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.

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.

Recently I read about a new type of encryption scheme using cloud computing to allow data to expire. Since I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about e-books lately, and one of the most annoying things about e-books is that they can’t be easily shared, at least without piracy.

This lack of sharing isn’t a huge problem for consumers who buy their books, but for people like me, who get most of their books from the public library, e-books probably won’t be on my horizon for quite awhile. This is sad, and steps should be taken to change this. Data destruction may be one of the ways to do it.

The new data destruction technology, called Vanish, is based on cloud computing, which means it’s for data stored online. This is fine for things like Gmail, or Google’s other document-based apps, but could something like this be adapted to e-books and e-readers, even though most e-books are stored offline on a device or computer? I’d like to think so, but currently, public libraries aren’t set up very well to handle e-books, let alone through an online interface. Still, the idea could be adapted for use online, and should be. Here’s why:

E-books (and other digital data) are a strange problem for publishers, since once the production and marketing costs are complete for an e-book (or e-music, or whatever) are paid, an unlimited number of copies can be made with virtually no cost at all. This is why content consumers, especially my generation (I’m 26) and younger, take an issue with paying the same price for digital content as for physical (media-based) content. I see no reason why I should have to pay 10 bucks for an e-book, when I can buy a physical one for ten bucks. My digital copy doesn’t cost the company anything (after production costs), so why should I have to pay full price?

I bring up that issue in a discussion about e-books, data destruction, and public libraries, because free copy prices on e-books could be a great boon for public libraries, especially libraries serving neighborhoods that already struggle to pay costs, stay open, and maintain a good level of quality.

The real question for bringing e-books to libraries is about what how the books are licensed. When a library orders 10 copies of Harry Potter and the Thousand Page Time Waster, or Twilight: Teen Pillow Talk with Sexy Vampires, publishers know that only ten people from that library can be using the book at a time. The library sets a reasonable check-out period (say, about two weeks), and that means that even if each copy leaves the library the instant it comes in, and there are no over dues, 260 people can read that book from that library every year. That probably doesn’t cut into the publishers profits that much, since they still sold 10 copies of the book, and since those 260 people are library users (read: poor people, anti-materialists, school kids, and tech writers with girlfriends who won’t let them buy any more books until they buy more shelves), and probably are only worth about 10 copies between them anyway.

However, e-books from a library present a different problem, depending on the licensing model used:

Limited copies per library, or

Infinite copies per library.

If e-books are handled by a library the way physical copies are, then only 10 people can have an e-book “checked out” at any one time. I assume this would be handled through some type of online interface. This limited checkout makes the library’s relationship with publishers pretty much the same as it is now, or at least, very similar. However, to use a system like this, although it satisfies the restraints of the current system, is pretty damn stupid. Digital books are not limited by the economy of scarcity, so if the library gets tons of demand, why shouldn’t 100 people be able to check the book out at once?

To overcome this stupidity means that the library needs to be able to deliver infinite copies to reasonably satisfy both their user-base and the logical advantages of using e-books in the first place. However, a library that was able to “check-out” an unlimited number of e-books would soon destroy the publishing industry (god forbid the middleman goes down!), once an easy way to read them is found, especially if the check-outs could happen online.

There has to be some happy medium, at least for now, in order to be e-books into libraries faster, and I think that digital data destruction might be it. If e-books checked out from libraries were limited to a set amount of time before they erased themselves (or became unreadable), then the library model for e-books becomes a little more palatable to publishers. Libraries can still give out unlimited copies of e-books, but the books become unreadable after two weeks, effectively asking the user to renew the book or stop reading it.

Of course, to prevent readers from just constantly renewing a never-ending collection of e-books, a limit on how many checked out books must be imposed. If the user wants to check-out a new e-book, s/he must allow one of the other (5? 10? 15?) e-books to expire. Libraries could also use a system that only allows a reader to check out a book once and never renew, but that’s just stupid – some people read much slower than others and could need multiple renewals to get through a particularly verbose tome. Account quantity limits are a better idea than item-based limits.

What do you think? What do you think are the problems to be overcome before e-books come to public libraries? How would you overcome them?

-m.