Epistemic demarcations as social erasures: taste and the politics of distinction from the ‘revolutions of wisdom’ to the ‘Green Revolution’

Abstract

The epistemic and aesthetic dimensions of taste are always inscribed in conceptions of the social order that the discourse on taste simultaneously enacts and rationalizes, while veiling the logics of difference and power it thereby affirms and reproduces. This article illustrates the entanglement of social and intellectual hierarchies that anchors the resolution of the problem of taste in the mechanisms of social distinction and erasure. It does so by examining four socio-epistemic configurations in the history of Western knowledge. The first vignette contextualizes the original devaluation of taste in the competition between the Socratic philosophers and epistemic labourers whose elevation of taste disrupted the Athenian aristocratic order. The second vignette explores the entanglement of humoural theory with the racial and religious orders of the premodern age, as imperial encounters threatened European identity brought into contact with the tastes of others. The third vignette examines how the epistemic status of gustatory taste became anchored in the hierarchy of cultural taste within British empirical philosophy. Finally, the paper tracks new forms of social distinction in the resistance to the globalization of food systems and to the democratization of culinary tastes, as manifested in the constitution of an exclusivist ‘standard of taste’ for wine appreciation.