Bitter After Taste

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5S BITTER AFTER TASTE Affect, Food, and Social Aesthetics Ben Highmore Affect gives you away: the telltale heart; my clammy hands; the note of anger in your voice; the sparkle of gle in their eyes. You ‘may protest your innocence, but we both know, don't we, that who you really are, or what you really are, is going to be found inthe pumping of your blood, the quantity and quality of your perspiration, the breathless anticipation in your throat, the ‘way you can't stop yourself from grinning, the glassy sheen ‘of your eyes, Affect isthe cuckoo in the nest; the fifth colum- nists out to undermine you: your personal polygraph machine. ‘When I was growing up “affect tr were the daily business of the playground. There, in clusters of boys, ina small war zone of incipient masculinity, we goaded, teased, and baited, The open secret was to maintain minimum intensity: keep cool The job of everyone was to get a blush would do, but the main prize was getting someone to “lose it"—to go, as we never described it then, “postal.” And of course someone (but, I remember, not everyone) always did For most of us it was clear, we were simply not in control of ourselves ‘out” of someone: a ter afer Taste Sense Affects Cultural inquiry in the last dozen years or so has increasingly turned its nt be thought of as a series of awkward mate~ es, Iaugurating this interest was @ renewed enthusiasm for studies that attention toward what m privileged the body (perhaps the most awkward materiality of all) a5 a problematic locus for meaning, experience, and knowledge. While some of ofculture and a shift away from the perceived obscurities and ultea-abstractions of advanced this work heralded new concerns with the physical actual textualism, it was also (and paradoxically) criticized precisely for its blood: lessness: “the body that eats, that works, that dies, that is afraid—that body just isn't there” (Bynum 1995, 1). The body, it seemed, was all too often to be found in the body of the text. Yet a body free of the trappings (and traps) of discourse, of culture, might not be much of a human body at all. The sense of between a creaturely body (bones, gristle, mucus bile, blood, and so oon) and the body reflected back through metaphor or other figural elements plays out a dualism that has long cas its shadows over philosophy. Of course, ight be possible to simply say that, yes, these are the kinds of creatures we are: tensi ina less troubled vein, chen suffering from toothache, we are likely to ‘make mountains out of molchills In the demand for the concrete (a concreteness sophisticated and com- plex enough to be desirable to minds drilled in the rigors of poststructural- ism and the like) cultural inquiry turned toward a materialism where a body would be understood as a nexus of finely interlaced force fields. In this essay I want to draw on this approach, especially on the critical studies of emo- tions and affects, of perception and the management of attention, and on Studies of the senses, the sensorial, and the human sensorium. More par- ticularly I want to build on the intuition that cultural expe 4 densely woven entanglement of all these aspects. Indeed the proposition that drives this essay is that the sticky entanglements of Substances and feelings, of matter and affect are central to our contact with the world Moreover, I want to argue here that these entanglements don’t require criti- cal untang nce is often. ing (the scholarly and bureaucratic business of sorting categories and filing phenomena); instead what is required is a critically entangled contact with affective experience. This means getting in among the murky connections between fabrics and feelings, between the glutinous and the sulfa (for example). Work on the senses showed immediately the difficulty of establishing and 49 Ben Highmore studying discrete sensual, experiential, and cognitive modes (a world of touch separable from a world of sight, for instance). The neurological condi: tion offsynesthesia (where one cognitive pathway bleeds into and triggers perceived as color) offers an extreme case ofa more general condition of sensual interconnection. Eating food, for instance, might necessarily privilege taste, yet to concentrate on taste to the exclusion of other senses means to fail to recognize that the experience of eating is also dependent on the haptic sensitivity of tongues and mouths, on our olfactory abilities, and on sight and sound (the cacoph. ony of crunching might actually be part of the “flavor” of pot example), More pertinent though would be the cross-modal networks that ks between perception, affect, the senses, and emotions. Here the swork that emerges out of the various body-oriented fields of cultural inquiry might require an overarching umbrella to fully attend to the more general condition of synesthesia pertaining to human subjects. Here senses and affect bleed into one another. This is where every flavor has an emotional resonance (sweetness, sourness, bitterness). Here the bio-cultural arena of disgust (especially disgust of ingested or nearly ingested foods) simulta- neously invokes a form of sensual perception, an affective register of shame and disdain, as well as bodily recoil. When emotions are described by flavors, though, are these simply metaphorical conventions? Or does the emotional condition of bitterness, for instance, release the same gastric response as the ingestion of bitter flavors? How do we make our way from one modality to another? {In common English usage the words designating affective experience sit awkwardly on the borders of the material and the immaterial, the physical and the metaphysical: we are moved by a sentiment; our feelings are burt; ‘am fouched by your presence. The interlacing of sensual, physical experience (here, the insistent reference to the haptic realm—touch, feel, move) with the passionate intensities