Against Value in the Arts and Educationproposes that it is often the staunchest defenders of art who do it the most harm, by suppressing or mollifying its dissenting voice, by neutralizing its painful truths, and by instrumentalizing its ambivalence. The result is that rather than expanding the autonomy of thought and feeling of the artist and the audience, arts defenders make art self-satisfied, or otherwise an echo-chamber for the limited and limiting self-description of peoples lives lived in an audit culture, a culture pervaded by the direct and indirect excrescence of practices of accountability.

This book diagnoses the counter-intuitive effects of the rhetoric of value. It posits that the auditing of values pervades the fabric of peoples work-lives, their education, and increasingly their everyday experience. The book uncovers figures of resentment, disenchantment and alienation fostered by the dogma of value. It argues instead that value judgments can behave insidiously, and incorporate aesthetic, ethical or ideological values fundamentally opposed to the value they purportedly name and describe. The collection contains contributions from leading scholars in the UK and US with contributions from anthropology, the history of art, literature, education, musicology, political science, and philosophy.

Sam Ladkin is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at the University of Sheffield.

Robert McKay is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Sheffield.

Emile Bojesen is Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Winchester.

Acknowledgements / 1. Introduction: Against Value,Sam Ladkin, Robert McKay and Emile Bojesen /Part I. Critique /2. The Authority of Value, and Abjection from Value,Marilyn Strathern /3. Post-critical,Hal Foster /4. Invaluable Elephants, or The Against-Value of Critique (for Animals),Robert McKay /5. Enlightenment Against Value? Two Intuitions and Humes Of the Standard of Taste,Tom Jones /6. Bargain-Basement Thought,Jonathan P. Eburne /7. Techno-Criticism and/against the Value of the Flesh,Fabienne Collignon /Part II. Arts /8. Useless Commodities, Disposable Bodies: An Essay on Value and Waste,Rob Halpern /9. Art and Devalorization: Asger Jorns Theory of Value,Karen Kurczynski /10. Art = Capital? Reflections on Joseph BeuysDas Kapital Raum 19701977,Christian Lotz /11. Value and Abjection: Listening to Music with Edward W. Said,Rachel Beckles Willson /12. Intransigent Play: Detail, Form and Interpretation in the Music of Derek Bailey,Dominic Lash /13. The nice thing about value is that everyone has it: Art& Anthropology Despite Culture,Sam Ladkin / 14. Rimbaud, the Occasion of Poetry, and the Walls of Our Schools,Geoff Gilbert /Part III.Education /15. Saying No! Profligacy versus Austerity, or Metaphor against Model in Justifying the Arts and Humanities in the Contemporary University,Griselda Pollock /16. The Teleology of Education and the Metaphysics of Contingency,Peter Thompson /17.Value: Critical Pedagogy,Participatory Art and Higher Education A New Measure and Meaning of the Common(s),Mike Neary /18. Educational Value: Contingency and the Learning Subject,Marie Morgan /19. Negative Aesthetic Education,Emile Bojesen/ Index