Do we "have" cultural/aesthetic taste, or does cultural/aesthetic taste "have" us?

Well, good work, Ricky. You've found a topic that I'm going to be mulling over all afternoon instead of getting my actual work done. Cheers, really.

I'm not going to be getting any work done either, but I won't be thinking about this. I'm just lazy.

Do you think Bourdieu would say the latter, since he's interested in the sociology of taste? Or is he not quite so deterministic? (I don't know; I've never read him, just read overviews of his work.)

Well said, NA.

(I already wasn't getting much work done.)

Are those the only two choices?

Okay, I think my basic thought w/r/t this question is that it's a false dichotomy. (i.e., Aimless OTM) There are plenty of ways in which taste is a pre-existing notion and we take on various tastes due to our position in life (including but not limited to age/race/ethnicity/sex/sexual orientation/level of education/subcultural status/etc.). (And quite frankly, I think it's foolish to suggest otherwise. This is the major problem I have with Kantian aesthetics, is that it seems to deny that we're shaped by various individual influences -- which is NOT the same as being "biased" [e.g., cheering on Othello because I just found out my wife is cheating on me, too], but simply recognizing that we all bring something unique and personal to the table.) And yet these tastes, as I may have indicated, are not exactly pre-packaged, either. We may have various predispositions, based on external constructs (e.g., try as I might, I have a hard time finding "overweight" people attractive, and it's not that difficult to imagine that media images have something to do with that) -- but when they all become tossed into a pot and stirred up and mixed with bits of psychology and bits of whim, then it is fair to say that the tastes we have are OURS. Even if we both of us have a taste for the same thing, it is likely that our reasons for liking it are ever so slightly different, based on our unique histories.

I have no idea if that makes any sense.

Well I've read minimal Bourdieu so far, but have a feeling his view would be the latter, yes. Feel free to discuss both sides.

Personally I'm with Bourdieu. I believe that we live in a hypermediated world which means one will never be able to come to a cultural artefact with any degree of 'innocence' or 'naivety'. Cultural works (objects) are the products of a capitalist society, and it is in the power of this society to validate them as works of art/literature/etc.
But I'm also of the opinion that you can 'buy into' taste. I'm about to graduate with a degree in English. I've had to pay fees for my education at university, but in return I am bestowed with an ennobling 'distinction' which supposedly gives me a certain degree of authority in matters of cultural taste (at least as far as lit is concerned). But then, the flipside of that is that I've *learnt* my area of expertise from others, who in turn learnt from others, who in turn...etc etc ad infinitum. Who tells them what to teach me? Which critics should I respect? Which are *correct*?

I think you're right about the hypermediation. But I think -- and maybe this is the key part of what I was trying to say -- that that provides us with predispositions, rather than taste outright. And that taste is something that takes into account psychological and sociological influences, as well as a fair share of random choice.

SHORT ANSWER: neither

Ricky,

Choose. There is no cheat sheet. Get over it all.

Hypermediation!? OK, but no-one has ever experienced without some form of language/culture/religion (cosmology) have they. As you say you are aware of the Hypermediation does that exempt you or is that the escape valve in the system?

"Choose. There is no cheat sheet. Get over it all.

Hypermediation!? OK, but no-one has ever experienced without some form of language/culture/religion (cosmology) have they. As you say you are aware of the Hypermediation does that exempt you or is that the escape valve in the system?"

Get over it all? How do you mean?
Anyway I'm aware that there's no cheat sheet. That's not what I'm looking for. I just find talking about these things much easier than reading the texts plain and simple. Much of what Bourdieu and Gramsci feels very accessible precisely because it effects us all. Yes indeed, there's no such thing as life without some form of mediation in today's world, and yes I do recognising this is the first step to what Kant would call 'enlightened thinking'. It's like Neo in the Matrix thinking outside the box, being able to perceive that he is being 'controlled' by external factors (in his case machines, in ours, the dominant social body).

