10.2.21

Means of Taste

If the means of production is the potency to create supply, then the means of taste is the potency to create demand.

How is taste attained, maintained, and propagated?

Georges Bataille posited that a general economy pivoted around the aesthetics of sacrifice, as in potlatch, as a way to achieve and maintain status.

Not long after Bataille published “The Accursed Share” in 1949, did the term ‘tastemaker’ become coined in 1950.

Rituals of sacrifice might also be practicing our relationship with death. And as one becomes more comfortable with death, one might be a better experiencer of life. It is to be able to experience life, that is to have a sense of ‘taste’, in the profound sense.

What we sacrifice of ourselves, willfully, is therefore what we are willing to live without. Perhaps these are the things we have only truly owned.

8.26.20