The distinction

Taste is a disposition, acquired, to differentiate, appreciate and establish differences

through a distinction operation hides what is unfairly called values in the most
automatic gestures or in the most insignificant body techniques in appearance, like
the movements of the hands, the way of walking, and offer the most fundamental
principles of construction and of the evaluation of the social world.
This expands the concept of distinction, not only in terms of the possession of certain
cultural assets but in the way of behaving.

Taste, by functioning as a kind of sense of social orientation, it guides the occupants

of a particular square in the social space towards the social positions adjusted to
their properties, to mix with distinguished people, and towards the practices or
goods that are convenient for the occupants of that position.

All knowledge of the social world is an act of construction that elaborates thinking
and expression schemes, and that between the conditions of existence and the
practices or representations the structuring activity of the agents is interposed that
far from reacting mechanically to mechanical stimuli, respond to appeals or to the
threats of a world whose meaning they have contributed to produce. The principle of
this structuring activity is a system of built-in schemes.

The cognitive structures that social agents elaborate to know practically the social
world are incorporated social structures. All agents of a particular social formation
have in common a set of fundamental perception schemes, that receive a beginning
of objectification in the pairs of antagonistic adjectives commonly used to classify
and qualify people or objects.
Its principle is the opposition between the elite of the dominant and the masses of
the dominated and glorifies the distinguished as unique characters.
The apparently more formal oppositions of this social mythology owe their ideological
efficacy to the fact that they refer to the most fundamental oppositions of the social
order: which, registered in the division of labor, is established between dominant and
dominated.
Similarly, it could be shown that the opposition between the right and the left that, in
its fundamental form, It affects the relationship between the dominant and the
dominated. The fear of being nobody, not having a reputation, are fundamental
categories of the dominant perception of the social world.

The fact that the oppositions that language entails are found, with very close values, in the
principle of the dominant vision of the social world it is understood if it is known that, reduced
to its formal structure, The same fundamental relationships are found in all societies divided
into classes. All social formations are divided into classes that are relationships of order that
differentiate, proposed these differences by the components of the upper classes, to
distinguish themselves from the insignificant common people.

Through the conditioning associated with the different conditions of existence, through
exclusions and inclusions, of the unions and divisions that are at the origin of the social
structure, the social order is progressively inscribed in the minds. There is hierarchy in
society, in the education system, in games, in language ... in everything. It seems natural to
us that some are above others, we have become accustomed.

Social divisions become principles of division that organize the vision of the social world.
Objective limits become sense of limits, practical anticipation of objective limits. You exclude
yourself from what you are excluded from. The proper thing about the sense of limits is to
forget them. They make us feel unable to thrive. In this way they end the struggle between
classes because they impose an early surrender, such is the force that symbolic violence
exerts.

The dominated tend to attribute what the distribution attributes to them,rejecting what is
denied them, content with what is granted and measuring their hopes for their possibilities.
The sense of social realities that is acquired by confronting a particular form of social need is
what allows acting as if the structure of the social world were known and the place occupied
in that structure and at the same time, the distances to keep
The same classifying opposition (rich / poor) can be applied to any point of the distribution
and to reproduce the entire space of it in any of its segments.
Whether it is to place oneself in the social space or to place others there, the sense of the
social space, like any other practical sense, it always refers to the particular situation in
which you should guide the practices.

Classes have no borders, they don't exist. Individuals are included in a social class for the
interest of having power and their claim to move as far away from the vulgar as possible.

Taste is the social need turned into nature. Everything happens as if the social conditioning
linked to a social condition tended to register the relationship with the social world in a
lasting and generalized relationship with the body itself.

Darian Carcamo Monroy

Bordieu, P. (1988) La distinción. Criterios y bases sociales del gusto. Madrir: Taurus.