Taste

and location of the organic is, in the longer term, a fundamental decenter­ ing of anthropology. However, after this period (broadly 1780-1830) the complexity of the organic analogy is progressively closed down. The later nineteenth-century transference of organicism into other spheres is still aware of the organism as connected to a life cycle. J.A. Symonds (who, unlike the New Critics, was well-read in Idealist science) follows Herbert Spencer in using evolution, which he defines as “the passage ofall things ... from simplicity to complex­ ity,” to think about other fields of knowledge. Symonds applies the result­ ing “biological view of the universe,”wherein the “whole scheme of things ... [is] regarded as a single organism,” to genres, while Spengler famously applies it to whole cultures. It is notable, however, that the possibilities for the contingent and singular opened up by Romantic organicism are here normalized, as the biological model becomes a way of predicting not only the “growth” of cultures and forms “in obedience to inevitable laws of self-expansion,”but also the fact that a form runs its course and “comes to a natural end” (Symonds 1.6-7, 43, 46-57). Growth is therefore valorized over a “decadence” that is denied its autonomous creativity. And in our own time, at least in AngloAmerican thought, the theory of organic form has become associated with complexly unified structures, and because of this curious conflation of organism and “structure,” operates in a timeless oblivion to the fact that organisms are generated, born and die. Tilottama Rajan University of Western Ontario Taste Taste in a physical sense has been in English since C13, though its earliest meaning was wider than tasting with the mouth and was nearer to the modern touch orfeel. It came from fw taster, oF, tastare, IT—feel, handle, touch. A predominant association with the mouth was evident from C14, but the more general meaning survived, for a time as itselfbut mainly by metaphori­ cal extension. “Good taast” in the sense of good understand­ ing is recorded from 1425.... The word became significant and difficult... in C18, when it was capitalized as a general quality: “the correcting of their Taste, or Relish in the concerns ofLife” 50 IPerloff (Shaftesbury).... Taste became equivalent to discrimination: ‘the word Taste ... means that quick discerning faculty or power of the mind by which we accurately distinguish the good, bad, or indifferent (Barry, 1784). Raymond Williams, Keywords Not surprisingly, Raymond Williams has little use for the eighteenth-cen­ tury sense of taste as discrimination, a mental faculty that can (and should) be trained by education and example. The oed tells us—in a definition Williams omits—that taste was originally equivalent to test—“a trial, test, examination,” as in Lear’ s speech (1.2.47), “I hope for my brother’ s justi­ fication he wrote this but as an essay, or taste of my Virtue.” The notion that taste is a kind of test of one’s ability to make judgments was bound to become a bugbear for a Marxist critic like Williams, for whom the very notion that “correct” taste can be acquired by the right kind of training represents nothing but the imposition of class privilege. “The idea oftaste,” writes Williams, “cannot now be separated from the idea of the consumer ... exercising and subsequently showing his taste” (315). Indeed, late twentieth-century theory has witnessed a wholesale decon­ struction of the notion of good taste. For Marxist critics like Janet Wolff and Terry Eagleton, taste is no more than “the power of certain classes and nations to select cultural artifacts for special attention and to denigrate as base or savage the artifacts both ofpopular, nonelite provenance and ofalien cultures.”8And Pierre Bourdieu offers a devastating critique of taste in his book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984). As a practical sociologist, Bourdieu was able to demonstrate in this study and elsewhere that taste is never “natural”; it is always socially produced. What we call good taste in art, fashion or food is only that which is preferred by the dominant social classes. Enjoyment ofclassical music, by this account, is no different from the taste for fine...

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