The Doctrine of Nerve Energies and Telegraphic Ways of Seeing from Douglass to Fisher

The first recipe in Abby Fisher's 1881 cookbook, What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking, sensually describes how to make dough for "Maryland Beat Biscuit": "add your water gradually in mixing so as to make dough stiff, then put the dough on pastry board and beat until perfectly moist and light" (9). The body partakes in the process of making biscuits, requiring a feel for "perfectly moist and light" dough. Although including the body in food production is commonplace in both contemporary and nineteenth-century cookbooks, Fisher's text, one of the first known American cookbooks that was not also a hospitality manual, intersects with the nineteenth century doctrine of nerve energies that blurred the boundaries between the inside and outside of the body. The telegraph and its electric currents emerged in the 1830s through Samuel Morse and provided a network metaphor that helped develop what Jonathan Crary calls "the doctrine of specific nerve energies" (38). The telegraphic lines connecting disparate geographies were an outer manifestation of the bodily nerves some scientists thought connected all human beings to each other. People suddenly became nodes in a network, undermining powerful myths of an autonomous, unified self.

Fisher, echoing the doctrine of nerve energies, produces food images in her recipes that call upon readers to use their subjective senses to link with and produce food. Here, correspondence between perception and object is unnecessary; food will emerge according the cook's personal taste. In Fisher's food images, the distance between subject and object, promoted through scopic regimes like Cartesian perspectivalism, collapses and connects the producer to his or her product. Fisher's recipes do not merely recite ingredients and dictate instructions; she does not list ingredients with their quantities and she does not describe cooking as a mechanical process. Instead, she uses subjective, qualitative terms that requires cooks to find out what "perfectly light and moist" dough feels like to them.

Blurring the boundaries between inside and outside, Fisher also draws from the African American literary tradition. Frederick Douglass, in his 1845 Narrative, uses the language of telegraphy to express the experience of thinking (Gilmore, Aesthetic Materialism, 111): thoughts, says Douglass, "flashed through my mind, and died away for want of utterance" (68). Douglass's flashing thoughts appear before him like the sudden appearance of a telegraphic message, challenging the image of a thinker who has total control over his own thoughts. For Douglass, thinking is coextensive with feeling, connecting mind and body. Abstract concepts like freedom were apprehended though feeling, not through an isolated a cognitive process. "I saw nothing without seeing it [freedom]," Douglass explains,"I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it" (69). Douglass apprehends freedom though multiple senses, not just through abstract definition. Likewise, Harriet Jacobs in her 1861 Incidents In The LIfe of A Slave Girl describes her grandmother's home in passive, sensual language: "There we always found sweet balsam for our troubles" (17). "Sweet balsam," signifying familial connection, appears without her conscious effort; her grandmother's love takes sensual form, a material rather than abstract image.

Literacy in Question: Visual Studies Challenge to Literary Studies and Composition

"Not being able to read or write myself, and my husband also having been without the advantages of an education--upon whom would devolve the writing of the book at my dictation--caused me to doubt whether I would be able to present a work that would give perfect satisfaction."

--Abby Fisher

Fields traditionally encompassed by the academic category English--rhetoric and composition and literature--risk tacitly endorsing efforts to delineate the boundaries of civilization, justifying the marginalization and exploitation of underprivileged populations. The assumption that students must become literate, culturally useful individuals bears a too-close resemblance to social Darwinism, persuading individual and collective actors to exclude and extinguish the illiterate masses from the civilized core. Written communication, taught as the necessary pathway towards cultural literacy, is pushed on every entering freshman as if to underscore the fact that the university does indeed have an intellectual gateway that separates it from the actual universe outside the ivory tower. Written communication defines the boundaries of the university, separating it from the Powerpoint presentations of the business world as much as from the confessionals offered by the clergy. It not only keeps out the uncivilized businessman and businesswoman, who supposedly hunger for money devoid of an ethical consciousness, but writing also keeps those in the university...well, "in" the university. Teach a slave to talk about whether she want to be free, and she'll never be free. Teach a student to write and he'll always seek advice from the professor, the writer par excellence.

