Value

Abstract

This curated collection examines the evolving study of “value” in literature, noting its multidimensional nature and growing scholarly interest. It highlights the challenges of defining value and explores its diverse dimensions: entities, criteria, concepts, sites, and actors. The project invites further insights to deepen understanding across temporal contexts.

While the term “value” defies clear-cut definitions and an identifiable number of associations, its study has increasingly come into being as a separate field. In 2011, the Modern Language Quarterly edited a special issue around the notion of ‘literary value’; in 2013, the scholarly journal Valuation Studies published its first issue; in 2015, Lamont, Beljean, and Chong called for a ‘post-Bourdieusian sociology of valuation and evaluation’; in 2017, Nathalie Heinich published Des valeurs: Une approche sociologique, an attempt to systematise theories and definitions of the notion of value and a programmatic call for an ‘axiological sociology’. Her book inspired a lively discussion, published in a 2020 special issue of the journal Cultural Sociology. “Value”, it seems, has come into being as an object of study, inspiring the constitution of its own temporal community within the academic universe of the twenty-first century.

While studying value has become a value in itself, the meaning of the concept tends to become increasingly blurry. As the initiators of the Valuation Studies journal cautioned in their first editorial, the term is a tricky one:

State it broadly, and valuation becomes everything and its study meets the entire field of the social sciences and humanities. State it narrowly, and the study of valuation as a social practice becomes the business of a handful of contributions locked up inside a closed and abstruse field of inquiry. Full reference in Zotero Library

Hence, while there is a desire to narrow “value” down, to make it intelligible as a clearly defined object of study, the concept itself seems to flee in all directions, resisting any simple attempts at definition and conceptualisation. One crucial difference in discourses on value is the one between moral and economic approaches that have been shaped by nineteenth-century ideas of ethical values and the development of a political economy, respectively. Both dimensions of values interpenetrated each other, a fact with repercussions for today’s discussions of works of literature, which function as both artworks, subject to discussions and statements on value, and commodities with specific values of exchange. To interrogate the relation between these dimensions is one of the biggest challenges when using value as a keyword for the study of literature.

As an initial framework to grapple with questions of value in our project work, we adopted a praxeological outlook to understand value as the outcome of a process: as the result of social practices of evaluation, the assessment of value, and valorisation, the production of value (see Full reference in Zotero Library for a more thorough engagement with these two verbs).¹Our project began as a collaboration within research area 4 of EXC 2020 Temporal Communities, and developed into four insights, as discussed below. In reflecting on the notion of “literary value”in particular, this development exhibits its own particularities. Focussing on social practices of evaluation and valorisation within the literary field—if one can still speak of one—allows us tentatively to identify specific dimensions in which the production of literary value has been diversified and differentiated: which “entities” are considered worthy of evaluation? What are the “criteria” used to evaluate these entities? What are the “concepts” mobilised in this process? At which “sites” do practices of evaluation and valorisation take place? And finally, which “actors” are involved in them? Within all these dimensions, scholars within a wide range of disciplines have identified an expansion and differentiation of processes of value-making.

Entities

In his book The Society of Singularities Full reference in Zotero Library, cultural sociologist Andreas Reckwitz diagnoses an expansion of objects subject to processes of evaluation—from a narrowly defined field of artistic objects to an increasing number of cultural entities, which ‘form a cultural sphere in which social processes of valorization […] take place’. These processes, according to Reckwitz, are increasingly shaped by what he calls a ‘social logic of singularities’. Within this logic, deviance from a particular norm becomes normative itself, creating value as ‘socially and culturally produced uniqueness’ (see also Full reference in Zotero Library). To him, this expansion implies a radical deviation from earlier practices of value-making, when value was associated with high-cultural practices and cultural critique was undertaken from a privileged perspective. His analysis, which has been critiqued for, among other things, its middle-class bias, seems to have serious implications for the production of literary value, as we not only witness an increase in the number of objects subject to evaluation but also much more dynamic processes of evaluation and valorisation.

