Does anyone even have Cocktail Parties Anymore?

Bourdieu is not afraid to step away from things. The distance he gives us between our objects of study (culture) and our methods of analysis lets us see the humane arts in sociological way. Though not for the faint of heart, the process allows to register connections within a complex and diverse matrix of relations that enable our supposedly internal reception to objects of taste. Naturalization of judgment is a central problem for Bourdieu and something that we as students and educators cannot afford to take for granted. For all the years of learnin' and sophistication, we are the aesthetes' worst enemy; we are all, in some sort or another, loud-mouth pedants. Our senses of refinement comes from the pedigree of the best institutions, the smartest professors, and by reading the best books (assigned to us by these aforementioned gatekeepers). And now we have the responsibility to inform everyone we can just how much we know about everything. We have become expert cocktail party guests, but would the people at these parties really want to invite us?

Bourdieu investigates the "ideology of natural taste" via distinction between the gastronome and the gourmet. "Whereas taste" Bourdieu cites de Pressac, "is the natural gift of recognizing and loving perfection, gastronomy is the set of rules which govern the cultivation and education of taste. Gastronomy is to taste as grammar and literature are to the literary sense" (68).

The gastronomes illustrate what Bourdieu calls illusio, or, belief, in " an involvement in the game which produces the game" (86). Scholars, or students of taste, need to be instructed in the rules of the game, they do not come naturally, which makes the whole mechanism of culture even more shadowy and serpentine. Money does not guarantee high-taste or brow status per se, and neither does learning/practice. The exchange rate of cultural capital from the almost infinite subject positions is dynamic and, even more importantly, speculative. It's easy to think from our sheltered position within the academy that we have some kind of purchase on taste, but taste in not unilateral. It gets put to many purposes, and signifies differently to many separate groups. We may no longer be masters of the cocktail party, Kenneth Burke's famous metaphor for academic writing notwithstanding. The sociologist of culture (or maybe the cultural studies-ist) cannot limit their purview to intra-institutional concerns, nor can they only investigate the enclaves of the highest-brow, the art producers. The coexistence and friction between and within these groups is where, for Bourdieu, the culture we want to study resides.