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 Stein Haugom Olsen

precondition for any social practice to operate. It is a general point about social
practices and institutions that they are defined by concepts and rules that one has
to internalise to enter into the practice. To continue over time social practices or
institutions must have some members at any one time. However, such social prac-
tices/institutions are not defined through their membership. They constitute their
own membership: the only requirement to this membership is that it has to some
extent internalised the concepts and conventions of the practice/institution and
applies them. Social practices of this kind cannot therefore be identified through
other criteria defining a community (e.g. criteria of social identity).
Aesthetic value is socially constituted and aesthetic justification can only be
recognised after a process of socialisation. However, aesthetic value is not consti-
tuted through consensus in a community but in a social practice governed by rules
and concepts cutting across many communities which can be defined in many dif-
ferent ways.32 Consensus does not constitute value. The theoretical advantage of
the argument from artistic failure is that it leaves no opening for community inter-
ests: no community has a stake in an artistic failure and thus nothing to say about it
that can be related to its dominant interests as a community. It is consequently eas-
ier to recognise that the reasons produced for denying it further critical attention
must have a basis different from that of the dominant interests of a community.
Once it is recognised that reasons for denying further critical attention to artis-
tic failures can have their basis outside the dominant interests of a community, it is
easy also to recognise how implausible is the assumption that a community defined
by e.g. common social identity should be able to agree on a set of artistic standards
of excellence that can be derived from, or that supports the dominant interests of
that community. It is here that one sees a conceptual blurring in the ‘instability of
value argument’ whereby members of a community are assumed to be participants
in the same social practice. Or, conversely, there is a conceptual blurring in the def-
inition of community: it is tacitly assumed that people who engage in the practice
of reading literature appreciatively as works of art constitute a community that
necessarily has a common social identity. However, there is no reason to believe
that white, middle-class, middle-aged men who, as cultural radicals claim, possess
cultural power, but who are not interested in literature or art, should share a set of
standards of artistic excellence that can be seen as underpinning their main com-
mon interests. Those white, middle-class, middle-aged men who are interested in
literature and art, will share such standards, but they will share them because they
are participants in a social practice that may (though it need not) go beyond the
community of white, middle-class, middle-aged men. This social practice is not

. For a detailed argument that literature is this kind of social institution or practice, see
Lamarque and Olsen, op.cit. pp. 255–67.