Saccatic Seeing on the Spyce Trade

What does a spyce trade look like?

It, like trading, is movement--it is defined by movement. The spyce trade relies on maps to navigate, yes, but these are new types of maps that unpetrify the eye from theory. In theory, the scopic gaze arrests our vision and becomes invisible. Simon Ings, in his book A Natural History of Seeing, notes experiments conducted at Brown University in Rhode Island and Reading University in England that proved the importance of eye movement for seeing. Test subject's eyes were fitted with contacts that kept a little spotlight--a little dot--in line with the center of the eye. Whereever the eye moved, the spotlight moved with it. But because the eye could not manuever around this dot of light, it ceased to see it--the spotlight disappeared. This is called saccadic movement.

Our eyes' natural propensity to move in order to see--its saccadic movement--perhaps comes from our natural evolution into predators: our eyes, Ing notes, are incredibly similar in physical design to squid eyes, both are focused towards the front of the head which helps us capture prey (as opposed to horses, which have a more sideways placement in order to avoid capture). Perhaps this argument works, perhaps it doesn't. But the fact remains, that our ability to see relies on the movement of our eyes.

This saccadic movement is represented in movies when, for example, in The Blair Witch Project freaked out characters stare into the camera moving their eyes from left to right as if they were looking for something--anything--to confirm or relieve their fears: just let us see it already! Of course, we never see the Blair Witch--we only hear it--leaving us, the viewer, to our own vain saccadic movement. Is the Blair Witch out there in the woods, or is she here staying in line with the saccadic movements of my eye? If the latter, then I guess I'm screwed.

But it is this latter case that is analogous to what theory is: theory is that Blair Witch that follows the saccadic movement of our critical eye, tormenting our psyches. Unable to see theory--can you point to theory?--theory in fact horrifies us. It is that elusive object petit a, which we structure our fantasies around. Theory is that never seen "Other" in the TV series Lost--the mystery that never seems to be fulfilled. To compensate for our horror, we publish anthologies and create carreers and institutions--all around that slippery noun, theory.

That is not to say that we must abolish theory. But rather, we should admit that a claim to use theory is equivalent to saying that I believe in something that I don't see--I believe in ghosts and they are haunting my house! Seeing is not always believing. And this is fine. But we lose the certainty that we are sane, that what we hear, taste, smell, and feel but cannot see is real. Theory does not uncover an unconscious, making this unconscious visible--for example, making the underlying means of production visible. This is mere inference--it is visible because I say it is visible, because through the scope of a particular theory it becomes visible. Even such created and fabricated visibility, however, does not add to our certainty. It affects us as all things affect us--without an end, without telos.

This appproach--admitting that theory accesses truth no more than our coffee in the morning--flattens the hierarchy of tactics (theory, history, anthropology, science, whatever) onto one non-hierarchical horizontal plane: a plateau. Theory does not access deep structures or even reveal instability of a text. It merely affects as all things affect. But our insistence that theory is some type of pure hermenuetic instrument that permits clear readings which might reveal, say, the cause of inequity keeps it tormenting us--just a little bit more thoery and we'll be there (akin to a drug addict: just one more hit! But one more is never enough). The Blair Witch can exist and elude our sight, but it does not have to torment us.

More productive, I think, is a supple hermeneutics--one which accounts for that material affect, which comes in the form of all senses and sense-memories. Relenquish the idea of a Biblical-type hermeneutics that conceives of interpretation as a metal act alone. Pick up instead, say, C.S. Peirce's assertion that all thinking is behavior, all theory is practice, all interpretation is affect. Relenquish Plato's detachment from the body--his "theory" of forms--and fully insert yourself into the polluted mess of the senses. This is where theory is truly at home: the affective domain of material senses.

This opens theory and our saccadic sight to the schizo of the self and the movement of the senses: open to the flow.

Let the spyce trade begin.

Definitions from Ch.2 of Grammar of Visual Design

Not quite, but almost exhaustive list of terms from the second chapter, "Narrative Representations": 

Locative: relate landscape to subject by locating them in a particular place (subject is passive)

Instrumental: relate tool to subject as an instrument (subject is active)

Vectors: like action verbs, they connect Participant (Actor) to Goal.

Participants: are either Interactive (participants in the act of communication) or Represented (which constitute the subject matter of communication). In formal art theory: participants are "volumes" or "masses" with their own distinct weight or gravitational pull. 

Processes: In formal art theory are called "vectors" or "tensions."

Visual Schemas: reducing visible world to simple geometric forms.

Transaction/Transactional Structure: something done by an Actor to a Goal. 

Classificatory Structure: includes analytic structure; lines without arrows; Participants can lost their separate identity to different degrees; never have a vector. 

Analytical: the Participants are not Actor or Goal, but Carrier and Attribute. Like a map. 

