Evaluation and the Renaturalization of Social Life

Evaluation appears to offer an objective way to distribute people through a society that recognizes them as symbolically equal. The book’s central claim is that this apparently neutral procedure does more than measure individual potential: it helps reorganize social life around personal traits, displacing public and political questions into judgments about private individuals. In that reversal, historically formed social distinctions come to look natural, while the public sphere in which people act as political subjects recedes.

Equality and the problem of distribution

The argument begins with a tension between symbolic equality and social allocation. If people are treated as interchangeable in their symbolic identity, and if no special public mandate is allowed to establish their place, a society still needs some way to assign roles and legitimate differences in position. Evaluation supplies that mechanism. It can range from quantified tests of ability to personalized, in-depth interviews, all presented as ways of estimating each person’s potential as objectively as possible.

The procedure promises to characterize individuals without relying on symbolic identities. Rather than asking what place someone occupies in a shared political or social order, it seeks a profile of capacities that can justify where that person should be placed within the social structure. Its neutrality is therefore consequential: evaluation does not simply discover an already settled distribution. It provides a language through which unequal placement can be represented as the result of individual potential.

The account also complicates the ideal of egalitarian justice. Equality, it argues, should not be accepted at face value when it is sustained by envy. In this version of egalitarian renunciation, a person gives something up not to benefit others, but to ensure that others cannot have it either. The gesture resembles self-denial, yet its force is comparative and restrictive: it makes the leveling of outcomes more important than a shared project of justice. This tension shows why the formal language of equality does not by itself guarantee a political commitment to collective emancipation.

From private exposure to the loss of public life

The discussion distinguishes the disappearance of privacy from a more fundamental loss. Contemporary media may expose intimate details, including details of sexual life, and this is often described as the erosion of private life. The book reverses the emphasis: what such exposure most threatens is public life itself. A person displayed as a collection of intimate properties, desires, traumas, and idiosyncrasies is no longer encountered primarily as a symbolic agent acting in a common public sphere.

That distinction changes the meaning of personal visibility. More information about an individual does not necessarily produce more public recognition. Instead, exposure can reduce a person to the private attributes that are available for scrutiny and assessment. Evaluation belongs to the same movement: both practices make the individual legible through personal characteristics, while leaving less room for a form of public agency that cannot be reduced to those characteristics.

The result is not the simple liberation of the individual from inherited identities. The book challenges the familiar account of contemporary life as thoroughly denaturalized, in which ethnicity, sexuality, and other features are experienced as choices or historically contingent constructions. It argues that the opposing process is at work: social life is being renaturalized. Features that appear intimate or natural become the terms through which social positions and public disputes are interpreted.

Evaluation and the renaturalization of social conflict

Evaluation regulates social promotion in a manner suited to this broader shift. As public questions are translated into matters of personal disposition, conflicts that might otherwise be articulated politically are recast as cultural, religious, or ethnic tensions. In a postpolitical order increasingly administered by experts, these naturalized or pseudo-naturalized differences become among the remaining legitimate forms of conflict. The procedure that ranks individual potential thus belongs to a society in which collective political disagreement is increasingly displaced into the management of personal and group characteristics.

The book makes the reversal concrete through a deliberately unsettling contrast: contemporary society can treat becoming a computer expert or successful manager as a gift of nature, while treating beautiful lips or eyes as matters of culture. The contrast exposes how supposedly natural and cultural categories can be reassigned. A skill associated with education and social organization is presented as innate, while an appearance commonly treated as natural is classified as cultural. Evaluation participates in this inversion by making professional potential appear to be an individual property rather than something shaped by social conditions.

This example echoes Karl Marx’s account of commodity fetishism, invoked through a comic reversal drawn from William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. The original contrast that the book discusses confuses what is given by fortune with what is acquired through learning. Recast in the age of evaluation, the confusion makes expertise and managerial success seem natural, while bodily beauty is rendered cultural. The point is not merely that social judgments can be mistaken. Their categories can conceal the processes that produce valued abilities and distribute opportunities, allowing social arrangements to appear as facts of nature.

Evaluation within modern social administration

The critique of evaluation connects it to the two-sided structure of modern social life described elsewhere in the book. One side is expert administration: bureaucratic and biopolitical systems regulate populations in the name of managing life and enabling individual happiness. The other is a capitalist order driven by continual self-revolution and the production and appropriation of excess. These are not reducible to one another, but together they frame a society in which administrative expertise and individual competition can operate at once.

Evaluation fits this setting because it translates social distribution into the assessment of personal potential. Its instruments may look impartial, but the ideal of a person stripped of symbolic identity does not remove the political question of who defines merit or how social positions are organized. Rather, it makes allocation appear as a technical judgment about individuals. In this sense, evaluation is not an isolated testing practice: it is one mechanism through which social promotion is regulated and public antagonisms are redirected into apparently personal or natural differences.

The concept therefore names both a procedure and an ideological effect. Evaluation promises objective comparison among equals, yet helps naturalize the resulting distinctions; intimate disclosure promises visibility, yet can obscure public agency; and the language of choice and personal identity can coexist with a renewed classification of people through supposedly natural traits. The book’s critical emphasis falls on this gap between the neutral appearance of assessment and the social order it helps reproduce.