"Value judgments only make sense as part of an argument and arguments are always social events." So in my comment above, I just was thinking in a general way about what John Guillory calls the "constitutive role of conflict for any discourse of value." That said, the argument of my second book is that the commodity aesthetic of the cute, the performance-oriented aesthetic of the zany, and the informational and discursive aesthetic of the interesting have a unique and even indexical relation to the ways in which the subjects of late capitalism consume, labor, and exchange. Insofar as these socially binding processes are also, inevitably, sites and stakes of social struggle, the aesthetic categories featured in the book reflect these struggles, albeit in a highly indirect and mediated fashion. The zany, for example, is an aesthetic not just about cultural performance but about performance as affective labor, whose gendered status in the post-Fordist culture of what Heather Hicks calls "soft work" becomes increasingly ambiguous. And in a way that repositions gender, in a historically unprecedented way, as a central question for late-capitalist zaniness, as we see in I Love Lucy . The longstanding question of the relation between gender and class gets raised by the question of how post-Fordist zaniness differs from its precedents. It's worth noting here that zaniness is an old but distinctively modern style of performing in which the employer/employee or master/servant agon has always played a central role, since its inception with the character of the