FCTX2010 - The Uses of Things: Design,

Consumption and Identity

Habitus: The Social Construction of Taste

Discuss Bourdieu’s concept of ‘Habitus’. How does this

concept explain the formation of personal taste? Can

taste be considered to be truly personal?

Student: Antonio Amendolagine - 1017031

Wordcount: 1953 words

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In this essay I will discuss Bourdieu’s concept of “Habitus” and how this explains

the formation of what we call personal taste. I will continue examining the problem

of the free will linked to the Habitus and the power to take personal decisions in

society. I will conclude by talking about fashion, one of the most immediate index

of the personal taste and how it works for “chavs”.

____

Everything starts from the idea that the human being is a problem solver, he gives

more meaning to things than is really required.

Recognising new objects, making up a story for them and giving them a

personality.

Always having in mind what he already knows, through affinities and differences,

being suspicious with what is unusual and new.

This redundant sense of meaning, in a continue negotiation is what give us the

free will, or just its illusion.

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“The conditionings associated with a particular class of conditions of existence

produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured

structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles

which generate and organise practices and representations that can be

objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at

ends or express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them.

Objectively ‘regulated’ and ‘regular’ without being in any way the product of

obedience to rules, they can be collectively orchestrated without being the product

of the organising action of a conductor.” (Bourdieu, 1990: 53).

Bourdieu tried to link and solve the opposition between the decisions taken by the

individual and those taken by the society over everyone.

Thus, he developed the “Habitus”, essentially an “acquired system of generative

dispositions.” (Bourdieu, 1977: 95).

To acquire information the Habitus starts from the society and when it begins to

generate the subject of this action is the individual.

Despite this, the contradiction that comes up is: “...without presupposing a

conscious aiming at ends or express mastery of the operations necessary in order

to attain them.”

Jenkins was the first to point this out, imagining that “Behaviour has its causes, but

actors are not allowed their reasons”. (Bourdieu, 1992: 97).

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Without a conscious aiming at ends we just have a “narrow” free will and using

Jenkins’ language there should be a Director that knows the reasons of our

behaviour.

As I said before, it can also be the fact that we give more meaning to our action:

there is not a meaning in our actions unless the actions in themselves, which

linked with each others are just pointing out a certain behaviour, nothing more than

that.

I think it is appropriate to link this idea to Kierkegaard’s thought in Either/Or: he is

not really concerned about the quality of the choice made by a man (it has a minor

role), to him it is important the choice in itself.

After the decision everything will become more clear even if the choice we have

picked is the wrong one. Choosing is important since everyone can and everyone

will, if we miss our choice, someone else will take it. Even in the movie “Matrix”,

there is the principal question of the choice: as a human being the main character

chooses but he can discover why and how only because of the oracle’s help that

recognises him as the One (no more just a human being). (The Matrix Reloaded,

2003)

The same concept within the society leads Bourdieu to talk about a distinction

between classes throughout the “Taste, the propensity and capacity to appropriate

(materially and symbolically) a given class of classified, classifying objects or

practices, is the generative formula of lifestyle, a unitary set of distinctive

preferences which express the same expressive intention in the specific logic of

each of the symbolic sub-spaces, furniture, clothing, language or bodily hexis.

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Each dimension of life-style 'symbolises with' the others... and symbolises

them.” (Bourdieu, 1984: 173).

I agree on the fact that consuming is good for thinking, when we follow our taste

we don’t need to buy things to possess them, we are already consuming their

idea.

There is a continuous struggling on meanings to define limits, to make clear what

belongs to one class and what belongs to the other one.

“It (the taste) continuously transforms necessities into strategies, constraints into

preferences, and without any mechanical determination, it generates the set of

’choices’ constituiting life-styles.” (Bourdieu, 1984: 175).

Naturally we develop a taste and a preference for what is available to us and to

our class (Williams, 1995).

____

This strongly involves the process of consumption, more and more responsible for

our taste, our lifestyle and the way we distinguish ourselves.

“The point being made here is that if goods function primarily as symbols, and all

groups of individuals use them to establish distinctions between themselves and

other groups of individuals, then there are, in principle, no limits to consumer

demand.” (Lury, 1996).

Brands know this and they change their strategies to be more or less “class

distinctive”.

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For example Coca-Cola understood that being the drink that is “open to

happiness” is the key to reach people with very different tastes because

happiness, like every emotions, belongs to everyone without class distinction

scheme. Differently from the past when, for a long period, it was linked to the

family and the tradition, giving Pepsi the incredible possibility to grow using the

strongest distinction “the choice of a new generation”.

There is a mystic promise in the process of consuming. Consuming is a safe and

genuine “religion” because there is a reliable concept of cause and effect: people

do not know what freedom really is, the brand suggests its solution, people believe

it and buy the product, suddenly feeling free.

Consumption process is unfailing and more and more mature: people need to get

possession of objects to deeply express themselves.

It is not enough defining their own lifestyle by an opposition, going further from

“bad tastes”, from what is mainstream and from what is unique. There is no bad

taste: if this “bad taste” is “unlocked” by a person with an high cultural capital or an

high economic capital, it becomes good.

