Evaluation regimes and the qualia of quality

1. Evaluation regimes and the qualia of quality

Much of the evaluative discourse described in the preceding papers is relatively informal: a conversation about liquor preferences in a car; comments on the beauties of a house in a letter; a gesture to a body part while chatting about kin. But in most societies there are also specific ritual forms through which authorized social agents conduct evaluations. Some regimes evaluate social agents, whether individuals or organizations, while others evaluate objects, e.g. art, wine, books, cars, kula shells. Qualia figure centrally in all of these forms of evaluation, but the way they figure varies considerably.

Insofar as regimes produce evaluations that are intended to be taken up by others, they have a public aspect: students’ grades are intended to be used by the school administration for the purpose of determining graduation eligibility; product reviews on Amazon are intended to be used by other consumers; kula-shell provenances are intended to be repeated by other kula traders.

The authority that underlies the performative efficacy of discourse is a percipi, a being-known, which allows a percipere to be imposed, or more precisely, which allows the consensus concerning the meaning of the social world which grounds common sense to be imposed officially, i.e. in front of everyone and in the name of everyone. (Bourdieu 1991: 106)

But regimes vary widely in the manner in which the evaluative process or its conclusions are publicized and/or kept secret. Sometimes the evaluation process is completely secret, and so are the results (i.e. paper grading). In most cases, though, evaluation regimes open at least some parts of the process to a small audience, who stand in for the broader audience to whom the results will eventually be publicized (i.e. dissertation defenses).

This paper describes two broad categories of evaluation regimes: a quantifying regime, in which qualia are standardized and commensurated; and a rhematizing regime, in which the qualities of objects and individuals are iconically and indexically made to serve as figures of one another. I would argue that these two types of regime account for most rituals of selection and promotion in modern urban institutions, especially schools and corporate offices. The rituals that constitute quantifying and rhematizing regimes have often been contrasted as representing divergent ideological frameworks. Nevertheless, these two regimes are used in tandem by the same institutions, and social actors often move from one regime to the other as they progress through a series of roles, even within in a profession or field.

In order to get into art school, Chinese art students have to pass a standardized examination in realist painting, in which thousands of students are tested at the same time; drawings are numerically scored by judges who examine thousands of drawings anonymously, and the scores are used to determine their level of skill. This is an example of the quantifying regime used in tests, scores and statistics, which standardizes qualia by assigning numerical values to the attributes of objects, signs, or forms.

However, in order to advance within an art school, impress their teachers, graduate in good standing and succeed in professional life, Chinese art students have to pass through ‘critiques’ (pinglun), performances in which they present their work in person to an audience of evaluators who evaluate it personalistically, by describing the ways that the work is like the person and the person like the work. This is an example of the rhematizing regime, in which evaluators construct a personalistic indexical icon through a ritual performance, and base their evaluation of the subject on values attributed to that indexical icon, such as sophistication or likeability.

Insofar as these two evaluation regimes are used in tandem or succession in many institutions, they are in practice treated as complementary. Numerical scores and short personalized evaluations are juxtaposed in elementary school report cards, corporate employee evaluations, medical provider rankings, online product reviews, etc. The ubiquity of this pairing suggests that these two modes of evaluation are compatible. But there is a profound tension between them, a tension that has been recognized by (among others) critics of ‘neoliberal’ movements towards commensuration (e.g. Rhodes and Slaughter 1997). The rhematizing regime is organized around a concept of personhood, while the quantifying regime is organized around a concept of standard. Despite the concurrent use of these two evaluation regimes, there is often a disjuncture between the rankings produced through quantification and those produced through rhematization, and this disjuncture can be a source of considerable anxiety for people moving from one regime to another (e.g. Cheng et al. 1999).

Different sorts of subjects are often subjected to these regimes in unequal proportion. Within large institutions and professional fields, applicants for positions of higher status are more frequently examined personalistically: undergraduates take examinations while professors have interviews. Testing regimes are constructed for public school systems, while high-priced private Montessori schools allow each student to progress at his own pace, innocent of grades or scores. On the other hand, when it comes to contrasts between professions there is no clear link between regime and status: would-be lawyers are subjected to bar examinations and often hired primarily according to their scores and ranks, while waitresses and security guards are (usually) hired through face-to-face interactions. Thus, the differences between these two regimes cannot be simply aligned with class or status distinctions.

