✍ Scribed by Christopher J. Knight
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
In "Contingencies of Value," among other places, Barbara Herrnstein Smith interestingly 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. ''1
At first surmise, the statement itself does not appear such a radical one. Experience again and again instructs us that tastes change; that one generation's style -i.e., raccoon coats, crew cuts, hoola hoops, love beads, etc. -is the next generation's kitsch; that the aesthetic tastes of one generation -Sir Richard Blackmore, James Fenimore Cooper, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Jack London, etc. -are often the bane of the next.
Still, we tend to hold to the belief that judgments -a more serious manifestation of taste, or so we would have it -are things more solidly grounded. The times may change, yet our positive evaluation of, say, Homer or Shakespeare, never does change. "The same Homer," to quote David Hume, "who pleased at Athens two thousand years ago, is still admired at Paris and London" (15) today and the "existing monuments of literature" (6), to borrow Northrop Frye's phrasing, will remain, we feel somewhat cockily, monuments forever.
Nevertheless, if we restrict our attention only to the Anglophile's monument par excellence, William Shakespeare, as Smith has done in her attention to the vagaries of opinion that have shadowed the Sonnets these last few centuries, we shall find that the Sonnets themselves "have been characterized, by men of education and discrimination, as inept, affected, idled with 'labored perplexities and studied deformities,' written in a verse-form 'incompatible with the English language,' a form given to 'drivelling incoherencies and puling, petrifying ravings.'"2
In other words, our evaluations have been altered by our values. Texts themselves have no determinate value; rather, their value is indeterminate, dependent as it is on a whole host of relations from which they can never be free. The text is never a text-in-itself, just as, or somewhat like, Kant's thing-in-itself (the ding an sich) is never that. Instead, the text is the measure of its relations -to its author, its readers, its world, other texts, etc. 3 To separate the text from this network of relations is to undermine the text altogether -to cause it to disappear. Or, as Smith writes,
📜 SIMILAR VOLUMES
This short note deals with the issue of existence of contingent epiderivatives for setvalued maps defined from a real normed space to the real line. A theorem of Jahn-Rauh [l], given for the existence of contingent epiderivatives, is used to obtain more general existence results. The strength and th