A submission to Keith Olberman's "worst person in the world" list: conservative pundit, George Leef, for mocking Julia C. Ehrhardt's article, "Towards Queering Food Studies: Foodways, Heteronormativity, and Hungry Women in Chicana Lesbian Literature." Per the title of his article, he asks, "Can You Find the Fake Course"? With the creativity of a juvenile delinquent, he pretends that someone made a course based on the title of her article and, by implication, suggests that any serious study on topics outside the heteronormative, white (& free-market loving) male doesn't possess any "bodies of knowledge." Apparently Chicanas, lesbians, food, and literature are devoid of knowledge, or maybe it's the specific combination that empties knowledge from these categories, he doesn't say. (He also mocks actual course titles--the Adultery novel, Queer Musicology, and Whiteness: The Other Side of Racism--complaining that students would benefit more from a course in logic. Funny, since he commits a number of logical fallacies throughout).
Although the article is poorly written, his initial image of queer Chicana literature and food as epistemologically lacking brings up some interesting questions about image. No single category seems to offend Leef. He never provides a reason why Chicana lesbian literature lacks knowledge, he only complains that such study takes up university money and valuable student time. Indeed, it is likely he can't articulate why he hates Chicana lesbian literature. He simply does.
Rather, the combination--queer, literature, Chicana, and food--produces an emergent image, one too progressive for his conservative, cultured-yogurt sensibilities. Emergence, a process in which novel images, behaviors, or phenomena arise from interactions, helps explain what Leef clearly cannot explain: his fears about food in Chicana lesbian literature. In fact, Moraga captures the emergent image in the title of one of her plays, "The Hungry Woman: The Mexican Medea." Chicana lesbians are hungry, possessing appetites for food and sex. The mythic figure of the Hungry Woman is covered in mouths, which threaten to eat much more than what Leef can control. Similarly, as third world countries (like new agricultural countries) threaten to become totally independent of transnational agri-businesses, the politicians and lobbyists subsidizing transnational industries are beginning to feel a collective fear. They don't have control over the Other.
The fake academic, the pseudo-researcher, the pundit, the phony, the worst person in the world. George Leef.
Monday, December 20, 2010
Sunday, December 19, 2010
The Heteronormativity of Consumer Relations
The received wisdom of consumerism, both as a science and as a behavior, takes a binary approach to understanding consumers. The marriage between the consumer and a given industry or institution functions as the paradigm for nearly all business. But for academics, and even for companies whose primary motive is profit, this binary perspective places severe restraints on creative thinking. Imagined as a binary relationship, a type of heteronormative marriage, the consumer-industry coupling offers a feeling and image of stability. It focuses on one aspect of the economic system where the exchange between consumer and "producer" appears straightforward: one offers a product, the other purchases the product. The systems of debt, today signs of unsustainable economic growth, remain invisible. And as Marx argues in Capital, we never see surplus value, the profit and congealed labor that makes many markets fundamentally unequal.
Tourist destinations offer as part of the leisure activities a narrow focus on the acts of exchange, downplaying any images concerning debt. Consumer-industry exchanges, in fact, become leisure activities. Going shopping provides the pleasure of purchasing and exchange, a fleeting escape from the debt that increases with every escape. The mythic marriage between consumer and industry becomes a dominant form of escape, not just an unquestioned coupling resonant with heteronormative relations.
Co-evolution, in the meanwhile, with other people, objects, plants, technologies, spirits has been ongoing, building a store of relations that can be called upon to challenge the dominance of consumer-industry couplings. Recent cultural research in animal studies, embodied in scholars like Donna Haraway, draw attention to the way humans and pets co-adapt to environments and even produce new ecologies that share only weak links with consumerism. Eating practices--vegetarianism and veganism--often bring into relief our powerful links with animals and the affective character of food, its capacity to induce certain feelings in us. Whether these are queer modes of consumption or not remains a question of their capacity to connect us to a diversity of actors, rather than any narrow focus on what goes in to our mouths.
Tourist destinations offer as part of the leisure activities a narrow focus on the acts of exchange, downplaying any images concerning debt. Consumer-industry exchanges, in fact, become leisure activities. Going shopping provides the pleasure of purchasing and exchange, a fleeting escape from the debt that increases with every escape. The mythic marriage between consumer and industry becomes a dominant form of escape, not just an unquestioned coupling resonant with heteronormative relations.
Co-evolution, in the meanwhile, with other people, objects, plants, technologies, spirits has been ongoing, building a store of relations that can be called upon to challenge the dominance of consumer-industry couplings. Recent cultural research in animal studies, embodied in scholars like Donna Haraway, draw attention to the way humans and pets co-adapt to environments and even produce new ecologies that share only weak links with consumerism. Eating practices--vegetarianism and veganism--often bring into relief our powerful links with animals and the affective character of food, its capacity to induce certain feelings in us. Whether these are queer modes of consumption or not remains a question of their capacity to connect us to a diversity of actors, rather than any narrow focus on what goes in to our mouths.
Friday, December 17, 2010
Restaurant Menus as Filters: Distributed Visuality as Constraint
Andrea Broomfield, in a Gastronomica article on the Titanic dining menus, demonstrates that despite the tripartite class segregation aboard the ship the bill of fares actually encourage patrons to "see their potential" rather than "feel their place" (41). Among third class passengers, for example, roast beef marked a cuisine normally reserved for higher classes. Upwardly mobile foods attracted a new market of third class passengers by placing them in a new food assemblage not found on other large ships. Even in offering a limited number of items the restaurant menu opens passengers to new horizons, including all the imaginative baggage of the American Dream.
The sense that third class travelers were embarking on a new path, whether the promise of class mobility was actual or not, is a type of distributed visuality affording them a new picture of what is possible. The image roast beef conjures is a worldmaking one, not simply reflecting economic conditions but producing an image of economic reality--of the U.S.--that invites exploitation. Of course, the consequences of the American Dream, much criticized, are far from perfect, the capacity of inducing a feeling of potential through a restaurant menu remains a powerful, if commonplace, strategy still in use today. Distributed visuality, as an invitation to other possible food worlds, is as much a filter or constraint upon material cultures as it is a line of flight away from hackneyed categories, stale ideas, and old images.
Marek Korczynski and Ursula Ott argue that the restaurant menu enables by constraining, "It lends shape and pattern to the plethora of alternatives that are available in many social spheres in contemporary society" (913). A type of visual activity, the menu helps structure what J.J. Gibson's adherents call the affordance landscape, which helps decide possibilities for action. A menu positions us as actors, Korczynski and Ott explain, providing us with the opportunity to make a meaningful choice. We experience ourselves as autonomous subjects; we gather pleasure through seeing ourselves as sovereign subjects. In a world where institutional constraints often incite disciplined routines and make docile bodies, experiencing ourselves as autonomous subjects can become a pleasurable escape from everyday pressures. Distributed visuality, then, risks being employed as an autonomy machine, affording us "false" choices that only reify hegemonic institutions.
But in a complex system, distributed visuality like the restaurant menu teeters between chaos and order, a far-from-equilibrium state, and placed in the right niche--given the right environment--it can create lines of flight, new affordances, and actuate new capacities towards a re-visioning food.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Sensory Distribution
About year or so ago Pizza Hut put out a commercial evoking the five senses. A character would go crazy looking at a pizza, another would go nuts smelling the pizza, and so on. Of course, for viewers watching the ad, the senses were largely semiotic constructs rather than experiential realities.
Sniffing was another visual tool at the disposal of marketers. But merely evoking the senses fails to achieve the complexity that distributed visuality entails.
Distributed visuality, a vision of interdependence among human and nonhuman actors, also draws on visual studies' association of vision with knowledge (John Berger's articulations, for example, in Ways of Seeing). That ways of seeing correspond to ways of knowing suggests what is at stake when looking at food, what scopic regime tends to dominate. If not a disembodied vision, like Cartesian perspectivalism, then at least a de-historicized vision arguably dominates our way of seeing food. While I doubt the Pizza Hut commercial could be considered embodied--it abstracts eating practices into a weird cartoon-ish world--it definitely doesn't offer room for personal narrative, let alone collective memory. Other than some personal work experience in this food industry, where can I recite a history that connects me to the ingredients, or to the place where the tomatoes were grown. More than being a locavore, I'd like to know my food at more than a sensual level.
Meredith Abarca writes about a type of sensory epistemology, sazón, which she locates among working-class Mexican and Mexican American women. Rather than quantify ingredients, measuring out a cup of flour for example, these women measured ingredients according to the taste of a dish. They seasoned, added sazón, according to their own subjective taste. This subjective, perspectival dimension, what Abarca calls al gusto, invites personal experience, memories, and stories into the picture of cooking. Not only are all the senses engaged, but they are subjectively enacted through cooking. Cooking, then, becomes a form of seeing and knowing the world, a distributed visuality that accounts for senses and stories.
The point of (r)evolutionizing how we see food through sazón and other distributed visualities may actually be a rather straightforward task. I certainly don't mind eating Pizza Hut. But shouldn't the ahistorical fast foods, and maybe even the faux-historical mass marketed exotic foods (certain culinary tourist foods), be the exception? Our jouissance can come from rarely eating out, rather than rarely eating a home cooked meal.
Overlooking Local Actors: Taking Pollan to Task
Globalization, as Marxist geographer David Harvey admits, has led to a multicultural fusion at all scales, the local, regional, and global are populated by diverse cuisines not just homogenizing agro-business or McDonaldization. Local and regional scales, in other words, are as much products of globalization as the world-system. As such, our cognitive processes and the food images we conjure are distributed among actors at different scales: transnational corporations, national governments, municipal institutions, community organizations, and individual people. During the carb-craze when bread got a bad rap, I heard everyone from government officials, to doctors, to my friends weighing in on the Atkin's diet. As Michael Pollan has pointed out, this craze was a just a symptom of the U.S.'s long-established eating disorder. A national image emerged from the interlocking of actors at different scales.
