Taste, Status, Pretension

https://newrepublic.com/article/134094/tyranny-taste

As this article explains, taste is inextricably bound up with class and social status. Not in a straightforward way, of course. For instance, for teenagers, it tends to be most fashionable to look bohemian, slovenly (the right kind of slovenliness) or thuggish (in short, donning clothes that signify a rejection of the mores and niceties of polite society), and to steep oneself in 'underworld' or 'rebel' culture. As everyone knows, teenagers or young adults who wear clothes associated in the adult world with wealth and prestige (suits, shiny watches), listen to classical music, speak in a very formal register (etc) typically do not have high social status - at best, they acquire social status within very small social circles. (But this still fits the pattern. More on this later.)

For a long time, my friend HR and I were obsessed with calling people "pretentious". It was our go-to insult for more than a year, and a massive number of people were caught on the receiving end (though never in person). We were teenage boys getting seriously into poetry and literary fiction, both very obsessive fans of Radiohead (and HR, with an artist father, has always been an aficionado of fine art, with very particular tastes), but one of our main conversational tropes was the vituperation of "hipsters". Obviously, the syntax in that sentence you just read has the effect of making us look ridiculous, but, to be clear, I'm not trying to undercut our belief that we weren't hipsters, because we really genuinely weren't hipsters (no, please believe me! I'm not at all concerned with saving my 15/16-year-old face (so to speak)). Evidence: we had no particular interest in coffee or cafes, we didn't dress or groom ourselves in any particular way (we sneered at people who cared about fashion), we didn't go to concerts by indie bands, we didn't practise photography (when we were together, we took no photos), we did not own smartphones or have Instagram accounts, we did not get obsessed with Tarantino films or Seinfeld (or whatever) (in fact, I despise Tarantino films and Seinfeld), we did not fetishise food (in fact, we spoke of our distaste for people who fetishise food), we reviled 'excess' sociality and exhibitionism (we were both great admirers of the Robert Lowell poem "For the Union Dead" thanks to our year 10 English teacher, Dr Windon, the man who unwittingly brought us together and thereby changed our lives), and our private dialect bore no correspondence to any dialect attributable to any known subculture; instead, it was a very strange jumble of formal syntax, *highly* archaic verbiage and very vulgar slang (we both had a thirst for memorising very old English words, such that we both now test in the 99.99...th percentile for vocabulary size (HR's vocabulary is larger but I wouldn't be surprised if we both turned out to be in literally the top ten of Australian 20-year-olds in terms of English vocabulary size)). We sneered at people who believed fashion was an art form, rather than simply a means of displaying social status, we sneered at people concerned with having good profile pictures and getting lots of 'likes', we sneered at people who sought popularity, we sneered at people who liked photography and took photos of themselves with serious, 'deep' looks in dilapidated urban environments (or whatever),  and we sneered at people who pretended to have intellectual depth but in actuality spent all their time socialising and on their phone (habits which precluded intellectual depth, so far as we saw things at the time (there was, to be fair, a logic to this - for example, we are now the two best undergraduate philosophers at USyd lmao)).
Were we, though not hipsters, nevertheless "pretentious" ourselves? Well, I mean, we were unambiguously supercilious and haughty and aloof (we would probably even concede this at the time - certainly aloofness). But were we pretentious? Most likely, you will think "Heck yeah". My own take, however, is that that would be simply an expressive speech act - and expressive speech acts are dead-ends. I think instead that this question can't be given a serious answer until we have an 'account' of pretension that is satisfactory in the sense that it clearly 'captures' the 'core' cases and its exclusion of certain edge cases is 'well-motivated'...
Now, on the surface, one fact that imperils the attempt to construct such an account is that, for those people in the habit of assigning the property of pretension to people or actions by people, the extension of this predicate varies so significantly (the set of objects (people, actions) designated pretentious varies greatly from designating person to designating person). What I will suggest, though, is that this variability of application does not show that 'pretension' is an extremely nebulous concept unfit for philosophical analysis, but tells us instead something about the way this word 'works' - in particular, the connections between the invocation of pretension, taste and social status. I'll attempt to illustrate this point with an anecdote.
After our exams finished, my friends (S and M) who live opposite me at my new abode in Forest Lodge (they live in a small flat, but it has a better kitchen than my terrace), kept inviting me over to watch an 'X-Men' movie with them, until we had finished virtually all of them (they didn't show me Deadpool or Logan). We started with X-Men: First Class, then we went forward in time through the X-Men trilogy to which that belongs (with McAvoy, Lawrence and Fassbender), then we watched The Wolverine (my favourite), then the early 2000s X-Men movies. I had not seen any of these movies before, but watching them was not a revelation: I did not feel the least pang of sorrow or regret that I had 'missed out'. Au contraire, I feel entirely vindicated in my prejudice that these comic book movies are for children and that they contain very little of interest to someone with a mature mind. Unfortunately, M and S - especially M - seemed to be disappointed with and critical of the fact that I saw these as childish movies, and lamented the fact that I couldn't enjoy them the way they did. (Not to give the impression that I was a real dick about it, though perhaps if I was a better, more altruistic (LESS PRETENTIOUS) person I could have literally just pretended that I was enjoying it at the same level of intensity as they.)
Why do I mention this? Because M recently used the word "pretentious" to describe me. Whilst I think this is understandable, I don't think this is 100% fair. From his perspective, I seem pretentious, because he thinks that I am more similar to him than I in fact am. He thinks that, if I 'let my guard down', then I could really enjoy these movies for their visceral thrill. He is mistaken. I am the guard. I don't mean to say, of course, that it is a great burden to watch the X-Men movies (and I did more or less enjoy The Wolverine) - they're compelling enough. But I never lose the impression when watching them that I'm witnessing something fundamentally silly and childish. The characters are unreal, nothing makes sense, and the dialogue is extremely dull and predictable. (Saying this, of course, makes me look even more pretentious from this kind of perspective.)
This brings us to my big thoughts about "pretension" and status:
To those who can't fathom certain 'higher' realms of aesthetic appreciation (to those who can't fathom liking Mahler, or being profoundly moved by a painting, or possessing an infatuation with long hikes through wild landscapes), people who claim to experience things in those realms will look fraudulent and will therefore seem "pretentious". At the same time, people never reach these realms of aesthetic appreciation without an awareness that it distinguishes them from the unwashed masses, or without an awareness that it gives them a certain higher status in the world of culture. Because learning to appreciate 'higher' art forms is difficult, and requires a lot of background knowledge, it is also the case that when one is first starting out, one necessarily has to be motivated by little else than a desire to be part of the elite caste.
Does that mean everyone who enjoys high culture is pretentious? No, I wouldn't produce such a pointless speech act. I also don't mean to get all 'relativistic' about pretension here. I personally think what makes someone derisibly pretentious is an obsession with exhibiting and displaying their idiosyncrasies, rather than trying to fit in with the people around them (assuming the people around them aren't horrible people). Some people clearly do this in a very egregious way. But I am more forgiving now. In fact, this brings me to the denouement.
Something that has happened to me over the last couple of years is that I've become significantly less liable to use this word "pretentious" than I used to be. Why? Because I've realised how easy it is to abuse. I know from personal experience how throwing it out willy-nilly can so easily seem justified and non-nasty. But I now recognise that it is usually nasty, and the person called "pretentious" usually doesn't deserve it. I've also become a much more understanding and slightly less judgmental person. Also, self-interest: why would I use a word that I know people are so willing to turn against me?
You can't really judge people for seeking status; it's like the fundamental social drive.

