This was prepared as a progress report for my supervisor: it repeats things I've already developed in earlier posts, sometimes verbatim, but overall more sharply and consistently, which at least will make it more suitable for backlinks from my future posts on heritage ethics.
I begin with the thought that the heritage value of an object (concrete or abstract), if it isn't entirely a product of the object's role in past events, seems to depend on the possibility of its being interacted with (a dispositional kind of value) rather than on its actually being interacted with: that a forgotten artefact buried in the ground can possess value as cultural heritage, by virtue e.g. of not-yet-seen aesthetic beauty and not-yet-extracted information about the era of its production. So, actually digging the object up and examining it perhaps doesn't add to its value; but intuitively, digging it up and examining it, exhibiting it, etc. seems 'good', not simply in the sense that people can now benefit from it (i.e. being 'good for them'), but in a sense of the realisation or fruition of that value. (By way of illustration, a completed jigsaw puzzle is 'more than the sum of its parts' in the sense that usually it forms a picture - perhaps with some aesthetic value - but its assembly doesn't seem to create value in the way that a sculptor's chiselling a statue from a block of marble does.) I hesitate to say that this is 'good for the heritage' itself, owing to the obvious difficulty of making sense of such an utterance, but (reminiscent of my sense that the value of heritage doesn't seem altogether extrinsic or altogether instrisic) I'm inclined to wonder whether there might be some sense to be made of it; and I find myself quite inclined to employ the language of flourishing or fruitfulness to express the employment of heritage within a continuing culture.
The root difficulty is that whereas, if someone reads a book and is thereby inspired to write another book that draws on it, this can be seen to be the creation of new value through the reuse of what is already there, it's not clear how well this reflects what happens when objects are simply used, e.g. when a book is read and enjoyed but no further creativity arises from that. Since the topic is cultural heritage, perhaps it could be argued that dissemination throughout a population, even ignoring links to other objects created or appropriated by that population, in itself serves to increase the cultural value of the object.
Two objections arise. Firstly, compare the case of literary value: here it seems pretty reasonable to say that if we want to assess the value of a work, we assume that we're talking about its value as apprehended by those with the necessary background knowledge to appreciate it. When we talk about the literary value of Great Expectations (as Dickens wrote it, i.e. in the English of his times), we aren't interested in the responses of people whose command of English just isn't up to that level. So, proceeding along these lines, the literary value of The Canterbury Tales is to be judged assuming an adequate grasp of Middle English (and mediæval England), and so on for however much obscure knowledge might be required. Literary value, then, is something readers discover rather than invent; so it seems to follow that a doubling of people fluent in Middle English, say, won't double the literary value of The Canterbury Tales, which will be exactly the same work it was before. Now, cultural heritage value may in part work differently, but one would expect the heritage value of literary works to arise in substantial part from their literary quality, i.e. not to be independent of this kind of value which doesn't vary with degrees of popular use. Similar points can be made elsewhere, e.g. in the case of the value of a work as a historical source, which represents what any historian can get out of it, not the number of historians who use it.
Secondly, and similarly, I have made the point already that heritage value seems to involve potential for use rather than actual use. I doubt, for example, that Wycliffe's Bible is much read nowadays. A possible conclusion is that it retains heritage value on account of its historical significance, but loses what value it once got from being widely read. However, 'value' seems an odd term to use in reference to what a work gains when used; rather, it's to value that we appeal to explain its being used, e.g. that a book is worth reading. A valuable work may be such that in suitably propitious circumstances it will be widely used. Obviously there's an epistemological problem in postulating 'ideal' circumstances of appraisal: how do we know what those circumstances are like, and what they would offer? Moreover, it's easily objected that the value 'ideally' discovered is the value of the cultural heritage object to some culture other than ours: the value of Homeric poetry for the ancient Greeks rather than modern Hellenists, for example, or for some imaginary all-knowing, all-feeling superculture which exists purely as an intellectual device and is quite removed from any actual people who ever lived. (I've toyed with the idea of postulating some kind of perfectly educated entity to offer an ideal vantage point, but I'm far from convinced that there really is a linear progression of cultural receptiveness from ignoramus to Grandmaster Polymath; certainly it seems to leave out the full possibility of perspectives from inside or outside any given culture.) Nevertheless, the basic point that cultural value isn't that prone to fluctuating practices seems to me sound, and so I'm inclined to say that use (as opposed to reuse in new creativity) is perhaps 'good' but doesn't increase the heritage value of what's used.