As obvious as this multi-scaled process may seem, the tendency, even for Pollan, is to grant more influence to national actors (the government, national media, the CDC) and see the contributions of individual people as mediums for mainstream ideology. For Pollan, John Kellogg, the physician who invented cornflakes, appears as a scientist promoting the hidden nutritional properties of food over taste. Never mind that Kellogg's medical practices, including enemas involving yogurt, were initially not mainstream. Divorced from historical context, Kellogg's goal to remedy and prevent gastrointestinal problems common in the late-nineteenth century become footnotes (if that) in Pollan's critique of scientific discourse. Pollan sacrifices the object-oriented vision, the distributed visuality, Kellogg uses to formulate his dietary advice. Kellogg, following modern science, was convinced that gut flora--the microscopic organisms in our stomachs that help breakdown food--played a crucial role in our digestive process. He saw beyond anthropocentric approaches and sought to create a co-adaptive environment for both humans and flora. (To his credit, however, Pollan offers an excellent non-antropocentric view of distribution in his book, The Botany of Desire)
In the same way that Pollan overlooks Kellogg's relationship with or perspective on gut flora, transnational food corporations have overlooked many-a-culture's relationship with food and the land. Cherrie Moraga's play Watsonville, for example, depicts a pueblo (a people and a town) whose relationship with the lemon trees and the oak groves around them contrast against the packing of nutrient-rich broccoli into tin cans at a cannery factory that employs many Mexican and Mexican-American workers. Food for Dolores, an older Chicana who has lost two children, is as much spiritual as it is nutritional. The opening scene begins with her placing a tray of enchiladas before the "Virgen," not for human consumption but for spiritual edification. On the other hand, where Dolores works, factory workers seal food into cold, separate, and serialized containers. The presumption on the part of the cannery owners is that food is eaten for its nutritive dimensions, who cares how it is packaged, who does the packaging, and how much these workers are paid? In Watsonville, food among the pueblo is a shared material, something to share with other people as well as a type of communion between the people, their land, and their spiritual ancestors. Together, this distributed assemblage of people, land, and spirit make up the pueblo.
Actors like the pueblo, and even Kellogg, contribute to the formation of a global system. They may be the nearly invisible background material, as in the peublo in some of Alfonso Cuaron's films (e.g., Children of Men), but the repressed capacity of their brand of relationships awaits a reawakening. Oddly enough, they may, in a postmodern turn, blur the relationships between foreground and background, casting the relationships between agri-business and a series of distributed actors into sharp relief. It will be hard to ignore suffering.
As obvious as this multi-scaled process may seem, the tendency, even for Pollan, is to grant more influence to national actors (the government, national media, the CDC) and see the contributions of individual people as mediums for mainstream ideology. For Pollan, John Kellogg, the physician who invented cornflakes, appears as a scientist promoting the hidden nutritional properties of food over taste. Never mind that Kellogg's medical practices, including enemas involving yogurt, were initially not mainstream. Divorced from historical context, Kellogg's goal to remedy and prevent gastrointestinal problems common in the late-nineteenth century become footnotes (if that) in Pollan's critique of scientific discourse. Pollan sacrifices the object-oriented vision, the distributed visuality, Kellogg uses to formulate his dietary advice. Kellogg, following modern science, was convinced that gut flora--the microscopic organisms in our stomachs that help breakdown food--played a crucial role in our digestive process. He saw beyond anthropocentric approaches and sought to create a co-adaptive environment for both humans and flora. (To his credit, however, Pollan offers an excellent non-antropocentric view of distribution in his book, The Botany of Desire)
In the same way that Pollan overlooks Kellogg's relationship with or perspective on gut flora, transnational food corporations have overlooked many-a-culture's relationship with food and the land. Cherrie Moraga's play Watsonville, for example, depicts a pueblo (a people and a town) whose relationship with the lemon trees and the oak groves around them contrast against the packing of nutrient-rich broccoli into tin cans at a cannery factory that employs many Mexican and Mexican-American workers. Food for Dolores, an older Chicana who has lost two children, is as much spiritual as it is nutritional. The opening scene begins with her placing a tray of enchiladas before the "Virgen," not for human consumption but for spiritual edification. On the other hand, where Dolores works, factory workers seal food into cold, separate, and serialized containers. The presumption on the part of the cannery owners is that food is eaten for its nutritive dimensions, who cares how it is packaged, who does the packaging, and how much these workers are paid? In Watsonville, food among the pueblo is a shared material, something to share with other people as well as a type of communion between the people, their land, and their spiritual ancestors. Together, this distributed assemblage of people, land, and spirit make up the pueblo.
Actors like the pueblo, and even Kellogg, contribute to the formation of a global system. They may be the nearly invisible background material, as in the peublo in some of Alfonso Cuaron's films (e.g., Children of Men), but the repressed capacity of their brand of relationships awaits a reawakening. Oddly enough, they may, in a postmodern turn, blur the relationships between foreground and background, casting the relationships between agri-business and a series of distributed actors into sharp relief. It will be hard to ignore suffering.
Monday, December 13, 2010
Food (R)evolution: Jamie Oliver vs Grace Lee Boggs
Part of re-visioning the seemingly predominant fast-food perspective of food production and consumption in the U.S. is the now fashionable phrase "food revolution," popularized by ABC's Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution (which will be returning for a second season in 2011). The show, accompanied with the usual reality TV spectacle, has received positive reviews from some of food studies' most influential members, including Marion Nestle's review in the Huffington Post. For Nestle, the most striking scene was when a class of West Virginia grade schoolers failed to identify the most common vegetables.
Striking perhaps, but not surprising. Slavoj Zizek's frequent discussions on "unknown knowns"--those things that we don't know that we know--could help anyone wishing to articulate how, of course, we know grade schoolers are not taught about vegetables, eating habits, or food production. This unremarkable fact is culturally repressed just enough so that when we are shown some actual footage of it framed by Oliver's British disgust, we can perform a bit and shake our heads.
Grace Lee Boggs, a Detroit activist who has helped urban communities reshape their environment, offers a twist to Oliver's reality TV revolution. In an uncanny revision of "revolution," she calls for a good food (r)Evolution: a revolution accompanied by evolution, a collective evolution out of our current mindset. On her blog, she explains,
In Borderlands, Gloria Anzaldua actually uses the term (r)evolution to echo chemist Ilya Prigogine's notion of "dissipative structures" (103). (R)evolution works out the clash of cultures, she says, creating an unpredictable and more complex structure, a new breed of corn. And like corn, Boggs sees communities growing from the ground up, starting urban gardens by using the city's young people.
As striking as Jamie Oliver's encounters with grade schoolers' ignorance may seem, the image ABC produces is first a spectacle. Real life covered in excrement. Should he begin to touch on the interweaving of government, corporations, and U.S. culture, a distributed visuality, we may begin to see that the barn floor is covered in shit.
Striking perhaps, but not surprising. Slavoj Zizek's frequent discussions on "unknown knowns"--those things that we don't know that we know--could help anyone wishing to articulate how, of course, we know grade schoolers are not taught about vegetables, eating habits, or food production. This unremarkable fact is culturally repressed just enough so that when we are shown some actual footage of it framed by Oliver's British disgust, we can perform a bit and shake our heads.
Grace Lee Boggs, a Detroit activist who has helped urban communities reshape their environment, offers a twist to Oliver's reality TV revolution. In an uncanny revision of "revolution," she calls for a good food (r)Evolution: a revolution accompanied by evolution, a collective evolution out of our current mindset. On her blog, she explains,
most Americans still believe we have no alternative to the food produced by agribusinesses who care as little about our health as they do about the health of the chickens, turkeys, cows and pigs, so tightly packed in pens and cages on factory farms that the floor is scarcely visible, and where visible, is covered with excrement.Using visual terminology, she evokes what I have called "distributed visuality," a way of seeing interdependency among multiple human and nonhuman actors. At stake in a food (r)evolution is the health of humans and animals, not to mention entire ecosystems. Revolution at the human scale, entails seeing our evolution with animals, plants, and land.
In Borderlands, Gloria Anzaldua actually uses the term (r)evolution to echo chemist Ilya Prigogine's notion of "dissipative structures" (103). (R)evolution works out the clash of cultures, she says, creating an unpredictable and more complex structure, a new breed of corn. And like corn, Boggs sees communities growing from the ground up, starting urban gardens by using the city's young people.
As striking as Jamie Oliver's encounters with grade schoolers' ignorance may seem, the image ABC produces is first a spectacle. Real life covered in excrement. Should he begin to touch on the interweaving of government, corporations, and U.S. culture, a distributed visuality, we may begin to see that the barn floor is covered in shit.
Distributed Visuality at the Global Scale: New Agricultural Countries
Harriet Friedman's "The Political Economy of Food: A Global Crisis," a 1993 essay published in the New Left Review among other venues, launched a number commentaries on what she calls new agricultural countries (NACs). Countries like Brazil and Thailand, considered third world countries by Western policy makers, developed distributed systems of food and agriculture that modified and even defied the dominant U.S. mercantile practice of producing food surpluses, subsidizing domestic agriculture, and using embargoes to enforce third world countries' dependence on U.S. transnational corporations. Brazil, she explains, "shifted the focus of domestic policy from agricultural subsidies to agroindustry, which increased the value of commodities and did not create surpluses" (46). A shift in "focus," Brazil's emergence as a key global player in exporting value added soy meal marks collective shift in perception among Brazilians.
