Pierre BourdieuāsĀ Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of TasteĀ and his related work:
āNothing more clearly affirms one's 'class', nothing more infallibly classifies, than tastes in music.ā
āTaste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.ā
āThose who suppose they are producing a materialist theory of knowledge when they make knowledge a passive recording and abandon the āactive aspectā of knowledge to idealism, as Marx complains in the theses on Feuerbach, forget that all knowledge, and in particular all knowledge of the social world, is an act of construction implementing schemes of thought and expression, and that between conditions of existence and practices or representations there intervenes the structuring activity of the agents, who, far from reacting mechanically to mechanical stimulations, respond to the invitations or threats of a world whose meaning they have helped to produce.ā
āThe point of my work is to show that culture and education aren't simply hobbies or minor influences. They are hugely important in the affirmation of differences between groups and social classes and in the reproduction of those differences.ā
āEvery established order tends to produce the naturalization of its own arbitrariness.ā