I do think that there is a place in the construction of identity for both arts and brands, but that this place is separate from the art and brands themselves, or so it seems. I’d like to pose a question to you, Jesup, and you, Angela, as well as anyone else who is following our discussion. But first, let’s get through some backstory:

Angela talks about art enjoyed innately for itself versus enjoying it after education. That’s what Bourdieu is talking about, too. He doesn’t agree with Angela, though, that the innate experience is the most important thing, or, more directly: the thing that actually happens. But let’s start there and examine it a little with some examples. I’m interested in brands and Angela is interested in Art, so let’s use an example from both. Let’s start with Art.

Angela uses the example of opera, which is a bit of a mis-categorization, since opera is a medium, not a specific piece. Inside any medium there are more approachable and less approachable works. Spider-man is more approachable comic than XKCD, for example. Mass-produced fiction (Ala Dan Brown) is a more approachable form of the novel than say, Proust. So there are degrees of approachability, but these stem from the individual work, not the medium itself. You could make the argument that one medium is more approachable than another, however.

I don’t know much about opera or music, but I think that it wouldn’t be a huge stretch of the mind to loosely lump Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody in with Puccini’s La Boehme, since both maintain some operatic vocal conventions. Since their subject matter is similar, they make a good comparison for our discussion.

Of the two, Queen’s composition is infinitely more approachable by the masses, both since it overlaps with conventional Rock and Roll music, but also because it’s more modern (in the timeline sense, not the theory sense). New stuff is easier to approach.

Certainly, if you are uneducated in opera, you are going to be able to appreciate the tonality of both works. However, I would argue that beyond the basic sensory experience, a person is more likely to enjoy Queen than Puccini, at least on the first listen. If one is motivated enough, Puccini might eventually overtake Queen, but only after some sort of educational period. Whether that means formal education or just an extended period of listening to La Boehme over and over, education is required nonetheless, if one is to be able to appreciate the nuances and make a distinction.

It’s like this: the first time you hear a foreign language, it all sounds like gibberish to your ear. You can’t even pick out the individual syllables. It sounds like “helloangelailikeoperadoyoulikeopera?” You can’t understand that. However, by listening to the sounds over and over, even before you know their meanings, you can begin to pick out the nuances of the speech to separate the words. Before education, whether that be formal training or just personal repetition and focus, that discernment is not possible. Works that do a better job of being approachable, like Queen, are easier to discern, and thus require less education. That’s Bourdieu’s point.

However, and let’s use the language metaphor again – there are some works that are only intelligible if one has prior knowledge that must be taught. It’s like Pig Latin. One cannot understand Pig Latin unless one already understands English. Imagine trying to listen to Pig Latin if you’re a native French speaker. You’re so far removed from the meaning, all you can do is listen to the sounds. You’ll never understand what it means without education. You might learn to appreciate the tonality of the thing, enjoy it for its sensory details, but you’ll never “get” it.

Whether art can be “gotten” is a separate thing, since there is no clear objective behind art. With art, it can be argued that “getting” it is different for everyone. Since the outcome of the thing is so subjective, it’s hard to judge the usefulness of the thing.

However, with brands (and therefore products) there is a direct objective in mind – product purchase, at the most base level. If one buys a thing, one “gets” a thing. Or, at the very least, one wants other to think one “gets” a thing. So testing this idea with brands is easier to do. That’s partly why I’m interested in them, since they are testable (and therefore, more scientific, at least with our current level of scientific understanding).

With brands, we can say whether the objective has been reached. Whether that objective was reached for the “right” reasons is part of that, but can still be removed from the quantitative analysis. So, let’s delve into an example for this, too. Let’s take two brands and compare them, just as we did for art. For the medium, let’s pick something essential, like clothing, since everyone needs clothes.

At one end you have Jordache, a clothing brand that used to have more prestige, but now produces cheap jeans and clothing for discount stores like Wal-mart. On the other hand, you’ve got high-end, prestigious brands like Praada, only sold at stores like Saks Fifth Avenue and other exclusive marketplaces.

Both of these brands sell clothes, but are aimed at entirely different demographics, if for no other reason that monetary gatekeepers keep the customers of the former from the latter.

I don’t know much about either brand, so it’s hard to go into specifics, but let’s say take an item, like blue jeans, and assume both brands sell that item. Jordache sells theirs at Wal-mart for 29.95 USD and Praada sells theirs at Saks Fifth Avenue for 499.95 USD (or some other high price).

