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Culture, Class, Distinction. Cresc.
"Culture, Class, Distinction" is major contribution to international debates regarding the role of cultural capital in relation to modern forms of inequality. Drawing on a national study of the organisation of cultural practices in contemporary Britain, the authors review Bourdieu's classic study of the relationships between culture and class in the light of subsequent debates. In doing so, they re-appraise the relationships between class, gender and ethnicity, music, film, television, literary, and arts consumption, the organisation of sporting and culinary practices, and practices of bodily and self maintenance.As the most comprehensive account to date of the varied interpretations of cultural capital that have been developed in the wake of Bourdieu's work, "Culture, Class, Distinction" offers the first systematic assessment of the relationships between cultural practice and the social divisions of class, gender and ethnicity in contemporary Britain. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the relationships between culture and society.
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First published October 1, 2008
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About the author
Tony Bennett
172 books11 followersTony Bennett is an English academic who has also worked in Australia. Bennett is an important figure in the development of the Australian approach to cultural studies known as "cultural policy studies."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Be...
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Tony Bennett
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Be...
Librarian note:
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name
for the singer please go to:
Tony Bennett
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 4, 2014
I’m reading Bourdieu’s Distinction at the moment and saw this and thought it might be interesting to see what an updated version might be like in a culture more like my own. This is an updated study in all senses – taking into consideration a lot of cultural studies and sociology that has happened post-Bourdieu. I’m not sure how happy Bourdieu would have been with this, but it was interesting all the same.
Ok, the basic idea is that different social groups have different levels of cultural capital. Society is made up of various fields and everyone is trying to position themselves in those fields in ways that are going to be to their best advantage. One of the things Bourdieu says you do in that case is acquire as much capital as you possibly can. Effectively there are three kinds of capital – financial (the best of the lot, as the others are more or less displays of this one and can be 'bought' with it too), social (who you know and who is likely to do stuff for you – your ‘network’ in business talk) and cultural capital (in which play by Shakespeare is Feste the fool?) The point is that to know stuff about culture, particularly high culture, implies having invested time and effort and money in that knowledge’s acquisition.
Bourdieu lived in a different time, particularly when he did the research into Distinction. Essentially what he did was survey and interview people in France from different social position – from farm labourers up to senior executives – and asked them things about their tastes. What sort of music do you listen to? What concerts to you go to? What magazines do you read? What books? What do you eat for dinner? Have you ever seen this painting? Do you like it?
The point was to challenge Kant’s notion of aesthetic judgement. Kant said that taste is essentially subjective, but that since we all have similar faculties, and since an aesthetic judgement of whether something is beautiful or not shouldn’t be contaminated by other kinds of judgements, then we should more or less all see the same things as beautiful. Okay, a slower version of that might be useful. Kant couldn’t really see anything in objects themselves that might make them beautiful. So, what we consider beautiful or ugly is pretty much a subjective taste for each of us – I don’t want to say ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ but let’s go with that for a second anyway. So, the judgement of beauty is subjective. The problem is that Kant didn’t really believe that. He didn’t believe you could look at King Lear carrying Cordelia onto stage and say, ‘oh, look, how beautiful’. That would make you a kind of psychopath. Beauty may be subjective, but that doesn’t mean it is just ‘up to you’ to decide what is beautiful. We look at the world with the same eyes and the same logical faculties, so although there is nothing in the objects themselves that make them beautiful (the judgement of beauty isn’t, therefore, objective) we all have the same faculties and so that makes the judgement of beauty universal.
Kant said you just can’t say, “The pyramids are ugly because I can’t help thinking of the slaves that must have died building them.” It might well be true that lots of slaves did die building the pyramids, but that, in itself, has nothing to do with the aesthetic worth of these buildings. We can all agree that it is terrible that people died building those buildings, but whether they are beautiful or not has to depend on something other than this appeal to the conditions under which they were built. An aesthetic judgement needs to consider formal issues related to the thing, not matters outside of aesthetic considerations. Kant also said that you can’t really say something is beautiful because it is functional. The purpose of a thing does nothing to add (or subtract) from its beauty. You might think your iPhone is beautiful because it lets you take photos and send texts and listen to music – but none of these things actually make it ‘beautiful’. If it has any beauty at all that beauty needs to be concerned with formal considerations related to the iPhone itself. And again, saying lots of Chinese young people are damaged by making your iPhone says nothing about its being or not being beautiful.
