Bourdieu's theory of taste: a grumbling abrégé (2023)

3/8/2026 at 4:15:26 PM

Bourdieu was ahead of his time.

People now identify themselves as belonging to a social class by subtle cues, it's like an unconscious messaging system to signal that you belong to some sort of club.

That's what "being raised right" means now.

It's now backwards to check if someone comes from a good or rich, noble family.

Instead, we check other subtle things.

Spend 5 min with anybody, and you can somehow know if that person can belong to your group of friends.

It's like animal checking each other' scents to accept them in a group.

by jokoon

3/9/2026 at 1:56:20 PM

>It's now backwards to check if someone comes from a good or rich, noble family.

It's not. You just do it discreetly.

by CGMthrowaway

3/8/2026 at 9:13:18 AM

I really appreciate that the author took the time and spent the effort to read bourdieu. Many years ago I tried to read it and flunked out. He is one of the worst writers ever to set pen to paper. Big mystery finally solved for me.

by mlsu

3/8/2026 at 5:41:52 AM

If Bourdieu had been American, he would have put much more emphasis on race and dialect, I think.

It's also the case that the US is much larger than France, so the kind of world where 400 people in New York really mattered stopped existing.

by alricb

3/8/2026 at 4:07:06 PM

Foucault was popular in the US, and had theories that were different but similar in concepts

by jokoon

3/8/2026 at 1:02:29 PM

how do I get a rich synthwave wife

by _dain_

3/7/2026 at 7:41:23 PM

by pingou

3/7/2026 at 5:49:04 PM

Slightly surprised to learn Master and Commander is “lowbrow”—is it just because it’s not an art film or whatever? Usually I’d expect Marvel films to be described that way (unfairly imo, when it comes to the Phase One batch at least)…

by BalinKing

3/7/2026 at 7:48:25 PM

It's clearly in a different category from the "highbrow" examples like Solaris, just by virtue of being entertaining to a broad audience. In contrast Solaris is the kind of movie where there's a five minute unbroken scene that's just a guy driving in traffic and thinking about his life. (Like the author, I like them both!)

by canjobear

3/7/2026 at 6:19:50 PM

The ‘brow’ standards have dropped significantly, in a process Fussell has described as the general proletarianization of culture.

For a long time films that would be considered niche and arthouse were middlebrow, because film itself was at best a middlebrow medium.

To people still concerned with the various brows, Marvel films are below low. They are sign of a debased and infantile film culture that caters to childish tastes and merchandising, not art.

by thundergolfer

3/7/2026 at 6:43:34 PM

Years ago I was surprised to read a critic that described Branagh's Hamlet as middlebrow. I mean, Henry V, sure - that only even qualifies as middlebrow because it's Shakespeare. I would assume it was lowbrow at the time it was written. I love the prologue, though.

by mordechai9000

3/7/2026 at 6:57:32 PM

Yeah I'd say the critic was most likely affirming the idea that film is a middlebrow medium. Seeing Hamlet at the Globe is high brow, but seeing Hamlet as the cinema is middlebrow.

by thundergolfer

3/8/2026 at 12:48:36 AM

The Globe is full of tourists, so it's multibrow at best.

Bourdieu's take was that the working classes like simple sentimental art, the middle classes like aspirational, middlebrow art because they feel they have something to prove, and the upper classes often prefer kitsch.

Although sometimes it's high status middlebrow kitsch, such as a lot of opera and light classical music, which is more sentimental than technical.

Most opera lovers have no idea who Luigi Nono was, and would care less if they did know.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joteZTLpHdE

Highbrow art is the exclusive niche domain of intellectuals and academics UNLESS it's been commodified into a Veblen good, like contemporary art.

by TheOtherHobbes

3/8/2026 at 6:43:27 AM

> Although sometimes it's high status middlebrow kitsch, such as a lot of opera and light classical music, which is more sentimental than technical.

Are you sure it's more sentimental than technical? Like, with-your-ears sure?

Note that it took something like 140 years for someone to write a tempo fugue using a piano technique in Chopin's 4th Ballade. That is to say-- sentimental composers are as good at hiding their technique as audiences are at missing it.

by jancsika

3/8/2026 at 3:44:10 AM

The film is by Peter Weir, who is capable of being quite highbrow. But, it stars Rusty, who is capable of being quite low brow. It depends. Are you not entertained?

The books are a bit highbrow and lowbrow. OBrien did a fantastic highbrow biography of Joseph Banks and another of Picasso, but this series is lowbrow. Not as lowbrow as his translation of "Papillon". He was in his youth feed as a quite highbrow up and coming thing. He wasn't Irish, he was an astute fake who left his first wife and reinvented himself in France under an assumed name he came to personify. John Le Carre is similar.

The books are more highbrow than CS Forester. I upset a Hornblower fan(atic) by averring Bush has a homoerotic fixation on Hornblower.

De gustibus...

by ggm

3/7/2026 at 6:35:51 PM

Marvel films are commercial tripe. Pure commodity fetishism and cheap spectacle. Utterly without literary merit.

Master and Commander is pretentious pulp. Real, quality media is obscure, and largely unpalatable to our debased modern sensibilities.

by rexpop

3/7/2026 at 6:12:32 PM

> lower-class people are in a sort of local maxima

If the writer knew that the correct term is “maximum” (singular) and misused the Latin on purpose, this is brilliant. Failing that, it’s still a wonderful inadvertent enactment of the thesis. Well done either way.

by didgeoridoo

3/7/2026 at 6:36:52 PM

Poorly done, either way ...

by readthenotes1

3/7/2026 at 6:03:23 PM

He sees through his beer purchases but he doesn't see through his seeing through them.

by sfpotter

3/8/2026 at 3:00:19 AM

Did you read the rest of his series? He addresses this in part 3:

> You’ve probably noticed this theory is hard to falsify: You think you’re not playing taste games? You think you “actually like” things because of the properties of those things? That’s because you’re playing higher-level games! And it’s rather convenient that this is all supposed to be unconscious. There’s also this weird sense of guilt. If you consciously change your tastes so you can fit in, that’s bad. If you unconsciously do that, that’s worse. If you unconsciously don’t try to fit in, you’re scum.

by oa335

3/7/2026 at 11:32:54 PM

Meaning what? That true enlightenment is to affirm openly all your likes and dislikes with no care for what anyone else thinks of them?

by FeteCommuniste

3/8/2026 at 12:34:24 AM

That's what Virgina Woolf said.

To be highbrow, you can like whatever you like as long as other people don't like it too.

(She didn't say that last part out loud, but it's strongly implied.)

by TheOtherHobbes