{"id":"5f5b3b566cee0700070c11de","slug":"distinction-en","title":"Distinction","audio_url":"https://hls.blinkist.io/bibs/5f5b3b566cee0700070c11de/5f5b3b576cee0700070c11e0-T1599814752.m4a?Expires=1643044068&Signature=W3meW7vYXWqwCbOZ0pWd1fLAJ5GyvPDDmHYS6JD5C3FRwE3MZO9R5g8uDfPx~6psWRma03OqJBfdW535xdENXY1TNe9eggc5~-1vc6J5seXaD569FecIxStQWXjh1V2LkNLT5Oomx~03xTlMxP7pTJW3rl~GAZJNGl2VC5GSTZN9ZoTh~F57BE24tF8v4pL2lVuXbNdYU355vGDY3KdvywiPRygbRVPxx2x~YYwu~MUh8EogqwGsoD6lkSz9QrjHZbXfLjHSmTwvYJRGyNDm2HMaL~tg~8-VW2Z87~gozN0Bzp28B2J9Q7v4Xy34irlJc2~lOeoSoVFtQfm2ndXW9w__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJXJM6BB7FFZXUB4A","chapters":[{"id":"5f5b3b576cee0700070c11e0","title":"We associate different tastes with different social classes.","text":"

Imagine two people with very different tastes in leisure activities. The first person likes to attend classical music concerts and visit art museums, while the second prefers to watch wrestling matches and go to amusement parks.

Now, if you had to guess, to which social class would you say each person probably belongs?

Chances are, you’d say the first person probably belongs to a much “higher” class than the second one. And that’s because all of us have intuitions about taste that are strongly tied up with our ideas about class.

The key message here is: We associate different tastes with different social classes.

Generally speaking, we tend to divide both tastes and classes along a scale that goes from low to high. At the bottom of the scale, there are the “popular” tastes of the working class. Next up, there are the “middle-brow” tastes of the middle class. And at the highest end, there are the “bourgeois” tastes of the upper class, along with what sociologists call the “legitimate” tastes of the cultural elite.

The cultural elite includes the more “refined” members of the upper class but also thought-leaders and taste-makers like intellectuals and artists. They may not be affluent, but they do have a lot of cultural cachet, so their tastes carry a lot of weight.

Now, the details of all these tastes vary from culture to culture. They also change from one era to the next. They can even differ within the same society during the same time period based on factors beyond class, such as ethnicity, gender, age, and place of residence. For instance, residents of trendy and happening cities tend to have more “fashionable” tastes than people in small, sleepy towns – even if they’re members of the same class.

It’s, therefore, impossible to give any timeless, universal examples here. The ones that author Pierre Bourdieu focuses on are drawn from 1960s France, so many of them will seem dated or culturally specific to us now. For instance, back then, “The Blue Danube” was an example of popular French taste in music, while “Hungarian Rhapsody” was middle-brow, and “Concerto for the Left Hand” was “legitimate.” Nowadays, many people wouldn’t even be familiar with any of these pieces of music.

But Bourdieu invites us to apply his ideas to our own cultural contexts, so let’s take him up on that invitation for a moment. In your society today, what would you consider popular, middle-brow, and legitimate tastes in music?

We don’t want to offend anyone by calling their favorite artist “middle-brow,” so you fill in the blanks here.

"},{"id":"5f5b3b576cee0700070c11e1","title":"To scientifically understand people’s tastes, we must take into account their ordinary ways of thinking about them.","text":"

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.

The key message here is: To scientifically understand people’s tastes, we must take into account their ordinary ways of thinking about them.

To see why, imagine you’re in 1960s Paris, and you try inviting members of the French elite to attend a circus. “Sacré bleu!” they might declare, with a look of disgust on their faces. As members of the elite, they’d probably view going to a circus as a “banal” and “vulgar” way to spend one’s leisure time. From their point of view, it’s “beneath” them.

Why? Well, in part because, in their minds, it’s the sort of thing working-class people do.

OK, now imagine inviting them to an evening at the opera. “Ah,” they might say. “Now we’re talking!” From their perspective, that’s the sort of “sophisticated” cultural activity that befits members of the elite, such as themselves. It’s on their level, so to speak.

