Those Things That Hold Us Together: Taste and Sociology

TLDR

Reflexivity provides a framework for analyzing taste, treating objects of taste as active, self‑shaping entities rather than inert items, and positioning amateurs as reflexive practitioners who continuously construct and test taste instead of accepting it as a fixed, socially determined choice. The study investigates taste as a collective technique that reveals how we sensitize ourselves to things, ourselves, situations, and moments, and how we regulate the sharing and discussion of these feelings with others. The authors analyze taste as a collective technique by examining amateurs’ reflexive practices that construct and test taste, thereby illuminating the processes of sensitization and shared emotional regulation.

Abstract

The idea of reflexivity has much to offer to the analysis of taste - but reflexivity in its ancient sense, a form neither active nor passive, pointing to an originary state where things, persons, and events have just arrived, with no action, subject or objects yet decided. Objects of taste are not present, inert, available and at our service.They give themselves up, they shy away, they impose themselves. ‘Amateurs’ do not believe things have taste. On the contrary, they make themselves detect them, through a continuous elaboration of procedures that put taste to the test. Understood as reflexive work performed on one’s own attachments, the amateur’s taste is no longer considered (as with so-called ‘critical’ sociology) an arbitrary election which has to be explained by hidden social causes. Rather, it is a collective technique, whose analysis helps us to understand the ways we make ourselves sensitized, to things, to ourselves, to situations and to moments, while simultaneously controlling how those feelings might be shared and discussed with others.