[Air-l] maybe a silly question.. but

Mary K. Bryson mary.bryson at ubc.ca
Sun Aug 27 22:32:11 PDT 2006


And so, how useful it might be, then, to go "back to the future" with
someone like Bourdieu, whose refutation of any notion of "individuality" and
"taste" is very compelling, if taste is read as a location of culture, and
as such, of the social written on the body.

"Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. 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." (from Pierre Bourdieu
'Distinction')

Mary

On 8/27/06 8:42 PM, "Jonathan Cornwell" <jrc at tcfir.org> wrote:

> "Taste Fabrics and the Beauty of Homogeneity" by Hugo Liu, Glorianna
> Davenport, and Pattie Maes introduced me to the wonderful (IMHO) phrase
> "taste fabric". The first part of the abstract reads:
> 
> "The quintessence of an individual's taste is her aesthetic sensibility and
> system of preferences. Online social network profiles, such as those
> appearing on Friendster and MySpace, are a veritable "show and tell" for
> taste-allowing individuals to perform acts of taste by declaring their
> favorite books, what music they love, and what their passions are. By mining
> these social network profiles en masse and analyzing how each taste instance
> (e.g. a book, an author, a band, a cuisine, etc.) is meaningfully correlated
> with every other, an underlying fabric of taste common across individuals
> can be inferred." [Taste fabric and the Beauty...]





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