On value and necessity: The Green Book and its others

This article examines entrenched debates around cultural value in neo-liberal contexts that have predominated over the last three decades; and moves on to examine how proposals for different forms of social and political structure suggest both alternative ecologies of value and a role for performance in designing them. We establish a broad frame for discussion of questions of value and culture by looking first at the current debate in the UK neo-liberal state, as exemplified by HM Treasury and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport and then turn to what Baudrillard has to say about the State, general equivalence and modernity's adversarial union with Death. In traversing that range, we examine discussions of the evaluation of culture from a policy perspective alongside another set of discussions which address forms of resistance to global capitalism through ‘commonalism’ and social production. Finally, we take in both the pragmatics and the theoretical underpinnings of the left alternative scoped by Roberto Unger to see how ‘institutional contexts permanently open to their own revision’ might both support and depend on collaborative creative practices and sustain an alternative ecology of cultural value.