ABSTRACT

Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) preoccupation with cultural capital as a resource to be deployed in the competition for advantage or “exchanged” for other forms of capital has obscured the ways that aesthetic pleasure matters for its own sake. Distinction (1984) analyzes how the exercise of socially shaped cultural taste-the “distinctions” people make, which in turn “distinguish” them-advantages or disadvantages people in the competition for social advantage, especially in the educational system. Cultural knowledge and taste become a kind of “capital” that can be exchanged at specific “ratios” for capital in other realms. Even The Rules of Art (1992), which focuses on culture creators rather than cultural consumption, deploys vast erudition about Flaubert and his contemporaries to argue that culture creators are driven by concern about rivalries and sources of distinction in an existing artistic field, or by the aspiration to define a new artistic field in which they are supreme. Lost in Bourdieu’s approach is the idea that a culture creator might be driven by the desire to create a certain aesthetic effect-to move, astound, delight, entertain, terrify, or simply affect an audience. Here I explore a different, but no less significant form of cultural stratification: the

differential availability of aesthetic pleasures to those with differing social resources. I focus on the production of cultural objects, performances, and meanings; on the ways audiences are brought into relationship with cultural creators; and on the organizations and practices that frame aesthetic experience. I start from the premise that aesthetic pleasure is one of the great goods of life. The

view that people participate in playful aesthetic experience only as a poor substitute for something else-politics, class struggle, the pursuit of power or status-is inadequate, both as an ideal of how people ought to live and as a description of how they do live (Stromberg 2009). I include under the broad category of “aesthetic pleasure” all forms of entertainment, from watching a wacky TV sit-com, to cruising YouTube for the latest political video, to the sometimes excruciating pleasures of serious drama, ballet, opera, or demanding music. Cultural expertise and the exercise of discriminating taste can serve to assert status, to intimidate others, and perhaps in some cases to gain access to material and other rewards. However, the Bourdieuian preoccupation with cultural distinction-both the amount of culture people “know” and the skills needed to decipher it-weakens

cultural analysis by assuming that culture’s major role is to reproduce inequality (by either mystifying class hierarchy, legitimating inequality, or serving as the opiate of the masses). Taking the aesthetic function of culture seriously directs attention to the social-

organizational factors that create differential access to aesthetic pleasure and to the social arrangements likely to produce such pleasure in greater or lesser measure. Social arrangements can stimulate or inhibit the creation of resonant cultural objects that appeal to particular sorts of audiences, and they can make the conditions for such enjoyment more and less available. Economic and educational inequalities matter partly because they deprive some groups of access to a full share of aesthetic pleasure-access to culture as a form of group expression and solidarity and access to intense, deep, rich, or thrilling cultural experience.