Now, notice what’s happening here. The elite’s attraction to the one activity and aversion to the other depends on how they conceive of themselves and those activities in terms of class. Their aversion to the circus is, in part, an aversion to things they associate with the working class, and it reflects their conception of themselves as members of the elite – people who are “above” the working class and the things to which it’s attracted. Meanwhile, their attraction to the opera is, in part, an attraction to something they associate with being members of the elite class.

And if you repeated the same experiment with some working-class French people, you’d probably find the opposite results. An evening at the circus? “Certainement!” they might reply. The opera? “Main non! That’s for fancy people – not the likes of us.”

This is just one example, but it illustrates a more general point, which is that our common-sense notions about the relationship between taste and class are already baked into our own tastes. To understand taste, therefore, we have to take those notions into account when studying it. After all, they’re an important part of the very phenomenon we’re trying to understand!

"},{"id":"5f5b3b576cee0700070c11e2","title":"People’s ideas about taste and class play an active role in shaping the realities of taste and class.","text":"

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.

The key message here is: People’s ideas about taste and class play an active role in shaping the realities of taste and class.

To understand this, let’s go back to our previous example. Remember, the French elite feel attracted to the opera because they view it as an elite activity, and they have an aversion to the circus because they view it as a working-class activity.

Now, in light of these facts, how are the elite going to spend their leisure time? Well, by going to the opera and avoiding the circus, among other things. And the opposite will be true of working-class people. They’ll go to the circus while avoiding the opera.

Thus, the two classes’ intuitions about taste and class turn into self-fulfilling prophecies. Because they perceive it as an elite activity, going to the opera actually becomes an elite activity – something that’s generally done by the elite and avoided by the working class. And the same thing happens in reverse for the circus. It actually becomes a working-class activity, thanks to the two classes’ perceptions of it.

A feedback loop then develops. The more that working-class people tend to go to circuses and elite people to operas, the more that reinforces their perceptions of which class does which activity. Not only that, but the two activities also become some of the distinctive features of the two classes in question. What are the working class and elite? Well, among many other things, they’re the people who tend to go to circuses and operas, respectively.

Thus, our intuitions about taste and class aren’t just mere ideas. By influencing our behavior, they help to shape the very realties of taste and class themselves. And this illustrates an even larger point: as human beings, we don’t just passively experience the social world around us. Instead, we actively construct that world ourselves through our actions and the ideas that guide them.

"},{"id":"5f5b3b576cee0700070c11e3","title":"Bourdieu advanced a hypothesis that builds on and refines our intuitions about the relationship between taste and class.","text":"

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.

So how do you decide which questions to ask? Well, you need some sort of preliminary, educated guess about what you need to know about your subject matter. In other words, you need a hypothesis.

The key message here is: Bourdieu advanced a hypothesis that builds on and refines our intuitions about the relationship between taste and class.

Remember, we generally divide tastes and classes along a scale of low to high. To recap: there are the “popular” tastes of the working class, the “middle-brow” tastes of the middle class, and the “bourgeois” and “legitimate” tastes of the upper-class and cultural elite.

Now, these last two pairings of class and taste overlap, but they’re also distinct from each other. Some, but not all, members of the upper class belong to the cultural elite and have “legitimate taste.” An affluent person who enjoys “sophisticated” art would be an example here. But there are also upper-class people who just have “bourgeois” tastes for things like luxury goods. Think of a rich industrialist who just spends his time and money on things like yachts and sports cars.

Meanwhile, there are intellectuals and artists who have “legitimate” tastes for things like literature and cinema. They’re a part of the cultural elite, but they’re not necessarily upper class; many of them have working-class or middle-class levels of income.

Now, ask yourself: who and what is higher on the overall scale of class and taste? The cultural elite and their “legitimate” taste? Or the upper class and their “bourgeois” taste?

The answer isn’t clear – and this lack of clarity gave Bourdieu a clue about how to proceed. He realized our intuitions are onto something, but they’re a bit muddled and need to be clarified.

