a social critique of the judgment of taste

The different aesthetic choices people make are all distinctions-that is, choices made in opposition to those made by other classes.

What emerges from his analysis is that social snobbery is everywhere in the bourgeois world. Bourdieu bases his study on surveys that took into account the multitude of social factors that play a part in a French person's choice of clothing, furniture, leisure activities, dinner menus for guests, and many other matters of taste. Distinction is at once a vast ethnography of contemporary France and a dissection of the bourgeois mind.In the course of everyday life people constantly choose between what they find aesthetically pleasing and what they consider tacky, merely trendy, or ugly.

France's leading sociologist focuses here on the French bourgeoisie, its tastes and preferences. Pierre Bourdieu brilliantly illuminates this situation of the middle class in the modern world. In a case study of New York's Direct Action Network (1999-2002), I will consider the ways in which a prefigurative, anarchist approach to political action both challenges, and is challenged, by Bourdieu's logic of distinction.No judgment of taste is innocent. If anarchist theory is always in danger of betraying its goal of full political and social equality for all, anarchistic social cooperation provides an ideal political context in which historically dominated individuals can transcend the logic of distinction.

Bourdieu's focus on the subconscious, relational nature of social domination can enrich anarchists' own understandings of existing hierarchies, and illuminate the ways in which anarchist theory can produce forms of political distinction directly at odds with anarchism's revolutionary mission. Special emphasis will be placed on the text's analysis of political inequality - particularly the ways in which revolutionary, leftist stances towards social domination can still embody a hierarchical logic of distinction. After outlining Bourdieu's theoretical and analytical background, I will discuss the major arguments and terminology of his groundbreaking 1979 work, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. This paper attempts to put Pierre Bourdieu's theories of social distinction into dialogue with the revolutionary theory of anarchism.

A social critique of the judgment of taste