Smith

 
Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Summary
 
Smith maintains that the value of literature is relative, the product of socially situated acts of reading. Literary value is determined extrinsically: it is a product of historical circumstances, so that what is deemed of value in one epoch may well be valued quite differently or not at all in another. Evaluation is necessarily contingent or relative: there can be no abiding values, no touchstones. Compared with the "axiological" attempts (which she reviews) of writers such as Hume and Kant to found aesthetics in general, universal principles, she notes that "what is at stake in the axiological project is always the contested legitimacy of someone's evaluative authority; and, though not all the battles are fought out in drawingrooms or classrooms, they are inevitably fought out in social arenas and along lines of authority and power defined by social, institutional, and economic categories" (72). In this view, there can be no components of an evaluative judgement which are not derived from the social position of the evaluator; nothing is dependent on the qualities of the work of art itself: "there are no functions performed by artworks that may be specified as generically unique" (35). To the extent that a reader identifies features or properties of a work for attention, these "are all the variable products of the subject's engagement with his or her environment under a particular set of conditions" (31-2).  
Smith argues that it is a mistake to attribute commonalities in response to "fundamental 'traits,' recurrent 'features,' or shared 'properties' of valued works. The attempt to locate invariance in the nature (or, latterly, the structure) of the works themselves is . . . no less misguided than the search for essential or objective value -- and is, in fact, only another form of that search" (15). Thus Smith regards the identification of features in a work that direct response to be a form of essentialism. In her account, the "properties" or "features" of a work are "at every point the variable products of particular subjects' interactions with it" (48). There can be no fixed, determinate features, influencing all readers: these, when they appear, flow from the valuations enforced on readers by what Stanley Fish terms the interpretive community; they are a product of education and cultural norms. Fish, Text 335
Smith's account of the ideological basis of literary evaluation, although she calls it into question, attributes considerable power to the normative aspect of its practices. She suggests that those in control of aesthetic judgement (usually those in academia) expect texts to perform the functions they find proper or desirable, finding any other functions irrelevant or improper. This group is also said to deem as necessary the conditions under which it engages with texts, other conditions being found irregular or substandard (41).  
Smith notes that issues of evaluation have largely disappeared from modern critical discussion, and that this has had the effect of ratifying, "by default, established evaluative authority" (24). If so, it might be thought that examing response at the individual, subjective level might be an appropriate countmeasure. Would we not detect a number of alternative value systems in operation, especially among those outside the academy whom she terms "noncanonical audiences" (25)? But her gesture towards this possibility is framed in a priori terms: rather than empirical investigation, her approach suggests explanation of others' tastes at a theoretical level whether we are contemplating "oppositional cultural theory" or "conservative humanism" (26). Explanations of literary preference, in other words, can only be made within the framework of pre-existing norms.  
Critique
 
In her account of the constraints on reading Smith imputes much more power to the group than it possesses: studies of actual readers show far more divergent reading practices and variant understandings of literature than Smith's account would allow. Smith's arguments on the normative power of such judgements are useful in alerting us to some of the less visible components of the reception of literature, but their power for understanding the multifarious world of reading is minimal. Both in terms of the interpretations they make and in their valuations, readers seem to go their own way when unconstrained by classroom structures of authority. That such reading is not irresponsible or whimsical, however (the spectre raised by Smith (11) and others, such as Fish), is shown by the persistent influence of formal features of a text in shaping the reading process. Fish, Doing 83
It is, at one level, quite true that "literary value is not the property of an object or a subject but, rather, the product of the dynamics of a system" (15). But what is missing from this perspective is that value follows from first having noticed features of a literary text and having found them striking. The now common argument that value necessarily precedes acts of noticing that endow what is noticed with value is a partial truth, and a misleading one in the case of literary response. "As readers and critics of literature, we are within that system," states Smith; thus, because we "have particular interests, we will, at any given moment, be viewing it from some perspective" (16). But, we might reply, it is that perspective that the encounter with the literary text calls into question: if our interests were invariably in control, as Smith supposes, the striking nature of the literary text would be inconceivable. But the strikingness of literature is a phenomenon particularly attributable to the individual basis of our literary reading, where it is the perspectives which we have, perhaps unconsciously, acquired from our culture that are especially likely to be questioned. The most significant conflicts, including those experienced under the influence of literary reading, are likely to be enacted within the individual. Smith, on the contrary, places the source of conflicts of value outside the individual. In this way Smith prevents herself asking a central question: whether the individual subjectivities of readers during literary response have anything in common, and if they do, what their sources might be.  
Several different levels of valuation are collapsed in Smith's account: "evaluations are not discrete acts or episodes punctuating experience but indistinguishable from the very processes of acting and experiencing themselves" -- in other words, we are always evaluating, always "calculating how things 'figure' for us" (42). What is missing in this account, despite Smith's awareness of conflicts of value, is the temporal process underlying the instalment and questioning of value. Literary texts often invoke value systems only to call them into question subsequently; in particular, it is our immediate acts of "figuring" that a text shows us to be superficial and inadequate.  
While Smith is representative in finding that the only alternative to the contingent value system she presents is the attribution to literary texts of "transcendent universal value" (53), there is a third alternative that neither she nor any other prominent modern theorist has been prepared to consider. It begins by taking seriously the question what real readers are doing when they read.  
References  

Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text In This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.

Fish, Stanley (1989). Doing what comes naturally: Change rhetoric, and the practice of theory in literary and legal studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Document created March 8th 2005