#use-value

‘Thinking’, Hannah Arendt noted in The Human Condition, became ‘the handmaiden of doing as it had been the ... handmaiden of contemplating divine truth in medieval philosophy’. With the rise of useful or practical knowledge (of trade, for example, or production processes), the contemplation of eternally given truth was to lose its epistemological prerogative.

In his purposeless activity the child, by a subterfuge, sides with use-value against exchange value. Just because he deprives the things with which he plays of their mediated usefulness, he seeks to rescue in them what is benign towards men and not what subserves the exchange relation that equally deforms men and things. The little trucks travel nowhere and the tiny barrels on them are empty; yet they remain true to their destiny by not performing, not participating in the process of abstraction that levels down that destiny, but instead abide as allegories of what they are specifically for.

The usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value. But this usefulness does not dangle in mid-air. It is conditioned by the physical properties of the commodity, and has no existence apart from the latter.

The flâneur's last journey: death. Its goal: novelty. 'To the depths of the unknown to finding something new' ... Novelty is a quality which does not depend on the use-value of the commodity. It is the source of the illusion which belongs inalienably to the images which the collective unconscious engenders. It is the quintessence of false consciousness, of which fashion is the tireless agent. This illusion of novelty is reflected,like one mirror in another, in the illusion of infinite sameness. The product of this reflection is the phantasmagoria of 'cultural history' in which the bourgeoisie enjoyed its false consciousness to the full. Art, which begins to have doubts about its function, and ceases to be 'inséparable de l'utilité' (Baudelaire), is forced to make novelty its highest value. Its arbiter novarum rerum becomes the snob. He is for art what the dandy is for fashion.

I do not see two separate cultures here. Not one bit. I think we are all dwelling in the culmination of what Heidegger called the technological understanding-of-being. Accordingly, in viewing the world as only in terms of utility, everything becomes a resource to be used efficiently--even our own lives are judged in these terms (how can I be the best me I can be?) In such a world, greater good, stakeholder claims, social justice, and cultural achievements--along with other medievalisms-- have gone by the wayside. And that is not all. For this is also something being actively exported by the global elite.