Episode 23 I just don’t enjoy the taste

Last week I promised I’d explore a paradox in Ally’s comments about the ‘brazen’ women in her halls. To do so, we need the continuation of the transcript of the conversation I discussed in Episode 22:

(Clark 2011, p. 129-30)

Here’s the contradiction: at one point, Ally says drinking pints is wrong because you’d never catch any of her friends doing it. These are her friends down south. If a girls was caught drinking a pint of lager, all the boys would just be like ‘What are you doing?’ She’s describing a social structure in which it is not appropriate for women to drink lager. The ‘self’ she constructs in this part of the conversation is the generic second-person – you – an observing, judging authority figure whose business it is to catch people out doing things they shouldn’t be.

Later, though, Chrissy questions her. Chrissy’s use of the second-person you is not generic, but specific – it’s directed at Ally herself. Would you drink it out of a bottle? When Ally is required to construct a self that corresponds to the first-person I or me, she comes up with a different reason for not drinking lager:

I just don’t enjoy the taste.

French theorist Pierre Bourdieu wrote a whole book on taste. Taste, he says, gives us insight into social structure:

this sense of the social structure […], put so well by the word taste – simultaneously ‘the faculty of perceiving flavours’ and ‘the capacity to discern aesthetic values’ – is social necessity made second nature, turned into muscular patterns and bodily automations. (1984, p. 474)

Social structure, Bourdieu explains, imprints itself on human beings through bodily dispositions – ways of carrying yourself, of speaking, moving, standing, dressing – and the things you find tasteful and distasteful. Taste may seem like a bodily response – unique to each individual’s preference, but really, he says, it’s social structure at its least conscious. The things you prefer, the things you enjoy, the things you desire – these are all likely to be social imprints, rather than expressions of some unique aspect of your individual body.

I too am fascinated by the relationship between social structure and the human body, but I have a different way of looking at it. My view of social structure is not one in which human beings negotiate their social worlds, with social structure imprinting itself on their bodies. Instead, I explore the many social structures that emerge from people’s everyday conversations, and the many versions of the self that emerge from these structures. When you listen carefully to enough conversations, you realise there are many, many social structures, and many, many selves.

And sometimes, in the course of the conversation, a self will become embodied. Like when Ally’s generic you (you’d never catch anyone) becomes a specific I (I don’t even drink like lager) – and then becomes an embodied I (I just don’t enjoy the taste). When the self becomes embodied in a conversation, possibilities for transformation often emerge. In Ally’s case, the transformation is this: the social structure makes its ideology explicit:

I’ve always thought of it as a guys’ drink.

The social structure speaks at this point, and it reveals to us not only its norms (lager is a guys’ drink), but also its instabilities – the relationship of the first-person to the idea is a mental process (thought), hedged by the adverb always. Once the social structure speaks, and makes its ideology explicit, it becomes clear that there’s room for the ideology to change.

And all that because the self became embodied in the course of a conversation.