Lady Beatriz A.

Labuzon
MA LCS
The value of Value
During the turn of the 20 th century, there was also a turn to language called the
Linguistic turn. In the Linguistic turn, Language is defined as a system of signs. These
signs are composed of a signifier and a signified. The signifier is the sound image and
the signified is the concept of an object. Ferdinand de Saussure, Swiss linguist and the
founding father of Structuralism states that the bond between the signifier and signified
is arbitrary or to put it simply the linguistic sign is arbitrary (Saussure1959 [1916], 67)
and systems of expression are grounded on the arbitrariness of the sign (Saussure 68).
The arbitrary relationship between the concept and the sound image is functional for
each gains its value from the other. It is a system of signs precisely because they exist
among people as something that can be shared in common. Thus, every expression
used in the society is based on collective behaviour or convention (Saussure 68).
The value of a certain piece of work is not found in the work itself but is situated
in the consciousness of a collective. The arbitrary relationship of the signifier-signified
greatly affects literary theory and literary criticism.
Terry Eagleton in his Introduction to Literary Theory mentions that The literary
critical discourse in itself has no definite signified, which is not to say that it embodies no
assumptions; it is rather a network of signifiers able to envelop a whole field of
meanings, objects and practices and certain pieces of writings are selected as being
more amenable to this discourse than others are what is known as literature or the

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literary canon (Eagleton 1996, 175). Since literary critical discourse has no definite
signified, it can open to any kind of writing.
However, it is not a question whether a certain piece of work should conform to
the discourse but as Eagleton notes that it is a question of the arbitrary authority of the
literary institution (176). A certain piece of work for it to be valuable must be constituted
by a certain institution as such. The value of a piece of writing depends on the literary
norms set by the institution. It is true that literary critical discourse can turn to any kind
of writing yet whether a piece of work is literary or non-literary must be based on and
recognized by the standards of the institution.
The query is that of the canon: what determines the value of a certain text? What
and who should be read? What determines the inclusion or exclusion of certain works in
the canon of the great books?
This paper therefore aims to explore who and what determines value- making
and value-judgement of a text through reflecting on the critical essays of two theorists.
As a consumer of goods from texts, it is but important to know who and what should be
read and what is the basis in giving value to certain texts. Thus, Matthew Arnold and
Barbara Herrnstein Smith are theorists who both provided governing criteria of values,
value-making and value-judgement and Terry Eagleton in his Introduction to Literary
Theory gives the readers an illuminating perspective of what gets in between the reader
and the work. Each offered a critical touchstone for comparison, reflection and
guidance.

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Value-making just like the concept of freedom is based on the opinions that
prevail in that age so that in a way it is left entirely to the whim of every generation
(Barbaza 4). The notion of objectivity is therefore smothered by the arbitrariness of
value-making. It is highly dependent on the accepted whim of every generation. People
may consider a piece of writing valuable for a century so long as they deem it to be
valuable.
Matthew Arnold, as an evaluative authority, laid out the basis of his critical valuejudgment and that is in all branches of knowledge, to see the object as in itself it really
is (Arnold 2001, 806). Arnold displays objectivity and universality of establishing the
value of an object in itself. This dictum of Arnold became the foundation of criticism. The
critical power must be exercised in seeing the object in itself. The object must bear
intellectual fruits that can be harvested profitably by the critical power. This therefore
means that the object must be a product of real genius inspired by a certain intellectual
and spiritual collective. Arnold further asserts this by stating seeing the object in itself
tends to establish an order of ideas; to make the best ideas prevail so that these new
ideas reach society, the touch of truth is the touch of life and there is a stir and growth
everywhere; out of this stir and growth come the creative epochs of literature (809). By
these, Arnold is constructing what should be read and consumed by the readers. He is
telling not only the writers but also the readers to satisfy the self not with bad pieces of
original writing but with the best ideas that prevail, current at that time.
Arnold institutes a high and more urbane standard of critical judgment. For
Arnold, a certain work should possess the idea of a disinterested endeavour to learn
and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world and thus to establish a
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current of fresh and true ideas (823). This disinterestedness means objectivity and
independence of judgment.
However, ideas must not be confined to the literature of ones own but should
draw substantially on foreign ideas because propagation of ideas should be an objective
endeavour. To be disinterested is to be a part of a common culture that acknowledges
classical languages, traditions and literatures. What Arnold tries to explain is that
despite diversity of ideas, there should be unity of thought to be able to propagate the
best that is known and thought in the world.
Accordingly, when Arnold mentioned that a poet ought to know life and the world
before dealing with them in poetry; and life and the world being in modern times very
complex things, the creation of a modern poet, to be worth much, implies a great critical
effort behind it (809), he is actually prescribing how a modern poet should be. In order
for a poet or a writer to be highly valued as such, he/she must conform to the
prescription of Arnold that the greatness of a poet (or a certain piece of work) lies in
his/her powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life. A poet (or a writer) to be drawn
in the circle of value must live in a world of ideasideas which animate and nourish the
creative power of the writer.
Arnold further rationalizes his claim of what a writer should be when he said that
the epochs of Aeschylus and Shakespeare make us feel their pre-eminence. In an
epoch like those is no doubt the true life of literature; there is the promise land, towards
which criticism can only beckon (825). If people desire to enter that Promised Land,

