Considering Value

These pics taken at various places are strung to serve, hopefully, as appetizers for a possible snorer on some IMMEDIATE reactions to recent discussions on a rather popular Mizo blogsite. .

How does one calibrate 'value'? The world of ‘objective’ science and commerce proffers fastidious scales notched with fancy Greek symbols so that, for instance, when I pump air into a set of tires, the numbers qualified by the Greek 'Psi' symbol helps determine my satisfaction for the work done. And yet our human world is a little more complicated and (only) less innocent than the quantifiable world of science and commerce. On flashing one’s symbols of value, it is often unsettling to realize that the significations resonate rather ambiguously leaving one to either doubt or attempt to steamroll one’s calibration over the nay-sayers. Still yet, the dust kicked up as one reacts to the ambiguity seems to refract one’s attention to a divergent tangent of power because it underlines who does the calibration and according to whose subjectivity the calibration is done. This is power not in its concretized occurrence as brute force but rather in terms of the definitive ability to control the actions and reactions of another that, in so many ways, underlines much of human activity and configuration. In calibrating something as being of value, one taps into a discourse of power that would help project one’s choices, actions and ideals as having a definitive grip on others, if not one’s own self. The jostling for value, in a way, then caricaturizes one’s own subjective standing in a discourse of power and how one chooses to define that standing.
Power is abstracted so that if one were to discuss value, ‘power’ itself would never surface in the course of the negotiation. When protesting student-groups are lathi-charged by policeman who for all their brutality could by all means deeply empathize with the students, it is a clash of values—a value for which the students protest and a value which the policemen want to protect. Snuggled somewhere subliminally is power that rarely surfaces or is ever culled out. If one were to move beyond the lathi-charge, the list is endless: who’s the insider and the outsider, whose knowledge is more efficient and relevant, etc.
With power being so pervasive, one might also see that in the jostling for ‘value’-able space, one would be just replacing x for y while innocently oblivious of one's impulse to influence or control (as altruistic and well-intentioned as they may be).
Also, a dilettante embracing of the ‘obvious’ without a careful handle on its ‘intrinsic’ could inadvertently lead to robbing Peter to pay Paul. Point in case is that our projections of options almost never are flat. With all these red flags up, values do help orient our sense of worth and direction and I would still hold on to the things I hold valuable. And yet, the problematic of the innocent and universal ‘value’ does continue to prompt me to caution-that values, if they are to be definitive beyond my own self, are negotiated rather than confrontational.

Some other possible after-thoughts:

-Power and knowledge

-Anonymity and power (those e-aliases and nix are telling)

-The finer art of chopping vegetables so that they cook evenly...just thought it might help my indigestion!!

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