Embedded analytical processes: detail (or Attributes) in naturalistic images say things about the Carriers: the men wear hats, scarves, and socks. 

Squares & Rectangles: can be stacked and aligned; form geometric patterns with each other; does not exist in nature.

Circles: self-contained, complete in themselves, warmth, protection.

Triangles: unlike square, it is tilted, so it is both a Participant and a Vector because it can convey directionality; sense of process; symbol of generative power.

Vertical/Horizontal Elongation: 

Interchangeability: of visual and verbal participants in a diagrams.

Narrative: connected by a vector; doing something to or for each other.

Conceptual: represent participants in terms of class, structure, and meaning; generalized, stable, timeless essence.

Narrative Visual Proposition: 

Indicator of Directionality: like an arrow, pointer.

Realist/Abstract images: the latter are harder to transcode, or translate into language. 

Transport: movement from one place to another.

Transformation: causally determined. 

Non-transactional structure: has not goal, is like an intransitive verb.

Transactional process: the Participant (Actor) instigates movements.

Actor: from which the vector emanates.

Goal: participant at whom or which the vector is directed. 

Events: representations of actions which include only the Goal.

Interactors: double role of Actor and Goal.

Reactional process: when a vector is formed by an eyeline.

Reacter: the Participant that looks at the Phenomenon.

Phenomenon: formed either by being looked at by the Reacter, or by a whole visual proposition, like a transactional structure. 

Speech/Mental processes: dialogue and thought balloons.

Conversion processes: a chain of transactional processes. 

Relays: do not just pass on, in unchanged form, what they receive, they always transform it. 

Geometric symbolism: does not use an participants, only a vector; like a helix; get meaning from symbolic value; abstract patterns extend the "Vectorial Vocabulary" by drawing our attention to possibilities. 

Locative Circumstances: relate participant to Setting.

Setting: a type of Participant. 

Circumstances of Means: like tools, but no clear vector between the tool and its user.

Circumstances of Accompaniment: like penguin with baby pic, no clear vector between the two but they form two distinct participants. 

Linguistic events: have processes that are happenings which cannot have an Actor.

Behavioral process: the meanings of visual non-transactional reactions form a more restricted filed, tied up as they are with one kind of behavior: looking (77). 

Projective processes: mental and verbal processes, processes of perception, affection cognition. 

Senser: the person that does the seeing. 

Definitions, Spyce Trade, Maps,

Spice-2-Spyce not only makes the reader a viewer (by transforming words into signs), but it also transforms the history of spice into the history of spyce. That is, spice as a species--or a class/category--whose definition scholars take for granted (tracing the history of an already assumed spice and spices) is transformed into spice as perception: the spy in spyce.

Why is this significant? Why do we need to account for how spice is perceived? Because the histories of spice thus far have focused only on spice from a Western perspective. That is not to say that these histories have not been incredibly informative, but rather that these histories have concentrated on a single or even multiple Western perspectives of spice: trade routes, for example, and how spice got from there to here, from the East to the West. What is needed is a definition of spice.

And a definition of spice comes from spyce. That is, the paradigmatic histories of spice become a synchronic definition of spyce--spice must be defined cross culturally. Author of the The Penguin Companion to Food, Alan Davidson, states this challenge directly: "Spices are hard to define." Spice, spicy, spiced--all definitions of these words vary per culture, if not per speech act. For example, the cooks I worked with in a Thai restaurant could understand spice in two ways: spice as hot, burning the mouth--the typical American perspective, or spice as multiple dried plants--cumin, coriander, black pepper, chili pepper, etc. Americans brought out the fact that Thai food had spiciness (hotness) to it--otherwise this fact is unremarkable in Thailand. 

So, a definition is not simply something abstracted from culture and history, as in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Rather, definition is the recognition of difference. If I remember correctly, Ian Lancashire at the University of Toronto, points to some of the gender-oriented origins of dictionaries in England: dictionaries were initially invented by men to educate women in seventeenth-century England. Upper-class women's tasks were confined to lacy poetry, while they were excluded from the political sphere. Here, difference is recognized in order to categorize women and associate this sex with particular tasks apart from the male "sphere of power." I put this in quotes because what constitutes power is surely subjective, and someday, perhaps, this sphere of power may become something else--mutants, per the X-Men, for example, I don't know. 

Perhaps, though, the practice of defining has inherited this exclusive formula: the exclusion of, say, women from particular spheres of social life through preoccupying them with vocabulary, not politics. Of course, this makes vocabulary incredibly political. To state it reductively, the man imposes a definition which the female must accept and dwell on. Is this not the essence of Frederick Jameson's ideologeme--that small unit of ideology that is given to us to work with. In this case, male ideology produces an ideologeme in the form of vocabulary that limits what the female can work with. It's like a coach who gives you a badminton racquet to play tennis--ain't no way you're gonna win. 

