I’ve noticed that taste, as a function of consensus, is often classist. The editorial taste of The New Yorker for instance. But there is another kind of taste, one that is personal and seems to register experiential truth. The latter taste transcends class, popularity, genre and academic classification. For instance, there are certain moments of controlled dissonance (noise) in music that just sound good, because they deliver a kind of experiential truth. These moments of what highbrow culture might call ugly are sometimes quite powerful and, well, tasteful. This kind of taste is esthetic in the sense of being integral to a truth of human experience. It is not related to class but to the effect of art on the senses. It is basically what tastes good to the eyes and ears and seems apt to the truth that the painting or song is trying to manifest.
Funny how “good taste” always seems to align perfectly with whoever already has the mic, the money, and the moral high ground. Turns out aesthetic judgment is just class warfare wearing a cardigan and calling itself refined.
Bourdieu’s is a cynical view of human nature, one which renders all moral-cum-normative claims illusory means of asserting social status or gaining economic capital.
Though there are certainly those that do merely seek to dominate, perhaps we also pursue goods and ways of life we believe have inherent value. The concepts of the good, the just, and the beautiful may not be merely subjective means of asserting one’s own value and excluding others, but genuine attempts at finding truths and pursuits of excellence in the human condition. Acknowledging social mediation does not entail denying that some ways of life are genuinely better than others, even if our access to them is historically distorted.
Obviously, it has been all too true that historically, conversations about these goods-in-themselves, and their distribution, have excluded vast swathes of humanity. But reducing this to mere “social violence” ignores a crucial point: the very use of the word violence presupposes normative critique, an implicit ought, that we ought to resist this violence in pursuit of something else, something better. But what is this we ought to pursue instead, if every attempt at pursuing or defending a good life is merely a violent social struggle to rise to the top of the pack at the expense of everyone else?
We are responsible for the theories that inform our worldviews—I do not want to live in a world that reduces all pursuits of the good to a relativist colosseum. The more we allow cynicism to inform our own lives, the more cynicism takes over the world. You must believe in the good to bring it about. In the (paraphrased) words of Pierre Bourdieu: Our theories shape our practices.
I’ve noticed that taste, as a function of consensus, is often classist. The editorial taste of The New Yorker for instance. But there is another kind of taste, one that is personal and seems to register experiential truth. The latter taste transcends class, popularity, genre and academic classification. For instance, there are certain moments of controlled dissonance (noise) in music that just sound good, because they deliver a kind of experiential truth. These moments of what highbrow culture might call ugly are sometimes quite powerful and, well, tasteful. This kind of taste is esthetic in the sense of being integral to a truth of human experience. It is not related to class but to the effect of art on the senses. It is basically what tastes good to the eyes and ears and seems apt to the truth that the painting or song is trying to manifest.
Damn bro the way words are arranged in your writing that is just too juicy for me to read
Funny how “good taste” always seems to align perfectly with whoever already has the mic, the money, and the moral high ground. Turns out aesthetic judgment is just class warfare wearing a cardigan and calling itself refined.
Bourdieu’s is a cynical view of human nature, one which renders all moral-cum-normative claims illusory means of asserting social status or gaining economic capital.
Though there are certainly those that do merely seek to dominate, perhaps we also pursue goods and ways of life we believe have inherent value. The concepts of the good, the just, and the beautiful may not be merely subjective means of asserting one’s own value and excluding others, but genuine attempts at finding truths and pursuits of excellence in the human condition. Acknowledging social mediation does not entail denying that some ways of life are genuinely better than others, even if our access to them is historically distorted.
Obviously, it has been all too true that historically, conversations about these goods-in-themselves, and their distribution, have excluded vast swathes of humanity. But reducing this to mere “social violence” ignores a crucial point: the very use of the word violence presupposes normative critique, an implicit ought, that we ought to resist this violence in pursuit of something else, something better. But what is this we ought to pursue instead, if every attempt at pursuing or defending a good life is merely a violent social struggle to rise to the top of the pack at the expense of everyone else?
We are responsible for the theories that inform our worldviews—I do not want to live in a world that reduces all pursuits of the good to a relativist colosseum. The more we allow cynicism to inform our own lives, the more cynicism takes over the world. You must believe in the good to bring it about. In the (paraphrased) words of Pierre Bourdieu: Our theories shape our practices.
Yeahhh, I also thought about this concept when I was 8 years old