Don’t fool yourself: social consciousness has become commoditized, as evidenced by culturally aware works by Cory Doctorow like The Makers and, to a small extent, Little Brother. I talked about that a little in my post on STUFF. More so, proof that it has been directly commoditized is directly exemplified by CauseWorld. This is the only program I’m aware of that does this, but I’m sure it’s not the only one that exists.

If you’re not familiar with it – CauseWorld allows users to donate “Karma” to specific charities. Karma represents real money that sponsors (read: companies who want you to buy what they sell) will donate to causes you choose. Karma costs no money for the users, but, and get this, because it’s goddamn genius, karma is earned via GPS located check-in locations in stores. Yeah, that’s right. Big companies are basically saying that they will donate money to charities that you choose if you go to their stores and spend a little time there.

There’s no way that you can say that this system isn’t stamped, signed, and delivered proof that social consciousness is a commodity that can be traded or sold. Whether it’s ultimately a good thing for the charities is hard to argue against – it probably is, and it’s certainly an easy way to get people into your stores for companies – it’s basically the same thing as “Pay-Per-Click” advertising on Google. Companies pay charities for store visitors, just like they pay Google for visitors to their website.

The real debate is whether it’s good for users, both financially and mentally. Sure, if it’s just a bonus of doing their normal shopping – they were going to go to The Gap anyway, so that feel good feeling they get for helping out is just a bonus for buying a new pair of Gap 1969 jeans, right? But you can’t argue that it doesn’t commodity social consciousness. It puts a price on it. I don’t know if that’s a good thing, even if it fits with the major first tenant of capitalism: everything has a price. But price isn’t the end all be all with everything.

So although our coffee-loving friend at the Mars Café might rock his free trade coffee grounds because he believes that he is supporting farmers and protecting the earth by doing so – he’s still buying his social consciousness with his dollar. Some might argue that he was going to buy coffee with his dollar either way, so it’s better that he buy the “right” coffee, but “right” is an appeal to “All I want” or “taste” (if you’ll allow me to through in some art lingo while also making a great pun). It’s the same thing. Just because his “All I want” is better justified, it still doesn’t change what it is. It’s taste.

And taste is a commodity that’s traded like any other. It’s socially created by “education” in proper taste, both in voiced and unvoiced lessons. Voiced by traditional education in university, commercials, segments on the nightly news, parent, friends, and that ubiquitous hippie girl you know who is always into a new cause. But the unvoiced lessons are probably more powerful, since we’re inundated with so much talk nowadays that after awhile it all becomes noise.

The unvoiced lessons are the ones you learn when trying to impress a girl by breaking into a higher class (and the pants of said higher class). The way she smiles when you pick up the check for the expensive wine, the way she frowns when you can’t. That tug of her lip, those glances she planned for you to catch but acts coy when you catch them – it’s all calculated by who’s giving what to whom, and for what reasons, even if it’s all just lonely neurons firing in the dark subconscious. Unvoiced lessons are given by physical social signals.

To speak to my point, I’d like to bring in a snobby literary theorist, which is a bit awkward, considering this conversation is essentially a discussion of how snobbery is created, commoditized, and why it probably isn’t a good thing, but, alas, I’m not above it if it speaks to my own ends. Thus, I submit to our conversation the introduction to Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste by Pierre Bourdieu. You can find a PDF of this introduction here. I hope it stays up (even though it’s probably under copyright) because I don’t want to just throw things at you that you have to go out of your way to find. In my experience, most won’t make much extra effort to go out of their way to prove someone else’s point.

Anyway, Bourdieu says that:

Whereas the ideology of charisma regards taste in legitimate culture as a gift of nature, scientific observation shows that cultural needs are the product of upbringing and education: surveys establish that all cultural practices (museum visits, concert-going, reading etc.), and preferences in literature, painting or music, are closely linked to educational level (measured by qualifications or length of schooling) and secondarily to social origin. The relative weight of home background and of formal education (the effectiveness and duration of which are closely dependent on social origin) varies according to the extent to which the different cultural practices are recognized and taught by the educational system, and the influence of social origin is strongest—other things being equal—in ‘extra-curricular’ and avant-garde culture. To the socially recognized hierarchy of the arts, and within each of them, of genres, schools or periods, corresponds a social hierarchy of the consumers.

Here we see Bourdieu making the point that taste is based on education, both formal and social. Although he’s talking about art, the line between “high” art and “low” art has been blurred even more since the time of his writing. I would submit that we now view products as a form of art, and that our tastes, controlled by both formal and social education, shape our views on those products. This fits very easily into Bourdieu’s idea structure. Note that he even uses the word “consumers” in the last sentence of the above quote. He goes on to talk about how we build these tastes:

The logic of what is sometimes called, in typically ‘pedantic’ language, the ‘reading’ of a work of art, offers an objective basis for this opposition. Consumption is, in this case, a stage in a process of communication, that is, an act of deciphering, decoding, which presupposes practical or explicit mastery of a cipher or code. In a sense, one can say that the capacity to see (voir) is a function of the knowledge (savoir), or concepts, that is, the words, that are available to name visible things, and which are, as it were, programmes for perception…A beholder who lacks the specific code feels lost in a chaos of sounds and rhythms, colours and lines, without rhyme or reason.

Here he builds on the concept we’re discussing – he mentions that specific method in which education about taste takes place. He points out that decoding taste is a matter of knowing the specific cultural markers that both define that taste, but also teach it to us. This is what I mean when I’m talking about the cute girl who bites her lip at you when you make the “right” (read: expensive) cultural, artistic, or, more importantly, brand decision. She gives you a cultural marker in order to teach you that you are on the right path. This serves as motivation for you to learn how to appreciate the arcane and encoded appreciation for that specific brand or product. We also taught these things formally, though voiced communication, by professors and celebrities yakking in commercials about charities.

