Hernstein Smith intricately and tediously teases out 'value', both as a process and as a phenomenon. For Hernstein Smith evaluation is always compromised and is not a universally stable designation -
'For evaluation is, I think, always mingled with regards that stand aloof from the entire point: always compromised, impure, contingent; altering when alteration finds; bending with the remover to remove; always Time's fool' (1).
The process of evaluation for a work has a past and a future, is rooted in moments in time and instances and is thus variable by those fixed marks or instances.
The first instance of such, interestingly, is in the very process of creation itself. The author must undertake a process of evaluation, selection and exclusion in order to compose a work. For Hernstein Smith value is an accumulative process. The determination of such is comprised of a combined economy of all experiences and encounters.
This applies within the process of composition as well as instances throughout the works history of reception. The original reception of Shakespeare’s sonnets will differ in value from those now, as those from earlier moments in it’s literary history.
Upon reception of a work, to evaluate a work is to estimate that economy of experiences and encounters for others -
‘to evaluate a work of art is, amongst other things, to estimate its potential value for others; but while our ability to make that estimation correctly certainly increases in time with all our general and specific knowledge, it also decreases in time as we become less and less like anyone else, and thus less able to predict anyone else’s responses on the basis of our own (5)’.
The process of evaluation is highly subject to variability and inconstancy. Hernstein Smith suggests the following variable must be considered to name a few - a consideration of how well that work will serve certain implicitly defined functions, the specificities of that implied audience, and how those defined conditions DEFINE the value given to a work (for instance to use the example she gives an opera at the Met will have a different value assignment than a performance of tribal African drumming to their respective recipients).
For Hernstein Smith, the cannons of literature or art are thus based on a collective accumulation of these of these evaluations -
‘the recommendation of value represented by the repeated inclusion of a particular work in anthologies of great poetry not only promotes but goes some distance towards creating the value of that work, as does its repeated appearance on reading lists or its frequent citation or quotation by professors, scholars, critics, poets and other elders of the tribe’ (11).
Interestingly also, Hernstein makes the point that the role of the scholar and the critique differ, in that it is the critic who determines value. There is then a politics of taste to consider, which Guillory picks up in the second reading.
For Guillory, in one sense the cannon can become a reflection of that collective of which it emerges. That site of preferential value maybe seen as a site of exclusion, where minority groups are not represented within the cannon. It is suggested that this is not a matter of political exclusion on the part of the critics but a circumstance of history itself, where minority groups or sexes may not have had access to literacy or the culture surrounding it.
The difference for Guillory between the syllabus and the cannon is ‘the difference between the pedagogic imaginary, with its images of cultural or countercultural totality, and the form of the list, as the instance of mass culture’s social imaginary, with its simultaneous denial and manifestation of cultural heterogeneity’ (197). Such groups are not represented in the canon of literature because of the nature of the construction of the cannon itself.
It seems to me however that the term ‘cannon’ still may be highly variable in meaning and applicability, and possesses the ability in the very nature of what it is to be a volatile an item as Hernstein Smith has suggested in her explanation of its composition. In the world of the literary and perhaps art the ‘cannon’ seems somewhat a more stable entity but consider it’s transference to the study of music or film? Is it possible to have a ‘cannon’ of great music or great film? Perhaps with music especially the instability of value is the most transparent. Each authoritative institutionalized voice of musical criticism appears to have a very different value set of what it deems worthy of inclusion into their ‘yearly’ cannons or even ones they comprise by the decade. Compare Rolling Stone, to Pitchfork, to Mojo, to street press like Drum and Brag. Perhaps in a medium like this that political element of lack of representation due to lack of access to the form is thrown to the wayside as most of these major institutions are able to consider obscure releases as long as they are heard or are thought to have been making some form of effect on the surface of the musical community. This again becomes a question of ease of access as a circumstance of the time we live in, in the emergence of literary cannons, such access was limited both by those who could access it and by the means of production of which it was distributed and reached.
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