The introduction outlines the historical problem central to this book. Namely, the question of what it meant to possess. The question loomed large in the eighteenth century because more people owned more things (particularly moveable property), the social function of movable property was shifting and in the commercial age, the law was often uncertain as to what could be owned and how. The introduction shows how the book seeks to explore the problem of what it meant to possess by examining how people responded to the loss of possessions.

This chapter examines the debate among neo-Kantian thinkers about the origin, function, and reach of concepts. Neo-Kantianism inherits from Kant a series of dualisms, and that between concept and intuition attracted especially intense critical scrutiny. Cohen, Rickert and Cassirer can be understood as proposing a ‘functionalization’ of cognitive concepts that avoids a sharp and static distinction between ‘concept’ and ‘intuition’, and defending Kant’s transcendental project against naturalization and psychologization. The temporalization of concepts, in their constitutive role for experience, is thereby accentuated in different ways. This functionalization of concepts must, however, be situated against the emergence of the notion of value and the question raised by Nietzsche of the value of concepts, or knowledge, for life. The relation between concepts and values points to their historical and cultural embeddedness with reference to different worldviews, and hence reveals the relation between concepts, the unity of a world, and forms of life.

Chapter 6 begins the work of examining why people expended so much time, effort, money and skill on reclaiming their lost possessions. It explores this question by looking to the rewards offered in ‘lost’ and ‘runaway’ notices and using them to investigate the different values at stake in possessions. It finds that ‘possessions’ such as watches, financial instruments, dogs and people held a range of values in the eighteenth century. Rather than marked by market values as the use of rewards might suggest, these ‘things’ were also valuable for the roles they fulfilled and the emotional or cultural importance they held. As with the previous chapter, by looking to the question of value, we begin to understand how ‘possessions’ were differentiated in this period. Such an insight becomes more apparent when the chapter explores not only the rewards offered, but also what they were offered for.

This chapter reflects on a case involving a pediatric patient with a rare neurogenerative disease whose medical team requested an ethics consultation when his parents disagreed with the medical recommendation to remove his breathing tube, knowing that this could lead to his death. The ethics consultation explored what at first appeared to be conflicting beliefs about the facts of this patient’s condition and quality of life: his medical team believed he had an irreversible, neurodegenerative condition that would become progressively more debilitating and uncomfortable; his parents believed that he may still recover from his disease and survive. Yet on deeper analysis, we came to see that this was not a case of a medical team holding true beliefs and a family holding false beliefs about the clinical facts of the matter, but rather a difference between ways of being in and seeing the world, particularly as it relates to reasoning from a position of faith in what might be. This case shows the importance of differentiating between claims about facts and assertions of values, and how biomedical expectations of evidence can influence perceptions of relevant information during a clinical ethics consultation.

Chapter 6 looks at how money acts both as an element in the moral concretion of the revolution’s moral project – one that here takes the form also of a ‘moral economy’ – but also a prime catalyst for its deterioration in the face of the pervasive condition of moral-cum-material decline Cubans call necesidad, intimating a sense of destitution that is felt to exert itself as an uncontrollable force. The relation between the revolution and what lies beyond it, then, is seen here through the prism of the duality of money as both a qualitative token of value and quantitative scale for commensuration. The former is central to the way pesos (Cuba’s national currency, issued by the revolutionary state) operate as moral concretions of the revolution, marking out the scope of its moral economy. The latter, however, comes into its own with the use of US dollars and locally issued currencies pegged to it, which have become increasingly pervasive in everyday consumption since the 1990s. In its capacity to commensurate all values quantitatively, the dollar rubs out the distinction between the state’s moral economy and the variously licit and informal realms of transaction that have grown alongside it in Cuba. Crucially, in this way, it tends to trump the revolution’s effort to position itself as transcendental condition of possibility for life, encompassing it with its own transcendental scope.

