Contingencies of Value - Barbara Herrnstein Smith

Well, I certainly chose a humdinger for my second blog. 'I'll pick this one,' she says. 'Never mind that it's a million trillion pages long,' she says.

So, I learnt (or re-learnt) a lot of very nice words from this reading, including 'axiological', 'hermeneutic' and 'hypostasization', and for that I thank Smith. But I was, like I'm sure many were, a wee bit skeptical about the proposed 'project' of devising 'descriptions and accounts of all the other phenomena and activities involved in literary and aesthetic evaluation in relation to our more general understanding... of human culture and behavior.' What a grand idea! I thought perhaps it might work as an approach to the evaluation of a text, perhaps as an alternative branch of theoretical investigation, but as a project? The mind, it boggles. So really, although I sympathised to a certain extent with her criticism of the rather teleological way the canon is built and defended ('We've always called this a classic, and thus it's a classic') I couldn't help but see all that came after in the light of this monstrous task I knew she was proposing.

One part I found interesting in a lot of ways was the idea, which I've recognised in many forms before, that any attempt to instill 'utility' in a piece of 'literature' or 'art' is to 'misuse' it. 'Utility' here is opposed to the 'function' Smith describes later, such as serving mankind etc., I mean rather by 'utility' a more pragmatic usage which is considered outside of the object's original function. This made me think, since I'm a fan of design blogs which feature a lot of DIY, about all the uses I've seen over the years for old books which aren't going to be read. Strap them together and make a table, they say. Fold the pages back in sections and make a nice little stand for a pot plant. Rip all the pages out and use them to decoupage something. And without fail, on every single one of those project posts, there will be a bunch of hysterical, 'You can't do that to BOOKS! THAT'S BLASPHEMY!' comments. I know this is a very literal interpretation of the idea of a functional misuse of an object which is supposed to have unquestionable intrinsic value, but I thought it was an interesting point considering that the overarching topic seems to be the danger of assuming value and 'mystifying' canonical works. Those commenters are 'the reading public', and they obviously have a pretty strong idea of the value inherent in a published work, regardless of which particular work it is (I made a pot stand out of Anna Karenina. I apologise for nothing). An idea, I suppose Smith would suggest, that has been instilled in them by the elevation of the book as an item of intrinsic value by the professional reading class.

I found Smith's arguments regarding the ways value is ascribed to be fairly convincing, but I would be interested to read much more about the ways she would collect and document all the contingencies she lists on which axiological judgement is based, for individuals and the academy. I could certainly see from an anecdotal perspective how those contingencies would naturally affect any reading, even a later reading of the same text, because I know I do that myself all the time. But I really fail to see how they could possibly be collated in any useful or empirical way.