Criteria

As the range of objects subject to valorisation grows, criteria of evaluation become more complex. Literature itself used to be defined solely by its adherence to purely aesthetic criteria, while the appliance of other criteria tended to push a work beyond the borders of the literary. Idealist conceptions such as these shaped for centuries the distribution of literary value as well as the number of applicable criteria for processes of evaluation, such as ideas about the autonomy of art (Full reference in Zotero Library) or certain forms of authorship. In more recent times, they seem to have lost some of their cultural authority, while alternative ways to measure and negotiate literary value gained traction. On the one hand, feminist, decolonial and other critiques of power relations have pointed to the racialised, gendered or otherwise hierarchically charged nature of allegedly universal values. This, in turn, has led to a discourse of political value ascribed to those literary or cultural products associated with these critiques and formerly marginalised actors—and a counter-discourse, in which a work can be devalued by marking its quality as “merely political”. On the other hand, softer criteria—for instance, a literary object’s social function as an affective experience or the authentic representation of lived experiences—have supplanted earlier thinking about aesthetic value as an intrinsic property of the object.

Concepts

The diversification of criteria has led to an expansion of grammars and concepts when it comes to describing literary value. A new vocabulary of affect and attachment has come into view, displacing practices of evaluation from the language of critical distance, judgement and disinterest to concepts targeting psychological and somatic processes. In feminist affect theory, as well as in the so-called post-critique-debate, scholars have started to negotiate anew the relation between “objective” and “subjective” dimensions of value-making—from Rita Felski’s work on attachment Full reference in Zotero Library to Sianne Ngai’s study on new aesthetic categories Full reference in Zotero Library. New concepts and vocabularies such as these were not only formed by new criteria for literary value but have themselves been formative of new regimes of valuation. 

Sites

A similar expansion has been diagnosed when it comes to possible sites of valuation and evaluation, an expansion particularly inflicted by the emergence of digital media and its invasion of the literary sphere. Traditional sites of consecration—for example, awards and literary criticism—are being complemented or even supplanted by social media platforms and literary blogs, a development that requires ‘a better protagonist […] than “the internet” or even “the digital” can supply on its own’ Full reference in Zotero Library. The new ways of defining and measuring literary value within these emergent sites have a powerful impact on the literary market, not least because their digital format subjects them to the algorithmic grasp of online marketing and market research, creating feedback loops that are shaped by and shape notions of value. At the same time, older sites and institutions have not completely disappeared. The ‘economy of prestige’ Full reference in Zotero Library is alive and well, and the decisions of the Nobel Prize committee for literature continue to spark controversies.

Actors

The new digital ecology challenges the authority of gatekeepers and experts within the literary field, leading to an expansion of the actor-network implicated in the production of literary value. In his recent study More and Less, Mark McGurl conceptualises Amazon not only as a site of valorisation but also as an agent in the literary market and a story-teller in its own right, arguing that ‘the rise of Amazon is the most significant novelty in recent literary history, representing an attempt to reforge contemporary literary life as an adjunct to online retail’ Full reference in Zotero Library. His argument implies a reconceptualisation of the idea of the author (as entrepreneur/service provider) as well as the reader (as a costumer with needs). More generally, in the digital world, a deliberately non-canonical, non-academic and deinstitutionalised approach to literature relies in a self-consciously non-professional or amateur perspective on norms and conventions established by online communities Full reference in Zotero Library. Literature, in that sense, tends to become a node in an open network of commentaries whose frame of reference is constituted by the experiences and preferences of online communities. At the same time, questions of political agency, social hierarchies and power relations have come to the forefront, raising the question of who is in a position to evaluate what object, and who has the cultural authority to ascribe value to literary objects in any meaningful way.

All of these processes of differentiation, in some way, seem to expand the borders of the “literary”, while at the same time threatening to devalue literature in a narrower sense vis-à-vis other cultural forms. While proximity to a default idea of types of literature, such as the printed novel, have been used as a criterion for literary value itself, leading to an internal hierarchisation of literary categories, the borders of the literary field have always been and continue to be porous. According to Mark McGurl, the literary novel itself has become a genre in its own right in the ‘Age of Amazon’, in a ‘colonization of literary fiction by the logic of genre that conserves literary fiction in its relative indifference’ (Full reference in Zotero Library, original emphases).

When we asked for contributions to our project work on “value”, we broadened the definition of the literary to encompass cultural practices whose nature as “literature” remains contested and has not always been included in Western and/or modern conceptions of literature—from age-old oral traditions to spoken word performances (Full reference in Zotero Library; Full reference in Zotero Library), from minor forms of written text to tweets, from theatre to cinematic practices. At the same time, we remain watchful for the effects this broadening has for the meaning and politics of the term “literature”. Tim Lanzendörfer has recently argued that ‘an inherited sense of what “literary” means […] excludes most writing’ Full reference in Zotero Library, diagnosing a profound anxiety within literary studies to come to terms with the importance of the literary market in its contemporary form. The uneasy and conflicted relation between “literary value” and “market value” thus continues to haunt ongoing discussions on valorisation and evaluation, despite the diversifications and ramifications registered above.

