Daily Inspiration Quote by John Barth

Barth’s line is a scalpel aimed at our most comforting superstition: that value lives inside objects the way seeds live inside fruit. He denies that there’s some natural “worth” embedded in a diamond, a diploma, a marriage, a novel. Instead, value is a social verdict, a story we agree to tell and keep telling until it feels like physics. That’s why the sentence lands with a cool, almost bureaucratic finality: “attributed,” “assigned,” “from outside.” It’s the language of paperwork, not romance, and that’s the point. Meaning isn’t discovered; it’s administered.

The subtext is both liberating and bleak. If value is conferred, it can be revoked. Taste changes, markets crash, reputations flip, canons get rewritten. Barth is also quietly implicating artists and readers in the same machine: the novel doesn’t come preloaded with importance; communities of critics, institutions, and fans manufacture a halo around it. Coming from a postmodern novelist, the claim doubles as aesthetic manifesto. Postmodernism doesn’t merely doubt old certainties; it shows how those certainties are made.

Contextually, Barth wrote in a cultural moment suspicious of “intrinsic” anything: after mass media, after advertising’s mastery of desire, after the mid-century’s disillusionment with grand moral narratives. The quote works because it refuses consolation while exposing a practical truth: if value is assigned, we’re responsible for the assignments. That’s not nihilism so much as a demand to own our judgments instead of treating them like nature.