a social critique of the judgement of taste

Thus food can be aesthetic of it is properly distanced.

This circle can be explained concretely by looking at two factors: education and social origin, both of which affect the ability to “distance oneself” from the aesthetic object. (28)īut he also makes the reverse claim: that the aesthetic point of view can create the aesthetic object. One of Bourdieu’s main points is that the object determines its subject:Īny legitimate work tends in fact to impose the norms of its own perception and tacitly defines as the only legitimate mode of perception the one which brings into play a certain disposition and a certain competence.

“Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier” (6). This detachment is the product of “negative economic necessities-a life of ease-that tends to induce an active distance from necessity.” Thus the aesthetic gaze rebounds onto the stylization of life itself: form is privileged over function, manner over matter.

Not only this, but the pure aesthetic is rooted in an ethics, or rather, an ethos of elective distance from the necessities of the natural and social…and takes the bourgeois denial of the social world as its limit” (5). He argues that the ability to engage in aesthetic judgment at all depends on a certain amount of cultural competency (“to see (voir) is a function of knowledge (savoir)” (2)). Bourdieu’s project, as he describes it, is to perform the “barbarous reintegration of aesthetic consumption into the world of ordinary consumption,” which in turn “abolishes the opposition which has been the basis of high aesthetics since Kant, between the ‘taste of sense’ and the ‘taste of reflection’” (6).

A social critique of the judgement of taste