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.

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.

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.

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"

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.

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.