The first shift in perception occurs when collectives refuse and critique the vision of the Green Revolution, the view that third world countries "lack" Western technology--genetically modified crops and chemical fertilizers--and, thus, they require intervention from Monsanto. By rejecting this position of dependance, NACs open up new visions of market dynamics. The second shift might be called distributed visuality, "a strategic mix of agricultural settlement, credit, and taxation policies to create an intensive livestock sector based on nationally produced grain and soya." Defined against the background of transnational corporate agriculture, distributed visuality invite actors to envision the economic world-system as a decentralized network not as a system reliant on any single country, institution, or rule.
There is no governing equation to economic health, especially in terms of the Green Revolution. The sublimation of genetically modified crops and laboratory produced fertilizers, perceived as the solution to world hunger, has proven only to impede in the development of local agricultural practices. Local environments, for instance, cannot sustain nutrient and water demands of genetically modified plants. Instead, each actor--that is, each country--holds a unique relationship to the world-system, the emergent geopolitical whole. Exploiting this relationship and the capacities hidden within a country's agricultural system begins with a new vision, seeing the collective body as capable of more actions than the dominant food regime would allow.
The first shift in perception occurs when collectives refuse and critique the vision of the Green Revolution, the view that third world countries "lack" Western technology--genetically modified crops and chemical fertilizers--and, thus, they require intervention from Monsanto. By rejecting this position of dependance, NACs open up new visions of market dynamics. The second shift might be called distributed visuality, "a strategic mix of agricultural settlement, credit, and taxation policies to create an intensive livestock sector based on nationally produced grain and soya." Defined against the background of transnational corporate agriculture, distributed visuality invite actors to envision the economic world-system as a decentralized network not as a system reliant on any single country, institution, or rule.
There is no governing equation to economic health, especially in terms of the Green Revolution. The sublimation of genetically modified crops and laboratory produced fertilizers, perceived as the solution to world hunger, has proven only to impede in the development of local agricultural practices. Local environments, for instance, cannot sustain nutrient and water demands of genetically modified plants. Instead, each actor--that is, each country--holds a unique relationship to the world-system, the emergent geopolitical whole. Exploiting this relationship and the capacities hidden within a country's agricultural system begins with a new vision, seeing the collective body as capable of more actions than the dominant food regime would allow.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Distribution of Images, Images of Distribution
Distribution of Images
For Benedict Anderson, national "imagined communities" emerge from productions of mass media. The printing press, for example, distributes images of, say, England nationalism on a mass scale, filling the English landscape with images that individual and collective actors interact with and maneuver through. The spatial language is appropriate to thinking about images if we are to consider images as more than Platonic abstractions. Images occupy space, a type of topological space, perhaps, not conceptualized metrically but as a network. A space beyond our local, common-sense experience of a given place. Imagined communities are image communities that take humanity into previously uncharted territory, producing cohesive collectivities out of spatially and even temporally distant actors.
In a word, images are distributed, "divided and shared among agents and structures in the environment" (Syverson 7). Really, images extend our sense and concept of the environment outwards. En"viron," a closed circuit, becomes ever larger as images introduce new encounters that extend the real and imagined boundaries of our world. It works at all scales too. Electron microscopes reveal cellular topographies, while the Hubble Space Telescope relays pictures of interstellar gas birthing new stars. We maintain social lives over rivers of information flow, a Facebook page connecting Texas to Thailand.
Images of Distribution
An image, as in a webpage, offers an image of distribution: those networks of friends that make up a given "community." Facebook remains constrained, however, by its templates, centralized by a company, centered around a spectator (me). An image of distribution would display Facebook under new light, a highlight of its material distribution among electrical circuits, laptops, houses, living rooms--simultaneously a socio-economic distribution among middle-classes and its deviations.
Food, a highly condensed social fact, as Arjun Appadurai says, and a material necessity, offers a potentially densely-connected, widely-dispersed image of distribution. Within complex systems of food are lines of flight connecting multiple scales and varying actors, material and social, organic and inorganic. In a nuclear age, to echo Timothy Morton, food is a plutonium hyperobject with a rate of decay beyond any individual human time scale. (Even generations may not live to tell the tale of plutonium decay, 24,100 years). The now famous commodity biographies on cod, spice, bananas, coffee offer a snapshot of this radioactive decay, but not the whole story. Not the endless flares of distribution perpetually heating up and burning out. But capturing the entire distributed quality of a commodity is impossible, a perpetual fractal machine dynamic to the core.
An image of distribution may be enough to spark a new fire trail, a fire walk in the David Lynch sense.
Enough of a cult following has sprung up around Lynch's early-90s drama, Twin Peaks, to demonstrate the power of a new path, a new line of flight out of rote TV dramas. Down the rabbit hole we go with images of distribution.
For Benedict Anderson, national "imagined communities" emerge from productions of mass media. The printing press, for example, distributes images of, say, England nationalism on a mass scale, filling the English landscape with images that individual and collective actors interact with and maneuver through. The spatial language is appropriate to thinking about images if we are to consider images as more than Platonic abstractions. Images occupy space, a type of topological space, perhaps, not conceptualized metrically but as a network. A space beyond our local, common-sense experience of a given place. Imagined communities are image communities that take humanity into previously uncharted territory, producing cohesive collectivities out of spatially and even temporally distant actors.
In a word, images are distributed, "divided and shared among agents and structures in the environment" (Syverson 7). Really, images extend our sense and concept of the environment outwards. En"viron," a closed circuit, becomes ever larger as images introduce new encounters that extend the real and imagined boundaries of our world. It works at all scales too. Electron microscopes reveal cellular topographies, while the Hubble Space Telescope relays pictures of interstellar gas birthing new stars. We maintain social lives over rivers of information flow, a Facebook page connecting Texas to Thailand.
Images of Distribution
An image, as in a webpage, offers an image of distribution: those networks of friends that make up a given "community." Facebook remains constrained, however, by its templates, centralized by a company, centered around a spectator (me). An image of distribution would display Facebook under new light, a highlight of its material distribution among electrical circuits, laptops, houses, living rooms--simultaneously a socio-economic distribution among middle-classes and its deviations.
Food, a highly condensed social fact, as Arjun Appadurai says, and a material necessity, offers a potentially densely-connected, widely-dispersed image of distribution. Within complex systems of food are lines of flight connecting multiple scales and varying actors, material and social, organic and inorganic. In a nuclear age, to echo Timothy Morton, food is a plutonium hyperobject with a rate of decay beyond any individual human time scale. (Even generations may not live to tell the tale of plutonium decay, 24,100 years). The now famous commodity biographies on cod, spice, bananas, coffee offer a snapshot of this radioactive decay, but not the whole story. Not the endless flares of distribution perpetually heating up and burning out. But capturing the entire distributed quality of a commodity is impossible, a perpetual fractal machine dynamic to the core.
An image of distribution may be enough to spark a new fire trail, a fire walk in the David Lynch sense.
Enough of a cult following has sprung up around Lynch's early-90s drama, Twin Peaks, to demonstrate the power of a new path, a new line of flight out of rote TV dramas. Down the rabbit hole we go with images of distribution.
Friday, November 26, 2010
Queering Foodways
As I finish the first complete drafts of chapter one and two, a distinction between these chapters and the later three has begun to emerge. The first two chapters, examining the emergence and intensification of novel food images, highlights systemic effects that provide social and material bodies with coherent self images (interpretants). The later three chapters, focused on the complex systems concepts of distribution, embodiment, enactment, examine the way these social-material bodies interact with multiple, cross-cultural foodways. So, metaphorically and literally bodies are at the forefront of the next three chapters.
As such, a healthy background of queer theorists', cyberneticists', and posthumanists' approaches to "the body," in all its ideological baggage, can benefit any research on the dynamics surrounding food and the bodies that derive symbolic and chemical nourishment from food. Queer theory especially deals with the complexities of interweaving material and social systems, a plaiting of food and culture with the body. Among cross-cultural foodways, ranging from tasting the Other thorugh foregin food to Creolizing culture with fusion foods, the fetish of occupying the Other's body through consumption often occurs within the matrix heteronormative behavior. The Other's food is coded as feminine, to put it reductively, and the consumer is coded male. Of course, television commercials often play with this normative binary, as in ads for the Quizno's torpedo sandwich.
Placing a phallic sandwich in a male-voiced machine, the sandwich "artist" (as Subway calls them) really does nothing more than enact a homosocial event akin to men horsing around in a football locker room. Nothing subversive here.
Where food begins a queer praxis, a new line of flight away from gender norms, is through a series of divorces, so to speak, from heteronormative pairings: food and reproduction, food and the fetish of the Other, food and nutrition (as a mainstream media enterprise, not Marion Nestle's empathic Food Politics). Divorcing, an appropriate legal metaphor indexing issues of gay marriage in the U.S., is a crucial first step towards reinventing the idea of marriage among actors and food with a queer image.
For starters, food, like sexuality, does not teleologically contribute to reproduction. The mass production of food in the U.S. bears more similarities with Walter Benjamin's descriptions of "mechanical reproduction" in the communications and aesthetic spheres than with Slow Food's vision of locally-produced food. The default process of food production is in fact reproduction. Food production comes implicitly packaged as God's plan, to echo to Catholic Church, for food to reproduce without variation. Evolution is stopped in its tracks. Likewise, food is often reduced to its nutritive value; it exists purely as fuel for the body. In this view, we measure pleasure in food against a background of health: if it tastes good, it must be bad. Similarly, sexual impulses and gender performances outside the heterosexual norm may impart some perverse, fetishistic pleasure, but it is pleasure measured against the heteronormative background.
