Pedagogy of Taste (Crowley)

During the early years of the nineteenth century, American rhetoricians such as John Witherspoon and John Quincy Adams taught civic virtue to their students, just as Quintilian had done. By the midpoint of the nineteenth century, however, American rhetoric teachers had developed another pedagogical goal, one that eventually supplanted the older focus on public, civic, discourse. Relying on Blair and on texts redacted from Blair, nineteenth-century rhetoric teachers began the business of developing taste in their students. This shift in the focus of rhetorical education--away from civic virtue and toward the bourgeois projects of self-improvement--coincided with the demise of rhetoric as a field of study. That is, when students and teachers became more interested in accruing the cultural and social capital associated with the cultivation of an educated taste than they were in preparing for the pulpit or for politics, the doctrines and principles of rhetoric--classical and modern--began to disappear from the American college curriculum. Late in the century, the study of English-language literature took over the task of disciplining bourgeois subjectivity, a task it still fulfills. Today, outside of speech departments, rhetorical education remains unthought: neither English-language literary study nor English composition have ever included systematic attention to public discourse within their purview. (34)

revision of rhetorical pedagogy in the late nineteenth century (35)

These historians bemoan the departure of rhetoric from American college curricula because they assume that ethical instruction--instruction in the development of character--disappeared with it. However, this assessment overlooks the fact that such instruction changed its guise and its habitation during the middle years of the nineteenth century. In a new aesthetic guise, ethical instruction was conducted under the pedagogical heading of taste, at first by rhetoric teachers, and later, during the last three decades of the century, by teachers of English-language literature. In other words, American colleges did not abandon ethical instruction when they abandoned rhetorical education; rather, they transformed instruction in the development of character to the study of English-language literary texts. What they did abandon was the ethical subjectivity that was maintained and disciplined within classical rhetorical study: the vir bonus [i.e. "the good man speaking well]. In his place appeared the genteel man of taste. (35-36)

pedagogy of taste

The pedagogy of taste that developed within early nineteenth-century rhetoric textbooks was explicitly designed to help students discriminate between the tastes of the educated and the uneducated classes. (36)

The belles lettres tradition can be opposed to the scientific-empirical tradition of American school rhetoric, a tradition carried forward by writers like Alexander Bain and Henry Noble Day, who were inspired by George Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776) rather more than Blair. It was this tradition that spawned current-traditional rhetoric. (footnote 6, p. 269)

It was Kant who posited the existence of a "pure" taste, a taste that appreciated works of art and natural beauty as things in themselves. By positing this notion, Kant rationalized the familiar distinction now made between "high" and "low" tastes. (36)

In the Scottish tradition...theorists defined taste as that capacity, or faculty, which permits  persons to discriminate the good front eh bad in works of art as well as the virtuous from the vicious in the realm of morality. In this tradition, which probably stems from the work of Frances Hutcheson, the exercise of taste was directly connected to the exercise of public responsibility... (36-37)

Blair's firm connection of taste to civic virtue (37)

In other words, the person of taste is equipped with several faculties--imagination, method, perception, sympathy, and judgment--all of which, when working together in harmony, allow him to perceive and evaluate the aesthetic and moral worth of scenes or objects surely and quickly, if not instantaneously. (38)

Newman and company advised their students that taste, the ability to discriminate the bad from the good, the beautiful from the ugly, is a sign of excellence that allows discrimination among people, as well. Someone who receives no pleasure from nature or art, according to Boyd, "is said to be a man of no taste" (43). On the other hand, "he who is gratified with that which is faculty in works of art is a man of bad taste; and he who is pleased or displeased, according to the degree of excellence or faultiness, is a man of good taste." Since taste is natural, all men display it in some degree (39). [...] Obviously, though, this natural capacity does not manifest itself in the same way or to the same degree in all people or peoples. Newman generously reads this difference as a difference in education and class privilege: persons who have leisure and occasion to exercise their emotional responses to beautiful scenes or objects will be able to strengthen that response, whereas the ability to respond emotionally will be stunted in persons who not enjoy such opportunities. (39)

Coppee and Quackenbos, on the other hand, locate the standard in "the concurrence of the right judgment of many well ordered and duly cultivated minds," [...] in other words, the standard is set by the preferences of those persons whose tastes are widely acknowledged to be accurate and penetrating. (41)

"the concurrent opinions of refined men in civilized nations, by whom the arts are cultivated, works of genius are freely discussed, and Taste is improved by science and philosophy" (Quackenbos, p. 41)

And so we see that the universal standard is actually set by quite a small group, and a familiar group it is, too: "men" living in "civilized nations" who cultivate the arts and who read science and philosophy. In other words, people just like the people who wrote these textbooks. (41)

The pedagogy of taste, I would argue, is such a policing mechanism. It is the means through which young men were taught to internalize the marks and limits of bourgeois subjectivity (read "white, straight, male, comfortable, Christian" subjectivity). The ability to discriminate the bad from the good, in concert with his fellows, marks the bourgeois subject for membership in the community. Just as surely, this mark distinguishes him from those others who are not so disciplined, those who are so roughened by toil and hard cirumstances that they ignore beauty altogether, like Newman's laborer, of those, like Quakenbos's savages, who revel in the coarse or bizarre.

Like all ideologies, the ideology of taste works to naturalize that which is culturally instituted. [...] The ideology of taste assigns socially constructed differences to nature, thus rendering its judgments true, right, and inevitable; at the same time it covers over the real social work it performs, which is to maintain and harden class distinctions. Early nineteenth-century school rhetoric texts teach not so much what, but who, to avoid. The pedagogy of taste helps students to internalize a set of rules that mark their inclusion in bourgeois subjectivity at the same time as it sets them off from members of other classes. (43)