Something is valuable insofar as the means for its consecution can be attained. Ends and means are always relative, since earlier ends become the means for further projects. However, there is an unsettling feeling regarding the question of how are novel forms of value, increasingly detached from the context of their apparition, related to an equally novel end which is to be attained through them. They indeed provide new means that, in turn, permit the positing of new projects, but disruption is domesticized within an economy mainly concerned with its self-preservation. If any, the expansion of a more or less stable model of commoditized urbanism is a goal to be attained, but this model subsumes any possibility for change under an already existing structure, where that change is to be bought before it buys you.
Participating in this economy provides the means for the positing of personal ends. But the extents to which individuals can formulate and attain them are also conditioned by the social structure, as expressed in the form of social objects.
The realm of intersubjective validity is mediated through the use of concepts that abstract those qualities in an entity which are valuable for the purposes of a subject. The aspects of the resulting object that are not included in the concept under which they are apprehended are revealed at the moments of crisis, when a situation cannot be understood by the current representation of the structure of society. In that situation, it becomes necessary to renegotiate what entities are actually taking part in the forming of social phenomena.
We are in need for concepts that are able to apprehend the specificity of those ends that become feasible by the complexification of social being, not only at a personal level but also in the structural level, as a direction to which action is directed. This is not implying to force anyone to contribute to an end, but is indeed necessary to discern possible horizons for guiding meaningful action.
A socially significant action that is not executed by a human agent responds to a deanthropomorphized social object. When its dependence towards decision making and particular interests is obscured, it becomes reified.
The identification of those entities that are not currently apprehended in the form of a concept is to be accompanied by making explicit the dependence of reified social objects towards valuation.