But wait a minute – how can they be muddled but also be self-fulling prophecies that shape reality at the same time? We’ll look at that in the next blink.

"},{"id":"5f5b3b576cee0700070c11e4","title":"Our notions about taste and class represent a “misrecognized” form of practical knowledge.","text":"

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.

A similar thing happens with our notions about taste and class.

The key message here is: Our notions about taste and class represent a “misrecognized” form of practical knowledge.

All of us understand the world around us in a certain way, and this understanding both influences and reflects our experiences of that world. However – and this is a very big “however” – we don’t necessarily understand why we understand the world the way we do. In fact, we’re prone to misunderstanding our very own understanding of it!

To see why, imagine you’re a member of the elite, and you want to want to maintain your reputation among your elite peers. Part of that means demonstrating that you have “good taste.” For instance, you need to be able to go to an art gallery, look at different paintings, and discern which ones are “good” and “bad.” A simple painting of a pretty sunset? Banal. An abstract jumble of shapes and colors? A fascinating exploration of visual forms!

Now, to do this sort of thing, you need to have practical knowledge about art and about how other members of the elite typically pass their judgments on it. That way, you can make those judgments yourself. We’ll go into this in more depth later, but for now, the point is simply this: all you need is that practical knowledge. As long as your judgments about art are “correct” in the eyes of other members of the elite, that’s all that matters. You don’t need an in-depth, data-driven sociological theory about how and why those judgments are made.

But that means that if you tried to explain how and why you and your peers judge art the way you do, you’d probably be relying on some sort of simplistic and inaccurate folk theory. In other words, you’d be like the person who thinks the bowling ball falls faster than the feather because it’s heavier.

"},{"id":"5f5b3b576cee0700070c11e5","title":"Taste and class have three dimensions: volume of capital, composition of capital, and social trajectory.","text":"

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.

The key message here is: Taste and class have three dimensions: volume of capital, composition of capital, and social trajectory.

The underlying idea here is that everyone has a certain amount of capital, which is any kind of asset that enables you to gain power, possessions, status, or advancement in your society. In his theory of taste, Bourdieu focuses on two main varieties of capital. The first is economic capital. This includes money, but it could also be property, stocks, or any other economic asset. The second is cultural capital, which is any non-economic asset that gives you stature in the eyes of other people.

For the elite, cultural capital could involve anything from an ability to play a musical instrument to talking or dressing in a “proper” manner, to having knowledge about the most “respectable” forms of art, literature, and cinema. It also includes having the “right” kind of degree. This gives you educational capital, which is one of the most important sub-varieties of cultural capital in modern society. After all, a “good” degree from a “good” university can help you get a “good” job. A “bad” degree from a “bad” university – not so much.

Of course, “good” and “bad” are in the eyes of the beholder – and that’s precisely the point. The value of your diploma isn’t inherent to the piece of paper; it depends on other people’s perception of it, which depends on cultural notions of value. For example, our contemporary technological society places an especially high value on scientific education.

Add up all your economic and cultural capital, and you have your volume of capital. Compared to the average, this can be high, low, or somewhere in between. But how is your volume of capital divided between the two categories? And how has it changed over time? The answers to these questions are your composition of capital and your social trajectory, which we’ll look at in the next two blinks.

"},{"id":"5f5b3b586cee0700070c11e6","title":"Our social status reflects our economic and cultural capital, and we can convert one type of capital into the other.","text":"

“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.

To unpack this, let’s start off with our composition of capital. Remember, this is how your overall capital is divided between two main buckets: economic capital and cultural capital. There are four basic possibilities. For the first two, you could have equally high or equally low amounts of both economic and cultural capital. For example, an upper-class member of the cultural elite could be loaded with money and have a prestigious university degree, among other economic and cultural assets. Meanwhile, a working-class person has a deficit in both types of capital – not much money, a low-value degree, or no degree at all.

Alternatively, you could have more of one type of capital than the other, which presents two more possibilities. If you’re a higher-education teacher, you could have a lot of cultural capital but not much economic capital – an excellent degree, but not much income, for instance. And if you’re an industrialist, you could have the opposite composition of capital. Maybe you have a ton of money, but you don’t put much stock in “higher culture” – you prefer to spend your time and money on luxury cars rather than the opera.