What, then, might a queer foodways look like? Of course, as many theorists have pointed out, queer refers to a deviation from the norm and need not refer directly to sexuality. Stimulating accounts incorporating sexuality, however, may derive from Cherri Moraga's metaphors of hunger and closetedness in Loving in the War Years and Gloria Anzaldua's imaginings of corn in Borderlands. Julia C. Ehrhardt covers these topics in an article, "Towards Queering Food Studies: Foodways, Heteronormativity, and Hungry Women in Chicana Lesbian Literature."
Samples of a queer foodways appear in more diffused form among food images used in the Showtime series, Dexter.
Images in the opening credits intentionally reflect Dexter Morgan's odd occupation as a serial-killing blood-spater specialist with the Miami PD. Not only is meat murder, but food and eating generally is murder. This weird association between food and Dexter's quirky serial killer justice lends a bit of queerness to food, bringing to the surface the pathological nature of eating and cooking. Take a closer look, the intro suggests, at the food you consume: the details reveal a little too much for comfort. Eating is a discontinuous process with no natural rhythm, no smooth path between male consumer and female nutrient. In a queer foodways, such binaries do not even exist. The eggs, the ham, the coffee, all have their singular texture; each has a culturally infused path, allowing us to connect to the world in novel ways. Already, I eat eggs with visions of bursting open bodies of strange yolk-ish creatures. A queer image, scary, pathological, and savory.
As such, a healthy background of queer theorists', cyberneticists', and posthumanists' approaches to "the body," in all its ideological baggage, can benefit any research on the dynamics surrounding food and the bodies that derive symbolic and chemical nourishment from food. Queer theory especially deals with the complexities of interweaving material and social systems, a plaiting of food and culture with the body. Among cross-cultural foodways, ranging from tasting the Other thorugh foregin food to Creolizing culture with fusion foods, the fetish of occupying the Other's body through consumption often occurs within the matrix heteronormative behavior. The Other's food is coded as feminine, to put it reductively, and the consumer is coded male. Of course, television commercials often play with this normative binary, as in ads for the Quizno's torpedo sandwich.
Placing a phallic sandwich in a male-voiced machine, the sandwich "artist" (as Subway calls them) really does nothing more than enact a homosocial event akin to men horsing around in a football locker room. Nothing subversive here.
Where food begins a queer praxis, a new line of flight away from gender norms, is through a series of divorces, so to speak, from heteronormative pairings: food and reproduction, food and the fetish of the Other, food and nutrition (as a mainstream media enterprise, not Marion Nestle's empathic Food Politics). Divorcing, an appropriate legal metaphor indexing issues of gay marriage in the U.S., is a crucial first step towards reinventing the idea of marriage among actors and food with a queer image.
For starters, food, like sexuality, does not teleologically contribute to reproduction. The mass production of food in the U.S. bears more similarities with Walter Benjamin's descriptions of "mechanical reproduction" in the communications and aesthetic spheres than with Slow Food's vision of locally-produced food. The default process of food production is in fact reproduction. Food production comes implicitly packaged as God's plan, to echo to Catholic Church, for food to reproduce without variation. Evolution is stopped in its tracks. Likewise, food is often reduced to its nutritive value; it exists purely as fuel for the body. In this view, we measure pleasure in food against a background of health: if it tastes good, it must be bad. Similarly, sexual impulses and gender performances outside the heterosexual norm may impart some perverse, fetishistic pleasure, but it is pleasure measured against the heteronormative background.
What, then, might a queer foodways look like? Of course, as many theorists have pointed out, queer refers to a deviation from the norm and need not refer directly to sexuality. Stimulating accounts incorporating sexuality, however, may derive from Cherri Moraga's metaphors of hunger and closetedness in Loving in the War Years and Gloria Anzaldua's imaginings of corn in Borderlands. Julia C. Ehrhardt covers these topics in an article, "Towards Queering Food Studies: Foodways, Heteronormativity, and Hungry Women in Chicana Lesbian Literature."
Samples of a queer foodways appear in more diffused form among food images used in the Showtime series, Dexter.
Images in the opening credits intentionally reflect Dexter Morgan's odd occupation as a serial-killing blood-spater specialist with the Miami PD. Not only is meat murder, but food and eating generally is murder. This weird association between food and Dexter's quirky serial killer justice lends a bit of queerness to food, bringing to the surface the pathological nature of eating and cooking. Take a closer look, the intro suggests, at the food you consume: the details reveal a little too much for comfort. Eating is a discontinuous process with no natural rhythm, no smooth path between male consumer and female nutrient. In a queer foodways, such binaries do not even exist. The eggs, the ham, the coffee, all have their singular texture; each has a culturally infused path, allowing us to connect to the world in novel ways. Already, I eat eggs with visions of bursting open bodies of strange yolk-ish creatures. A queer image, scary, pathological, and savory.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Modality Quotes
From Kress and Van Leeuwen's Reading Images
84
-networks "tend to obscure the fact that the range of choices is ultimately pre-designed and limited"
-"the network is modelled on a form of social organization which is a vast labyrinth of intersecting [85] local relations in which each node is related in many different ways to other nodes in its immediate environment, but in which it is difficult, if not impossible, to form a coherent view of the whole"
85
-"may obscure the globalizing tendencies"
99
-"When analytical structures are topological, theyare read as accurately representing the 'logical' relations between participants, the way in which participants are connected to each other...but not the actual physical size of the participants or their distance from each other"
154
-modality is about "the reliability of messages"
-"we regard our sense of sight as more reliable than our sense of hearing"
-modality markers, "cues for what can be regarded as credible," help us to make decisions
155
-modality "refers to the truth value or credibility of (linguistically realized) statements about the world"
-modality markers in language: may, will, must, possible, probable, certain
-modality is composed of "shared truths"
156
-"while the photograph restricts itself to representing what would normally be visible to the naked eye, the diagrams do not: they make visible what is normally invisible"...."they take recourse to abstract graphic elements"
158
-"A 'realism' is produced by a particular group"
-"Each realism has its naturalism--that is, a realism is a definition of what counts a real--a set of criteria for the real"
-"photorealism"...."how much correspondence there is between what we can 'normally' see of an object, in a concrete and specific setting and [159] what we can see of it in a visual representation"
159
-picture of coffee is clearer than soft background, and so holds higher modality
160
-abstraction relative to the standards of contemporary naturalistic representation
160-163
-types of modality markers
163
-"The world 'as we see it' (rather than 'as we know it', and certainly not 'as we hear it' or 'as we feel it') has become the measure for what is 'real' and 'true'"
164
-"the 'hyper-real' does not have the decreased modality it has in 'photographic' naturalism. Magazine photos of food are one example....the more a picture can create an illusion of touch and taste and smell, the higher its modality"
165
-"a realism that takes subjective emotions and sensations as the criterion for what is real and true"
171
-"a multiplicity of ways in which artists can relate to the reality they are depicting and 'define' reality in general"
-food photos both abstract and sensory
84
-networks "tend to obscure the fact that the range of choices is ultimately pre-designed and limited"
-"the network is modelled on a form of social organization which is a vast labyrinth of intersecting [85] local relations in which each node is related in many different ways to other nodes in its immediate environment, but in which it is difficult, if not impossible, to form a coherent view of the whole"
85
-"may obscure the globalizing tendencies"
99
-"When analytical structures are topological, theyare read as accurately representing the 'logical' relations between participants, the way in which participants are connected to each other...but not the actual physical size of the participants or their distance from each other"
154
-modality is about "the reliability of messages"
-"we regard our sense of sight as more reliable than our sense of hearing"
-modality markers, "cues for what can be regarded as credible," help us to make decisions
155
-modality "refers to the truth value or credibility of (linguistically realized) statements about the world"
-modality markers in language: may, will, must, possible, probable, certain
-modality is composed of "shared truths"
156
-"while the photograph restricts itself to representing what would normally be visible to the naked eye, the diagrams do not: they make visible what is normally invisible"...."they take recourse to abstract graphic elements"
158
-"A 'realism' is produced by a particular group"
-"Each realism has its naturalism--that is, a realism is a definition of what counts a real--a set of criteria for the real"
-"photorealism"...."how much correspondence there is between what we can 'normally' see of an object, in a concrete and specific setting and [159] what we can see of it in a visual representation"
159
-picture of coffee is clearer than soft background, and so holds higher modality
160
-abstraction relative to the standards of contemporary naturalistic representation
160-163
-types of modality markers
163
-"The world 'as we see it' (rather than 'as we know it', and certainly not 'as we hear it' or 'as we feel it') has become the measure for what is 'real' and 'true'"
164
-"the 'hyper-real' does not have the decreased modality it has in 'photographic' naturalism. Magazine photos of food are one example....the more a picture can create an illusion of touch and taste and smell, the higher its modality"
165
-"a realism that takes subjective emotions and sensations as the criterion for what is real and true"
171
-"a multiplicity of ways in which artists can relate to the reality they are depicting and 'define' reality in general"
-food photos both abstract and sensory
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Cooking and Writing
I know Peter Elbow has covered the similarities between cooking and writing, but I'm compelled to recite my personal experience.
I love looking at the recipes in the NY Times but when it comes to transforming recipes into food, I see the ingredient list and realize all my shortcomings: my lack of ingredients and tools and my lack of motivation to spend three hours prepping, cooking, and plating elaborate dishes. These recipes require some serious economic resources and some real dedication to becoming a foodie. As a cook, I've come to revel in simplicity and develop an appreciation for good weekly planning.
Likewise, I've come to value clear writing over the opaque rhetoric often used by contemporary theorists. As much as I enjoy reading Zizek, Deleuze, and Butler, their complex, unclear writing cannot make complex issues more interesting. They are NY Times recipes, accessible to readers with the resources and know-how to decipher and use their opaque writing. And reading their books, I can't help but get discouraged: I simply don't have the ingredients and motivation to write like postmodern theorists.
