Spoiled Distinctions

Spoiled Distinctions charts twentieth-century experiments in the aesthetics of the ordinary, arguing that Proust and his literary and philosophical successors (Francis Ponge, Nathalie Sarraute, Yasmina Reza, Pierre Bourdieu, and Roland Barthes, among others) multiply strategies for reading and valuing the everyday. These authors explore the unsophisticated side of aesthetic experience. Alert to the ways in which the hunger for distinction shapes mundane acts of seeing and feeling, they invite us to imagine less exclusive practices of art-making and of aesthetic perception. While Bourdieu teaches us to understand "taste" as a social orienting device rather than simply a gift of nature, Proust, Ponge, and Sarraute teach us to pay attention to the disorienting phenomenology of aesthetic perceptions, which not only solidify social hierarchies, but also unsettle established criteria and habits of classification. At the same time, these authors substitute for the distance and dignity of Kantian "disinterestedness" a variety of non-appropriative, fumbling forms of aesthetic interest. Mapping the intersection of phenomenology, aesthetics, and the sociology of culture, the book identifies five experimental paradigms that spoil distinctions of taste: prestige, the quelconque ("whatever"), nuance, the awkward, and the douceatre ("sickly sweet"). These modernist heirs to the beautiful and sublime register the dissonance between residual, reverential habits of aesthetic enjoyment and the ordinariness of the artwork in late modernity.