I spent a few years of my life doing a Cultural Studies PhD, so my eyes lit up when I saw the thread title, then srooped when I realised how sick of the topic I got. The question of individual agency vs cultural shaping is certainly no either / or thing. Neither should you rely on Gramsci and Bourdieu as your sole theorists (unless you have to). The main reason is that both of these people are (sort of) on the same side: they posit that culture is a "tool" that's imposed by elites. Gramsci / Althuser thinks that culture is mostly a political tool (ie to inculcate certain aesthetic and moral ideas...ie it does the work of politics, but not in an overtly political manner). But GRamsci saw this working at a meta-political level, rather than in everyday relations between classes that structure social relations.
Bourdieu introduces the idea of "taste" as one that's closely related to "cultural capital." For Bourdieu, good "taste" (good wine, interesting music, high art etc) involves a set of symbols that are somewhat arbitrary (ie there's nothing intrinisically more valuable about foccacia than white bread), but that we understand as belonging to certain classes.
Those who think differently are some of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies (see Stuart Hall, or Adorno before him)who think that our individual choices are not reducible to expressions of class, and neither are they predicatble (ie the reason to many products / ideas fail is because of our whimical natures).
I'll post more if you want, but I'm finding myself a little boring...

No, you're being very helpful, carry on!
The reason I mention Gramsci and Bourdieu is because that's to whom I'm required to refer. The module of my degree is basically only an introduction to the field of cultural studies you will have looked at in more depth.

I think the question is basically trying to get me to present the argument which Bourdieu and Gramsci make (to show I've read and understood them both). Actually, that's rather interesting when you think about it: both of these theorists talk about the ways in which a canon of cultural works is built and maintained, just as my tutors have had to select the most 'canonical' or 'popular' theorists in order to give me an introduction to the field.

I'm pretty sure I'll be able to put forward a strong arguement for this side of the coin. What I'm not so sure of is how to suggest that we *do* have some element of innate taste that exists before any impact which the 'elites' (intellectuals, ruling bodies, sunday papers) have on us, chiefly because I can't see how we do. I do however like the idea that jaymc puts forward about 'predispositions' upon which our enlightened decisions can be made. But is it true that those of us who are not 'enlightened' are the ones watching Pop Idol and buying Westlife records? Where does 'popular culture' come into the arguement?

MOstly under the rubric of "subcultures". Popular culture is often seen as one meta thing, but it's better seen as competing interests that sometimes gain ascendence. "Outsider groups" (i dunno, the, er, trenchcoat mafia, or goth, or radical lesbians, or soccer hooligans) use pop culture ideas and emblems (clothes, songs, drugs, language) to fashion the world around them into ways that make it more valuable or meaningful for them. The "insiders" (ie mainstream) are thought to basically take those things (ideas, language, songs, clothes etc) from the outsiders that are interetsing but not threatening. (thus, we have girl power but not radical feminism, or we have "queer eye" but not gay TV, or Blink 182 but not Fugazi etc). There are exceptions, when the force of a thing breaks through, but this is the basic model...well, that the Birmingham School developed in the 1960s-70s.
The flipside (engineered control, a la Gramsci etc) suggests that since pop culture increasingly has great power in the way we fashion ourselves, the "culture industries" (music, movies, fashion etc) can have enormous power. Government, in their view, becomes vital in this, inasmuch as it can regulate the culture industries (through censorship, taxes, rules about availability to certain markets, audiences etc).

Just to qualify that notion of predispositions, Bourdieu talks about the relationship between dispositions and positions (by which he means social). Bourdieu is interested in getting at class and social power as it's manifest in certain fields (intellectual, cultural). There is always a struggle for power in any field, the struggle for legitimacy (value) and the power to legitimize (he calls this consecration). Social power comes in the form of reproducing social/class hierarchies through the acquisition and accumulation of types of capital privileged in a certain field (cultural capital, intellectual capital, plain ol' capital). People jockey for position, both consciously and unconsciously, adopting and adapting to the rules of the game which become manifest through habits of mind, habitats, just plain old habits (a process/product which B calls the 'habitus').