Instead, I draw from Maya Angelou's memoir cookbook, The Welcome Table, which provides relatively simple recipes that connect to taste, culture, and tradition in complex ways. The recipes are simple but the resulting taste is complex, drawing from Angelou's heritage and personal experience. Her prose also expresses clarity without sacrificing complexity. The key to her clear writing, I think, is her capacity to create images, which are made from basic ingredients--good, though not necessarily standard, syntax and grammar. She plays with images at many levels, ranging from a cohesive picture of her whole book to individual metaphor used by her grandmother. Writing and cooking weave together, the clarity and simplicity of each practice producing complex images and tastes.
I may observe complex spectacles, but my sustenance starts with simplicity.
I love looking at the recipes in the NY Times but when it comes to transforming recipes into food, I see the ingredient list and realize all my shortcomings: my lack of ingredients and tools and my lack of motivation to spend three hours prepping, cooking, and plating elaborate dishes. These recipes require some serious economic resources and some real dedication to becoming a foodie. As a cook, I've come to revel in simplicity and develop an appreciation for good weekly planning.
Likewise, I've come to value clear writing over the opaque rhetoric often used by contemporary theorists. As much as I enjoy reading Zizek, Deleuze, and Butler, their complex, unclear writing cannot make complex issues more interesting. They are NY Times recipes, accessible to readers with the resources and know-how to decipher and use their opaque writing. And reading their books, I can't help but get discouraged: I simply don't have the ingredients and motivation to write like postmodern theorists.
Instead, I draw from Maya Angelou's memoir cookbook, The Welcome Table, which provides relatively simple recipes that connect to taste, culture, and tradition in complex ways. The recipes are simple but the resulting taste is complex, drawing from Angelou's heritage and personal experience. Her prose also expresses clarity without sacrificing complexity. The key to her clear writing, I think, is her capacity to create images, which are made from basic ingredients--good, though not necessarily standard, syntax and grammar. She plays with images at many levels, ranging from a cohesive picture of her whole book to individual metaphor used by her grandmother. Writing and cooking weave together, the clarity and simplicity of each practice producing complex images and tastes.
I may observe complex spectacles, but my sustenance starts with simplicity.
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
Defining "Food Image"
Explaining my project to "non-specialists" always helps me address basic issues that I tend to overlook. My mom asked me what I mean by "food image," a compound phrase I couldn't unpack very clearly for her. So here goes.
First, the institution of food studies has generally taken a more social, economic, and political perspective on food, rather than attempting a wholesale definition. One of the most quoted definitions comes from Arjun Appadurai, who sees food as a "highly condensed social fact." He points out that when we convert a part of our environment into food, we create a "powerful semiotic device." The boundaries of edibility and palatability often separate cultures, serving as grounds for perceived exoticism, primitiveness, or disgust. So food has a complex material and social DNA.
Second, visual studies sees images as a cultural phenomenon. WJT Mitchell provides a widely cited and coherent definition, understanding images as a family that includes graphic, optical, perceptual, mental, and verbal forms. He also understands images, or pictures, as "worldmaking" devices, rather than world-reflecting devices. The definition I use the most comes from N Katherine Hayles's book on cybernetics and literature. Drawing from information theories, she claims an image is a condensation of information that can be both visually evocative and invite visualization.
The symmetry between her definition of image as a condensation of information and Appadurai's notion of food a highly condensed social fact offers a pathway into defining food images. A food image condenses social information, affording a way of visualizing the world. Although food proper may be a condensed social fact, it does not necessarily lead to visualization or to visually evocative graphics and language. Here, I think, is the boundary between food and food images: it is not edibility that separates them, we can eat food but not food images; rather, it is visualization. When food allows us to visualize, it becomes a food image.
This definition actually accords with Manuel DeLanda's description of Hume's theory of images. Hume didn't think images were reflections of the world. Rather, images, even in the mind, were low-level reproductions of the world. The difference between the actual world and the image of the world was not that one was real and the other was just mental; the difference between world and image was a matter of intensity: the image is a lower-level intensity of the world. A low-level reproduction or image of an apple allows visualization in ways that the material apple cannot. In Proust's famous description of eating a madeleine, he reveals an image of food that allows us to not only represent the actual world but to also produce a world filled with memories, tastes, and psychological drama.
When food allows us to visualize, then it becomes a food image.
Revision
A few tips I've picked up.
1) Change the font. This practice can spice up routine reading, especially at the sentence level.
2) Read aloud, either by yourself or get someone to read for you. Hearing writing can help you hear unclear sentences.
3) Read backwards, from last sentence to first. The idea here is to get rid of the cohesive picture of your writing that you have in your head, and read for sentence-level clarity.
4) Highlight key sentences in each paragraph and put it into an outline. The best advice I have read from Tara Gray, using key sentences helps to provide a more global picture of your essay and makes you look for coherence. Be sure to organize everything with your working thesis.
1) Change the font. This practice can spice up routine reading, especially at the sentence level.
2) Read aloud, either by yourself or get someone to read for you. Hearing writing can help you hear unclear sentences.
3) Read backwards, from last sentence to first. The idea here is to get rid of the cohesive picture of your writing that you have in your head, and read for sentence-level clarity.
4) Highlight key sentences in each paragraph and put it into an outline. The best advice I have read from Tara Gray, using key sentences helps to provide a more global picture of your essay and makes you look for coherence. Be sure to organize everything with your working thesis.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Speed and Foodscapes
In the nineteenth century, photography produced visually evocative images and telegraphy introduced a type of visualizing mechanism in which people and places could be seen as networks. Both technologies introduced new ways of imagining place, drawing boundaries and corroding boundaries between places. More crucially, these technologies contributed to a visual milieu in which the speed of images reached a critical point, transforming places from static topographical materials located on a map into visual spectacles. Place was known primarily through visual means.
This shift did not occur statically, as if all one had to do was look through a camera lens and see place rather than smell or feel place. A place became more than a place, more than a territory or environment. A place became a "scape," a fluid image crossing over and through boundaries. Place melted from a solid to a liquid; the accelerated speed of image transmission pushed place into a new pattern of information, one that no longer relied on presence to figure material reality. Images moving in rapid succession, like a strip of film at the movies, appear fluid: a smooth stream of motion flickers across the screen. Scapes, likewise, are fluid. Not metaphorically, but materially. Places, now scapes, pour into individual and collective bodies, reacting with them as much as any other fluid--water, alcohol, coffee. The foodscape of New Orleans, for example, is at first limited by its material constraints, like a young body of water, but then as time progresses it begins to carve out a deep basin to become a river.
The fluid of places can be trapped, pushed through electric turbines in a dam, a practice that affords actors new capacities to generate complex material like the foodscape. A cookbook is such a dam. It impinges on the flow of a place, stealing image of New Orleans by drawing from the very technologies that created the flow in the first place. A photographic gaze not only accelerates image transmission, but also confines it, directs it, using it to capture scapes and generate new hybrid entities called foodscapes. Fluid place composed partly of food, foodscapes emerge from the intensity of flavor and temperature brought about by visual media. The foodscape capacities had yet to be realized, but they ranged from branding New Orleans an exotic Creole scape at the 1884 world's exhibition to casting Southern foodways as something available to San Francisco consumers in the wake of reconstructionist nostalgia in the U.S.
Photography and telegraphy first accelerated image transmissions, then were modified into machines servicing cookbooks (the photographic or telegraphic gaze). These visualizing machines caught the fluid scapes, converting them into cultural energy that could be used to produce foodscapes of various colors.
Monday, September 27, 2010
What to Drink When Writing
As a food studies researcher, I can be highly conscious of what I eat and drink when I write. And typically iced coffee is my drink of choice. The taste of the coffee as much as the caffeine induces focus. At a subconscious level, it tells me "it is time to write." Coffee brings together the experience of writing, folding my ideas into my environment, the computer screen, and, eventually, into language.
I tend to drink coffee for this specific purpose. My "writing drink" introduces a specific pattern of information, affording me certain connections with my environment. I become a rhizome, an assemblage of different things that are given cohesion through coffee. I become an embodied subject, fusing with my material environment.
I tend to drink coffee for this specific purpose. My "writing drink" introduces a specific pattern of information, affording me certain connections with my environment. I become a rhizome, an assemblage of different things that are given cohesion through coffee. I become an embodied subject, fusing with my material environment.
Where to Write
There is an article by Benedict Carey published in the NYTimes on study habits, "Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits," which cited research on study locations that runs counter to traditional thought: studying in different locations can be good. We make subconscious connections with our environment, helping us think through the same problems in different ways.
I assume the same research findings might apply to writing. Perhaps use novel locations for free writing, which I already practice when I write more experimental blog entries. For now, I am trying to keep consistent hours at the desk in my home. But I'll try to keep track of any variations in my writing when I write in coffee shops, in other people's houses, at the library, in the outdoors, etc. I'll try to supply updates here.
Oct. 6 - So far: writing at coffee shops presents a host of distractions & writing in the morning may not be any more productive but it leaves me in a better mood the rest of the day.
Oct. 12 - blogging offers a site to digress a bit more than I feel is appropriate in Microsoft Word. Even creating a "swimming" doc of loose ideas are better described through my blogs. However, blogging does border on rabbit holing, taking long tangential breaks.
I assume the same research findings might apply to writing. Perhaps use novel locations for free writing, which I already practice when I write more experimental blog entries. For now, I am trying to keep consistent hours at the desk in my home. But I'll try to keep track of any variations in my writing when I write in coffee shops, in other people's houses, at the library, in the outdoors, etc. I'll try to supply updates here.