Visual literacy, on the other hand, challenges teleological notions of writing as the penultimate medium of civilization. Writing, after all, developed in many societies as a crude record keeping device; more important cultural memories were transmitted orally. Visual studies opens the university, and more specifically English, to the broader cultural oscillations between written and visual literacies. Neither writing nor images form the end product of modern civilizations; Western civilization has not "progressed" into written literacy, nor has it de-evolved into a primitive visual culture (as might be inferred from Marshall McLuhan's descriptions of a single human tribe reduced to a global village through new visual technologies). Lived experience, as well as human development, begins at a general sensory level, often using sight to coordinate motor skills and learn cultural signifiers, like facial expressions. While verbal language becomes an important cultural tool, visual literacy emerges with writing serving as the skeletal framework that makes reading a book from left to right, or top to bottom, possible.

Visual studies helps separate writing from literacy, allowing us to see that even the illiterate--those who cannot personally write and read--can still write through surrogacy. Abby Fisher, an ex-slave who could not read or write, wrote a cookbook in 1881 through dictating to an amanuensis. She signifies her capacity as a mother not through written style, but through an image: in her final recipe, a remedy for infants, she boasts that she raised eleven healthy children into adulthood, a remarkable feat for any woman living in nineteenth century America. The figure of the image, here, is not a spectacle or simulation as popularized in postmodern theories. Rather, the image displays a heightened sense of cultural literacy, a familiarity with more than one culture. Black and white women will appreciate the image of her eleven children. Her cookbook may be written in words, but it signifies through images.

Fisher's interdependency with her amanuenses is overlooked in a culture that stresses the autonomy of the author: writing as an individual, not collective, act. On the other hand, interdependency is fundamental to many visual productions that populate our cultural environment. Packages on a grocery store shelf and commercials on the television involve hundreds of hours of collaboration time, ranging from research and development to the aesthetic representation itself. The effort at universities to push group learning occurs less at the written level and more at the visual and oral levels as students pick up social cues from their peers. And yet, at the end of the course, they are still judged individually by a single professor. Myths of individualism die hard. Images continue to live whether we acknowledge the collaboration behind them or not.

Intensification of Food Images in Late-Nineteenth Century Cookbooks

Two cookbooks, Lafcadio Hearn's 1885 La Cuisine Creole and Abby Fisher's 1881 What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking, mark divergent turns in food images during the nineteenth century. Hearn, a folklorist working within the scientific tradition, visualizes Creole foodways through a documentary lens; he assumes the role of a documenter, rather than a representative, of Creole culture. Fisher, a former slave, writes within the African American autobiographical tradition, periodically revealing biographical detail in her recipes. She explicitly represents southern foodways, drawing from African American culture a body of shared experiences. In both cases, food becomes the central source of expression, translating the nineteenth century scientific lens and the African American autobiographical tradition into food images. Paralleling this translation of cultural material into food images, developments in visual and visualizing technology--especially the camera and the telegraph--intensified geographic relations and daily routines, a process David Harvey, among others, calls "time-space compression." The world's geographic space becomes compressed into Marshall McLuhan's "global village," and, according to urbanist Paul Virilio, "global" time becomes instantaneous. Visual technologies and the epistemological changes that accompany them accelerate the pace of daily life and shrink the size of the perceived world, affecting the way food images are deployed.

As visualizing technologies change the way spectators see the world and space-time compression emerges as symptom of these technologies, food images take on new roles through a process of intensification. Drawing from the thermodynamics concept of intensity and from Immanuel Kant's studies on "intensive magnitude," philosophers use intensity to refer to forces--like temperature, pressure, and speed--that push complex systems towards a "tipping point" "where quantitative change suddenly leads to qualitative change" (Taylor 148). Intensive properties cannot be added up to grasp the whole: "one does not add, for example, three 'units' of ten degrees to apprehend a temperature of thirty degrees" (Bonata and Protevi 100). Rather, an intensity like speed refers to a relationship between bodies (Virilio). Between food images of the late-nineteenth century, for example, visual habits influenced by the telegraph and the camera changed the way spectators saw food. This change in the way people saw food, I claim, reaches a tipping point in the late-nineteenth century when food becomes more than a literary trope and emerges as a way of seeing in itself.

