postmodernism and Bourdieu

 I'm sure it's been pointed before, but Bourdieu isn't very keen on popular cultural. He almost worse than Adorno. Of course, his purpose is not to evaluate this culture, but to see how it works in relation to the working class. This class makes a virtue of necessity, liking its cheap, uncomplicated food and decor because it cannot afford anything better, or the time and educational level to pursue it.  Elite taste doesn't come off much better, since it is a stand-in for elite social status, and middlebrow taste merely aspires to elite or "legitimate" taste without ever getting there. Of course, his aim is not to evaluate these three kinds of culture, but to line them up with the cultural self-definitions of social classes. By not evaluating, he simply lets his own elitism come through. 

Postmodernism basically blows Bourdieu out of the water. The avant-garde goes eclectically in search of kitsch inspirations and doesn't mind being accessible. The middlebrow loses its stigma, as college professors read Mary Oliver. Popular culture is vibrant in rock and jazz, and even intellectuals realize where the action is. Bourdieu published his book in 1979, after doing his research in the 1960s. But after 1968 the entire cultural landscape shifts under his feet. Now it has been pointed out that the social classes are still differentiated by the type of music they like, but that now the intellectual elites like many genres, from classical and jazz to folk (omnibrows), with others being less eclectic in taste. The stigma around pop music only obtains within genres, so that rock and roll snobs, if there are any, will look down on bands that aren't as good. 

Probably Bourdieu's categories never were as relevant in the US or Spain anyway. It's not that there are not hierarchies of taste corresponding to sociological hierarchies, as must be the case to some extent everywhere, but that these aren't going to line up so perfectly as they do in France before 1968.  

Postmodernism in this context: eclecticism in elite forms + explosion of youth culture after the 1960s.