Now imagine you’re the son of this industrialist. The good news? You’re born into wealth. The bad news? You aren’t going to be inheriting the family business. To maintain your social status, you’ll need to get a good job – perhaps a high-ranking executive position in a private firm. Of course, you might have some social connections that can help you out with this. But you’ll probably still need a decent amount of cultural capital so that you’ll seem “respectable” to the people hiring you.

There are many possible ways of gaining that cultural capital: getting a “good” degree, becoming knowledgeable about art and literature, attending “high society” cultural events, and so on. But most of them share at least one thing in common: they require money to acquire. Fortunately, you have that in spades, so you just need to reinvest the economic capital of your inherited wealth into some form of cultural capital. This would be an example of a reconversion strategy: a way of converting one form of capital into another.

The end result? A change in your composition of capital. And as we’ll see in the next blink, it could also affect your overall volume of capital and, therefore, your social trajectory as well.

"},{"id":"5f5b3b586cee0700070c11e7","title":"People protect and improve their social status by converting economic capital and cultural capital into each other.","text":"

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.

The key message here is: People protect and improve their social status by converting economic capital and cultural capital into each other.

When we classify people in terms of categories like the “working class” and the “middle class,” we’re painting huge segments of society with a pretty broad brush. In a country like France, these categories lump together millions of people who have a fairly wide range of capital volumes and compositions. The middle class, for example, includes everyone from primary teachers to shopkeepers. The teachers tend to have higher amounts of cultural capital and lower amounts of economic capital, while the opposite is true of the shopkeepers.

To paint a more finely grained picture of society, we need to distinguish class fractions within each class. A class fraction is basically a group of people who occupy a similar class position within the overall three-dimensional space of society. That means they have similar volumes and compositions of capital, and their capital is tending to move in the same direction as a result of larger forces in society.

People often cluster around a class position based on their occupational categories, such as teachers and small-scale farmers. Now, imagine you’re the sons of one of those farmers. Your family has been farming for many generations, and things were going alright for a while. But now farming is in decline, and your overall class fraction is on a downward social trajectory.

What do you do?

Well, you might try to move into a new line of work. And, if you could afford it with whatever money your family has left, you’d probably try to get a university degree to increase your chances of success. In that case, you’d be converting your economic capital into cultural capital. Your hope is that you can escape the economic currents that are pulling down your class fraction by shifting into a different fraction – maybe office work or engineering. That way, you can preserve your vertical position within the social hierarchy by shifting horizontally, so to speak. If you’re lucky, you might even rise up at the same time.

"},{"id":"5f5b3b586cee0700070c11e8","title":"People’s tastes are correlated to their class positions within the three-dimensional space of the social hierarchy.","text":"

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!

The key message here is: People’s tastes are correlated to their class positions within the three-dimensional space of the social hierarchy.

In Bourdieu’s vision, society is a multifaceted, multidimensional, and dynamic place. To recap, there are four main classes: the working class, middle class, upper class, and cultural elite. Within each class, there are various class fractions with different volumes and compositions of capital. These volumes and compositions, in turn, are continuously shifting over time, as people’s social trajectories change, and as they employ different reconversion strategies to turn one type of capital into another. Finally, these trajectories and strategies occur in response to larger social and economic forces, such as the decline of an occupational group within the overall economy.

However, if we take a freeze-frame of this overall moving picture at any given time, the resulting image is fairly straightforward. Picture an X-Y graph with a vertical line and a horizontal line forming a cross. The vertical line represents people’s volume of capital. High volumes are high on the line; low volumes are low.

The horizontal line, in turn, represents people’s composition of capital. On the right side of the line, we have people with relatively high amounts of economic capital and low amounts of cultural capital. On the left side, we have people with the opposite composition of capital: not much money or other economic assets, but a relatively high amount of cultural cachet.

