The Sovereignty of Taste

Introduction

Introduction Twenty years ago, when I completed my first manuscript, I found myself in the midst of a dilemma.My work was based on a definition of the word play that could only be properly understood through a complete reading of the book: readers needed to know at the beginning the use of a word they could only comprehend once they had been through the entire work.In some respects this problem reflects the fundamental conundrum at the heart of all interpretation,as described by the hermeneutic circle: one must move back and forth from part to whole in order to make sense of a book, yet one cannot really know what the whole is until one has read the entire work. One begins by inferring the nature of the whole based on prejudgments that have been established by prior reading. As one continues to read the book, one modifies one’s sense of the whole to correspond better to the specifics of the work rather than forcing it to abide by one’s expectations.So I explained that I couldn’t precisely define my key term and gave myself over to the reader’s generosity, hoping that the word play would become richer over the course of the book precisely because I resisted penning it in from the outset. Twenty years later, I continue to be burdened by this problem of definition .In The Sovereignty of Taste, the word taste resists easy encapsulation.Even worse, taste comes to the reader with a full set of associations in place. In the end,though,I am interested in undermining those associations even as I resist defining the word.Most pertinently, readers tend to assume that taste is variable , relative to each individual, a function of the idiosyncratic collocation of experiences that each of us undergoes during life: I value one kind of novel because of my suburban background, while another reader prefers another kind as a result of a more rural background. 2 Introduction The last thing one should do at the beginning of the twenty-first century is assert that taste is an inborn capacity that individuals share to a greater or lesser degree with all other human beings, regardless of cultural context. Contemporary society has become so oriented to difference that it seems inconceivable that there might be a biological substructure to what is commonly called taste. Yet it seems to me that humans have a common capacity for taste that manifests itself in endlessly different ways because of the multifarious experiences of people in the world.If everything is finally a matter of taste,perhaps it is time to reconsider the implications of the word taste in order to better understand how fundamental it is to people’s ways of orienting themselves to the world. Without a proper sense of the taste that organizes human nature , one might exaggerate one aspect of behavior at the expense of others, assuming either that humans have complete conscious control over their lives or deciding instead that they are a function of various biological or social substrates. Taste is the golden mean between these extremes, the mechanism on the basis of which humans make sense of the world, the means through which people achieve their full individuality, the capacity through which the species derives whatever pleasure is to be had in the world, and the device through which it achieves an ongoing sense of what is fitting and proper for individuals and the community as a whole. Without taste, life is devoid of everything that energizes humans on a daily basis. If I want to make such great claims for taste, though, I must first recapitulate the circuit through which I determined its centrality to our lives,which brings me back to the word play. Although I didn’t fully realize it when I first started thinking about beauty, I see now that I was forming the fundamental conviction that the world is first and foremost an aesthetic place. This Nietzschean assumption wasn’t as clear to me then as it is now, in part because I was more taken with Heidegger and Derrida than Nietzsche at the time,in part because it takes a while to begin to see how some basic words— play, imitation, beauty—intersect the same dynamic framework of life and articulate the means through which humans make sense of their place in the world. Play has been separated from imitation...