Nor should the difference between these evaluation regimes be attributed to an historical transition. It has frequently been argued that practices of quantification emerged with modernity and gradually increased in scope and scale, replacing older, more personalistic modes of evaluation, through the successive historical movements of Fordism and neoliberalism (Espeland and Stevens 1998; Harvey 1989; Collier and Ong 2005). Arguments about the transition from personal to quantitative evaluation have been particularly heated recently in the field of public education, where administrators and policy designers have attempted to implement ‘outcome-based education’ (OBE) models against the will of teachers and principals, who argue that these standardizing models undermine the relationships that are crucial to successful education ‘outcomes’. However, the quantifying regime is a venerable institution, especially in China, where the test has a long history (cf. Elman 2000 and Miyazaki 1981). Moreover, if quantitative modes of evaluation have increased in scope and scale, personalistic forms of evaluation, framed by liberal notions of irreducible individuality of the kind popularized through Dewey-ian education theory, can hardly be said to have disappeared (c.f. Woronov 2008). Every job interview, audition, performance review, etc. is an example of the latter. Quantification is not a totalizing regime that eliminates one-on-one comparison. Far from it: it seems that there is a productive dialectic relationship between these two evaluation regimes.

These regimes conflict, in that they demand different abilities and reward different forms of preparation, and thus represent different ideologies of value; this conflict is resolved insofar these regimes are used in alternation and combination. Over the course of 20 to 30 years of education, students alternate between tests and performances, at various frequencies depending on the school system. Essays, audition tapes, interview recordings, are weighed against test scores. The subject that manages to satisfy both a meritocratic, objective, quantitative evaluation and a relational, subjective, personalistic, indexical-iconic evaluation is an embodied synthesis of these two regimes.

The dialectical relationship between these two regimes is evident in the new evaluation instruments that are built to combine them. The online recommendation portals now used by many American graduate schools ask recommenders to provide both numerical evaluations (ranking the student against a specified class of peers, and assigning the student to a percentile of achievement in each of the following categories of performance) and personalized letters rhematically describing the student and his or her work, without deciding how the two parts of the evaluation are supposed to be weighed against each other. The same synthesis appears in the online forms used for consumer review of businesses or products on sites such as Amazon, where reviewers often feel a need to comment on the number of stars they have given an object: to make an attempt to translate the quantitative metric into a qualitative one. The prevalence of such syntheses should not, however, blind us to the contradictions between these two regimes. In what follows I describe a site in which their contrast is still manifest to all participants: Chinese art education.

2. The art-school entrance test

Every year in January and February, hundreds of thousands of Chinese high-school students compete in a standardized examination of realist drawings and paintings, in order to gain entrance to art and design schools around the country. Most art schools (as well as art departments in academic and normal universities) hold multiple tests in cities around the country: for example, the Central Academy of Fine Arts holds a test in each provincial capital and some other major cities. The tests are scheduled over a series of weeks during the New Years’ Holiday, and most students travel by train from city to city taking tests over the course of a month. Each set of tests is preceded by a registration fair held on the grounds of a large university, at which lesser-known schools and departments set up information tables, attempting to attract students to register. The tests themselves take one or two days (depending on the school) of examinations, with two three-hour examinations a day, each one devoted to one genre of painting or drawing: sumiao (chiaroscuro portraits), secai (powdered-pastel, usually still-life), suoxie (sketching, usually full-body figures), and for some schools or majors sheji (design, usually graphic). OPEN IN VIEWER

The visual qualia that test-takers seek to embed in drawings are highly standardized, and yet they are not subject to a single evaluation scheme. In a suxie or ‘sketch’ drawing, lines should be visible and gestural, rough and choppy; in sumiao or chiaroscuro, there should be almost no visible lines, but only softly intersecting patches of shading. The Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) requires a more stylized and exaggerated form of portraiture than the China Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou, where softer, gentler shading is the desired effect; the Lu Xun academy favors a classic socialist realist effect, with rugged planes of shading describing rugged faces. These qualia are associated with words like ‘clear’, ‘smooth’, ‘clean’, ‘rough’, ‘expressive’, and ‘full of feeling’ etc.; but the qualia always exceed the words in specificity, and so they must always be depicted, whether in a printed image, or by the example of a teacher. Students learn which qualia are desirable in which drawings, and for which schools, from their test-prep teachers (on which more below), and from the art-test-preparation ‘copy-books’ (mofangshu) that occupy most of the art section in any Chinese bookstore, and provide the bulk of the business for specialty art bookstores. Because the valuation of these qualia depends partly on context, failure on the test means a failure to produce the right qualia in the right drawing for the right audience of expert test examiners.

