“You’re Eating Too Fast!” On Disequality and an Ethos of Convivium*

* Versions of this paper were presented at the Trent University Philosophy Society (Peterborough, Canada), the Canadian Society for Italian Studies International Conference (Trieste, Italy), and at “The Politics of Food, Taste and Time” panel of the 2006 meeting of the American Political Science Association (Philadelphia, USA). I would like to thank Jane Bennett, Bonnie Honig, Patchen Markell and John McCormick for their comments, criticisms and for agreeing to participate on an extremely convivial APSA panel. In this regard my gratitude also goes to Werlen Hansjakob, the Philadelphia Slow Food Convivium leader, for providing victuals. This essay was written with generous support from the Canada Research Chairs program and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Standard Research Grant.

Abstract

One of the most powerful of all political gestures is an aesthetic one: the divisions of the senses that determine what counts as a legitimate political claim. Accompanying such gestures are assumptions about the correspondences between a sense organ, acts of perception and the making of sense. This essay explores these aesthetico‐political concerns by asking the following question: is there a taste for politics? I begin by examining the mouth as a complex organ of political reflection in the history of political thought and the role of flavor as an important thematic consideration in selected works of Plato, Kant and Rousseau. I then move to a discussion of some recipes of the nineteenth century gourmand Pellegrino Artusi and their contribution to the eco‐gastronomic interventions against culinary globalization of the Slow Food movement. My interest is to explore the ethical orientation of convivium which, I argue, is rooted in sensation. As developed and theorized by the practitioners of Slow Food, convivium relies on a principle of transversality that is neither utilitarian, rationalist nor communicative but is, rather, organoleptic: it requires an appreciation of how the divergences of tastes, textures and flavors coexist in the diurnal dimensions of sensory life.

* Versions of this paper were presented at the Trent University Philosophy Society (Peterborough, Canada), the Canadian Society for Italian Studies International Conference (Trieste, Italy), and at “The Politics of Food, Taste and Time” panel of the 2006 meeting of the American Political Science Association (Philadelphia, USA). I would like to thank Jane Bennett, Bonnie Honig, Patchen Markell and John McCormick for their comments, criticisms and for agreeing to participate on an extremely convivial APSA panel. In this regard my gratitude also goes to Werlen Hansjakob, the Philadelphia Slow Food Convivium leader, for providing victuals. This essay was written with generous support from the Canada Research Chairs program and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Standard Research Grant.

What separates speaking from eating renders speech possible; what separates propositions from things renders propositions possible. (Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense.)

Notes

* Versions of this paper were presented at the Trent University Philosophy Society (Peterborough, Canada), the Canadian Society for Italian Studies International Conference (Trieste, Italy), and at “The Politics of Food, Taste and Time” panel of the 2006 meeting of the American Political Science Association (Philadelphia, USA). I would like to thank Jane Bennett, Bonnie Honig, Patchen Markell and John McCormick for their comments, criticisms and for agreeing to participate on an extremely convivial APSA panel. In this regard my gratitude also goes to Werlen Hansjakob, the Philadelphia Slow Food Convivium leader, for providing victuals. This essay was written with generous support from the Canada Research Chairs program and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Standard Research Grant.

1. We will leave aside a third partition: the mouth as sexual organ — both expressive and consumptive in its orientation; though it should be noted that Augustine’s entire theology is premised on precisely this principle: concupiscence, for Augustine, repeatedly occurs through the mouth (Augustine 1998), p. 29.

2. Though I limit myself to the discipline of political theory, it should be noted that these issues were first explored by the anthropologist Sidney Mintz who, in such works as Sweetness and Power (1985) and Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom (1997), argues for the political relevance of food as a communicative practice.

3. Confound here is a noun that designates an object of dissensus. For more on this see ‘The Brightness Confound’ in Massumi (2002), pp. 162–176.

4. See Panagia (2006), especially ‘Images of Political Thought’.

5. In this respect I should specify that a genealogy of political reflection, though committed to the indeterminate, is not committed to conceptual clarification. That is, a genealogy of political reflection is not interested in expanding on the truth‐value of a concept.

6. See Gilles Deleuze’s claim in ‘The Image of Thought’ that ‘postulates in philosophy are not propositions the acceptance of which the philosopher demands; but, on the contrary, propositional themes which remain implicit and are understood in a pre‐philosophical manner. In this sense, conceptual philosophical thought has as its implicit presupposition a pre‐philosophical and natural Image of thought, borrowed from the pure element of common sense’ (Deleuze 1994, p. 131).

7. The Italian reads as follows: ‘Ciò che c’è di indeterminato negli oggetti costituisce quel bordo ambiguo che permette le sovrapposizioni, le allusioni e anche le confusioni. Questa instabilità sottrae gli oggetti alla solitudine cui li condanerebbe una ipotetica precisiona assoluta’ (Garroni 2005, p. 7).

8. See the chapter ‘No vox populi, Vox dei’ in Panagia (2006).

9. The Italian reads as follows: ‘Per Platone, l’origine del disordine e della proliferazione delle passioni è quindi alimentare. È attraverso la bocca che gli uomini si lasciano attirare nella storia. È l’apetito che non soltanto determina l’avvento della mutazione, il cambiamento della città perfetta immaginaria, ma provoca anche le trasformazion di un tipo di regime in un altro’ (Sissa 1999, p. 42).