Bourdieu's notion of taste is both the objectification and embodiment of capital, which articulates our position in the social field. We surround ourselves with nice things, which reflect our education/upbringing (intellectual capital) and act, talk, etc. (symbolic and cultural capital) in a particular way. To say where taste begins and ends is a difficult question in Bourdieu's work. It's a delicate balance between display and concealment; that is, how one acquires cultural/symbolic capital which makes itself invisible in the form of a kind of 'sixth sense' (a good way to think about this is the notion of style or 'cool', or 'I see cool things'), or supposed 'naturalness,' is part of a deft game that works to maintain a certain social status. Cool, when considered in relation to Bourdieu's model, is learned, but that process of acquisition is mystified in such a way that its origins are obscured. People aren't born cool; they're enmeshed in a certain set of dispostions which is intimately tied to a particular social position (class, family background), which allows them to 'improvise' responses to culture in a 'spontaneous' manner that seems not to be based on some kind of rational calculus.

What you're getting at is the old sociological bugaboo that tries to understand the relationship between structure and agency. More specifically, what is it that mediates the relationship between between these two? Some would call it ideology, hegemony, or interpellation. Bourdieu is notoriously slippery when it comes to this, as the notion of causal determination, instead seeing it as something he explains in terms of reflexivity and recursivity, a feedback loop which has no beginning or end but ongoing.

Now Bourdieu might have something to say about your posting this on a semi-clandestine board in which there is a sometime wanton and unwieldy display of cultural capital. This is a great model for analysis, really. Someone should be talking about this board in Bourdieu's terms. A social map of how people got here. Could be fun, for a minute. Or maybe not.

Paul's on the money in many respects. I'm just waiting for someone to mention Sarah Thornton here and her silly addition to sociological lexicon, subcultural capital. It's just a species of cultural capital, nothing more, nothing less (her most interesting addition to subcultural theory is her discussion of the role of the media in the construction of subcultures, a more nuanced take than the one we get with the Birmingham one). Let's just call this diss a pre-emptive strike.

On the subcultural theme again, the Birmingham crew was a bit cagey on how subcultural dress, argot, music, gets adopted as a kind of uniform. That is, what is the origin of subcultural taste? Their read is an essentially essentialist one. That taste is a direct reflection of dominated group. Punk in their reading was a working class phenomenon, a product of a disenfranchised group's struggle to come to grips with institutionalized and systematic exclusion. They use the products/commodities of the dominant class as tools against it, to create a social space through which they assert their needs/desires and to create a sense of solidarity (Hebdige's read on the swastika is telling in this respect). I think they read class and punk practice a bit too mechanically. Bourdieu is not far off from this model, but he wants us to consider the notion of power struggles as material and symbolic, as much more complex, and as manifest in all sorts of social settings. I'm not doing him justice here, really.

Bourdieu is infamously silent on popular culture.

That also makes a lot of sense. One thing though - how do 'subcultures' establish themselves in the first place? How do they 'break off' from the mainstream - is it a conscious decision? The way I see it is if person X listens to Fugazi, he/she has to have heard it somewhere in the first instance (or from a friend, who had to have heard it somewhere etc etc). Therefore he probably discovered the band through the usual media channels (the only other way I can think of is if he unwittingly wanders into his local bar and they happen to be playing). Now if, as you rightly say, 'culture industries' have great power, surely person X didn't so much 'discover' the band, but was 'offered' Fugazi as an option by the press/radio/TV? Do the culture industries want to create subcultures, and if so why?

Tricky question Ricky. A subculture is the product of a number of different forces. Some would say (the Birmingham group again) that they are structurally excluded, yet having some sense of agency, indviduals begin to articulate that sense of disenfranchisement through the only means they know of: the appropriation and resemanticization of objects from the dominant/mainstream culture. Thus subcultural practice is somehow an inverted reflection of social structure, less a direct mirroring. That they coalesce into a group is a much more mysterious process. What the organizing or unifying principle might be is difficult to pinpoint. Having affinities for certain types of cultural products/producers is rooted in experience, family background and education, all of which reinforce one another (so says Bourdieu, again).

That some people can imagine themselves outside of the influence of the media and/or cultural industries speaks to the notion of social distinction that B is on about.

An Adorno, or other cultural mandarin, would suggest that the culture/cultural industries have a great deal of influence on, and interest in, taste. The reasons why are obvious. Striking a pose of disdain for mainstream culture doesn't get us much closer to the reasons why people choose this band over that, however. One must consider a range cultural preferences and read them against social and cultural contexts in order to gain some insight into how choices are both free and determined (and a plug - I've tried to do this in some articles on scenes and subcultures recently).