of love, say, or bitterness, makes it hard to imagine ‘untangling them, allotting them to discrete categories in terms of their ‘physicality or their ideational existence. The bruising that I experience when 1 am humiliated in front ofa loved one is intractably both literal and meta- ‘phorical: I am bruised, I sit slightly shumped, more weary and wary, yet this Druising also reaches inside, I feel internally battered. Could you possibly “feel” that you were in love if you couldn't also feel your beating heart another, resulting in, for instance, sound bei 0 chips, for register tragedy if didn't experience rivulets of bing into your throat or your palms sweat? Would I really be moved bya 18 trickling down my cheeks? The Biter after Taste cold, acrid sweat that runs down my side, the bundle of bees nesting in my stomach tell me Lam anxious. The wind that and gnaws at my bones with its bitter chill is a memory ofa foretaste of a terrible coldness that is the feeling of isolation, homesickness, alienation, despair. The register of hot and cold, of warmth and frost, of passion an ites, that gets under my skin ispassion is an emotional and affective register. Itis also, as is immediately i suggested, a register of sensorial perception, and sensual expression. Social Aesthetics ‘The umbrella term that I have in mind for cross-modal investigation is the term “aesthetics;” more specifically (and as a way of avoiding a certain amount of confusion) “social aesthetics” The story of aesthetics is not well enough known to avoid having to repeat it (however briefly) again here. ‘Aesthetics emerged as a named arena of philosophy in the mid-eighteenth century in the work of Alexander Baumgarten. For Baumgarten aesthetics was the field of sensate perception—the world perceived through what he called the “lower cognitive faculties” (Baumgarten 20008, 48). Baumgar- king simply remaindered whole territories of life. ‘Terry Eagleton vividly describes this territory as “nothing less than the whole of our sensate life together—the business of affections and aversions, of how the world strikes the body on its sensory surfaces, ofthat which takes root in the gaze and the guts and all that arises from our most banal, biological insertion into the world” (Eagleton 1990, 13). Aesthetics, in it initial im- petus, is primarily concerned with material experiences, with the way the sensual world greets the sensate body, and with the affective forces that are fsenerated in such meetings. Aesthetics covers the terrain of both “the vehe- ‘ment passions” (fear, grief, rapture, and so on) and the minor and major affects and emotions (humiliation, shame, envy, irritation, anxiety, disdain, Surprise, and so forth). It is attuned to forms of perception, sensation, and attention (distraction, spectacle, concentration, absorption, for exampl the world ofthe senses (haptic, aura, gustatory, olfactory, and visual experi- ence}; and to the body (as gestalt and in pieces).? Most importantly and most Suggestively, it would be concerned with the utter entanglements of all of these elements, Anyone interested in the history of aesthetics must be faced with this odd ‘Predicament: how does a form of inquiry that was once aimed at the entire er Highmore creaturely world end up as specialized discourse about fine art? How did an about the affects, the body, and the senses end up fixated on only one tiny area of sensual life—beauty and the sublime? What happens to fear, disappointment, contentment, smell, touch, boredom, frus tration, weariness, hope, itchiness, backache, trepidation, and the mass of hardly articulated feelings and moods that saturate our social, sexual, p. cal, and private lives? And aren't these the elements (rather than beauty and the sublime) that fill most of our lives most of the time? The answer is right there in aesthetic discourse from the start and it takes two forms. First is the a priori assumption that certain experiences are simply better than others ambitious curi (thus beauty will win out over boredom each and every time because beauty is seen as edif iplifting whereas boredom would simply register asthe failure of self-discipline and moral vigilance (“the devil makes work for idle hands”) Second is the difficulty of speaking and writing about creaturely, experiential through exemplification (an exemplifca tion that is most often provided by art) Itis this second characteristic of aesthetic di excey ourse that results in the misdirection of aesthetic, directing itto become simply synonymous with at theory. For Baumgarten the worry is that “impressions received from the senses, fantasies, emotional distur- bances, etc. are unworthy of philosophers and beneath the scope of their consideration” (Baumgarten 2000a, 490). Being generally untrustworthy and unedifying, this creaturey life has to be transformed, and in the end (but also in the beginning) improvement—where the improvement is aimed at sensation, sentimer and perception. One way of pursuing such improvement is via exemplary acts of sensual appropriateness: thus poetry becomes an example of the striving toward sensual perfection (Baumgarten 2000b). Here the artwork is a mor is what aesthetics becomes—a form of moral lesson, an aesthetic example to be mimicked and developed for the pursuit of the good and the true. The almost complete suppression ofthe fullness of human cre ly life within much aesthetic discourse and the concomitant obsessive concentra- tion on the artwork deserve more space than I can give them here.