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.
