The Riddle of Values

The riddle of values—concerning both humans and things—reflects a long intellectual struggle throughout history. Brian Massumi’s assertion that “value is too valuable to be left in those hands” serves as a footnote in the dense web of value theories.¹ From the very outset of Western philosophy, exemplified by Aristotle, value has been understood through the separation of use value and exchange value—categories that, in turn, determine embedded social relations and the structural causes underpinning any given society. This split between use and exchange value marks a genealogical divergence across value theory frameworks. Aristotle famously stated, “Of everything which we possess, there are two uses; for example, a shoe is used for wearing and is also used for exchange.”² From this premise, property, ownership, value, and society are ordered.

Karl Marx’s concept of surplus value continues this line of thought, examining the structural conditions of capitalist society by highlighting the accursed excess that emerges from subtracting use value from exchange value. His allegory of the “dance of a wooden table,” particularly in connection with China’s Taiping Tianguo, can be read as an early omen of the operations of transcontinental late capitalism.³ It is no coincidence that Aristotle’s Politics begins with economics—or oikonomia—meaning the management of a household (oikos), as states and societies are conceptual extensions of domestic organization: from farming, cleaning, and cooking to slavery, wealth accumulation, and property defense.⁴ Aristotle’s political economy frames the economy as the “rule” of masters over slaves and of fathers over wives and children. Crude as it may sound today, he already recognized “those hands” in which values are governed—and how they are confined to the oppressed. In this light, the economy was always a political instrument. From Aristotle to Adam Smith to Marx, value is never merely an abstraction of measurability—it is a means of control.

Economy structures the household, the city, and the state, determining power relations before formal political institutions even emerge. This insight has been pursued by economists from Smith and Ricardo to Marx and Keynes: economic power underlies all governance. In East Asia, the Japanese translation of “economy” as keizai (經濟)—later adopted into Chinese during the May Fourth Movement—connotes “ordering the world and managing the people,” derived from the Taoist classic Baopuzi (抱朴子).To decouple economy from politics cannot be achieved externally; it must occur from within—through the very measurement of value. And this measurement, in its broadest sense, must be interrogated.

Immeasurability and Potentiality

This decoupling must be understood ontologically, wherein value, in its ordering of power relations, has lost the coherence of fixed measurement. From Plato’s idea of intrinsic property to Kant’s transcendental idealism and Marx’s metaphysical theory of value, measurement is central to value theory. The Enlightenment aimed to measure everything—including reason itself. Thus, any transgression of value requires first recognizing the importance of the immeasurable in subject-object relations: demographics, class, the human-nonhuman divide, and the ecology of things and their social functions and significance.

No transcendent power exists a priori to dictate how value is measured. Instead, immeasurable forces—affection, desire, and multitudinous energy—must be foregrounded to undermine the rigid link between economy and politics. Immeasurability, then, is not simply resistance to quantification—it transcends classification and normalization. In Deleuzian terms, to become monstrous is to become immeasurable, breaking away from value determinism.⁵ To transvalue means to go beyond fixed scales of value. Potentiality—especially that which Marx saw as the suppressed productivity of labor—must be reclaimed as an active, creative force that continuously generates new social relations, moving beyond capital’s chain reaction. A new community can emerge through pre-constitutional measurements, disintegrating the dominant values that guide society.

Transvaluation turns the economy—as a political tool of control and enslavement—into aesthetics: the realm of unmanageable immeasurability and potentiality. In this context, the vicious circulation of capital ceases to serve a mediated political function and instead becomes integral to meaning itself. The familial boundaries that once defined domesticity begin to blur, opening paths for new political relations and forms of subjectivity. This is a reversal of Aristotelian politics, wherein the oikos—the household—returns as a locus for political reimagination and emancipation. Here, economy must become eco-aesthetics: a term that designates a line of flight from the current social logic of late capitalism. Ultimately, economy and aesthetics are inseparable. Eco-aesthetics reintegrates the fundamental means of survival—labor, production, care—into a creative and imaginative reconstitution of political orders.

Eco-Aesthetics and a New Home

We must return to the original meaning of economy—the management of the household—and redefine it within an eco-aesthetic framework. This redefinition must go beyond traditional domestic limits, integrating the entangled forces of ecology, labor, and affect. Rather than viewing the household as a static domain ruled by the father/husband/master, we must imagine it as an evolving aesthetic-political entity, shaped by fluctuating relations of care, survival, and reciprocity. This transformation aligns with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of anti-Oedipal subjectivity, where mental, social, and environmental ecologies intersect to create new relational forms. The becoming of schizoid subjectification dismantle rigid familial categories and property ownership hierarchical structures. Such a reconfiguration extends into a horizontal paradigm, where kinship-making and the cultivation of “odd kin”—as Donna Haraway proposes—construct alternative modes of belonging.⁶

These kinships, rather than resisting tradition, introduce an immeasurable potentiality that displaces economic rationality with open-ended communal life. The household becomes a site of speculative relation, where relations are not predefined by institutions but emerge through cohabitation and performative encounters. Eco-aesthetics reimagines economy as an aesthetic experience of making a new household, where production and reproduction are no longer reduced to labor and exchange but are woven into the poiesis of living—among humans, animals, plants, and nonhuman things alike. This shift is not a sociological revision, but a meta-political intervention—resonant with Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic-political strategies that question institutional order.⁷ The household transforms from a site of economic management into one of aesthetic and political imagination. Every act of care, sharing, and spatial organization becomes an aesthetic gesture that reconfigures our lived environment according to values that are life-enhancing and creatively enlivening, as opposed to preformulated and restrictive.