Contingencies of Value: Barbara Herrnstein Smith

Contingencies of Value
Barbara Herrnstein Smith
1. The Exile of Evaluation

It is a curious feature of literary studies in America that one of the most
venerable, central, theoretically significant, and pragmatically inescapable
set of problems relating to literature has not been a subject of serious
inquiry for the past fifty years. I refer here to the fact not merely that
the study of literary evaluation has been, as we might say, "neglected,"
but that the entire problematic of value and evaluation has been evaded
and explicitly exiled by the literary academy. It is clear, for example, that
there has been no broad and sustained investigation of literary evaluation
that could compare to the constant and recently intensified attention
devoted to every aspect of literary interpretation.The past decades have
witnessed an extraordinary proliferation of theories, approaches, move-
ments, and entire disciplines focused on interpretive criticism, among
them (to recite a familiar litany) New Criticism, structuralism, psychoanalytic
criticism, reader-response criticism, reception aesthetics, speech-act theory,
deconstructionism, communications theory, semiotics, and hermeneutics.
At the same time, however, aside from a number of scattered and secondary
essays by theorists and critics who are usually otherwise occupied,' no
one in particular has been concerned with questions of literacy value and
evaluation, and such questions regularly go begging-and, of course,
begged-even among those whose inquiries into other matters are most
rigorous, substantial, and sophisticated.
Reasons for the specific disparity of attention are not hard to locate.
One is the obvious attachment of problems of interpretation and meaning
Critical Inquiry 10 (September 1983)
C 1983 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/83/1001-0005$01.00. All rights reserved.
Critical Inquiry 1983.10:1-35.

Downloaded from www.journals.uchicago.edu by Uppsala University on 05/26/20. For personal use only.
2 Barbara Herrnstein Smith Value
to the more general preoccupation with language that has dominated

the entire century and probably, as well, the fact that disciplines such as
linguistics and the philosophy of language are more accessible to literary
scholars than the corresponding disciplines, especially economics and
sociology, that are more broadly concerned with the nature of value and
evaluative behavior. The reasons for the general neglect and exile, however,
are more complex, reflecting, among other things, the fact that literary
studies in America, from the time of its inception as an institutionalized
academic discipline, has been shaped by two conflicting and mutually
compromising intellectual traditions and ideologies, namely-or roughly
namely-positivistic philological scholarship and humanistic pedagogy.
That is, while professors of literature have sought to claim for their
activities the rigor, objectivity, cognitive substantiality, and progress as-
sociated with science and the empirical disciplines, they have also attempted
to remain faithful to the essentially conservative and didactic mission of
humanistic studies: to honor and preserve the culture's traditionally es-
teemed objects-in this case, its canonized texts-and to illuminate and
transmit the traditional cultural values presumably embodied in them.
One consequence or manifestation of this conflict has been the continuous
absorption of "literary theory" in America with institutional debates over
the proper methods and objectives of the academic study of literature
and, with respect to the topic at hand, the drastic confinement of its
concern with literary evaluation to debates over the cognitive status of
evaluative criticism and its proper place, if any, in the discipline.
A bit of history will be helpful here. In accord with the traditional
empiricist doctrine of a fundamental split or discontinuity between fact
and value (or description and evaluation, or knowledge and judgment),
it was possible to regard the emerging distinction within literary studies
between "scholarship" and "criticism" as a reasonable division of labor.
Thus, the scholar who devoted himself to locating and assembling the
historical and philological facts necessary to edit and annotate the works
of, say, Bartholomew Griffin might remark that, although Griffin was
no doubt a less fashionable poet than such contemporaries as Spenser
and Shakespeare, the serious and responsible scholar must go about his
work in a serious and responsible manner, leaving questions of literary
merit "to the critics."The gesture that accompanied the remark, however,
Barbara Herrnstein Smith is University Professor of English and

communications and director of the Center for the Study of Art and
Symbolic Behavior at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author
of, among other works, Poetic Closureand On the Margins of Discourse.Her
previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, "Narrative Versions, Narrative
Theories," appeared in the Autumn 1980 issue. The present essay is part
of a full-length study of literary and aesthetic value and evaluation.

Critical Inquiry September1983 3
was likely to signal not professional deference but intellectual conde-

scension; for the presumably evenhanded distribution of the intellectual
responsibilities of literary study-the determination of facts to the scholar
and value to the critic-depended on an always questionable and in-
creasingly questioned set of assumptions: namely, that literary value was
a determinate property of texts and that the critic, by virtue of certain
innate and acquired capacities (taste, sensibility, etc., which could be seen
as counterparts to the scholar's industry and erudition), was someone
specifically equipped to discriminate it.
The magisterial mode of literary evaluation that issued from this set
of assumptions (and which, in Anglo-American criticism, characteristically
reproduced itself after the image-and in the voice-of Dr. Johnson
and also of such latter-day "master-critics"as Matthew Arnold and T. S.
Eliot) was practiced most notably by F R. Leavis in England and, in
America, perhaps most egregiously, by Yvor Winters. Its reaches and a
taste of its once familiar flavor can be recalled in this passage from Leavis'
Revaluation:
There are, of course, discriminations to be made: Tennyson, for

instance, is a much better poet than any of the pre-Raphaelites.
And Christina Rossetti deserves to be set apart from them and
credited with her own thin and limited but very notable distinction....
There is, too, Emily Bronte, who has hardly yet had full justice as
a poet. I will record, without offering it as a checked and deliberated
judgment, the remembered impression that her Cold in the earth is
the finest poem in the nineteenth-century part of The OxfordBook
of English Verse.2
Such unabashed "debaucheries of judiciousness" (as Northrop Frye would
later characterize them) were, however, increasingly seen as embarrass-
ments to the discipline, and the practice of evaluative criticism became
more defensive, at least partly in response to the renewed and updated
authority given to axiological skepticism.
In the thirties and forties, a number of prominent philosophers,
among them A. J. Ayer and Rudolph Carnap, began to argue that value
judgments are not merely distinct from empirically verifiable statements
of fact but vacuous pseudostatements, at best suasive and commendatory,
at worst simply the emotive expressions of personal sentiment, and in
any case neither reflecting nor producing genuine knowledge.3 For the
positivistic literary scholar, such arguments reinforced his impression
that the work of his critical colleague was the intellectually insubstantial
activity of a dilettante, while the true discipline of literary studies was
exhibited in his own labors, in which he had always sought to achieve a
rigor and objectivity as free as possible from the contamination of value
ascription. In the institutional struggles that ensued, various maneuvers
were developed to secure for "criticism" not only a central place in the

discipline but also an intellectual status equal in respectability to that of

empirical science and what was commonly referred to as "serious schol-
arship."
One obvious tactic, still favored in many quarters of the literary
academy, was to invoke the humanistic mission of literary studies and
turn the fact-value split against the scholars' claim of centrality. Thus
Winters would maintain that while science was value-neutral-or, as he
put it, "amoral"-literary studies had moral responsibilities. The function
of historical scholarship and philology was, accordingly, ancillary: spe-
cifically, it was "to lay the groundwork for criticism," while the important
job was, precisely, to evaluate literature.4 For Winters, this meant to
declare, forthrightly and unequivocally, what was good and bad literature
(which was to say, "moral" or "decadent" literature), and he did not
hesitate, himself, to rank-order not only poets and poems but also literary
genres, verse forms, and entire centuries.
Winters had a genius for unequivocality that was imitated but never
matched by his numerous followers. In any case, a more common tactic,
exemplified by a number of the New Critics,was to devise some formulation
of critical activity that bridged the fact-value split or at least unobtrusively
edged the two sides together. Thus, in 1951, W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., in an
important essay titled "Explication as Criticism," observed that it was
necessary to find "an escape between the two extremes of sheer affectivism
and sheer scientific neutralism" and attempted to demonstrate how eval-
uation could be assimilated into the typical New Critical production of
increasingly exquisite explications and fine-grained analyses: "But then,
finally, it is possible to conceive and produce instances where explication
in the neutral sense is so integrated with special and local value intimations
that it rises from neutrality gradually and convincingly to the point of
total judgment."5
It may be recalled here that Wimsatt's attempt to expose "the affective
fallacy"was directed largely at the "psychologicaltheory of value" developed
by I. A. Richards in the twenties, which Wimsatt charged with amounting
to subjectivism and leading to impressionism and relativism. Richards'
theory was, however, in effect an updated rehearsal of the eighteenth-
century empiricist-normative account and, like the latter, designed to
rebut axiological skepticism.6 An adequate theory of criticism, Richards
wrote, must be able to answer such questions as "Whatgives the experience
of reading a certain poem its value?" and "Why is one opinion about
works of art not as good as another?";7 and while the first of these
questions no doubt seemed to Wimsatt altogether different from what,
for him, would have been the more proper question of what gives the
poemitselfits value, the second of them makes Richards'normative objectives
quite clear. Indeed, he consistently put his psycho-neurological account
of value in the service of canonical judgments and repeatedly translated
it into versions of evaluative absolutism and objectivism. Thus, the re-

markable chapter on "Badness in Poetry" in Principles of LiteraryCriticism

concludes its excruciating examination of the failure of a sonnet by Ella
Wheeler Wilcox to produce a "high level of organization" of "adequate
[neural] impulses" with Richards' observation that, although "those who
enjoy [the sonnet] certainly seem to enjoy it to a high degree," nevertheless,
with good and bad poetry, as with brandy and beer, the "actual universal
preference of those who have tried both fairly is the same as superiority
in value of one over the other. Keats, by universal qualified opinion, is
a more efficient poet than Wilcox, and that is the same as saying his
works are more valuable."8 The invocation of an "actual" universality
coupled with such question-begging hedges as "fairly"and "qualified" is,
as we shall see, characteristic of traditional empiricist-normative accounts.
It was not, one suspects, its alleged relativism that made Richards' theory
so unabsorbable by the literary academy but rather the raw jargon and
unedifying physiology that attended it.
The boldest move in the mid-century effort to give disciplinary re-
spectability and cognitive substance to criticism was, or course, Frye's call
upon it to redefine itself as a project that banished evaluation altogether.
In his "Polemical Introduction" to the Anatomyof Criticism,Frye insisted
that, if criticism was ever to become a "field of genuine learning" (sig-
nificantly exemplified by "chemistry or philology"), it would have to "snip
... off and throw . . . away" that part that had "no organic connection
with [it],"-namely, evaluation.9 For Frye, the shifting assessments and
rank-orderings made by critics were not only a noncumulative accumulation
of subjective judgments but also irrelevant to "real criticism," since he
believed, echoing and endorsing Eliot, that "the existing monuments of
literature form an ideal order among themselves." "This,"Frye commented,
"is criticism, and very fundamental criticism. Much of this book attempts
to annotate it" (AC, p. 18).
In what proved to be a memorable passage, he derided "all the
literary chit-chat which makes the reputations of poets boom and crash
in an imaginary stock-exchange," and observed:
This sort of thing cannot be part of any systematic study, for a

systematic study can only progress: whatever dithers or vacillates
or reacts is merely leisure-class gossip. The history of taste is no
more a part of the structureof criticism than the Huxley-Wilberforce
debate is a part of the structure of biological science. [AC, p. 18]
In view of Frye's Platonic conception of literature and positivisticconception