With this image in mind, we can now describe any individual, class fraction, or overall class in terms of occupying a position or area on the graph. Bourdieu’s basic hypothesis is that different clusters of taste correspond to different clusters of people within each quadrant of the graph. For example, university lecturers and artists would fall pretty close to each other, somewhere in the lower portion of the top-left quadrant. Both groups have a modest amount of higher-than-average overall volume of capital, which is composed of much more cultural capital than economic capital. Their tastes should be fairly similar to each other.

Meanwhile, lower-level executives and shopkeepers would fall relatively close to each other in the top-right quadrant. They also have a modestly high volume of capital, but it has the opposite composition: higher economic capital, lower cultural capital. Their tastes should be fairly similar to each other as well – but also much different than those of the lecturers and artists. We can, therefore, recognize members of the same class fraction by their similar tastes, even if they have very different occupations.

"},{"id":"5f5b3b586cee0700070c11e9","title":"The correlations between taste and class can be further clarified by accounting for social trajectory.","text":"

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.

The key message here is: The correlations between taste and class can be further clarified by accounting for social trajectory.

Imagine two middle-class men who occupy similar positions on the X-Y graph. Let’s call them Pierre and Bruno. Both men are low-level executives in a private-sector office place. They both have a modestly high volume of capital, which is composed of more economic than cultural capital. For instance, they’d have relatively high incomes, and they would probably both have decent degrees, giving them some cultural capital. But compared to, say, university lecturers, they haven’t invested themselves as much in other forms of cultural capital, such as being knowledgeable about the forms of art, literature, and cinema that the elite deems most worthy of knowing.

Pierre and Bruno thus belong to the same class fraction, so we might expect them to have similar tastes. But here’s the catch: Pierre is the downwardly mobile son of an upper-class family, while Bruno is the upwardly mobile son of a working-class family. From their childhoods, the two men might retain some of the tastes from their families’ class backgrounds. Their tastes might be quite different from each other as a result. For example, Pierre might still have a taste for the ornate antique furniture of his childhood home, while Bruno might still favor the simpler utilitarian furniture he grew up with.

That’s just one way that social trajectory can affect people’s tastes. Another place where it can play a major role is when an entire class fraction is subject to a downward or upward social trajectory. For example, when a fraction is ascending, it tends to try to adopt the tastes of the fractions and class above it, whose ranks they aspire to join. That’s why upwardly mobile middle-class people often try to mimic the tastes of the upper class by engaging in conspicuous consumption – buying luxury goods that display their wealth.

"},{"id":"5f5b3b586cee0700070c11ea","title":"Pierre Bourdieu’s survey results confirmed his hypothesis.","text":"

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?

The short answer is yes.

The key message here is: Pierre Bourdieu’s survey results confirmed his hypothesis.

Both of Bourdieu’s surveys were based on the same questionnaire, which asked questions about the tastes and class backgrounds of French men and women living in Paris, the mid-sized city of Lille, and an unnamed “small provincial town.” After conducting an initial survey in 1963, he decided to repeat it in 1967 and 1968 in order to increase his sample size, which ended up encompassing 1,217 people altogether.

The respondents hailed from many occupations: manual workers, domestic servants, shopkeepers, secretaries, teachers, nurses, doctors, artists, office workers, executives, and even captains of industry. Each respondent was given a list of more than 40 questions to answer.

Some of the questions had to do with their class backgrounds: the occupations, income levels, and education levels of themselves, their fathers, and their paternal grandfathers. By using income and education levels as indicators of economic and cultural capital, Bourdieu was able to estimate both their and their family’s volume and composition of capital. This, in turn, enabled him to gauge their social trajectory, since he could compare the capital the respondents’ were born into with the capital they currently possessed. A loss of capital would indicate a downward social trajectory, for example.

The other questions had to do with the respondents’ tastes, which were measured by the products they owned, products they wanted, activities they preferred, and opinions they expressed. Bourdieu’s interviewers asked questions like: What kinds of furniture, music, movies, radio programs, and hobbies did they like? What did they think about modern art?

On top of that, the interviewers were tasked with making observations about the respondents’ clothing, hairstyles, home decor, manners of speech, and other attributes.

The end result? A pretty comprehensive picture of the tastes and class backgrounds of a broad cross-section of French society. And it showed that Bourdieu was right: people’s tastes and class positions tended to cluster together in the way he predicted. People in similar positions on his X-Y graph tended to have similar sets of taste, as long as they had similar social trajectories.