‘ In one 3 scientists today find them- selves having to turn to novels and films when they want to explore the world 3, $0 the study of aesthetics has engaged with the poets and the painters as providers ofthe most useable materials, ‘There are, of course, many forms of inquiry that use artworks for under- sense itis an unexceptional story. Just as 50 of emotions, affects, and sensu pinning their theories. Freudian psychoanalysis with its reliance on classical rafter Taste myth is only the most famous. Yet the situation of aesthetics is singular here: if psychoanalysis had given u y ubiquitous and ordinary and decided instead that it would be most profit: ably found only in the work of novelists and painters, then psychoanalysis would be approaching though, lives or dies on its ability to talk to our common existence—even if this existence is often experienced in the lonely grip of individualism. Aesthetic discourse, certainly in its classic period (in the work of Kant, for instance), perpetually slides between actuality and the artwork. For Kant itis always first and foremost nature and our experience of nature that will furnish the setting for experiences ofthe sublime and the beautiful. Bu it is also the artwork that will rally concretize this experience into something for aesthetic appreciation, Thus while Kant always starts out with an engage- rent with nature, itis in the end the artwork that will offer the firmest assurance of the longevity (and value) of such an experience. This sense that the artwork completes sensual experience (resolves it into more satisfying and morally superior forms) isa central tenet within aesthetic discourse, and it immediately suggests that there is something generally incomplete and unsatisfactory about day-to-day experience (which, surely, is often the case) But from this perspective aesthetics can only be interested in those forms of ‘experience that are available to be resolved and completed (the meal that achieves gastronomic heights; the portrait that dis sitter; the story that resolves the problematic encounter), Aesthetic saisfac- tion (in its dominant mode) is satisfaction in the end form of a process, rather than in the messy informe of the ongoing-ness of process. Much of what co yet. forall that, tion, irritation, restlessness—it is impossible to imagine an artwork that completes these affects into satisfying forms (without abandoning the speci- ficity ofthe affect), because the character of these affects is dissatisfaction and incompletion (irritation works by de-completion, so to speak). Beauty, as a responsive, creaturely register, is favored by aesthetics because of its ‘moralizing mission (it addresses betterment) and because itis seen to reside on the idea that the unconscious was soci situation of aesthetics. Psychoanal Is the essence of the in sal ized patterns and shapes, proportions or ratios, narrative forms and. tonal sequences, and so on, So if “aesthetics” is going to work as an umbrella term for heuristic inquiry into affect and its interlacing of sense perception and bodily dispen- sation then it will have to work hard to disconnect itself from the tra on of 3 Ben Highmore aesthetic thinking that has remained bound to the moral mission of the 10. countertradition of aesthetic thinking (from Georg Simmel through to Jacques Ranciére) as wel countertradition that might otherwise seem to bbe almost completely situated within the evaluative tradition of aestheties artwork and its evaluation. It will mean connect as recruiting voices to t (John Dewey for one) While certain forms of aesthetic thinking will have to be jettisoned, other aesthetic terms should become newly resonant. Taste ‘The term “taste? often center stage in evaluative aesthetic discourse, vividly registers the imbrication of sense and status, of discernment and disdain, of the physical and the ideational, The very mo describe refined and discerning choice (and the social status that might go with it) should alert us to the way that bodily sensorial life is implied in such judgments from the start. Given the pri ing and seeing, but also touch) in the history of Western thought seem that the very idea of “taste” to signify discernment is already flirting ‘with distaste by invoking the “lower” senses (smell and taste), One aspect of this distribution of sense (both cognition and sensation) is the way that cognition (“ah Isees” “Theat you”), whereas “taste” is mobilizing sensorial realms that are, inthe 3 dictates, seeing and hearing are invoked in matters of ide end, impervious to ratio “Taste” isa perilous business. It is hedged in from all sides by the physical possibility of revulsion, disgust, and disdain. Who can be certain of their taste? As David Hume made clear in the mid-eighteenth century: “We are apt to call barbarous whatever departs widely from our own taste and apprehen- sion; but soon find the epithet of reproach retorted on us” (Hume 2008,134)- But if we are socially vulnerable in our discernment, that vulnerability is intensified by an affective pull that makes taste matter in very specific ways. After all distaste is not simply disagreement: even in its mildest form it, involves the wrinkling of noses, turning the head away, and so on. Atits most ‘extreme, distaste is revolt, physical nausea, vomiting, and retching. In ordi- nary circumstances distaste is signaled through a register of affects sliding from condescension to disdain to scorn and contempt: how could you pos- sibly have imagined that this disgusting item would be appealing to me? Disdain, then (as the most general mode of showing distaste), is one way of, inflicting affective pain, and it is most effective when emotional interest is Bitter after Taste involved end where approbation is sought. Disdain works to push away and to ruin simultaneous) Jonathan Franzen’s ambitious novel, The Corrections (2001), provides, ‘among other things, an emotional vivisection of a white, midwestern, mid- dle-clas, elderly couple, and the more sophisticated and metropolitan lives of their children. A sprawling novel that chillingly portrays disintegrating imental states a5 well as international financial networks, The Corrections is links between mentalities and markets. While none of the characters are conventionally sympathetic, one of the least sympatheti- cally drawn characters is the mother, Enid. Taste matters for Enid; and