Analysis and evaluation are distinct operations from taste and journalism

Evidence

“Taste,” in the loosest media sense of personal preferences, would seem to correspond to what used to be nobly and philosophically designated as “aesthetic judgment” (the change in codes and the barometrical fall in lexical dignity is at least one index of the displacement of traditional aesthetics and the transformation of the cultural sphere in modern times). “Analysis” I take to be that peculiar and rigorous conjuncture of formal and historical analysis that constitutes the specific task of literary and cultural study; to describe this further as the investigation of the historical conditions of possibility of specific forms may perhaps convey the way in which these twin perspectives (often thought to be irreconcilable or incommensurable in the past) can be said to constitute their object and thereby to be inseparable. Analysis in this sense can be seen to be a very different set of operations from a cultural journalism oriented around taste and opinion; what it would now be important to secure is the difference between such journalism — with its indispensable reviewing functions — and what I will call “evaluation,” which no longer turns on whether a work is “good” (after the fashion of an older aesthetic judgment), but rather tries to keep alive (or to reinvent) assessments of a sociopolitical kind that interrogate the quality of social life itself by way of the text or individual work of art, or hazard an assessment of the political effects of cultural currents or movements with less utilitarianism and a greater sympathy for the dynamics of everyday life than the imprimaturs and indexes of earlier traditions. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 651

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes taste, analysis, and evaluation — three distinct operations Jameson insists must not be conflated.
• XREF: connects to: Valuation and evaluation are analytically separable processes of worth attribution. — Ève Chiapello, Financialisation of Valuation, 24