The cookbooks of Hearn and Fisher mark a shift to food as a way of seeing and knowing, specifically within the folklorist and African American literary traditions. Although a large number of cookbooks were printed before the appearance of Hearn's and Fisher's cookbooks in the 1880s, the appearance of Hearn's and Fisher's texts within four years of each other provide a space for comparing the ways visual intensification affects food images. Explicitly, Hearn records the recipes of "Creole housewives" to provide "the young housekeeper" with simple, delicious dishes made "from the things usually thrown away by the extravagant servant" ("Introduction"). However, Hearn's cookbook, along with his collection of Creole aphorisms, Gombo Zhebes, was initially marketed at the World's Fair, also known as the World Cotton Centennial, held in New Orleans from 1884-85 (Gotham). Published for a global audience, Hearn's cookbook facilitated the production of New Orleans as a tourist culture famous for its food. As he claims in the subtitle of his cookbook, the recipes are drawn "From Leading Chefs and Noted Creole Housewives, Who Have Made New Orleans Famous for Its Cuisine." Shaped by the demands of the global market, Hearn's La Cusine Creole contrasts with regional tone of Fisher's Preface: "The publication of a book on my knowledge and experience of Southern Cooking, Pickle and Jelly Making, has been frequently asked of me by my lady friends and patrons in San Francisco and Oakland, and also by ladies of Sacramento during the State Fair in 1879." Written for her "friends," Fisher's cookbook reveals select details about her life that, while few in number, color her recipes as intensely personal extensions of her lived experience. In both cases, food images invite particular ways of seeing that respond, both directly and obliquely, to the intensification of visual habits in the late-nineteenth century.

Saccatic Seeing on the Spyce Trade

What does a spyce trade look like?

It, like trading, is movement--it is defined by movement. The spyce trade relies on maps to navigate, yes, but these are new types of maps that unpetrify the eye from theory. In theory, the scopic gaze arrests our vision and becomes invisible. Simon Ings, in his book A Natural History of Seeing, notes experiments conducted at Brown University in Rhode Island and Reading University in England that proved the importance of eye movement for seeing. Test subject's eyes were fitted with contacts that kept a little spotlight--a little dot--in line with the center of the eye. Whereever the eye moved, the spotlight moved with it. But because the eye could not manuever around this dot of light, it ceased to see it--the spotlight disappeared. This is called saccadic movement.

Our eyes' natural propensity to move in order to see--its saccadic movement--perhaps comes from our natural evolution into predators: our eyes, Ing notes, are incredibly similar in physical design to squid eyes, both are focused towards the front of the head which helps us capture prey (as opposed to horses, which have a more sideways placement in order to avoid capture). Perhaps this argument works, perhaps it doesn't. But the fact remains, that our ability to see relies on the movement of our eyes.

This saccadic movement is represented in movies when, for example, in The Blair Witch Project freaked out characters stare into the camera moving their eyes from left to right as if they were looking for something--anything--to confirm or relieve their fears: just let us see it already! Of course, we never see the Blair Witch--we only hear it--leaving us, the viewer, to our own vain saccadic movement. Is the Blair Witch out there in the woods, or is she here staying in line with the saccadic movements of my eye? If the latter, then I guess I'm screwed.

But it is this latter case that is analogous to what theory is: theory is that Blair Witch that follows the saccadic movement of our critical eye, tormenting our psyches. Unable to see theory--can you point to theory?--theory in fact horrifies us. It is that elusive object petit a, which we structure our fantasies around. Theory is that never seen "Other" in the TV series Lost--the mystery that never seems to be fulfilled. To compensate for our horror, we publish anthologies and create carreers and institutions--all around that slippery noun, theory.

