n: Classes and Classifications Taste is an acquired disposition to differentiate and appreciate. It marks differences by a process of distinction which is not a distinct knowledge. It functions as a sort of social orientation, implying a practical anticipation of what the social meaning or values of the chose practice or thing will probably be. All knowledge of the social world is an act of construction implementing schemes of thought and expression. Between the conditions of existence, there intervenes the structuring activity of the agents who respond to the invitations or threats of a world whose meaning they have helped to produce (habitus). The principle of this structuring activity is not a system of universal categories but a system of internalized schemes which having been constituted collectively and historically are acquired in the course of individuals' practical lives. Embodied Social Structures; Social science in constructing the social world takes note of the fact that agents are the subject of acts of construction of the social world. But social science also aims to describe the social genesis of the principles of construction. All agents in a given social formation share a set of basic perceptual schemes which receive the beginnings of objectification in pairs of antagonistic adjectives. The ultimate source of this network is the opposition between the dominating elite and the dominated mass. The same classificatory schemes can function in whole fields organized in polar oppositions. These schemes are particularly applicable to one field, but are transferable to others because of all the homologies between fields. Knowledge without Concepts: Social divisions become principles of division organizing the image of the social world. Objective limits become a sense of limits. The sense of limits implies forgetting the limits. The primary experience of the social world is the doxa: an adherence to relations of order which beca...