10. On Kant, freedom and the experiential life see Guyer (1996).

11. Spang (2001, p. 63) describes how ‘a restaurant meal also allowed others to be like Rousseau. With its private rooms, intimate tables, and particularized service, the restaurant made isolation available to everybody … The restaurant introduced Rousseau’s desire into the marketplace’.

12. One need only consider the extent to which theorists from Hobbes to Arendt invoke the theatrical metaphor through the etymology of the word ‘person’ from the Latin per‐sonare (meaning to make a sound) to indicate the privileged function of the mouth as organ of speech.

13. The symposium, held on 15 March 2004, was attended by the author.

14. This debate is a version of the authenticity debates occurring in international courts and at G8 summits regarding the branding and production of indigenous food products like prosciutto, parmigiano reggiano and champagne.

15. My point is that Barthes’s connotative and denotative linguistic description of ‘Italianicity’ in ‘The Rhetoric of the Image’ (Barthes 1999, pp. 32–51) cannot account for flavor as part of the visual experience. Thus, the moment that ‘al dente’ enters into considerations of the condition of phenomenal perception, then Barthes’s semiotic account is disrupted. To use his own terms developed later in his career, the ‘al dente’ flavor/texture here counts as the punctum of the experience of pasta (for his discussion of photography’s punctum see Barthe 1981).

16. It goes without saying that this is, indeed, a bittersweet alliance given that Barilla’s principal preoccupation was with access to North American market shares dominated by Catelli and other non‐Italian companies (and, it should be noted, I do not believe that Barilla was motivated by altruism in its efforts to educate taste). This is an especially relevant point to make given the political unrest during the ALMA conference occurring, as it did, at the height of the Parmalat embezzlement scandal (Barilla and Parmalat are amongst the largest food manufacturers in Italy and are both indigenous to Parma, which is 20 kilometers from Colorno). See Povoledo (2004).

17. Recent important historical studies from a group of scholars primarily associated with the Università di Bologna include Sorcinelli (1992) as well as Capatti and Montanari (2003).

18. Camporesi (2001, LIX). The Italian reads: ‘la cucina dei ‘signori’ divulgata e democratizzata’ [author’s translation].

19. Importantly, as Capatti and Montanari (2003, p. 28) point out, ‘the adjective raffinato (refined) is often used, along with delicato (delicate) and signorile (elegant), to designate the style of the dishes, the choice of seasonings, and the distinctiveness of the flavors’.

20. The connection to Kant is mine, though the exposition of the triad is Piero Camporesi’s (2001, p. XXXI).

21. Slow Food’s symbol is the snail (shown above) which is also the name of its newsletter. For more information see: http://www.slowfood.com/eng/sf_ita_mondo/sf_ita_mondo_newsletter.lasso

22. For a similar interpretation of the durational dimension of ‘slow food’ see Berlant (2007). For a more critical perspective on the Slow Food movement see Meneley (2004).

23. On the concept of ‘dissensus’ see Rancière (1998).

24. Deleuze and Guattari (1993, 158). Deleuze re‐affirms this point in his Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation: ‘In fact, the body without organs does not lack organs, it simply lacks the organism, that is, this particular organization of organs. The body without organs is thus defined by an indeterminate organ, whereas the organism is determined by determinate organs’ (p. 41).

25. When reading Deleuze on the body‐without‐organs it is often helpful to consider Georges Bataille’s discussion and critique of utilitarianism through his articulation of the concept of ‘unproductive expenditure’. See especially the two essays — ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’ and ‘The Notion of Expenditure’ — in Bataille (1985) as well as Bataille (1991).

26. For a compelling consideration of the writings of Gilles Deleuze and the culinary arts, see Dolphijn (2006).

27. It should also be added, for the purpose of precision, that though Kant famously endorses a sensus communis, as Arendt and many others have pointed out, this is not the same as an overlapping consensus, nor does it correspond to an inter‐cultural notion of cosmopolitanism. A sensus communis for Kant is a human capacity he attributes to all of us that, as he explains, corresponds to a faculty of judgment. It is, in short, a sense common to all, though it is not the same in all of us. Because it is not the same in all of us, Kant ultimately reverts to comparison as a necessary correlate for judging (see especially section 40 of Division I of the Critique of Judgment).

28. Foucault (1994). See especially Vol. 4, pp. 353–365 (the 1982 lecture at the Collège de France).

29. Foucault’s lecture explains how un‐learning is a permanent struggle in the development of the person of virtue. But, he explains further, this is all put to a therapeutic purpose in order to restore the soul.

30. I would like to distinguish this account of the pluralization of flavor from that of Hardt and Negri’s (2000) account of multitude. In their case, the solution to the problems of empire is to create more generality: ‘Empire can be effectively contested only on its own level of generality and by pushing the processes that it offers past their present limitations. We have to accept that challenge and learn to think globally and act globally’ (pp. 206–207). From the perspective of an ethos of convivium that rejects such accounts of ‘the organism’, this form of political engagement is too quick and easy, simply producing ‘battling generals’ that renounce the productive political role of particularities. For an excellent critical engagement with Hardt and Negri on this and other points, see Shapiro (2003).