Of course, I've argued previously that groups or categories of interrelated objects, rather than individual items, seem to be the primary value-bearers where heritage is concerned; but that doesn't alter value's seeming, while dependent on what people do and think, nevertheless not to be the concept to employ when characterising any sense that it's 'good' when heritage objects actually do play some cultural role instead of 'merely' possessing potential for it. Consequently I'm left with something new to develop.
One reason I'm hopeful that I can employ a notion of 'flourishing' (for which I may want to find an alternative term) is that I think it may help me decide how to address the possibility of 'bad' (as opposed to merely worthless) categories. This illustrates what I have in mind:
'[A]n institutional arts policy generated in Britain in the last quarter of the twentieth century... establish[ed] a separate category and public-funding structure that seemed to define the role of the black artist from outside. Such terms as 'ethnic arts', 'ethnic minority arts', 'non-British arts' and 'multi-ethnic arts' were used...'
Colin Rhodes, Outsider Art: Spontaneous Alternatives, p. 216
The problem isn't that these categories fail to classify anything. Even completely arbitrary ones, like 'pastel works by European or Sri Lankan artists featuring a cat and at least two persons, one of them clad partly in blue', do pick things out. Rather, I suspect this case can be explained in comparison with the cases you've talked to me about where an exhibition emphasises some aspects of its exhibits at the expense of others, so the curators find themselves choosing between e.g. artefacts as sources of knowledge and artefacts as beautiful things to be admired. In those cases, de-emphasising certain aspects doesn't actually close them off; pointing out that an exhibit is impressive to behold may distract from what it can tell us about history, but doesn't detract from it's also being informative. In contrast, the category of 'ethnic arts' just lumps a lot of stuff together and characterises it in terms of what it isn't; and unlike in the case of Outsider Art, where part of the point was to say that all those disparate objects with sometimes insane creators should legitimately be called 'art', the effect, while also admitting objects to the general category of 'art', is to de-emphasise the distinctions between items without compensating by doing anything to highlight aspects of what's really there. Latent value is still present, but the category has a stifling effect, getting in the way of appreciation; it may pick out a collection of beautiful and interesting objects, but it might as well pick out ugly and dull ones.
In all cases, the objects being classified seem to retain their value as what they are in fact, but in the case of 'ethnic arts' the category is, arguably, at fault. Now that raises a difficulty for me, because of the importance of putting (concrete and abstract) objects in categories (e.g. 'Anglo-Saxon burial sites', 'great English literature', etc.) to my developing account of value in cultural heritage. If a category is 'bad', should that perhaps have a negative effect on the value of the items that fall into it, corresponding to the positive effect that e.g. historiographical progress has in drawing out the value present in historical sources? I'm disinclined to say that simply putting things in a malformed category can sap value from them (art can be worth looking at whether or not someone calls it 'ethnic'); but if the category doesn't diminish value, in what way is it bad? I think perhaps it can be said to get in the way of use and thereby inhibit flourishing: the category obscures the value that's there and consequently makes it harder to make use of.
Another case that makes me think a notion of 'flourishing' might help is that of the unseen Nabokov manuscript which has been back in the news recently: Vladimir Nabokov at his death left instructions to burn work he had done on what would have become a novel called The Original of Laura, and his son has been wrestling for years with the question of whether he should comply. In looking at this as a heritage question - is this unseen work part of our literary heritage, by virtue of sharing its authorship with several published and wisely appraised works, or not, by virtue of being unseen? - I draw on my thoughts about works having value in combination where associations exist between them, to argue that Laura will have certain associations with the published works (being a development of the same author's literary style, for example) and therefore it is, in a sense that matters, not wholly unknown to us, with the consequence that to an extent at least it has some status as part of our literary heritage. So far so good, and I'm glad I can apply this understanding of cultural heritage value to an actual test case when one comes up and get the beginnings of a potentially helpful account of it; but what I lack is an account of what difference it then would make should Laura be published. Presumably the value of 'Nabokov's oeuvre' would be reduced by its destruction, but while it exists - if it hasn't been burnt by now - its value contribution is there, but inaccessible. So it seems incorrect to say that publication would add value, but I am inclined to say it would add something, and I think flourishing may be the notion to employ.