All of which means that aesthetic taste is ‘disinterested’. That is, it ignores the purpose of something and it ignores those aspects of something that are more properly judged by other criteria (morality, theology and so on) and is only concerned with formal considerations.
Bourdieu is trying to show in his research that the judgement of taste is linked to your social class and that rather than being purely disinterested, it is actually one of the main ways people have to show their ‘distinction’. That is, the judgement of taste tends to be an entirely negative thing – that is, I like this because I know you don’t have what it takes to understand why it should be liked. And I don’t like that because you like it and I don’t want to be anything like you. The ‘you’ in those sentences tends to be someone of a lower class than the ‘I’ in those sentences.
Bourdieu found that social classes certainly did differentiate themselves according to their cultural tastes. To simplify – the working class tended to like things that were concrete and directly related to their lived experience. The middle class – and this was increasingly true the further you went up the middle class ladder – tended to like things increasingly abstract. So, where the working class might like folk songs, the lower middle class might like light classics, while the upper class would tend to like The Well-Tempered Clavier by Bach. The thing is that the further up the ladder you go, the more likely it is that the people you are talking to will also play an instrument and so their tastes will also reflect that increased level of understanding of the more abstract aspects of music.
Some of the findings from this study did not confirm Bourdieu’s findings. Now, this is to be expected, in a lot of ways. Time has moved on and England in the early 2000s is quite a different place to France in the 1960s. The problem for me was that I kept seeing similarities where the authors were seeing differences. One of the things they pointed out as a difference was that people in England didn’t seem to be as much snobs as the French had proven to be. This is a really interesting finding – but I think it is interesting for quite a different reason. The thing is that England – and English speaking nations generally - are aggressively anti-intellectual. I think this may have had some impact on the things the English like when compared to those the French like – a people less known for being shy of being intelligent.
There were also horror statistics about how many people read books (you know, one-third of bugger all) and then the sorts of books they read if they do read books (you know, utter shite). But what was particularly interesting was that boys tend to like science fiction and girl tend to like the classics if they have been to university – which is still the place most likely to pass on cultural capital. Why this division? Well, boys tend to end up in sciences and girls in humanities.
The other thing I found particularly interesting was that music provides a key cultural dividing line. But not in that the further up the ladder you go the more you will like abstract ‘serious’ music – but that your tastes are likely to be those of an omnivore. In fact, rather than classic music being a clear dividing line for the classes, many people from all classes said they liked classical. What they meant by classical wasn’t always the same – with someone asking if Acker Bilk’s Stranger on the Shore was classical. But there were also age and sex differences which made divisions much more clear than purely class ones. And while people might have vague notions of what constituted classical music, many had a very fine grained understanding of popular music – you know, liking house, but not death metal, and punk, but not acid jazz.
I was also interested that they had more or less replicated some of Bourdieu’s results when it came to watching sport – that is, what sport you watched was a site of class distinction. As was who plays sport – the further up the social scale you are the more likely you are to go on playing some form of sport or do some form of exercise. And that this will be increasingly true as you get older.
One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is the idea that just because different social classes might watch the same thing – you know, might like to watch East Enders on TV – does that mean they are really watching the same thing? I know this is gaming the whole thing, but I think there is something in it. I Know it sounds like I’m saying that even when the thesis is shown to be wrong by the evidence, I am still trying to save the thesis by saying that middle class people and working class people watching the same program aren't watching the same thing. But I still sort of think this is true. I think it is fair to say that an education that has been spent reading fiction or doing film studies or reading social theory is probably going to give you tools to watch something like East Enders in ways that leaving school at seventeen probably isn’t. The finding that middle class people were also likely to be omnivores also implies that they not only don’t get enough out of something like East Enders to satisfy them, but also that they have the cultural resources to be able to get something out of a range of cultural experiences. One of the things people said they liked about soaps was either than they displayed issues related to problems in everyday life or that they liked how they were scripted and structured – these are quite different ‘enjoyments’ with one much more abstract than the other, and much more likely to be why someone from the middle class watched.
While they certainly found that culture wasn’t nearly as much of a social bond or boundary of class distinction as Bourdieu did, it was also clear that certain classes were still able to use their cultural capital to differentiate themselves – and that this was often done in a way that also sought to avoid being considered a snob, and so involved people of higher classes tending to be omnivores, rather than solely obsessed with purely abstract art forms.
