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Habitus is a key concept in the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and plays an organizing role in his classic study Distinction where tastes are divided between different class-based habitus. These divisions are set in the context of Bourdieu's account of the French cultural field as being polarized between a bourgeois habitus defined by the Kantian ethos of disinterestedness and a working-class habitus governed by the choice of the necessary. This paper probes this account of the habitus and aesthetics and its political implications, in the light of the challenges to it that are presented by Bernard Lahire's sociology of individuals and Jacques Rancière's account of the politics of aesthetics. It is illustrated by drawing on the evidence regarding the social distribution of cultural tastes from a recent study of the relationships between cultural practices and cultural capital in the United Kingdom. The central argument of the paper is that, far from succeeding in using the techniques of empirical sociology to map out a space that is beyond aesthetics, Bourdieu's account remains complicit with those tendencies in the history of western aesthetics that have functioned to exclude the working classes from full political participation.

The formulations of cultural sociology have a tendency to merge culture and the social so closely that they become indistinguishable from one another. Drawing on Foucauldian governmentality theory and actor network theory, this article argues that it is preferable to examine the processes through which culture is separated off from the social via the production of distinctive cultural assemblages.The kinds of issues that need to be taken into consideration to account for the work that goes into making culture as a publicly differentiated realm are identified. Attention then focuses on the kinds of work that culture does in being brought to act on the ‘working surfaces on the social’ that are organized in the relations between social and cultural knowledges. The argument is exemplified by considering how the assemblages of Aboriginal culture produced by Baldwin Spencer enabled the production of a new surface of social management through which the relations between white and Aboriginal Australia were organized in the context of the Aboriginal domain.