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they must nourish their minds with a sense of creative activity and possess the spirit of
the classical tradition. A writer must put emphasis on the importance of tradition.
However, when one explores Arnolds principle of value-judgment, he offers a
very utopian way of determining the value of a certain work which would definitely
exclude those works that are not the best that is known and thought in the world.
His claim of a disinterestedness endeavour was doomed when he further stated
that the sense of creative activity belongs only to genuine creation and should not be
derived from a poor, starved, fragmentary, inadequate creation (825). Nevertheless, for
the consumers who embrace and valorise classical ideas and in pursuit of flawlessness
and greatness of texts, then Arnold definitely is the authority.
No literary work is valuable unless it is valuable to the people for particular
reasons at a particular time. Arnold may have prescribed a disinterested conception of
value and judgment but still; these are arbitrary value-judgements. In this sense,
disinterested criticism is not possible. This therefore affirms Eagletons contention that
the claim that knowledge should be value-free is itself a value-judgement (Eagleton
1996, 12).
On the other hand, Barbara Herrnstein Smith challenges the traditional
conception of value, judgment, and justification. The aim of Smith is to provide an
illuminating alternative theory of value. Smith argues that 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 (Smith
1983/84, 15). Literary evaluation is a form of economy and a practice of Economics
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simply because value is the result of the complex interaction of economies that is,
systems of exchange of "goods." Value is determined by its market price. The higher the
price is; the more valuable a commodity is. Accordingly, the higher the demand, the
higher the value is. The value of an entity can be determined through its exchangevalue, its utility or use- value, and intrinsic value (for nonutilitarian objects such as
artworks).
Smith further stipulates that the value of an entity to an individual subject is the
result of the dynamics of an economic system specifically the personal economy
constituted by the subjects needs, interest, and resources-biological, psychological,
material, and experiential (16). But these personal economies of a subject are
continuously altering and changing because needs, interests and resources are
themselves correlated to an ever shifting environment. Value is therefore an arbitrary
indication of the unremitting interplay between webs of people and their environment.
Value becomes a variable function in a system that signifies a subjects engagement
with his/her milieu under particular conditions.
Smith further stresses that of particular significance for the value of works of art
and literature is the interactive relation between classification of an entity and the
functions it is expected or desired to perform (17). Here, a certain object is valuable if it
effectively performs its function. A person will only realize and appreciate the value of
something when it is being valued as such and when it functions for him/her.
However, if this certain object performs other functions not related to its real
function then one reclassifies the object and recognizes its alternate function- which
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also means that as Smith puts it to misuse this object and fail to respect its presumed
purpose and conventional generic classification (17).
In effect, there is a proposition that value must be pure, untainted and free from
utilities, interests and sources. There should be an objective value. But deducting these
forms of particularities and individualities means defining value out of its existence. Or in
Smiths terms the essential value of an artwork consists of everything from which it is
usually distinguished (18).
Consequently, forms of privileging and standard-izing of tastes and preferences
are inescapable. Judgements and justifications will always be infinite since value is
always and will be arbitrary. Value making is like shopping in a department store. People
can choose and select from a diverse array of goods. There are a lot to choose from but
selection of goods will depend on the grounds that these goods can serve better than
the others. Thus, peoples selection, like their selection among any array of goods, will
always be contingent (23).
In the first place, how does this thing called value started? Smith explains
In other words, for a responsive creature, to exist is to evaluate. We are
always calculating how things figure for usalways 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.
(Smith 1983/84, 23)
Smith posits that as gregarious creatures, people developed their evaluative
behaviour. This behaviour has become deeply entrenched in the consciousness of
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individuals forming their principles, biases and prejudices. Value-making therefore

