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
Spice-2-Spyce:
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:
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."