In the last sentence of this quote, he mentions that a beholder who is unable to interpret the code is left without understanding. This is your father, my parents, the apathetic young – anyone who is unable to culturally discern between brand X and brand Y. They have not yet noticed or been taught the cultural significance, as well as the rewards, for that distinction.

Moving on:

An art which ever increasingly contains reference to its own history demands to be perceived historically; it asks to be referred not to an external referent, the represented or designated ‘reality’, but to the universe of past and present works of art. Like artistic production, in that it is generated in a field, aesthetic perception is necessarily historical, inasmuch as it is differential, relational, attentive to the deviations (écarts) which make styles. Like the so-called naive painter who, operating outside the held and its specific traditions remains external to the history of the art, the ‘naive’ spectator cannot attain a specific grasp of works of art which only have meaning—or value—in relation to the specific history of an artistic tradition. The aesthetic disposition demanded by the products of a highly autonomous field of production is inseparable from a specific cultural.

Here we see the next step and it’s easier to understand why I think Bourdieu has a place in our discussion. He’s talking about self-referential art here, the kind of art that is only valid as place in an artistic timeline. This is a loose definition of taste – the only way to say that one type of coffee is better than another type of coffee is to be educated in the timeline of coffee itself – that is, to write one’s personal story of coffee consumption. Now, this isn’t quite what Bourdieu is saying here – I don’t want to misuse him – however, the idea of creating a cultural connoisseur and becoming an expert in self-referential art is the same: we learn the process of distinction, the value of the process itself, and thus understand the idea of taste. After that, what taste is specifically important can be defined by any who is willing to produce more arcane cultural markers:

This mastery is, for the most part, acquired simply by contact with works of art—that is, through an implicit learning analogous to that which makes it possible to recognize familiar faces without explicit rules or criteria—and it generally remains at a practical level; it is what makes it possible to identify styles, i.e., modes of expression characteristic of a period, a civilization or a school, without having to distinguish clearly, or state explicitly, the features which constitute their originality. Everything seems to suggest that even among professional valuers, the criteria which define the stylistic properties of the ‘typical works’ on which all their judgements are based usually remain implicit.

He goes on to discuss a bit more what exactly defines this sense of taste, how it is learned, and I’m going to gloss over that in hopes of brevity. It’s there in link if you’d like to read it. However, once he’s moved past that, he makes the most interesting and telling addition to our discussion yet. Because there are points that connect with our discussion all the way through, the easiest way to draw these out is to go through Bourdieu’s text alongside our discussion:

The pure aesthetic is rooted in an ethic, or rather, an ethos of elective distance from the necessities of the natural and social world, which may take the form of moral agnosticism (visible when ethical transgression becomes an artistic parti pris) or of an aestheticism which presents the aesthetic disposition as a universally valid principle and takes the bourgeois denial of the social world to its limit.

This says that brands and products are morally agnostic and therefore their own thing. However:

The detachment of the pure gaze cannot be dissociated from a general disposition towards the world which is the paradoxical product of conditioning by negative economic necessities—a life of ease—that tends to induce an active distance from necessity.

This says that taste is based on economics.

Although art obviously offers the greatest scope to the aesthetic disposition, there is no area of practice in which the aim of purifying, refining and sublimating primary needs and impulses cannot assert itself, no area in which the stylization of life, that is, the primacy of forms over function, of manner over matter, does not produce the same effects.

Discerning people are shaped as discerning people, but as they live the discerning life, they get more discerning. Connoisseurism breeds more connoisseurism, which was my original point in the first post.

And nothing is more distinctive, more distinguished, than the capacity to confer aesthetic status on objects that are banal or even ‘common’ (because the ‘common’ people make them their own, especially for aesthetic purposes), or the ability to apply the principles of a ‘pure’ aesthetic to the most everyday choices of everyday life, e.g., in cooking, clothing or decoration, completely reversing the popular disposition which annexes aesthetics to ethics.

Here he talks about adding aesthetic status on objects that are banal or common – making something cool because it fits in with the tastes you’ve been educated to think are cool. This is directly applies to advertising and brand allegiance.

In fact, through the economic and social conditions which they presuppose, the different ways of relating to realities and fictions, of believing in fictions and the realities they simulate, with more or less distance and detachment, are very closely linked to the different possible positions in social space and, consequently, bound up with the systems of dispositions (habitus) characteristic of the different classes and class fractions.

This inspires the ideas of different brands for different classes, with different levels of connoisseurism for those classes. Aspiring to, or reaching a brand or product with higher and more specific taste elements makes people learn how to find those elements in other brands, desire them, but also fetishize those things as if they matter.

Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.

We think we are classy because we like brands that are supposed to be classy. We also like things based on what class we’d like to join, and think that by liking a higher class of goods, we attempt to join a higher class.

Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed.

Choosing companies, products, and brands on a regular basis, operating in a discerning mode, builds the behavior of discerning people.

The allegiance is not to the brand itself – that’s a short sighted and silly idea. The allegiance is to connoisseurism, the idea that taste is something true, and that there is a better and a less good. The allegiance is to the idea of rank, of file, of inequality. For without inequality, there can be no better and no worse. The allegiance is to distinction.

And this allegiance to distinction is what captivates us. It’s an old story, the story of the haves and the have nots, the difference between thriving and mere survival.

Does the addition of these ideas about artistic taste link up with the ideas of products in your mind? Please share your thoughts in the comments and WE’LL TALK.