sweet”, the other receptors partake in the flow of information, in the noisy transfer.

The tongue, aided by our olfactory faculties, processes even the simplest things in a way far more complex than our models of organization can capture. It is an organ of excess, of too much information, and through this also part of the creation of human civilization. Were tastes simply a case of linear, purified information – one for sweet, two for bitter, three for umami – the human mind would never have been confronted with the problem of how broiled meat tastes. This taste cannot be presented in a formulae: two parts sweet plus one part bitter and five parts umami. Instead, it is a sensation requiring an almost magically sensitive device of sensemaking – the tongue. At the same time, the existence of this device attached to the human system demanded much of the primate brain. All the senses, combined with the birth of language, made it necessary for the brain to develop too. Out of such things, cultures are born.

III.
What is the taste of culture? The coffee presently sloshing through the cavity of my mouth carries with it far more than can be captured by trying to describe it as hot, acrid and pleasant-tasting. It tastes of mornings and break-times, comfort and work. Compare this to the taste of a lover, lingering on the tongue and in the mind, a layered affair where the physical realities of sweat and secretions are overlaid with romanticized notions and idealization. My love tastes of paradise and joy, residual comestibles and exocrine glands…

As an observation, the fact that taste is a function of both physical and cultural elements might seem trivial. However, studies of organization and the economic nexus often works from the implicit assumption that we can draw clear boundaries between the biological and the socio-cultural. As a result, much of e.g. management studies is a remarkably bloodless affair, devoid of the sweaty brow and the smell of urine so common in the workplaces of our great nations. Often, this seems to be due to a feeling that bodies and the biological are really just grist for the economic mill, mere effects. In a line of argumentation remarkably close to Michel Foucault’s notion of the body created through clinical gazes and power/knowledge-regimes, the discourse of business rarely acknowledges the possibility that bodies could be more than that which is affected by organizing. The manifold devices of the world of organizations may be passively acted upon by such bodies, like a grain of sand can create unwanted friction in an engine, but bodies are seldom afforded any real agency. And even when they are, as in discussions of resistance and less-than-docile bodies, this agency comes not from within the body, but from that primus motor of our thinking, the intentional actor.

What is interesting about the tongue is that it shows us an alternative position to this issue of agency. Michel Serres has in his usual idiosyncratic way argued that the philosophy has concentrated on understanding our second tongue, language, whilst the first one, the tasting tongue, has been ignored. He has, following this, stated:

All around us language replaces experience. The sign, so soft, substitutes itself for the thing, which is hard. I cannot think of this substitution as an equivalence. It is more of an abuse and a violence. The sound of a coin is not worth the coin; the smell of cooking does not fill the hungry stomach; publicity is not the equivalent of quality; the tongue that talks annuls the tongue that tastes or the one that receives and gives a kiss.

Still, here the tongue that tastes is here afforded a primacy, a romantic notion of origins that I’m not quite prepared to accept. In Serres, the tasting tongue seems almost atavistic, a remnant of an earlier, purer age, and the annulment that he seems to claim is enacted by culture is to me a curious continuation of fallacy of the social being the adversary of the biological. What the tongue, to me, instead shows is how a biological “platform” – if such a crude and mechanistic word can be used – can be a place from which cultural and social mores develop. Receptors, developed over millennia, part of a nervous system attached to a physical brain with a wondrous capacity for development, all these are biological facts and certainties. While my tongue and the tongue of a Amarakaire tribesman are not the same thing, and the way we appreciate the taste of a macadamia nut may differ greatly once the brain has processed the impulses sent, the fact that both of our cultural reactions to the taste of the nut is mediated and made possible by the physical characteristics of the tongue is incontestable. Note that this does not mean that I believe all tongues to be biologically identical, simply that all tongues have biological properties. Neither do I want to explain everything by pointing back to neural activity and taste-receptors. Instead, it is the wandering across boundaries, the seamless interplay, the acting manifold of the tongue that entices me.

IV.

