dynomight · Nov 2023 · bourdieu effort
I recently noticed that when I buy beer, I sometimes get Belgian Trappist Quintupel. And I sometimes get American Fermented Value Product. But never Blue Moon or Sam Adams or Peroni or Becks or Pilsner Urquell.
Why? I guess I thought I did that because I was… quirky and free-spirited? Unlike people who buy stuff based on marketing, I was independent and multifaceted.
But then I noticed it’s not just beer:
domain OK also OK horror beer cheap macro beer fancy-person beer midwit beer books detective novels Derek Parfit Malcolm Gladwell furniture street-scavenged bought or built with solid wood anything with wood veneer movies King Kong, Master and Commander Solaris, In the Mood for Love Crash words “so” “thence” “consequently”
And isn’t it odd that things coded as highbrow or lowbrow are always OK, but never middlebrow? And is that really a coincidence?
Or maybe—just maybe—are my beer purchases a clue that underneath it all I’m a striving, pretentious, hypocritical, sniveling excuse for a human being?
I was led to these reflections by Pierre Bourdieu’s 1979 book, Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste. It’s full of inviting 176-word sentences like this:
Again, to understand the class distribution of the various sports, one would have to take account of the representation which, in terms of their specific schemes of perception and appreciation, the different classes have of the costs (economic, cultural and ‘physical’) and benefits attached to the different sports—immediate or deferred ‘physical’ benefits (health, beauty, strength, whether visible, through ‘body-building’ or invisible through ‘keep-fit’ exercises), economic and social benefits (upward mobility etc.), immediate or deferred symbolic benefits linked to the distributional or positional value of each of the sports considered (i.e., all that each of them receives from its greater or lesser rarity, and its more or less clear association with a class, with boxing, football, rugby or body-building evoking the working classes, tennis and skiing the bourgeoisie and golf the upper bourgeoisie), gains in distinction accruing from the effects on the body itself (e.g., slimness, sun-tan, muscles obviously or discreetly visible etc.) or from the access to highly selective groups which some of these sports give (golf, polo etc.).
But sociologists insist it’s one of the greatest works of the 20th century. So I figured—what the hell—why not fight through 600 tangled pages? Does it say something interesting? Is it written like this for a reason? Will I learn to like this kind of writing and thereby gain some sort of enlightenment?
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