When the Useless Becomes Bewitching
The Slow Food movement and modernist cuisine appear, on the surface, to be quite opposed to each other. One represents the resistance of our food traditions to the march of technological innovation. The other represents the leading edge of that march. I hope to show that this conflict between these movements is more apparent than real and that, at a deeper level, they represent complementary trends in a society desperately seeking relief from a dehumanized world.
This conflict between technology and those who resist it is, in part, about the role of instrumental reason, or, to put it more simply, our excessive reliance on efficiency as a foundational value. The Slow Food movement, with its relaxed rhythms and adherence to tradition, ignores the value of efficiency. The point of eating is to savor the moment without the crush of schedules and external demands on our time and attention. By contrast, modernist cuisine seeks more efficient technological mechanisms for extracting more flavor, while dispensing with the old, less efficient methods, and thus it embodies the essence of instrumental reason. However, this appearance of conflict belies a deeper and more significant similarity between these two movements. When we understand these movements correctly, we may see both as a kind of antidote to the destructive march of instrumental reason. In the end, both of these movements are about aesthetics—about enhancing the enjoyment of our sensory experience.
Aesthetics is the part of life that most easily escapes the clutches of instrumental reason. When we enjoy something for its aesthetic value, its function fades in importance and its efficiency is usually irrelevant. We enjoy a work’s appearance regardless of whether it has a function. Through being wholly absorbed in the object itself, art removes us, if only for a few moments, from the dominance of instrumental value and allows us to see an object or activity as having intrinsic value, as having its end in itself, instead of having value merely as a means to something else. Through continual exposure to aesthetic objects, we experience the enriching stability and persistent meaningfulness of a world in which some objects and activities call us to undivided and unconditional commitment, an entryway into a world infused with ultimate cares, where the simple delight in something has all the meaning one could want.^
A sense of wonder underwrites this undivided commitment. When we recognize that an object has value beyond its usefulness or function, we become more attuned to the allusive meanings and hidden dimensions of it. We are open to the possibility of multiple interpretations and the inexhaustible mystery of things, and we confront a reality that resists our attempts to fully understand it. As the philosopher Martin Heidegger repeatedly noted, in the production of art, reality withholds something from us, escapes our attempts to control it, and is thus a source of persistent, reoccurring intrigue and fascination. Instrumental reason buries this fascination because it encourages us to believe that the function of an object and our ability to control it exhausts its value, thus evacuating it of all mystery.
Art reminds us that we can never thoroughly master reality. It always means more than what can be said and is capable of taking on forms never previously imagined, piquing our curiosity again and again, reveling in the sheer wonder at the infinite complexity of the world. Through art we embrace our limits even while we push against them, and the material world takes a stand against complete intelligibility. All art is a vain and pointless struggle against the recalcitrance of the world, which makes its resistance felt in the struggle of the artist to impose form on it.
We can never rid ourselves of instrumental reason or the value of efficiency, nor should we. It is a rational response to human vulnerability, and has brought about much good. But the moments in which we grasp the intrinsic, noninstrumental value of things are not only moments of pleasure but also moments in which we glimpse a much different sort of world, one in which matter resists conceptualization, the hard surfaces of reality resist manipulation because they have their own capacities and developmental direction, and meaning expands beyond what can be calculated or measured. It is through the recognition of intrinsic value that reality comes to have the depth that sustains commitment and motivates genuine care, a point for which I will argue more thoroughly in chapter 5 when we look at the nature of beauty.
If this account of the value of art is correct, contemporary trends in food and wine have a similar appeal. The Slow Food/heritage/locavore movements (of which the natural wine movement is a part) acknowledge and demand that we live within the constraints of the constant and insurmountable rhythm of the seasons, the vagaries of climate and weather, and other threats that make farming hazardous and uncertain. The resistance of the world is inscribed in the flavors that reflect the unique qualities of geographical locations (terroir), the impact of weather on ripeness, and influence of climate and soil on the availability of food, all factors over which we had very limited control until the advent of modern technology. The demand to slow down and savor opens a time and space in which we can be receptive to multiple interpretations and sense the gleam of nature in its interplay with culture that is the transformation of raw materials into a meal.
But how does modernist cuisine fit this story about the limits of our control over nature? Isn’t molecular gastronomy attempting to overcome this resistance of nature to our designs? By manipulating chemical structure using the devices and techniques of modernist cuisine, food is less and less a natural object and increasingly an example of our dominance over nature. The tension between our ability to impose our will on reality and the resistance of reality to our will is right there on the plate. Do we best confront human vulnerability by preserving the past and local traditions as the Slow Food movement wishes or by changing the future as modernist cuisine advocates? The answers to life’s deepest questions lie buried in the mashed potatoes.