In the standardized art-school entrance tests, many ‘qualities’ of line and shadow, color and composition are evaluated, such that each of thousands of entrants’ drawings can be ranked relative to every other. These values are quantified, in that each drawing is given a numeric score, and then the scores of the three drawings are combined into a zhuanye or specialty test score, which is delivered to the student and the school’s admissions office. These scores are then weighed against a student’s academic test scores and against those of all the other entrants, and according to quotas for students from each province, and letters of acceptance and rejection accordingly sent out. Success on the test is the opportunity to be invested with the predominant value in an adolescent’s life, a college education. Failure means trying again, or when time and family resources are exhausted, giving up on this opportunity altogether.

The test regime follows many of the procedures used in the Chinese imperial examination system prior to the 20th century. First, there are procedures to prevent students from producing qualitatively better paintings than they are competent to produce. Students carry their own materials (pencils and brushes, powdered pigment, chamois and gum erasers, drawing boards, folding easels and stools and collapsible water buckets) into the test-venue, but all materials are carefully examined, and the actual drawing papers are distributed by the test administration. Although according to one test-taker, ‘some people bring a little book full of pictures, to paint things that they can’t remember how to paint – but this is called cheating’ (see Miyazaki 1981 for accounts of similar strategies in the imperial system).

Second, there are procedures which systematically attach and detach the test-material to or from the name, face and identification number of the testee in each phase of the test, in order to ensure that the evaluative ranking is oriented exclusively to the qualities of the drawing, and not to the ‘qualities’ (or social relations) of the student. In the moment of passage into the test-grounds, name, face and ID must be appropriately indexically linked to the individual holding the registration paper (the imperial examination registration papers included physiognomic descriptions; modern test-registration papers include a photograph). During the period of the test each student is supposed to maintain a physical distance from other students’ drawings or to enact that distance by averting their eyes. When the test-drawings are handed over to the test-proctor, the student must be identified with the papers he hands in. But when the test-drawings are reviewed by the examiners, identifying materials are segregated. In imperial examinations, test-essays were actually copied by scriveners to prevent evaluators from recognizing handwriting, but this procedure cannot be applied to the art test, because of the centrality of handiwork to the evaluation. It is important that the line-quality of the drawing remain an index of the testee, and so it must be isolated from all other indexes (names, ID numbers, and physical proximity to the body of the maker). It is only after the score has been constructed that the number can be reattached to the registration paper, and this process must be conducted by a different set of authorities than the ones who conduct the evaluation: in theory, at least, the evaluators and the test administrators are not only separate individuals but also maintain a taboo of communication regarding these forms of knowledge.

This is a novel situation for art testing. From 1978 (when the tests were reinstated after the end of the Cultural Revolution) until the end of the 1990s, art school entrance tests were relatively informal, small affairs. They were held in the school to which the students were applying, in the departmental studios, and the department faculty, who were also the test-examiners, observed the test-takers drawing. The former lack of concern about separating bodies and their indexes from drawings is demonstrated by the following anecdote from the late 1980s, related to me by one of the participants: a few teachers at CAFA were watching students take a test, and complaining to one another that the female students they had admitted recently were ugly. So they looked around at the girls and chose the prettiest one, and then went over to take a look at her drawing and her registration papers, which identified her as being from Sichuan. When the time came to review the drawings, hers was almost put onto the ‘no’ pile, until one teacher said, ‘hey, isn’t that that Sichuan girl’s drawing?’

As the art test system expanded over the course of the 1990s, procedures developed for academic testing were gradually applied to the art test, and the test itself became increasingly disconnected from the schools to which it offers access. By 2005 most tests were administered offsite and graded by non-faculty. This trajectory reached its apotheosis in 2008, when the school-administered test-system was finally replaced by a provincial ‘unified test’ (tongkao), run by provincial education ministries.

