Applying Class and Taste to everything

I attended Charlotte Brunsdon’s talk on the televisual city Friday and found it to be quite unique. When describing the way London was portrayed in television she kept emphasizing the importance of such literary works from Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock. She explained that much of how London is depicted stems from its growth and development during the 19^th century. I thought that it was amusing just how often she mentioned literature as the defining factor to the screen version of London (because in order to justify film as an art it has been frequently compared to older art forms). To me it sounded like there was a matter of both class and taste to the way in which London was presented through television (and to a greater extent film). And although there have been some changes in how London appears the main goal of these changes is similar to how Holohan discusses changes in the presentation of the family (in a documentary mode) as “a move toward fluidity in making and interpreting meanings about social structures” (22). The newer depictions of London are faster and more condensed so the audience quickly assesses the on screen city as London and in the case of her example of the contemporary TV show Sherlock, the city becomes even more fluid in its representations (does this perhaps expose a shift in how audiences navigate metropolitan areas and the “social structures” of a city?) almost becoming a character in its own right. While I am aware that not everyone was at the talk I found it quite valuable that how she discussed the televisual city (and the work done on depictions of cities in television) during our week of class and taste. Charlotte explained that in comparison to film little work has been done on cities in television (again film is seen as of a higher class and more refined taste than television) and she talks about this as being in relation to the gendered assignments of TV and film. She describes the city on film as the place of the flanneur out and about the town while the city on television is brought into the home for the domestic audience (and I’m realizing now I should have taken notes instead of being swept in the rapture of her insightful lecture, I apologize that I don’t have an eidetic memory to recall her exact terms on the PowerPoint). Though the city itself remains the same whether it is on film or television, how it is presented can differ drastically. “Objectively and subjectively aesthetic stances adopted in matters like cosmetics, clothing or home decoration are opportunities to experience or assert one’s position in social space … the strategies aimed at transforming the basic dispositions of a life-style into a system of aesthetic principles… are in fact reserved for members of the dominant class” (Bourdieu 206). Essentially, as Charlotte pointed out, London aesthetically has been constructed based on the prominent literature that emerged during its most formative years of development and this has been maintained long after their authors have come and gone. This is mirrored in many debates between film and television with one being heralded as a high art. Well now that I feel like I have been ranting I want to say that these “aesthetic principles” that come to define class and taste definitely hit a wall when they mingle in different arenas (the work on cities like London in film vastly outweighs the work on it in television even though the city is highly cosmopolitan). So what is class? What is taste? What does it mean to be the smart sibling in Honey Boo Boo’s family? Is it enough to be a London when on television or the prettiest person when in a trailer park? How does one maintain notions of class or taste as being consistent when current media allows the intersection of the tasteful and the tasteless (my Little Pony porn I’m talking to you)?