"},{"id":"5f5b3b586cee0700070c11eb","title":"People’s tastes emerge out of and reflect the material conditions of their class positions.","text":"

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.

Instead of looking at the ins and outs of how certain tastes correspond to certain class positions, we’re going to address an arguably more important question: why do they correspond in the first place?

The key message here is: People’s tastes emerge out of and reflect the material conditions of their class positions.

We could unpack this idea with any number of examples from any number of areas in which people have tastes: clothing, home decor, television shows, personality traits, and just about anything else. But to keep things short and simple, let’s start off with the area where we have taste in the most literal sense: food.

There are some obvious reasons why people’s dietary preferences emerge out of and reflect the material conditions of their class positions. If you’re poor, you can only afford low-cost meals. If you’re rich, you can splurge on gourmet restaurants. But there are other, less-obvious factors besides money.

For example, in 1960s France, working-class men tended to place a high value on having physical strength and a muscular physique. This, in turn, reflected the fact that many of them were involved in manual labor that required muscle power. Now, you’d have a hard time bulking up on petite dishes of haute cuisine. If you’re a working-class person, you’d want filling, nourishing food – the cheaper, the better.

So those would be some material conditions behind your working-class diet. These conditions lead you to develop a disposition toward a certain type of food. And the same goes for other areas of taste. For example, with clothing, you’d be inclined toward low-cost, sturdy garments that you could afford with your meager income, but that could also withstand the wear and tear of manual labor – two important considerations if you’re a working-class person.

Notice how both of these examples of working-class taste emerge out of and reflect similar material conditions: low income and manual labor. This brings us to a more general point: particular tastes for different things, such as food and clothing, don’t just cluster around the same class position by accident. There are underlying material conditions that bring them together.

"},{"id":"5f5b3b586cee0700070c11ec","title":"People’s tastes are ultimately rooted in their habitus.","text":"

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.

The key message here is: People’s tastes are ultimately rooted in their habitus.

Your habitus is essentially your overall set of dispositions toward everything you can do and buy in life. Think of it as being like the guiding star behind all of your “lifestyle” choices. To put this point into the more technical language that Bourdieu uses: your habitus is the generative principle behind your lifestyle – the underlying logic beneath the way you live your life.

To unpack this idea, let’s go back to the French working class’s food and clothing preferences. If we look beneath the surface here, we can see an underlying emphasis on each item’s utility rather than esthetics. The working class wants filling food and sturdy clothing rather than fancy dinners and chic outfits. To put this into philosophical language, they care more about the substance of their food and clothing than the form. In the case of food, for example, they’re more concerned about the nutritional content of a dish than the style in which it’s cooked or served.

After all, if you’re a member of the working class, you don’t have much free time or disposable income to spend on food, but you also need to get a lot of energy out of it. You have to think about your survival first and foremost, squeezing as much nourishment out of your food as you can. You, therefore, need to focus on the food’s substance and utility. You can’t afford to place a premium on the more formal and esthetic elements of it.

This emphasis on utility and substance over esthetics and form is at the heart of the working class’s habitus. It’s a key part of how they envision and approach the world around them, and it informs their tastes in every area of life – including art and entertainment. For example, the working class prefers straightforward, easy-to-follow movies with likable characters and engrossing stories rather than avant-garde cinema with non-linear narratives and experimental film-editing techniques. Why? Because they primarily care about a movie’s content (its “substance”) and entertainment value (its “utility”), rather than its formal elements or aesthetic value.

"},{"id":"5f5b3b596cee0700070c11ed","title":"The tastes of the affluent elite provide them with a way of marking themselves off from other classes.","text":"

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.

In doing this, they act as if they are “above” the mundane material world of the working class, floating around in a more rarefied realm of “refined” taste – a realm where mere food is turned into a gourmet dining experience, mere clothing into an artistic expression of one’s personality, and so forth. But the truth is a bit more mundane.

The key message here is: The tastes of the affluent elite provide them with a way of marking themselves off from other classes.