Addendum, added 8th of August:
It occurred to me today that there is one common kind of derisible music-related pretension which I really ought to have discussed, and for more than one reason. It is the phenomenon of a person who listens to 'indie' music which is fairly melodically and rhythmically simple and formulaic (whether highly popular or not) holding a blanket distaste for 'pop music' (I don't think it's pretentious to hold a blanket distaste if you literally only listen to classical music). I reckon you see this often. The reason it's such a great example of pretension is because it seems like such a great example of fraudulence: a person fitting this description is deceiving themselves in order to distinguish themselves from others (this is actually overly simplistic, as that article suggests). Basically, if you like simple indie music, you no doubt find certain pop songs pleasurable and could, if you changed your mindset (perhaps not as easy as it sounds), enjoy listening to certain pop songs on repeat, in a playlist. A related musical phenomenon is the phenomenon of rejecting a band like Coldplay because everyone you regard as cool thinks it's uncool, even though you secretly can still take pleasure from the music.
One reason why I think I ought to have discussed these kinds of pretension is that they are personally relevant to some extent. In particular, I think I have become less subject to both of them over time. For example, I now make sure to add to my massive 3000-track Spotify playlist current pop songs which I enjoy and which give me a sensation of pleasure which is not merely akin to eating fairy floss or a chocolate bar (this usually equates to 'replay value'). Lana Del Rey's new song "Lust for Life" with The Weeknd and Katy Perry's "Chained to the Rhythm" are two recent examples (I also just added The Weeknd's "I Feel it Coming" and "Starboy" to this playlist).
As for Coldplay, I actually still keep the first three Coldplay albums on my Spotify playlist (along with early Muse albums which I added in 2013). I think I may remove Parachutes at some point, because that album is particularly insipid and watery - but early Coldplay is really not unpleasant, and I feel no pressing need to remove it from my playlist...
Anyway the reality is I'm saying all this because I think whoever reads this will think I'm super cool and high-status for being so different from everyone else that I've like totally transcended pretension while still having super diverse and interesting taste and whatever... I"m barely joking. I'm a huge asshole. We all are. As I said before, status is like the fundamental social drive. Especially for males. And males like me are desperate for validation in these kinds of areas...

Yeah this is all very bleak.

Update, 17th November 2017:
https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/931477133821607937