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Anticipation can be a killer, and around the neck of the academic woods that I frequent, there is little that has
been so anticipated as the results of the Australian Everyday Cultures Project. Organised by Tony Bennett, John
Frow and Michael Emmison, heavyweight boxers in the fields of Cultural Policy Studies, Cultural Studies and
Qualitative Sociology respectively, funded by that rarest of beasts, a large ARC humanities grant, and laboured on
by an army of postgraduates, this project had ambitions to match its grand scale. Comprising an extensive
quantitative survey of over 2,700 Australians and long hours of follow-up qualitative interviews, the Australian
Everyday Cultures Project sought to reprise Pierre Bourdieu's classic study of French cultural practices in the
1960's -- published in English in 1984 as Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste -- in an
Australian context. Each of the principal investigators, however, had published extensively their own critiques of
Bourdieu's study, and thus sought not merely to reproduce it, but to rectify its mistakes and presumptions.
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This project also sought, I might add, to take advantage of a high-water mark in Australian Cultural Studies:
Brisbane in the early 1990s -- when it was conceived -- was a strange attractor, sucking postgraduates and academics from
around Australia into the maws of any one of the three universities there in which innovative, cross-disciplinary
and politically engaged (although sometimes politically instrumentalised) Cultural Studies work was being done.
Arguably this moment has now passed -- since 1996 we have had a Federal Government that doesn't give a shit about
cultural policy, and come January 2000, two of the three authors of this book will no longer be working in Australia
and neither will have been replaced by Cultural Studies practitioners --, but that is no reflection upon this book,
conceived and researched during the heyday of the Brisbane school.
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Thus the weight of expectation and the almost palpable taste of anticipation. Slavoj Zizek would have us believe
that expectation and anticipation are symptoms, and as such, are unrealisable as a condition of their possibility --
i.e. that anticipation must always be disappointed, and expectation let down, if they are to be anticipatory.
However, I am here to say, and Accounting for Tastes is here to prove, that Zizek is wrong. In four words:
Accounting for Tastes rocks. In setting out to correct Bourdieu's mistakes, in particular his
instrumentalist reduction of everything, in the last instance, to economic class location, the authors sought to
study "the relationships between the patterns of participation in the different fields of cultural practice"
(2) of Australian society.
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To attempt to summarise the already summarised results presented in Accounting for Tastes would be to do it a
major disservice, as one of the standout achievements of an impressive book is the complexity and irreducibility of
cultural practices that the authors trace and describe. Possessing the benefit of hindsight, Bennett, Emmison and
Frow have been able to rectify Bourdieu's principal errors, the rigid formalism and overwhelming economic
instrumentalism that mars Distinction, to produce a heterogenous, multipolar and -- dare I say it -- rhizomatic
account of social and cultural practices in Australia. Nevertheless, the role of a review is to review, and so I
would like to highlight three findings which are for me especially significant. The first is the categorisation of
class in Australia, which following their data the authors schematise as a nine-tier structure, comprising the never
employed, manual workers, sales and clerical workers, supervisors, para-professional (such as registered nurses,
police officers and welfare workers) workers, professionals (including teachers, artists, health practitioners,
accountants and engineers), managers, the self-employed (those who employ fewer than three workers) and employers
(who employ three or more workers). This structure is only imperfectly reducible to traditional Marxist
formulations of class that are based around the Hegelian Master/Slave dialectic, including variations such as
Ehrenreich's 'professional-managerial class' and Bourdieu's definition of professional workers as 'the dominated
fraction of the dominant class', and thus explains, for me, the spectacular and ongoing failure of multifarious
well-intentioned socialist groupings attempts to mobilise a nonexistent unified proletariat against a long since
departed bourgeoisie.
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Secondly, the authors identify two distinct forms of cultural practice, which are not reducible to class locations
or class practices, which they term 'inclusive' and 'restricted' taste cultures. 'Inclusive' taste cultures
primarily consist of "high-status people who exhibit 'omnivorous' cultural profiles" (187) -- particularly managers and
professionals, and to a lesser extent para-professionals and employers, who tend to have some form of tertiary
education and a relatively broad knowledge and appreciation of differing cultural forms. 'Restricted' taste
cultures, on the other hand, tend to consist primarily of manual and sales/clerical workers, the self-employed and
the unemployed; to have only secondary or primary educations and to take or select their cultural experiences from a
relatively narrow band of possibilities. The authors extrapolate a "generalised structural opposition between a set
of practices and preferences which is conservative and restricted, and another which is more active, more open to
the unfamiliar, and more inclusive" (109), the primary definer of which is post-secondary education.
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Thirdly, the authors distinguish three main groupings of Australian political beliefs, again not reducible
either to the nine-tier class structure or the binarising regime of value of 'inclusive' and
'restricted' taste cultures. They name these groupings 'conservative welfarist', 'progressive feminist' and
'conservative pro-market', and they are espoused, unsurprisingly, by three distinct social cohorts. The
'conservative welfarist' ideology tends to be espoused by "by the oldest and least-educated members of the community
... by working-class groups [and] the self-employed" (255); 'progressive feminist' "by the youngest and best
educated members of the community, by women rather than men" (255), by working-class groups and professionals, but
it is strongly opposed by both managers and the self-employed; and finally the 'conservative pro-market' ideology is
espoused "by the oldest and least-educated members of the community ... by the two employer classes and managers"
(256) and is strongly opposed by professionals.
