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<\/a>Moments of Valuation: Exploring Sites of Dissonance <\/i>(also from Oxford University Press, 2015) offers another effort.\u00a0 The three word summary:\u00a0 value is performed<\/i>. This collection (which I co-edited with Ariane Berthoin Antal and Michael Hutter) emphasizes that valuation takes place in situations. Valuation is spatially localized and temporally marked. It takes place in situ. And the papers provide detailed accounts of various sites and settings (or, more accurately, setups) in which valuation takes place. It takes place in discrete moments of time. And the papers provide rich accounts of the critical moments when evaluative attention is particularly acute: the attentive moment when a dinner guest first sips a glass of wine, the instant when a luxury perfume is sprayed into a special device allowing the customer a sense of its sillage<\/i> (the scented trail left by a fragrance wearer), or the moment when the professional art appraiser is cross-examined in the courtroom witness box.\u00a0 As such, the book might just as well have been titled Sites of Valuation: Exploring Moments of Dissonance<\/i>.<\/p>\nBut, as with pricing and prizing, there is not really all that much new in the statement value is performed<\/i> \u2013 for these ideas, if differently expressed, were already there in John Dewey\u2019s marvelous essay, On Valuation<\/i> (for a lively revisiting of those ideas see especially Fabian Muniesa\u2019s new book, The Provoked Economy, <\/i>Routledge 2014).\u00a0 It is for this reason that Michael Hutter and I introduce our edited book with a brief essay, \u201cPragmatist Perspectives on Valuation.\u201d The entire chapter is available on my website here<\/a>. \u00a0The paragraphs below offer a little taste:<\/p>\n De gustibus non est disputandum<\/i>. We begin, indisputably, with taste. Then we immediately make it disputatious because we challenge the dominant view in cultural sociology that taste is something one has<\/i>. Taste, in that view, is primarily symbolic because it is used for social purposes to mark distinction (Bourdieu 1984). By contrast the authors in this volume treat taste not as a noun but as a verb. It is something one does<\/i>. It is a social process, to be sure; but if symbolic, it is also emphatically material.<\/p>\n Valuation involves a tasting, a testing. The studies here reject the claim that things just \u201chave\u201d some value, that their taste is intrinsic to them, and that tests reveal this natural value. At the same time they also deny the claim that the taste of things is something merely \u201cattributed\u201d to them, and that tests then do nothing more than reveal this value. We reject the dichotomy between natural objects (for which there is nothing to do but exploit the properties of things) and socially constructed objects (for which it is enough to show their arbitrary character as the stakes in social games).<\/p>\n We consider that the things to be tested and tasted are not given but made, and they are transformed in the very process of testing. Furthermore, tasting them or becoming attached to them is not like choosing some gratuitous label to enter a social logic of identity and difference; rather, identities are made and transformed by them. The chapters in this volume treat people\u2019s relationship with things as reciprocal interactions: making things and making us. As Antoine Hennion writes in his chapter: \u201cSo conceived, both operations (tasting and testing) are productive, open, and they remain tightly connected, referring less to an absolute divide between objectivity and subjectivity than to a continuous co-production of stabilization and transformation, both in the things and in our capacity to feel what they do.\u201d (Hennion in this volume).<\/p>\n To the two verbs\u2014to taste and to test\u2014we now add another: to contest. The adage de gustibus non est disputandum <\/i>is misleading, for in matters of taste there can be disputes. Taste, whether the noun is understood as the quality of a thing or as the quality of a person, can be put to tests. And these tests are themselves contested. As the chapters here detail, the trials of valuation frequently involve disputes among different measures of worth, orthogonal principles of evaluation, and contending tests of value.<\/p>\n Moments of Valuation:<\/b><\/p>\n Exploring Sites of Dissonance<\/b><\/span><\/b><\/p>\n Edited by<\/i> CONTENTS<\/i><\/i><\/p>\n Michael Hutter <\/b><\/span>and David Stark<\/span> Trevor Pinch<\/b><\/span> Antoine Hennion<\/b><\/span> Michael Hutter<\/b><\/span> John Brewer<\/b><\/span> Svetlana Kharchenkova <\/b><\/span>and Olav Velthuis<\/span> Phillipa K. Chong<\/b><\/span> Sophie M\u00fctzel<\/b><\/span> Anne-Sophie Tr\u00e9buchet-Breitwiller<\/b><\/span> Claude Rosental<\/b><\/span> Andrea Mennicken <\/b><\/span>and Michael Power<\/span> Liliana Doganova <\/b><\/span>and Peter Karn\u00f8e<\/span> Holger Strassheim<\/b>, Arlena Jung<\/b>,<\/span> and Rebecca-Lea Korinek<\/span> Ignacio Far\u00edas<\/b><\/span> Ariane Berthoin Antal<\/b><\/span> Kimberly Chong<\/b><\/span> Hbk | 6.5\u00d79.5 in. | 368 pgs\u2028ISBN: 978-0-19-870250-4 | March 29, 2015 Available in bookstores and at online retailers<\/p>\n FURTHER INFORMATION:<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n http:\/\/thesenseofdissonance.com\/books.php<\/a><\/p>\n ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Cover photograph \u00a9 2013 Nancy Warner. Reproduced with permission of diRosa Art Preserve.\u00a0This article is co-posted with Socializing Finance<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\nAriane Berthoin Antal, Michael Hutter<\/span>, <\/b>and David Stark<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n
\n<\/b>Pragmatist Perspectives on Valuation<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n
\nMoments in the Valuation of Sound<\/i><\/p>\n
\nPaying Attention: What is Tasting Wine About?<\/i><\/p>\n
\nDissonant Translations in Creative Industries<\/i><\/p>\n
\nConnoisseurship and Art Attribution<\/i><\/p>\n
\n<\/b>An Evaluative Biography of Cynical Realism<\/i><\/p>\n
\nPlaying Nice, Being Mean, and the Space In Between<\/i><\/p>\n
\nStructures of the Tasted<\/i><\/p>\n
\nMaking Things Precious: Luxury Perfumes<\/i><\/p>\n
\nPrinciples of Evaluation in Artificial Intelligence<\/i><\/p>\n
\n<\/b>Accounting and the Plasticity of Valuation<\/i><\/p>\n
\n<\/b>Clean and Profitable<\/i>\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n
\n<\/b>Reframing Expertise in Public Policy<\/i><\/p>\n
\nEpistemic Dissonance in Architectural Practice<\/i><\/p>\n
\nSources of Newness in Organizations<\/i><\/p>\n
\nPerforming Worth in Post-Mao China<\/i><\/p>\n