However, despite this change in administration, the focus of the test has not changed. It is still concerned with the production of highly refined visual qualia – soft shading, crisp lines, good composition – which have only become more refined as they have been standardized. These qualia are not easy to manufacture. To prepare for these examinations, art students spend one to three years in part-time study on the weekends and during summer vacations, in private, often one-room ‘art-test prep schools’, ¹ learning highly standardized forms of drawing and painting. After finishing their high school coursework they take a full year of full-time study, often practicing 10 to 12 hours a day, 6 days a week (see Chumley 2011 for more on this system). The whole system of training and testing is organized around the production of qualia that are nevertheless isolated within the system: there is a general understanding that the features of a good drawing are so particular to the form and the format as to have no relation to anything else. The ‘technical’ styles of drawing demanded by the test are not linked to stylistic changes in contemporary art or design. Just as test-drawings are detached from their makers and appear as isolates, comparable only to each other, the qualia of good drawings are not related to anything else, and so they don’t become productive sites for metaphorical evaluations of persons or nations. After the conversion of qualia into quantities, the drawings are destroyed.

The isolation, standardization and erasure of qualia in the art test system is recognized by participants through a widespread discourse of lack: as two aspiring video-game designers told me after a test in Qingdao, Shandong, ‘we don’t have our own style, we all paint the same’. Or, in the words of a CAFA teacher (‘Xi Laoshi’) to a second-year college student who performed badly in a critique, ‘You Shandong students are all like steamed bread; one after another you come out all the same.’ ² In comparing Shandong students to steamed bread, the teacher emphasizes lack of both qualia and quality. Steamed bread is the blandest food and among the cheapest; it is what northern Chinese peasants, migrant laborers and prisoners eat. He further describes steamed bread as being industrially produced, a mode of production that figures both the ways that drawings are made in a standardized system and the ways that students are taught (‘one after another, you come out the same’).

Xi Laoshi’s comment is an appraisal of the quantifying regime deployed within a rhematizing regime, a regime that is concerned with the discovery (rather than production) of unique, individual selves through qualisigns. Industrial production of cheap, bland items is exactly the opposite of what art students are expected to do in their professional lives, beginning in the second-year college-level creativity classes, where they are called upon to find their own styles. In the next section I turn to an examination of the rhematizing regime and its ways of converting qualia into values.

3. The ‘creativity class’ critique

If the quantifying regime isolates test-objects from test-subjects in order to quantify qualia, and concludes by re-attaching the score to the subject, the rhematizing regime does the opposite: it is a performance in which examiners and subjects come together to build associations and links between the qualia of an object and those of a subject.

In the visual-culture professions, presentations, studio visits, and critique classes (hereafter, ‘critiques’) are crucial events for both contrastive individuation and indexical identification (Agha 2005). In critique, a curator, gallerist, critic, client or teacher examines a piece of art or design, often with a small audience of assistants or students. The work is laid on the floor, pinned to the wall, or set on a table, and then the participants proceed to ‘respond’ to it, interpret it, and evaluate it, often with commentary framed as metapragmatic discourse what the art object is ‘saying’ or ‘doing’. In the course of critique, the art object is frequently treated as a kind of speech, a bit of talk in a visual channel, emanating from the artist-as-speaker, but more often it is treated as a speaker in its own right, as ‘having something to say’, whether as an animator of the artist’s thought, or as a principal with its own logic, about which clients, curators, critics and other viewers are authorized to speculate. On the one hand, there is an ‘animation’ in the sense of extension of self into object (Munn 1986); on the other hand the object is ‘animated’ in the sense of being given intensions of its own (Silvio 2010). OPEN IN VIEWER

In order to enregister a personal style that is both recognizably their own and also able to take on broader meanings, circulating beyond themselves, artists and designers have to learn to ‘animate’ objects in both of these senses, and manage the slippages of participant roles that result from the contrast between them. In these evaluation regimes, the evaluator (teacher, critic, client, curator) evaluates the maker through the work and vice versa, in part by rhematizing the work, positing aesthetic qualia as iconic indexes of the makers’ personality. This kind of rhematization underlies what Geoffrey Pullum has called ‘creative work metonymy’, ³ the identification of authorial agent and product; art and design students must learn to participate in and in fact guide this rhematization in critique.

Chinese art students’ first experience with critique comes in the second year of college, in the ‘creativity classes’ (chuangzao or chuangzuo ke) that mark the completion of foundation training (generally a continuation of the realist art practice learned for the art school entrance test). Creativity class functions institutionally (and is experienced by students) as a moment of radical transition from one evaluation regime to another. Students are transferred from a standardized training focused on mimesis and organized by ideologies of embodied technical skill, to a student-led dialogue focused on narrative and organized by ideologies about meaning and language. Students are asked to locate a ‘self’ (gexing/xingge/ziji/ziwo) in their own bodies, memories, and feelings. They are asked to take up meaningful forms and make them their own, even though such forms are, like words, always embedded in other people’s work, and other people’s talk (Bakhtin).

