Thoughts on Bordieu

Thoughts on Bourdieu

A crude summary of Bourdieu’s aim in at least the first one hundred pages of Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste is a sociological rebuttal to the Kantian and Arnoldian definition of culture being autonomously removed from the forces of economics. Through questionnaire surveys completed by 1,217 people across the categories of working, middle, and upper classes, Bourdieu observes and concludes that the distinctions between cultural tastes are determined by the class status one is born into and the level of education one attains. Taste hierarchies are created and naturalized by the upper classes. The consumption and appreciation of art is designated as a leisure activity and appears effortless without labor. “Material or symbolic consumption of works of art constitutes one of the supreme manifestations of ease” (55). They have enormous power in conferring the distinction between what is good tacky and what is refined. Culture is equated with capital, something with a market value that is owned and protected by a privileged minority. The phrase the “pure gaze” is mentioned often and defined as “a break with the ordinary attitude towards the world which, as such, is a social break” (31). Those with the power of “aesthetic disposition” erect the boundaries that separate the cultural tastes between classes. For example, Bourdieu writes that the purpose of working class aestheticism is to provide a model of what not to appreciate by classes higher on the ladder. “As for the working classes, perhaps their sole function in the system of aesthetic positions is to serve as a foil, a negative reference point, in relation to which all aesthetics define themselves, by successive negations” (57). The practice of upper class taste formation as defined by it’s opposite is not without pernicious repercussions. Bordieu writes, “…but because each taste feels itself to be natural – and so it almost is, being a habitus – which amounts to rejecting others as unnatural and therefore vicious. Aesthetic intolerance can be terribly violent. Aversion to different life styles is perhaps one of the strongest barriers between the classes” (56). In a sense upper class taste formation is a process of violent exclusion. Knowledge of the arts is construed and manipulated towards the obscure and inaccessible. Levine’s articulation of audience participation as a way to engage and create cultural meaning is briefly discussed by Bourdieu. The “deep-rooted demand for participation” among the working class is kept at “at arm’s length” by the obscurity of content and references in an artistic production.

The historical origin of these taste hierarchies is briefly mentioned as beginning in the seventeenth century, but an elaborated discussion of where, how, who, and why this particular time period is significant for the emergence of this phenomenon seems absent in at least the first hundred pages. Also, to apply the distinctions raised by Bourdieu to contemporary American society would probably fail to reveal a corresponding analogue. Postmodernism has flipped and eroded categories creating more complex, fluid, and ultimately more confusing taste categories as created and consumed by society.

Matt Nelson