Distinction (book, Pierre Bourdieu)

Introduction:

Questions of taste are bound up in the goals of sociology, which seeks to establish the conditions by which tastes are made.

Individual tastes are determined primarily by nurture and secondarily by nature. The so-called hierarchy of the arts corresponds to a class hierarchy in society. Cultural wars are thus also class wars between different models of cultural acquisition. For instance, educational institutions favor and support the established cultural order—a particular class.

According to an intellectualist theory of art, understanding a work of art requires knowledge of a complex cultural code of secondary meanings, a code tied to a particular class. However, people understand and contextualize works of art more by instinct than conscious decoding, which is why an aesthetic theory of art is closer to the way people perceive art than the intellectualist theory. According to the aesthetic theory of art, the form of things and not the things they represent establishes their aesthetic value. Work of art are distinguished by their styles.

This “pure gaze” approach to art implies a break from the ordinary, a rejection of the signified for form. Fans of popular art, on the other hand, reject the rejection of the normal and demand representative art. Whereas Kant, a champion of pure gaze aesthetics, strove to distinguish between what’s pleasurable and what’s good art, popular audiences* conflate the two.

Popular audiences and artists reduce art to the things of life, whereas intellectual audiences and artists value representation more than the represented, which has something to do with the fact that the ruling class doesn’t have to worry about the necessities of life.

A science of taste and cultural consumption has to begin with the rejection of the established distinction between aesthetic objects and everyday objects.

The Aristocracy of Culture

We are all bound up in cultural wars, and so we cannot speak clearly and objectively about culture without first speaking clearly and objectively about the ways we ourselves are perceiving culture. We always have to contextualize our own views before we examine others. Otherwise we are only pretending to science in order to further our own political views and preconceptions.

I conducted a survey to examine the correlation between hierarchies of taste and hierarchies of class, and also of the correlation between this correlation and the type of cultural good considered. What I found was that cultural tastes and education capital are closely linked, and also that "the weight of social origin in the preference-explaining system increases as one moves away from the most legitimate areas of culture."

"Legitimate" works of art impose norms of perception and then tacitly define those imposed modes of perception as the only legitimate way to perceive art writ large. However, every essentialist analysis of the "aesthetic disposition," the 'right' way of approaching art, is bound to fail.

[Aside]

Reading this so soon after digging into Frye's Anatomy of Criticism draws them into dialogue. Re Bourdieu's latest point above, I think Frye would agree. Part of Frye's argument is that value-judgments about art can never be objective and are always ultimately reflections of a particular time and place. Bourdieu goes further by drawing out the way that aesthetic judgments also reflect different classes/educations within a time and place.

But would Bourdieu object to Frye's positive project, his effort to objectively classify works of art not according to their value but simply to their type. Would Bourdieu agree that this is possible, and would he care?

[End of Aside]

References:

Critique of Judgment (book, Kant)