Is taste purely a matter of personal choice?

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This was posited to me by one of my flatmates last night. I reckon no: obviously we choose what we like, but that's codified and conditioned by XXX external forces - whilst she turned it into a question of nature and nurture, and threatened to throw her wine over me.

― Manny, Thursday, 7 November 2002 14:18 (twenty-three years ago)

She is a moron.

Point her to any demographic pattern of behaviour (eg. people from lower income backgrounds tend to more tabloids than people from higher income backgrounds) and ask her 'do you think this is some massive coincidence?

Or perhaps she thinks the thinks she is special and above all cultural influence.

― N. (nickdastoor), Thursday, 7 November 2002 14:23 (twenty-three years ago)

Taste is more than consumption patterns though Nick.

― Tim (Tim), Thursday, 7 November 2002 14:25 (twenty-three years ago)

Possibly, but you'll have to tell me more if I am to revise my opinion that Manny's flatmate is a moron.

― N. (nickdastoor), Thursday, 7 November 2002 14:27 (twenty-three years ago)

I'm undecided on this one - What about people who break the mould, so to speak? Those who have grown up in the same surroundings, with the same influences, but decide (using N's example) to read a broadsheet?

― Plinky (Plinky), Thursday, 7 November 2002 14:28 (twenty-three years ago)

they're pretending to be someone they're not.

― RJG (RJG), Thursday, 7 November 2002 14:29 (twenty-three years ago)

You're being a real bitch today Nick. Grrr.

― Graham (graham), Thursday, 7 November 2002 14:30 (twenty-three years ago)

We could restart my thread on aesthetics that no-one posted to! Short answer = no, taste is not personal choice. (Choice having very little to do with it, even if it is *personal*). Taste = machine for production of class relations.

― alext (alext), Thursday, 7 November 2002 14:34 (twenty-three years ago)

alex, I saw your thread! I am still thinking though!

― Josh (Josh), Thursday, 7 November 2002 14:38 (twenty-three years ago)

Still not convinced. If we are all indoctrinated Brave New World style, that still doesn't explain those break from what they're, supposedly, conditioned to do.

― Plinky (Plinky), Thursday, 7 November 2002 14:41 (twenty-three years ago)

The idea that a person consciously chooses to like [x] is one I've never really bought. But it is a staple of interweb music discussion groups: lots of people genuinely believe that others have made conscious [= non-instinctual, somehow false] choices.

Are you sure it's *class* relations that taste generates, Alex?

― Tim (Tim), Thursday, 7 November 2002 14:41 (twenty-three years ago)

Taste is more than consumption patterns though

Well, precisely. I think what's important though is the distinction between uhm "I like rilly rilly expensive red wine/jeans/UK garage white labels [and have a taste] for it but can't afford it", and the medium or how you find out about them (or don't) = taste as demarcated by what you have access to and can afford = both class and affluence.

And to go back to what Plinky said, by defn "class norms" INCLUDE such "abberations", no? Just because it's a norm doesn't mean its in stasis.

― Manny, Thursday, 7 November 2002 14:47 (twenty-three years ago)

Ha Ha I am playing at being Bourdieu.

― alext (alext), Thursday, 7 November 2002 14:47 (twenty-three years ago)

Hm is there dressing up involved in that game?

― Tim (Tim), Thursday, 7 November 2002 14:49 (twenty-three years ago)

No but I am thinking with a French accent...

I think class relations is OK as long as we don't think of classes as fixed categories which exist prior (or after perhaps) to their production via taste. ie the moment of judgement distributes the person expressing taste, his audience and the potential contexts for this judgement into a set of relations whose grounding is social. (ie there is no such thing as working-class taste) (Hence a community of taste is never *just* an aesthetic community). NB this does not devalue the aesthetic, since it is a romantic myth that aesthetics and politics are necessarily opposed (see also commerce).

― alext (alext), Thursday, 7 November 2002 14:53 (twenty-three years ago)

Too many big words, I give up.

― Plinky (Plinky), Thursday, 7 November 2002 14:56 (twenty-three years ago)

Well alright but you just know when I hear the word class I'm going to start thinking about relationship to the means of production.

*creak*

― Tim (Tim), Thursday, 7 November 2002 14:57 (twenty-three years ago)

Plinky, of course any demographic statistic only describes general patterns. But it's the general pattern that is important thing in this case.

In this example, the poorer people who buy broadsheets are either

a) a distinct group who have some access to free will that the others don't. This would have to be the corrolary of Manny's flatmate's argument.

b) subject to other influences of nature / nurture that have produced, in the whirling cocktail of the human mind, a preference for broadsheets instead. This is what makes sense to me.

