But your question points, for me, to a necessary weakness of Bourdieu’s scheme as applied to our contemporary culture: Bourdieu, as I’ve noted before, was working in the ideological context of an economy of mass production and consumption and its concomitant culture. Despite the wonderful relational complexity of his model, your question about ironic versus non-ironic consumption shows that he’s still largely in a framework structured by homogeneity: consumption is a unitary act, happening only in one way in a society whose tastes are structured by the dominant class. For Bourdieu, consumption is mass consumption, not the new individuated consumption described by Shoshana Zuboff and James Maxmin in The Support Economy (and hinted at by Thomas De Zengotita, Hal Shapiro & David Varian, and others).

If one wants to do a synchronic mapping of cultural valuation, one could certainly replace the temporal Z axis with a Z axis that’s some sort of continuum of societal positions of identity — but what would the endpoints be? Ironic to non-ironic, it seems to me, replicates some of the valuation of the Y axis, in that the ability to ironically consume something (for some people) possesses more overall capital than the ability to consume something non-ironically: liking David Hasselhoff for his camp qualities is more culturally sophisticated — more a mark of distinction — than liking David Hasselhoff because he plays the part of Michael Knight so well.

And the question of overlapping axes of value takes me to Steve’s question, as well: I’m familiar with the Political Compass, and have used it (and its less problematic successor) in my class when we’re starting the argument unit to talk about positionality, perspective, and audience. Yes, the graphing of those surveys performs something similar to what Bourdieu’s doing, by taking a single variable (”right/left” politics; cultual value) and showing how it’s complicated by more than one factor, in effect taking a hierarchy and turning it into a more complex relational space. But Bourdieu’s graphing feels more difficult because the variables — the axes of value — are so closely interrelated, and Bill’s point makes it clear that there are even more variables (who consumes and how they consume; both, themselves, culturally value-laden variables) than those Bourdieu works with.

So, yeah, maybe I just need to head over to the Mathematics department and ask if they’ve got some N-dimensional mapping software I can borrow.

polo (-3,9)
tennis (-2,7)
cycling (-2,5)
golf (-1,3)
baseball (2,-2)
basketball (3,-5)
football (4,-8)

Given that, where might you put NASCAR, Chris? (Wherever you put it, I’ll argue that Formula 1 goes something like 1 unit above but 2 or 3 units to the left.)

Maybe I’m just resisting Bourdieu’s schema a little too much. [Creeps back into the bushes.]

iceburg (6, -8)
baby spinach (4, -7)
hearts of romaine (3, -5) not many people like them but the rich do

Somebody should do cars.