And the idea that culture industries want to create subcultures has a hint of a kind of elitism that does nothing but avoid trying to answer a complex question. I'm not saying you're doing that, but there those who take that line and imagine themselves outside of the predatory game of commodity culture. Attitudes like this simply reiterate that social distinction as a form of power does exist, while doing nothing to undermine or challenge it.

Do we "have" cultural/aesthetic taste, or does cultural/aesthetic taste "have" us?

More good points. Thanks!
Before we get too carried away with subculture, does anyone care to briefly summarise the two sides of the coin? (taste = free agency, or determined by culture industries). Also, to me the idea that the aesthetic disposition and cutural capital can be bought into (through education, by attaining a title of intellectual distinction) seems crucial to the arguement. Essentially, doesn't the answer depend on who the "us" in the question refers to?

Of course, the translation of cultural and economic capital is easily done. The pejorative bourgeois bohemian, for instance, says so much. There's a great scene in The Moderns that neatly demonstrates this point.

I don't think a summary does the discussion much justice. "Taste" does not equal unfettered agency, nor does it mean rigid determinism. Instead, those forces within fields which help to delimit and define taste (as perception and appreciation) are fraught by a struggle for power within which it is possible, indeed necessary, to have it both ways. The search for origins or causal determinations is perhaps misguided, but we always want to know "Why?"

I think the implication that we are captured/captivated by taste is a bit hazy. Taste is something we acquire through enculturation and education, but that learning, both institutional and social, is influenced by a constellation of factors, both subjective and objective. We certainly "have" taste, but it is modulated by forces outside of our conscious control (be they family, friends, or the culture industries).

I was thinking about the relationship between the physical world and the subtle laws of physics that we humans experience all the time and aesthetics. Like for example a long hair laying on a sheet of paper, obeying the laws of tension and shear, can only hold a certain shape. Comparing it to an attempt at drawing a similar shape with a pencil. the curves of the hair are usually much more beautiful. This is a very stripped down concept of beauty as it relates to nature. Also the inverse could be true where the drawing of the hair which because it looks totally or slightly foreign, it is also beautiful.

Thanks Geoff,

I think your last line is effectively the stance that the question is pushing me to adopt. I'm well aware that this isn't simply an either/or case, but since I haven't really studied the middle ground, for the time being it'll have to be. But, I can certainly say that this is a matter I'll be pondering for a good while after this exam.

And thanks, A Nairn, for your post, but you've gone off on a tangent somewhat. The art vs. nature debate, though related, isn't that useful to the question of taste.

I think it's really interesting how brothers and sisters, coming from the same early family conditioning, and having attended the same schools in the same places, develop different tastes, and get more different over time. I'd say the cultural differences between me, my brother and sister are increasing as we settle into our different cities (sister: Edinburgh, brother: London, me: Berlin) and different careers (sister: actress, brother: academic, me: musician). It's complicated, though: my brother doesn't seek out contemporary art, but turns out to have social links with artists I only know from galleries. He doesn't know their work, though! My sister has what I'd call good taste in home decoration, but what I'd call completely unacceptable taste in music.

Another complexity: my 'habitus' as a music consumer is completely out of sync with my habitus as a music producer. I make records I would consider way too vulgar, accessible and populist to buy!

I always like to keep in mind Bourdieu's simple question, posed in Distinction: If museums are free to the public how come not everybody goes (asked in the French context)? From there begins the journey that leads us to our current dilemma. And if you can get through Bourdieu's tome, well, that's proving some sort of point.

Momus: I also wonder if you're suggesting Bourdieus sees some sort of homology between how we consume and what we produce (as artists, academics, etc.). I think there's still room for plenty of variables, which complicate B's ideas (gender, geography and biography included).

And, as an aside, I've seen you at some shows in Berlin which indicate that we're sharing the same habitus sometimes (and I can see how your music and your taste are somewhat in line with one another - heed Bourdieu again: a little reflexivity goes a long way).

Good luck on the exam, Ricky.