All the same, what was particularly interesting here was what people said they didn’t like, rather than what they did like – and these were often a rejection of what would be considered working class tastes. A lot of this is really interesting.
Ok, the basic idea is that different social groups have different levels of cultural capital. Society is made up of various fields and everyone is trying to position themselves in those fields in ways that are going to be to their best advantage. One of the things Bourdieu says you do in that case is acquire as much capital as you possibly can. Effectively there are three kinds of capital – financial (the best of the lot, as the others are more or less displays of this one and can be 'bought' with it too), social (who you know and who is likely to do stuff for you – your ‘network’ in business talk) and cultural capital (in which play by Shakespeare is Feste the fool?) The point is that to know stuff about culture, particularly high culture, implies having invested time and effort and money in that knowledge’s acquisition.
Bourdieu lived in a different time, particularly when he did the research into Distinction. Essentially what he did was survey and interview people in France from different social position – from farm labourers up to senior executives – and asked them things about their tastes. What sort of music do you listen to? What concerts to you go to? What magazines do you read? What books? What do you eat for dinner? Have you ever seen this painting? Do you like it?
The point was to challenge Kant’s notion of aesthetic judgement. Kant said that taste is essentially subjective, but that since we all have similar faculties, and since an aesthetic judgement of whether something is beautiful or not shouldn’t be contaminated by other kinds of judgements, then we should more or less all see the same things as beautiful. Okay, a slower version of that might be useful. Kant couldn’t really see anything in objects themselves that might make them beautiful. So, what we consider beautiful or ugly is pretty much a subjective taste for each of us – I don’t want to say ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ but let’s go with that for a second anyway. So, the judgement of beauty is subjective. The problem is that Kant didn’t really believe that. He didn’t believe you could look at King Lear carrying Cordelia onto stage and say, ‘oh, look, how beautiful’. That would make you a kind of psychopath. Beauty may be subjective, but that doesn’t mean it is just ‘up to you’ to decide what is beautiful. We look at the world with the same eyes and the same logical faculties, so although there is nothing in the objects themselves that make them beautiful (the judgement of beauty isn’t, therefore, objective) we all have the same faculties and so that makes the judgement of beauty universal.
Kant said you just can’t say, “The pyramids are ugly because I can’t help thinking of the slaves that must have died building them.” It might well be true that lots of slaves did die building the pyramids, but that, in itself, has nothing to do with the aesthetic worth of these buildings. We can all agree that it is terrible that people died building those buildings, but whether they are beautiful or not has to depend on something other than this appeal to the conditions under which they were built. An aesthetic judgement needs to consider formal issues related to the thing, not matters outside of aesthetic considerations. Kant also said that you can’t really say something is beautiful because it is functional. The purpose of a thing does nothing to add (or subtract) from its beauty. You might think your iPhone is beautiful because it lets you take photos and send texts and listen to music – but none of these things actually make it ‘beautiful’. If it has any beauty at all that beauty needs to be concerned with formal considerations related to the iPhone itself. And again, saying lots of Chinese young people are damaged by making your iPhone says nothing about its being or not being beautiful.
All of which means that aesthetic taste is ‘disinterested’. That is, it ignores the purpose of something and it ignores those aspects of something that are more properly judged by other criteria (morality, theology and so on) and is only concerned with formal considerations.
Bourdieu is trying to show in his research that the judgement of taste is linked to your social class and that rather than being purely disinterested, it is actually one of the main ways people have to show their ‘distinction’. That is, the judgement of taste tends to be an entirely negative thing – that is, I like this because I know you don’t have what it takes to understand why it should be liked. And I don’t like that because you like it and I don’t want to be anything like you. The ‘you’ in those sentences tends to be someone of a lower class than the ‘I’ in those sentences.
Bourdieu found that social classes certainly did differentiate themselves according to their cultural tastes. To simplify – the working class tended to like things that were concrete and directly related to their lived experience. The middle class – and this was increasingly true the further you went up the middle class ladder – tended to like things increasingly abstract. So, where the working class might like folk songs, the lower middle class might like light classics, while the upper class would tend to like The Well-Tempered Clavier by Bach. The thing is that the further up the ladder you go, the more likely it is that the people you are talking to will also play an instrument and so their tastes will also reflect that increased level of understanding of the more abstract aspects of music.
