distinction a social critique of the judgement of taste

Bourdieu finds a world of social meaning in the decision to order bouillabaisse, in our contemporary cult of thinness, in the “California sports” such as jogging and cross-country skiing. Pierre Bourdieu brilliantly illuminates this situation of the middle class in the modern. The different aesthetic choices people make are all distinctions―that is, choices made in opposition to those made by other classes. He argues that this Kantian aesthetic fails to recognize that tastes are socially conditioned and that the objects of consumer choice reflect a symbolic.

What emerges from his analysis is that social snobbery is everywhere in the bourgeois world. No judgement of taste is innocent - we are all snobs. Bourdieu bases his study on surveys that took into account the multitude of social factors that play a part in a French person’s choice of clothing, furniture, leisure activities, dinner menus for guests, and many other matters of taste. In the course of everyday life people constantly choose between what they find aesthetically pleasing and what they consider tacky, merely trendy, or ugly. Reading Guide to Bourdieu, P (1986) Postscript: Towards a Vulgar Critique of Pure Critiques, in Distinction: a social critique of the judgment of. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, (1984).

Distinction a social critique of the judgement of taste