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As well as producing important empirical evidence of the complexity of cultural practices, Accounting for
Tastes also achieves important methodological aims. Primarily, it demonstrates that there is a useful role for
qualitative sociology. Unlike most empirically driven, statistically analysed sociology, which tends to
lobotomistically and pointlessly re-invent the wheel with each new survey, Accounting for Tastes successfully
extrapolates its data by drawing upon relevant Cultural Studies work to explain the statistical results it
generates. A good example of this is the use of Ken Gelder's work on the textual construction of vampires to
explain a statistical correlation between the reading of horror fiction and the strongly gendered category of sales
and clerical workers. The pleasure and relief that comes from reading sociological analyses that are widely read
and actually know about their objects of analysis -- rather than just how to crunch numbers -- is corporeal, it is a
bodily experience, and it almost persuades me that sociology is a discipline and not merely a technical skill better
computerised. Secondly, and no less significantly, it provides evidence for the utility of and the need for 'one
more turn after the linguistic turn' as Bruno Latour phrases it -- that is, the so-called 'material' or anthropological
turn in Cultural Studies. There isn't the space in this review to go into a history of Cultural Studies, except to
say that the semiotic turn in the analysis of culture, which ushered in what is now known as Cultural Studies, was
historically necessary to escape the rigid determinism of most Marxist accounts, but has itself long descended into
its own dead ends, or what I would call the 'literature error'. Briefly, this mistook the insights that everything
can be textually analysed and that it is semiosis, not signification, that generates meaning to concern itself,
firstly, too strictly with 'auteur' cultural practices -- i.e., literature, film and television -- and secondly, with
'resistant' or 'aberrant' readings of these texts which, whilst plausible, bore no necessary relation to how these
cultural practices might actually be being used, nor with what other social or cultural formations they might be
helping articulate other than individual gratification and self-identification. One of the strengths of the
anthropological turn, of which Accounting for Tastes is an excellent example, is to seek other texts, other
forms of evidence to suggest which of the polysemy of possible readings of cultural practices might actually be in
use, by whom, and what this might imply. All cultural practices are rhizomatic, are blackboxed networks, and it is
the role of Cultural Studies to describe, as the authors of Accounting for Tastes put it, "the pattern of
relationships", the enabling articulations of the complex social objects it studies.
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Nevertheless, in spite of my praise and the fact that, as well as working briefly on the project that resulted in
this book, two of its authors are my supervisors, there are some criticisms to be made of it. Firstly, and banally,
there is the obvious but necessary criticism of all quantitative methodologies. As we know, these do not point to
some 'reality' but merely generate another form of text which still needs to be textually analysed afterwards; and
they generate very particular forms of texts, strongly dependent upon the questions asked, the possible answers
allowed and the presumptions present in the initial surveys. The authors of Accounting for Tastes are very
aware of these limitations, however, addressing them in their introduction and indicating what they see as the
limits to this form of analysis. Secondly, the sheer volume of data generated by the Australian Everyday Cultures
survey means that Accounting for Tastes is by necessity a very schematic account of the results. Barring
another decade's work and a thousand more pages, this is perhaps unavoidable, but there is an element of unassuaged
intrigue left over after reading it -- the questions 'yes but what about ... ?' and 'how does this compare with ...
?' are never far from the surface whilst reading it. Furthermore, because of the authors' otherwise laudable
attempts to describe rather than polemicise their results, linkages between their conclusions are sometimes left
unexplored, or are left to stand on their merits when a paragraph of supporting polemic might make them more
conclusive.
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However, the real test of any book, indeed of any cultural practice, is whether it changes its human components -- its
users, readers, participants -- even slightly. And for me, Accounting for Tastes does this. Sitting at my desk
looking out at the expensive cars and badly dressed people passing by my window, and wondering why I live in such a
godforsaken suburban hell, I am reminded by Accounting for Tastes that the differences between me and my
neighbours are not so much educational or economic, but rather, can be put down to differing regimes of value and
different taste cultures which are not merely stalking horses for economic class divisions. And so, if only because
it lets me understand and appreciate my neighbours better, I can't recommend Accounting for Tastes highly
enough.
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Details
Accounting for Tastes: Australian Everyday Cultures. By Tony Bennett, Michael Emmison and John Frow.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. ISBN: 0-521-63504-7 (pbk.); RRP: A$ 34.95 paperback; A$ 95.00 hardback.
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Citation reference for this article
MLA style:
Sean Aylward Smith. "Economies of Signs and Tastes: 'Accounting for Tastes'." M/C Reviews 16 Oct. 1999.
[your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/words/tastes.html>.
Chicago style:
Sean Aylward Smith, "Economies of Signs and Tastes: 'Accounting for Tastes'," M/C Reviews 16 Oct. 1999,
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/words/tastes.html> ([your date of access]).
APA style:
Sean Aylward Smith. (1999) Economies of Signs and Tastes: 'Accounting for Tastes'. M/C Reviews 16 Oct. 1999.
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/words/tastes.html> ([your date of access]).
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