becomes a practice and values are products of these social and cultural practices.
Eagleton asserts the same contention that people share deep ways of seeing and
valuing which are bound up with their social life and which could not be transformed
without transforming that life (Eagleton 1996, 12). Value- judgments are inextricably
linked to a persons social life.
The value of a value-judgement relies on its utility to those who produce and
receive it. People produce, make and determine values for their own benefit. Thus, in
the production and standardization of values, one should consider individual value
judgments, evaluative behaviour, normative institutions and social mechanisms. Since
human beings do not exist in a vacuum, valuing and evaluations are predetermined.
Accordingly, all judgment move within an invisible network of value-categories (12)
and these categories are crafted by virtue of various social and cultural practices and
highly specialized and elaborated institutions (Smith 1983/84, 27).
Various economies and evaluative activities arbitrate a works acquisition of
value. A literary work therefore goes through a complex course of evaluations.

The

first evaluative act is that of the author. Before the readers experience the work, it was
already pre-figured by the author and has been the result of the artists own interests
and resources as it evolves in the process of composition (28).

Also, this work of art

passes through innumerable acts of evaluation performed by other people who have
their own personal economies. These people may be a publisher, editor, professional
reviewer, book-seller, scholars, teachers or critics who would want the value of a work to
be marked, reproduced and transmitted. They are determinants of value or in other
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words they are the so-called evaluative authority. Their selection in evaluating the value
of a certain work involves certain criteria or standards. Not only that, they also maintain
definitions of value in order to perpetuate their privileging power of evaluative authority.
What then is the value of Value? As the preceding discussion suggests, there
are a handful of value determinants. Arnold posits that a certain work, in order to be
deem as valuable, must be impregnated with ideas that are the best that is known and
thought in the world and thus to establish a current of fresh and true ideas. On the other
hand, Smith elucidates the readers that the value of a literary of work is continuously
produced and re-produced by the very acts of implicit and explicit evaluation that are
frequently involved 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 (34).
Undeniably, value has no definite signified for it consists of a web of signifiers.
It's irreconcilable so it leaves the readers with a choice that really does have to be
made. While it is true that some will take one side and others will take another, readers
will find their selves siding or not siding with them, at least for reasons of exploring who
or what determines value- making and value-judgement of a text that arise out of the
distinction between these two positions.

Works Cited

Arnold, Matthew. 2001. The Function of Criticism at the Present Time. The Norton
Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Gen. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. 806-825.
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Barbaza, Remmon. 2002. The Art of Liberating, Ideya 4:1 (September 2002) 3-11.

de Saussure, Ferdinand.1959 [1916]. Course in General Linguistics, transl. Wade

Baskin. New York, Toronto and London: McGraw Hill
Eagleton, Terry. 1993. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis, MN & London:
University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. Contingencies of Value. Canons. Ed. Robert von Hallberg.
5- 39.

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