Name: Distinction
Rating: 3.5 (4 reviews)
ISBN: 9780674212770

Pierre Bourdieu

Examines differences in taste between modern French classes, discusses the relationship between culture and politics, and outlines the strategies of pretension

A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

Distinction

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Differences between works are predisposed to express differences between authors, partly because, in both style and content, they bear the mark of their authors’ socially constituted dispositions (that is, their social origins, retranslated as a function of the positions in the field of production which these dispositions played a large part in determining); and partly because they remain marked by the social significance which they received from their opposition, and that of their authors, in the field of production (e.g., left/right, clear/obscure etc.) and which is perpetuated by the university tradition.

Illegitimate extra-curricular culture, whether it be the knowledge accumulated by the self-taught or the “experience’ acquired in and through practice, outside the control of the institution specifically mandated to inculcate it and officially sanction its acquisition, like the art of cooking or herbal medicine, craftsmen’s skills or the stand-in’s irreplaceable knowledge, is only valorized to the strict extent of its technical efficiency, without any social added-value, and is exposed to legal sanctions (like the illegal practice of medicine) whenever it emerges from the domestic universe to compete with authorized competences.

Distinction A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

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