Hunger ist Hunger, aber Hunger, der sich durch gekochtes, mit Gabel und Messer gegeßnes Fleisch befriedigt, ist ein andrer Hunger, als der rohes Fleisch mit Hilfe von Hand, Nagel und Zahn verschlingt. Nicht nur der Gegenstand der Konsumtion, sondern auch die Weise der Konsumtion wird daher durch die Produktion produziert, nicht nur objektiv, sondern auch subjektiv. Die Produktion schafft also den Konsumenten. Karl Marx

In order to explore this manifold, take the interplay between your tongue and a lover. Kissing, an activity sadly absent from much of academic discourse (although not unknown on the conference circuit), is obviously a cultural affair. We are inundated with notions what a romantic (or merely hot) kiss is supposed to be. Historical imagery, literary descriptions, flowery language, famous cinema kisses, small-talk and confessions have all aided and structured our understanding of a kiss, and as a consequence, our experience of a kiss is culturally colored. A kiss is, in more than one way, not just a kiss. At the same time, even though the sensation thereof is filtered through layers of culture and social mores, there is a specific physical aspect to it all. The skin that is touched, the other tongue met, the sensation of the other captured by that incredibly sensitive communicative organ. The tongue senses, it tastes, it interacts. And these sense-reactions, often referred to as base sensations, are not simple. The tasting tongue handles much more information than language can describe, but this form of sensemaking is not a question of either the physical or social. It is both, for in the processing of “noisy information” the tongue sways between the two, in the same manner the tongue traverses the boundaries between I and thou, the inner and the outer. The kiss is both a cultural affair and a physical act, extremely intimate and tied to a social network of meaning. And in its own way, the humble tongue handles this traversion, mediates the physical and moistens the social.

This swaying, this refusal to be just one thing, is what is abhorrent to the mode of thinking practiced in e.g. business schools. By being different from itself, a biological thing that processes information and mediates culture, the tongue may well be part of economy but not part of the thinking thereof. And by being so steadfastly physical, so wet and spongy, so connected to our base desires as well as to our chatting, bullshittin’ selves, it forces us to look to our bodies, ourselves. Thinking of economy has been occupied with cleansing, creating flat surfaces and smooth models, and the slithering thing that follows us everywhere is exactly the kind of thing this thinking has tried to banish. Still, people chat, sample a jalapeño popper, suck on their thumb when they’ve banged it, give head, lick envelopes, and eat, eat, eat. The tongue, that prime communicative medium, is ever-present in economy, but to the thinking thereof it is truly a viper, a worm at the heart of the economic. And whereas the notion of economy being created by intentionally acting individuals requires some notion of decision or drive, and thus has steered us towards imagining rationality and calculation as innate parts of enterprising behavior, the tongue represents immediacy, reacting regardless of our intentions. This infrangible nature scares us, for regardless of our wishes – and management studies is a theory of wishes and wants – it will behave as it wants. In front of this uncontrollable organ, organization theory cowers.

For while it is true that e.g. organization studies has talked, almost incessantly it seems, of things connected to the tongue – language, rhetoric, discourse, narratives – this has always been done in the purified sense, a sense where the mouth that speaks has not been allowed to sully the elegant modeling and reducing of the phenomenological world. And here Serres point becomes important. Talking of language without talking of the tongue is obviously a violence, a deadening of the faculties. Reducing the mouth to an automaton of discourse is a brutal act of denigration, of positing that which we find easy to think about as that what is important to think. The tasting tongue, capturing the subtle and sublime informational flows from umami, is in fact engaging in an act many times more complex than mere talking, and possibly an act that is far more important to economy. Without discernment, the capacity to order things in the world, the capacity to desire or dislike, the constitutional differences in the world would never have started that symbolic interplay we now call our culture. And without the tongue, much of our discernment would be lost. Further, without this discernment, the very notion of wants and needs, of demand, of consumption would simply not exist. Marx might be right in saying “die Produktion schafft also den Konsumenten,” but in much the same way, the tongue does part to play in creating economy, and it should be acknowledged. As itself, as biological, as cultural, as the real tongue of economy.