of science, it is not surprising that he failed to recognize that his analogy
here cuts both ways. For not only could the Huxley-Wilberforce debate
be seen as very much a part of the "structure"of biological science (which,
like that of any other science, including any science of literature, is by
no means independent of its own intellectual, social, and institutional

history), but, since the "order" of "the existing monuments of literature"

is the distinctly sublunary product of, among other things, evaluative
practices, any truly systematic study of literature would sooner or later
have to include a study of thosepractices. In other words, the structure of
criticism cannot be so readily disengaged from the history of taste because
they are mutually implicating and incorporating.
Joining as it did both an appeal to scientific objectivity and a humanistic
conception of literature, while at the same time extending the promise
of a high calling and bright future to a project pursued in the name of
"criticism," Frye's effort to banish evaluation from literary study was
remarkably effective-at least to the extent of haunting a generation of
literary scholars, critics, and teachers, many of whom are still inclined to
apologize for making overt value judgments, as if for some temporary
intellectual or moral lapse.'0 It was hardly the last word on the subject,
however, and as late as 1968 we find E. D. Hirsch, Jr., attempting to
rehabilitate the cognitive status of evaluative criticism in an essay signif-
icantly titled "Evaluation as Knowledge." In the essay, Hirsch argues that
the value judgment of a literary work, when properly directed to the
work itself and not to a "distorted version of it," closely coordinated with
a correct interpretation of its objective meaning and rationally justified
with reference to specific criteria, does constitute a genuine proposition
and, therefore, like a "pure description," does "qualify as objective knowl-
edge."" Since just about every concept engaged by Hirsch's argument is
at issue in contemporary epistemology and criticaltheory, it is not surprising
that it did not settle the question of the intellectual status of evaluative
criticism-for Hirsch or anyone else.'2
The debate over the proper place of evaluation in literary studies
remains unresolved and is, I believe, unresolvable in the terms in which
it has been formulated. Meanwhile, although evaluative criticism remains
intellectually suspect, it certainly continues to be practiced as a magisterial
privilege in the classrooms of the literary academy and granted admission
to its journals as long as it comes under cover of other presumably more
objective types of literary study, such as historical description, textual
analysis, or explication. At the same time, however, the fact that literary
evaluation is not merely an aspect of formal academic criticism but a
complex set of social and cultural activities central to the very nature of
literature has been obscured, and an entire domain that is properly the
object of theoretical, historical, and empirical exploration has been lost
to serious inquiry.
Although I confine my comments here primarily to the American
literary academy and to Anglo-American critical theory, the situation-
and its intellectual and institutional history-has not been altogether
different in continental Europe. The dominance of language- and inter-
pretation-centered theories, movements, and approaches, for example,
is clearly international, and versions of the positivist/humanist conflict

have shaped the development of literary studies in Europe as well. Certain

exceptions are, however, instructive. When, in the twenties and thirties,
East European theorists also sought to transform literary studies into a
progressive, systematic science, the problematic of value and evaluation
was not excluded from the project. For example, the historically variable
functions of texts and the interrelations among canonical and noncanonical
works and other cultural products and activities were recognized and
documented by, among others, Jurij Tynjanov and Mikhail Bakhtin; and
Jan Mukarovsky's explorations of the general question of aesthetic value
were both original and substantial.l3 Also, studies in the sociology of
literature, especially in France and Germany, and the project of reception
aesthetics have concerned themselves with aspects of literary evaluation.14
It should also be noted, however, that the study of value and evaluation
remained relatively undeveloped in the later work of formalists and
structuralists,'5 while Marxist literary theory has only recently begun to
move from minimal revisions of orthodox aesthetic axiology toward a
radical reformulation.'6 It may be added that, although the theoretical
perspective, conceptual structures, and analytic techniques developed by
Jacques Derrida are potentially of great interest here (especially in con-
junction with the renewed attention to Nietzsche), their radical axiological
implications remain largely unexplored,'7 and, insofar as it has been
appropriated by American critical theory, deconstruction has been put
almost entirely in the service of antihermeneutics, which is to say that it
has been absorbed by our preemptive occupation with interpretive criticism.
Recent moves toward opening the question of value and evaluation in
the American literary academy have come primarily from those who
have sought to subject its canon to dramatic revaluation, notably feminist
critics. Although their efforts have been significant to that end, they have
not, however, amounted as yet to the articulation of a well-developed
noncanonical theory of value and evaluation.
One of the major effects of prohibiting or inhibiting explicit evaluation

is to forestall the exhibition and obviate the possible acknowledgment of
divergent systems of value and thus to ratify, by default, established
evaluative authority. It is worth noting that in none of the debates of the
forties and fifties was the traditional academic canon itself questioned,
and that where evaluative authority was not ringingly affirmed, asserted,
or self-justified, it was simply assumed. Thus Frye himself could speak
almost in one breath of the need to "get rid of... all casual, sentimental,
and prejudiced value-judgments" as "the first step in developing a genuine
poetics" and of "the masterpieces of literature" which are "the materials
of literary criticism" (AC, pp. 18, 15). The identity of those masterpieces,
it seemed, could be taken for granted or followed more or less automatically
from the "direct value-judgement of informed good taste" or "certain

literary values . . . fully established by critical experience" (AC, pp. 27,

20).
In a passage of particular interest, Frye wrote:
Comparative estimates of value are really inferences, most valid

when silent ones, from critical practice .... The critic will find soon,
and constantly, that Milton is a more rewarding and suggestive poet
to work with than Blackmore. But the more obvious this becomes,
the less time he will want to waste belaboring the point. [AC, p. 25]
In addition to the noteworthy correlation of validity with silence (com-

parable, to some extent, to Wimsatt's discreet "intimations"of value), two
other aspects of Frye's remarks here repay some attention. First, in claiming
that it is altogether obvious that Milton, rather than Blackmore, is "a
more rewarding and suggestive poet [for the critic] to work with," Frye
begged the question of what kind of work the critic would be doing. For
surely if one were concerned with a question such as the relation of
canonical and noncanonical texts in the system of literary value in eigh-
teenth-century England, one would find Blackmore just as rewarding
and suggestive to work with as Milton. Both here and in his repeated
insistence that the "material" of criticism must be "the masterpieces of
literature" (he refers also to "a feeling we have all had: that the study of
mediocre works of art remains a random and peripheral form of critical
experience" [AC, p. 17]), Frye exhibits a severely limited conception of
the potential domain of literary study and of the sort of problems and
phenomena with which it could or should deal. In this conceptual and
methodological confinement, however (which betrays the conservative
force of the ideology of traditional humanism even in the laboratories
of the new progressive poetics), he has been joined by just about every
other member of the Anglo-American literary academy during the past
fifty years.
The second point of interest in Frye's remarks is his significant
conjoining of Milton with Blackmore as an illustration of the sort of
comparative estimate that is so obvious as not to need belaboring. Black-
more, we recall, was the author of an ambitious epic poem, The Creation,
notable in literary history primarily as the occasion of some faint praise
from Dr. Johnson and otherwise as a topos of literary disvalue; its function-
indeed, one might say, its value-has been to stand as an instance of bad
poetry. This handy conjunction, however (and similar ones, such as
Shakespeare and Edgar Guest, John Keats and Joyce Kilmer, T. S. Eliot
and Ella Wheeler Wilcox, that occur repeatedly in the debates outlined
above), evades the more difficult and consequential questions of judgment
posed by genuine evaluative diversity and conflict: questions that are
posed, for example, by specific claims of value made for noncanonical
works (such as modern texts, especially highly innovative ones, and such
culturally exotic works as oral or tribal literature, popular literature, and

"ethnic" literature) and also by judgments of literary value made by or

on behalf of what might be called noncanonical or culturally exotic au-
diences (such as all those readers who are not now students, critics, or
professors of literature and perhaps never were and never will be within
the academy or on its outskirts).
The evasion is dramatized when conflicts of judgment arising from
fundamental and perhaps irreconcilable diversity of interest are exhibited
in currently charged political contexts. A specific example will illustrate
my point here. In 1977 a study of Langston Hughes' poetry was published
by Onwuchekwa Jemie, a Nigerian-born, American-educated poet and
critic, at that time associate professor of English and Afro-American
literature at the University of Minnesota. In one section of his study,
Jemie discusses Hughes' poetic cycle, "Madame," in relation to Eliot's
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and Ezra Pound's "Hugh Selwyn
Mauberly," comparing various formal and thematic aspects of the three
works. He observes, for example, that each of them is "consistent in
language, tone and attitude with the socio-psychological milieu which it
explores: the ghetto dialect and sassy humor [in Hughes' work], the
cynical polished talk of literary London [in Pound's], and the bookish
ruminations of Prufrock's active mind in inactive body"; he then concludes
pointedly: "In short, to fault one poem for not being more like the other,
for not dealing with the matter and in the manner of the other, is to err
in judgment."'8 Soon after its publication, a reviewer of Jemie's book in
the London TimesLiterarySupplementtook it very much to task for, among
other things, its "painfully irrelevant comparisons," citing the passage
quoted above.'9 And, a few weeks later, there appeared in TLS an ex-
traordinary letter to the editor from Chinweizu, himself a Nigerian-born,
American-educated writer and critic. Responding to the review and par-
ticularly to the phrase, "painfully irrelevant comparisons," he shot back:
Painful to whom? Irrelevant to whom? To idolators of white

genius? Who says that Shakespeare, Aristophanes, Dante, Milton,
Dostoevsky, Joyce, Pound, Sartre, Eliot, etc. are the last word in
literary achievement, unequalled anywhere? ... The point of these
comparisons is not to thrust a black face among these local idols of
Europe which, to our grave injury, have been bloated into "uni-
versality"; rather it is to help heave them out of our way, clear them
from our skies by making clear . .. that we have, among our own,
the equals and betters of these chaps. ... In this day and age, British
preferences do not count in the Black World. As Langston Hughes
himself put it half a century ago: "If white people are pleased, we
are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter."20
This brief case history in the problem of literary evaluation illustrates,

among other things, what genuine evaluative conflict sounds like. (It also
illustrates that, contrary to Frye's assertion, the history of taste is not "a