That is not to say that we must abolish theory. But rather, we should admit that a claim to use theory is equivalent to saying that I believe in something that I don't see--I believe in ghosts and they are haunting my house! Seeing is not always believing. And this is fine. But we lose the certainty that we are sane, that what we hear, taste, smell, and feel but cannot see is real. Theory does not uncover an unconscious, making this unconscious visible--for example, making the underlying means of production visible. This is mere inference--it is visible because I say it is visible, because through the scope of a particular theory it becomes visible. Even such created and fabricated visibility, however, does not add to our certainty. It affects us as all things affect us--without an end, without telos.

This appproach--admitting that theory accesses truth no more than our coffee in the morning--flattens the hierarchy of tactics (theory, history, anthropology, science, whatever) onto one non-hierarchical horizontal plane: a plateau. Theory does not access deep structures or even reveal instability of a text. It merely affects as all things affect. But our insistence that theory is some type of pure hermenuetic instrument that permits clear readings which might reveal, say, the cause of inequity keeps it tormenting us--just a little bit more thoery and we'll be there (akin to a drug addict: just one more hit! But one more is never enough). The Blair Witch can exist and elude our sight, but it does not have to torment us.

More productive, I think, is a supple hermeneutics--one which accounts for that material affect, which comes in the form of all senses and sense-memories. Relenquish the idea of a Biblical-type hermeneutics that conceives of interpretation as a metal act alone. Pick up instead, say, C.S. Peirce's assertion that all thinking is behavior, all theory is practice, all interpretation is affect. Relenquish Plato's detachment from the body--his "theory" of forms--and fully insert yourself into the polluted mess of the senses. This is where theory is truly at home: the affective domain of material senses.

This opens theory and our saccadic sight to the schizo of the self and the movement of the senses: open to the flow.

Let the spyce trade begin.

Definitions from Ch.2 of Grammar of Visual Design

Not quite, but almost exhaustive list of terms from the second chapter, "Narrative Representations": 

Locative: relate landscape to subject by locating them in a particular place (subject is passive)

Instrumental: relate tool to subject as an instrument (subject is active)

Vectors: like action verbs, they connect Participant (Actor) to Goal.

Participants: are either Interactive (participants in the act of communication) or Represented (which constitute the subject matter of communication). In formal art theory: participants are "volumes" or "masses" with their own distinct weight or gravitational pull. 

Processes: In formal art theory are called "vectors" or "tensions."

Visual Schemas: reducing visible world to simple geometric forms.

Transaction/Transactional Structure: something done by an Actor to a Goal. 

Classificatory Structure: includes analytic structure; lines without arrows; Participants can lost their separate identity to different degrees; never have a vector. 

Analytical: the Participants are not Actor or Goal, but Carrier and Attribute. Like a map. 

Embedded analytical processes: detail (or Attributes) in naturalistic images say things about the Carriers: the men wear hats, scarves, and socks. 

Squares & Rectangles: can be stacked and aligned; form geometric patterns with each other; does not exist in nature.

Circles: self-contained, complete in themselves, warmth, protection.

Triangles: unlike square, it is tilted, so it is both a Participant and a Vector because it can convey directionality; sense of process; symbol of generative power.

Vertical/Horizontal Elongation: 

Interchangeability: of visual and verbal participants in a diagrams.

Narrative: connected by a vector; doing something to or for each other.

Conceptual: represent participants in terms of class, structure, and meaning; generalized, stable, timeless essence.

Narrative Visual Proposition: 

Indicator of Directionality: like an arrow, pointer.

Realist/Abstract images: the latter are harder to transcode, or translate into language. 

Transport: movement from one place to another.

Transformation: causally determined. 

Non-transactional structure: has not goal, is like an intransitive verb.

Transactional process: the Participant (Actor) instigates movements.

Actor: from which the vector emanates.

Goal: participant at whom or which the vector is directed. 

Events: representations of actions which include only the Goal.

Interactors: double role of Actor and Goal.

Reactional process: when a vector is formed by an eyeline.

Reacter: the Participant that looks at the Phenomenon.

