Gardening Taste: Theoretical Concepts and Framework - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 40

able to distinguish between dominant and popular aesthetics. The ability to make
certain choices through consumption, for example purchasing goods where form
takes precedence over function, indicates that one has the powers to discriminate
between legitimate (or elite), middlebrow or popular tastes.
If for Bourdieu the unthinking habituation of routines in the habitus is akin to
agency, then one also requires his concept of field, akin to structure, as a means
of understanding how agents are organised across social space. A field is a social
sphere where it is possible to map the struggles which agents undertake as a means
of securing access to resources or capitals; in effect it is, 'a structured system of
social positions … the nature of which defines the situation for their occupants'
(Jenkins 1992, 85). Historically contingent, the borders of fields are fuzzy and
indeterminate - indeed for Bourdieu it is only through the acquisition of empirical
data that their boundaries can be understood. Fields are determined by the specificity
of their content, whether it be education, lifestyle goods or gardening, and each field
produces a habitus which in turn is germane to the field in question. Here I define
gardening as a field which operates according to its own specific logic, but which
is productive of the kinds of classed habitus(es) which are described empirically in
some detail in chapter 6.
Bourdieu argues that the root cause of taste distinctions is directly related to the
material conditions of people's experience of social class in contemporary society.
Legitimate taste is the privilege of the bourgeoisie, since this is the only group
which is economically able to cultivate a 'distance from necessity' or an aesthetic
of disinterested contemplation. Legitimate taste for Bourdieu is based on Kantian
aesthetics: for Kant, pure art had to be separated from the 'coarse pleasure' of sensual
response, rather it must be enjoyed by privileging the 'pure pleasure' of intellectual
faculties above any other. Elite taste, for Bourdieu, is premised on the ability to
appreciate the representational form of an artwork over its function. The capacity
to privilege mode over matter in virtually every area of life, to wear clothes that
are fashionable as opposed to warm and serviceable, for example, or to seek leisure
pursuits with no practical purpose, is to cultivate desires which are distanced from the
urgent, physical needs of the working-class. Indeed, bourgeoisie taste defines itself
against the 'taste of necessity' of working-class people. Popular taste, by contrast,
is described by Bourdieu in terms of a reversal of the Kantian aesthetic. In fact
the working-class, according to Bourdieu, possess what Kant had called 'barbarous
taste'. The popular aesthetic is characterised by the expectation that, 'every image
explicitly … fulfil a function ' (Bourdieu 1990b, 86). In Photography (1990b)
Bourdieu illustrates that the working-class '“functional” aesthetic' is comprised of
an inability to be able to make judgements based on the universal attributes of form.
Asked to comment, his respondents were unable to see that images of a dead soldier
and a pregnant women might constitute what others in the field might describe as
'beautiful photographs'. Rather, they were reduced to their ethical or moral functions,
for them the picture of the soldier, '“could be used to show the horror and uselessness
of war”' (ibid.) In short, the working-class are unable to separate the representational
from that being represented; for them taking photographs has nothing to do with the
celebration of art, rather, the camera is used to celebrate working-class life.