There's also the idea of class as a taste distinction: ‘Taste, a class culture turned into nature, that is, embodied, helps to shape the class body. It follows that the body is the most indisputable materialization of class taste’ (Bourdieu, 1984)
Not to justify whatever the author intends, but if there is substance there, it is part of a class critique
Don't forget how fashion industry takes the styles of working class and marginalized people and turn it to profits after decades of deriding it as tasteless.
Taste, a class culture turned into nature, that is, embodied, helps to shape the class body. It follows that the body is the most indisputable materialization of class taste
Please rephrase this on the level of a dum dum for me
I think Bourdieu (a famously obscure French "postmodern" writer) is basically saying that class can physically manifest itself in the body, and that taste is fundamentally a class value. It's from a book that I didn't read(!) called Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste which is supposedly about how distinguishing your taste is a form of distinguishing your class. For me this idea is important because it leads to today's liberal aesthetics of posturing while doing nothing in practice.
In general my point with the comic is that even if we take it at face value (poor people make bad clothing decisions and are therefore immoral and stupid), then poor people only do this because of proletarian culture, which today is obviously co-opted by consumer society from its inception, even created to be simply a target market, sold to and commodified; therefore it is not immoral or stupid at all to fit in with your peers, it could be socially mandated. Of course, the comic is dumb and Bourdieu's idea becomes confusing and breaks down when all the bougie elites read his book and decide that understanding proletarian culture is also a form of upper class distinction (which fits right in with liberal multiculturalism) but I think the idea is still very helpful.
There's also the idea of class as a taste distinction: ‘Taste, a class culture turned into nature, that is, embodied, helps to shape the class body. It follows that the body is the most indisputable materialization of class taste’ (Bourdieu, 1984)
Not to justify whatever the author intends, but if there is substance there, it is part of a class critique
Don't forget how fashion industry takes the styles of working class and marginalized people and turn it to profits after decades of deriding it as tasteless.
Please rephrase this on the level of a dum dum for me
I think Bourdieu (a famously obscure French "postmodern" writer) is basically saying that class can physically manifest itself in the body, and that taste is fundamentally a class value. It's from a book that I didn't read(!) called Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste which is supposedly about how distinguishing your taste is a form of distinguishing your class. For me this idea is important because it leads to today's liberal aesthetics of posturing while doing nothing in practice.
In general my point with the comic is that even if we take it at face value (poor people make bad clothing decisions and are therefore immoral and stupid), then poor people only do this because of proletarian culture, which today is obviously co-opted by consumer society from its inception, even created to be simply a target market, sold to and commodified; therefore it is not immoral or stupid at all to fit in with your peers, it could be socially mandated. Of course, the comic is dumb and Bourdieu's idea becomes confusing and breaks down when all the bougie elites read his book and decide that understanding proletarian culture is also a form of upper class distinction (which fits right in with liberal multiculturalism) but I think the idea is still very helpful.
Okay, thank you ty