history where there are no facts" [AC, p. 18], though we have barely
begun to recognize either how to chronicle its episodes and shape its
narrative or its significance not only for "the structure of criticism" but
also for the structure of "literature.")I would suggest that it is, also among
other things, the very possibility of that sound that is being evaded in
Anglo-American literary studies and, furthermore, that when the sound
reaches the intensity that we hear in Chinweizu's letter, the literary academy
has no way to acknowledge it except, perhaps, in the language of coun-
teroutrage.21
It is clear that, with respect to the central pragmatic issues as well
as theoretical problems of literary value and evaluation, American critical
theory has simply painted itself out of the picture. Beguiled by the hu-
manist's fantasy of transcendence, endurance, and universality, it has
been unable to acknowledge the most fundamental character of literary
value, which is its mutability and diversity. And, at the same time, mag-
netized by the goals and ideology of a naive scientism, distracted by the
arid concerns of philosophic axiology, obsessed by a misplaced quest for
"objectivity," and confined in its very conception of literary studies by
the narrow intellectual traditions and professional allegiances of the literary
academy, it has foreclosed from its own domain the possibility of inves-
tigating the dynamics of that mutability and understanding the nature
of that diversity.
The type of investigation I have in mind here would seek neither
to establish normative "criteria,"devise presumptively objective evaluative
procedures, nor discover grounds for the "justification"of criticaljudgments
or practices. It would not, in short, be a literary axiology or, in effect,
the counterpart for evaluative criticism of what a literary hermeneutics
offers to be for interpretive criticism. It would seek, rather, to clarify the
nature of literary-and, more broadly, aesthetic-value in conjunction
with a more general rethinking of the concept of value; to explore the
multiple forms and functions of literary evaluation, institutional as well
as individual, in relation to the circumstantial constraints and conditions
to which they are responsive; to chronicle "the history of taste" in relation
to a general model of historical evaluative dynamics and specific local
conditions; and to describe and account for the various phenomena and
activities that appear to be involved in literary and aesthetic evaluation
in relation to our more general understanding-as it is and as it develops--
of human culture and behavior.
The sort of inquiry suggested here (which obviously could not be
pursued within the confines of literary study or critical theory as they
are presently conceived and demarcated) might be expected to make its
accounts internally consistent, externally connectable, and amenable to
continuous extension and refinement; for it is thus that the theoretical
power and productivity of those accounts would be served and secured.
This is not, however, to imagine a monolithic intellectual project that

would offer to yield an ultimately comprehensive, unified, and objective

account of its subject; for to imagine it thus would, of course, be to
repeat, only on a grander scale, elements of the raw positivism and naive
scientism that were, in part, responsible for both the exile of evaluation
and the confinements of modern critical theory. What is desirable, rather,
is an inquiry pursued with the recognition that, like any other intellectual
enterprise, it would consist, at any given time, of a set of heterogeneous
projects; that the conceptual structures and methodological practices
adopted in those projects would themselves be historically and otherwise
contingent (reflecting, among other things, prevailing or currently in-
teresting conceptual structures and methods in related areas of inquiry);
that whatever other value the descriptions and accounts produced by
any of those projects might and undoubtedly would have (as indices of
twentieth-century thought, for example, to future historians), their specific
value as descriptions and accounts would be a function of how well they
made intelligible the phenomena within their domain to whoever, at
whatever time and from whatever perspective, had an interest in them;
and that its pursuit would be shaped by-that is, energized and transformed
in response to-those interests, and its descriptions and accounts con-
tinuously and variously interpreted and employed in accord with them.22
The discussion that follows is designed to suggest a theoretical frame-
work for such an inquiry.23
2. The Economicsof Literaryand AestheticValue
All value is radically contingent, being neither an inherent property

of objects nor an arbitrary projection of subjects but, rather, the product
of the dynamics of an economic system. It is readily granted, of course,
that it is in relation to a system of that sort that commodities such as
gold, bread, and paperback editions of Moby-Dickacquire the value indicated
by their market prices. It is traditional, however, both in economic and
aesthetic theory as well as in informal discourse, to distinguish sharply
between the value of an entity in that sense (that is, its "exchange-value")
and some other type of value that may be referred to as its utility (or
"use-value") or, especially with respect to so-called "nonutilitarian" objects
such as artworks or works of literature, as its "intrinsic value." Thus, it
might be said that whereas the fluctuating price of a particular paperback
edition of Moby-Dickis a function of such variables as supply and demand,
production and distribution costs, and the publisher's calculation of cor-
porate profits, these factors do not affect the value of Moby-Dickas ex-
perienced by an individual reader or its intrinsic value as a work of
literature. These distinctions, however, are not as clear-cut as may appear.
Like its price in the marketplace, the value of an entity to an individual
subject is also the product of the dynamics of an economic system, specifically

the personal economy constituted by the subject's needs, interests, and

resources-biological, psychological, material, and experiential. Like any
other economy, moreover, this too is a continuously fluctuating or shifting
system, for our individual needs, interests, and resources are themselves
functions of our continuously changing states in relation to an environment
that may be relatively stable but is never absolutely fixed. The two systems
are, it may be noted, not only analogous but also interactive and inter-
dependent; for part of our environment is the market economy, and,
conversely, the market economy is comprised, in part, of the diverse
personal economies of individual producers, distributors, consumers,
and so forth.
The traditional discourse of value-including a number of terms I
have used here, such as "subject,""object,""needs,""interests,"and, indeed,
"value" itself-reflects an arbitrary arresting, segmentation, and hypos-
tasization of the continuous process of our interactions with our envi-
ronments-or what could also be described as the continuous interplay
among multiple configurable systems. It is difficult to devise (and would
be, perhaps, impossible to sustain) a truly Heraclitean discourse that did
not reflect such conceptual operations, but we may recognize that, insofar
as such terms project images of discrete acts, agents, and entities, fixed
attributes, unidirectional forces, and simple causal and temporal rela-
tionships, they obscure the dynamics of value and reinforce dubious
concepts of noncontingency-that is, concepts such as "intrinsic,""objective,"
"absolute," "universal," and "transcendent." It is necessary, therefore, to
emphasize a number of other interactive relationships and forms of
interdependence that are fragmented by our language and commonly
ignored in critical theory and aesthetic axiology.
First, as I have already suggested, a subject's experience of an entity
is always a function of his or her personal economy: that is, the specific
"existence" of an object or event, its integrity, coherence, and boundaries,
the category of entities to which it "belongs" and its specific "features,"
"qualities," or "properties" are all the variable products of the subject's
engagement with his or her environment under a particular set of con-
ditions. Not only is an entity always experienced under more or less
different conditions, but the various experiences do not yield a simple
cumulative (corrected, improved, deeper, more thorough, or complete)
knowledge of the entity because they are not additive. Rather, each
experience of an entity frames it in a different role and constitutes it as
a different configuration, with different "properties" foregrounded and
repressed. Moreover, the subject's experiences of an entity are not discrete
or, strictly speaking, successive, because recollection and anticipation
always overlay perception and the units of what we call "experience"
themselves vary and overlap.
Second, what we speak of as a subject's "needs," "interests," and
"purposes" are not only always changing (and it may be noted here that

a subject's "self"-or that on behalf of which s/he may be said to act with
"self-interest"-is also variable, being multiply reconstituted in terms of
different roles and relationships), but they are also not altogether in-
dependent of or prior to the entities that satisfy or implement them; that
is, entities also produce the needs and interests they satisfy and evoke
the purposes they implement. Moreover, because our purposes are con-
tinuously transformed and redirected by the objects we produce in the
very process of implementing them, and because of the complex inter-
relations among human needs, technological production, and cultural
practices, there is a continuous process of mutual modification between
our desires and our universe.24
Of particular significance for the value of "worksof art"and "literature"
is the interactive relation between the classificationof an entity and the
functions it is expected or desired to perform. In perceiving an object
or artifact in terms of some category-as, for example, "a clock," "a
dictionary," "a doorstop," "a curio"-we implicitly isolate and foreground
certain of its possible functions and typically refer its value to the extent
to which it performs those functions more or less effectively. But the
relation between function and classification also operates in reverse: thus,
under conditions that produce the "need" for a door-stopping object or
an "interest"in Victorian artifacts, certain properties and possible functions
of various objects in the neighborhood will be foregrounded, and both
the classification and value of those objects will follow accordingly. As
we commonly put it, one will "realize" the value of the dictionary as a
doorstop or "appreciate" the value of the clock as a curio.25(The mutually
defining relations among classification, function, and value are nicely
exhibited in the OED's definition of "curio" as "an object of art, piece of
bric-a-brac, etc., valued as a curiosity," which is, of course, something
like-and no less accurate than-defining "clock" as "an object valued
as a clock.") It may be noted here that human beings have evolved as
distinctly opportunistic creatures and that our survival, both as individuals
and as a species, continues to be enhanced by our ability and inclination
to reclassify objects and to "realize"and "appreciate" novel and alternate
functions for them-which is also to "misuse" them and to fail to respect
their presumed purposes and conventional generic classifications.
The various forms of interdependence emphasized here have con-
siderable bearing on what may be recognized as the economics of literary
and aesthetic value. The traditional-idealist, humanist, genteel-tendency
to isolate or protect certain aspects of life and culture, among them works
of art and literature, from consideration in economic terms has had the
effect of mystifying the nature-or, more accurately, the dynamics-of
their value. In view of the arbitrariness of the exclusion, it is not surprising
that the languages of aesthetics and economics nevertheless tend to drift
toward each other and that their segregation must be constantly patrolled.26
(Thus, an aesthetician deplores a pun on "appreciation" appearing in an

article on art investment and warns of the dangers of confusing "the

uniqueness of a painting that gives it scarcity value . . . with its unique
value as a work of art.")27To those for whom terms such as "utility,"
"effectiveness," and "function" suggest gross pragmatic instrumentality,
crass material desires, and the satisfaction of animal needs, a concept
such as use-value will be seen as irrelevant to or clearly to be distinguished
from aesthetic value. There is, however, no good reason to confine the
domain of the utilitarian to objects that serve only immediate, specific,
and unexalted ends or, for that matter, to assume that the value of
artworks has altogether nothing to do with pragmatic instrumentality or
animal needs.28 The recurrent impulse or effort to define aesthetic value
by contradistinction to all forms of utility or as the negation of all other
nameable sources of interest or forms of value-hedonic, practical, sen-
timental, ornamental, historical, ideological, and so forth-is, in effect,
to define it out of existence; for when all such particular utilities, interests,
and sources of value have been subtracted, nothing remains. Or, to put
this in other terms: the "essentialvalue"of an artwork consists of everything
from which it is usually distinguished.
To be sure, various candidates have been proposed for a pure, non-
utilitarian, interest-free, and, in effect, value-free source of aesthetic value,
such as the eliciting of "intrinsically rewarding" intellectual, sensory, or
perceptual activities, or Kant's "free play of the cognitive faculties." A
strict accounting of any of these seemingly gratuitous activities, however,
would bring us sooner or later to their biological utility and/or survival
value (and indeed to something very much like "animal needs"). For
although we may be individually motivated to engage in them "for their
own sake" (which is to say, for the sake of the gratifications they provide),
our doing so apparently yields a long-term profit in enhanced cognitive
development, behavioral flexibility, and thus biological fitness, and our
general tendency to do so is in all likelihood the product of evolutionary
mechanisms.29 Moreover, as I have pointed out elsewhere, the occasioning
of such activities (or "experiences") is not confined to "works of art" and
therefore cannot, without circularity, be said to constitute the defining
"aesthetic function" of the objects so labeled.30 More generally, it may be
observed that since there are no functions performed by artworks that
may be specified as unique to them and also no way to distinguish the
"rewards"provided by the art-related experiences or behavior from those
provided by innumerable other kinds of experience and behavior, any
distinctions drawn between "aesthetic" and "non- (or "extra-) aesthetic"
value are fundamentally problematic.31
Suggestions of the radically contingent nature of aesthetic value are