To answer this question, we need to explore how art in general and the food movement in particular can induce social change. Many works of art explicitly take up political themes or show examples of oppression or liberation. Picasso’s Guernica, the film Brokeback Mountain, or novels about the Holocaust are obvious examples. No doubt these works are inspiring, but I doubt that these depictions by themselves alter political events or provide us with new information about the events depicted. Instead, art operates more subtly behind the scenes, redefining what can be seen or said, who is visible and who is not. Questions about political participation involve decisions about what will count as speech and what is just noise. As French philosopher Jacques Ranciere writes, “Politics is primarily conflict over the existence of a common stage and over the existence and status of those present on it.”*8 What matters is who gets to speak. Artists give voice to people or ideas that have been marginalized. They keep memories alive, juxtapose incongruous images and make the juxtaposition seem natural, and tell stories about characters we have never met. We learn nothing new about the destruction of war from Guernica. But Picasso’s depiction of the horror of nationalist violence during the Spanish Civil War gives representation to the victims, primarily women and children, who otherwise would have disappeared from history. Art contradicts violence by abrogating the silence of its victims.
Art also provides a space in which new characters appear and are juxtaposed with the old characters and thus achieve an equality of appearance. Through the production and consumption of art, individuals change their representations within society because art defines ways of being together or being apart, of being inside or outside, in front of or in the middle of, and changes our assumptions about who or what belongs in the same space. Warhol placed an ordinary commodity, Brillo boxes, in an art museum; Brokeback Mountain placed and celebrated gay relationships within the macho world of the cowboy; the Stones juxtaposed rebellion and lascivious pleasure. Art expresses the idea that we need not endorse the identities forced upon us by the authorities by reordering the occupants of the space around us. Ranciere calls this the “partition of the sensible.’89 Artistic practices take part in the partition of the sensible insofar as they suspend the ordinary coordinates of sensory experience and reframe the network of social relationships we engage in by situating them in a different space and time, and by revising our perceptions of what is common and what is singular. The emergence of rock music in the 1960s performed many of these strange juxtapositions. The idea of a guitar hero is conceptually absurd. Yet, by embodying the militaristic, sacrificial idea of “hero” in the vain, individualistic posing of the rock guitarist, the idea that self-expression represents our deepest yearnings is placed on the cultural stage alongside religious devotion and corporate climbing. The volume at which rock music was played constructed a physical barrier that regulated the space around the emerging “hippie” community and drew a boundary across which complacency and conformism could not travel, while psychedelia threw open the vast fluidity of internal consciousness and put it on the public stage, the inside becoming outside. Aesthetic experience allows unconventional meanings and directions to emerge not by carrying messages but by reordering sensory experience.
In contemporary society, food plays a similar role. However, the partition of the sensible with regard to food reorders our sense of both time and space. In the first instance, it puts our lives outside the time frame of the production paradigm’s emphasis on efficiency. The production paradigm prescribes a certain use of our time—the hamster wheel of production and quantitative consumption that drives the frantic pace of modern life. By contrast, the Italian meal and, more generally, locavorism make visible the human in a world of corporations and prescribes a different use of our time—the time to savor the tissue of little things that sustains life’s meaning. Industrial food sends the message that there is no time for cooking or human contact, and it makes possible the opportunity to fill the day with other more “productive” activities, thus reinforcing the lack of time. It’s all about the speed up, reinforcing an industrial rhythm that will sell more products. The modern mechanisms of control work by controlling how time is perceived. Because food is so central to the organization of life, via the culture of the table that control is thwarted by disrupting our sense of time.
However, time is not the only factor of production disrupted by the food revolution. By focusing on taste and hospitality we are placed outside the space of the production paradigm and its attempt to objectify persons. The production paradigm pits one person against another in a competitive space with a strict hierarchy in which sharing goes in one direction—to the top of the organization. It is inherently authoritarian. The space of hospitality with food at its center operates differently. There is a hierarchy, the carer and the cared for, but relations of reciprocity and interchange are at its core, as described in chapter 1.
The Italian meal as imagined above is idealized, to be sure. It is not an everyday occurrence and surely not a part of every Italian citizen’s life. It is only one aspect of a complex culture, an abstraction we have sacralized as one example of the foodies’ temple. ^ Indeed, with the traditional Italian meal we have turned life into art. The enjoyment is not merely of the sensory properties of the food but also of the meaning of a way of life. The mythology, the romance, is precisely the point.
