ABSTRACT
What in reality we are facing here is an aesthetic difference between the cultured and bodily pleasures that Bourdieu sees manifested in the ‘taste of reflection’. For him, behind this theory is an ‘ideological mechanism’ that sees in the progression from nature to culture an evolution from body to mind, while also implying a passage from material to intellectual values, and from intuitive and rude to educated and civilised manners.19 In architectural terms this means a step between impure and pure taste or, using Jules Lubbock’s term, the emergence of ‘good taste’. Bourdieu’s philosophical understanding of a ‘taste of reflection’ and Lubbock’s design model of ‘good taste’ have eventually come together to form a system that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries created the basis for what is called ‘good design’. Reading Lubbock’s The Tyranny of Taste (1995) gives us an exact account of how this was, for example, put into practice in British society through a long aesthetic debate stretching from David Hume to Adam Smith, and from William Hogarth through to John Ruskin, amongst others. This contributed to a ‘political economy of design’ in which interconnections between economics, social policy, morality and design were established.20 But the supreme virtue of good taste, which was understood simultaneously as a ‘taste of beauty’ and ‘taste of refinement’, had profound effects not just on
design, but also on the understanding of the body and its manners. In this context, George Vigarello’s ‘concepts of cleanliness’, which has been touched upon in the Introduction when talking about the Bourgeois Body, is relevant. It helps us understand how the rising problems of health in the nineteenth century triggered a cleansing process of the body, and how that was driven towards what Adrian Forty has called an ‘aesthetic of cleanliness’ legitimized by principles of modern hygiene. Vigarello explains: ‘The exhortation which the bourgeoisie employed with regard to the popular classes (…) confirmed and extended these processes; cleanliness did not only increase resistance, it assured order.’21 So, the argument about hygiene and cleanliness implies not only cleansing the body and its environment, but also the taste and design by which the representation of human flesh and architectural flesh becomes ruled.22 Mark Wigley takes the argument further in White Walls, Designer Dresses (1995), pointing out that ‘[i]t is about a certain look of cleanliness. Or, more precisely, a cleansing of the look, a hygiene of vision itself.’23 And since the perceptual culture of both Bourgeois Body and Modern Body became determined by a supremacy of vision, this is even more alarming. Regarding architectural interiors, Wigley remarks that ‘[t]he rejection of decoration in favor of the cultivated eye is explicitly understood as a form of purification.’24 Any ornamental voluptuousness or sensual excess is removed in favour of an architectural experience whereby ‘pleasure [is] purified of pleasure’, as Bourdieu emphasizes.25 One is witnessing here to the substitution of pleasure by notions of comfort, the latter being a decent, mannered and clean bourgeois variant of the former.26 The renouncement