I.
Entrepreneurship is often understood as the art of the new – new ventures, new companies, new products, innovations and so on. It would thus seem like a most unpromising sphere for inquiring into sampling and reuse. I will argue that this is a fundamental fallacy, not only in lay thinking but in the very theory of entrepreneurship, and that there is much analytically to be gained from understanding it as a form of sampling. In fact, I will argue that such a perspective in fact corresponds well with the very start of entrepreneurship as a field of inquiry, as the definition of the entrepreneur that started this interest does in fact paint him/her as a sampler:

As it is the carrying out of new combinations that constitutes the entrepreneur, it is not necessary that he should be permanently connected with an individual firm[…]

[W]hatever the type, everyone is an entrepreneur only when he actually “carries out new combinations,” and loses that character as soon as he has built up his business, when he settles down to running it as other people their business.
Joseph Schumpeter (1934/1983), The Theory of Economic Development, p. 75, 78

In other words, Schumpeter, in defining the role of the entrepreneur, saw him (sic) as something of a DJ, a remix-artist that took the existing world, rearranged it, and out of this formed something new. Existing resources became beats, old infrastructures samples that could be recombined. Rather than a mythical being that created the new ex nihilo nihil, he found ways of making the old seem new again, like a performance artist who takes a hammer and a spray-can of paint and refashions the way in which we view our surroundings. Banksy the entrepreneur, or Schumpeter the beat-master.

II.
One of the most iconic phenomena in entrepreneurship, particularly in the teaching, talking and theorizing thereof, is the business plan. This textual artifact, which is supposed both to guide, sell and manifest the entrepreneurial vision, is often seen as the tangible start of new venturing, and accordingly much has been said/written about it. As it is supposed to be a map of a new venture, one would think that originality would be the hallmark of such a plan. This, however, is a dubious idea. In fact, business plans can be understood as a form of collage art, remixed and sampled, which then stand as original texts. It is a queer form of writing this, that has to be simultaneously original and comfortingly unoriginal. The art to writing such lies in being able to take common forms of expression, well-known rhetorical tricks, and still somehow be able to suffuse this with a freshness.
Putting together a business plans is thus a question of mixing. Just the right amount of recognizable samples to create a feeling of well-being and legitimacy, together with a fresh new stream of ideas. Books and software exist to help you along, providing you with a proverbial baseline, upon which you can riff your original and loopy ideas. These template collections (for only rarely are they anything but) obviously mimic sound banks, ready-packaged business plans modules that one can plug into the creation one tries to make. Their popularity stands as testament of the fact that no-one actually believes that entrepreneurship – for all the pretty things we say about it – is an entirely original act.
Yet we often wish to ignore this. In order to be taken seriously, entrepreneurship has to be portrayed as an invocation against the mundane and unoriginal in the world, continuously recast as a truly novel act. Talking about things such as unoriginal entrepreneurship or sampling in conjunction with this is anathema to a society which valorizes both entrepreneurship and innovation, even though this could open up an interesting avenue of inquiry. Entrepreneurship, the idealized version, seems to be the very anti-thesis to sampling, and there is an ideological need to protect this fantasy.

III.
Entrepreneurial sampling doesn’t end with the business plan, however. Rather, it shows us one of at least three ways in which sampling exist within the nexus of entrepreneurship. In the business plan, we can see a case of mimetic sampling, where reusing modes of argumentation and similar devices is done in order to mimic an archetypal idea of entrepreneurship. In other words, mimetic sampling is a question of trying to establish legitimacy, looking and sounding the part. Such sampling will be ongoing throughout the entrepreneurial career, and we can see things such as office design, business cards, the naming of companies (faux-Latin or science-y sounding) and similar things as variations of this device. This kind of sampling may seem like merely the manipulation of surface effects, and thus of no consequence for the “real” act of entrepreneurship. At the same time, the upkeep of a front is critical in the starting of a new venture, and looking at the emphasis placed on things such as marketing and business planning, we can still say that mimetic sampling plays a role in enterprising. But this is, as noted, only one of such modes.
A more critical, and potentially less understood, mode is that of resource sampling. Part of the theory of entrepreneurship from the very beginning, the way in which an entrepreneur treats the world as a set of resources has been a dominant underlying and unspoken logic of how we’ve understood these matters – not entirely unlike the way in which Martin Heidegger conceptualized technology as that which transforms the world into a resource. Still, the very nature of this form of re-utilization of the already existing, that which is “always already”, has escaped overt theorizing. Much of entrepreneurship theory does, in fact, deal in things such as “opportunity recognition” and “optimization of possibilities”, but the fundamentally unoriginal aspect of entrepreneurship doesn’t really fit the ideological matrix constructed by theory. What does an entrepreneur do? Simply put, she looks around in the world, sees things that could be utilized more efficiently or combined in new and interesting ways. This, obviously, is something that works on a very abstract level – resources can be things such as talent, a distribution-channel, a supply of maple syrup, and so on. The entrepreneur sees things in the world that are already there, but can also see beyond them, into a land of new combinations and mixes. The fantasy is that one can, through the transformative magic of entrepreneurship, channel some form of essential newness which one then brings into the world, which would place the re-combination as merely the symptom of creating the new. This, however, builds on a rather suspect metaphysics, one which people such as Joseph Schumpeter and Friedrich Hayek seemingly had no problem cultivating.