commonly countered by evidence of apparent noncontingent value: for
example, the endurance of certain classic canonical works (the invocation

of Homer being a topos of the critical tradition) and, if not quite Pope's
"gen'ral chorus of mankind," then at least the convergent sentiments of
people of education and discrimination. Certainly any theory of aesthetic
value must be able to account for continuity, stability, and apparent
consensus as well as for drift, shift, and diversity. The tendency throughout
formal aesthetic axiology has been to explain the constancies and con-
vergences by the inherent qualities of the objects and/or some set of
presumed human universals and to explain the variabilitiesand divergences
by the errors, defects, and biases of individual subjects. The classic de-
velopment of this account is found in Hume's essay, Of the Standard of
Taste, where the "catholic and universal beauty" is seen to be the result
of
[t]he relation which nature has placed between the form and the
sentiment.... We shall be able to ascertain its influence ... from
the durable admiration which attends those works that have survived
all the caprices of mode and fashion, all the mistakes of ignorance
and envy.
The same Homer who pleased at Athens two thousand years
ago, is still admired at Paris and London. All the changes of climate,
government, religion and language have not been able to obscure
his glory....
It appears then, that amidst all the variety and caprice of taste,
there are certain general principles of approbation and blame, whose
influence a careful eye may trace in all the operations of the mind.
Some particular forms or qualities, from the original structure of
the internal fabric are calculated to please, and others to displease;
and if they fail of their effect in any particular instance, it is from
some apparent defect or imperfection in the organ.
Many and frequent are the defects ... which prevent or weaken
the influence of those general principles.32
The essay continues by enumerating and elaborating these defects, in-

troducing the familiar catalog (already given vivid expression in, among
other places, Pope's Essay on Criticism:"Of all the causes which conspire to
blind / Man's erring judgment and misguide the mind") with an analogy,
also a commonplace of the tradition, between "the perfect beauty," as
agreed upon by men "in a sound state of the organ," and "the true and
real colors" of objects as they appear "in daylight to the eye of a man in
health."33
The following is a more recent statement of the traditional view:
False judgments and intuitions of an object can only be corrected

if there is a correct and permanently valid intuition of an object....
The relativity of value judgments merely proves that subjective
judgments are conjoined with the person, that mistakenjudgments-

of which there is no dearth in the history of literature-are always

the fault of the person.
... Just as the universal validity of a mathematical proposition
does not necessarily imply that everyone can understand it, "but
merely that everyone who understands it must agree with it," so the
universal validity of aesthetic value does not necessarily mean that
evidence of it is felt by everyone. Aesthetic values demand an adequate
attitude, a trained or reliably functioning organ. Moreover, the fact
that the history of literature contains, albeit tacitly, a firm gradation
of valuable works of art is an indication that values transcend his-
toricity.
... The value-feeling organ must not be encumbered with pre-
judgments, pre-feelings, or arbitrarily formed opinions if it wishes
to address itself adequately to the object, a process that is by no
means always easy,... for the human being is in part-an external
but not uninfluential part-a historical creature, embedded in a
whole cluster of behavior compulsions that stem from his environ-
ment.34
This conflation of, among others, Hume, Kant, Nicolai Hartmann, and
Roman Ingarden is remarkable only in making particularly flagrant the
logical incoherence of the standard account, whether in its empiricist,
idealist, or phenomenological guise.
Given a more sophisticated formulation, Hume's belief that the in-
dividual experience of "beauty" can be related to "forms" and "qualities"
that gratify human beings "naturally" by virtue of certain physiological
structures and psychological mechanisms is probably not altogether without
foundation.35 Taken as a ground for the justification of normative claims,
however, and transformed accordingly into a model of standards-and-
deviations, it obliged him (as it did and does many others) to interpret
as so many instances of individual pathology what are, rather, the variable
products of the interaction between, on the one hand, certain relatively
uniform innate structures, mechanisms, and tendencies and, on the other,
innumerable cultural and contextual variables as well as other individual
variables-the latter including particulars of personal history, temper-
ament, age, and so forth. What produces evaluative consensus, such as
it is, is not the healthy functioning of universal organs but the playing
out of the samedynamics and variable contingencies that produce evaluative
divergences.
Although value is always subject-relative, not all value is equally
subject-variable. Within a particular community, the tastes and preferences
of subjects-that is, their tendency to find more satisfaction of a particular
kind in one rather than another of some array of comparable items and
to select among them accordingly-will be conspicuously divergent (or
indeed idiosyncratic) to the extent that the satisfactions in question are
themselves functions of types of needs, interests, and resources that (a)

vary individually along a wide spectrum, (b) are especially resistant, if

not altogether intractable, to cultural channeling, and/or (c) are especially
responsive to circumstantial context. Conversely, their tastes and pref-
erences will tend to be similar to the extent that the satisfactions in
question are functions of types of needs, interests, and resources that (a)
vary individually within a narrow spectrum, (b) are especially tractable
to cultural channeling, and (c) remain fairly stable under a variety of
conditions.
Insofar as satisfactions ("aesthetic" or any other: erotic, for example)
with regard to some array of objects are functions of needs, interests,
and resources of the first kind, preferences for those objects will appear
"subjective," "eccentric," "stubborn," and "capricious." Insofar as they are
functions of the second, preferences will seem so obvious, "natural,"and
"rational" as not to appear to be matters of taste at all. Indeed, it is
precisely under the latter conditions that the value of particular objects
will appear to be inherent, that distinctions or gradations of value among
them will appear to reduce to differences in the properties or qualities
of the objects themselves, and that explicit judgments of their value will
appear to be objective. In short, here as elsewhere, a co-incidence of
contingencies among individual subjects will be interpreted by those
subjects as noncontingency.
Because we are dealing here not with two opposed sets of discrete
determinants but with the possibility of widely differing specifications
for a large number of complexly interacting variables, we may expect to
find a continuous exhibition of every degree of divergence and convergence
among the subjects in a particular community over the course of its
history, depending in each instance on the extent of the disparity and
uniformity of each of the relevant contingencies and on the strength of
various social practices and cultural institutions that control the exhibition
of extreme "deviance."36It may be noted that the latter-that is, the
normative mechanisms within a community that suppress divergence
and tend to obscure as well as deny the contingency of value-will always
have, as their counterpart, a countermechanism that permits a recognition
of that contingency and a more or less genial acknowledgement of the
inevitability of divergence: hence the ineradicability, in spite of the efforts
of establishment axiology, of what might be called folk-relativism: "Chacun
a son gout"; "De gustibus . ."; "One man's meat is another's poison";
and so forth.
The prevailing structure of tastes and preferences (and the consequent
illusion of a consensus based on objective value) will always be implicitly
threatened or directly challenged by the divergent tastes and preferences
of some subjects within the community (for example, those not yet ad-
equately acculturated, such as the young, and others with "uncultivated"
tastes, such as provincials and social upstarts) as well as by most subjects
outside it or, more significantly, on its peripheryand who thus have occasion

to interact with its members (for example, exotic visitors, immigrants,

colonials, and members of various minority or marginalized groups). Con-
sequently, institutions of evaluative authority will be called upon repeatedly
to devise arguments and procedures that validate the community's es-
tablished tastes and preferences, thereby warding off barbarism and the
constant apparition of an imminent collapse of standards and alsojustifying
the exercise of their own normative authority. In Hume's words, "It is
natural to seek a Standard of Taste; a rule by which the various sentiments
of men may be reconciled; at least a decision afforded confirming one
sentiment and denying another"-the usefulness of such a rule to the
latter end being illustrated in the essay by that memorable vignette of
the barbarian in the drawing room who "would assert an equality of
genius and elegance between Ogilby and Milton or Bunyan and Addison"
and what ensues: "Though there may be found personswho give preference
to the former authors, no one pays attention to such taste; and we pronounce
without scruple the sentiment of these pretended critics to be absurd
and ridiculous."37The sequence emphasized here is no less telling than
the embarrassment of the argument by the examples.
Both informally, as in the drawing rooms of men of cultivation and
discrimination or the classrooms of the literary academy, and formally,
as in Hume's essay and throughout the central tradition of Western
critical theory, the validation commonly takes the form of privileging
absolutely-that is, "standard"-izing-the particular contingencies that
govern the preferences of the members of the group and discounting
or, as suggested above, pathologizing all other contingencies.38 Thus it
will be assumed or maintained: (a) that the particularfunctions they expect
and desire the class of objects in question (for example, "works of art"
or "literature") to perform are their intrinsic or proper functions, all
other expected, desired, or emergent functions being inappropriate, ir-
relevant, extrinsic, abuses of the true nature of those objects or violations
of their authorially intended or generically intrinsic purposes; (b) that
the particular conditions (circumstantial, technological, institutional, and
so forth) under which the members of the group typically interact with
those objects are suitable, standard, or necessary for their proper ap-
preciation, all other conditions being irregular, unsuitable, substandard,
or outlandish; and, perhaps most significantly, (c) that the particular
subjectswho compose the members of the group are of sound mind and
body, duly trained and informed, and generally competent, all other
subjects being defective, deficient, or deprived-suffering from crudenesses
of sensibility, diseases and distortions of perception, weaknesses of char-
acter, impoverishment of background-and-education, cultural or historical
biases, ideological or personal prejudices, and/or undeveloped, corrupted,
or jaded tastes.
With regard to this last point (c), we may recall here the familiar
specifications of the "ideal critic" as one who, in addition to possessing

various exemplary natural endowments and cultural competencies, has,

through exacting feats of self-liberation, freed himself of all forms of
particularity and individuality, all special interests (or, as in Kant, all
interests whatsoever), and thus of all bias-which is to say, one who is
"free" of everything in relation to which any experience or judgment of
value occurs. (In these respects, the ideal critic of aesthetic axiology is
the exact counterpart of the "ideal reader" of literary hermeneutics.)
We may also note, with regard to the first point (a), that the privileging
of a particular set of functions for artworks or works of literature may
be (and often is) itself justified on the grounds that the performance of
such functions serves some higher individual, social, or transcendent
good, such as the psychic health of the reader, the brotherhood of mankind,
the glorification of God, the project of human emancipation, or the
survival of Western civilization. Any selection from among these alternate
and to some extent mutually exclusive higher goods, however, would
itself require justification in terms of some yet higher good, and there is
no absolute stopping point for this theoretically infinite regress of judg-
ments and justifications. This is not to say that certain functions of artworks
do not serve higher-or at least more general, comprehensive, or longer-
range-goods better than others. It is to say, however, that our selection
among higher goods, like our selection among any array of goods, will
always be contingent.
3. The Multiple Forms, Functions, and Contextsof Evaluative