The brain faces an array of behavioral control challenges varying in complexity, abstraction, and temporal scale. Leveraging multiple decision-making strategies offers a clear advantage, allowing for adaptability to different contexts. Even when solving a single problem, the selection from or combination of different strategies can enhance the likelihood of success. Consequently, the brain faces the critical task of arbitrating between experts effectively. Here, we review theories of multiple controllers in value-driven decision-making, the mechanisms of arbitration between them, and the neural correlates of such processes. Although these theories have provided meaningful explanations for observed behavior and neural activity, fundamental questions persist regarding the precise nature of these controllers, their interactions, and their neural underpinnings. Notably, the role of subjective states in these computations has been largely overlooked, despite their obvious importance in the experience of making decisions.

This short chapter discusses the impact of lab-grown diamonds on the traditional diamond industry and the value of a diamond and uses it as an allegory for AI’s potential impact on intellectual property. Additionally, the chapter touches upon consumer preferences and the growing trend towards alternative gemstones, as well as the implications for the future of the diamond industry, again drawing parallels to the IP system.

Fifth-century Greek tragedy and visual art centres on interaction between people, including antithetical relations, reflecting a society shaped by monetised exchange and commerce. Platonic metaphysics is focused on unchanging being, placing supreme value on the possession of money and devaluing or excluding exchange and interaction. Although dialogues such as the Phaedo contain the idea of the unity of opposites, and binary opposites such as body and soul, Platonic metaphysics aims at the negation of opposites, and thus of antithesis. The contrast between being and seeming emerges in fifth-century tragedy and philosophy, but it is given much greater prominence by Plato and is linked with the theory of Forms. One of the Platonic accounts of the relationship between Forms and particulars is in terms of original (Form) and copy or image (particulars). Plato is the first to offer a theorization of the idea of the image (in the Sophist) and to define the idea of mere image (not reality). Plato’s treatment of the being-seeming relation, like the theory of Forms generally, expresses the reification of the value of money, treated as the basis of possession, excluding exchange.

Chapter 1 establishes the primary intrigue surrounding professional speechwriters and other sorts of invisibilized language workers: namely, the complication of an author who is never animator nor principal of their labor (Goffman 1981). Here Mapes also lays out the theoretical cornerstones of her research: language in institutional and professional contexts; language work and wordsmiths; metadiscourse; and reflexivity and semiotic ideologies. This framework serves to address not only the ways in which workplace communication both establishes and contests particular communities of practice but also how larger issues related to metalinguistic awareness and political economy are implicated in these processes. Next, Mapes briefly maps the history of speechwriting as well as the relatively scant scholarly engagement with practitioners. She then turns to the specifics of her project, documenting the details of her data collection, method, and analytical process. The chapter concludes with an overview of the rest of the book, as well as an explanation of the three primary rhetorical strategies (invisibility, craft, and virtue) which arise in speechwriters’ metadiscursive accounts of their work.

Chapter 2 introduces readers to the three interconnected concepts which are key to speechwriters’ practices: 1) frontstage and backstage; 2) participation framework; and 3) production format (Goffman 1959, 1981). Next, Mapes maps the profession of speechwriting, using descriptive analysis to document practitioners’ education and career trajectories, production of deliverables, and day-to-day practices. This is followed by a second analytical section which outlines the rhetorical strategies of invisibility, craft, and virtue. First, Mapes uses interview data to unpack the specifics of invisibility as a point of professional pride and skill, demonstrating how speechwriters understand and even embrace the erasure of their authorship. Second, she documents the constructions of expertise and skill which characterize speechwriters’ craft, and which allow them to claim status as “creatives.” Lastly, Mapes details how virtue features across the dataset, arguing that it is necessarily tied to the cultural indexicalities associated with “impact.” In sum, this chapter sets the groundwork for understanding how speechwriters engage in the status competition characteristic of contemporary capitalism.