IV.
The notion that an entrepreneur, seemingly through the sheer force of her personality, can conjure up something fundamentally novel and ontologically different into the world, may be politically expedient, but it is philosophically suspect. It builds on the fallacy of innovation being a break with history, and although e.g. the field of innovation management has flirted with the notion of innovation as processual and developmental, the ontological issue of novelty remains insufficiently explored and often conveniently ignored. Whereas the study of innovation has been inundated with epistemological frippery on historical linkages and the difficulty of stating when an innovation comes into being, the very problem of having a field that gets its legitimacy by assuming that one can talk about innovation in a sensible and ontologically grounded way has yet to be dealt with. Talking about innovation and entrepreneurship as sampling might seem like both an answer and an attack on this. On one hand, by emphasizing that novelty does not necessarily spring from an metaphysical event beyond the ontology one commonly adheres to (the “I don’t really know where that comes from”-argument), but rather from a recasting of what is always already there, such a move would de-dramatize the process of innovation. On the other hand, this would bring into question whether there is any point in talking about things such as “innovations”, as this so clearly then would point to an ideological recasting of the far less dramatic event of sampling.
Even if we set aside this ontological quandary, there remains a theoretical problem. How are we to understand the way in which entrepreneurs engage with their surroundings, effectively setting themselves as the nexus through which the world as a set of resource flows? Often this issue has merely been side-stepped by referring to an innate cleverness in entrepreneurs, a defining capacity to identify new opportunities. I would contend that this is insufficient. Instead, we need to rethink the relation, and view entrepreneurship as located as much in the existing world as in the mind of the entrepreneur. To some, this might sound almost like a pantheistic argument, one where there is a potentiality and an energy in all things, just waiting to be channeled by a sufficiently focused agent. And, in fact, there might be some truth to this. The resource-nature of resources is insufficiently understood, and this has led us to a view of entrepreneurship that over-emphasizes the individual and hypes innovation. By viewing entrepreneurship as sampling, and the entrepreneur as a DJ of resources, we could instead focus on the dialectical back and forth between the entrepreneur and the world she inhabits, and through this create more realistic theories about how the entrepreneur creates value out of the existing (rather than seeking refuge in empty metaphysics).