Behavior
It follows from the conception of value outlined here that evaluations
are not discrete acts or episodes punctuating experience but indistin-
guishable from the very processes of acting and experiencing themselves.
In other words, for a responsive creature, to exist is to evaluate. We are
always calculating how things "figure" for us -always pricing them, so
to speak, in relation to the total economy of our personal universe.
Throughout our lives, we perform a continuous succession of rapid-fire
cost-benefit analyses, estimating the probable "worthwhileness"of alternate
courses of action in relation to our always limited resources of time and
energy, assessing, re-assessing, and classifying entities with respect to
their probable capacity to satisfy our current needs and desires and to
serve our emergent interests and long-range plans and purposes. We
tend to become most conscious of our own evaluative behavior when the
need to select among an array of alternate "goods" and/or to resolve an
internal "contest of sentiments" moves us to specifically verbal or other
symbolic f6rms of cost accounting: thus we draw up our lists of pros and
cons, lose sleep, and bore our friends by overtly rehearsing our options,
estimating the risks and probable outcomes of various actions, and so

forth. Most of these calculations, however, are performed intuitively and

inarticulately, and many of them are so recurrent that the habitual arith-
metic becomes part of our personality and comprises the very style of
our being and behavior, forming what we may call our principles or
tastes-and what others may call our biases and prejudices.
I have been speaking up to this point of the evaluations we make
for ourselves. As social creatures, however, we also evaluate for one
another through various kinds of individual acts and also through various
institutional practices. The long-standing preoccupation of aesthetic ax-
iology with the logical form and cognitive substance of verbal "value
judgments" and, in particular, with debates over their "validity,""truth-
value," and "verifiability,"has obscured the operation and significance of
institutional and other less overt forms of evaluation. It has also deflected
attention from the social contexts, functions, and consequences of all
forms of aesthetic and literary evaluation, including their complex pro-
ductive relation to literary and aesthetic value. Although I am more
concerned here with the latter questions and shall return to them below,
some comments on explicit aesthetic judgments (and on certain familiar
axiological perplexities regarding them) are in order.
Evaluations are among the most fundamental forms of social com-
munication and probably among the most primitive benefits of social
interaction. (Animals-insects and birds as well as mammals-evaluate
for one another, that is, signal to other members of their group the
"quality"of a food supply or territory by some form of specialized overt
behavior.)39 We not only produce but also solicit and seek out both
"expressions of personal sentiment" and "objective judgments of value"
because, although neither will (for nothing can) give us "knowledge" of
the value of an object, both may let us know other things we could find
useful. For example, other people's reports of how well certain objects
have gratified them, though "mere expressions of subjective likes and
dislikes," may nevertheless be useful to us if we ourselves have produced
those objects or if-as lovers, say, or parents or potential associates-we
have an independently motivated interest in the current states, specific
responses, or general structure of tastes and preferences of those people.
Also, an assertion that some object (for example, some artwork) is good,
great, bad, or middling can, no matter how magisterially delivered or
with what attendant claims or convictions of absoluteness, usually be
unpacked as ajudgment of its contingentvalue: specifically, as the evaluator's
observation and/or estimate of how well that object, relative to others of
the same implied category, has performed and/or is likely to perform
certain particular (though taken-for-granted) functions for some particular
(though only implicitly defined) set of subjects under some particular
(unspecified but assumed) set or range of conditions. Any evaluation,
therefore, is "cognitively substantial" in the sense of being potentially
informative about something. The actual interest of that information,

however, and hence the value of that evaluation to us (and "we" are
always heterogeneous) will vary, depending on, among other things, the
extent to which we have any interest in the object evaluated, believe that
we take for granted the same taken-for-granted functions and assume
the same assumed conditions, and also think that we (or others whose
interests are of interest to us) are among that implicitly defined set of
subjects-or, of course, the extent to which we have an interest in the
evaluator's sentiments by reason of our independently motivated interest
in him or her.
In view of the centrality of the question in post-Kantian aesthetic
axiology, it may be noted that if the set of relevant subjects implied by
an evaluation is not contextually defined or otherwise indicated, it will
usually be appropriately taken to consist of the evaluator himself and all
others whom s/he believes are like himself or herself in the pertinent
respects. Of course, some evaluators believe that all other people are-
or should be-like themselves in the pertinent respects: hence, apparently,
the curious and distracting notion that every aesthetic judgment "claims
universal subjective validity."40The familiar subjectivist/objectivist con-
troversy is commonly seen to turn on whether, in making an aesthetic
judgment, I speak "for myself alone" or "for everyone."A consideration of
the social functions of such judgments, however, suggests that, if such
a formulation is wanted at all, it should be that, in making aesthetic
judgments, I tend to speak "for myself and some others."
We may also consider here what is thought to be the suspect prop-
ositional status of value judgments as distinguished from and compared
to that of so-called factual statements and the consequent demotion of
the former to the status of "pseudostatements." There is, of course, no
way for us to be certain that someone's reports of his or her personal
likes or dislikes are sincere, or that the estimates and observations offered
are the estimates and observations actually made. Like all other utterances,
value judgments are context-dependent and shaped by the relation of
the speaker to his or her audience and by the structure of interests that
sustains the verbal transaction between them. (In effect, there is no such
thing as an honest opinion.) For this reason, we will always interpret
(supplement and discount) evaluations in the light of other knowledge
we have of the evaluator (or think we have: there is no absolute end to
this regress, though in practice we do the best we can), including our
sense-on whatever grounds-of the possibility of flattery or other kinds
of deception: the evaluator may be the author's personal friend or profes-
sional rival, s/he may not want to hurt the cook's feelings, s/he may want
to recommend himself or herself by creating the impression that s/he
shares our tastes, and so forth. In all these respects, however, value
judgments are no different from any other kind of utterance, and neither
their reliability nor their "validity"as "propositions" is any more (or any
less) compromised by these possibilities than that of any other type of

verbal behavior, from someone's saying (or otherwise implying) that s/he
has a headache to his or her solemn report of the measurement of a
scientific instrument.
There is a tenacious conviction among those who argue these questions
that unless one judgment can be said or shown to be more "valid"than
another, then all judgments must be "equal" or "equally valid." Indeed,
it is the horror or apparent absurdity of such egalitarianism that commonly
gives force to the charge that "relativism" produces social chaos or is a
logically untenable position. While the radical contingency of all value
certainly does imply that no value judgment can be more valid than
another in the sense of being a more accurate statement of the value of
an object (for the latter concept then becomes vacuous), it does not follow
that all value judgments are equal or equally valid. On the contrary, what
does follow is that the concept of "validity" is inappropriatewith regard
to evaluations and that there is no nontrivial parameter with respect to
which they could be "equal."This is not to say that no evaluations can be
better or worse than others. What must be emphasized, however, is that
the value-the "goodness" or "badness"-of an evaluation, like that of
anything else (including any other type of utterance), is itself contingent,
and thus a matter not of its abstract "truth-value" but of how well it
performs various desired/able functions for the various people who may
at any time be concretely involved with it. In the case of an aesthetic
evaluation, these people will always include the evaluator, who will have
his or her own particular interest in the various effects of the judgments
s/he produces, and may also include anyone from the artist to a potential
publisher or patron, various current or future audiences of the work,
and perhaps someone who just likes to know what's going on and what
other people think is going on. Each of them will have his or her own
interest in the evaluation, and it will be better or worse for each of them
in relation to a different set of desired/able functions. What all this suggests
is that the obsessive debates over the cognitive substance, logical status,
and "truth-value" of aesthetic judgments are not only unresolvable in
the terms given but, strictly speaking, pointless.
As was indicated above, the value of an explicit verbal evaluation-
that is, its utility to those who produce and receive it-will, like that of
any other type of utterance, always be a function of specific features of
the various transactions of which it may be a part, including the relevant
interests of the speaker and any of those who, at any time, become
members of his or her de facto audience. It follows that the value of a
value judgment may also be quite minimal or negative. For example,
depending on specific (and readily imaginable) contextual features, an
aesthetic judgment may be excruciatingly uninteresting to the listener or
elicited from the speaker at considerable expense to himself or herself.
Also, aesthetic judgments, like any other use of language, may be intim-
idating, coercive, and otherwise socially and politically oppressive. If they
are so, however, it is not because of any characteristic frailty of their

propositional status (and "justifying" them-that is, giving a show of

justice to their claims of objectivity or universal validity-will not eliminate
the oppression) but, once again, because of the nature of the transactions
of which they are a part, particularly the social or political relationship
between the evaluator and his or her audience (professor and student,
for example, or censor and citizen) and the structure of power that
governs that relationship.4' We may return now from the discussion of
individual overt value judgments to the more general consideration of
evaluative behavior, normative institutions, and the social mechanisms
by which literary and aesthetic value are produced.
4. The Cultural Re-Productionof Value
We do not move about in a raw universe. Not only are the objects
we encounter always to some extent pre-interpreted and preclassified
for us by our particular cultures and languages, but also pre-evaluated,
bearing the marks and signs of their prior valuings and evaluations by
our fellow creatures. Indeed, preclassification is itself a form of pre-
evaluation, for the labels or category names under which we encounter
objects not only, as was suggested earlier, foreground certain of their
possible functions but also operate as signs-in effect, as culturally certified
endorsements-of their more or less effective performance of those
functions.
Like all other objects, works of art and literature bear the marks of
their own evaluational history, signs of value that acquire their force by
virtue of various social and cultural practices and, in this case, certain
highly specialized and elaborated institutions. The labels "art" and "lit-
erature" are, of course, commonly signs of membership in distinctly
honorific categories. The particular functions that may be endorsed by
these labels, however, are, unlike those of "doorstops"and "clocks,"neither
narrowly confined nor readily specifiable but, on the contrary, exceptionally
heterogeneous, mutable, and elusive. To the extent-always limited-
that the relation between these labels and a particular set of expected
and desired functions is stabilized within a community, it is largely through
the normative activities of various institutions: most significantly, the
literary and aesthetic academy which, among other things, develops ped-
agogic and other acculturative mechanisms directed at maintaining at
least (and, commonly, at most) a subpopulation of the community whose
members "appreciate the value" of works of art and literature "as such."
That is, by providing them with "necessary backgrounds," teaching them
"appropriate skills,""cultivatingtheir interests,"and, generally, "developing
their tastes,"the academy produces generation after generation of subjects
for whom the objects and texts thus labeled do indeed perform the
functions thus privileged, thereby insuring the continuity of mutually
defining canonical works, canonical functions, and canonical audiences.42

