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Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Bourdieu, Nice, 1979, 1984)

Pierre Bourdieu, translated by Richard Nice

JLJ - Probably Bourdieu's most popular work. Let's see why. Bourdieu, in his works, totters on the edge of an intellectual 'Epic fail' - failing to actually communicate his ideas by stringing together incomprehensible sentences that never seem to end, and when the reader stumbles through them (one seems to be assaulted by the words he hurls as projectiles), convey no meaning to the reader. Lost in French culture, as well as in his mind, Bourdieu occasionally produces interesting 'almost truths' that just might help us understand the social world we live in.

Not an easy read. Not recommended unless you truly wish to struggle with a work. Opening a work by Bourdieu is like clicking the "play" button on a Youtube 'Fail Compilation' - you see the ramp, you see the rider approach it on a bike, you know the 'face plant' result before it actually happens.

Perhaps a Bourdieu-lover can explain to me what this means: "necessity includes... all that is usually meant by the word... Necessity imposes a taste for necessity which implies a form of adaptation to and consequently acceptance of the necessary". When you are done explaining that, maybe you could start with page 1, and explain that to me, then explain page 2, then page 3, then continue on to the end of the book.

Bourdieu's concept of the habitus is, in my opinion, THE central concept for explaining how it is that a machine can play a game. That combined with works on improvisation, will form my conceptual approach to machine-based game playing. Love him or hate him, you must read him to understand how it is that a machine can play a game.

p.54 To be able to play the games of culture with the playful seriousness which Plato demanded, a seriousness without the 'spirit of seriousness', one has to belong to the ranks of those who have been able... to maintain for a long time, sometimes a whole lifetime, a child's relation to the world.

p.94 The dispositions constituting the cultivated habitus are only formed, only function and are only valid in a field, in the relationship with a field which... is itself a 'field of possible forces', a 'dynamic situation', in which forces are only manifested in their relationship with certain dispositions.

p.101 The habitus... enables an intelligible and necessary relation to be established between practices and a situation, the meaning of which is produced by the habitus through categories of perception and appreciation that are themselves produced by an observable social condition.

p.169 The mere fact that the social space described here can be presented as a diagram indicates that it is an abstract representation, deliberately constructed, like a map, to give a bird's-eye view, a point of view on he whole set of points from which ordinary agents... see the social world.

p.169 Bringing together in simultaneity, in the scope of a single glance - this is its heuristic value [JLJ note to self, use in current paper] - positions which the agents can never apprehend in their totality and in their multiple relationships, social space is to the practical space of everyday life... what geometrical space is to the 'traveling space'... of ordinary experience, with its gaps and discontinuities.

p.170 The habitus is both the generative principle of objectively classifiable judgements and the system of classification... of these practices. It is in the relationship between the two capacities which define the habitus, the capacity to produce classifiable practices and works, and the capacity to differentiate and appreciate these practices and products (taste), that the represented social world, i.e., the space of life-styles, is constituted.

p.170 The habitus is not only a structuring structure, which organizes practices and the perception of practices, but also a structured structure: the principle of division into logical classes which organizes the perception of the social world is itself the product of internalization of the division into social classes.

p.172 inevitably inscribed within the dispositions of the habitus is the whole structure of the system of conditions, as it presents itself in the experience of a life-condition occupying a particular position within that structure.

p.172-173 all the practices and products of a given agent are objectively harmonized among themselves, without any deliberate pursuit of coherence, and objectively orchestrated, without any conscious concertation, with those of all members of the same class. The habitus continuously generates practical metaphors, that is to say, transfers... or, more precisely, systematic transpositions required by the particular conditions in which the habitus is 'put into practice'

p.175 This classificatory system [JLJ - the habitus]... continuously transforms necessities into strategies, constraints into preferences, and, without any mechanical determination, it generates the set of 'choices' [JLJ - great, note to self put in current paper]

p.209 agents apprehend objects through the schemes of perception and appreciation of their habitus

p.223 The agents only have to follow the leanings of their habitus in order to take over, unwittingly, the intention immanent in the corresponding practices, to find an activity which is entirely 'them'

p.250 The struggle itself thus produces effects which tend to disguise the very existence of the struggle.

p.372,374 the habitus is a virtue made of necessity... necessity includes... all that is usually meant by the word... Necessity imposes a taste for necessity which implies a form of adaptation to and consequently acceptance of the necessary... The specific effect of the taste for necessity, which never ceases to act, though unseen... is most clearly seen when it is... operating out of phase, having survived the disappearance of the conditions which produced it.

p.438 the habitus... defines the relation to the position synchronically occupied and consequently the practical or explicit 'positions' taken vis-a-vis the social world