― N. (nickdastoor), Thursday, 7 November 2002 15:02 (twenty-three years ago)

My mind = whining cockatiel.

― Tim (Tim), Thursday, 7 November 2002 15:08 (twenty-three years ago)

I smell RUIN

― alext (alext), Thursday, 7 November 2002 15:10 (twenty-three years ago)

corollary bah - that will teach me to use big words.

― N. (nickdastoor), Thursday, 7 November 2002 15:10 (twenty-three years ago)

So, what you are saying is you agree with both arguments and nobody can prove it one way or another anyway?
Me too.

― Plinky (Plinky), Thursday, 7 November 2002 15:18 (twenty-three years ago)

My mind = winsome cocker spaniel

― Liz :x (Liz :x), Thursday, 7 November 2002 15:18 (twenty-three years ago)

I'm saying that I can't disprove (a), but the idea that there some people have 'free will' and some who don't seems evidently preposterous and self-deludingly arrogant.

― N. (nickdastoor), Thursday, 7 November 2002 15:28 (twenty-three years ago)

I agree with thet, Nick. That doesn't prevent me from really feeling it when I love something, when something really stirs the whirling cock-a-leekie soup which is my mind. And that's the bit which gets me: how unmediated my taste *feels*. And that's what makes me agree with Alex.

― Tim (Tim), Thursday, 7 November 2002 15:30 (twenty-three years ago)

One of the good things about Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste: he discusses class not as a static blocks, but in terms of where you are in the social structure at a given time, and in relation to your trajectory through it (eg you wouldn't expect the working class kid about to go to university to have identical taste to his neighbour who dropped out at 16, although they both come from manual worker families). Also takes into social, economic, educational and cultural capital.
And, as I remember it, he pays attention to time as an asset. So, for instance, young Hopkins may not have had a lot of cash, but he had the time to search out strange/rare - but cheap - books and records in the charity and second hand shops of Sidmouth or Ilkley which gave him his aesthetic distinction over those who simply shopped in HMV//WH Smiths.

― MM, Thursday, 7 November 2002 15:35 (twenty-three years ago)

'Over'? No. From, perhaps.

I think I managed to avoid Ilkley.

― Tim (Tim), Thursday, 7 November 2002 15:37 (twenty-three years ago)

Time. Yeah, I feel like my tastes and loves are my own too. Because they *are*. The confusion with this type of argument arises, I think, when we try to separate our own thoughts on it from 'ourselves' and our actions. It can't be done. That's really vague and unthought out but it's my only way of expressing it. We can't escape ourselves and it's where all the action is so we shouldn't worry about it.

― N. (nickdastoor), Thursday, 7 November 2002 15:38 (twenty-three years ago)

Time = Tim (not generally, obv.)

― N. (nickdastoor), Thursday, 7 November 2002 15:39 (twenty-three years ago)

tim wait for no man (pbut)

― mark s (mark s), Thursday, 7 November 2002 15:41 (twenty-three years ago)

"Over" rather than "from"? That's how Bourdieu would see it. And how did you really see it when you were 16? Did you really think that liking think that liking Bon Jovi or Simply Red and liking Al Green and the Blue Orchids were distinctive, but equally worthwhile points of view?

― MM, Thursday, 7 November 2002 15:48 (twenty-three years ago)

"I'm saying that I can't disprove (a), but the idea that there some people have 'free will' and some who don't seems evidently preposterous and self-deludingly arrogant"
N, I really hope you don't think I was talking about myself when I was referring to people who broke the mould, I'm as fickle as they come and very easily influenced, honest. I was more referring to, you know, famous clever folk. It irks me the way some people go on about how we are all indoctrinated but don’t seem to include themselves in that statement, as if they can see something the rest of us cannot.

― Plinky (Plinky), Thursday, 7 November 2002 15:52 (twenty-three years ago)

No, I didn't, but I do now. I think my 16-year-old self and I would disagree over various things, actually. This is most likely a good thing, no?

― Tim (Tim), Thursday, 7 November 2002 15:54 (twenty-three years ago)

I would love to see 16yr old Tim have a fight with 31(?) year old Tim.

It irks me the way some people go on about how we are all indoctrinated but don’t seem to include themselves in that statement, as if they can see something the rest of us cannot.

That's what I meant, and I was referring to Minny's flatmate's derived opinions, not yours, Plinky.

― N. (nickdastoor), Thursday, 7 November 2002 16:12 (twenty-three years ago)

Tim: yes a good thing - all I'm saying is that one of the things that one of the things that prompts teenagers, boys especially to search out the obscure is to give them a sense of difference AND of superiority (the problem with this position being the subject of Ghost World, among many other things.) With your advanced years you have your sense of democratic open-mindedness, indulge friends who pretend to like ELP and yet can still enjoy Big Flame.

