Concept
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement, 1979) by Pierre Bourdieu, is a sociological report about the state of French culture, based upon the author's empirical research from 1963 until 1968. The English translation was published in 1984, and, in 1998, the International Sociological Association voted Distinction as an important book of sociology published in the 20th century. As a social critique of the judgements of taste, Distinction (1979) proposes that people with much cultural capital — education and intellect, style of speech and style of dress, etc. — participate in determining what distinct aesthetic values constitute good taste within their society. Circumstantially, people with less cultural capital accept as natural and legitimate that ruling-class definition of taste, the consequent distinctions between high culture and low culture, and their restrictions upon the social conversion of the types of economic capital, social capital, and cultural capital. The social inequality created by the limitations of their habitus (mental attitudes, personal habits, and skills) renders people with little cultural capital the social inferiors of the ruling class. Because they lack the superior education (cultural knowledge) needed to describe, appreciate, and enjoy the aesthetics of a work of art, ‘working-class people expect objects to fulfil a function’ as practical entertainment and mental diversion, whilst middle-class and upper-class people passively enjoy an objet d’art as a work of art, by way of the gaze of aesthetic appreciation. The acceptance of socially dominant forms of taste is a type of symbolic violence between social classes, made manifest in the power differential that allows the ruling class to define, impose, and endorse norms of good taste upon all of society. Hence, the naturalization of the distinction of taste and its misrepresentation as socially necessary, deny the dominated classes the cultural capital with which to define their own world.
