Distinction Quotes

“Taste is first and foremost distaste, disgust and visceral intolerance of the taste of others.”
― Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

“Those who suppose they are producing a materialist theory of knowledge when they make knowledge a passive recording and abandon the “active aspect” of knowledge to idealism, as Marx complains in the theses on Feuerbach, forget that all knowledge, and in particular all knowledge of the social world, is an act of construction implementing schemes of thought and expression, and that between conditions of existence and practices or representations there intervenes the structuring activity of the agents, who, far from reacting mechanically to mechanical stimulations, respond to the invitations or threats of a world whose meaning they have helped to produce.”
― Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

“The radical questionnings announced by philosophy are in fact circumscribed by the interests linked to membership in the philosophical field, that is, to the very existence of this field and the corresponding censorships.”
― Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

“Music is the 'pure' art par excellence. It says nothing and has nothing to say. Never really having an expressive function, it is opposed to drama, which even in its most refined forms still bears a social message and can only be 'put over' on the basis of an immediate and profound affinity with the values and expectations of its audience. The theatre divides its public and divides itself. The Parisian opposition between right-bank and left-bank theatr, bourgeois theatre and avant-garde theatre, is inextricably aesthetic and political.”
― Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

“A number of ethical, aesthetic, psychiatric or forensic classfications that are produced by the "institutional sciences",not to mention those produced and inculcated by the educational system, are similarly subordinated to social functions, although they derive their specific efficacy from their apparent neutrality. They are produced in accordance with the specific logic, and in the specific language, of relatively autonomous fields, and they combine a real dependence on the classificatory schemes of the dominant habitus (and ultimately on the social structures of which these are the product) with an apparent independence.”
― Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

“Verbal virtuosities or the gratuitous expense of time or money that is presupposed by material or symbolic appropriation of works of art, or even, at the second power, the self-imposed constraints and restrictions which make up the "asceticism of the privileged" (as Marx said of Seneca) and the refusal of the facile which is the basis of all "pure" aesthetics, are so many repetition of that variant of the master-slave dialectic through which the possessors affirm their possession of their possessions. In so doing, they distance themselves still further from the dispossessed, who, not content with being slaves to necessity in all its forms, are suspected of being possessed by the desire for possession, and so potentially possessed by the possessions they do not, or do not yet, possess.”
― Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

“Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed.”
― Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

“Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.”
― Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

“O pedante compreende sem sentimento profundo, enquanto o mundano usufrui sem compreender.”
― Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

“L’œuvre d’art ne prend un sens et ne revêt un intérêt que pour celui qui est pourvu du code selon lequel elle est codée. [...] Le spectateur dépourvu du code spécifique se sent submergé, «noyé», devant ce qui lui apparaît comme un chaos de sons et de rythmes, de couleurs et de lignes sans rime ni raison.”
― Pierre Bourdieu, La distinction - critique sociale du jugement

“[Et] la philosophie pratique du corps masculin comme une sorte de puissance, grande, forte, aux besoins énormes, impérieux et brutaux, qui s’affirme dans toute la manière masculine de tenir le corps, et en particulier devant les nourritures, est aussi au principe de la division des nourritures entre les sexes, division reconnue, tant dans les pratiques que dans le discours, par les deux sexes. Il appartient aux hommes de boire et de manger plus, et des nourritures plus fortes, à leur image. Ainsi à l’apéritif, les hommes seront servis deux fois (et plus si c’est fête) et par grandes rasades, dans de grands verres (le succès du Ricard ou du Pernod tenant sans doute pour beaucoup au fait qu’il s’agit d’une boisson à la fois forte et abondante – pas un « dé à coudre »), et ils laisseront les amuse-gueule (biscuits salés, cacahuètes, etc.) aux enfants et aux femmes, qui boivent un petit verre (« il faut garder ses jambes ») d’un apéritif de leur fabrication (dont elles échangent les recettes). De même, parmi les entrées, la charcuterie est plutôt pour les hommes, comme ensuite le fromage, et cela d’autant plus qu’il est plus fort, tandis que les crudités sont plutôt pour les femmes, comme la salade : ce sont les uns ou les autres qui se resserviront ou se partageront les fonds de plats. La viande, nourriture nourrissante par excellence, forte et donnant de la force, de la vigueur, du sang, de la santé, est le plat des hommes, qui en prennent deux fois, tandis que les femmes se servent une petite part : ce qui ne signifie pas qu’elles se privent à proprement parler ; elles n’ont réellement pas envie de ce qui peut manquer aux autres, et d’abord aux hommes, à qui la viande revient par définition, et tirent une sorte d’autorité de ce qui n’est pas vécu comme une privation ; plus, elles n’ont pas le goût des nourritures d’hommes qui, étant réputées nocives lorsqu’elles sont absorbées en trop grande quantité par les femmes (par exemple, manger trop de viande fait « tourner le sang », procure une vigueur anormale, donne des boutons, etc.), peuvent même susciter une sorte de dégoût.”
― Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

“Thus, for an adequate interpretation of the differences found between the classes or within the same class as regards their relation to the various legitimate arts, painting, music, theatre, literature etc., one would have to analyse fully the social uses, legitimate or illegitimate, to which each of the arts, genres, works or institutions considered lends itself. For example, nothing more clearly affirms one's 'class', nothing more infallibly classifies, than tastes in music.”
― Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste