Bourdieu, Distinction, and Aesthetic Consumption

Abstract

This chapter argues that rather than being focused on the higher levels of consumption of aesthetic goods on the part of the educated class, Pierre Bourdieu’s main hypothesis in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste was concerned with how differences in class fractions as defined by total educational endowment (parental and individual) predict the extent to which individuals consume more artistically legitimate versus less artistically legitimate cultural forms. This argument leads naturally to Bourdieu’s understanding of the difference between the consumption styles of the educated (and less educated) classes as built from his understanding of differences in the formative experiences of different classes. The chapter develops the implications of this for contemporary debates regarding a more illuminating explanation of the omnivore taste phenomenon and other forms of aestheticized consumption.

Genres, Objects, and the Contemporary Expression of Higher-Status Tastes

“…Individuals with more education tend to like fewer objects, and specifically those objects with greater consecration. Consistent with Lizardo's (2018) reading of Bourdieu, education has its strongest effects on forming more exclusive tastes. We add to this picture by showing that exclusivity is expressed most clearly at the level of specific objects-in short, schooling ratchets up the tendency toward exclusivity.…”

“…As suggested by Lizardo (2018), we believe that in disaggregating the effect of these two socializing agents, future work can more directly focus on the different social positions of "stayers" and "movers" into and out of higher-status positions (Bourdieu 1984; see also Streib 2015). Specifically, our findings highlight the roles that tastes may play in mitigating the downward or upward slopes of "movers" into different classes, as well as potentially cementing the positions of otherwise unworthy high-status "stayers."…”

“…How might family socialization differ from formal schooling in their influences on adulthood tastes? As argued by Lizardo (2018), the different effects of these two sites of capital accumulation are an important, if almost entirely unexplored, insight of Bourdieu's (1984) theorizing in Distinction. In this close reading of Bourdieu's theory, Lizardo (2018) outlines how the effects of domestic capital inherited through childhood socialization create a durable aesthetic disposition that can be applied more broadly across an array of cultural objects, some of which have not been given wider institutional consecration.…”

“…Our next two hypotheses look to the socializing antecedents of this contemporary configuration of higher-status tastes. Building on Lizardo's (2018) interpretation of Bourdieu and our theorization of the affordances of genres and objects, we would predict that familial socialization and schooling will contribute differently in creating the configuration of inclusive and exclusive tastes. Specifically, we predict the following: Hypothesis 2a: Higher-status familial socialization will be the strongest predictor of inclusive taste at the genre level.…”

Cultural Capital in China? Television Tastes and Cultural and Cosmopolitan Distinctions Among Beijing Youth

“…Paradoxically, this seemingly democratic shift to omnivorous distinction and cultural ‘openness’ (Roose et al, 2012) often benefits people from privileged backgrounds, particularly those with greater parental cultural capital. As Lizardo (2019) argued, the ‘deep’ aesthetic disposition cultivated through early immersion in HCC environments is more transposable to less legitimate cultural forms than more ‘shallow’ cultural capital acquired through formal education. Contemporary cultural capital thus entails appropriate knowledge to single out ‘quality’ and engage with less legitimate culture in a sophisticated manner (Flemmen et al, 2017; Friedman and Reeves, 2020; Prieur and Savage, 2013).…”