Definition, however, can be an incredibly useful tool. We need to extend the abbreviated versions we get from dictionaries, which are understandably language and culture specific. But I think once we begin to extend definitions across cultures, we will find a new communication is possible. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guatarri claim that communication only occurs in cross-cultural encounters--that is, language, for example, was formed so that two tribes could relate and trade with each other. Otherwise, the embodied practices of a tribe could fulfill the social functions necessary for community behavior. While at this point this claim might be more speculation than science, there is nevertheless incredible potential lodged in a synchronic analysis of spice--that which I call "spyce."

This is analogous to making a map, rather than a history. The map highlights particular similarities and dissimilarities, but it offers the potential to navigate across multiple territories. Definitions-as-maps allow us to perceive the world from a different perspective. The topological map vs. the topographical map for instance. The map of elevated terrain vs. the map of population density. Each map has its own use value. But we can switch these maps--these perspectives--like the predator switches his vision (from the movie Predator). This is not to say that we are predators, but that we do need multiple visions--ways of seeing--if we are to survive and change this world. 

Spyce is part of this project of change. It focuses on a single substance--or rather a signifier--to map our way through and between cultures. This is akin to Jameson's cognitive mapping, which requires a focus-substance to navigate the morass. Zizek notes in Welcome to The Desert of The Real that global capitalism discourages attempts at cognitive mapping. We are instead left in disarray--like being in a mall, where do I go? I don't know, just purchase, consume, and worry about direction later. Disorientation forces us to grab onto anything that orients us. I once had horrible vertigo and I was perpetually forced to grab the closest solid object--whether that was a person, stool, desk, or lamp. The same goes for disorientation. Disoriented we reach for safety and unfortunately what we may grasp may be a highly conservative perspective. After 911, did Bush not immediately call for people to keep consuming, while also claiming that we need to attack. Forget about alternatives, let us just stabilize ourselves and then think.

But being afloat, so to speak, is not such a bad thing. Especially when you have a map. 

So what may come of having a map, or maps? A new spyce trade. A trade not only in substances, but in perspectives. A trade not on what we see, but on how we see--ways of seeing. The new commodity is not substance, but style. To be continued...

Becoming Plant ala Typee

Super Bowl. Becoming plant. Not Madden, not Cardinals, not Pittsburgh, only plant.

Plant, of course, is in the spice. "Walk without rhythm and you won't attract the worm." The worm from David Lynch's Dune craves rhythm, craves spice, and consumes pattern to establish another link in its length. While its existence breathes rhythm--like we consume oxygen--it exudes chaos (carbon dioxide?). Try consuming that. Global warming. Oh my god! Hole in the ozone layer. Holes are where crap falls through. The world is a toilet. The sun shits and we consume: the Son of Christianity sacrifices body and you consume sacrament. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Time and pattern is of no consequence, it is only there for the worm. From who do you consume? Worms crap spice and we consume: oxygen, water, moola, products, sacrament...consumption. 

But let's talk fast--fast as in speed, yes, we need to act now--but lets talk starvation. 38 million people in the United States have to choose between buying food and paying bills--check it out, SA Food Bank, or the USDA. These starving, they are resistance by necessity--that imagined utopia Slavoj talks about, where we imagine because we must. I had Muslim roommates, who fasted during Ramadan. I participated, but without any direction. Because you do it, I do it. Let's do it. Starve. Come night, of course, we ate. But somewhere in that 38 million, you did not. Eat. 

Someone did not eat. Someone passed. Me, you, we...guilty. Were you eating frozen pizza? Were you guilty? Don't feel bad. Just get out and spyce up the world, man. Don't just change things, change perceptions. Wander. Float the earth and allow something to sever and something to connect. Just don't look back--Lot's wife in the Old Testament turned into a pillar of salt. We still don't know if salt is a hereditary taste or not. But if you can live with that question, then go ahead, look back. Spyce is not just seasoning--as in Iron Chef competitions--but also sea-sunning: 311 band says 'I'm free as I stare at the sea.' Check out the spyce of life, the sea-sunning of perception--see? (I'm) sunning--shining a light on you. Do you believe what you C? Aha, seeing is not so apparent anymore (is it C-ing, seaing, seeing?). But suffering is apparent--you know it exists, you've been there. If you have suffered, you know compassion. Not "no" compassion. You knowledge compassion--you have already made a type of knowledge of compassion: it is relevant, irrelevant, fake, true, believable, stupid, nice, wonderful, yada yada. It exists. 

U s e                                    i t. 

What is spice-2-spyce?

This blog is basically my working out of academic issues I need to write about. Right now, its mostly dissertation stuff. So there is a lot of stumbling, some experimentation, and vain attempts to articulate what can't be articulated. As a nice poet once said, sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.

