The Practice of Value

Abstract

This paper seeks to think about the orders of value that govern our lives and our work as humanists engaged in the many dimensions and formations of textual culture. By talking about the varieties of judgment I engage in my daily life I set up a reflection on the structures of value that underlie particular practices of valuation. Drawing on Kant's distinction between determinate and reflective judgments, I ask whether we can speak of a general principle of judgement, an Urteilskraft, which crosses different domains of understanding, or whether it is more plausible or more useful to distinguish between different domains and modalities of judgement. I conclude that the particular determinacy and indeterminacy of a judgement is a function of the regime of value that constitutes its conditions of possibility, and I conclude the paper by trying to define the operation of such regimes.