The ethical and civic dimensions of taste

We argue in this chapter that within ‘taste’ there may be strong ethical commit­ments, including senses of solidarity – principled, but also strongly felt – with national and sub-national formations, such as those enjoined by the Australian dis­course of Reconciliation. To make this argument we engage with a critique of the representation of working class taste in Bourdieu’s Distinction (Bennett, T., 2011). Bennett questions Bourdieu’s reliance on ‘aesthetic categories’ in his questionnaire. Discussing the items on which Bourdieu drew heavily in demonstrating ‘the uni­formity of working class taste with regard to its exclusion from legitimate culture’ (Bennett, T., 2011: 537), Bennett points to other possible questions that would have revealed ‘forms of pleasure and judgment associated with a wider range of cultural practices’ than those considered in Distinction. A survey instrument better suited to eliciting the ‘distinctive forms of pleasure and judgment’ of the ‘excluded’ would pose questions enabling respondents to show how they: ‘connect aesthetic evaluations to ethical judgments as a positive value rather than as a failing’; ‘express preferences in hedonistic terms, linking aesthetic to bodily pleasures’; and, ‘connect cultural choices to forms of collective or group involvement’ (Bennett, T., 2011: 538).