Oct. 6 - So far: writing at coffee shops presents a host of distractions & writing in the morning may not be any more productive but it leaves me in a better mood the rest of the day.
Oct. 12 - blogging offers a site to digress a bit more than I feel is appropriate in Microsoft Word. Even creating a "swimming" doc of loose ideas are better described through my blogs. However, blogging does border on rabbit holing, taking long tangential breaks.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Defining My Project in 25 Words
Got some good advice from a professor, who recommended that I work on summarizing my dissertation project in twenty-five words or less. This advice became relevant after I tried to explain my project to my dentist. I oscillated between vague generalities and hyper-specialized research findings. Needless to say, I would make a horrible CNN contributor. So here are some dissertation soundbites. (I'll keep revising as my writing progresses).
Hopefully practicing this condensing method will help during job interviews, grant and fellowship applications, and most importantly help me explain to friends and family why I'm not an inane, overspecialized academic.
My dissertation project is about:
-the role that food images play in shaping our image of political, social, and economic systems that affect food production and consumption.
-the way food images can spice up the way we eat and grow food.
-cross-cultural food images that can provide new relationships among cultures, foodways, and vision.
-the way writers, communities, and nations visualize the role of food in social, political, and economic systems.
-how food images function as efficient statements about individual and collective identity
1/16/10
My dissertation, "Complex Foodscapes: Visualizing Cross-Cultural Networks through Food Images," studies the complex system of food images that help define our relationships with food. Food might be succulent, as in a juicy piece of meat. It might be exotic, as Thai food and Mexican food are often presented. Or, food might be comforting, like a hearty bowl of chili. The types and combinations of relationships with food are endless, but they remained constrained by our economic, political, and social relations. Putting food images from literature, cookbooks, and social movements in a broader cross-cultural context characteristic of today's global food system, I describe the way images both constrain our ways of perceiving food and liberate our vision to perceive new food worlds. In Chapter One, using the concept of emergence--a process in which novel food images emerge, or self-organize, from simple rules--I demonstrate how John Dryden's efforts to control the interpretation of his historical poem, Annus Mirabilis, as a type of advertisement for free trade and English nationalism unintentionally produces an image of a decentralized economic system based on the early modern spice trade. Against assumptions that Annus Mirabilis univocally reflects an imperialist politics, I draw attention to the images of decentralized systems that emerge out of Dryden's poem. Chapter Two...
Hopefully practicing this condensing method will help during job interviews, grant and fellowship applications, and most importantly help me explain to friends and family why I'm not an inane, overspecialized academic.
My dissertation project is about:
-the role that food images play in shaping our image of political, social, and economic systems that affect food production and consumption.
-the way food images can spice up the way we eat and grow food.
-cross-cultural food images that can provide new relationships among cultures, foodways, and vision.
-the way writers, communities, and nations visualize the role of food in social, political, and economic systems.
-how food images function as efficient statements about individual and collective identity
1/16/10
My dissertation, "Complex Foodscapes: Visualizing Cross-Cultural Networks through Food Images," studies the complex system of food images that help define our relationships with food. Food might be succulent, as in a juicy piece of meat. It might be exotic, as Thai food and Mexican food are often presented. Or, food might be comforting, like a hearty bowl of chili. The types and combinations of relationships with food are endless, but they remained constrained by our economic, political, and social relations. Putting food images from literature, cookbooks, and social movements in a broader cross-cultural context characteristic of today's global food system, I describe the way images both constrain our ways of perceiving food and liberate our vision to perceive new food worlds. In Chapter One, using the concept of emergence--a process in which novel food images emerge, or self-organize, from simple rules--I demonstrate how John Dryden's efforts to control the interpretation of his historical poem, Annus Mirabilis, as a type of advertisement for free trade and English nationalism unintentionally produces an image of a decentralized economic system based on the early modern spice trade. Against assumptions that Annus Mirabilis univocally reflects an imperialist politics, I draw attention to the images of decentralized systems that emerge out of Dryden's poem. Chapter Two...
Thursday, September 23, 2010
NPR's Images of Violent Mexico, Imagining the Authentic Meal
Is it me or is NPR doing an inordinate amount of reporting on violence in Mexico? The latest headline, "Fed Up, A Mexican Town Resorts to Mob Justice," depicts Mexico as the new Wild West, a town turned into a type of collective Batman. Today's headline stories on Mexico in Fox News and Democracy Now focus on the "protection" of Mexican journalists, rather than the epidemic violence apparently surging among the Mexican population.
NPR, our National Public Radio, continues to fuel the nationalist machinery that nation builds other countries through U.S. cultural pathways. It is not exactly imperialism, but it is not responsible journalism either.
This image of a violent Mexico risks becoming the unspoken precursor to authenticating anything identified as Mexican. The very notion of an "authentic" Mexico requires an image of violence: the "artificial" act of eating a meal becomes a triumph over the "natural" violence of Mexico. A background of violence forms the conditions against which everything Mexican must emerge.
NPR, our National Public Radio, continues to fuel the nationalist machinery that nation builds other countries through U.S. cultural pathways. It is not exactly imperialism, but it is not responsible journalism either.
This image of a violent Mexico risks becoming the unspoken precursor to authenticating anything identified as Mexican. The very notion of an "authentic" Mexico requires an image of violence: the "artificial" act of eating a meal becomes a triumph over the "natural" violence of Mexico. A background of violence forms the conditions against which everything Mexican must emerge.
Friday, September 17, 2010
The Masterchef Rankings: Foucault & Distribution
I've been thinking about the concept of distribution mostly in terms of networks: distributed networks are totally decentralized. Feminism, for example, is a movement that possesses distributed qualities: it tends to stress ubiquity over unity, widespread reform rather than uniform change.
But Michel Foucault's studies on "Discipline," an institution emerging in the eighteenth century, bring together distributed networks and the ranking of the body in ways I'm still trying to flesh out. Discipline, he says,
He doesn't make this point very explicit, but I think by the term "rank" he means "arrangement." He dissociates rank from hierarchy. For instance, he discusses the transformation from Roman pyramidal supervision--a hierarchical system of governance, military, and education--to a distributed system of education in the eighteenth century when "'rank' begins to define the great form of distribution of individuals in the educational order" (146). Students occupy multiple ranks, some determined by test scores, others by behavior, and still other by social position--by cliques perhaps. They are arranged according to different criterion.
Although I struggle with the term "rank," I can see Foucault's description of distributed ranks possessing some significant implications for the way food images induce our bodies into institutionally specified arrangements. I've been watching celeb chef Gordon Ramsey's show on Fox, Masterchef, which arranges its contestants according to specific skill sets. The final two contestants, for instance, were type cast as the "pastry princess," a twenty-two year old female from the South, and "the experimenter," a male from Boston. In accordance with the dominant institution of gender in the US, the pastry princess occupies a relatively passive position, embodying the "traditional" Southern cuisine. The male "experimenter" occupies the active, innovating position: he takes risks, which could lead to his downfall or elevate him to godly status. Ooooo the excitement! The pastry princess eventually won, her Southern gal appearance made for good television especially for the all-male panel of judges. In terms of rank, the pastry princess occupied the high position among desert cooking, but a lower position among those experimenting with entrees.
The prevailing food image emerging out of the show was one in which rank mattered, but only as a concept distributed among different culinary spheres. No single person was the measure of what counted as a Masterchef; thus, the panel of three judges, and not just Gordon Ramsey. This distributed ranking system extends well into other aspects of food images, especially among images produced by food critics. Even the prevailing conversations on health and "going green" reinforce the idea of ranking. A certain acumen, a set of knowledge, is required to be on the side of good food, health, and sustainability. In fact, I find that the more you use the term "sustainability" the higher your rank in institutions focused on healthy food and fair trade. Foucault reveals that such rankings still fall under the regime of Discipline, making bodies "docile."
But Michel Foucault's studies on "Discipline," an institution emerging in the eighteenth century, bring together distributed networks and the ranking of the body in ways I'm still trying to flesh out. Discipline, he says,
"individualizes bodies by a location that does not give them a fixed position, but distributes them and circulates them in a network of relations" (Discipline and Punish 146)This statement on the fluidity of bodies is directly preceded by a statement on "rank," which seems opposed to fluid, distributed movement: "Discipline is an art of rank, a technique for the transformation of arrangements." How is a body simultaneously included in a system of ranks and a system of distribution? Why does Foucault pair rank with distribution?
He doesn't make this point very explicit, but I think by the term "rank" he means "arrangement." He dissociates rank from hierarchy. For instance, he discusses the transformation from Roman pyramidal supervision--a hierarchical system of governance, military, and education--to a distributed system of education in the eighteenth century when "'rank' begins to define the great form of distribution of individuals in the educational order" (146). Students occupy multiple ranks, some determined by test scores, others by behavior, and still other by social position--by cliques perhaps. They are arranged according to different criterion.
Although I struggle with the term "rank," I can see Foucault's description of distributed ranks possessing some significant implications for the way food images induce our bodies into institutionally specified arrangements. I've been watching celeb chef Gordon Ramsey's show on Fox, Masterchef, which arranges its contestants according to specific skill sets. The final two contestants, for instance, were type cast as the "pastry princess," a twenty-two year old female from the South, and "the experimenter," a male from Boston. In accordance with the dominant institution of gender in the US, the pastry princess occupies a relatively passive position, embodying the "traditional" Southern cuisine. The male "experimenter" occupies the active, innovating position: he takes risks, which could lead to his downfall or elevate him to godly status. Ooooo the excitement! The pastry princess eventually won, her Southern gal appearance made for good television especially for the all-male panel of judges. In terms of rank, the pastry princess occupied the high position among desert cooking, but a lower position among those experimenting with entrees.
 |
| Whitney, the "pastry princess" |
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Say No to Symbols: Evolution from HGTV to Victory Gardens
I routinely regret not investing in Scripps Networks Interactive, the parent company of the Food Network, the Travel Channel, and other lifestyle television networks. Lifestyle images are parceled into categories: separate channels focus on design, home and garden, travel, and food--even "fine" food. The boundaries between these categories, though porous, are not arbitrary; channel developers must work through the cultural materials that make any boundary cohesive. Categories are more like species, they are born at a specific historical moment and in time they will go extinct. The separation between food and home design, for example, becomes wider as the capacity to profit off these categories intensifies. Profit serves as the river separating a single species into two isolated reproductive communities, which, like horses and mules did, evolve into their own species.