This cautious attempt to broaden the concept of literary value while at the same time specifying its meaning is very much in line with EXC 2020’s approach to the concept of Temporal Communities, itself an attempt to shed a new perspective on literature and literary studies as a whole, while proposing a very specific concept for doing so. If that which is termed “literature” is never a given but constituted by communities over and through time, as the proposal for a temporal-communities-approach to literature invites, then ideas around value and valorisation are key to this process. Practices of valuation are subject to specific temporalities, but they also engender certain concepts and experiences of time that act as implicit or explicit criteria in the valuation of literary works. To endow something with literary value, then, also codetermines which concepts of temporality circulate and dominate within a given historical environment.

The contributions discussing “value” will expand and elaborate on the observations made above, but they may also contradict or critique them. In the first cluster of insights, literary value is discussed in the context of film, theory and online culture. Till Kadritzke uses the example of the film Wanda (1970) and its reception history as an example for discussing Girish Shambu’s call for a ‘new cinephilia’, which integrates political aspects into discussions of aesthetic value. Alexandra Ksenofontova discusses the value of the prefix “post”, bringing earlier critiques of the term into dialogue with more recent configurations of it, such as “postethnic” or “postmigrant”. Alix Ricau, in turn, discusses the mediated value of animals on social media and identifies a separation between pets and farm animals, which sheds light on the complexities of both practices of valorisation in social media and human-animal relationship. Finally, Dina Oleimy expands on the questions of what value is and how it is produced in an environment increasingly determined by digitalisation, analysing the valuation practices within platforms such as Facebook or Instagram. The four clustered insights all share a commitment to thinking about value as the outcome of an ongoing process, reflecting the complex relation between the practice of evaluation and valorisation on the one hand, and the resilient autonomy of the objects under scrutiny on the other.

They also help to delineate the concept of “temporal communities”. Kadritzke’s insight understands the reevaluation of Wanda as the coming-into-being of a new community of cinephiles inspired by feminist revisions of the canon, literally valorising an artwork that had no communal reception during the second-wave moment of feminism when it was published. Ksenofontova’s text brings the question of temporality into focus, differentiating the variety of ways that the prefix “post” is used, a differentiation that is very much informed by theoretical work on the concept of temporal communities. Ricau discusses the relation between online communities and their shared objects of desire, proposing that animals on social media retain a temporal autonomy not exhausted by their reception by those communities. Oleimy expands on digital platforms more generally, addressing the ontology of value from the perspective of digitisation and datafication, an approach destined to contribute to our understanding of how value-making communities constitute themselves in our present moment, independently from the objects of valorisation.

Most of the insights in our project work on “value” did not develop independently from each other but are themselves results of a temporal-communal practice—namely, the outcome of lively discussions within research area meetings and other working groups of EXC 2020 Temporal Communities. Within research area 4, in particular, members have shared their ideas and outlines for project work on keywords, such as “value” and “circulation”, and we have discussed these ideas and their relation in several meetings. Ideas around the relation between “aesthetic” and “political” value have appeared in various discussions of the research area, as well as in discussions at the Cluster in general, leading to the development of concepts such as “situated value”. The relation between “value” and other project work on “circulation” have been at the forefront, especially in the publication process of the volume, The Value of Circulation, published in April 2023. As the keyword value will serve as the overarching theme of the Cluster’s annual conference in 2024, the insights collected here have also been shaped by the first meetings dedicated to the organisation of the conference.

Future insights will further expand our understanding of how value is constructed. For instance, until now we have barely discussed implications on the idea of canon-building, the notion of authorship and the practices of translation. Furthermore, the four insights so far address very specific phenomena from the last decades, engendering a presentism that also forecloses the use of older philosophies of value; we, therefore, invite further insights dealing with phenomena from older periods and establishing a link between earlier philosophies of value and the concepts of literary value discussed in the current fields of research. Finally, as the historical arguments made here always risk simplifying matters, one might also ask to what extent the processes described here already are at play in earlier historical formations, and thus not so new at all.

Insights

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Responses

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