Understanding Cultural Taste

Sensation, Skill and Sensibility

David Wright

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137447074
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book will help students and researchers to clarify a complex concept that is often over simplified in media and cultural studies, the sociology of culture and cultural policy. It updates established theoretical and methodological debates in the study of taste and provides an original perspective on a distinct and rich research field.

1

Theorizing Taste

This chapter sets out to provide a summary and critique of the foundations of the theoretical problem of taste. It has a central preoccupation with the sociology of taste, but arriving at this requires reflection on accounts of taste which pre-date the establishment of a coherent discipline of sociology, including philosophical and historical accounts of the role for taste in abiding questions for the social sciences in the Western, European tradition. In attempting to reassert the utility of a sociological understanding of taste for contemporary and future scholarship, the chapter also engages with accounts which problematize and trouble the coherence of what has become the dominant sociological account of the relationship between taste and social life. The aim here is two-fold: first to lay out how taste has emerged as a subject for sociological study and to indicate the kinds of question that scholars of taste have been concerned with; and second to suggest which of these questions might still be worth asking as part of the ongoing project of understanding the role of taste in contemporary social life.

The chapter proceeds with reflection on the problem of taste in relation to the sensory responses of the human body and, subsequently, in the attribution of cultural, artistic or aesthetic worth. This shift is achieved as a consequence of how concerns with taste have been framed historically, in relation to philosophical questions about the formation of people and societies in Western Europe. Such reflections provide the background to the entrance of sociology and for consideration of how taste can be understood as an exemplary sociological problem, mediating between the personal and the social in modern, urban, market-oriented life. This discussion also prepares the ground for the entrance of Pierre Bourdieu and Distinction, the work which looms large over the study of taste and which will be a touchstone for each of the subsequent dimensions of taste discussed in this book. This chapter lays out three central aspects to Bourdieu’s contribution: the specific engagement with the Kantian version of sensory aesthetic experiences; the ‘conceptual triumvirate’ of capital, habitus and field, which have been Bourdieu’s most abiding contribution to the sociological toolkit; and finally the central question of the relationship between taste and social class which has done considerable work in shifting our understanding of the role and consequences of class as a cultural as well as an economic category. These are sketched outlines here, to be filled and revisited in subsequent discussion. The chapter moves on to consider some challenges to Bourdieu, principally from the philosopher Jacques Rancière’s reassertion of the politically progressive possibilities of an aesthetic engagement with the world and, by extension, the possibility it suggests of an egalitarian, rather than hierarchical, conception of taste.

Refining taste: From the natural to the cultural

One central difficulty that this book seeks to address is the very fluidity of the concept of taste which allows discussions of taste to become, very quickly, discussions of cultural and social life in general. We might start by discussing taste, and end up by considering how taste infiltrates discussion of a range of social, political, artistic, cultural and even economic topics, discussing everything. The actual experiences of taste and tasting can fall away in this move. Retaining and foregrounding this experiential aspect of taste as a useful analytic category in itself requires some refining of the terms of the debate. All analytic procedures should begin with a consideration of the terms they use – and the polysemous nature of the words and concepts that are conjured up by the term ‘taste’ make this an especially important starting point for this endeavour.

Bourdieu’s magisterial empirical exploration of taste begins with a clear assertion that any sociological understanding of the role of taste in social life needs to consider how ‘the elaborated tastes for the most refined objects is re-connected with the elementary taste for the flavours of food’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 1). He goes on to explain how the words we use to describe phenomena act as ‘programmes for perception’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 3), giving energy and impetus to the social meanings of their application. This shaping of the social meanings of the very sensations in our mouths can also be demonstrated powerfully through consideration of a conceptual fellow traveller of the concept of taste, the notion of disgust.

