Elaine Loves Bourdieu

Ok chaps, here we go…. I’ve been asked to tell you about the work I did for my undergraduate dissertation. It’s all about culture and taste and the connection between this and social class. It came up when we were talking about Morris’s ideas about improving people’s lives through wallpaper etc. People seemed keen to know more about these ideas so I’m presenting them on Friday. My dissertation was based on the work of Pierre Bourdieu. I’ve put these notes together so that you can read up before Friday – to have a bit of background to his thinking. There’s a bit of theory to go through which, I hope, will set the scene and get our brains fired up. Sorry that it’s a bit weighty and dense but it’s really hard to explain these ideas sometimes I hope it makes sense. See you on Friday Elaine

Pierre Bourdieu, French Sociologist 1930-2002

Quite cute, n’est pas? Used methods drawn from a wide range of disciplines (especially philosophy, sociology and anthropology) to understand society. Interested in how ‘worldview’ is constructed and its effect on social dynamics – often his ideas opposed standard Western philosophical traditions. Previously ‘capital’ had purely financial meanings. He extended the idea of capital to other categories like: • social capital - the idea that social networks have capital • cultural capital - non-financial assets of educational, social, and intellectual knowledge given to children who grow up in non-wealthy but highly-educated and intellectuallysophisticated families • symbolic capital - resources available to a person on the basis of honour, prestige or recognition, the person becomes an embodiment of a cultural value. E.g. a war hero may have symbolic capital when running for political office For Bourdieu each person has a position in a multidimensional social space; he or she is not defined only by social class membership, but by every single kind of capital he or she can articulate through social relationships. That capital includes the value of social networks, which Bourdieu showed could be used to produce or reproduce inequality. Every aspect of modern life - economy, politics, arts, bureaucracy, science or education creates a cluster of social relations that people engage in every day. Through this, they'll develop a certain disposition for social action that is conditioned by their position in the social field. Bourdieu suggests that dominant or dominated and orthodox or heterodox are only two possible positions within the social field. (Heterodox means a departure from accepted beliefs or standards)

This disposition, combined with every other disposition the person develops through being in the social world, will eventually tend to become a ‘sense of the game’, a way of classifying the world an opinion, a taste, a tone of voice, a group of typical body movements and mannerisms and so on. Through this the person develops a certain habitus - a ‘system of dispositions’ or a cluster of ideas, views etc that is typical of his position in the social space. Groups of people who share this habitus often acknowledge, legitimate and reproduce the social forms of domination (including prejudices) and the common opinions of each social field as self-evident, often dismissing other world views. Bourdieu claims that how people choose to present their social space to the world – their aesthetic dispositions - depict their status. Bourdieu says that these dispositions are internalised at an early age and guide the young towards their appropriate social positions, towards the behaviours that are suitable for them, with an aversion towards other behaviours. Bourdieu said ‘No judgement of taste is innocent’ meaning that aesthetic taste is a product of social and cultural influences.

Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (written 1984) This is Bourdieu’s best known book in which he argues that judgments of taste are related to social position. He combined, in a totally original way, social theory and data from surveys, photographs and interviews to try to understand the influences of both external social structures and subjective experience on the individual. The book concerns the operation of taste in French society and is based on a large survey carried out in 1963 and 1967-8, with a total of 1217 subjects. In this survey, people from all aspects of French society (peasants to bourgeoisie) were asked to specify their preferences on a huge range of things - their personal tastes in music, art, theatre, home decor, social pastimes, literature etc. They also answered questions about their knowledge of these arts. He found that, despite the apparent freedom of choice in the arts, people's artistic preferences (such as classical music, rock, traditional music) strongly tie in with their social position; and showed that subtleties of language such as accent, grammar, spelling and style – all part of cultural capital – are a major factor in social mobility (for example, getting a higher-paid, higherstatus job). Pierre Bourdieu's work emphasised how social classes, especially the ruling and intellectual classes, preserve their social privileges across generations despite the myth that contemporary post industrial society boasts equality of opportunity and high social mobility, achieved through formal education. He suggests that class fractions teach aesthetic preferences to their young. Class fractions are determined by a combination of the varying degrees of social, economic, and cultural capital. He says that cultural capital, not economic capital, is the most important marker, stating that “differences in cultural capital mark the differences between the classes” In opposition to Marxist views, Bourdieu criticised the primacy given to the economic factors, and stressed that the capacity of people to actively impose and engage their cultural worldviews and systems plays an essential role in reproducing social structures of domination. This means, potentially, that giving people cultural capital may well make the biggest difference to them in terms of their ability to be more empowered in society – including financially – this is huge in my opinion, E. Acquiring cultural capital depends heavily on “total, early, imperceptible learning, performed within the family from the earliest days of life” Bourdieu hypothetically guarantees that the opinions of the young are those that they are born into, the accepted “definitions that their elders offer them” He asserts the primacy of social origin and cultural capital by claiming that social capital and economic capital, though acquired cumulatively over time, depend upon it.

According to Bourdieu, tastes in food, culture and presentation are indicators of class because trends in their consumption seemingly correlate with a person’s fit in society. Each fraction of the dominant class develops its own aesthetic criteria – each fraction “has its own artists and philosophers, newspapers and critics, just as it has its hairdresser, interior decorator, or tailor.” But Bourdieu does think social capital and economic capital are very important in the forming of cultural capital. The production of art and the ability to play an instrument “presuppose not only dispositions associated with long establishment in the world of art and culture but also economic means…and spare time” “Taste functions as a sort of social orientation, a ‘sense of one’s place,’ guiding the occupants of a give social space towards the social positions adjusted to their properties, and towards the practices or goods which befit the occupants of that position.” Different tastes are thus seen as unnatural and rejected, resulting in “disgust provoked by horror or visceral intolerance (‘feeling sick’) of the tastes of others.” Bourdieu believed class distinction and preferences are “most marked in the ordinary choices of everyday existence, such as furniture, clothing, or cooking, which are particularly revealing of deep-rooted and long-standing dispositions because, lying outside the scope of the educational system, they have to be confronted, as it were, by naked taste.” He suggested that “the strongest and most indelible mark of infant learning would probably be in the tastes of food.” He thought that meals served on special occasions are “an interesting indicator of the mode of self-presentation adopted in ‘showing off’ a life-style (in which furniture also plays a part).” The idea is that their likes and dislikes should mirror those of their associated class fractions. Children from the lower end of the social hierarchy are predicted to choose “heavy, fatty fattening foods, which are also cheap” opting for “plentiful and good” meals as opposed to foods that are “original and exotic.” These outcomes would reinforce Bourdieu’s “ethic of sobriety for the sake of slimness, which is most recognized at the highest levels of the social hierarchy,” that contrasts the “convivial indulgence” characteristic of the lower classes. The contrasts between the tastes of luxury (or freedom) and the tastes of necessity reveal a distinction among the social classes. The degree to which social origin affects these preferences surpasses both educational and economic capital. At equivalent levels of educational capital, social origin is an influential factor in determining these dispositions. Ultimately Bourdieu observed that that social origin, more than economic capital, produces aesthetic preferences because, regardless of economic capability, consumption patterns remain stable. My question, which I posed in my undergraduate thesis was ‘Do Bourdieu’s findings in the 60’s have any relevance today (early 90’s) when TV, mass media etc have brought culture into our lives in a totally different way? Has this changed the development of taste across the classes or is the expression of taste just the same despite these huge social changes?’ I’ll tell you how I got on when we meet on Friday, ……(cue cliffhanger music)… I promise there will be plenty of pictures, not just theory. See you soon Elaine