A Social Aesthetics as a General Cultural Sociology?

• In Event: 267 - Regular Session. Habitus

Abstract

Scholars have long acknowledged a distinction between cultural sociology, which assumes a central role for culture in many spheres of social life, and a narrower sociology of Culture focused upon the production, distribution, consumption and reception of what are consensually taken to be Cultural products and services. This article argues that the field theory of Pierre Bourdieu, commonly associated with the sociology of culture, presents a cultural sociology, a systematic account of the role of culture across social domains. This general cultural sociology is by its nature an aesthetics—an examination of how actors respond to the qualitative properties of their experiences. Aesthetics, rather than being confined to a small area of high culture, is the most reasonable model for a science of action. This article presents a brief overview of a field approach to aesthetics, then offers a rereading of Bourdieu that suggests that his work may provide the basis for an aesthetic approach to social explanation. It then argues that by focusing “second-order” judgments—judgments of the distinguishing judgments of others—it may be possible to demonstrate the most fundamental ways that this social aesthetics can point the way to a rigorous cultural sociology of action. This argument hangs upon the consubstantiality of judgments: judgments, like things judged, have a perceptible reality, which may allow social actors (and social researchers) to orient themselves in the social world by responding to the judgments of other actors.

Authors

• Benjamin Merriman, University of Chicago

• John Levi Martin, University of Chicago