It has also become an archive of my writing process. So, I record my attempts to carry out advice from friends, professors, and how-to-write books and websites. Part of the challenge and benefit to my current position is staying at home full-time with my infant son and two cats while my incredibly generous partner finishes her medical residency, an eighty-hour-a-week job.

I know theory is not saving lives (yet), but I'll try to sketch out my theoretical position.

My Disciplines:

main: Food Studies, Visual Studies, Complex Systems Theory

minor: rhetoric, semiotics, postcolonial theory

overarching: feminism

I bounce a lot of ideas off semiotics, so I have a traditional streak. I like structuralism. But I''ve read enough Bruno Latour to be cautious about framing debates between structure and agency. Semiotics, especially the Peircean strand from C.S. Peirce to Yuri Lotman, doesn't meddle with those terms anyways. Even Saussure, our paternal structuralist, never talks about "agency." He was a linguist, c'mon.

My philosophies:

Since I'm fashionably caught up in the complex systems buzz, I focus on processes, relationships, and becomings (rather than being, identity, or structure). In itself, this approach is nothing new. My pleasure derives from synthesizing literary theory, complex systems theory, and visual studies in order to think about food in ways that depart from historical and anthropological accounts.

Who to read:

If you're in the humanities and want to use complex systems theory, you'll first want to get an idea of how the humanities borrows from researchers studying complex systems. John Urry, Mark C. Taylor, and N. Katherine Hayles provide accessible texts that synthesize their respective fields--sociology, philosophy, and literature--with complex systems, or more broadly, with chaos theory. If you're in rhetoric and composition, Margaret Syverson and Byron Hawk provide applications that are ready to use in the classroom.

Next, check out some of the scientists who have helped make complex system accessible to people in other fields. John Holland, Francisco Varela, Ilya Prigogine, and Stuart Kaufmann have all provided interdisciplinary accounts. Melanie Mitchell, an accomplished theorist and computer scientist, offers a very nice introduction to the scientific end.

Then move to philosophers and social critics that not only borrow from complex systems but also create novel syntheses of their own; many of these thinkers, in fact, do not use complex systems, but their thoughts are easily fused within a complexity paradigm. Philosopher Manuel DeLanda offers the best synthesis of complex systems theory with social, political, and historical thought. He is accessible and translates the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze into useable language. John Protevi and Mark Bonata provide insight into DeLanda's and Deleuze's relationship to complex systems. Deleuze and Guatarri's A Thousand Plateaus, however, is an endless source of inspiration, frustration, and amusement, and it can be productively read against Donna Haraway and Slavoj Žižek--both of whom have issues with Deleuze. Jacques Derrida and Edward Said offer intellectual roads to critique and extend Žižek's Lacanian side. And speaking of Lacan, Hayles builds on cybernetics to go beyond the presence/absence binaries that Lacan and Derrida scrupulously critique.

If you want to link this short list of complex thinkers to visual studies begin with C.S. Peirce, who Derrida and Deleuze draw on. His triadic models of the sign will drive you nuts, but it is the most dynamic approach to semiotics and an in-road to understanding the way signs, language, and images are complex systems. Yuri Lotman and Mikhail Bakhtin, Russian giants of semiotics and literary theory, likewise present language and signs as complex systems. Martin Jay, Jonathan Crary, and W.J.T. Mitchell depart from semiotics, offering throughly historical accounts of vision that mesh well with the important role that time plays in complex systems.

Gender studies naturally flows from visual studies: the relationship between "scopic regimes" and gender date at least to the invention of writing; see Elise Kermani's dissertation on the mythic origins of langauge and anthropologists, like Nancy Makepeace Turner, accounts of pre-literate societies. Some of the most cited feminist, visual studies crowd borrows heavily from Western male thought: Judith Butler borrows from Foucault; Laura Mulvey and Jacqueline Rose borrow from Freud; Gayatri Spivak borrows from Derrida.

For the true intellectual juice read Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands, a text that synthesizes myth, politics, and spirituality in ways resonant with Deleuze and Guatarri's fusion of semiotics, music, and the physical sciences in A Thousand Plateaus. Read together, these texts can "queer" almost anything, making new lines of flight wherever you take them.

Spice-2-Spyce:

This is basically an attempt to create a line of flight for vision. That is, I don't do away with vision as a privileged source of perception (like anyone, I need to see the road as I drive), but by combining my interests in food studies with visual rhetoric a new way of seeing is possible. Spice-2-spyce embodies this new way of seeing. By changing "i" to a "y" in spice, the repressed maternal visual element is made salient (the phallic "i" is turned into a vaginal "y," a letter Kermani writes about extensively). The "2" and the "y" disrupt our sense of linear reading, making the word or phrase a visual display rather than a mere word. The reader can turn into a viewer, a spectator, an observer. The word "spice" has etymological roots in "species," a term used to organized reality according to "appearances."