A Political Economy of Co-Experience

An account of a co-experience is composed by one participant in a relation and used by a third party who took no part in it. Earlier volumes in this series established that the operative force of such an instrument is separable from the account it contains, is exchanged, and has no description in property law. This volume asks what a political economy of that object looks like: what circulates, on what terms, and what accumulates to whom. It argues that accounts drawn from singular relations admit no comparison from their content, so that comparability is supplied by the standing of the party who issued them; that a party whose standing serves in this office stands to the accounts compared as a measure stands to what is measured, so that the co-experiences in which that party participated fall outside the set the operation compares; and that the structure so described is Marx's analysis of the general equivalent, whose extension beyond the commodity has been made by others and whose application to a party who measures by issuing accounts has not. The volume then examines what accumulates. A standing grows by being exercised and is not diminished by exercise; it admits no transfer, so a concentration of standings admits no correction by transfer and acquisition runs solely through positions in institutional hierarchies. The vocabulary of capital applies in respect of accumulation, return, and reproduction and fails at alienation; the vocabulary of financialisation applies in respect of prospective valuation and fails at the assignable claim. On circulation the volume finds a practice conducted in three exchange relations of which it names one, whose content degrades under unverifiability by two compounding mechanisms, and which is market-inalienable in fact while unprohibited in law. Two findings run against the position of the series: the conditions of issuance are reproduced by the asymmetry that made the practice worth examining, and the instruments proposed to improve it carry a contraction of it as their cost. The volume argues that these pose a question the series has not answered, namely whether its aim is the reform of the practice or its reduction, and that no further work on remedies should proceed before the question is settled. The volume proceeds without prices, units, or series, and states the methods that operate without them.