From a utility standpoint, both brands will clothe your legs, keep rodents and children from directly nibbling your ankles, and generally keep you warm. So their utility, at least on a base level is the same. For some customers, base utility is all that matters in a pair of pants, either because they have not been educated about brand recognition, or because they want to use them for a specific purpose and that purpose only, such as, you know, wearing as pants.

To someone who is only interested in the utility of the pants, Jordache will do fine, in the same way that Queen will do fine for someone who wants to listen to something akin to opera. For those people, the extra money spent on Praada, for essentially the same product, is absurd. Only an education in the finer details of why Praada is “better” can influence someone to buy Praada over Jordache.

Before you freak out about that statement, let me first say that education is multifaceted and takes place on many mental levels. It’s doubtful that you’ll ever see a professor at a college (well, maybe in the fashion department) try to educate you about the differences.

What you will see, however, is commercials, prints ads, and different classes of people wearing different products. These things serve as an education about brands. If you see someone who you’d like to be – a famous writer, a sports star, or even your boss’ boss, wearing Praada instead of Jordache, you’re going to associate that brand with success, treat it as a marker of who you want to be, if you think that person is the type of person you’d like to be. At that point, the jeans you wear fulfill more that base utility of warming your legs. They also tell a story of success for you by associating you with a “higher” class.

If you had not been educated to that story, if you’d been on a desert island and a plane dropped two pairs of pants from the sky and you’d never been associated with brands or the idea of brand discernment, your reaction would be based purely on utility and sensual details. You wouldn’t know that Praada has a story of success and Jordache has a story of working class. This is a bit of a simplification, but you get the idea.

It’s education that makes people discern between brands. My original point to the whole thing was that this education that teaches you to discern makes it easier for you to discern in other areas outside your original expertise (say, moving from pants to coffee), to see that discerning as a good thing, and more importantly, as an important thing THAT MATTERS AND YOU SHOULD CARE ABOUT.

I’ve always held in my mind this precious gem, this notion that I could not bring myself to touch, that all education was good. That it was the knowledge itself that could be used for good or ill, but the knowing, the knowing was always positive. So the struggle has been how to allow that gem to crack, to sub-divide it, just a little, so that the positive view of knowledge was maintained, while still allowing the view that some knowledge, the level of discerning in things beyond a view for their simple utility, was probably negative.

I’m not sure how to do that, without cracking the whole gem. I’m afraid that if I aim my chisel wrong, the whole idea will shatter and I’m not sure if that’s in the best interest.

The only way I’ve been able to figure it so far, is by categorizing a hierarchy of important knowledge and less important knowledge. That’s nothing new – people have been doing that since the first philosophers. But that’s knowledge, not education. Since I feel like I’m talking about a specific educational process here, that doesn’t seem to solve the dilemma.

Now, Angela and Jesup have been approaching it from a different angle. Neither have approached it from the way I am, from a judgment of the process itself. Both seem more interested in the subject of the process, whether it is art or identity. But those are subjects of knowledge, not a process of knowledge acquisition and sorting, at least as I understand them. Maybe I’m wrong. I don’t know.

Now, I don’t care if we talk about art, or jeans, or coffee, or ideas. What I care about is how we learn those things and if the method that teaches us those things is tainted by the triviality of the subject matter.

The actual subject matter doesn’t matter to me, so long as it’s trivial, a pure sensory, pleasure-only-oriented pursuit. That’s what I really want to know, because if you can teach (and not sully) critical thinking by first teaching people about coffee, that’s a big win for critical thinking. But, if by beginning with coffee then people learn the lesson that they never need to move beyond silly things like coffee, instead just learn that it is okay to laterally move to things like jeans, or HDTVs or other products, then there is a big, big loss for critical thinking, because critical thinking itself is more important than those things, and, and this is the big one: it should be applied to bigger things than coffee or jeans.

So, the question I’m really asking is this: does the way we learn to discern and think critically effect our views of critical thinking in the long term? How, Jesup, does the method we use to think, and the way be come to that method affect our identity? And Angela, how does the way we learn critical thinking and the ability to discern effect our relationship with art?

That’s what I wanna know, because it seems like my thesis is that starting with coffee is a bad idea because it teaches people that lateral moves to other products are the only available outlet for the use of that idea.