On the Political Biology of Eating and Performing (with) Food

Abstract

Performance research involving food frequently focuses the ‘political economy of food sovereignty' where political action involves providing visibility to power differentials in righting injustices and/or celebrating differences. Alimentary and gustatory processes of eating are often assumed as ‘naturally' given and rarely put under a critical biopolitical lens. This essay, which zigzags between three food performances and three interdisciplinary concepts, attempts to reconfigure normative conceptions of the biopolitical; by interrogating instead the politics of biology away from transcendental conditions and anthropogenic definitions that lead to a radical insufficiency of justice to cater for difference. Firstly, Giorgio Agamben's concept of bare life in his biopolitics is argued to be itself ontologically political, through performances of eating that decentre the human in definitions of biological life. This reveals and complicates biology's implicit technicity as that which demarcates what is human life from what is not. Secondly, food performances conjure the ‘enteric imagination' that bring into focus the entanglements of instinctual and ethical life. These performances, with concrete coordinative connections between eating and hearing make porous the epistemological domains between individuality and communality, organic and inorganic, life and death, towards a richer idea of biopolitics as ‘lived-intuition.' Lastly, the essay outlines Gilles Deleuze's ‘becoming-minor’ as a creative and affirmative politics, arriving not as the result of majoritarian agreement nor counter-hegemonic movements, but rather the aggregation of a myriad of molecular, minor events where inventions and conjugations of specific, unforeseen and autonomous modes of becoming exist. Focusing on the politics of biology in this way provides alternatives to idealistic definitions of life whose exigencies can be seen not only in relation in their binary opposition to death, but moves towards a positive one, immanent to multiple modalities of being. The biopolitics of eating does not oppose but stays with the inarticulable but nevertheless real sensoria, providing a surface for experimentation that produces abstractions, concepts, disciplines, gestures and alimentary processes, towards a biopolitics of food that acknowledges that the biological is in itself already political.

Notes

1 As Jean-Luc Nancy (2006) says in ‘Fragile! Handle with care’, democracy is as love is: ‘Love is fragile, like glass, like human skin, and the skin of many animals and plants, like democracy.’

2 Inspired by Isabelle Stengers’s advice on reading Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality: ‘This is why you cannot read Process and Reality from the first to the last page, in a linear manner, but must zigzag, using the index, being lured to come back to something you recollect but which had remained mute, and now takes on a new importance, participating in the leap you have just felt possible’ (2008: 109).

3 I am using ‘complementarity’ as Arkady Plotnitsky (1994) demonstrates, as occurring between wave and particles in Bohrian quantum physics. These are occasions where two or more mutually exclusive theories are required to explain a single phenomenon, and where no adequate synthesis is possible.