ABSTRACT
Taste is variously invoked to describe a physical sensation, aesthetic sense, or moral sensibility, and it can be a characteristic of people or of things. It is a foundational concept in the sociology of culture, connecting accounts of the centrality of the choice and preference for goods in the struggle for status across the twentieth century with the various reflexive freedoms available for the construction of late-modern lifestyles. A pivotal reference in the development of this strand of study is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, arguably the most influential and controversial piece of cultural sociology yet published. “Cultural capital” emerges from Distinction as the definitive Bourdieuian concept. This chapter will concentrate on the changing role of the concept in how processes of taste formation have been analyzed. I will argue for the continued centrality of Bourdieu’s schema for the understanding of contemporary cultural production and consumption despite a range of transformations in the processes of taste formation themselves and in the ways in which these processes are researched and understood. Although Bourdieu was not the first to reveal that an individual’s taste is socially
organized, the significant contribution of Distinction was to undermine the belief, stemming from Kant (1987 [1790]), that notions of cultural value are somehow ahistorical and reflective of a common sense of the beautiful. Bourdieu does more than merely reveal that tastes are socially constructed: he argues for a place for personal taste in struggles for social position-struggles ostensibly organized between class fractions. There are homologies for Bourdieu between hierarchies of “high” and “low” (or legitimate and popular) culture and the relative positions of people adhering to these forms in social and economic hierarchies. The appreciation of culture is constitutive of class relations. Taste, then, represents the lived experience of the power relations inherent in social structurea manifestation, physically experienced or expressed, of an individual’s stock of cultural capital, which can exist in three forms. First, cultural capital is institutionalized; that is, it emerges from forms of socially accredited institutions, nominally schools and universities, which bestow it in the form of qualifications but also denote it through the canonization of particular texts, pieces of music, or works of art as worthy of study. Second, it is objectified, and is accrued by the ownership or knowledge of specific works of art,
books, and pieces of music. Finally, it is embodied and revealed by the correct comportment of the body in dress or styles of speech. Different forms of cultural capital can be traded or accumulated in different arenas, or fields, of social life, but within the structuring, overarching field of power, the possession of those forms of capital that have been legitimized or consecrated does most to determine one’s social position. Alongside his concern with the consumption of culture, Bourdieu makes a significant
contribution to the understanding of the production of culture and, by extension, the production of tastes. In Distinction, this process is an interaction between (1) the consecration of legitimate culture by the educational system and reproduced in the family via the class system, and (2) the operation of taste-makers or cultural intermediaries. An emerging fraction of the middle class of 1960s France, cultural intermediaries are defined by Bourdieu (1984: 359) as, “all the occupations involving presentation and representation (sales, marketing, advertising, public relations, fashion, decoration, and so forth) and in all the institutions providing symbolic goods and services.” If, as Bourdieu claims, this was a group with increasing importance in the understanding of cultural life in 1960s France, their significance has increased exponentially in contemporary Western societies, a point to which I will return in the final section of this chapter (pp. 297-82). Elsewhere in his work, Bourdieu (1993, 1996) also placed cultural capital as central to
the production of cultural goods. Fields of cultural production, he suggests, are variously organized according to the spread of cultural capital between two extremes or “poles.” This spread maps onto the various commitments of producers and consumers as actors within fields to the concerns with art for art’s sake on the one hand, the “autonomous pole,” and the concern with art for the sake of economic profit on the other, “the heteronomous pole” (Bourdieu 1996: 124). The “game” of culture requires producers who are committed to the various positions in the field, with those richer in cultural capital tending towards the autonomous pole. It also requires consumers with similar commitments. Bourdieu describes the “universe of celebrants and believers” (Bourdieu 1996: 169) who are rich in cultural capital and ready to accept the ideas of “canon” or “classic” or avant-garde that emerge from producers. Boschetti (2006) suggests that it was Bourdieu’s attempt to bring to light the role of the symbolic in the legitimation of the social order that accounts for the hostile reaction to his work in some circles. She explains:
the cult of culture is such a deeply entrenched and shared belief that there was very little likelihood that a critical analysis would be well received or appreciated by either culture people, who profit by the prestige of culture, or those excluded, who in spite of the exclusion adhere to this cult.
