Articulating value and missing links in ‘Geographies of Dissociation’

In the spirit of Ibert et al.’s ‘Geographies of Dissociation: Value Creation, “Dark” Places, and “Missing” Links’, we briefly suggest several ways in which ‘Geographies of Dissociation’ itself elides certain crucial issues in the cultural economies of value. The first relates to the need to develop more fully and concretely the relational spatialities of globally networked production. The second follows from this by suggesting that, in order to consolidate its argument of lacunae and elisions, the article overlooks or downplays crucial elements in the work of global value chain research, cultural studies and broader cultural-economic geography, and value theory that have—in their own ways—developed complex analyses of the spatial articulations of governance, ownership, branding, and the production of value. We conclude by returning to Marx’s value theory of labor (not to be confused with Ricardian labor theory of value) to suggest that a more direct question about what drives systems of cultural valuation in the context of networked production might enable the authors to advance the development of a dissociative geography