Because the art of the Italian meal is a separate form of experience, distinct from the culture of the production paradigm and the frantic rhythms of everyday life, it is not beholden to the hierarchies that constitute society. This separateness is an elaboration of a “new” form—not an actual disconnection from the community but a tension with the status quo via the use of a mythology. Art in this case suppresses its own autonomy and identifies with the mythology. Political change, after all, must not be merely sectarian but must be working toward a good life, its telos must be human happiness and the enjoyment of pleasure, and so these ideals are crucial. The appeal to tradition does refer to the past but not in the name of a status quo or deference to the authority of entrenched interests. It is opposed to the dominant trends in society that run roughshod over the values of place, particularity, and tranquility.
Yet, although art and life overlap, they must remain distinct if art is to provide a critique of life. If the distinction between art and life is collapsed, it will deprive aesthetic experience of its capacity to be a center of controversy and conflict. When we suppress the boundaries of art then anything can be art, as Warhol shows with his Brillo boxes. But when art becomes too closely identified with the everyday and its deeply ingrained habits, it no longer has the capacity to surprise. It will lack the allure and enchantment that is at the essence of art. Part of the function of art is to preserve the variety of possible sensory experiences so they can’t become routine, homogeneous, or ordinary. Thus, locavorism and the mythology of the Italian meal, which stand in here as symbols for all the sacred, traditional spaces of the food world, are not sufficient to sustain a revolution. They are always in danger of stultification, of becoming safe and pat, and worse, of being absorbed into the mainstream. If art is to be constantly updating its revolutionary role, it must remain in tension with the everyday. This is the role of modernist cuisine. Every revolutionary art needs an outside, something to unsettle the dominant forms of social change to prevent it from becoming mere repetition. Thus, in order for the food revolution to succeed, there must be constant tension between the tradition-bound, parochial, conservatism of the Slow Food/locavore movement and the innovation of modernist cuisine. The Italian meal is one sensory world; modernist cuisine quite another. It’s the tension between the two that explains food’s revolutionary promise.
How does the sensory conflict engage political energies? This issue is one that has dogged philosophical views advocating the revolutionary potential of art from Schiller to Adorno. In the case of food, however, there is a ready answer—by preserving the interest in taste as an adventure—which, as I argue in the final chapter of this book, cannot easily be assimilated to corporate interests. Locavorism provokes a break with industrial food production. But what that enables us to see is a world of flavor in the thrall of subjectivity and play. When the world of pleasure is disconnected from the production paradigm and creates its own community at least the potential for social change exists.
Thus, both the Slow Food/locavore movement and modernist cuisine, despite their opposition, have something in common. They both direct our attention to the realm of the aesthetic where we least expect to find it—in the pleasures and joys of everyday life. Therein lay their true value.
Philosophers have long considered wine and food to be too related to a function or purpose to have intrinsic value. But the fact that we eat food to satisfy nutritional requirements and drink wine to enjoy the effects of alcohol does not preclude them from having intrinsic value as well—in the absence of hunger or any desire to be inebriated, food and wine can be enjoyed for purely aesthetic reasons. The peculiar potency of wine and food as works of art lies in the fact that they are accessible to us every day. Much of day-to-day life revolves around securing, preparing, and consuming food. Thus, wine and food are commonplace enough to express the quality of ordinary life. However, when we focus on their aesthetic dimension, they achieve some distance from their practical function and need not succumb to the deadening effects of instrumental reason. Wine and food, when considered aesthetically, bring traces of the sacred to people otherwise thoroughly enmeshed in instrumental value.
Great art reveals the inexhaustible beauty of the world. But this can be experienced much more readily in a practical engagement with reality, in something as ordinary as the consumption of food or wine, rather than the abstract space of the museum or the symphony hall. The Slow Food movement is not a solution to our problems of sustainability. It is instead a call to find something sacred in our lives, something that has intrinsic value. Similarly, modernist cuisine is not merely a set of tools and practices for becoming more efficient in the kitchen. It is an attempt to make eating mysterious and intriguing and to discover sheer moments of joy in the fantastic concoctions of these remarkably creative chefs.
The aesthetic world of food and beverage—a community of taste—is the primary site of resistance, in the modern world, to the inexorable colonization of reality by instrumental reason. It remains to be seen whether this is a gathering of the tribes or a passing fad to be swept up in the rise of the machines. It is, in any case, a silent revolt that quietly cultivates the thin reed of a human kind of flourishing in the muddy bog of a dehumanized world.
It is these glimpses of the sacred in the everyday that really make life meaningful. The revolution in taste is a revolution in the tissue of little things that hold life together, which may never make the history books, but makes individual lives immeasurably better. By transforming the commonplace, art, especially the edible arts, reinforces the sacred in the profane and suffuses life with an aura of mystery visible only when the useless becomes bewitching.
