#exchange-value

As these lived spaces come under the domination of exchange-value,differences are sought out, flattened, and absorbed within capitalism. Or at least the attempt to reduce and contain difference is made.

Before entering new 7"s or LPs into the library, Yohannon always reinforced the record sleeves' borders with green electrical tape, thereby partially destroying their exchange-value, emphasizing their use-value, and marking them as MRR's communal property. --N.Rombes

The Gespenst that Marx calls abstraction is a substitution for nothing, which in constituting the nothing as something that could be substituted for, institutes an originary simulation of exchange between something (common, abstract) and nothing. But the institution is structured like a substitution. It looks like the positing of an improper name (a common noun), say "exchange value," or just "value," or "abstract human labor," or more precisely "human," for something which has no name at all of its own.... The situation is that described by the rhetoricians as catachresis

What is decisive in collecting is that the object is detached from all its original functions in order to enter into the closest conceivable relation to things of the same kind. This relation is the diametric opposite of any utility, and falls into the peculiar category of completeness. What is this “completeness”? It is a grand attempt to overcome the wholly irrational character of the object’s mere presence at hand through its integration into a new, expressly devised historical system: the collection. And for the true collector, every single thing in this system be­comes an encyclopedia of all knowledge of the epoch, the landscape, the indus­try, and the owner from which it comes. It is the deepest enchantment of the collector to enclose the particular item within a magic circle, where, as a last shudder runs through it (the shudder of being acquired), it turns to stone. Every­ thing remembered, everything thought, everything conscious becomes socle, frame, pedestal, seal of his possession. It must not be assumed that the collector, in particular, would find anything strange in the topos hyperouranios, that place beyond the heavens which, for Plato, shelters the unchangeable archetypes of things. He loses himself, assuredly. But he has the strength to pull himself up again by nothing more than a straw; and from out of the sea of fog that envelops his senses rises the newly acquired piece, like an island. Collecting is a form of practical memory, and of all the profane manifestations of "nearness" it is the most binding. Thus, in a certain sense, the smallest act of political reflection makes for an epoch in the antiques business. We construct here: an alarm clock that rouses the kitsch of the previous century to "assembly."

The world exhibitions were training schools in which the masses, barred from consuming, learned empathy with exchange value. “Look at everything; touch nothing.”