it imalters so considerably because she is never quite certain of her taste, or rather, of the status of her taste in the wider world. Within the confines of hher home she can wield taste as a weapon in the constant war of her disap- pointing marriage. Her husband, who has retired and is su‘fering from Parkinson's disease, has bought his first piece of furniture, a vast blue leather armchair. The chair provokes Enid to the point where she redecorates their sitting room so as to have an excuse for expelling the chai: constantly weavi Enid looked at the chair. Her expression was merely pained, no more. “I never liked that chair” ‘This was probably the most terrible thing she could have said to Al- fied. The chair was the only sign he'd ever given of having personal jion of the future, Enid’s words filled him with such sorrow—he felt such pity for the chair, such solidarity with it, such astonished grief at its betrayal~that he pulled off the dropcloth and sank into its arms and fell asleep. (Franzen 2001, (Franzen’s book is, as you might have gathered, something of black comedy) Here taste is more than cultural capital, its cultural power played Out on a violently affective plane. This chair sits uncomfortably with other chairs for me it echoed the chair inthe US. TV comedy Frasier, where a sophisticated Seattle psychiatrist (Fraser) lives wit hisblue-ollar,ex-patice oficer dad in a swanky, tastefully designed apartment. Marti, the dad, has one piece of furniture, an ill-repsired, sickly green Barcalounger. The chair sits there na field of intense affect, constantly puncturing Frasier’ aesthetic realm (Highmore 2001), Enid knows how to use taste to wound because she s constantly aware of how it would be possible for certain people (mos specifically her daughter Denise) to completely undo her through taste and distaste: “Enid had, true Bs Bon Highmore nough, had fun at Dean and Trish’s party, and she'd wished that Denise had been there to see for herself how elegant it was. At the same time, she was afraid that Denise would not have found the party elegant at all, that Denise would have picked apart its specialness until there was nothing left but ordinariness. Her daughter’ taste was a dark spot in Enid’ vision, a hole in her experience through which her own pleasures were forever threatening to leak and dissipate” (Franzen 2001, 13). Denise can wield such power in matters of taste, not simply because she has left the Midwest for the seemingly more sophisticated pastures of the Eastern Seaboard, but because she has become the head chef at Philadel phia’s coolest restaurant. Haute cuisine, even in the pseudo-rustic casual elegance of its contemporary performance, is tastefulness in a pristine but not simply with discernment. Rather dogmatic state. The strong relationship between food and taste based on the metaphoric association of “ta food is the sine qua non of taste's affective function. Not only does food provide so many opportunities for the production of shame and humiliation jgnorance and squeamishness (not being sulficiently food) as well as biological uncouthness (not having a such production because food is orchestrated around the body (its surfaces, its interiors, its ingestions). The crumpled shame experienced by the protagonist of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar is occa sioned by the lass humiliation she feels when she thinks a bowl of water and petals, provided for cleaning diners’ fingers, isa very light soup (Plath 2001). She feels this so strongly because her “mistake” involves her mouth and her alimentary sel. ‘Tasteisan orchestration ofthe sensible, a way of orderingand demeaning, of giving value and takingit away. On the one handit seems to occupy a thin level of culture (the preoccupation of snobs, gourmands, and the lke); on another it will seem as the very basis of culture, not simply its system of values but the way that set of values gets under your skin and into your bones. ‘While it might seem an overstatement to suggest that groups might goto war cover tate disputes, iis hard to imagine that what we term culture is no the end (and endlessly) driven by the peculiar admix of affect, sensual per~ ception, and bio-power that is instanced by taste. From one angle at least, social struggle is struggle through, in, and about taste. But itis statement reeks of “bad taste.” of a glib condescension whereby desperate economic survivals reduced to aesthetics I only need to think ofthe disdain that greets ‘many forms of popular democracy to think it has some pertinence Biter after Taste smogenesis and Ethos In late 1955, with one eye probably on the tise of fascism in Europe and cother on the role that anthropology has played as an arm of colonial ad- ministration, Gregory Bateson outlined a research project forthe study of schismogenesis|Schismogenesis (the cultural processes arising from the meeting of disinet cultural groups rear Tations) that, often a result inthe intensification of is clear that cultural and in forms of “ap- ” he isin 935—particulary interested in, and aware of, “drastic disturbances which follow contacts between profoundly different communities” (Bateson 1935, 179). For Bateson the study of schismogenesis proximate eq) would bean essential project for a class of expert so ‘would be to inform political administrators. Schismogenesis is Bateson puzzling to understand how and why groups don't undergo some sort of cultural osmosis when they come into contact with one another, why cultural mixing doesn't result in “melting pot” cul: tures, and why distinction and rivalry are often intensified through contact. Of course, he is not naive enough to forget that cultural contact is neat always forged under conditions of violent domination, but he is also enough of an anthropologist to have examples of cultures where antagonistic inter sr0up contact is an essential element of theic general life-world. Schismo- Benesis is Bateson’ initial attempt to bring a form of systems theory to bear Om social life. For Bateson there are two (often overlapping) forms of schis- 'mogenesis: symmetrical schismogenesis and complementary schismogene. sis, Acculturation often leads “toward more intense rivalry in the case of symmetrical schismogenesis, or toward increasing differentiation of role in complementary schismogencsis” (Bateson 1958, 285). After the Second ‘World War the spectacular proliferation of nuclear weapons by the protago- nists inthe cold war offered a vivid example of symmetrical schismogenesis Generally symmetrical schismogenesis occurred and occurs between two Separate units that encounter one another (nation-states, tribal groups, and © forth). Complementary schismogenesis is more ubiquitous: Bateson sees it occurring between genders within communities, and between the old and the young; and we could see tas a form of class distinction, where class dif- ferences intensify at moments of close proximity. In contemporary mul scientists whose job it tural society complementary schismogenesi is perhaps even more visible, Ben Highore Distine ns between symmetrical and complementary schismogenesis are hard to maintain for long: itis hard, for instan« lke the cold war as not intensifying difference (ideological and cultural) at the same time as rivalry. Similarly the idea that forms of complementary schismogene- sis don't also entail forms of rivalry is difficult to s to see someth in. What is more important, though, is the way Bateson understands the conditions necessary for schismogenesis to occur: after: is perfectly possible for schismogene- sis not to occur. For Bateson schismogenesis is dependent on the particular “ethos” ofa group. While we are used to thinking of a “group ethos” asa fairly innocuous ethic (fairness, for instance), Bateson means something at once more intricate and more expansive by the term. But even from its ordinary sense you can see how an ethos of superciliousness, for instance, that two groups might share would result in schismogenesis while an ethos of sharing and empathy might not. For Bateson the ethological approach is premised on the idea “that we may abstract from a culture a certain systematic aspect called ethos which we may define as the expression of a culturally stan- dardised system of organisation ofthe instincts and emotions ofthe in (Bateson.1958,118, emphasisin original) Ina world more alertto diferenceit right be that we would want to temper the sense of standardization being offered here, but the > ofthe instincts and emotions” might wel fit with the sense of social aesthetics Lam keen to suggest Bateson goes on to describe “ethos” as a “definite tone of appropriate behaviour” as “a definite set of sentiments towards the rest of the world,” as “an emotional background,” and so on. This, as Bateson claims, is an ab- straction, an abstraction based on the purview of the social scientist, yet within its abstract surface lie real concrete elements, ways of doing (hugs, handshakes, kisses, slaps, and the like), forms of perceiving (social recogni- tion and misrecognition of class, caste, gender, sexuality, and so on), affec: tive intensities (affordances of anger, uses of humiliation, and so forth), and more! Ethos might well best be approached as something like tonality, or feeling, but its polyphonic dimension must be continually stressed. Ethos, 10 borrow a term from Jacques Ranciére, could be thought of asthe “distribu tion of the sensible” (le partage du sensible): “the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience. It is a del tation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and stakes of politics as a form of experience” (Rancitre 2004, 13). Ethos, then, would be the orchestration of perception, sensorial culture, affective intensities, and so on: more perti- Bitter ater Taste nently it wll be the interlacing ofthese. Forms and techniques of personal hygiene or food preparation, for instance, might differ between two cultures. Such differences might be the sit of feiction when two cultutes meet or need to coexist, From this might come a rudimentary understanding of schismo- genesis. Ethos (or social aesthetics) allows you to see why and how a particu- lar style of washing matters; it links the perception of cleanliness and di purity and impurity, to orchestrations of shame and comfort, to resonances of other sensual worlds, and on to the social ontology of bodies. Orwell At the same time as Gregory Bateson was undertaking fieldwork among the Iatmel people in New Guinea, and while he was writing about schismo- genesis and ethos back in Cambridge, the journalist and novelist George Orwell was undertaking his own empirical study of schismogenesis. In the late 19205 and early 19308 in London and Paris, and again in 1936 in the industrial towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire, Orwell plunged himselfinto a world of poverty and dirt, The books of this period, Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier, were experiments in the limits and possibilities of ethos. To write these books meant sleeping rough in London, working in terrible cafés in Paris, and living in dirty lodgings in Wigan, While Down and Out in Paris and London was provoked by Orwell’s own poverty, The Road to Wigan Pier was commissioned by a publisher. Yet in some ways both books and the experiences that they retold were a response to his aesthetic auto-critique. Orwell returned to England after working for five yeats as a colonial police officer in Burma. He returned shameful of the despotism he had willingly taken part in; he was haunted, he said, by “innu erable remembered faces—faces of prisoners in the dock, of men waiting in the condemned cells, or subordinates I had bullied and aged peasants I had snubbed, of servants and coolies I had hit with my fist in moments of rage” (Orwell 1975, 129). Orwell recognized himself as divided between ethos (which was thoroughly bound by class) and what Bateson called “eidos”— the rational, logical, reasoning self (which was thoroughly convinced by Socialism). In his own words he was “both a snob and a revolutionary.” The Road to Wigan Pier is directed at the realization that rational argument tisunderstands the hold that ethos has over each and every one of us. In describing the extensiveness of his own class ethos Orwell sees it as deter- ‘mining the very way he moves his body: ng It is easy for me to say that 1 want to get rid of class-distinctions, but nearly everything I think and do is a result of class-distinctions. All my notions—notions of good and evil, of pleasant and unpleasant, of funny and serious, of ugly and beautiful—are essentially middle-class noti: iy taste in books and food and clothes, my sense of honour, my table ‘manners, my turns of speech, my accent, even the characteristic move: ments of my body, are the products of a special kind of upbringing and a special niche about half-way up the sacial hierarchy. (On The experiments in rough living were undertaken because Orvell was faced with the evidence of class schismogenesis even (perhaps especially) among those who rationally wanted to see the end of cass divisions. The Road to Wigan Pier is an odd and uncomfortable read. For one thing the feeling of ethological schismogenesis is performed through the address of the text: the book is only addressed to those outside the working class Similarly, while Orvell is undertaking what might best be thought of as st, the reader is constantly being implicitly solicited on the matter of tate (this is disgusting, isnt i), a solicitation that is designed to provoke the very reactions that he discusses as being so problematic for a progressive politic. eriments in d ‘The mapping of ethos is undertaken along its contours and these con- tours have only one tone—revulsion. Reading across Orwell's writing, par ticularly his journalism and memoirs, you are faced with a figure that not only finds revulsion in others but is dearly compelled by sel-disgust? especially the boarding school he attended from the ages of eight to thirteen, taught him ethos through the deep pedagogy of shame and hum ation, and in this way internalized his feelings of self-disgust? It is the pedagogy of disgust that is such an elemental figure in Orwell work and provides a more effective class investment than the mere ideological beliefs that are usually associated with social class: “It may not greatly matter if the average middle-class person is brought up to believe that the working classes are ignorant, lazy, drunken, boorish, and dishonest it is when he is brought up to believe that they ate dirty that the harm is done, And in my childhood ‘we were brought up to believe that they were dirty. Very early in life you acquired the idea that there was something subtly repulsive about a working class body; you would not get nearer to it than you could help” (Orwell 975, 2). This then might be both the starting point and conclusion of Orwell’s isgust experiment” In between is the work of encounter. Tebecomes obvious that Orwell, in The Road to Wigan Pier, has not gone early! Biter afer Taste out to find an average working-class Wigan family to lodge with, He has gone out to find an exceptionally disgusting family to lodge with: these ate the Brookers. The Brookers run both a lodging house and a “tripe shop.” The shop has dead fies in the window and beetles crawling around the tripe. Tripe isthe lining ofa cow's stomachs itis cheap, nutritious, and notorious for its indigestible texture and the length of time required for cooking it. Mars. Brooker is monstrously overweight and confined to a sofa, where she cats gargantuan meals and wipes her mouth with scraps of newspaper that she leaves lying around. Mr. Brooker does most ofthe work, which includes serving the lodgers food with filthy hands (bread always comes with dark fingerprints on its surface), Chamber pots are always full and remain under the kitchen table during meals, Both the Brookers complain incessantly, and their general bitterness adds to the disgust ofthe scene. Affect, sensorial ex- perience, and perception congregate most particularly around Mr. Brooker and his bitterness: “In the mornings he sat by the fire with a tub of filthy water, peeling potatoes at the speed of a slow-motion picture. I never saw anyone who could peel potatoes with quite such an air of brooding resent- ‘ment. You could see the hatred of this ‘bloody woman’s work; as he called it, fermenting inside him, a kind of bitter juice. He was one of those people who can chew their grievances lke a cud” (Orwell 1975, 1). ness is what feeds Mr. Brooker, his sense of injustice, his spite (he a cow). But itis also bitterness that seems to feed off Mr. Brooker: at one point Orwell describes Mr. Brooker’s sense of injustice as a ‘worm living in his bowels. Mr. Brooker’s potato peeling seems to infuse the food with bitterness (clearly all of the meals were indescribably revolting), and the sense of this work being an infringement of gender roles further intensifies the bitterness. Orwell didn’t need to stay with the Brookers. They are representative neither ofthe class that Orwell is looking at nor of the lodgings available in Wigan. Orwell’ disgust experiment is, in the end, aimed directly at him The bitterness that drives Mr. Brooker mimes the biterness that drives Orwell and is most evident when he is writing about his own childhood humiliations, What starts out a8 an investigation of complementary schis mogenesis (the intensifying of difference through class distinction) turns out to be symmetrical schismogenesis—where mutual bitterness isthe affective ingredient that drives class division. Orwell's bitterness is, in the end, self- feflesive and itis that that proves the only posible way out of the strangle- ‘Own ethos. To get there required a season in hell. Ben Highmore Vindaloo