Windows into the ethically made: affect, value, and the ‘pricing paradox’ in the maker movement

ABSTRACT

This paper seeks to examine the ‘pricing paradox,’ an affective-ethical-economic conundrum encountered by small-scale urban craft producers known as ‘makers.’ Set within an industrialized producer-consumer imaginary, the pricing paradox captures a central frustration for makers: ‘ethical’ production inflates prices, consequently generating new ethical questions about accessibility. Unethical prices, in other words, are the cost of organizing one’s production around ethical values. Unable to meaningfully affect the pricing mechanism, makers have responded to this conundrum by seeking ways to open ‘windows’ into their production process, thereby extending an invitation to the consumer and stewarding affective attachments between producer-consumer and consumer-object. The idea is to change the value proposition between makers and consumers and shape an alternative value imaginary in which prices at least make more sense. Additionally, the paper seeks to situate affect more prominently in discourses on moral/ethical economies. As such, the paper uses feminist affect theory to think differently about defetishization, ethical production/consumption, and value more broadly. Finally, the paper concludes with a discussion on the politics of windows and their broader situation in the impasse of contemporary capitalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Maker movement
• value
• moral economy
• ethical economy
• affect

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Austin Cummings for providing feedback on an early draft of this paper. I would also like to thank Brian Elliott for his unique perspective on Walter Benjamin’s work, from which I have learned so much. Thank you as well to my colleagues in the research on the maker movement, especially Greg Schrock and Charles Heying. Finally, I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers whose generous feedback opened new ‘windows’ through which I was able to frame this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In the ‘Expose’ essays that frame The Arcades Project, Benjamin uses the German word Liebhaber, which was translated as ‘connoisseur’ by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. I use the term ‘lover’ (i.e. ‘lover’s value’) instead based on my consultation with philosopher Brian Elliott, who translates Liebhaber literally as ‘one having love for.’ In discussion with Elliot, we reached the conclusion that ‘connoisseur’ suggests specialized knowledge, whereas ‘lover’ (or even ‘enthusiast’) fits what Benjamin was trying to express more closely.

2 Critics of the Arts & Craft Movement argued that such goods were overpriced and bourgeois (see, for example, Morozov 2014).

3 In Radical Secrecy, Clare Birchall (2021) makes the case that transparency is ultimately about form rather than content; makers’ ‘windows’ seem to corroborate this claim, given their invention as a revelatory form for a specific content (i.e. defetishization of production).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Steve Marotta

Steve Marotta is a cultural urban studies scholar and adjunct assistant professor in the Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University in Portland, OR (USA). His recent work has focused on the intersection of affect theory, urban transformation, and the politics of craft/creative/social movements.