ese act to make our wealth legitimate and our status certain. Our
socio-economic status thus communicates itself through a complex "code" presented by our
tastes, our possessions, our knowledge, etc. What is remarkable—and Bourdieu did
extensive anthropological study in French society to demonstrate the fact—is how
predictable are the tastes and preferences in a given class. That is, walk into any upper,
middle, or working class home; interview the people there about what they like, know, and
believe; and each class reveals consistently common interests in art, music, décor, food,
travel, reading, etc. among its members. Taste is thus not, as we are accustomed to
conceive it, a matter of individual discernment or some inner quality that only certain special
people have—and most don’t. Rather, taste is a cultural code composed of signs distributed
in a socially predictable pattern, and one that reveals deeper truths about our class’s
relationship to the economy.
Media Economics, Policy, and Regulation 4-7
Cultural capital is a code that defines who is inside and who is outside a particular social
class. This barrier is not abstract or inconsequential, insofar as we feel it in our revulsion at
someone’s bad taste, in the unfashionable clothing worn by the poor, at our embarrassment
at not knowing the right social etiquette at a formal dinner, etc. That is, cultural capital’s
power is real and embedded deeply in our experience.
(iii) 英语论文网 【http://www.51lunwen.org】difference and distinction
It’s helpful now to remember the semiotic notion of difference here. Semiotically speaking,
meaning is a product of "difference" (the pattern of relationships between signs), because in
the semiotic perspective there is no relationship between the sign and the referent, i.e., the
thing the sign is referring to in the world. That is, meaning is defined in semiotics not by what
a sign is, but what a sign is not, i.e., a dog is not a cat, not a bird, not a squirrel. Because
signs do not “stick” in the world, they take their order and consistency from their
relationships with other signs. We thus think of signs in relationship with other related signs
in what semioticians call a “paradigm” and that we might refer to more generally as a cultural
or epistemological category: for example, dog, cat, and bird all belong to the category we
might call “animals.” The sum of our culture is, in one sense, the sum of all the logical
categories into which we organize our knowledge and experience.
What Bourdieu is doing here is marrying this concept of difference to what human beings
actually do in society. That is, difference becomes a means of creating "distinction," i.e.,
higher status granted to those who locate themselves in a particular space within the
network of sign relationships. As Bourdieu writes in Distinction (p. 85): “Where the ideology
of charisma regards taste in legitimate culture as a gift of nature, scientific o
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