Where the examination system held students to a unified standard, in creativity class students are asked to find themselves in an array of distinctions based on subtle correspondences between styles and personality types or characterological roles (Agha 2003). Consequently, chuangzao ke mark a radical transition from general and standardized technical training to self-directed professionalization; the individuation of students by style through the discursive marking of aesthetic and stylistic differences, including speech-styles (Irvine 2001), and also the beginning of their socialization to distinct aesthetic communities (analogous to language communities). In these classes students are asked to rapidly develop a range of new discursive and aesthetic practices, new allegiances and new self-positionings, as teachers urge them to ‘find yourself’ and (correlatively) ‘find what you like’. Many students find this experience more stressful than liberating, precisely because of the ideological weight placed on the problem of creativity, individual personality (gexing, xingge) and style (fengge) in contemporary China, especially in the visual-culture industries. They find themselves worrying that ‘I don’t know what I like. I don’t have a lot of personality.’

The first student selected by Xi Laoshi to undergo critique in the class I observed at CAFA in the spring of 2008 was a fashionably dressed and confidant young woman I will call Huang Weilin. In response to the assignment ‘dot, plane, line’, she had dripped white wax in little piles and lines on a sheet of glass, which she laid on the floor. The girls – only the girls – went up to take a closer look. When they had settled back, Xi Laoshi began the critique by asking the classmates, ‘Who thinks it looks good?’ and then noting that most hands went up, ‘Who thinks it’s ugly?’ One boy raised his hand, to laughter. Xi Laoshi then commented on his feelings (ganjue) about her choice of materials and their meaning, concluding his comments by saying, ‘materials have a language’ (cailiao shi you yuyande). Huang responded obliquely, by telling a story about flying in an airplane looking at the buildings below, and describing the peace and stillness (pingjing) of the morning street in Milan, which she had seen on her travels.

In China in 2008, airplane travel was still rare, and international flight even rarer, at least for college students. Huang’s description of a privileged experience she shared with her teacher and TA might have been less than explanatory for many of her classmates. But this kind of indexicality, linking a very common material to a very particular biographical experience, was exactly what the teacher was looking for, and he was evidently pleased. The class TA, recently returned from MFA studies in Boston, commented that glass is connected to danger (in a general indexical way: glass is fragile, so when we look at it we might think of its potential to break). Huang Weilin deferred this interpretation, explaining that she was interested in glass’s ‘clarity’ (qingche), like the clarity of the wax. Xi Laoshi replied, ‘Your thought process is good.’ He suggested a book, and she said she already knew it. Xi Laoshi finished the critique by saying, ‘Even though you’ve studied drawing and painting, you can still do this!’, commending the girl for her ability to overcome years of potentially creativity-suppressing, technical, test-preparation training and succeed in a radically different form of practice.

In this encounter, though Xi Laoshi opened with what might have been interpreted as a mildly dismissive question, Huang Weilin was successful at contextualizing the object in terms of her own biographical experience and suggesting terms of interpretation through which her arrangement of glass and wax could be understood as an indexical icon of herself. As a result she was evaluated well. Xi Laoshi focused the discussion on the theme of the materials, glass and wax, from early on. His first question (‘does it look good?’) directed the other students to focus on the aesthetic qualities of the material. Later he made this connection more explicit. In saying that materials have a language, he was subtly asking her to gloss her materials. She answered with a story, suggesting that glass and wax mean both vision (aerial views) and stillness, quiet (pingjing, like morning in Milan). These qualia also suggested highly valued personal qualities: in this class, as in others, teachers repeatedly referred to students’ possession or lack of ‘clarity’ (qingchu, a related term), meaning understanding of what they ought to be doing, suggesting both artistic competence and professionalism. Pingjing (stillness or quiet) refers also to personal serenity, a quality that is understood to be particularly desirable and rare in young women, that likewise suggests maturity.

