“We are by nature – by deep, biological nature – visual, tactile creatures,” says David Brown, the former president of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Our sensory side is as valid part of our nature as the capacity to speak or reason. Artifacts do not need some other justification for pleasing our visual, tactile, emotional natures. Design, says Brown, is moving from the abstract and ideological – “this is good design” – to the personal and emotional “I like that”.
“Aesthetics is more pervasive than it used to be – not restricted to a social, economic, or artistic elite, limited to only a few settings or industries, or designed to communicate only power, influence or wealth.” This contradicts Bourdieu’s ideas.
What Bourdieu calls habitus (including manners, aesthetic values, taste, etc) “is not just a random series of dispositions but operates according to a relatively coherent logic, what Bourdieu calls the logic of practice. This logic is shaped primarly in early childhood within the family by the internalization of a given set of determinate objective conditions both directly material and material as mediated through the habitus and thus the practices of surrounding adults especially the parents. While later experience will alter the structure of the habitus’s logic of practice, these alterations from school or work will be appropriated according to the structural logic of the existing habitus.”
“Moreover the habitus is a unified phenomenon. It produces an ethos that relates all the practices produced by a habitus to a unifying set of principles. The habitus is also by definition not an individual phenomenon. That is to say it is internalized and operationalized by individuals but not to regulate solitary acts but precisely interaction. Thus the habitus is a family, group and especially class phenomenon, a logic derived from a common set of material conditions of existence to regulate the practice of a set of individuals in common response to those conditions. Indeed Bourdieu’s definition of class is based on the habitus.”
“So when Bourdieu turns to the specific field of cultural consumption, or rather appropriation, the regularities his survey data reveals in taste patterns across a wide range of fields from food, clothing, interior décor and make-up to sport and popular and high art markers or indices of the habitus of classes and class fractions and what Bourdieu is concerned to reveal is not a particular pattern of consumption or appropriation, since in a different state of the field other markers could be used for the same relational positions, but the logic which explains this particular relationship between a range of cultural goods and practices and a range of class habitus. Bourdieu’s analysis of the concrete specificities of contemporary French cultural practice are thus part of a wider theory of symbolic power, its empirical validation and refinement and the same time a political intervention in a symbolic class struggle.”
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