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.

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...

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.

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,

"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"

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."

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.