sizing, to size

• Garnier, P. (2014). Childhood as a question of critiques and justifications: Insights into Boltanski’s sociology. Childhood (Copenhagen, Denmark), 21(4), 447-460. doi:10.1177/0907568213491770

 In this one, the main thing I was thinking about was the idea of age as a cité, about that possibility. Because at one point, he's like, the child is an age to the state, but to his father he's this subordinate being. 

What is a cité? and why could age be confused with one? A

Even if age cannot be considered as a polity in the model of Justification, the relations between adults and children can be considered as a specific moral and political ‘order of worth’ and analysed as a matter of debates. Morally, the ‘best interest’ of the child represents a ‘common good’ or a ‘good in itself’, which is the matter of lively disputes among adults and between adults and children. Morality has to be understood as concerning the ‘good life’, and in a wider sense, what is ‘good’ or ‘worthy’ for adults and children. It is also a question of responsibilities and a claim for justice, which is closely related to politics. Politically, age constitutes a principle of justification of adults’ domination over children, which can always be a matter of critique and justification. Domination has to be legitimate, founded in reason, in order not to be criticized as violence, alienation or exploitation. Political order means also competing versions of representations of children, speaking on behalf of children, considering their social status and participation in political and social life.

So maybe it's not child that's potentially an OOW, but the relationship between adults and children are? And how would this resonate with what you got from Latour guy? namely, that an OOW has to be achieved?

The sociology of critical capacities does not stop with the tableau of orders of worth and the resulting compromises. The impulse for symmetry generates a number of questions: What do the orders of worth have in common? Why is their number limited? How is it possible to tell legitimate forms of justification from illegitimate ones? The answer to these questions is given in the subtitle of On Justification. Only regimes that create ‘economies of worth’ are legitimate (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006). An economy of worth is achieved when a conflict closes with the advantage of the winner being also a contribution to the common good. For example, in a conflict on working time models in firms, employees may base their arguments on the domestic order of worth. To invoke a common good, they can argue that only restrictions on working hours allow family structures to remain intact and thus to contribute to social reproduction. Additionally, actors do not settle conflicts only in discursive ways. They are equally based on ‘tests of worth’. The notion of a test can best be illustrated by looking at sports. To determine a winner of a 100-metre sprint, an ever-expanding set of tests is required, from watches and their certification to wind measurements to doping tests.

And is a cité an OOW?

In any case, so changing the law such that a child is 12 is an OOW, supposedly, because, in making that change, there are winners and losers, reconfigurations of people and objects, and a common good is produced. 

Adults dominate over children, and this is where you have to see the whole selection principle, you have to be able to see what else is possible in order to really feel the thrust of this. How is it that adults are able to secure their dominate over children, and for that domination to be seen as legitimate? Not alienation, not exploitation, but legitimate. But it has to always be under threat, to at any moment begin to seem to be illegitimate again. 

But also, the state measures children through the metric of age, whereas the father measures a child through ... sizing as a verb... the father sizes the son through the former's relationship to the latter, which is a hierarchy, and in that hierarchy, the son will always be smaller, so it's a completely different love language, so to speak, but it's not a genre, is it? 

How would you test age? in the "state" world? you'd test it through birth certificates or something? and in the domestic, you'd test it through ... poverty? opportunities to leave? 

Value and Umwelt What the above excursus into the pre-modern notion of measure suggests is that value lies at the core of measure, yet not simply as a product of measurement. In modern sci-ence, one is immediately led to associate value with a numerical determination – such as for instance, the value of the Planck constant. However, once we examine value as a co-original facet of measure, we are led to distinguish – with Spinoza – what we could call value as the natura naturans of measure, from what we understand by measurement as its natura naturata. We could perhaps endorse the following formulation: measure valorises  (it  visibilises  value,  it  gives  back  a  quantitative,  comparative  indication  for  the  phenomenon  at  hand),  but  value  circumvents  or  eludes  measurement  (it  can  never  be  reduced  to  the  numerical  quantification  attached  to  a  measured  thing).  Using  Thom’s  

Brighenti 227(1988)  terminology,  such  separation  corresponds  to  that  between  the  ‘pregnantial’  and  the ‘salient’ aspects of value. While salience pertains to the domain of established forms, ‘pregnance’  aliments  the  domain  of  informal  forces.  Pregnance  is  communicated  throughout various saliences, travelling ‘contagiously’ from one salience to another.This  distinction  may  help  explain  why  measure  systems  never  work  completely  as  they are expected to work – i.e., they do not work as if they were purely salient entities, simple  diagrams,  rulers  or  grids  to  be  applied  to  inert  matters.  The  predicament  in  all  measure systems and all measurement apparatuses can thus be traced back to the episte-mological disappearance, or invisibilisation, of virtus from modern measure. Such disap-pearance  has  left  molis  as  the  only  legitimate,  visible  reference.  Certainly,  theoretical  alternatives to this situation have been advanced. In the social science, for instance, the theory of Boltanski and Thévenot (1991) has made an effort to rescue a conception of virtus  in  the  context  of  the  social  practices  of  justification.  Boltanski  and  Thévenot  employ the term grandeur to address what we may characterise as an intensive principle of valorisation whose quantification is always problematic and, so to speak, always ‘to come’.The ‘test’ is precisely for Boltanski and Thévenot the momentous situation when the pregnantial  tension  of  valorisation  is  crushed  into  a  legible  quantification  –  the  test  is  always a test of strength, even though its preparation can be quite subtle. The English translator has, in this sense, correctly rendered the term grandeur as worth, rather than as magnitude or other related words. Indeed, for the French theorists the central problem in producing an acceptable justification lies in convincingly connecting the stance at hand to some available principles that can lend worthiness to it. In this sense, before Boltanski, Chaïm  Perelman  had  already  produced  a  fundamental  analysis  of  argumentation  that  went in this same direction (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1958). In fact, Perelman pre-sented rhetoric as an arsenal of mobilising argumentative strategies whereby adherence to a given thesis can be gained or increased. Such psychological adherence, which we may think to be a fortiori measurable, is attained by aligning the given case to an invisi-ble-but-present  value,  capable  of  precipitating  or  shifting  the  magnitude  of  consent.  Value, which Perelman characterises in terms of a series of tropes, features in his model as a kind of mathematical ‘attractor’ of psychic adherence

x

• Brighenti, A. M. (2019). Umwelt-measures. on extensive and intensive measures: Introduction to the special issue ‘Theorising measures, rankings and metrics’. Social Science Information, 58(2), 224-237. doi:10.1177/0539018419858816

• Guggenheim, M., & Potthast, J. (2012). Symmetrical twins: On the relationship between actor-network theory and the sociology of critical capacities. European Journal of Social Theory, 15(2), 157-178. doi:10.1177/1368431011423601