There is just a small visible part of our entire taste, for example what we wear.

Analysing it we can try to go back to the complete taste of an individual.

When we understand that there is an antinomy between one expression and other

manifestations we accept that there is not bad taste but extravagance.

Every classification on other people’s taste needs a context in which it can become

consistent.

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I also think that unique objects, in our society, are not the correct match to build a

personal taste because no one can recognise them in order to understand

something about our taste and then about our lifestyle.

On the contrary they are the best to escape from this mechanism. Starting using

just unique objects, handmade, is very misleading in this point of view:

theoretically we are quitting the idea of being seen, the idea of being judged, we

are quitting the modern society, based on the principle of seeing and being seen to

understand how good is our leisure time.

“The new logic of the economy rejects the ascetic ethic of production and

accumulation, based upon abstinence, sobriety, saving and calculation, in favour

of a hedonistic morality of consumption, based on credit, spending and enjoyment.

This economy demands a social world which judges people by their capacity for

consumption, their ‘standard of living’, their lifestyle, as much as by their capacity

for production.” - (Bourdieu, 1984: 310)

However quitting is impossible for two reasons: at the present time doing without

mass market products it is not even thinkable, in our society they are too rooted

and mainly we are wasting the possibility to express our cultural or economic

capital, structured on the middle class model.

The pursuit of freedom and the free will comes after the achievement of the

highest capital possible, nonessential if it is cultural or economic, that guarantees

to the individual to become society-proof.

But this point is also arguable since the capital we have got is the result of the

comparison among other people’s capitals: it is clearly a relative concept.

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“As Ibsen’s Peer Gynt observed, we are all onions. If you keep peeling off our

layers you find - absolutely nothing left. There is no true inner self. We are not

Emperors represented by clothes, because if we remove the clothes there in not

an inner core. The clothes were not superficial, they actually were what made us

what we think we are”. (Miller, 2009: 1).

Fashion is a strange system and, as Georg Simmel says in his absolutely inspiring

essay (Simmel, 1996), it is impossible to stay away from it.

It is a mix of the individual and the society: individual details within society rules or

their negation, as well.

This is true because we are costantly having the fashion system in our mind, even

if we deny it.

It is fundamentally based on an high economic capital and a decent cultural capital

(since new fashion is randomly determined) useful to say “I absolutely know what I

am doing, I enjoy it and I enjoy being in a society which support this fashion”.

But fashion is also business, that is the only way to explain why a previous trend

becomes affordable to the mass, the cultural capital in it is never the same.

Involving the mass in this process of consumption is due to create new fashion

every time.

Fashion, according to Simmel, ends when everyone follows it. The moment in

which it happens is the moment to change fashion because the distinctive purpose

is failing.

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About “chavs” the question is fascinating.

In my opinion these people are trying to break the system, unconsciously, using

shortcuts in a faulty inductive reasoning.

They look at the people who can afford latest fashion (as everyone they can just

look at the people they can mentally afford, I mean they automatically choose

people similar to them because to be inspired everyone must understand what he

is looking at), therefore they try to recognise precious and visible elements of their

status: in this operation, the brand power steps and it blinds “chavs”: the

monogram and the brand pattern become reproduced perpetually the most visible

elements.

This process is inductive because “chavs” are trying to build their capital starting

from an aesthetic manifestation, they are clearly missing stylistic personal

undertones but the imitation of themselves (Simmel, 1996), repeated in every

aspect of their fashion.

The society condemns them because what they do is unusual.

In my opinion they have found their own way trying to “dope” their capital,

exceeding it, using empirical formulas.

The fact that the society can talk about them is not a minor detail: it expresses its

judgment, creating a balance, defining “chavs” and itself, making the distinction.

____

In conclusion, I think that there is no personal taste, mainly because the human

being does not want it: we always look for approval, we need it to keep ourselves

in the society as we need refusal to make a distinction within the society.

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The Habitus, as a system that acquires information from the society, is sure

enough acting in it.

This acquirement of data in some fields combined with each others seems to be

personal taste: the raw material is absolutely a common good, the only

fundamental difference is the way every individual combine these data.

Distinction from the top-class and imitation from the bottom-class are cyclic: when

the imitation is completed then the distinction can start, struggling for the

appropriation of new meanings that signify surviving.

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Bibliography

Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction. Harvard University Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1990) The Logic of Practice. Stanford University Press.

Jenkins, R. (1992) Pierre Bourdieu. Routledge.

Lury, C. (1996) Consumer Culture. Rutgers University Press

The Matrix Reloaded. (2003) Directed by: Laurence and Andrew Wachowski.

U.S.A. Warner Bros.

Miller, D. (2009) Stuff. Polity.

Pepsi (1984) The choice of a new generation [advertisement] http://

www.youtube.com/watch?v=po0jY4WvCIc (Accessed on: 12.05.11).

Simmel, G. (1996) La moda. Mondadori.

Williams, S. J. (1995) Theorising class, health and lifestyles: Can Bourdieu help

us? In: Sociology of Health & Illness. 17 (5) pp. 577-604.

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