It will be instructive at this point to consider the very beginning of

a work's valuational history, namely, its initial evaluation by the artist
(here, the author); for it is not only a prefiguration of all the subsequent
acts of evaluation of which the work will become the subject but also a
model or paradigm of all evaluative activity generally. I refer here not
merely to that ultimate gesture of authorial judgment that must exhibit
itself negatively-that is, in the author's either letting the work stand or
ripping it up-but to the thousand individual acts of approval and rejection,
preference and assessment, trial and revision that constitute the entire
process of literary composition. The work we receive is not so much the
achieved consummation of that process as its enforced abandonment:
"abandonment" not because the author's techniques are inadequate to
his or her goals but because the goals themselves are inevitably multiple,
mixed, mutually competing, and thus mutually constraining, and also
because they are inevitably unstable, changing their nature and relative
potency and priority during the very course of composition. The completed
work is thus always, in a sense, a temporary truce among contending
forces, achieved at the point of exhaustion, that is, the literal depletion
of the author's current resources or, given the most fundamental principle
of the economics of existence, at the point when the author simply has
something else-more worthwhile-to do: when, in other words, the
time and energy s/he would have to give to further tinkering, testing,
and adjustment are no longer compensated for by an adequately rewarding
sense of continuing interest in the process or increased satisfaction in
the product.
It is for comparable reasons that we, as readers of the work, will
later let our own experience of it stand: not because we have fully "ap-
preciated" the work, not because we have exhausted all its possible sources
of interest and hence of value, but because we, too, ultimately have
something else-more worthwhile-to do. The reader's experience of
the work is pre-figured-that is, both calculated and pre-enacted-by
the author in other ways as well: for, in selecting this word, adjusting
that turn of phrase, preferring this rhyme to that, the author is all the
while testing the local and global effectiveness of each decision by im-
personating in advance his or her various presumptive audiences, who
thereby themselves participate in shaping the work they will later read.
Every literary work-and, more generally, artwork-is thus the product
of a complex evaluative feedback loop that embraces not only the ever-
shifting economy of the artist's own interests and resources as they evolve
during and in reaction to the process of composition, but also all the
shifting economies of his or her assumed and imagined audiences, including
those who do not yet exist but whose emergent interests, variable conditions
of encounter, and rival sources of gratification the artist will attempt to
predict-or will intuitively surmise-and to which, among other things,
his or her own sense of the fittingness of each decision will be responsive.43

But this also describes all the other diverse forms of evaluation by
which the work will be subsequently marked and its value reproduced
and transmitted: that is, the innumerable implicit acts of evaluation per-
formed by those who, as may happen, publish the work, purchase, preserve,
display, quote, cite, translate, perform, allude to, and imitate it; the more
explicit but casual judgments made, debated, and negotiated in informal
contexts by readers and by all those others in whose personal economies
the work, in some way, "figures";and the highly specialized institutionalized
forms of evaluation exhibited in the more or less professional activities
of scholars, teachers, and academic or journalistic critics-not only their
full-dress reviews and explicit rank-orderings, evaluations, and revaluations,
but also such activities as the awarding of literary prizes, the commissioning
and publishing of articles about certain works, the compiling of anthologies,
the writing of introductions, the construction of department curricula,
and the drawing up of class reading lists. All these forms of evaluation,
whether overt or covert, verbal or inarticulate, and whether performed
by the common reader, professional reviewer, big-time bookseller, or
small-town librarian, have functions and effects that are significant in
the production and maintenance or destruction of literary value, both
reflecting and contributing to the various economies in relation to which
a work acquires value. And each of the evaluative acts mentioned, like
those of the author, represents a set of individual economic decisions,
an ajudication among competing claims for limited resources of time,
space, energy, attention-or, of course, money-and also, insofar as the
evaluation in a socially responsive act or part of a social transaction, a
set of surmises, assumptions, or predictions regarding the personal econ-
omies of other people.
Although, as I have emphasized, the evaluation of texts is not confined
to the formal critical judgments issued within the rooms of the literary
academy or upon the pages of its associated publications, the activities
of the academy certainly figure significantly in the production of literary
value. For example, the repeated inclusion of a particular work in literary
anthologies not only promotes the value of that work but goes some
distance toward creating its value, as does also its repeated appearance
on reading lists or its frequent citation or quotation by professors, scholars,
and academic critics. For all these acts, at the least, have the effect of
drawing the work into the orbit of attention of a population of potential
readers; and, by making it more accessible to the interests of those readers
(while, as indicated above, at the same time shaping and supplying the
very interests in relation to which they will experience the work), they
make it more likely both that the work will be experienced at all and also
that it will be experienced as valuable.
The converse side to this process is well known. Those who are in
positions to edit anthologies and prepare reading lists are obviously those
who occupy positions of some cultural power; and their acts of evaluation-

represented in what they exclude as well as in what they include-constitute

not merely recommendations of value but, for the reasons just mentioned,
also determinants of value. Moreover, since they will usually exclude not
only what they take to be inferior literature but also what they take to
be nonliterary, subliterary, or paraliterary, their selections not only imply
certain "criteria" of literary value, which may in fact be made explicit,
but, more significantly, they produce and maintain certain definitions of
"literature" and, thereby, certain assumptions about the desired and ex-
pected functions of the texts so classified and about the interests of their
appropriate audiences, all of which are usually not explicit and, for that
reason, less likely to be questioned, challenged, or even noticed. Thus
the privileging power of evaluative authority may be very great, even
when it is manifested inarticulately.44 The academic activities described
here, however, are only a small part of the complex process of literary
canonization.
When we consider the cultural re-production of value on a larger

time scale, the model of evaluative dynamics outlined above suggests that
the "survival"or "endurance" of a text-and, it may be, its achievement
of high canonical status not only as a "workof literature"but as a "classic"-
is the product neither of the objectively (in the Marxist sense) conspiratorial
force of establishment institutions nor of the continuous appreciation of
the timeless virtues of a fixed object by succeeding generations of isolated
readers, but, rather, of a series of continuous interactions among a variably
constituted object, emergent conditions, and mechanisms of cultural se-
lection and transmission. These interactions are, in certain respects, anal-
ogous to those by virtue of which biological species evolve and survive
and also analogous to those through which artistic choices evolve and
are found fit or fitting by the individual artist. The operation of these
cultural-historical dynamics may be briefly indicated here in quite general
terms.
At a given time and under the contemporary conditions of available
materials, technology, and techniques, a particular object-let us say a
verbal artifact or text-may perform certain desired/able functions quite
well for some set of subjects. It will do so by virtue of certain of its
"properties" as they have been specifically constituted-framed, fore-
grounded, and configured-by those subjects under those conditions and
in accord with their particular needs, interests, and resources--and also
perhaps largely as pre-figured by the artist who, as described earlier, in
the very process of producing the work and continuously evaluating its
fitness and adjusting it accordingly, will have multiply and variably con-
stituted it. Two points implied by this description need emphasis here.
One is that the value of a work-that is, its effectiveness in performing
desired/able functions for some set of subjects-is not independent of

authorial design, labor, and skill. The second, however, is that what may
be spoken of as the "properties" of the work-its "structure," "features,"
"qualities,"and, of course, its "meanings"-are not fixed, given, or inherent
in the work "itself" but are at every point the variable products of some
subject's interaction with it. (It is thus never "the same Homer.") To the
extent that any aspect of a work is recurrently constituted in similar ways
by various subjects at various times, it will be because the subjects who
do the constituting, including the author, are themselves similar, not only
in being human creatures and in occupying a particular universe that
may be, for them, in many respects recurrent or relatively continuous
and stable, but also in inheriting from one another, through mechanisms
of cultural transmission, certain ways of interacting with that universe,
including certain ways of interacting with texts and "works of literature."
An object or artifact that performs certain desired/able functions
particularly well at a given time for some community of subjects, being
perhaps not only "fit" but exemplary-that is, "the best of its kind"-
under those conditions, will have an immediate survival advantage; for,
relative to (or in competition with) other comparable objects or artifacts
available at that time, it will not only be better protected from physical
deterioration but will also be more frequently used or widely exhibited
and, if it is a text or verbal artifact, more frequently read or recited,
copied or reprinted, translated, imitated, cited, and commented upon-
in short, culturally re-produced-and thus will be more readily available
to perform those or other functions for other subjects at a subsequent
time.
Two possible trajectories ensue:
1. If, on the one hand, under the changing and emergent conditions
of that subsequent time, the functions for which the text was earlier
valued are no longer desired/able or if, in competition with comparable
works (including, now, those newly produced with newly available materials
and techniques), it no longer performs those original functions particularly
well, it will, accordingly, be less well maintained and less frequently cited
and recited so that its visibility as well as interest will fade, and it will
survive, if at all, simply as a physical relic. It may, of course, be subsequently
valued specifically as a relic (for its archeological or "historical"interest),
in which case it will be performing desired/able functions and pursue
the trajectory described below. It may also be subsequently "rediscovered"
as an "unjustly neglected masterpiece," either when the functions it had
originally performed are again desired/able or, what is more likely, when
different of its properties and possible functions become foregrounded
by a new set of subjects with emergent interests and purposes.
2. If, on the other hand, under changing conditions and in competition
with newly produced and other re-produced works, it continues to perform
some desired/able functions particularly well, even if not the same ones
for which it was initially valued (and, accordingly, by virtue of othernewly

foregrounded or differently framed or configured properties -including,

once again, emergent "meanings"), it will continue to be cited and recited,
continue to be visible and available to succeeding generations of subjects,
and thus continue to be culturally re-produced. A work that has in this
way survived for some time can always move into a trajectory of extinction
through the sudden emergence or gradual conjunction of unfavorable
conditions of the kind described above under (1). There are, however,
a number of reasons why, once it has achieved canonical status, it will
be more secured from that risk.
First, when the value of a work is seen as unquestionable, those of
its features that would, in a noncanonical work, be found alienating-
for example, technically crude, philosophically naive, or narrowly topical-
will be glozed over or backgrounded. In particular, features that conflict
intolerably with the interests and ideologies of subsequent subjects (and,
in the West, with those generally benign "humanistic" values for which
canonical works are commonly celebrated)-for example, incidents or
sentiments of brutality, bigotry, and racial, sexual, or national chauvinism-
will be repressed or rationalized, and there will be a tendency among
humanistic scholars and academic critics to "save the text" by transferring
the locus of its interest to more formal or structural features and/or
allegorizing its potentially alienating ideology to some more general
("universal")level where it becomes more tolerable and also more readily
interpretable in terms of contemporary ideologies. Thus we make texts
timeless by suppressing their temporality. (It may be added that to those
scholars and critics for whom those features are not only palatable but
for whom the value of the canonical works consists precisely in their
"embodying" and "preserving" such "traditional values," the transfer of
the locus of value to formal properties will be seen as a descent into
formalism and "aestheticism,"and the tendency to allegorize it too generally
or to interpret it too readily in terms of "modern values" will be seen not
as saving the text but as betraying it.)
Second, in addition to whatever various and perhaps continuously
differing functions a work performs for succeeding generations of in-
dividual subjects, it will also begin to perform certain characteristiccultural
functions by virtue of the very fact that it has endured-that is, the
functions of a canonical work as such-and will be valued and preserved
accordingly: as a witness to lost innocence, former glory, and/or apparently
persistent communal interests and "values"and thus a banner of communal
identity; as a reservoir of images, archtypes, and topoi-characters and
episodes, passages and verbal tags-repeatedly invoked and recurrently
applied to new situations and circumstances; and as a stylistic and generic
exemplar that will energize the production of subsequent works and texts
(upon which the latter will be modeled and by which, as a normative
"touchstone," they will be measured). In these ways, the canonical work
begins increasingly not merely to survive within but to shape and create

the culture in which its value is produced and transmitted and, for that
very reason, to perpetuate the conditions of its own flourishing. Nothing
endures like endurance.
To the extent that we develop within and are formed by a culture
that is itself constituted in part by canonical texts, it is not surprising that
those texts seem, as Hans-Georg Gadamer puts it, to "speak"to us "directly"
and even "specially":
The classical is what is preserved precisely because it signifies and