The reason for this becomes especially clear in the case of “higher culture.” For example, to be able to appreciate the formal, aesthetic elements of a painting that make it a “good” example of Impressionism, you need to know what distinguishes it from other Impressionist paintings. You also need to be able to distinguish Impressionism in general from all of the other movements in art that preceded it, followed it, and competed against it during its heyday.

And that means you need to be well-versed in art history and various theories of esthetics. This, in turn, requires that your parents and the society around you invest a lot of time and resources into developing your cultural capital as you’re growing up. Some of these things you’ll learn if you go far enough in the educational system. Others you’ll learn through more informal means, such as frequent museum visits or having artwork in your family’s home.

Without all of this training and cultural capital, you won’t even be able to identify the features of a work of art that you’re supposed to have opinions about, such as the distinctive brush strokes of an impressionist painting.

By having “refined” tastes for things like art, the elite are thus not only able to distinguish between, say, a Monet and a Manet; they’re able to distinguish themselves as the sort of people who can distinguish between those sorts of things. Or in other words, their tastes enable them to distinguish themselves as members of the elite.

Taste, therefore, provides them with a marker of class – a way of judging who belongs and who doesn’t belong to the ranks of the elite.

"},{"id":"5f5b3b596cee0700070c11ee","title":"Taste provides us with a way of making class distinctions.","text":"

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.

The key message here is: Taste provides us with a way of making class distinctions.

To understand this idea, imagine if you woke up one day and everyone in your society started treating you as if you belonged to the upper class. Whether you’re trying to access a VIP lounge, attend a gala dinner filled with rich and famous people, or obtain a credit line for pursuing a new business venture, it’s as if everyone in the world is suddenly ready to tell you “right this way, sir or ma'am.”

Congratulations. For all intents and purposes, you’re now a member of the upper class. And that’s because class is a social phenomenon that we construct through our relationships and interactions with each other. You’re a member of this or that class if other people view and treat you as belonging to that class.

To put this into fancier language, the existence of class presupposes various acts of classification. For one person to belong to the working class and another person to belong to the middle class, other people need to classify them as belonging to those class categories.

But how can they make these classifications? Well, there need to be criteria for belonging to each class. Middle class people need to look and act in certain ways, and other people need to be able to recognize their appearances and behaviors as being distinctly middle class.

Our sense of taste allows both of those things to happen. On the one hand, a person’s middle-class tastes lead him to look and act as a middle-class person – wearing middle-class clothing, eating middle-class food, attending middle-class events, and so forth. On the other hand, other people’s tastes allow them to recognize these lifestyle choices as being those of a middle-class person. For instance, members of the upper class can see the middle-class person’s fashion choices and tell at a glance that he isn’t one of them, because his style doesn’t conform to their own.

Thus, taste is what enables us to distinguish both ourselves and other people in terms of class. Or to sum it all up in a single word, taste is a matter of distinction.

"},{"id":"5f5b3b596cee0700070c11ef","title":"Final summary","text":"

The key message in these blinks:

People’s tastes are ultimately rooted in the material conditions of their lives. They emerge from, reflect, and demarcate people’s class positions in society. These positions are shaped by their volume of capital, composition of capital, and social trajectory, which form the three dimensions of the social space through which society’s class structure can be understood. We can identify people’s position in this space by measuring their shifting amounts of economic and cultural capital. Different sets of tastes correspond to different positions within the three-dimensional space. Because people need cultural capital to develop and exercise “legitimate” tastes for things like art, these tastes provide the cultural elite with exclusionary ways of demonstrating their elite status, both to each other and to those with less cultural capital than themselves.

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What to read next: A Matter of Taste by Stanley Lieberson

If you’ve made it this far, congratulations. Those were a lot of ideas to digest. Ready for a breather? Why not continue your journey with a title that both builds on the ideas you just learned and is a bit more straightforward at the same time?

In our blinks to A Matter of Taste, by sociologist Stanley Liberson, you’ll learn how and why customs and fashions change over time. Focusing on naming convention and using them as a way of illustrating larger social tendencies, these blinks will help you round out the picture of taste and class that you’ve just acquired.

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