Distinction summary

Common sense provides us with a starting point for investigating taste, but it’s just that: a starting point. As we’ll see, there’s definitely an identifiable relationship between taste and class, so it’s put us on the right track. But common sense isn’t a scientifically rigorous foundation on which to build a theory. As a sociologist, Bourdieu wanted to conduct a more intellectually sophisticated, empirically established inquiry.

So what should we do? Set aside our common sense and try to start from scratch? Not quite – and that’s because of one of the peculiar aspects of studying a social phenomenon like taste. 

Alright, so people’s tastes are influenced by the way they think about the relationship between taste and class. It’s a bit of a mouthful to put into words, but the idea itself is fairly straightforward. So why’s it so important? 

Well, this idea has some major ramifications for our understanding not only of taste but also of class. Now, taste might seem like a fairly narrow topic of interest, but class is one of the central concepts of sociology, along with some important schools of thought in other social sciences, such as Marxist economics and history. That makes the next idea we’re going to look at crucial for anyone who wants to understand society.

OK, so our common-sense ideas about taste and class are definitely important – but we still need to go beyond them if we want to gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between the two things. For that, we’ll need some empirical data to study. Back in the 1960s, Bourdieu realized that himself, so he launched a pair of extensive, in-depth surveys. 

Now, when you conduct a survey, the responses you get are highly dependent on the questions you ask. After all, there’s an infinite number of questions you could ask your respondents. And if you ask two very different sets of questions, you’ll get two very different sets of answers. 

Pop quiz: if you drop a bowling ball and a feather from a roof, which one will hit the ground first? The bowling ball, of course. Why? Because it’s heavier, many people would say. 

Now, if you know your physics, you know that’s not true and that it’s a matter of air resistance rather than weight. But even if you have a confused understanding of why objects fall the way they do on Earth, that wouldn’t stop you from making the correct choice. In other words, you’d have practical knowledge about the physics of falling objects, but, to use one of Bourdieu’s terms, you’d misrecognize that knowledge when trying to explain it – misattributing the difference in velocities to weight when you should be attributing it to air resistance. 

So what’s our overly simplistic folk theory about taste and class? Well, in dividing the two things on a scale that goes from low to high, we’re essentially putting forward a one-dimensional hierarchy. The scale is a vertical line, and each type of taste and class represents a position on the line. If you’ve ever talked about people climbing or falling down the socio-economic “ladder,” you’ve used this model yourself when talking about class. 

Now, for everyday conversation, the ladder serves its purpose, but if we want to develop a more scientifically precise understanding of class and taste, we need to go beyond it. And that brings us to Bourdieu’s hypothesis, which is that we can understand class and taste in terms of a three-dimensional space rather than a one-dimensional line. 

“Composition of capital” and “social trajectory” – the words sound technical, but the ideas themselves are pretty straightforward. However, this wouldn’t be French theory if things were simple, so there’s another complication to add to the mix. It has an even more technical-sounding name: capital reconversion strategies. But the idea itself isn’t that difficult, so stick with us! 

The key message here is: Our social status reflects our economic and cultural capital, and we can convert one type of capital into the other. 

A person’s social trajectory can change for many reasons. A decline could be the result of personal misfortune, like someone blowing her savings on a failed business venture. 

But oftentimes, a shift in a person’s overall volume of capital is tied up with the ebbs and flows of the economy and society as a whole. These larger tidal forces tend to lift up or drag down whole groups of people who are in similar socio-economic boats, so to speak. Here’s where capital reconversion strategies often come to the fore. 

So, what does any of this have to do with taste? Don’t worry; we’re getting there. We’ve been gradually building up the concepts we need to grasp to understand Bourdieu’s hypothesis. Now we’re finally getting to the main event.

Ready? Let’s go! 

So far, so good? Great – because now we’re going to have to add a couple of wrinkles to the picture. But don’t worry – it’s not going to get that much more complicated. 

Here’s the thing: that X-Y graph we looked at in the previous blink is essentially a two-dimensional representation of society. It just accounts for people’s volume of capital and composition of capital. But remember, there’s also a third dimension: social trajectory. To round out our picture, we need to add this factor into the mix. 

Alright, so that was the hypothesis Bourdieu had in mind when he created his surveys. If he’s right, people’s tastes should correspond to their volume of capital, composition of capital, and social trajectory. 

So now comes the big question: was the hypothesis correct? Did the surveys bear it out? 

So which tastes correspond to which class positions? Large portions of Distinction cover the answer to this question in painstaking detail. 

But unless you’re really interested in 1960s French society, the specifics aren’t that interesting in and of themselves, so we’re going to skip over most of them and start to wrap things up on a more general level. 

Let’s recap: the material conditions of people’s lives lead them to develop certain dispositions toward things like food and clothing. These dispositions, in turn, manifest themselves as tastes – preferences for one type of food over another, for example. 

Now, imagine if you took all of someone’s dispositions toward all of the areas of taste – not just food and clothing, but furniture, books, music, art, hobbies, and so forth. The result would be something Bourdieu calls a habitus – the final technical term we’ll be tackling in these blinks. 

If you took everything we just said about the working class and put it in reverse, you’d have a pretty accurate description of the habitus of the affluent members of the cultural elite. 

Because of their wealth, these people’s survival is all but assured, and they have plenty of time and money to devote to the non-essential elements of their food, clothing, and just about anything else. They can, therefore, afford to overlook the substance and utility of things and focus more on their formal and esthetic dimensions. 

So those are the broad strokes of Bourdieu’s theory of the relationship between taste and class. From here, the details become increasingly complicated, as he drills down deeper and deeper into the fine distinctions between the different tastes of different class fractions within each of the main social classes of 1960s France.

However, we now have enough of an overview of Bourdieu’s theory to be able to zoom out and look at the bigger picture of what it’s telling us.