Distinction

Distinction Definition

Distinction refers to the social consequences of expressions of taste. Whenever people consume — popular culture, leisure, fine arts, the home, vacations, fashion — their choices express tastes, and those tastes are not innocuous: what and how people consume can operate as a mechanism of social reproduction. Expressions of taste are acts of distinction insofar as they signal, and help to perpetuate, differences of social class. In this respect distinction stands alongside, but apart from, other class-reproduction mechanisms such as educational credentials, the accumulation of financial assets, and membership in clubs and associations.

Before Bourdieu: Simmel and Veblen

Although “distinction” is often used loosely as a synonym for related ideas of status display — especially Thorstein Veblen’s famous notion of conspicuous consumption — the term as developed by Pierre Bourdieu in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1984) is more precise, and its nuances emerge by comparison with earlier theories. (Bourdieu himself was more interested in berating Parisian elites than in conversing with rival social theory.) The most influential predecessors were Georg Simmel’s trickle-down theory of fashion and Veblen’s account of the “honorific” consumption of the leisure class. In Simmel’s model, elites race continually to distinguish their consumption from social inferiors, who do their best to imitate higher-status tastes; the constant inflation produced by copying yields a highly dynamic fashion system. This is essentially a consensus-symbol model: what is consumed is irrelevant so long as elites collectively decide it will serve as a class signal. The anthropologist Lloyd Warner worked with a similar model in his celebrated ethnographic studies of the American class system. Veblen, by contrast, attended to claims to distinction that participants themselves need not recognize as such. Like Bourdieu, he closely observed elite status signals that had become naturalized as simply “good taste,” but he defined elites by their wealth and examined how they convert wealth into consumption that cannot easily be imitated — spending excessively on “wasteful” indulgences, using their wives as stage props, defining beauty in terms of expense, and so on.

Bourdieu’s Contributions

Bourdieu’s theory makes three major advances. First, he carefully unpacks the independent contributions of economic capital and what he calls cultural capital. Economic capital permits tastes for luxurious and scarce goods, much as Veblen described; cultural capital is different, consisting of the socialized tastes that come from “good breeding” — growing up among educated parents and peers. Cultural elites express tastes that are conceptual, distanced, ironic, and idiosyncratic. Instead of a one-dimensional class hierarchy, Bourdieu can therefore specify how class fractions are composed — and how they often clash — according to their relative endowments of economic and cultural capital. Second, he offers a materialist theory of why different class fractions incline toward particular tastes, tracing causal links between social conditions and preferences: the economic deprivations of the working class, for example, produce the “taste for necessity.” Unlike consensus models, this allows one to predict which cultural products different fractions will favor and how they will consume them. Third — most notable and least remarked — is Bourdieu’s eye for the subtle distinguishing practices that pervade everyday life. Much like Erving Goffman, he picks apart micro-details — how one dresses, how one vacations, how one justifies aesthetic preferences — to reveal their broader sociological significance.

Empirical Studies and Cultural Critics

Bourdieu’s work stimulated many empirical studies testing the relationship between taste and social reproduction, but their results have been inconclusive. An inherent difficulty is that the cultural practices which communicate distinction are often extremely subtle, poorly captured by conventional social-science constructs and by survey measures — the primary method of follow-up research to date. For this reason some of the most telling treatments of distinction have come from cultural critics who are acute observers of the social world and sensitive to historical shifts in taste. Though less systematic, Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, Paul Fussell’s Class: A Guide through the American Status System, and David Brooks’s Bobos in Paradise capture better than any sociological study how American elites signaled distinction in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s respectively. The challenge for future research is to develop theories and methods sensitive to such nuances.

Criticisms

Bourdieu’s theory has drawn considerable criticism, particularly for being overly structural and economistic. A central weakness is his nomothetic model, which abstracts from historical particulars to claim universal application — creating a fundamental tension with his richly detailed descriptions of tastes, many of which are peculiar to France. Rather than “testing” the model in its universal form, the most fruitful path is to treat Bourdieu’s framework as a skeleton and then specify the particular characteristics of distinction across different societies and historical periods. Mapping these particular formations is a massive and important project that has only just begun.