The Cultural Logic of Facts and Figures: Objectification, Measurement and Standardization as social processes.

-The participants have worked on all aspects of the project: objectification, quantification, measurement and standardization. These processes are characeteristic of the times we live in, they shape our identities and modes of thought. The contributions document how measurement and standardization influence our perception of the world, the relations between ethnic groups, our understanding of health and disease an changing understandings of the boundary between the natural and the artificial. The participants have done field work, archival study and content analysis to show how the mentioned processes shape our understanding of meaning and morality, personhood and thinghood.

Dominant modes of objectification are basic cultural premises in any given society. Everywhere and in all historical epochs we will find varieties of objectifying practices and different factualization procedures, but some eras are more prone to quantify than others. Ours is such an era. OSQ will examine how contemporary styles of objectification, fact making and technologies of quantification constitute a cultural logic which shape social processes and trends. These styles are also co-constitutive of our notions of meaning and representation, morality and personhood. OSQ will document how these cultural premises are rhetorically active in all the environments which SAMKUL lists as thematic priority areas. We have gathered a distinguished group of academi cs who through 5 work packages will: -show how quantification technologies developed during the 19th century bring into being several theoretical entities which have played a major role in social life throughout the 20th century and continue to do so; - identify the cultural logic which informs present day economics and explicate the normativity inherent in the increased use of standards; -examine the emergence of new entities in health discourse, transformations of the landscape through measurement and standardization, resulting in inter-ethnic conflict between groups with different conceptions of the landscape; entification in New Public Management; -describe the tension between standardization and traditional forms of expression in the arts: music, da nce, literature and the visual arts, and the dialectics which define the relationship between social and artistic environments; -identify contemporary cultural understandings of identity and subjectivity and their relationship to quantification; legal rhe toric and the transformation of 'culture' from horizon to intellectual property, and the changes in contemporary forms of communication and ethical discourse brought about by measurement and entification.