Gardening Taste: Theoretical Concepts and Framework - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 41

The middle-brow taste of the petty bourgeoisie is characterised by what Bourdieu
describes as 'cultural goodwill': they recognise legitimate goods, but they lack the
competence to consume them with the insouciance of those rich in cultural capital.
It is this class who, according to Bourdieu, hungrily seek the advice of the new
cultural intermediaries working in the media, whose task is to judge the value of the
latest positional goods (Leiss 1983) and proffer befitting ways of how they should
be consumed. There are a whole swathe of lifestyle garden media products which
cater for a petty bourgeoisie audience, texts which are designed to help assuage
any anxieties about revealing their reader's middling position. Gardens Illustrated
(March 2001, 35) for example, shows the reader a set of plant tags which ape the
patina of 'authentic' labels. The feature also carefully demonstrates ways in which
the 'verdigris copper tag' from The Conran Shop, or the 'steel “tournefort” label'
from Botanique Editions should be displayed in relation to the plants.
Bourdieu's work offers an analysis that insists on the social dimension of taste.
Objects and goods are not intrinsically imbued with value; rather, taste is historically
and socially constructed. And the classifying systems through which taste is regulated
are not fixed; they too are historically contingent and changeable. In this way, his
work provides an historically flexible model for understanding the significance of
taste in the context of societies that are divided by class inequalities.
Symbolic violence
In order to define Bourdieu's theory of symbolic violence, it is necessary to turn to
his empirical work on the French education system, in particular the text he jointly
authored with Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (1990a).
Central to their theory, is the idea that all societies exercise power through discrete
cultural processes, rather than by punitive and coercive prohibition.
Symbolic violence is the subjection of symbolic systems of meaning on to classes
or groups using methods which appear inevitable and are experienced as legitimate.
Successful subjection occurs, he argues, because the felt legitimacy of symbolic
violence works to mask its power relations. This is brought about by the process of
misrecognition; rather than seeing power relations objectively as a constructed set
of interests, classes perceive them as rightfully sanctioned (Bourdieu and Passeron
1990a, 12). Hence, symbolic violence is exercised upon the social agent with his or
her complicity, a process which continually works to re-inscribe their domination.
Yet as Bourdieu argues, culture is itself arbitrary - there is nothing intrinsically
valuable about either the contents or the subjection of what any society deems as
'Culture'; this is what is implied by Bourdieu's term the 'cultural arbitrary'.
Much of the work of symbolic violence occurs through 'pedagogic action', or
the process by which the imposition of the cultural arbitrary upon social agents
is achieved. Symbolic meaning systems are transmitted through three types of
pedagogic action: 'family education' and 'institutionalised education' - both of
which are self explanatory - and 'diffuse education' (Bourdieu and Passeron
1977, 64). Diffuse education, works casually through inter-personal contexts as
those with cultural competence interact and educate less competent members of
the social order, for example, among one's work or friendship groups. It is also