Miller (1997) opens his discussion of the social and psychological history of disgust with some reflection on Darwin’s account of the relation between the sense of taste and disgust, suggesting, through his observation of the reaction of a ‘native’ of Tierra Del Fuego to the soft touch of a piece of cold meat, that there is ‘a strong association in our minds between the sight of food, however circumstanced, and the idea of eating it’ (Darwin, quoted in Miller, 1997: 1). This association is partly a function of the Anglophone etymology of taste in which, for Miller, ‘taste is made to stand as a metonym for the fact that disgust is often indicated by facial expressions and interjections that denote spitting, vomiting or rejecting contaminants that have gotten past the lips’ (Miller, 1997: 85). The linguistic association of the sense of taste with disgust allows all forms of negative sensory reactions to be reviled as distasteful and disgusting. Disgust here can be understood as an evolutionarily valuable response for keeping poisonous or harmful substances out of our bodies. It becomes, as a result, a powerful, biologically based, mode of classification of what is good and what is not that feeds through into other forms of classification. As interesting, though, is the change in the historical lexicon that Miller, who is suspicious of such purely biological understandings of disgust, describes. What counts as disgusting is not simply a constant or reflex response to external stimuli but shifts over time. In the time of Shakespeare, for example, it was not foul tastes that were disgusting but the excesses of oral sensual pleasures that might accompany too good a taste. The label of disgust was attached, in the European tradition, to the sensory sins of the flesh – with gluttony and with lust. The meaning of the word ‘taste’ in relation to a ‘newly recognized capacity for refinement’ (Miller, 1997: 169) emerged in the seventeenth century, at the same time as the meaning of the word disgust assumed its more contemporary meaning. The emergence of a cultural category of good taste as the operation of restraint accompanied the shift in meaning of disgust more exclusively towards the foul or distasteful. Examining historical processes that underpin the shift can indicate how the concepts of taste and disgust have become complicit in the management of both personal behaviour and social life across time.

The most comprehensive attempt to chart these processes in Western Europe is provided by Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process. First published in 1939, this work represents an exemplary piece of historical sociology that charts the relationships between the rise of the institutions and practices of the modern social world and the shifts in the public management of various forms of biological process, including eating, sleeping, sex and the technologies and rituals of defecation. Elias reminds us that modern questions of taste are not just questions of aesthetics or indeed questions of choice or preference. These dimensions of taste are always bound up with rules of conduct, which identify and demarcate the acceptable management of the body and the persistent difficulties and tensions of living with other people and their bodies. The establishment of such norms of conduct as taken for granted has taken centuries and cannot be understood at the level of individual sensory responses alone. The ‘sociogenetic’ process of the development of what we now recognize as ‘civilization’, beginning in the Middle Ages, can be crudely summarized as one of ‘segregation’, and ‘the hiding “behind the scenes” of what has become distasteful’ (Elias, 1994: 99) and the development of taboos which ‘are nothing other than ritualized or institutionalized feelings of displeasure, distaste, disgust, fear or shame, feelings which have been nurtured under quite specific conditions’ (Elias, 1994: 104).

There are, from the position of the twenty-first century, commonsensical explanations for these developments which relate them to the developing human understanding of the relations between hygiene, germs and illnesses. Such a belief is strengthened by the relation between processes of bodily training that are evident in contemporary society and the important work of socializing children into the world of adults, often accompanied and justified through admonishments about what kinds of behaviour are ‘good for you’ and why. As Elias explains,

much of what we call ‘morality’ or ‘moral’ reasons has the same function as ‘hygiene’ or hygienic reasons’: to condition children to a certain social standard. Moulding by such means aims at making socially desirable behaviour automatic, a matter of self-control, causing it to appear in the consciousness of the individual as a result of his own free will, and in the interests of his own health or human dignity.

(Elias, 1994: 123)

The self-evidence of contemporary rules of conduct about eating or defecation belies, for Elias, the processes underpinning their establishment as taken for granted, which have been as much to do with broader historical changes in how society is ordered and how people have managed the difficult processes of living together. We might see a ‘hygienic’ relationship surrounding, for example, rules pertaining to the expulsion of spit or sputum from the mouth. However, for Elias, such rules are better understood as a result of changing norms of conduct which precede the widespread knowledge of any relationship between saliva and the transformation of germs – that is, before there was knowledge that germs even existed. Instead, ‘what first arouses and increases the distasteful feelings and restrictions’, he suggests, ‘is a transformation of human relationships and dependencies’ (Elias, 1994: 130).

