 Cover of the first edition | |
| Author | Pierre Bourdieu |
|---|---|
| Language | French |
| Subject | Taste |
| Publication place | France |
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Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement, 1979) byPierre Bourdieu, is a sociological report about the state of French culture, based upon the author'sempirical research from 1963 until 1968. The English translation was published in 1984, and, in 1998, theInternational Sociological Association votedDistinction as an important book of sociology published in the 20th century.[1]
As a social critique of the judgements of taste,Distinction (1979) proposes that people with muchcultural capital — education and intellect, style of speech and style of dress, etc. — participate in determining what distinct aesthetic values constitutegood taste within their society. Circumstantially, people with less cultural capital accept as natural and legitimate that ruling-class definition oftaste, the consequent distinctions betweenhigh culture andlow culture, and their restrictions upon the social conversion of the types ofeconomic capital,social capital, andcultural capital.
Thesocial inequality created by the limitations of theirhabitus (mental attitudes, personal habits, and skills) renders people with little cultural capital the social inferiors of the ruling class. Because they lack the superior education (cultural knowledge) needed to describe, appreciate, and enjoy theaesthetics of a work of art, 'working-class people expect objects to fulfil a function' as practical entertainment and mental diversion, whilst middle-class and upper-class people passively enjoy anobjet d'art as a work of art, by way ofthe gaze of aesthetic appreciation.[2]
The acceptance of socially dominant forms of taste is a type ofsymbolic violence between social classes, made manifest in thepower differential that allows the ruling class to define, impose, and endorse norms of good taste upon all of society.[3] Hence, the naturalization of thedistinction of taste and its misrepresentation as socially necessary, deny the dominated classes the cultural capital with which to define their own world. Moreover, despite the dominated classes producing their own definitions ofgood taste and ofbad taste, "the working-class 'aesthetic' is a dominated aesthetic, which is constantly obliged to define itself in [the] terms of the dominant aesthetics" of the ruling class.[4]
In the development of social-class identity, the aesthetic choices that people make for themselves also create social-class factions, which are in-groups that distance members of a social class from each other and from other social classes. Thecultural capital taught to children, a predisposition towards a certain cuisine, certain types of music, and a certaintaste in art are the distinctions of taste that then guide children to their places in their social class and within the hierarchy of social classes. Such self-selection into a social class is achieved by the child's internalization of preferences for objects and behaviours particular to a given social class, and the internalization of a cultural aversion towards the other social classes, a feeling of "disgust, provoked by horror, or visceral intolerance ('feeling sick') of the [bad] tastes of others."[5]
The cultural tastes of the ruling class (communicated through thedominant ideology) determine what isgood taste and what isbad taste for the middle class and for the working class. Therefore, the concept ofgood taste is an example ofcultural hegemony, of how a ruling class exercise social control by their possession of the types of capital (social capital, economic capital, cultural capital) that ensure thesocial reproduction and thecultural reproduction of themselves, as a ruling class. Because persons are taught their cultural tastes in childhood, a person's taste in culture is internalized to theirpersonality, and identify his or her origin in a given social class, which might or might not impede upwardsocial mobility.
As researchers, Bourdieu and the statistician Salah Bouhedja appliedgeometric data analysis, as part of amultiple correspondence analysis, of "the complete system of [social] relations that make up the true principle of the force and form specific to the effects recorded in such and such correlation" usingcorrespondence analysis of the data from two surveys: (i) the "Kodak survey" (1963) and (ii) the "Taste survey" (1967), and subsets of data from the "dominant classes" and from the "petite-bourgeoisie".[6]
In 1998, theInternational Sociological Association votedDistinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979) an important book of 20th-century sociology, likeThe Civilizing Process (1939), byNorbert Elias andThe Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (1966), byPeter L. Berger andThomas Luckmann.[1]
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