While disgust, disdain, and repulsion might evidence the borderlan ethos and the most fertile grounds for the work of schismogenesi | think, be wrong to think of schismogenesis as only taking place as form of rejection, Schismogenesis also takes place (more awkwar intense, sensual enthusiasm. Voracious eating, especially of food experi- in forms of series starring Sanjeev Bhaskar, Kulvinder Ghir, and Meera Syal, spoofed the culture of aggressive relish by transforming the stereotypical scene of restau- lads” Their sketch “Going for an Eng by mimicking UK. cinema advertising of the 1970s (by using badly ed and heavily scratched images), urging custome the authentic taste of England right staurant in Bombay fo side the restaurant a raucous group of Indians is getting ready t0 order. When they ask themselves why they come here every Friday, one of rs should be endlessly pati sat of anything to do with, ture (food culture, in ps that they should be racist but in an offhand manner rather than confrontationally; that the customers should order the hottest dish on the menu and not balk at the customers should carry on vociferously drinking alcohol. Actuality is ‘usually more complex than myth, This is Javed, who is remembering a inspecified) when he owned a restaurant in Bradford (probably during the late 1970s and into the 19805) He is remembering one particular night when a customer demanded a particularly strong curry: customers should be jciness; that ater He was accompanied by a group of friends, He asked [the] waiter for a vindalu dish. I was listening to him. I went to my chef and asked him to sake a special vindalu dish for him. You know a vindalu pouring lemon juice over lots of green c strong and bitter. So we gave him the that the dish was not hot enough. I was astonished. I asked bring back the dish. Then I poured a big tablespoon full of chillies. My chef and other persons started to say, “Oh uncle! Are you mad! Do you going to die” I swear I put as well. I added lemon juice as well because garlic is also hot, So when he was eating ‘ends were laughing at him. After finishing his meal he came towards the counter. He was completely wet wi asked who had cooked that dish. I pushed my chef backwards because I thought he might fight. You know it was one o'clock in the morning. I te his sweat, He shook hands with me and cold me that icha strong dish in his entre life. He told me that he (ing that dish. And finally he thanked me very much, 1 told him that it was alright. But Son you go to your home tonight and then yo ugh). He came back after two weeks and asked me give me that poison again.” Then I asked him who had told him to eat those vindalu dishes, I mean T chillies he had never eaten had really enjoyed: that these were not even our own wards. These jould have been used in a way that these dishes tasted mild and touches of humor, flavors and feelings are knotted to- ether in complex and contradictory ways; pleasure and pain, politeness and. we. The le of social aesthetics at its most entangled. At a basic the tale ofa male cus ily challenge of immense propo: le animosity in either the victory or the dete: there is clearly enough insens f the customer for the threat of violence, The food itself has Waiters and the restaurateur to fe 13 Ben Highmore become a form of aggression (which seems to be a source of sorrow for the restaurateur, though he isthe one telling the tale) and it is “spice” that in the end defeats the customer. How would we unpick this scene to make it understandable as a scene of schismogenesis, of social aesthetics? At one level I think “unpicking” is the last thing that is required. The affective density of this scene, what makes it resonate so awkwardly, isthe threading of such intense gustatory relish, with 1 of the spices, with the bodily effects of copious perspiration. What though is the mood of this scene, what sits tone? I think (and of course this is merely speculation) that it is necessarily multi-tonal the almost nuclear bur No doubt there isa vector of bitterness-aggression that drives this gustatory relish. Within the general (and mythic) culture of this scene the potential ass. While South Asian restaurants and takeaways in Britain are often run on the basis of self: racist inflection is played out across gender and exploitation (whereby both owners and waiters earn minimum wage or less, and only earn money by working much longer hours than the customary forty hours a week), they signify as part of entrepreneurial and aspirational culture, For many working-class Anglo-Celtic British, eating an “Indian ‘may well be experienced through the mottled glass of class envy. For this vector the masculinity ofthe restaurant (most ofthe South Asian restaurants in the United Kingdom are run by Muslims whose heritage is Bengali, Ban- sladeshi, or Pakistani, and most are run exclusively by men) andits status as both restaurant and affordable would be crucial. Yet the bitterness-aggression vector might not be working alone. Across this, and driving gustatory relish in another direction, might be a vector animated by xenophilia-openness. Is this vector harder to substantiate? And if so, why would that be? Ambiguity surrounds the choice of the dish vin- aloo, Mythically itis the most violent of dishes, the one that isthe “stron- gest” But ifthe association is that spiciness is equated with Indian-ness, then the more spicy the more “Indian.” Vindaloo is a working-class choice (proof of an unsubtle palate), butts also the choice most outward looking (within this logic, at least). Bateson acknowledged that ethos was achieved through pedagogy (the training of the senses, of affect, ofthe orchestration of aes- ‘thetic life), But this also means that change of ethos requires sensual, affec- tive pedagogy. The Indian restaurant, the be driven by bitterness, but he might also be a learner: a very strict autodidact, willing to undergo sensual realign ment as quickly as