Some of the findings from this study did not confirm Bourdieu’s findings. Now, this is to be expected, in a lot of ways. Time has moved on and England in the early 2000s is quite a different place to France in the 1960s. The problem for me was that I kept seeing similarities where the authors were seeing differences. One of the things they pointed out as a difference was that people in England didn’t seem to be as much snobs as the French had proven to be. This is a really interesting finding – but I think it is interesting for quite a different reason. The thing is that England – and English speaking nations generally - are aggressively anti-intellectual. I think this may have had some impact on the things the English like when compared to those the French like – a people less known for being shy of being intelligent.
There were also horror statistics about how many people read books (you know, one-third of bugger all) and then the sorts of books they read if they do read books (you know, utter shite). But what was particularly interesting was that boys tend to like science fiction and girl tend to like the classics if they have been to university – which is still the place most likely to pass on cultural capital. Why this division? Well, boys tend to end up in sciences and girls in humanities.
The other thing I found particularly interesting was that music provides a key cultural dividing line. But not in that the further up the ladder you go the more you will like abstract ‘serious’ music – but that your tastes are likely to be those of an omnivore. In fact, rather than classic music being a clear dividing line for the classes, many people from all classes said they liked classical. What they meant by classical wasn’t always the same – with someone asking if Acker Bilk’s Stranger on the Shore was classical. But there were also age and sex differences which made divisions much more clear than purely class ones. And while people might have vague notions of what constituted classical music, many had a very fine grained understanding of popular music – you know, liking house, but not death metal, and punk, but not acid jazz.
I was also interested that they had more or less replicated some of Bourdieu’s results when it came to watching sport – that is, what sport you watched was a site of class distinction. As was who plays sport – the further up the social scale you are the more likely you are to go on playing some form of sport or do some form of exercise. And that this will be increasingly true as you get older.
One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is the idea that just because different social classes might watch the same thing – you know, might like to watch East Enders on TV – does that mean they are really watching the same thing? I know this is gaming the whole thing, but I think there is something in it. I Know it sounds like I’m saying that even when the thesis is shown to be wrong by the evidence, I am still trying to save the thesis by saying that middle class people and working class people watching the same program aren't watching the same thing. But I still sort of think this is true. I think it is fair to say that an education that has been spent reading fiction or doing film studies or reading social theory is probably going to give you tools to watch something like East Enders in ways that leaving school at seventeen probably isn’t. The finding that middle class people were also likely to be omnivores also implies that they not only don’t get enough out of something like East Enders to satisfy them, but also that they have the cultural resources to be able to get something out of a range of cultural experiences. One of the things people said they liked about soaps was either than they displayed issues related to problems in everyday life or that they liked how they were scripted and structured – these are quite different ‘enjoyments’ with one much more abstract than the other, and much more likely to be why someone from the middle class watched.
While they certainly found that culture wasn’t nearly as much of a social bond or boundary of class distinction as Bourdieu did, it was also clear that certain classes were still able to use their cultural capital to differentiate themselves – and that this was often done in a way that also sought to avoid being considered a snob, and so involved people of higher classes tending to be omnivores, rather than solely obsessed with purely abstract art forms.
All the same, what was particularly interesting here was what people said they didn’t like, rather than what they did like – and these were often a rejection of what would be considered working class tastes. A lot of this is really interesting.
Want to read
January 23, 2023Mentioned in Trevor’s review of Bourdieu
July 31, 2010
This book offers a nice summary/critique of Bourdieu, but then ceases to make a very successful intervention into extending his work. It is useful for its ability to point out the weaknesses of Bourdieu's work, as well as to detail how his work has been taken up by sociologists and theorists since. However, its attempt to then replicate Bourdieu's study (while adding variables for gender and age) into the contemporary British setting falls mostly flat, and actually does more to call attention to the sustainability of Bourdieu's argument (particularly regarding cultural capital), than it really challenges it. In the end, the book is easy to read/skim, and its bibliography provides a nice overview of a lot of the cultural sociology work done in the decades since Distinction, but it's unlikely to change anyone's mind about the strengths and weaknesses of Bourdieu's work overall.
June 19, 2014
Starts off feeling wordy while they explain the methodology of their research, but when the results are laid out about differences in taste between classes, genders, races, etc. it becomes a really interesting read. Will be useful for figuring out how to gear a museum exhibit to the most people possible.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews