On Poetic Value

Suppose we reject Bentham’s conflation of cultural value with subjective pleasure, but are also sceptical about the notion of ‘inherent’ value. Where does that leave us? An answer furnished by the social sciences is that value, like meaning, is socially constituted. Paint and canvas, paper and ink (or pixels on a screen) are physical phenomena; ‘goodness’ and ‘badness’ are not. A cultural ‘scene’ is a kind of institution in which all the members have come to a rough consensus (or behave as if they have) about what to find valuable; at the minimum, they have decided to invest their time in one set of activities or practices instead of another. The extent to which that consensus can bear scrutiny is open to question.

Take a regular audience at a poetry reading series: it may be assumed that they all have some degree of enthusiasm for the material being read, at least some of the time, but this is not necessarily easily separable from an attachment to the social occasion of the reading (nor, indeed, in the British case, from some kind of incidental physical addiction to ethanol). Individually, they may have widely differing, even barely overlapping conceptions of literary value; their estimation of poetry in general may range from ‘an amusing enough way to pass the time’ to ‘the most vital of human creations’. In keeping with Bourdieu’s model of the field of cultural production, they will probably tend – as consumers of an economically marginal art – to place a high value on the ‘uncommercial’ (the ‘fit audience though few’), although this will take different forms in ‘mainstream’ and ‘avant-garde’ circles.

An interesting question is whether experimental writing, which tends to eschew semantic transparency, is therefore more elastic in the range of values that can be ascribed to it. Thinking about this, I was reminded of some remarks made last year by Andrew Duncan in an exchange with Joe Luna. Duncan expressed an anxiety about Luna’s critical enthusiasm for the work of Jonty Tiplady:

This is the worry with Tiplady - that you identify with him so intensely that you aren’t interested in the words. Would this poetry survive if it was pitched into a space, a group of people, where nobody knew anything about the ‘cultural placing’ and only had the words to work with?  

Meaninglessness is the ‘soft area’ where this kind of emotional identification soaks in and shows up as a stain. It’s a sort of void where insiders see perfection and outsiders see only perplexing failure to articulate. It takes on the colouration of delicate signals which otherwise would not be picked up at all. It allows collusion. It is like the ‘la la la’ in a pop song - it is either seductive or irritating, depending on whether you like the song.

These remarks seem pertinent, even if they are effectively a variation on the populist ‘emperor’s new clothes’ argument. Duncan’s worries may be misplaced, though. If we take the statement that ‘insiders see perfection and outsiders see only perplexing failure to articulate’ and generalise it to the formula ‘insiders see X, outsiders see not-X’, then it could be applied more or less accurately to any minority pastime, subculture or special interest group (skateboarders, toad breeders, bronies, collectors of Nazi memorabilia), where ‘X’ is whatever peculiar tenet or obsession separates the members of the group from the wider population. If one accepts this point, then the main things left to worry about, were one so disposed, would be the social composition of the membership, the necessarily limited potential for expansion, and any threats to the group’s ‘survival’ in a world of competing entertainments.

An analogy can be made with money. As the philosopher John Searle discusses in his dry yet conceptually interesting book The Construction of Social Reality, money is a social fiction. Rectangular pieces of paper with coloured markings are accepted as units of exchange in a particular territory because they are backed by particular institutions (central banks, shops, etc) and are underwritten by a collective social agreement to attribute symbolic (but effectively literal) value to them. The value of particular currencies is not stable, and may evaporate in periods of hyperinflation. Similarly, cultural institutions could be said to operate their own ‘currencies’ (whether in the form of artworks themselves or the conceptual vocabularies used to evaluate those artworks), which may have value only within their own confines.¹

Since members of a cultural institution – particularly a small one such as a poetry scene – have a vested interest in maintaining and reproducing it, they will generally be concerned with ‘boosting’ its internal value by acts of affirmation: attending events and clapping at the end, buying books and reviewing them (if at all) favourably. There may be plenty of behind-the-scenes bitching and a bit of polemical jousting, but this can be absorbed. There are, however, limits: since small scenes rely on an appearance of inclusive camaraderie, aggressive and public attacks on the work of individual members or their revered forebears (Prynne, O'Hara, Stein, etc) risk exposing faults in the institution itself, reminding the disputants that their sense of shared aims and values is precarious, and, ultimately, fictional. This is theoretically acknowledged in arguments over gender representation, over whether it is acceptable to flirt with 'mainstream' publishers and venues, and over the value (or lack thereof) of ‘militant’ politics. Most members are willing to suppress their differences, though, because of their personal investments in the institution.

Outside, beyond the fringes of academia, the upstairs rooms of pubs or other 50-capacity venues, and a few corners of the internet, no-one is likely to be listening; those who hear anything more than a ‘perplexing failure to articulate’, an irritating ‘la la la’, have, for the most part, no particular incentive to care. They are not wrong. Nor should this perturb us. 

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1 Franco Berardi has also written on this topic recently, but makes effectively the opposite argument.