V.
We could extend all this into the third mode of entrepreneurial mixing, namely identity sampling. Being an entrepreneur is to inhabit a specific iconography, and much of what has been described above could be understood as following directly from the archetypal idea of an entrepreneurial identity. The original act of entrepreneurial sampling, thus, might be the one the budding venturer engages in when she first dons the identity of “the entrepreneur”. This is not merely a question of renaming one’s identity, but mixing in things such as “successful player”, “Richard Branson”, “master of her own destiny”, “future leader” and “growth-creator” into one’s existing identity. Being an entrepreneur is not simply a question doing entrepreneurship, but rather a recasting of identity which enables entrepreneurial action. By sampling in the kind of identity-functions that society is rife with, which bolsters things such as risk-taking and opportunity-searching (i.e. drives resource-sampling), the aspiring entrepreneur recasts not only the world but herself, and thus creates entrepreneurship as a remix.
The move I’ve tried to outline in this brief essay is primarily one of de-romanticizing entrepreneurship, and move this away from the trivial valorization of “innovation”. Although I (and quite a few others) believe that entrepreneurship can be an important generator of value, the field that studies it has been rife with ideological over-selling, and the phenomenon does in fact deserves a more realistic approach to the theorization thereof. By bringing in post-original moves such as sampling into the strive to understand it, we can both enrich the vocabulary we use to discuss entrepreneurship, and also open up for new avenues for studying this.
In this vein, discussing entrepreneurship as sampling is not a question of trying to belittle the field, but to enhance it. By trying to distance the field from metaphysical explanations, and instead bring in less affected modes of discussing entrepreneurship, we could stimulate a discussion that could build on empirical understandings and realistic analysis of the actual acts through which the entrepreneurial enters into the world. The remix, rather than a mode of post-production, would in such an understanding be the very linchpin of value-creation. The entrepreneur as a sampler is still a creator, but this would no longer be an abstract notion, but a very direct and graspable form of creation – the constant re-creation of the world.

There are things I desire more than this, but still:
Cool Hunting: Tumi x Anish Kapoor Backpack

Economy, it seems, is no laughing matter. Economy, it seems, is the real deal, serious matters, the no-frills package. Where economics is the dismal science, business studies is obviously the serious science, the research of that which is done for a reason. And the reasons for doing are, in this field, always assumed to be serious. Still, since the very beginning of organized economic activity in the Paleolithic era, most of the energy and resources expended have gone towards the frivolous – the production of toys and baubles. At the same time, management and organization studies (MOS) has, due to an unfortunate fallacy, almost exclusively studied ‘serious’ businesses (e.g. car manufacture, steel mills et cetera) mistakenly believing these to be primary economic areas, even though this can easily be contradicted. Thus, most if not all of management studies as a field is based on a view of economy that is, quite simply, wrongheaded. The validity of such management studies consequently comes into question, being rooted not in economic facts but in moralizations about economy. The role played by man’s unquenchable thirst for frivolities (such as games, fun, pleasure, joy, toys, trinkets) is perhaps even more pronounced today, in contemporary ‘post-industrial’ society, but has always played the main role in economy – note that e.g. world trade and globalization originated in the business of spices and drugs (coffee, tea, tobacco), frivolities of the first order. This will be my starting point. But a starting point for what? My contention is that the discussions undertaken regarding management and economy in a post-industrial economy is hampered by how we understand the basis of economic action, and our way to ascribe lofty reasons for it. This essay thus discusses how the frivolous and the playful, dimensions traditionally placed at the margins or even outside economic logic, exist at the very core of what economy, understood as a system of meaningful exchanges, is.

My interest, however, is most closely focused on a specific ordering of economic activity, one often referred to as managerialism. This refers to a way to look at economy that emphasizes the role of planning, control and steering, and has become a dominant perspective in its own right. Whereas economics (in any of its guises) studies the larger economic order, and consumption studies and marketing the interplay between offerings and consumption, management has become a catch-all for intentional, instrumental economic action. In my perspective, this includes the field of “organization studies”, so that the larger field can be referred to as management and organization studies – MOS. Management, as an activity, is usually comprehended as something that has at least a core of rational, functionalist logic: “In order to achieve X we must do Y”. This, however, posits that the aims of management, the end results of managerial action, are assumed to be taken-for-granted concepts, given truths a priori. This, as noted by Gustafsson*1*, constitutes the metaphysics of economic reason, where notions such as ‘utility’ and ‘necessity’ play an important part. “In order to achieve X” means that this X, whatever it may be – an annual profit, the invasion of a country, a better mousetrap – remains unquestioned, as an accepted part of the equation. And inasmuch as it is questioned, the answer is assumed to take on a similar form: “Why should we make a profit annually? Because this will enable us to serve our stakeholders.” And why should they be served? Because, because, because… There is always assumed to be a reason, an underlying logic that one can fall back on. And, at the micro-economic heart of business studies, this logic is thought to be one of utility, the fulfillment of needs, doing good.