possible. is always a scene of sensual pedagogy. This customer might wel Biter ater Taste ‘And Polities? this essay I have been promoting an attentiveness to affect throug ‘wider lens of social aesthetics. In doing this I was keen to emphasize the connections between affect, sensual and sensorial culture, perception, and so on. Occasionally I have hinted at the longer tradition involved in thinking about the aesthetics of social life; and once or twice I have offered concrete ‘examples ofthis tradition (Bateson, and in a different vein, Orwell) Bate son's term for the dense weave of aesthetic propensities that might be shared (et some level) by a group is “ethos” Other writers have tried out different terms. For Ruth Benedict, for instance, it was the “pattern” or configuration, of culture that mattered; for an ongoing French tradition, include Marcel Mauss and Pierre Bourd cultural disposition has been “habitus”"* This social aesthetic work has provided some wonderfully fleshy sociologys it has also at times offered tit, ‘mechanistic, and overly normative accounts of lively culture. A commitment entanglement is hard to sustain for long and harder still to shape into something approaching academic conclusions. But demic payoff for soci ich would the term for this wider sense of 10 deseri aesthetics might seem, at times, ambiguous and uneven, the political utility of such an approach must seem even more dubious. In the world of affect, of social aesthetics, is there a place for pol Clearly if there is it wouldn't be one that could hitch its flag straightfor- wardly to a sense of determinable outcomes. For a start, the complexity of these intermingling registers seems to guard against predictable effects and alfects,Ifpolitis is envisaged as a form of rational persuasion for progressive ‘ends, say, then the realm of social aesthetics might seem to be a nificant hindrance for it. In Orwell's writing it almost seems as if ethos is an impos- sible foe, @ prison house that can accommodate you but from which you ‘an’t escape. This is the rationale of his argument. Yet the performance of the Work and the performance of the life suggest something else: the transfor- ‘mation of ethos through experiments in living, Here politics is a form of experiential pedagogy, of constantly submitting your sensorium to new sen- sual worlds that sit uncomfortably within your ethos, There is hope here: Social aesthetics points to the mutability and dynamism of ethos and habi- ‘ts, as well as their conservatism, Just as ire is no necessary progeessivism 'm this realm there is no essential defensive resistance either. The vindaloo ater (whether he likes it or not) is engaged in a form of sensorial pedagogy: as Bend whether his lessons reaffirm his 108 or expand it in empathetic directions is hard to tell Itseems clear though that if our “affect horizons” are the result of deep ped thetic realms of communities would need to champion an affective counter- pedagogy. What would this look like? If this p ing up the affective, sensorial tuning and retuning of the social body—then it would need to be exorbitant. But it would also need to reverberate at the level of the everyday. You could imagine such an approach politicizing school dinners in a way that wasn't simply dedicated to the instrumentalism of nutrition, but oriented to the communicative pedagogy of multicultural food. This would be a modest, everyday politics, a politics ofthe gut as much as the mind, oriented more toward ethos than eidos. ogys then an affective polities that wanted to expand the aes- s was dedicated to open- Notes See, for instance, Feher, Nad, 2. For contemporary work in 3. Fora recent addition to theliterature, see He 44 There are exceptions, and exceptions too numerous to mention here. Feminist aesthetic engagement has been much more attentive to our creature lie ee for ce, Armstrong 2000, 5 See Simmel 968, Rancitre 2004, and Dewey 1934 6 For Bateson’ discussion of ethos asa problematic term, see Bateson 1972, 73-87. 7 or evidence of this, sce Miller 1997. Miller quite rightly dedicates a chapter 10 Orwell in his book on disgust and shows the complexity of Orwell's disgust. 't indebted to Miller on this, 8. See Orwell19s2 for an account of his early schoo years orchestrated through hui ation, shame, and disgust 9 Ahmad Jamal: ethnogrephie study of food consumption in Bradford (U.K.) was undertaken in the mid-1990s with informants from British Pakistani and Bangls~ desi and Anglo-Celtic communities here isnot the space here to provide a full account ofthe class dimensions ofthe Bri 1 and its reception. A history of this dasporic cuisine and its various clas inflections canbe pieced together from the following source ‘Choudhury 1993, Collingham 2005, Monroe 2005, and Visram 2002, 1 See Benedict 1934, Bourdiew 1977, and Mauss 2006, for relevant work. Cleary this far from being a homogenous tradition; nonetheless the potential and problems that 1 would want to point at here do run through most work that has tried to gather together the threads of living culture and speak about ther ata general level. 1 would argue that eritial inquiry into cultural affect tends in two directions on the ‘one hand thete is a centripetal tendency to draw all the threads together to form & knot-on the other hand more specialized work has moved centrifugal, untangling 002, Ngai 2005, and, - Roazen 2007. uth Asan restau Biter ater Taste 57 these threads and isolating particular strands. Research in this aea fel the pl ofthese centrifugal and centripetal forces. The idea of stressing “entanglemet is essay is my attempt to mitigate these forces. Benedict, Bourdieu, and Mauss navigate between these forces as they mave from concrete specificity to theo abstraction. The abi inconsistently. ial visible in this work, THE AFFECT THEORY READER Edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS Durham & London 2010

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