In early modern Europe, these transformations included the changing relationships of power between the royal courts and the emerging professional intelligentsia – relationships that were experienced differently in Elias’s account in France, Germany and Italy. These changes are accompanied by the development of a material infrastructure for the management of the body (e.g. the handkerchief), or for conduct at mealtimes (e.g. the plate or cutlery). These have become taken for granted aspects of human social life in Western Europe but were the product of struggle, and uneven and contested processes of change. Elias describes how, in the eleventh century a Venetian dogaress is rebuked by ecclesiastics for using a fork to eat her food as an ‘excessive sign of refinement’ that offended God (Elias, 1994: 55). The emergence of these infrastructures of conduct were also signs of wealth and power, and their spread an indication of the slow processes of the more general acceptance of norms of behaviour within a population. Elias analogizes these processes with the accretion of particles onto a central body that takes place in the development of a crystal. The handkerchief emerged in Renaissance Italy and France, for example, and was precisely a symbol of wealth and prestige. A courtly inventory of the possessions of Henry IV of France (1589–1610) reveals that he owned only five; by the time of Louis XIV there were too many to count (1643–1710); and, of course, in the contemporary period they are, like the most self-evident elements of any social infrastructure, disposable and abundant enough to be almost invisible.

There were at least two impetuses to these changes which are useful in shaping a contemporary theory of taste. First was the establishment of rules and norms of behaviour through which royal courts could emphasize their difference from other sorts of people – albeit that these differences could subsequently be imitated and the conduct itself could spread through aspirant individuals and groups. Elias’s analysis is itself largely based on instruction manuals in conduct and etiquette which aim precisely to foment this kind of imitation; as one suggests from the sixteenth century when eating, ‘in good society one does not put both hands into the dish. It is most refined to use only three fingers of the hand. This is one of the marks of distinction between upper and lower classes’ (Elias, 1994: 46). Second, these norms of conduct established the symbolic means through which relationships of respect between strata of society were conducted. There are, as Elias has it, ‘people before whom one is ashamed, and others before whom one is not’ (Elias, 1994: 113). He explores this with an example from a sixteenth-century Italian instruction that the

members of the human body should be covered except in the presence of people before whom one is not ashamed: ‘It is true that a great lord might do so before his servants or in the presence of a friend of lower rank; for in this he would not show him arrogance but rather a particular affection or friendship.’

(Elias, 1994: 113)

Such an emphasis on the management of the body and its relation to social hierarchy and rank, and of the establishment of norms of refinement between status groups, serves to indicate the extent to which questions of taste move from the biological to the cultural. Such examples imply that approaches to taste, and especially to notions of good and bad taste, need to take account of the social and historical contexts of tasting, and pay attention to the ways in which questions of taste have been, and remain, bound up with processes of categorization, and with questions of conduct – and that both these elements are bound up with the structure of human relationships. These are both themes that are further explored in the following section.

Aesthetics and the senses

The previous section establishes two important elements of a theory of taste that help to underpin the argument in this book: first that the criteria of taste in relation to cultivation or refinement can be seen to shift historically; and second that taste is more than an individual sensory experience, albeit that sensory experiences still provide the language through which the forms of categorization and conduct attached to the concept of taste are articulated. In this section these elements are explored further in relation to the senses and aesthetics. This moves us, to the relief no doubt of some readers, away from questions of bodily management and disgust, and towards notions of beauty. Again this reflection is in a historical mode with engagement with the dominant philosophical figure in this debate, Immanuel Kant and his Critique of Judgment – a key work in the development of Western philosophy, in the establishment of aesthetics as a sub discipline and, as we shall see, the key stepping-off point for more contemporary sociological engagements with the question of taste. Highmore (2010) explains how aesthetics emerged as a distinct area of study in the mid-eighteenth century as an attempt to bring the sensory and affective into philosophical study which had previously been largely focused on the logical and rational – and had thus seemed not to capture the total experience of human life. In this initial formulation, aesthetics ‘is primarily concerned with material experiences, with the way in which the sensual world greets the sensate body, and with the affective forces that are generated in such meetings’ (Highmore, 2010: 121). This has echoes of our earlier iterations of the significance of the senses in understanding taste, indicating the existence of a relationship, which became of critical interest to thinkers of the period, between what feels (tastes, smells or looks) good and what is good. More recently – and specifically since the intervention of Kant – aesthetics has been concerned less with judging whether the sensory experience of the world was good or not in a moral sense but in the detached identification and appreciation of what is beautiful.

