ESC: English Studies in Canada

Distinction gave me a way of thinking about the politics of culture that broke through exhausted debates about whether the political rested in the form or content of works. Some books alter the way you think; others systematize what you were already thinking. Distinction, which hardly talks about popular music, hit me at a time when I was immersed in clubs and music scenes and gave me a vocabulary with which to express unformed intuitions. Few works have been criticized on such weak grounds (that it is too French, or only about the 1960s, or that it cannot account for the struggle over meaning). In France, where the legacy of Bourdieu is oppressive, it may well be time to move on. In Canada, where we are still reluctant to think of our tastes as having a social location, it still has much to teach us.