Scott and dialectics

[Kevin D. Haggerty]

I would be interested to hear this argument expanded a little more. In
particular, what type of "universal import" do you think the subjective
evaluations of music might have? I would also like to know what it would
mean for such subjective evaluations to be "objective"? (I'm not trying to
bait, I just don't know what you are hinting at.)


What riled me about, for example, Haggarty's
> post was that his approach would have denied that the particular,
> subjective evaluation of music could have any universal import, that it
> could be objective (that is, that evaluations of music as high or low
> were anything other that expressions of "class conflict" 


Not that I think evaluations of music, art, etc., are entirely a matter of
class conflict. Rather, what I was thinking about was that if we think with
Bourdieu about the question of the evaluation of art, he notes that there
is a particular structure of feeling (a habitus) loosely associated with
different classes in their engagements with cultural objects, artifacts,
music,  etc. The structure of feeling loosely associated with the elite, or
upper class, is the one that tends to be recognized as being more refined
or correct. Such approval and legitimation is not the result of any
conspiracy but results from genuine shared beliefs about the superiority of
particular works of art by the people who's opinion is able to "stick".
Over time, this tends to loosely reproduce the habitus of the elite and
affirm the rightness of their artistic discriminations.

So, I guess in this respect, the evaluations of art and music are never
entirely subjective (in the sense of  being entirely peculiar to a
particular individual). Rather, we hear and see works of art in ways that
have been informed by our particular class upbringing. 

(I'm still not sure if any of this is relevant to a FS list, but I figured
I would throw it out anyway).

Cheers, 

Kevin D. Haggerty