Where profit flows, new species are born. (Monsanto can literally create a new species of grain as it institutes monopolistic practices over all aspects of cereal production.) When these new species are born, it becomes harder for us to see their commonalities. It is harder for us to discern their interaction in creating an image of middle-class lifestyle, for example. We focus on their extensive properties, the things that common sense tells us are different. One category clearly deals with material that potentially enters our bodies, the other deals with material that surrounds our bodies.
But these differences are merely different manifestations of a single genetic flow: the genetics of the American middle class. Just because different tools are used--a spatula for the cook and a paint brush for the home designer--doesn't mean we aren't dealing with the same image. Scripps, after all, is the parent company, embracing both HGTV and the Food Network.
Is it profitable for us, the television audience, to bring together these two species? Perhaps. No, if we think we are going to see an underlying truth: a whole picture will suddenly emerge, enlightening us to the mechanization of the capitalist system. Yes, if we accept that something new may emerge, a new assemblage, like the coupling of cattle with humans that allowed communities to become sedentary. In fact, the coupling between food images and home design images is already occurring. For example, Michelle Obama's efforts to revive the White House Victory Garden are recorded on youtube:
This new garden marks a significant change in the White House landscape and even in its design: the flow of traffic presumably increases between the kitchen and the section of the White House lawn where the garden is placed. People's material bodies flowing through doorways change the design of the House, perhaps requiring new security posts and new maintenance buildings (a shed). The link between home design and food is barely apparent in this video, but it is there.
Contrary to popular declarations that the new garden represents a "symbolic" change, echoing the symbolic change of Barak Obama's election to the White House, the actual affects of the new garden are potentially much greater. The term "symbolic" seems to imply that the garden and Obama represent something that is already visible, ready for showing off. But the election of Obama had an incredibly diverse set of reactions not reducible to any apriori images. He is far more than a symbol of African American accomplishment; his election literally changed the racial landscape of the US, if not the world: while ethnic minorities found a new role model, conservatives found a new demon. The garden combines the home design species and its kin, food image species, and produces something new, something that has yet to be clearly outlined. Like species in biology, these lifestyle species become the raw material for evolution, or perhaps (r)evolution.
Where profit flows, new species are born. (Monsanto can literally create a new species of grain as it institutes monopolistic practices over all aspects of cereal production.) When these new species are born, it becomes harder for us to see their commonalities. It is harder for us to discern their interaction in creating an image of middle-class lifestyle, for example. We focus on their extensive properties, the things that common sense tells us are different. One category clearly deals with material that potentially enters our bodies, the other deals with material that surrounds our bodies.
But these differences are merely different manifestations of a single genetic flow: the genetics of the American middle class. Just because different tools are used--a spatula for the cook and a paint brush for the home designer--doesn't mean we aren't dealing with the same image. Scripps, after all, is the parent company, embracing both HGTV and the Food Network.
Is it profitable for us, the television audience, to bring together these two species? Perhaps. No, if we think we are going to see an underlying truth: a whole picture will suddenly emerge, enlightening us to the mechanization of the capitalist system. Yes, if we accept that something new may emerge, a new assemblage, like the coupling of cattle with humans that allowed communities to become sedentary. In fact, the coupling between food images and home design images is already occurring. For example, Michelle Obama's efforts to revive the White House Victory Garden are recorded on youtube:
This new garden marks a significant change in the White House landscape and even in its design: the flow of traffic presumably increases between the kitchen and the section of the White House lawn where the garden is placed. People's material bodies flowing through doorways change the design of the House, perhaps requiring new security posts and new maintenance buildings (a shed). The link between home design and food is barely apparent in this video, but it is there.
Contrary to popular declarations that the new garden represents a "symbolic" change, echoing the symbolic change of Barak Obama's election to the White House, the actual affects of the new garden are potentially much greater. The term "symbolic" seems to imply that the garden and Obama represent something that is already visible, ready for showing off. But the election of Obama had an incredibly diverse set of reactions not reducible to any apriori images. He is far more than a symbol of African American accomplishment; his election literally changed the racial landscape of the US, if not the world: while ethnic minorities found a new role model, conservatives found a new demon. The garden combines the home design species and its kin, food image species, and produces something new, something that has yet to be clearly outlined. Like species in biology, these lifestyle species become the raw material for evolution, or perhaps (r)evolution.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
3 Visual Intensities
Three intensities emerge out of nineteenth-century visual culture in the U.S.: speed, the accelerated pace of everyday life due to an increased connectedness; modality, the truth-value of images: what images can be trusted, which are real and authentic; attention, the degree to which a spectator can make something coherent: order out of chaos. These intensities exist on a continuum, ranging from slow to fast, false to true, inattentive to attentive. A continuum is a handy way of saying that that the boundaries between slow and fast, false and true, inattentive and attentive are opaque. Life is not slow in a tribal village. Indeed, Marshall McLuhan used the term "global village" to describe the accelerated pace of life brought about by globalizing media. We, the cosmos, have become a highly condensed village not a geographically disparate set of cities. Cross-cultural relations intersect at a high rate sometimes increasing homogeneity (McDonaldization) and sometimes increasing heterogeneity (the fusion restaurant). The difference between spirituality and machine--as in the techno-Buddah above--blurs as intensive relations (speed, modality, attention) transform the objects of our spiritual-machinic umweldt. The accelerated pace of daily life and increased connectivity brought about by mechanisms of speed (the train, the telegraph, the printing press) push our cultural systems into time-space compression, a process, David Harvey explains, that "brings together different worlds (of commodities) in the same space and time” (300)." Speed becomes the precondition for modern spatial conditions. The insularity of the familial home from the exogenous world of production, commerce, and commodities directly results from the pace of capitalist processes demanded by the production line, the call center, the consumer-driven media. Home as heart and hearth becomes separate from business so that it becomes the business: work hard, at the pace of capital, to earn a home adorned with all the signifiers of middle-class life.
Home becomes the site of authenticity, where real life happens. Intensifying modality, now from real to hyperreal--have you ever seen a magazine photo of food or food network TV show that does not use hypersaturated color?--pushes our image systems into the simulacrum, the place where image supersedes realty (Jean Baudrillard's precession of simulacra).
Work, on the other hand, requires attention. It requires increasing worker's attention, whether through Fordist models of productivity (long hours on the assembly line) or through Silicon Valley's institutionalized yoga classes. All strategies impose a mode of attention.
But home and work, in a world of intensities, are not separate spheres. Work and home, to quote Jonathan Crary, exist on a continuum--a "single surface of affect" (6)--in which one involves the intensification of authenticity and the other involves the intensification of the inauthentic life. What about working from home? Ask anyone who works form home and they will tell you that in order to be successful, they still need to maintain a strict time table, a certain composure that separates home-stuff from work-stuff. Admittedly, when working form home the authentic and inauthentic have been intensified so much that a new phase emerges: the phase Zizek calls the chocolate laxitive, where you can have your cake and eat it too. (The very substance that gives you constipation also prevents you from having it). The fallout of this new phase are unclear. Perhaps it is akin to the TV series Weeds, housewives turned drug dealers. Perhaps this image is only what we would like to see. Another image produced for and by the mainstream. Look elsewhere: working from home has a long history among the working class, selling food from the home. Two dreams, one grown from the wealth of suburbia and the other from the material demands of everyday life. Some boundaries remain clear.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
What is the Intensification of Food Images?
Intensification refers to the forces that drive a system towards change, towards emergence, towards a tipping point, towards a phase transition, towards bifurcation, whatever. Intensity cannot be added up to understand the whole: three units of thirty degrees Fahrenheit cannot be added up to ninety degrees; rather they average together, forming one unit of thirty degrees. Temperature pushes water into boiling points, and into phase transitions of gas, liquid, and ice.
Technology can intensify the human capacity to visualize ourselves and the world. The camera intensifies our capacity to visualize an object, whether material, cultural, or an image from our own memory. The object can be seen from multiple angles, detached from a governing source. It is also disembodied, seen as something separate from the spectator. The telegraph intensifies our capacity to see our networked relationship to the world, inviting us to redraw the boundaries between self and other, body and world. Telegraphic wires were once seen as outward manifestations of our internal nervous system: electricity flows through both inner and outer systems. These intensifications of our visual culture can bring systems to a crisis, stimulating dramatic changes in the extensive characteristics marking a given system.
The nineteenth-century system of food images reflect this intensification of visual culture as food images oscillate between literary representations that are part of a narrative and cookbooks that take culinary snapshots of food. A far-from-equilibrium system in the 1880s, food images became icons of New Orleans and the African American South. Two of the first cookbooks to represent New Orleans and the African American South, La Cuisine Creole and What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking reorganize the way food images function. Hearn emphasized the disembodied visual habits from photography, selling the image of New Orleans on a global scale at the 1884 World Cotton Centennial; Fisher emphasized the embodied visual habits invited by the telegraph, demonstrating an awareness of the body's relationships to other bodies--alimentary, cultural, and material. Both require positioning within nineteenth-century racial and cultural politics.