Thus, Huang Weilin succeeded in developing a complex indexical and iconic association for the combination of glass and wax that could also serve as a figure for herself. She linked the visible qualia of the work to biographical experiences of airplane flight and European travel, face-to-face engagements with Western cultural monuments (the same privileged subjectivity suggested by Xi Laoshi’s notebook about his travels in Europe and America, which he had presented to the class only the week before, and the TA’s frequent references to his MFA studies in America). The iconicities suggested by the interpretation (the clarity of glass is like a quiet morning; wax drips are like buildings viewed from above) implicitly also suggested personal qualities that Huang Weilin would like to have the teachers attribute to herself: clarity of purpose, maturity, self-possession, calm.

Part of Huang Weilin’s success lay in her ability to emphasize the iconicity of glass and wax while avoiding any reliance on conventional symbolism. Conventional sign systems offer a public accessibility that is precisely opposed to the subtlety of signification that makes art interpretation and critique interesting. The semiotic ideologies common to contemporary art and design require an air of idiosyncrasy, otherwise known as creativity: objects should not appear as tokens of types. This is a semiotic ideology that departs radically from the conventional typologies used in many exchange systems, which rely on conventionalized interpretations to narrow the potentially dangerous ambiguities of iconicity. In Anakalang it is because everyone knows that horns and spears signify men and cloth signifies women (Keane 1993) that these objects can play a crucial role in tense marriage exchanges. In contrast, at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, ambiguity is crucial to creative practice.

It should be evident from this analysis that both genres of speech and particular spatial arrangements are crucial to rhematizing evaluations. In critique-class, the student who made the artwork and the art object stand together, in the center, surrounded by fellow students and facing the teacher and teaching assistant. Mutual evaluations of thing and maker emerge in the discussion: qualia attributed to the object are used to evaluate the maker, and qualia attributed to the maker are used to evaluate the object, through the discursive construction of an indexical icon around the two of them. Most other rhematizing regimes employ similar ritual forms, in which the subjects of evaluation stand in proximity to some object of work, in front of the authorized evaluators and a small audience of ratifiers: think of elementary-school science fairs and corporate presentations, where authorial subjects stand next to models or Powerpoint presentations and narrate them for evaluators and audiences. In review situations where evaluated subjects are not physically present, they may be rhetorically evoked. Even textual evaluations such as book and commodity reviews frequently replicate this kind of physical arrangement by ‘moving’ from the author to the book (or from the gadget to the brand) and back again, constructing a parity between them.

5. Conclusion

Evaluation regimes are institutionalized frameworks that facilitate the emergence of what Harkness calls a ‘state of qualic transitivity’, albeit of highly restricted scope. In the quantifying regime, this transitivity is not used to transpose qualia from one semiotic order to another, but rather to convert qualia into quantities, according to evaluative metrics that can only be understood by experts (e.g. figure skating scores). There is thus a tendency in quantifying regimes to isolate and refine qualia. The rhematizing regime, by contrast, is concerned with transposing qualia from individual objects to individual subjects and back again. Consequently, rhematizing regimes tend to be more explicitly concerned with generating associations that link up with external discourses.

The thesis that modernity is characterized by the increasing prevalence of quantifying regimes has been well- and frequently argued (see Espeland and Stevens 1998 for examples), as has the notion that post-Fordist capitalism has been obsessed with the aesthetic elaboration of selves. I would put these points together by suggesting that there is a dialectical relationship between these two evaluation regimes, at least from the point of view of the institutions who administer them and the subjects who must pass from one to the other over the course of their lives. As education systems around the world expand, quantifying regimes predominate selections in early stages, but rhematizing regimes dominate in later stages; as more subjects go on to post-graduate education, passing through rhematic regimes (such as letters of evaluation) in turn qualifies one to conduct quantifying evaluations. Academic, governmental and corporate organizations use numerically scored periodic reviews, with meeting- or presentation-based rhematizing rituals at each stage of advancement.

The experience of quality is increasingly framed by these evaluation regimes, in an increasingly broad range of contexts. Many Americans now habitually consult both quantitative scores and qualitative reviews on Amazon prior to any ‘major’ purchase. In resorting to Zagat reviews to choose restaurants and Consumer Reports to select phones, people come to behave as if qualisigns of value must emerge from evaluation regimes, rather than from phenomenological experience. They seek out reviews, rather than trusting their own first impressions. Where conventional qualisigns of the kinds described in most of the papers in this volume facilitate an experience of experience (such that qualities are not experienced as discursive evaluations, but as direct, sensuous impressions), evaluation regimes foreground the discursivity of the qualisign, and in so doing, seem to provoke an incipient distrust of experience.