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202 Chapter 9 Postmodernism

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meaning since you’ve been gone.’ Or to put it in a less danceable discourse, a text is
never really the issuing source of value, but always the site where the construction of
value – variable values – can take place.
Of course, when we ascribe value to a text or practice, we are not (or rarely ever) say-
ing this is only of value to me; our evaluation always (or usually always) includes the
notion that the text or practice should also be of value to others. The trouble with some
forms of evaluation is that they insist that their community of others is an ideal com-
munity, with absolute cultural authority over all other valuing communities. It is not
that they insist that all others should consume what they value (it is usually better for
‘value’ if they do not), but they do insist on due deference for their judgements and
absolute recognition of their cultural authority to judge (see discussion of the ‘culture
and civilization’ tradition in Chapter 2). 48
The postmodern return to questions of value has witnessed an increased interest in
the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1984). As I pointed out in Chapter 1, Bourdieu argues
that distinctions of ‘culture’ (whether understood as text, practice or way of living) are
a significant aspect in the struggle between dominant and subordinate groups in soci-
ety. He shows how arbitrary tastes and arbitrary ways of living are continually trans-
muted into legitimate taste and the only legitimate way of life. The consumption of
culture is thus a means to produce and to legitimate social difference, and to secure
social deference.
Bourdieu’s project is to (re-)locate ‘value’ in the world of everyday experience, to
suggest that similar things are happening when I ‘value’ a holiday destination or a par-
ticular mode of dress, as are happening when I ‘value’ a poem by T.S. Eliot or a song
by Otis Redding or a photograph by Cindy Sherman or a piece of music by Gavin
Bryars. Such evaluations are never a simple matter of individual taste; cultural value
operates both to identify and to maintain social difference and sustain social deference.
Distinction is generated by learned patterns of consumption that are internalized as
‘natural’ preferences and interpreted and mobilized as evidence of ‘natural’ compet-
ences, which are, ultimately, used to justify forms of social domination. The cultural
tastes of dominant groups are given institutional form, and then, with deft ideological
sleight of hand, their taste for this institutionalized culture (i.e. their own) is held up
as evidence of their cultural, and, ultimately, their social, superiority. The effect of such
cultural distinction is to produce and reproduce social distinction, social separation
and social hierarchy. It becomes a means of establishing differences between domin-
ated and dominant groups in society. The production and reproduction of cultural
space thus produces and reproduces social space.
Bourdieu’s purpose is not to prove the self-evident, that different classes have dif-
ferent lifestyles, different tastes in culture, but to identify and interrogate the processes
by which the making of cultural distinctions secures and legitimates forms of power
and control rooted in economic inequalities. He is interested not so much in the actual
differences, but in how these differences are used by dominant groups as a means
of social reproduction. The much heralded collapse of standards rehearsed (almost
weekly) in the ‘quality’ media, may be nothing more than a perceived sense that the
opportunities to use culture to make and mark social distinction are becoming more