Phenomenon: formed either by being looked at by the Reacter, or by a whole visual proposition, like a transactional structure. 

Speech/Mental processes: dialogue and thought balloons.

Conversion processes: a chain of transactional processes. 

Relays: do not just pass on, in unchanged form, what they receive, they always transform it. 

Geometric symbolism: does not use an participants, only a vector; like a helix; get meaning from symbolic value; abstract patterns extend the "Vectorial Vocabulary" by drawing our attention to possibilities. 

Locative Circumstances: relate participant to Setting.

Setting: a type of Participant. 

Circumstances of Means: like tools, but no clear vector between the tool and its user.

Circumstances of Accompaniment: like penguin with baby pic, no clear vector between the two but they form two distinct participants. 

Linguistic events: have processes that are happenings which cannot have an Actor.

Behavioral process: the meanings of visual non-transactional reactions form a more restricted filed, tied up as they are with one kind of behavior: looking (77). 

Projective processes: mental and verbal processes, processes of perception, affection cognition. 

Senser: the person that does the seeing. 

Definitions, Spyce Trade, Maps,

Spice-2-Spyce not only makes the reader a viewer (by transforming words into signs), but it also transforms the history of spice into the history of spyce. That is, spice as a species--or a class/category--whose definition scholars take for granted (tracing the history of an already assumed spice and spices) is transformed into spice as perception: the spy in spyce.

Why is this significant? Why do we need to account for how spice is perceived? Because the histories of spice thus far have focused only on spice from a Western perspective. That is not to say that these histories have not been incredibly informative, but rather that these histories have concentrated on a single or even multiple Western perspectives of spice: trade routes, for example, and how spice got from there to here, from the East to the West. What is needed is a definition of spice.

And a definition of spice comes from spyce. That is, the paradigmatic histories of spice become a synchronic definition of spyce--spice must be defined cross culturally. Author of the The Penguin Companion to Food, Alan Davidson, states this challenge directly: "Spices are hard to define." Spice, spicy, spiced--all definitions of these words vary per culture, if not per speech act. For example, the cooks I worked with in a Thai restaurant could understand spice in two ways: spice as hot, burning the mouth--the typical American perspective, or spice as multiple dried plants--cumin, coriander, black pepper, chili pepper, etc. Americans brought out the fact that Thai food had spiciness (hotness) to it--otherwise this fact is unremarkable in Thailand. 

So, a definition is not simply something abstracted from culture and history, as in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Rather, definition is the recognition of difference. If I remember correctly, Ian Lancashire at the University of Toronto, points to some of the gender-oriented origins of dictionaries in England: dictionaries were initially invented by men to educate women in seventeenth-century England. Upper-class women's tasks were confined to lacy poetry, while they were excluded from the political sphere. Here, difference is recognized in order to categorize women and associate this sex with particular tasks apart from the male "sphere of power." I put this in quotes because what constitutes power is surely subjective, and someday, perhaps, this sphere of power may become something else--mutants, per the X-Men, for example, I don't know. 

Perhaps, though, the practice of defining has inherited this exclusive formula: the exclusion of, say, women from particular spheres of social life through preoccupying them with vocabulary, not politics. Of course, this makes vocabulary incredibly political. To state it reductively, the man imposes a definition which the female must accept and dwell on. Is this not the essence of Frederick Jameson's ideologeme--that small unit of ideology that is given to us to work with. In this case, male ideology produces an ideologeme in the form of vocabulary that limits what the female can work with. It's like a coach who gives you a badminton racquet to play tennis--ain't no way you're gonna win. 

Definition, however, can be an incredibly useful tool. We need to extend the abbreviated versions we get from dictionaries, which are understandably language and culture specific. But I think once we begin to extend definitions across cultures, we will find a new communication is possible. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guatarri claim that communication only occurs in cross-cultural encounters--that is, language, for example, was formed so that two tribes could relate and trade with each other. Otherwise, the embodied practices of a tribe could fulfill the social functions necessary for community behavior. While at this point this claim might be more speculation than science, there is nevertheless incredible potential lodged in a synchronic analysis of spice--that which I call "spyce."