Although business is often derided as often unethical and having morals only when it suits other purposes, there exists a specific notion about the ethical underpinnings thereof, namely that business creates results that can be critically analyzed as being more or less useful and sensible. For instance, although some have criticized the market economy for creating side effects that are harmful – uneven distribution of wealth, ecological mishaps – such criticism has still usually implicitly accepted that there is a point to economy, a meaningful creation of useful things. Similarly, the apologists of the market economy usually point to all the “good things” that capitalism has created, often through the rhetoric device of “material well-being”. Both proponents and opponents of the market economy seem to agree that an economic system should strive to doing good, even though they are divided on the subject of what this means and what can be accepted on the way towards this goal.

Although any explanation that builds on polar opposites by necessity becomes a caricature, I can perhaps utilize this to illustrate my counter-position. Pro-market thinking, which dominates MOS, commonly argue for their position by pointing out that the market economy creates valuable and useful things. Without the market economy, they say, we’d have less choice, fewer utilities, our needs would be met less adequately. To this those critical of the market economy might answer: “Yes, but do we really need all these things? We live in luxury, and destroy the planet while we’re at it.” Further, not all have those things we do, so there is a fundamental injustice to it all, when some have their needs met and some do not. We might learn to live with less, like those quaint primitives Marshall Sahlins described and who seem to have lead fairly nice lives. What is important to note, is that in this latter critique, the real point is missed. By applying a moral judgement to economy, an important analytic point is lost. Where one camp argues that the economy produces necessities, the other argues against the need for these. A third way,the way suggested here, is to acknowledge the simple fact that although the market economy produces frivolities, unnecessary items, this needn’t be a problem.

Whereas those who would to the economy afford the marvelous and quite magical capability of transforming whatever is added to its machinery into precious and supremely useful commodities, one could reasonably be far more taken with the fact that people will, at great expense, purchase and consume a wide variety of things which to an outside observer (such as the famed Azande anthropologist) would seem almost inexplicably pointless. For instance, I have the pleasure of working with a researcher who does work on the production of themepark attractions, and who has memorably referred to the prime example of such, the rollercoaster, as a “machine for the transportation of human subjects in three dimensions so that the start and end points are the same”. Her somewhat sterile wording is of course important. A rollercoaster is a pointless machine, and has no useful purpose, as it does, in fact, merely transport its passengers back to the exact point they started. This, however, belies its importance. The enjoyment people can derive from one has nothing whatsoever to do with any imagined utility inherent in its use. Were we, for instance, to hear a person claim that she goes on rollercoasters for medical reasons we would normally react with suspicion or laughter. Instead, a machine such as this has to be understood as a frivolity, something which has meaning but no simple, singular utility.

This imagined critic might state that I thereby have shown that the economy is, in fact, a mistake. Much of what it does (most, in fact) has no real use-value, in Marx’s simple sense of the word. This seems wrong, to a lot of people. The spewing forth of an endless line of products no-one needs and the majority of people cannot afford seems like the result of a machine gone haywire, and this is de facto close to how the market economy is often viewed. In such a view, an error has been commited, and the machinery meant for useful production has been perverted into creating the pointless gor profit. Such theorizing can be found in a number of schools of thought, but perhaps most poignantly within the the writings of the Frankfurt School, i.e. within “Critical Theory”. What is interesting in such a critique is the way in which the meaning of economy becomes extremely similar within the two camps one would think would disagree over this very point. Both would, implicitly, view that there exists a correct developmental path for economy, one that would bring about both quantitative and qualitative improvements in the production and distribution of useful things. Thus, the critique against contemporary market economies usually hinge on the fact this process has been twisted by consumerism. Pro-market thinking will say that the market will choose wisely (as proven by improved standards of living), and anti-market thinking will argue the opposite. Both thus imagine that wisdom and prudence is at the heart of economy, and that the definition of these notions will serve to decide the issue.