― MM, Thursday, 7 November 2002 16:24 (twenty-three years ago)

Right, sure.

― Tim (Tim), Thursday, 7 November 2002 16:27 (twenty-three years ago)

Tom Ewing to thread - he'll tell y'all that market researchers target very specific class groups with new products, and that surveys pitched at style leaders always use ABC1 demographic despite everything we know about street style.

I've been in offices where the thrust of conversation is 'this is C2DE, therefore it's shoddier and tackier than the ABC1 product'.

― suzy (suzy), Thursday, 7 November 2002 16:50 (twenty-three years ago)

Suzy, I'm sure that's true, but what are you getting at (sorry, probably me being thick).

― Tim (Tim), Thursday, 7 November 2002 16:54 (twenty-three years ago)

Ulp punctuation horror.

― Tim (Tim), Thursday, 7 November 2002 16:55 (twenty-three years ago)

Reducing taste to power relations (class or otherwise) seems inadequate.

(So does the word 'taste': I know Tom E agrees on this at least.)

AlexT would say that 'reducing' is not the word: the aesthetic is not being devalued by the power argument. I think that's a clever point, but I still think that the aesthetic *is* devalued, somewhat at least, by that argument. This could depend on where you start from, though.

If you think that what we call 'taste' is about, say, 'love' (of art, sounds, styles, feelings, etc), then to say that that love is a function of power relations feels like a devaluation of it. (That doesn't necessarily make it wrong - though as I say, I think the power argument is not wholly adequate; and I think Tim H agrees with me, really.) I can't feel my way around that conclusion.

― the pinefox, Thursday, 7 November 2002 17:14 (twenty-three years ago)

(But of course, to say that the power argument is inadequate isn't to deny its importance as part of the overall picture. I think Bourdieu is 'right' as far as he goes - but there is so much further to go.)

― the pinefox, Thursday, 7 November 2002 17:16 (twenty-three years ago)

I agree -- aesthetics seems to be interesting as an attempt to discuss the affective dimension of objects ('artworks' or otherwise); the introduction of taste to the discussion of aesthetics, at least since Hume, but I think at least since Hutcheson, brings in the problem of value which is often a distraction. Whether it can be avoided is another question.

― alext (alext), Thursday, 7 November 2002 17:19 (twenty-three years ago)

I ate an orange and made it taste of apples.

― jel -- (jel), Thursday, 7 November 2002 18:33 (twenty-three years ago)

If you replace taste with opinion (which are similar) this thread has a lot to say:

people who derail perfectly civilized discussions by saying, "well everyone has their own opinion": Classic or I have lost all respect for you DUD

― A Nairn (moretap), Thursday, 7 November 2002 21:26 (twenty-three years ago)

'distraction'!

― Josh (Josh), Thursday, 7 November 2002 22:57 (twenty-three years ago)

Market researchers like to and need to generalise, and social classification is a way for them to do this. I think what Suzy is saying is that the aesthetics-class relationship soon becomes a vicious circle as products are created for and pitched at certain classes, i.e. the object of taste already has an aesthetic (and therefore class) relationship with its consumer before the moment of judgement.

― Tom (Groke), Friday, 8 November 2002 09:37 (twenty-three years ago)

Social class falls massively short of being a sufficient cause. This is a complex world (not to mention hypermediated, etc.) with myriad effects on the formation of anyone's mind, and although I can't prove that all of these different determinants behave in a chaotic/complex way, in the modern scientific usage, I'm convinced that they do. This should be an angle that allows for statistical generalisation while leaving ample room for all kinds of individual exceptions. I grew up in a house entirely without books or records or art, but I am passionately in love with these things. This doesn't mean that the lack of them caused my love, and I dare say it more often leads to uninterest, but there were countless other factors that shaped me.

I am not discounting (I typed that without the 'o' first time! Freudian as all hell) free will, but that is enacted against a huge and important background of influences (using the reviled word in its broadest, loosest, most inclusive sense).

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Saturday, 9 November 2002 15:24 (twenty-three years ago)

three months pass...

Although I do believe that all taste and culture is learned, I find it useful to come back to food when discussing taste. (It was only in the 1700s, that the powers of sensation, residing in the tongue and palate, were metaphorically transmuted into the powers of cultural discrimination and judgment.)

And when you genuinely do not like a certain food, all the arguments about "acquired taste" vanish. For further reading, check http://www.jahsonic.com/Taste.html

― Jan Geerinck (jahsonic), Wednesday, 5 March 2003 13:06 (twenty-three years ago)

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