This is analogous to making a map, rather than a history. The map highlights particular similarities and dissimilarities, but it offers the potential to navigate across multiple territories. Definitions-as-maps allow us to perceive the world from a different perspective. The topological map vs. the topographical map for instance. The map of elevated terrain vs. the map of population density. Each map has its own use value. But we can switch these maps--these perspectives--like the predator switches his vision (from the movie Predator). This is not to say that we are predators, but that we do need multiple visions--ways of seeing--if we are to survive and change this world. 

Spyce is part of this project of change. It focuses on a single substance--or rather a signifier--to map our way through and between cultures. This is akin to Jameson's cognitive mapping, which requires a focus-substance to navigate the morass. Zizek notes in Welcome to The Desert of The Real that global capitalism discourages attempts at cognitive mapping. We are instead left in disarray--like being in a mall, where do I go? I don't know, just purchase, consume, and worry about direction later. Disorientation forces us to grab onto anything that orients us. I once had horrible vertigo and I was perpetually forced to grab the closest solid object--whether that was a person, stool, desk, or lamp. The same goes for disorientation. Disoriented we reach for safety and unfortunately what we may grasp may be a highly conservative perspective. After 911, did Bush not immediately call for people to keep consuming, while also claiming that we need to attack. Forget about alternatives, let us just stabilize ourselves and then think.

But being afloat, so to speak, is not such a bad thing. Especially when you have a map. 

So what may come of having a map, or maps? A new spyce trade. A trade not only in substances, but in perspectives. A trade not on what we see, but on how we see--ways of seeing. The new commodity is not substance, but style. To be continued...

Becoming Plant ala Typee

Super Bowl. Becoming plant. Not Madden, not Cardinals, not Pittsburgh, only plant.

Plant, of course, is in the spice. "Walk without rhythm and you won't attract the worm." The worm from David Lynch's Dune craves rhythm, craves spice, and consumes pattern to establish another link in its length. While its existence breathes rhythm--like we consume oxygen--it exudes chaos (carbon dioxide?). Try consuming that. Global warming. Oh my god! Hole in the ozone layer. Holes are where crap falls through. The world is a toilet. The sun shits and we consume: the Son of Christianity sacrifices body and you consume sacrament. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Time and pattern is of no consequence, it is only there for the worm. From who do you consume? Worms crap spice and we consume: oxygen, water, moola, products, sacrament...consumption. 

But let's talk fast--fast as in speed, yes, we need to act now--but lets talk starvation. 38 million people in the United States have to choose between buying food and paying bills--check it out, SA Food Bank, or the USDA. These starving, they are resistance by necessity--that imagined utopia Slavoj talks about, where we imagine because we must. I had Muslim roommates, who fasted during Ramadan. I participated, but without any direction. Because you do it, I do it. Let's do it. Starve. Come night, of course, we ate. But somewhere in that 38 million, you did not. Eat. 

Someone did not eat. Someone passed. Me, you, we...guilty. Were you eating frozen pizza? Were you guilty? Don't feel bad. Just get out and spyce up the world, man. Don't just change things, change perceptions. Wander. Float the earth and allow something to sever and something to connect. Just don't look back--Lot's wife in the Old Testament turned into a pillar of salt. We still don't know if salt is a hereditary taste or not. But if you can live with that question, then go ahead, look back. Spyce is not just seasoning--as in Iron Chef competitions--but also sea-sunning: 311 band says 'I'm free as I stare at the sea.' Check out the spyce of life, the sea-sunning of perception--see? (I'm) sunning--shining a light on you. Do you believe what you C? Aha, seeing is not so apparent anymore (is it C-ing, seaing, seeing?). But suffering is apparent--you know it exists, you've been there. If you have suffered, you know compassion. Not "no" compassion. You knowledge compassion--you have already made a type of knowledge of compassion: it is relevant, irrelevant, fake, true, believable, stupid, nice, wonderful, yada yada. It exists. 

U s e                                    i t.