The problem might be in a notion developed by the aforementioned Karl Marx, namely that of use-value. This concept is central to his thinking, and refers, simply put, to the usefulness of any given commodity. To Marx (any many others), this is the truest form of value, the way in which different things can be compared according to their usefulness. Drilling equipment has higher use-value than a hammer, partly because the former is a more complex construction and has thus taken more work to put together. Further, such equipment can be applied to more difficult tasks, i.e. its uses are more multifaceted. A hammer is more useful than a hairpin, for much the same reasons, and a toy has so little use-value that it is usually ignored completely. What Marx then notes is how exchange-value can pervert the natural order given by the categorization implied by use-value. Sometimes, depending on a number of factors, exchange-value becomes disattached from use-value, and this has many implications. This debate still rages on, in the sense that usefulness and utility are continuously either implicitly or explicitly referred to as natural and logical ways to view the true value of things. There is, however, a simple philosophical error that is often done in talking about these things. Use-value is here viewed as an essential aspect, a quality, of a thing, even though use, as a concept, is fluid and contextual. The notion of a natural and immutable use-value is, in fact, no more stringent than the idea that every hour has a specific economic value regardless of what one does with said hour. The notion of use-value is however one that Marx explicitly wants to exclude from discussions of economy:

The commodity itself appears as unity of two aspects. It is use value, i.e., object of the satisfaction of any system whatever of human needs. This is its material side, which the most disparate epochs of production may have in common, and whose examination therefore lies beyond political economy.

It is a strange statement, and Marx goes on to state that the very notion of use-value is presupposed generally and never really engaged with in a market economy, as the commodity-form of things forces people to relate to these through other forms of knowing than the assumedly pure category of use, specifically to their abstracted value in a system of exchanges. This abstraction, the exchange-value of the commodity is completely detached from the use of the object, and it is this specific form of extreme abstraction that enables capitalist logic to dominate that which Braudel referred to as the “material life”. With this in mind, it is interesting to note how Marx refers to use-value as something to exclude from political economy on the basis that it is too general a notion. Whereas the abstraction that is the exchange-value of the commodity form is assumedly both universal and treatable, the universality of the material form of need satisfaction “of any system whatever” is seemingly by Marx viewed as an anthropological matter. The use of an object is, in this way, the rudiment that Marx leaves unanalyzed.

A thing, any thing, obviously and by logical necessity has a number of uses. Although it is not true that anything can be done by any thing, almost everything can be done by a number of things and every thing can be used for a number of uses. A mobile phone can be used to drive in a nail, even though it is less suited to this than a hammer is. A mobile phone can also, even within its core capabilities, be used in many ways. Its use-value as a way to call mom might be less than its use-value for phone-sex or vice versa, depending on how one actually, in a local context, uses a phone. For a lonely bachelor living with his parents in a rural community, the primary use of a phone, particularly one that can be easily transported to a more private surrounding, may well be for sexual entertainment. Calling mom and the ambulance are selling points, but not the main thing that gives the object use-value. The same may not hold for the identical mobile phone of his mother. It is thus difficult to say anything specific about an imagined true use of such a thing. We could instead say that things have multiple use-values, so that their value is less something within the object and more within the context they are conceived in. The use-value of an object is in such a view something that is created when an object is made meaningful. Turning away from the notion of a single, overarching notion of use, and replacing this with a view that emphazises how things are actually made meaningful and then used, value thus becomes a far less clear concept. The singular use-value of the aforementioned rollercoaster is almost impossible to deduct, since it has no real utility, no objective use. Still, as a decidedly pointless machine, it can be used in many ways – to titillate, to scare, to flirt on – that makes the use thereof meaningful. This difference in how we approach the word “use” is highly important.

Today, the question of community stands as perhaps the most potent symptom of contemporary business schizophrenia. On one hand, businesses are increasingly sticking to a radical form of individualistic egoism, with ideas about maximizing shareholder value, free agency or one-to-one marketing presenting a perfectly fragmented world. On the other, ideas about affiliation, communities (on the web or off – and what is a brand except the fetish of a community around a commodity?) and similar linked-in phenomena are dominating much of the discussion about what business is developing into. Of course, both these positions could be seen as punditry, as either scare-mongering or as over-hyping relatively minor movements. Still, they capture something of a Zeitgeist, a belief in that Tönnies old separation between the Gemeinschaft and the Gesellschaft would be not only important, but critical for understanding contemporary business practice.

