Garden Interpreters: Garden Lifestyle Television and Media Culture - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 100

trends, producing and crystallising particular symbolic ideas, in a bid to educate
publics. A key part of their project has been to break down previous barriers to
elite forms of knowledge. As cultural interfaces the new intellectuals have striven to
formulate, 'an art of living which provides them with the gratifications and prestige
of the intellectual at the least cost … they adopt the most external and most easily
borrowed aspects of the intellectual lifestyle … and apply it to not-yet-legitimate
culture' (Bourdieu 1986, 370). The result has amounted to a destabilisation of
previously established knowledge hierarchies which in some quarters have virtually
dismantled the popular versus high culture dichotomy. As Bourdieu argues, the new
good which ciphers aspects of the intellectual lifestyle, 'is still able to fulfil functions
of distinction by making available to almost everyone the distinctive poses, the
distinctive games and other external signs of inner riches previously reserved for
intellectuals' (Bourdieu 1986, 371).
Mindful of the new middle-class who Bauman (1987) describes as 'neither
coarse nor fully refined, neither ignorant nor educated to the standards boasted by
the elite' (Bauman 1987, 135), the new cultural intermediaries are concerned with
the project of tutoring the new petite bourgeoisie in how to make discriminatory
judgements about the positional value of symbolic goods. Taste configurations and
lifestyle preferences are associated with social class and occupational status, making
it possible to plot out the world of taste and its minutely graded distinctions. Within
late capitalism, however, where the ever-increasing proliferation of symbolic goods
can shift the value of 'marker goods', there is a potentially endless supply of work
for new intellectuals (Featherstone 1991). In a context where the positional value
of symbolic goods is relative, the anxiety of members of the new petite bourgeoisie
to consume legitimate aspects of culture is potentially assuaged by the work of the
new cultural intermediaries. Their task is to supply the self-conscious consumer with
the knowledge required to both judge the cultural value of the latest goods and be
attuned to the culturally befitting ways of how they should be consumed. I argue that
the role of the personality-interpreter is to display and proffer the social and cultural
value of post-modern modes of history to the self-conscious middle-class consumer
so that they might be consumed judiciously in the 'right' ways.
For post-modern writers, the experience of the present no longer entails the
possession of a coherent sense of the linear progression of history. 'Eschewing the
idea of progress,' asserts Harvey, 'postmodernism abandons all sense of historical
continuity and memory, while simultaneously developing an incredible ability to
plunder history and absorb whatever it finds there as some aspect of the present'
(Harvey 1989, 54). Similarly, for Jameson, post-modern culture is characterised
by a 'weakening of historicity' (1991, 6). As a result, the past becomes a series
of malleable signs without any concrete sense of the forces or narrative trajectory
of material history. Other writers have identified a crisis in the representation of
history. Taylor, for example, argues that the television viewer's experience of
history is presented as, 'an endless reserve of equal events' (Taylor 1987, 104).
Television is, he argues, 'the first medium in the whole of history to present the
artistic achievements of the past as a stitched together collage of equi-important and
simultaneously existing phenomena largely divorced from geography and material
history' (ibid.). This kind of approach produces what has been called a, 'flattening