Monday, August 16, 2010
Intensification Notes
DeLanda Intensive Science
Definitions
56-traits that characterize intensive thinking in biology: populations and rates of change/heterogeneity (58)
68-the term, intensity, comes from thermodynamics
70-Two Deleuzian modifications to thermodynamics definition, inspired by biological sciences: a) when intensities are divided they are divided by critical threshold, "its extensive properties suffering a radical change in nature"
72-b) new capacities become apparent through high intensification, far-from-equilibrium conditions; "capabilities to form assemblages with other individuals, organic or inorganic"; "We may have exhaustive knowledge about an individual's properties and yet, not having observed it in interaction with other individuals, know nothing about its capacities"
Other
70-Deleuze: "Difference is not diversity"; diversity is a given, it's like a cardinal series of numbers; difference operates like an ordinal series (81)
76-"zone of intensity" informs what expressive capacities appear
77-intensive sciences "reveal how one and the same 'virtual limb' is unfolded through difference intensive sequences"; he's talking about the tetrapod limb
78-"we need to conceive a continuum which yields, through progressive differentiation, all the discontinuous individual that populate the actual world"
-"we need a way of meshing these together into a heterogeneous whole....as a plane of consistency"
79-differential relations & function
80-"Unlike trajectories, a vector field is not composed of individuated states, but of instantaneous values for rates of change"
81-"condensation of singularities....a metaphor of this process....is the occurrence of a phase transition in an actual material such as water"
82-"Russell introduced the term distance (or intensity) to define relations of proximity between the elements of an ordinal series"
84-"When two separate series of events are placed in communication, in such a way that a change in probabilities in one series affects the probability distribution of the other, we have an information channel"
87-"In the vicinity of the bifurcation the capacity to transmit information is maximized"
114-coupling influenced by intensity held at a critical threshold of strength
120-degree of connectivity
Bonata and Protevi Geophilosophy
100-Deleuze borrows from Kant's study of "intensive magnitude" in "Anticipations of Perception" in the Critique of Pure Reason
-"while one must add together the parts of an extensive quantity to achieve a grasp of its unity...one does not add, for example, three 'units' of ten degrees of heat to apprehend a temperature of thirty degrees"
Massumi A User's Guide
69-7?- infant & BwO, going through threshold changes
8-"a plateau is reached when circumstances combine to bring an activity to a pitch of intensity that is not automatically dissipated in a climax leading to a state of rest"
66-"Actual intensity has extension (form and substance), virtual intensity does not: it is a pure intensity"
60-attractor: "state towards which a system tends"
-intensity: "the differential potential created by the contradictory motion and density requirements of the two attractors (equilibrium & far from equilibrium)
47-"Stirrings that are not just prepersonal, but impersonal, bodily but inhuman, outside intentionality, open irrevocably to chance"
-"How there can be sensation without a unified subject"
Parr The Deleuze Dictionary Constantin V Boundas "Intensity" def
131-force refers to the relation between forces
-"the encounter of intensity--being the task of sensibility--is the first necessary link in the interaction of all faculties striving to generate the differentiated virtual within thought"
132-"Sensation is the affect"
Patton Deleuze: A Critical Reader Daniel W Smith
37-"They [intensive forces] can only be sensed from the point of view of the transcendental sensibility that apprehends it immediately in the encounter as the limit of sensibility itself"
-"'sensation ceases to be representative and becomes real'"
43-shift in modern art from matter-form relation to material-force
-44-drawing from Lyotard, "the figure is the form that is connected to a sensation" (different from figuration, a representation practice)
-"In Bacon's paintings, it is the human body that plays this role of the Figure: it functions as the material support or framework that sustains a precise sensation"; he deforms the body, undoing its extensive unity to reveal its intensive reality
Deleuze and Guatarri A Thousand Plateaus
37-the proper name is the instantaneous apprehension of a multiplicity....the subject of a pure infinitive comprehended as such in a field of intensity"
22-Bateson and Balinese culture, "plateau of intensity"
54-"One travels by intensity; displacements and spatial figures depend on intensive thresholds of nomadic deterritorialization (and thus on differential relations) that simultaneously define complementary, sedentary, reterritorializations"
Friday, August 13, 2010
Cookbooks as Culinary Snapshots
In the 1880s, two antebellum cookbooks emerged that provided culinary snapshots of regional cuisines. Lafcadio Hearn's La Cuisine Creole spotlighted New Orleans food and cooking, while Abby Fisher's What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking highlighted Southern food. These texts, unlike many of the cookbooks published before the 1880s, offered culinary snapshots of distinct regional foodways; previous cookbooks were often hospitality manuals designed to coach domestic and professional servants. As visual technologies changed in the U.S., introducing what Walter Benjamin dubbed the "age mechanical reproduction," cookbooks increasingly focused on connecting food and place through verbal snapshots provided by the recipes. Snapshots, or more generally, images, condense large amounts of information. Recipes, for example, invite readers to extract sensual images--taste, touch, sound, scent, and appearance--along with abstract measurements that compose a particular dish. When Fisher, describing a recipe for biscuits, tells her readers to "add your water gradually in mixing so as to make dough stiff" and then "roll out the dough to thickness of third of an inch" she creates an image of food that is temporal ("gradually"), sensual ("stiff"), and quantitative. This description is an image of Southern food that is felt in the fingers as much as it is measured by the eyes.
Recipes, coupled with scopic regimes of the nineteenth century, reorganized relationships among spectators, food, and place. In the age of mechanical reproduction, Benjamin argues, the "aura" of a painting is lost; a place, likewise, becomes a reproducible image, its authenticity is produced through images rather than seen as inherent in its material location. Dominant ways of seeing shifted from the technique of perspective, which focused the spectator's attention on a single point, to the figure of the camera, which saw an object from multiple perspectives. The multiplicity of recipes focused on a single geographic region echoed the visual habits afforded by the camera: recipes provided multiple snapshots of a distinct place. In addition to the camera, which invited disembodied visual habits, the doctrine of specific nerve energies--a theory posited by physiologists that the body was a visual producers--informed nineteenth-century visual habits. The boundary between inside and outside was blurred by recipes, like Fisher's, that folded sensual experience into the production of food. For Fisher, the taste and appearance of food emerges from the cook's capacity to taste, touch, smell, and see, offering (the appearance of) a personal dimension to the experience of regional foodways. Recipes oscillate between numerous, disembodied images of regional foods and sensual, embodied images of food that could create an image of a deeply personal experience of place. Place could be known through multiple, embodied culinary snapshots.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Extrasensory and Endosensory Cooking
Marshall McLuhan declared that modern electronic-based technology relocated our nervous system outside our bodies. We feel through technologies, our physical being is encased in electrical wires, images, codes. Any private operator, he warned, could now own and control this extrasensory nervous system, influencing--even owning--our decision-making process. Decision making is outsourced to extrasensory operators. Decisions become recipes, behavior becomes the cooking of decision-making recipes, and Martha Stewart, Rupert Murdoch, Disney, Microsoft, Google, and every variety of media become recipe makers. Mass media offers variation on only one cookbook shaped through the collusion of the entertainment industry with military, government, and transnational corporations.
Remedy to this extrasensory ownership, endosensory cookbooks invite interdependence, community, democracy. Endosensory cookbooks entail centering recipes on the body, a material edifice not reducible to abstract concepts alone. The body connects, forges links, and becomes a part of other bodies, blurring the distance between self and other. Culture, as a space of cultivation that organizes relationships among various actors, plays a critical role in drawing together material bodies, making them coherent, and putting them through a process of individuation. This deterritorialized cookbook, applying as much to food as to U.S. policy towards Palestine, affords actors a means to reconfigure their capacities as ethical subjects. Ethics breaks against the shores of what inhibits and what stimulates our capacities to transform our material-cultural positions. Endosensory cookbooks become the ethical instruments of our era.
What Can A Cookbook Do?
In the title of an essay Gilles Deleuze asks "What Can A Body Do?" He does not ask what is a body, how do we define a body, what is the ideal form of a body, what is the difference between the body and the soul? He seeks function.
Key to the question of function are relationships. A body functions in relationship to a series of other bodies, cultural and material, collective and individual. We--our bodies--are assemblages of other bodies, which afford and constrain how we function.
Along the same line of questioning, how does a cookbook function? The cookbook, a textual, visual, sensual body, produces forms of relatedness: how a reader relates to food, becomes a cook, an eater, a dish washer. A whole series of roles, spanning across time, are implicit before we even pick up a cookbook. Sometimes the cookbook makes reference to these roles verbally, as nineteenth-century hospitality manuals did; sometimes the cookbook references these roles visually, as Martha Stewart does in Great Food Fast. The cover of her book offers not only an aesthetic statement, but it also offers a plate setting. The angular view from above provides the spectator with a tablecloth, a plate, a bowl, and finally the food, all centralized around the shrimp. Food preparation becomes a highly centralized act, implied in the image not explicitly stated.
Images do not need to be graphic. The verbal image in Lafcadio Hearn's recipe for "Flounder and Mullets Fried" associates freshness with locality: "These fish are very fine when fresh from the waters of Lake Ponchartrain" (25). Hearn's image of cooking involves a specific place, which many of readers will not have access to when they cook. Why include this image of locality and freshness? Sold at the 1884 World's Fair, Hearn's book purports to provide the recipes that "have made New Orleans famous." Locality, New Orleans and more generally Louisiana, is as key an ingredient in his cookbook as okra in gumbo or red beans with rice. For Hearn, relatedness means linking cooking and eating with place. Even if that place is somewhere else. Especially if that place is somewhere else.
So what can a cookbook do? It can make cooking more than just cooking.
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