Taste for Taste

I stumbled last night on a post from about a week ago over at What is the What, and read the brief discussion in the comments in response to the question posed by Jeremy: what’s the difference between taste and preferences?

It’s an interesting question. I don’t have anything deep to add, but I’ve been playing it about in my head since it touches on some things that I’m interested in, myself. In any event, the differences between the two terms are pretty subtle, and in many contexts we’d probably use them almost interchangeably. Therefore, whether we can leverage any differences between the two into a useful explanation or account of social action – the motivation behind Jeremy’s question – is hard to say.As was discussed in the comments, definitions of taste often make reference to standards of some kind, such as beauty, cultivation, refinement. In other words, taste is often defined with reference to ‘good’ taste, and suggests a kind of a cultivated habit, as J Lena writes, of selecting one set of things over another. However, distinctions of good versus bad don’t seem to enter into discussions of preferences (which is perhaps why economists prefer preferences, rather than tastes); preferences have a ‘brute’ quality to them, in that preferences are just preferences – they are what they are – and we aren’t typically immediately interested in an accounting or natural history of their origins.

Of course, this isn’t to say that preferences escape evaluation altogether. Different preferences – or more likely, different combinations of preferences – may lead a person to make better or worse choices, though such evaluations are usually made after the fact, or from a distance, by others other than the choosing person herself. And even then, what’s likely to come under scrutiny are the choices rather than the preferences. Preferences contribute to but aren’t the whole of choice, which is invariably situational. My preferring to walk, rather than take the subway, may seem to perfectly plausible to me, without need for ongoing justification; my decision to walk in a pouring rainstorm may be rather more perplexing and in need of some explanation. Also, people can use preferences to evaluate other people’s preferences: that I prefer to walk rather than take the subway may seem to others, who disdain walking, a perverse and unappealing characteristic of mine. But for me, my preference still remain ‘brute.’ It’s a more complex and awkward matter for me to use my preferences to evaluate my preferences; I’d rather just say that I have conflicting preferences (I am what I am, which is not to say that I am consistent) rather than chase my own tail and risk schizophrenia.

So much for ‘brute’ preferences. What about tastes? To continue with the above example, it would be strange, I think, to say that I have a taste rather than a preference for walking. But it wouldn’t be wrong, but it would be simply rather uninformative to say that I have a preference for good food (a statement that would be regarded semi-ironically, as if what’s being offered is bad, thus necessitating a comment on the obvious). But In contrast, it would be perfectly understandable to say that I have a taste for junk food (thus revealing something about my attitudes toward prevailing wisdom about food). Then again, I prefer to spend Friday nights at home – is that a taste? Again, there are enough overlaps to make a systematic differentiation between tastes and preferences difficult to maintain in a consistent and rigorous fashion.

I think one issue to consider is not how tastes and preferences enter into how people act, but how people are observed acting (which includes how people observe themselves acting). To me, taste is a kind of second-order concept: to introduce yet another term, it refers to a stylization of our first-order preferences. Of course, this raises a hornet’s nest as well: what is style? A baseline definition might be that style connotes an ordering of elements, a deliberate patterning of behavior or choices. So, preferences transform into tastes when we can observe, and thereby stylize them, but not just in any old way. Especially, we stylize them into a taste by using distinctions – of good versus bad, delicate versus strong, refined versus unrefined, elite versus demotic, superficial versus deep, common versus idiosyncratic, lasting versus fleeting. Taste implies preferences, but preferences can be stylized into tastes and thereby given a kind of ordering into patterns that help us to make the personal identity and social position (class)* observable, meaningful, and above all open to evaluation.

Why then bother with ‘taste’ and not just talk about a person’s ’style’? It strikes me that we sometimes release a person from the burden of being social statements, the carriers of information generated out of structural differentiations. To say that a person ‘has a style’ means that she ‘has a style of her own’: we see that she has preferences and routinely prefers her preferences in her actions, and so she’s freely being free, rather than being a successful or failed carrier of certain kinds of preferences, e.g., good or bad taste. This is one reason why, when we individually evaluate our own tendencies, we either say that “I prefer …” or “My style is to…” rather than “I have a taste for … “. To acknowledge that you have tastes is to imply that your identity (no matter how seemingly individual your tastes may appear to you) is tightly linked to society and all of its evaluative distinctions (you’re good/bad, superficial/deep, lasting/fleeting) and the games these imply. To make these kinds of acknowledgments (or attributions) of taste doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not free. But, it certainly makes your identity contingent – more so than preference – upon other possibilities that aren’t necessarily your own. That’s why elites don’t call their tastes tastes – or even preferences, for that matter. They are who they are, as if to conceive of having other kinds of tastes were, if not impossible, at least distasteful, and therefore to be avoided as a topic of conversation.

Conversely…to continue with my bullshit freshman theorizing in a bit more ‘phenomenological’ vein…why bother with taste and why not just stick with preferences? Preferences are in some sense opaque: there’s no accounting for them. But taste allows us to assign higher, and more complex, degrees of freedom to actors. Everyone has preferences and as the economists tell us, one preference is as meaningful as the next. Stylized into tastes, however, we gain some insight into how categories of class and distinction structure identities – but also some insight into how identities navigate structure. To use a series of rather inept and stereotypical images, elite tastes ‘float above’ and ‘disengage,’ the delicate and the refined evanesce and withdraw into quietude, the popular and demotic boisterously assert, the superficial flit about and treat everything as play, and so on. People can also mix and match their tastes, e.g., here having a taste for high culture and there for low. These seem like conflicting preferences or preferences with no order to them, but at the level of taste they emerge as a (Simmelian?) play of styles that both reflect and refract the constraints and possibilities offered by society. Preferences alone can’t account for these styles of performing, even if they’re essential elements in their construction.

Ok, that’s probably enough.

*Taste strikes me as arising out of processes of stratification than functional differentiation; the latter equips different spheres of action with different concepts for carrying out social observations. Art and erotics seems to have captured the market for taste, leaving the economy and politics with preferences (and interests), while science stands guard over knowledge. Despite these differences, in all of these domains, however, we can observe ’styles’ at work, since styles refer more openly to how actors link situations to situations, choices to choices, decisions to decisions without necessarily being linked to particular preferences via taste. Thus we’re familiar with the political operative who is all style and technique – even if his own tastes and preferences remain opaque (and indeed, opacity may be a condition of certain kinds of styles).

Late add: In retrospect, I think it’s probably bonkers to claim as I just did that we don’t refer to our own tastes whereas we might our preferences or styles. Of course we do. It’s just that, perhaps, in referring to our tastes regarding cultural objects for example (‘my taste in furniture runs toward Danish modern…’) we refer to certain kinds of discriminations and distinctions that indicate how we see ourselves relative to others with respect to those same categories objects. It’s a signal that allows others to find out something about us, and to decide whether or not our tastes are expected and even banal (‘of course you do – you’re that type of snob’) or surprising (‘really? I didn’t expect that’). Tastes, to put it flippantly, are culture’s contribution to social contingency.