Antoine Hennion, The Passion for Music: A Sociology of Mediation, translated by Margaret Rigaud and Peter Collier, Farnham, Ashgate, 2015, 339pp, £75 hardbackDavid Wright, Understanding Cultural Taste: Sensation, Skill and Sensibility, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, 188pp, £60 hardbackA few years ago I undertook an audit of the theoretical resources that a Cultural Studies programme I was reviewing was offering their undergraduates. The programme was taught across various disciplines including media and communication, sociology, geography and anthropology. One name was inescapable - Pierre Bourdieu - and one conceptual phrase was ubiquitous - cultural capital. By the time they had fi nished their degree, students seemed persuaded (if the evidence of their dissertations was anything to go by) of one uncontroversial fact, namely that our relations to cultural materials, be they food and drink or television and music, are determined and explained by the forms of cultural capital that are attached to them and by our access to such capital.The students were being taught aspects of Bourdieu's 1979 book La Distinction, Critique sociale du jugement, which was a theoretical analysis, based on an extensive survey (using questionnaires) of French tastes undertaken in the 1960s. The book showed a world (or a country, at least) where your liking for Bach's 'The Well-Tempered Clavier' indicated your access to 'legitimate' culture and your social prospects. Bourdieu was relatively uninterested in how much you liked Bach or in thinking about your relative attachment to this piece of music; his main interest was the fact that you preferred Bach to Strauss' 'Blue Danube', or to the songs of Petula Clark. He was also interested in the different semantic frameworks that social groups were able to bring to cultural objects, and in one famous example showed how a photograph of the hands of an elderly woman solicited very different responses across a hierarchy of social classes: for the 'most culturally deprived' the responses were aimed at the specifi c content of the image, at the gnarled hands and the labour that they must have undertaken; for those with the most cultural assets the responses were more abstract and more liable to treat the photograph as an image that can work symbolically and have autonomous aesthetic qualities (the arrangement of the hands, the chiaroscuro of the photograph).When this book was translated into English in 1984 as Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste it arrived as a valuable weapon of class struggle. It was wielded as a device for puncturing the sureties of those who felt that a certain form of 'high' or 'legitimate' culture was somehow naturally superior to the culture most readily available to the majority. Cultural capital analysis could reveal that, in some crucial ways, knowledge about opera or impressionist painting could operate in a similar way as golf: it gave a certain class or class fraction a set of shared referents, access to a social milieu, and a way of asserting the value of their leisure. It also gave students of media, fi lm and cultural studies a handy way of responding to those that thought that their time would be better spent studying the classics.More than thirty years on, Bourdieu's book is no longer an intervention. Now it is where the discussion of taste starts from. It is part of a common sense. It is the foundation of our understanding of the way taste and class are articulated, and this is hardly news to either opera lovers or horror fi lm fans. Thirty years on, Bourdieu's intervention in taste culture looks as if an understanding of 'good taste' as some sort of moral value was swapped for understanding taste as a functional element of social reproduction. In the act of dethroning legitimate culture and the class that it underwrote, Bourdieu deployed an administrative rationality that treated culture as an instrument of an alreadyorganised class society. …
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Jul 30, 2021
Pavol Kalinay 
Open Access