ABSTRACT
‘Taste’ is often considered as the act of recognising both blatant and nuanced distinctions in a world of things and practices. Indeed, for the theorist of taste, Pierre Bourdieu, the expression of taste is always a way of marking social differences. For him a taste that is shared by all would not be able to convey ‘cultural capital’ (his term for the instrumental value of taste). Yet, we live in a world where there seems to be general tastes shared by most if not all: a taste for convenience, for instance, and the taste for those tools that allow us to perpetuate private life (the personal telephone, the private car, and so on). These are the mundane tastes and ubiquitous objects that this chapter discusses. My argument is not that these tastes and objects ‘overcome’ the social differences that are Bourdieu’s analytic goal (far from it); instead I argue that these mundane tastes are part of a much larger shift in the social and historical sensorium, and that rather than reflecting social differences that precede taste, are prime agents in the production of new experiences and new orchestrations of social difference.
