The revival of poetics in the work of the Russian Formalists aimed to develop a science of literature, a scientific discourse purged of value-judgements and subjective, humanist philosophy. Literature did not reproduce or express or reflect either forms of consciousness or human and social action. Poetic theory assumed a relativist standpoint in which clear-cut distinctions between "great" and "mediocre" art were impossible. As a science, poetics could make no aesthetically valid distinctions between a newspaper report on a race meeting and the description of the race in Anna Karenina. The development of poetic theory in structural linguistics, for example, with its emphasis on a concept of literature as a structure of internal combinations and relations, further eroded the category of the aesthetic. In recent years aesthetic elements such as beauty, form, harmony, coherence, etc. have increasingly been derided as so much ideological ("bourgeois") baggage; and from within aesthetics itself, aesthetic value has often been assimilated to the intuitive feelings and perceptions of the subject thus defining judgement as merely a matter of private taste.