Contests over value: From the informal to the popular

Abstract

Looking across this collection, I reflect first, that informality is only one way of paying attention to a stabilisation of processes that may not be the result of what it is understood to be. And second, paying attention in this way is to point to its partiality in its incompleteness and to constrain its availability to specific functions and agendas. As the papers show, informality is intensely situated in the specifics of all kinds of articulations and imbrications in many other processes. One of the most useful is to constantly reopen the questioning of value and to see these as an organising contestation of the social production and distribution of wealth. It provides an insight into the agency of subject creation that people retain in order to engage in accumulation of wealth, even if the expectations and calculations of what this is worth must constantly be recalibrated. In the sense that it is useful, it may be in pointing to a role of subject creation that entails the vast networks of incalculability that underlie all contemporary computation.