Such a move also echoes the importance of sensory restraint as laid out by Elias in the development of modern societies. An experience of tasting is not necessarily judged to be better if it produces more or more intense sensory responses of a particular type. Indeed, in relation to some cultural artefacts – sentimental music, a melodramatic television drama or even a pornographic film – the deliberate attempt to stimulate or manipulate sensory responses is more likely to be judged distasteful to modern sensibilities. Kant’s philosophical intervention provides some explanation of how this shift has been achieved. Crucial in it was the development of a distinction between higher and lower forms of apprehending the world – with lower forms being more connected with the senses and higher ones being within the realms of thought and reflection. This immediately sets up a distinction between thinking and non-thinking people, which, as we’ll see, has both a longer philosophical history and a more contemporary application in debates about taste. For now, though, it is noteworthy that accompanying this distinction is another, shared by Kant and outlined in his writings on anthropology, between the higher and lower senses. Taste and smell are the lower senses. As Gronow describes (1997) in his discussion of the philosophical arguments surrounding the possibility of social forms being beautiful, these senses are essentially subjective, not least because they require immediate physical contact between an individual tasting or smelling subject with the things that they taste or smell. They therefore work against studied contemplation as opposed to immediate sensation. The ear and most especially the eye, by contrast, allow distance from the object of interest and therefore are better suited to the kinds of contemplation which allow for the cultivation of higher forms of understanding.

While we might describe a meal or a perfume as ‘beautiful’, they cannot be beautiful in the same way as music (or perhaps a songbird) or art (or a landscape or sunset) can be. Indeed, strictly for Kant, it is unlikely that a taste or smell can be considered beautiful at all because of their association with the biological needs of the body for nourishment. Such apparent judgements of ‘beauty’ are better understood as descriptions of the sensations that accompany the feelings of approval of the particular phenomenon being judged or experienced. It is this distinction, laid out in the Critique of Judgment, which generates two types of judgement: of the agreeable and of ‘pure beauty’. Both of these are aesthetic judgements in that they both pertain to the apprehension of an object through the (high or low) senses which was the concern of the developing science of aesthetics. It is the latter which is the closest to the contemporary meaning of aesthetics in relating to those characteristics of the form of an object which allow it to be judged as beautiful or not. Judgements of the agreeable, which might be referred to as ‘beautiful’ in everyday language, are really judgements of sense. Judgements of pure beauty are judgements of taste – that is, of a higher order than sense judgements alone.

Two components of this Kantian version of the judgement of pure beauty are important to the subsequent role for aesthetic judgement in the sociological discussion of taste. First such a judgement generates a feeling – of approval or pleasure – that is of a different order than judgements of sense which are agreeable (a nice taste on the tongue, for example, or the satisfaction from a nutritious meal) or indeed from judgements of the good (which are bound up with moral precepts about knowing and doing the right thing and the consequences stemming from this knowledge). It is a feeling of approval that is disinterested – that is, it does not relate to anything other than the contemplation of the thing itself – and not, for example, to how it was made or who made it. Second, given this disinterestedness and its removal of the concept of beauty from the subjective whims of human desire or interest, objects which are judged to be beautiful are beautiful for everyone. As Wicks describes it,

since all modes of sensory gratification, along with utilitarian and moral interests, have been disconnected from judgments of pure beauty, nothing related to the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introducing Taste
• 1. Theorizing Taste
• 2. Measuring Taste
• 3. Governing Tastes
• 4. Globalizing Tastes
• 5. Producing Tastes
• 6. Digitalizing Tastes
• Conclusion: Dimensions of Taste
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index