Chapter 5 examines how speechwriters’ claims to transgressive agency are a source for “affective binding” (see Comer 2022) and status production, contributing to the “virtuous outlaw” identity of the speechwriter community. Mapes’ focus here is rooted in affect studies (e.g. Ahmed 2004) and notions of emotional labor (e.g. Hochschild 2012), as well as the rather prolific scholarship concerning professional/personal identity as it emerges in workplace discourse (e.g. Holmes 2007). What comes to the fore is the way in which emotion is complicatedly entangled with the “semiotic ideologies” of one’s professional life (see again Keane 2018). Focusing on both Professional Speechwriting course materials as well as a video-recorded meeting between members of the Speechwriter Organization, Mapes demonstrates how participants characterize their professional expertise as especially superior to that of (hypothetical) speakers. In framing themselves as uniquely skilled and knowledgeable, speechwriters deem their transgressive professional practices as virtuous and admirable, allowing them to claim power and status within the neoliberal linguistic marketplace.

Chapter 6 explores how the business of speechwriting is necessarily caught up in the commodity chains of the market, and the ways in which status competition permeates high-end language work – including academia. After a brief section which summarizes the preceding chapters, Mapes identifies three overarching problems which her book helps to illuminate. These pertain to 1) political economy, field, and the marketplace; 2) folk linguistics; and 3) community-centered collaboration and consultation. As a means of further interrogating these specific issues, Mapes briefly analyzes data from her participation in a two-day Speechwriter Organization conference. Focusing on the ways in which practitioners both claim and contest their community membership, she identifies moments of solidarity building, and moments of individual status production. Across these two sections Mapes highlights speechwriters’ paradoxical struggle for legitimacy. They want their work to be acknowledged and valued, and yet it is only by operating and competing within the particular confines of their “field” (Bourdieu 2005 [2000]) that they can accumulate capital. Hence, in both avowing and disavowing ownership, power, and prestige, speechwriters demonstrate the real complexity of professionalized language work under neoliberal conditions.

Chapter 4 unpacks the complex ways in which claims to craft emerge in speechwriters’ metadiscursive accounts of their work. As theoretical background Mapes considers the ways in which more ordinary instances of language play are necessarily distinct from the “exceptional” creativity which defines speechwriters’ work (see Swann and Deumert 2018). Relatedly, she turns to poetics (e.g. Jakobson 1960) to examine how speechwriters exemplify a spectacular, institutionalized expression of the aesthetic or artistic dimensions of language. The subsequent analysis draws primarily on speechwriter memoirs and interviews to investigate the the microlinguistic choices which characterize speechwriters’ claims to artistry; their emphasis on persuasion as creative practice; and their proclivity for formulating themselves as distinctly neoliberal “bundles of skills” (e.g. Holborrow 2018). This chapter thereby demonstrates how poetics/creativity are used as key status-making strategies by which speechwriters shore up their privilege vis-à-vis peers and other language workers.

Chapter 3 focuses on the notion of invisibility by tracking the life of a political speech from assignment to delivery. Mapes’ theoretical framework for this analysis comprises three interrelated concepts: language materiality (Shankar and Cavanaugh 2012), or the ways in which language and material objects are complicatedly entwined and consequently a matter of political economy; text trajectories (e.g. Lillis 2008), as in the processes that facilitate a text’s evolution; and entextualization (Bauman and Briggs 1990), the de- and recontextualization of language. Following Macgilchist and Van Hout’s (2011) ethnographic approach to documenting text trajectories, the analysis is divided into three case studies which together demonstrate speechwriters’ strategic and material erasure throughout the evolution of their deliverables. Ultimately, Mapes concludes by arguing that this ethnographic text trajectory evidence is another indication of the ways in which language workers must discursively enact Urciuoli’s (2008) “new worker-self” in order to claim status and success as wordsmiths.

This paper examines what Kant says about the economy in Feyerabend’s notes of Kant’s lectures on natural right. While Feyerabend does not report Kant having a systematic discussion of the economy as a topic in its own right the text is interesting in what it shows about the context and the development of Kant’s thought on issues to do with political economy. I look at the Feyerabend lecture notes in relation to things said about the economy in Achenwall’s Natural Law, Kant’s text book, as well as in Kant’s Doctrine of Right. Looking at the three texts in relation to each other illuminates the development of Kant’s thinking and the paper focuses on tracing the relations between ideas to do with the economy in the three texts. I look at Kant’s developing thoughts on the economy in relation to the following ideas: an account of money; an account of value and price; the theorization of labor; taxation; property and the commons.