Bourdieu attempts to account for cultural taste by linking it to economic and social hierarchies in French society. He came up short for me in two places: he did not seem able to fully account for the usefulness of inutility in social life or for the desire to transgress aesthetic norms.

For both I would refer to his quotation of Proudhon criticizing “art for art’s sake” on page 49. Proudhon (a 19th century social anarchist) is quoted at length and blames “verse for verse’s sake” and “form for form’s sake” for the decadence and vice he saw plaguing France at his time. After reading Bourdieu’s characterization of the “working class aesthetic” (41) as one concerned with wasting both time and materials on art that seemingly serves no purpose, we might find ourselves sympathizing with the sentiment behind Proudhon’s statement. However, in a portion of his Economic Contradictions NOT quoted by Bourdieu, Proudhon goes further: “love for love’s sake leads to unnatural vice, onanism, and prostitution; art for art’s sake ends in Chinese knickknacks, caricature, the worship of the ugly.”

It seems today we would spontaneously reject this. The notion that the “purpose” of love should be to produce offspring or that art should (or could) again take up its religious mission of reproducing norms to teach us how live strikes us as reactionary. Bourdieu misses the opportunity to show how the so-called autonomous art of the bourgeois can be more than a mere conspicuous consumption of resources and fruitless expenditure of energy, and can, in fact, prefigure the creative practices of a society emancipated from the logic of capital.

For all Bourdieu’s discussion of Kant he never mentions Lacan’s 1963 essay Kant avec Sade, in which he posits that the presence of the Law actually generates the desire for its transgression. The jouissance (as surplus enjoyment) that comes from transgressing aesthetic norms might supplement his economic explanation of aesthetic transgression regardless of its basis in social status.

Bourdieu references “ben’s heap of coal” on page 33 claiming it was designed to be an affront to common sense. Recent exhibits and sculptures featuring piles of bricks and construction materials are also designed to shock people into recognizing the art of everyday life, or rather to recognize the creative potential in their mundane labor. It seems like this type of aesthetic consumption invites us not to bracket off art from daily life but to invite daily life into the sphere of art. This type of work “serves a purpose” and coincides with the artist’s desire to transgress as well as the desire of the audience to be shocked; but the secret pleasure that comes from being offended doesn't seem able to be accounted for in strictly economic terms.