interprets itself; [that is,] that which speaks in such a way that it is
not a statement about what is past, as mere testimony to something
that needs to be interpreted, but says something to the present as
if it were said specially to us.... This isjust what the word "classical"
means, that the duration of the power of a work to speak directly
is fundamentally unlimited.45
It is hardly, however, as Gadamer implies here, because such texts are

uniquely self-mediated or unmediated and hence not needful of inter-
pretation but, rather, because they have already been so thoroughly
mediated-evaluated as well as interpreted-for us by the very culture
and cultural institutions through which they have been preserved and
by which we ourselves have been formed.
What is commonly referred to as "the test of time" (Gadamer, for
example, characterizes "the classical"as "a notable mode of'being historical,'
that historical process of preservation that through the constant proving
of itself sets before us something that is true")46 is not, as the figure
implies, an impersonal and impartial mechanism; for the cultural insti-
tutions through which it operates (schools, libraries, theaters, museums,
publishing and printing houses, editorial boards, prize-awarding com-
missions, state censors, etc.) are, of course, all managed by persons (who,
by definition, are those with cultural power and commonly other forms
of power as well), and, since the texts that are selected and preserved by
"time" will always tend to be those which "fit" (and, indeed, have often
been designed to fit) their characteristic needs, interests, resources, and
purposes, that testing mechanism has its own built-in partialities accu-
mulated in and thus intensifiedby time. For example, the characteristic
resources of the culturally dominant members of a community include
access to specific training and the opportunity and occasion to develop
not only competence in a large number of cultural codes but also a large
number of diverse (or "cosmopolitan") interests. The works that are dif-
ferentially re-produced, therefore, will often be those that gratify the
exercise of such competencies and engage interests of that kind: specifically,
works that are structurally complex and, in the technical sense, information-
rich-and which, by virtue of those very qualities, are especially amenable
to multiple reconfiguration, more likely to enter into relation with the

emergent interests of various subjects, and thus more readily adaptable

to emergent conditions.47 Also, as is often remarked, since those with
cultural power tend to be members of socially, economically, and politically
established classes (or to serve them and identify their own interests with
theirs), the texts that survive will tend to be those that appear to reflect
and reinforce establishment ideologies. However much canonical works
may be seen to "question" secular vanities such as wealth, social position,
and political power, "remind" their readers of more elevated values and
virtues, and oblige them to "confront" such hard truths and harsh realities
as their own mortality and the hidden griefs of obscure people, they
would not be found to please long and well if they were seen to undercut
establishment interests radically or to subvert the ideologies that support
them effectively.(Construing them to the latter ends, of course, is one
of the characteristic ways in which those with antiestablishment interests
participate in the cultural re-production of canonical texts and thus in
their endurance as well.)
It is clear that the needs, interests, and purposes of culturally and
otherwise dominant members of a community do not exclusively or totally
determine which works survive. The antiquity and longevity of domestic
proverbs, popular tales, children's verbal games, and the entire phenom-
enon of what we call "folklore," which occurs through the same or cor-
responding mechanisms of cultural selection and re-production as those
described above specifically for "texts,"demonstrate that the "endurance"
of a verbal artifact (if not its achievement of academiccanonical status as
a "work of literature"-many folkloric works do, however, perform all
the functions described above as characteristic of canonical works as such)
may be more or less independent of institutions controlled by those with
political power. Moreover, the interests and purposes of the latter must
always operate in interaction with non- or antiestablishment interests and
purposes as well as with various other contingencies and "accidents of
time" over which they have limited, if any, control, from the burning of
libraries to political and social revolutions, religious iconoclasms, and
shifts of dominance among entire languages and cultures.
As the preceding discussion suggests, the value of a literary work is

continuously produced and re-produced by the very acts of implicit and
explicit evaluation that are frequently invoked as "reflecting" its value
and therefore as being evidence of it. In other words, what are commonly
taken to be the signs of literary value are, in effect, also its springs. The
endurance of a classic canonical author such as Homer, then, owes not
to the alleged transcultural or universal value of his works but, on the
contrary, to the continuity of their circulation in a particular culture.
Repeatedly cited and recited, translated, taught and imitated, and thor-
oughly enmeshed in the network of intertextuality that continuously

constitutesthe high culture of the orthodoxly educated population of the

West (and the Western-educated population of the rest of the world),
that highly variable entity we refer to as "Homer" recurrently enters our
experience in relation to a large number and variety of our interests and
thus can perform a large number of various functions for us and obviously
has performed them for many of us over a good bit of the history of
our culture. It is well to recall, however, that there are many people in
the world who are not-or are not yet, or choose not to be-among the
orthodoxly educated population of the West: people who do not encounter
Western classics at all or who encounter them under cultural and insti-
tutional conditions very different from those of American and European
college professors and their students. The fact that Homer, Dante, and
Shakespeare do not figure significantly in the personal economies of
these people, do not perform individual or social functions that gratify
their interests, do not have value for them, might properly be taken as
qualifying the claims of transcendent universal value made for such
works. As we know, however, it is routinely taken instead as evidence or
confirmation of the cultural deficiency-or, more piously, "deprivation"-
of such people. The fact that other verbal artifacts (not necessarily "works
of literature" or even "texts")and other objects and events (not necessarily
"works of art" or even artifacts) have performed and do perform for
them the various functions that Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare perform
for us and, moreover, that the possibility of performing the totality of
such functions is always distributed over the totality of texts, artifacts,
objects, and events-a possibility continuously realized and thus a value
continuously "appreciated"-commonly cannot be grasped or acknowl-
edged by the custodians of the Western canon.
1. The most recent of these include E. D. Hirsch, Jr., TheAimsof Interpretation(Chicago,

1976), esp. the essays "Evaluationas Knowledge" (1968) and "PrivilegedCriteria in Evaluation"
(1969); Murray Krieger, "Literary Analysis and Evaluation-and the Ambidextrous Critic,"
in Criticism:Speculativeand AnalyticEssays, ed. L. S. Dembo (Madison, Wis., 1968); a number
of brief essays by Anglo-American as well as continental European theorists in Problemsof
LiteraryEvaluation, ed. Joseph Strelka (University Park, Pa. and London, 1969); and the
chapters on value and evaluation in John Ellis, The Theoryof LiteraryCriticism(Berkeley
and Los Angeles, 1974), John Reichert, Making Sense of Literature (Chicago, 1977), and
Jeffrey Sammons, LiterarySociologyand Practical Criticism(Bloomington, Ind. and London,
1977). All of them either participate directly in the self-justifying academic debates outlined
below or are haunted by them into equivocation.
2. F. R. Leavis, Revaluation: Traditionand Developmentin English Poetry (London, 1936;
New York, 1963), pp. 5-6.
3. See esp. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (London, 1936).
4. Yvor Winters, The Function of Criticism(Denver, 1957), p. 17.
5. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., The VerbalIcon (Louisville, Ky., 1954), p. 250.
6. See the discussion of David Hume below, pp. 15-18.
7. I. A. Richards, Principles of LiteraryCriticism(1924; London, 1960), pp. 5-6. "The
two pillars upon which a theory of criticism must rest," Richards declared, "are an account

of value and an account of communication" (p. 25). It was, of course, the latter that
subsequently became the overriding concern of critical theory.
8. Ibid., p. 206.
9. Northrop Frye, Anatomyof Criticism:Four Essays (Princeton, N.J., 1957), pp. 18, 19;
all further references to this work, abbreviated AC, will be included in the text.
10. It should be recalled that, like many others (e.g., Hirsch [see n. 12 below]), Frye
continued to maintain that interpretivecriticism could lay claim to objectivity. See his remarks
in a paper delivered in 1967: "The fundamental critical act ... is the act of recognition,
seeing what is there, as distinguished from merely seeing in a Narcissus mirror of our own
experience and social and moral prejudice .... When a critic interprets, he is talking about
his poet; when he evaluates, he is talking about himself" ("Value Judgements," in Criticism:
Speculativeand Analytic Essays, p. 39).
11. Hirsch, The Aims of Interpretation,p. 108. See also n. 40 below, for Hirsch's neo-
Kantian formulation.
12. In a recent unpublished essay, "Literary Value: The Short History of a Modern
Confusion" (1980), Hirsch argues that, although literary meaning is determinate, literary
value is not. With respect to the latter, however, he concludes that "there are some stable
principles"-namely, ethical ones--"that escape the chaos of purely personal relativity" (p.
22). As will be seen in the analysis below, "personal relativity" neither produces chaos nor
is in itself chaotic. The escape route of ethical principles and other appeals to higher goods
are discussed below (p. 19).
13. See Jurij Tynjanov, "On Literary Evolution" (Moscow, 1927), trans. Ladislav Matejka
and Krystyna Pomorska, in Readingsin RussianPoetics,ed. Matejka and Pomorska (Cambridge,
Mass., 1971); Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelaisand His World(Moscow, 1965), trans. Helene Iswolsky
(Cambridge, Mass., 1968); and Jan Mukarovsky, AestheticNorm, Function, and Valueas Social
Facts (Prague, 1934), trans. Mark E. Suino (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1970).
14. For surveys and discussions, see Sammons, LiterarySociologyand Practical Criticism,
and Rien T. Segers, The Evaluation of Literary Texts: An ExperimentalInvestigation into the
Rationalization of ValueJudgments with Referenceto Semioticsand Estheticsof Reception (Lisse,
1978). For a recent study of considerable interest, see Jacques Leenhardt and Pierre Jozsa,
Lire la lecture:Essai du sociologiede la lecture (Paris, 1982).
15. It is not mentioned as such, e.g., in Jonathan Culler's StructuralistPoetics:Structuralism,
Linguistics, and the Study of Literature(Ithaca, N.Y., 1975).
16. See, e.g., the thoroughly equivocal discussions of "objectivevalue"in Stefan Morawski,
Inquiries into Fundamentals of Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1974), and the
revalorization of the standard Eng. Lit. canon in Althusserian terms in Terry Eagleton,
Criticismand Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London, 1976), pp. 162-87. For
other discussions of this point, see Hans Robert Jauss, "The Idealist Embarrassment:
Observations on Marxist Aesthetics," New Literary History 7 (Autumn 1975): 191-208;
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977), esp. pp. 45-54 and 151-57;
Tony Bennett, Formalismand Marxism(London, 1979), esp. pp. 172-75; and Peter Widdowson,
"'Literary Value' and the Reconstruction of Criticism,"Literatureand History6 (1980): 138-
50. See also n. 33 below.
17. See, however, Arkady Plotnitsky, "Constraints of the Unbound: Transformation,
Value, and Literary Interpretation" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1982), for an
extensive and sophisticated effort along such lines.
18. Onwuchekwa Jemie, Langston Hughes: An Introduction to the Poetry (New York,
1976), p. 184.
19. C. W. B. Bigsby, "Hand in Hand with the Blues," Times Literary Supplement, 17
June 1977, p. 734.
20. Chinweizu, letter to the editor, Times LiterarySupplement, 15 July 1977, p. 871.
21. Thus Sammons, in his embattled book, writes of "the elements ... in the canon
of great literature" to which we should be attentive so that, faced with charges of elitism,
"we will not have to stand mute before claims that inarticulateness, ignorance, occult