If we take the frenzy that has erupted over sites such as MySpace, YouTube and flickr (sites I like, except MySpace – and this is probably due to me being too old), we can see something like a Damascene revelation in business media. Communities have value that cannot be reduced to individual production! Well, duh. To an extent this seems to be an extension of the old “the value is in the network”-liturgy we’ve heard since the dawn of the internet age, complete with inane references to “if there’s only one fax, it isn’t worth that much, but imagine how the value increases as additional faxes are connected to the network….” And, in both cases, we see that people still don’t get the prime lesson Karl Marx taught us: There is a difference between use-value and exchange-value.

Communities, whether we’re talking about the people living in your yard, your circle of friends or some neat-o Web 2.0-thingy, can have tremendous use-value. This, obviously, is due to the fact that community enables a kind of social division of labor, and also because all communities create synergetic effects – there is no need for you to buy a belt-sander if your neighbor has one, and it’s much more convenient to use a friend as a babysitter than hire a stranger. One might even go so far as to say that the very nature of a community gives it a structural use-value, even though this will be realized somewhat differently in different communities. Obviously, we can imagine communities where the realized use-value is very small, possibly even zero, but it looks like basically all existing communities would generate use-value for those who partake in it. Just as obviously, this is the common sociological explanation for the very existence of communities – they are beneficial for their members.

However, does this mean that communities are valuable? Due to the fact that most people assume that value=value and that value=self-evident, there is a prevailing notion that communities would have extrinsic value, i.e. that they could be valued in the same way e.g. a company can. Here, we have the confusion between use-value and exchange-value in a relatively pure form. That the intrinsic use-value of a community would mean that it makes sense to price it and turn it into exchange-value – such as has happened in the case of MySpace and is happening in the case of YouTube – seems, as I said, a slightly schizophrenic move. To begin with, it is a confusion between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, the buying of the unbuyable. We could call it a mistranslation, where the interpersonal is valued from outside, by an individual egoist. But it also points to the very problem of assigning exchange-value in our post-industrial era. In a situation where one of the hottest commodities on the market derives its value from being seen as “this thing of ours” (as I would argue is the case with all online communities, a valuation that basically calls it “this thing of mine” seems almost psychotic.

Note that I am not claiming that those fine and upstanding capitalist that are busy acquiring online communities would be crazy, on the contrary. They are quite possibly making a very good deal (or not, the vagaries of such deals are the stuff of legend), but the logic of this deal is in a very real sense phantasmagoric. Effectively, they are buying two things which cannot be bought, trust and hipness, and betting on no-one getting on to them before they capitalize on their investment.

But if we are to truly gauge the value of online communities, such speculative investments can in no way be a reliable measure. Instead, we need to actually work with theories of value and try to think about what an online community is. And it is here that I would like to make a 180 degree turn, suggesting that maybe we can treat online communities not like any old commodity, but like a very specific commodity well theorized in e.g. Marx.

I would like to suggest that online communities are, in a sense, machines – that is, they are capital goods. Think about user-generated content. What is this but output from a very specific kind of machine? And think about what Marx said machines are: Crystallized labor. An online community like flickr takes the labor of its members and systematizes this into output, controlled by those who run the site. It might not be owned by them, but they control the way in which it is disseminated and processed, i.e. they control the means of production. Members in the community might believe that it is their cameras and their work that constitutes this means, but as internet pundits are so happy to point out, it is the system not the individual output that drives the enterprise. In this sense, the participatory work of people in online communities could well be interpreted as common labor (and please, let’s have none of this neo-nonsensical abstract labor crap), with the community itself representing a classic capital good. And these, as we well know, can be appraised, bought and sold on the market quite well.

The question this poses, however, is somewhat more disturbing: If a community can be bought and sold, is it a community? Are online communities, in fact, communities at all? After all, there can be a plethora of social feelings, interpersonal relations and the likes present in a factory or a slave camp. Yet, no-one in their right mind would call these places a “community of labor”. Or…?