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Contemporary Cultural Theory

other not simply as a matter of economics, but also as a matter
of habitus: ‘social class, understood as a system of objective deter-
minations’, he insisted, ‘must be brought into relation . . . with the
class habitus, the system of dispositions (partially) common to
all products of the same structures’ (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 85).

Cultural capital
Bourdieu’s most widely cited study, however, and certainly the
most influential in cultural studies, has been Distinction, a work
that takes as the object of its critique precisely the same kind of
high modernism as that privileged in Frankfurt School aesthet-
ics. Where Adorno and Horkheimer had insisted on a radical
discontinuity between capitalist mass culture and avant-garde
modernism, Bourdieu would focus on the latter’s own deep
complicity with the social structures of power and domination.
The book was based on an extremely detailed sociological survey,
conducted in 1963 and in 1967/68, by interview and by ethno-
graphic observation, of the cultural preferences of over 1200
people in Paris, Lille and a small French provincial town
(Bourdieu, 1984, p. 503). Analysing his sample data, Bourdieu
identified three main zones of taste: ‘legitimate’ taste, which was
most widespread in the educated sections of the dominant class;
‘middle-brow’ taste, more widespread among the middle classes;
and ‘popular’ taste, prevalent in the working classes (p. 17). He
characterised legitimate taste primarily in terms of what he called
the ‘aesthetic disposition’ to assert the ‘absolute primacy of form over
function’ (pp. 28, 30). Artistic and social ‘distinction’ are thus inex-
tricably interrelated, he argued: ‘The pure gaze implies a break
with the ordinary attitude towards the world which, as such, is a
social break’ (p. 31). The popular aesthetic, by contrast, is ‘based
on the affirmation of continuity between art and life’ and ‘a deep-
rooted demand for participation’ (p. 32). The characteristic
detachment of this ‘pure gaze’, Bourdieu argued, is part of a more
general disposition towards the ‘gratuitous’ and the ‘disinterested’,
in which the ‘affirmation of power over a dominated necessity’
implies a claim to ‘legitimate superiority over those who . . .
remain dominated by ordinary interests and urgencies’ (pp. 55–6).

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