More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
For our purposes, taste is a crucial concept in providing a direct link between status seeking and the formation of individual identities. Taste involves choice, and from what we’ve learned so far, we make our aesthetic choices within the context of status.
There is a reason taste focuses on “superficial” aesthetics rather than practical actions. People from very different backgrounds use the same screwdrivers, automotive lubricants, and kitty litter.
In status appraisals, taste first assists in the simple task of screening whether a stranger is “one of us.”
Common interests inspire reciprocal judgments of “good taste” and bestowing of social approval; mismatched preferences engender disapproval and social distancing.
By triangulating all the signals, cues, and absences, we understand someone’s taste as a gestalt. We can call this a sensibility—the underlying “feel” that choices express.
Up until the 1950s, American culture contained three taste worlds: the highbrow of wealthy elites and intellectuals (classical music, abstract art, serious literature), the middlebrow of the upper middle classes (urbane popular culture with intellectual undercurrents), and the lowbrow of the lower middle classes (schmaltzy songs, popular cinema).
Over the last fifty years the number of American taste worlds has greatly expanded, especially as minority and immigrant communities formed their own status groups with unique conventions.
The skill aspect of taste means it never just expresses our unconscious habitus, but can be shaped through conscious choices. Good taste can be a reflection of noble birth—or the result of self-improvement.
To gain status from great taste involves progress across three attributes: deep knowledge, congruence, and bounded originality.
For Kant, understanding the beautiful meant transcending immediate sensual pleasures and relishing refined forms of “contemplative” aesthetics.
Kantian taste requires us to find pleasure in things that take time and effort to appreciate: classical music, avant-garde art, postmodern novels, and gourmet cuisine.
Expanded knowledge, however, is not enough to move up the taste hierarchy. Lifestyle choices also must reveal congruence—an internal consistency with the target sensibility.
These established groupings of products are called constellations, and each taste world contains distinct sets. Congruence in taste means replicating these constellations or making well-balanced adjustments to the predetermined formulas.
Good taste requires knowing not to overdo a single signal if it doesn’t match everything else.
But the truest marker of excellent taste is bounded originality. As we learned before, the highest-status individuals can’t imitate anyone lower on the hierarchy and, therefore, must make distinctive choices. Great taste requires uniqueness.
Choices should express the individual’s exceptional character. They must surprise and delight. This requirement for originality explains the elite disdain for fashion, which is often dismissed as following the opinions of others.
The reason for a bounded originality is that all choices must still conform to a certain sensibility and ensure congruence.
Originality works best when the individual has already established mastery of a high-status sensibility and enjoys high-status privilege.
Originality is much easier with granular knowledge and expertise, because knowing what is distinctive requires knowing what is common.
The famed food critic Anthony Bourdain arguably reached the foodie pantheon not by celebrating haute cuisine but by championing overlooked delicacies such as the Japanese convenience store egg-salad sandwich.
A shortcut for great taste is arbitrage, finding easily procured things in one location and then deploying them elsewhere where they’re rare.
Perfect taste, however, doesn’t just require making choices that satisfy certain standards. We also have to prove that our choices are appropriate and natural for our particular life stories.
Authenticity is an obvious virtue in the realm of material goods. Things should be what they are supposed to be.
Authenticity has become particularly important in the modern era, where manufacturers can easily pump out ersatz copies of desirable goods.
To be authentic, explains philosopher Charles Taylor, requires discovering and realizing one’s “originality.” An authentic self embodies positive virtues, such as honesty and self-confidence.
Genuine people are also more reliable, as we can expect them to be consistent over time. The measure of authenticity applies to not only actions but also desires.
Inauthenticity is not just an act of cunning deception but implies a lack of self-confidence to resist external forces—those who end up always jumping on the bandwagon. Pretension is another manifestation of this personal deficiency: the sin of acting more erudite than one’s education and social position justify.
Ideally all signals should be behavioral residue—reflections of how we live rather than items acquired for the purpose of claiming status.
To be judged as authentic, we must provide information validating the provenance of our taste. Signals, cues, and significant absences are compared with our immutable characteristics and demographic details, such as age, gender, race, sexual orientation, and native language.
A precursor to authenticity was the past emphasis on suitability—i.e., making the choices that best match our particular lifestyle and sensibility.
Suitability means conformity to certain standards, and here we get a hint of how authenticity can become a prison. For all the infinite choices in life, we are “allowed” to associate publicly only with ones “suitable” to our immutable characteristics and background.
By extension, personas appear more authentic when they include a few “mistakes”—i.e., sloppy behaviors, low-status habits. Perfect taste suggests an overexertion of effort. Great taste should appear natural.
All of this leads us to the central paradox of authenticity: we are supposed to listen to the voice in our hearts, to “discover and articulate our own identity”—and yet, only others can judge whether we are authentic.
And in the last century authenticity has become a powerful bulwark for status-disadvantaged communities who create desirable cultural styles and artifacts.
Cultural appropriation describes illegitimate majority use of minority conventions, especially as status symbols.
The most powerful form of authenticity thus remains authenticity by origin: the principle that groups who formulate a convention are the best at replicating it.
Our standards are shifting toward authenticity by content: the principle that the best things are those made by the original methods (i.e., “It ain’t where you’re from; it’s where you’re at”).
Fakers and poseurs will be punished. This has an overall effect of keeping us conservative when choosing signals. Our best tactic is to choose signals close to our immutable characteristics and in line with our origin stories.
Strivers at the bottom must acquire status symbols and build on top of their origin stories. Authenticity can be yet another privilege of the elite.
In signaling, we build personas—observable packages of signals, taste, sensibility, immutable characteristics, and cues absorbed from our upbringing and background. Others use this persona to determine our identity. At the same time, we have a self within our minds, known only to us. Persona, identity, and self are never quite the same.
Every single person on earth is different. When we ask “Who am I?” then, the question is simply whether others effectively acknowledge the distinctiveness of our existence.
We now seek an individual identity that transcends demographic categories and classifiers. If we can be easily summarized through stereotype, category, and class alone, we’re failures.
After negotiating all of the demands of status, the resulting persona is almost like cultural DNA—a sequence of choices, behaviors, and experiences acquired over the course of our lives.
Modernity has democratized the aristocratic propensity toward individual distinction. But uniqueness remains an easier action for those at the top, which means that the easiest way to resolve the fundamental tension between being original and getting along in society is to acquire high status.
Advising everyone to “be yourself” is therefore unfair as a broad mandate in a world still marked by bias: not everyone is born into a set of privileged attributes and behaviors.
Before status-disadvantaged individuals can be themselves, they must band together to open a path toward upward mobility. This is the logic behind identity politics, where individuals sharing demographic characteristics unite to raise the status levels associated with their defining trait.
Moreover, the emphasis on being yourself overlooks the fact that self-definition is a continual process. We are writing a novel of identity for others, and the persona is simply the latest draft.
For all these concerns, the persona is a mere “application.” Receiving an identity requires being identified by others. Why are others identifying us? The most immediate reason for their attention is status appraisal. To properly interact with strangers, we must know their status.
Personas are vehicles for status claims, and identities are results of status appraisals. Every identification, thus, becomes an evaluation.
A valuable identity can feel good even when we’re alone. Self-esteem is more credible when it corresponds to social esteem.