mumbling, and loutishness are just as good as fine literature" (LiterarySociologyand Practical
Criticism,p. 134).
22. See Gonzalo Munevar, Radical Knowledge:A PhilosophicalInquiryinto the Nature and
Limits of Science (Indianapolis, 1981), for an elaboration of a "performance model" of
scientific activity along the lines implied here.
23. For a companion piece to the present essay, see my "Fixed Marks and Variable
Constancies: A Parable of Literary Value," Poetics Today 1 (Autumn 1979): 7-31.
24. Some aspects of this process are discussed by Pierre Bourdieu in "La Metamorphose
des gofts," Questionsde sociologie(Paris, 1980), pp. 161-72. The more general interrelations
among human "needs and wants," cultural practices, and economic production have been
examined by Marshall Sahlins in Cultureand Practical Reason (Chicago, 1976), Mary Douglas
in The Worldof Goods(New York, 1979), and Jean Baudrillard in For a Critiqueof thePolitical
Economyof theSign (Paris, 1972), trans. Charles Levin (St. Louis, 1981). Although Baudrillard's
critical analysis of the concept of "use-value"-and, with it, of "sign value"-is of considerable
interest for a semiotics of the marketplace, his effort to develop, "asa basis for the practical
overthrow of political economy" (p. 122), a theory of a value "beyond value" (created out
of what he calls "symbolic exchange") is less successful, partly because of its utopian an-
thropology and partly because the value in question does not escape economic accounting.
25. For an excellent analysis of the relation between classification and value, see Michael
Thompson, Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destructionof Value (Oxford, 1979), esp. pp.
13-56.
26. The magnetism or recurrent mutually metaphoric relation between economic and
aesthetic-especially literary-discourse is documented and discussed by Marc Shell in The
Economyof Literature(Baltimore, 1978) and Kurt Heinzelman in TheEconomicsof theImagination
(Amherst, Mass., 1980).
27. Andrew Harrison, Making and Thinking (Indianapolis, 1978), p. 100.
28. See George J. Stigler and Gary S. Becker, "De gustibus non est disputandum,"
AmericanEconomicsReview 67 (March 1977): 76-90, for an ingenious and influential attempt
(at the opposite extreme, perhaps, of Baudrillard's [see n. 24 above]) to demonstrate that
differences and changes of behavior (including aesthetic behavior) that appear to be matters
of "taste"and, as such, beyond explanation in economic terms can be accounted for (a) as
functions of subtle forms of "price"and "income"and (b) on the usual (utilitarian)assumption
that we always behave, all things considered, so as to maximize utility. As Stigler and Becker
acknowledge, recent experimental studies of "choice behavior" in human (and other) subjects
suggest that this latter assumption itself requires modification.
29. See Robert Fagen, Animal Play Behavior (Oxford, 1981), pp. 248-358, for an
extensive analysis of "intrinsically rewarding" physical activities and an account of the
evolutionary mechanisms that apparently produce and sustain them.
30. See the related discussion of "cognitive play" in my On the Margins of Discourse:
The Relation of Literatureto Language (Chicago, 1978), pp. 116-24.
31. Monroe Beardsley's "instrumentalist" (that is, utilitarian) theory of aesthetic value
(Aesthetics:Problemsin thePhilosophyof Criticism[New York, 1958], pp. 524-76) and Mukafovsky's
otherwise quite subtle exploration of these questions (see n. 13, above) do not altogether
escape the confinements and circularities of formalist conceptions of, respectively, "aesthetic
experience" and "aesthetic function."
32. David Hume, "OftheStandardof Taste"andOtherEssays,ed. John W. Lenz (Indianapolis,
1965), pp. 8-10.
33. Ibid., p. 10. At the conclusion of the essay, Hume almost-but not quite-reinstalls
the very de gustibus argument that the standard of taste was presumably designed to answer:
"But where there is such a diversity in the internal frame or external situation as is entirely
blameless on both sides, . . . a certain degree of diversity of judgment is unavoidable and
we seek in vain a standard by which we can reconcile the contrary sentiments" (pp. 19-
20). Of course, the qualification ("as is entirely blameless on both sides") that keeps this
from being a total turnabout also introduces a new normative consideration (how to determine

whether or not-or to what extent-something "in the internal frame or external situation"
is blamable)and thus moves again toward the type of potentially infinite regress into which
all axiologies typically tumble.
34. Walter Hinderer, "Literary Value Judgments and Value Cognition," trans. Leila
Vannewitz, in Problemsof LiteraryEvaluation, pp. 58-59.
35. The discipline of "empirical aesthetics" has been developed out of precisely such
a belief. For a recent survey and discussion of its findings, see Hans and Shulamith Kreitler,
Psychologyof the Arts (Durham, N.C., 1972). See also n. 47 below.
36. See Morse Peckham, Explanation and Power: The Controlof Human Behavior (New
York, 1979), for an account of deviance (or what he calls "the delta effect") as the product
of the relation between cultural practices and the randomness of behavior and, more
generally, for a highly original discussion of the processes and institutions of cultural
channeling.
37. Hume, "Ofthe Standard of Taste,"pp. 5, 7.
38. Communities are of all sizes and so are drawing rooms: the provincials, colonials,
and marginalized groups mentioned above (including the young), insofar as they constitute
social communities, may also be expected to have prevailing structures of tastes and preferences
and to control them in the same ways as do more obviously "establishment" groups. Folk-
relativism is neither confined to the folk nor always exhibited by them.
39. To the extent that such forms of behavior are under the control of innate mechanisms
that respond directly to-or, in effect, "register"-the conditions in question, they are not,
strictly speaking, verbal or symbolic. For this reason, such evaluations may be "objective"
in a way that, for better or worse, no human value judgment can be.
40. Kant's tortured attempt, which occupies most of The CritiqueofJudgment,to ground
such a claim on the possibility of a cognition of pure aesthetic value (that is, "beauty")
produced by nothing but the free operation of universal cognitive faculties has been recently
revived and supplemented by Hirsch's attempt to ground it on the possibility of "correct
interpretation," specifically the "re-cognition" of that "universally valid cognition of a work
... constituted by the kind of subjective stance adopted in its creation"(TheAimsof Interpretation,
pp. 105-6). For a recent and very thorough examination of The Critiqueof Judgment, see
Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1979); for a
thoroughly irreverent examination of it, see Jacques Derrida, "Economimesis,"trans. Richard
Klein, Diacritics 2 (Summer 1981): 3-25.
41. I discuss these and related aspects of verbal transactions in On the Margins of
Discourse, pp. 15-24 and 82-106, and in "Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories," Critical
Inquiry 7 (Autumn 1980): 225-26 and 231-36.
42. Pierre Macherey and Etienne Balibar analyze some aspects of this process in
"Literature as an Ideological Form: Some Marxist Propositions," trans. James Kavanagh,
Praxis 5 (1981): 43-58.
43. See Howard Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1982), pp.
198-209, for a description of some of the specific constraints that shape both the process
and its termination and, more generally, for a useful account of the ways in which artworks
are produced by "social networks."
44. For a well-documented illustration of the point, see Nina Baym, "Melodramas of
Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors," American
Quarterly33 (Summer 1981): 125-39. In addition to anthologies, Baym mentions historical
studies, psychological and sociological theories of literary production, and particular methods
of literary interpretation.
45. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truthand Method, trans. Sheed and Ward, Ltd. (New York,
1982), pp. 257-58.
46. Ibid., p. 255.
47. Structural complexity and information-richness are, of course, subject-relative as
"qualities"and also experientially subject-variable: that is, we apparently differ individually
in our tolerance for complexity in various sensory/perceptual modes and in our competence

in processing information in different codes, so that what is interestingly complex and

engagingly information-rich to one subject may be intolerably chaotic to another. See Gerda
Smets, AestheticJudgmentand Arousal (Louvain, 1973), and Sven Sandstrom, A CommonTaste
in Art: An ExperimentalAttempt(Lund, 1977), for two recent studies relevant to the point.
Its relation to the general problem of aesthetic and literary value, itself a very complex
matter, cannot be pursued here but is discussed briefly in On the Margins of Discourse, pp.
116-24.


Contingencies of Value: Barbara Herrnstein Smith

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Contingencies of Value: Barbara Herrnstein Smith

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Contingencies of Value: Barbara Herrnstein Smith

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Contingencies of Value

Barbara Herrnstein Smith

1. The Exile of Evaluation

Critical Inquiry 1983.10:1-35.

to the more general preoccupation with language that has dominated

Barbara Herrnstein Smith is University Professor of English and

Critical Inquiry 1983.10:1-35.

was likely to signal not professional deference but intellectual conde-

There are, of course, discriminations to be made: Tennyson, for

Critical Inquiry 1983.10:1-35.

discipline but also an intellectual status equal in respectability to that of

Critical Inquiry 1983.10:1-35.

markable chapter on "Badness in Poetry" in Principles of LiteraryCriticism

This sort of thing cannot be part of any systematic study, for a

In view of Frye's Platonic conception of literature and positivisticconception

Critical Inquiry 1983.10:1-35.

history), but, since the "order" of "the existing monuments of literature"

Critical Inquiry 1983.10:1-35.

have shaped the development of literary studies in Europe as well. Certain

One of the major effects of prohibiting or inhibiting explicit evaluation

Critical Inquiry 1983.10:1-35.

literary values . . . fully established by critical experience" (AC, pp. 27,

Comparative estimates of value are really inferences, most valid

In addition to the noteworthy correlation of validity with silence (com-

Critical Inquiry 1983.10:1-35.

"ethnic" literature) and also by judgments of literary value made by or

Painful to whom? Irrelevant to whom? To idolators of white

This brief case history in the problem of literary evaluation illustrates,

Critical Inquiry 1983.10:1-35.

Critical Inquiry 1983.10:1-35.

would offer to yield an ultimately comprehensive, unified, and objective

2. The Economicsof Literaryand AestheticValue

All value is radically contingent, being neither an inherent property

Critical Inquiry 1983.10:1-35.

the personal economy constituted by the subject's needs, interests, and

Critical Inquiry 1983.10:1-35.

Critical Inquiry 1983.10:1-35.

article on art investment and warns of the dangers of confusing "the

Suggestions of the radically contingent nature of aesthetic value are

Critical Inquiry 1983.10:1-35.

The essay continues by enumerating and elaborating these defects, in-

False judgments and intuitions of an object can only be corrected

Critical Inquiry 1983.10:1-35.

of which there is no dearth in the history of literature-are always

Critical Inquiry 1983.10:1-35.

vary individually along a wide spectrum, (b) are especially resistant, if

Critical Inquiry 1983.10:1-35.

to interact with its members (for example, exotic visitors, immigrants,

Critical Inquiry 1983.10:1-35.

various exemplary natural endowments and cultural competencies, has,

3. The Multiple Forms, Functions, and Contextsof Evaluative

Critical Inquiry 1983.10:1-35.

forth. Most of these calculations, however, are performed intuitively and

Critical Inquiry 1983.10:1-35.

Critical Inquiry 1983.10:1-35.

Critical Inquiry 1983.10:1-35.

propositional status (and "justifying" them-that is, giving a show of

4. The Cultural Re-Productionof Value

Critical Inquiry 1983.10:1-35.