Composing Opposition

Salt and pepper.  An exegesis of structuralist text.  An agency of a gastronomic cogito where the awareness of one's senses mitigates the existence of a socially-bound set of spices whose seeming ubiquity seems now to be merging with the infinite.

To engage farce.  In French- stuffing.  The interiority, physicality, and topological distortions of an existence.  A performance by the senses.  In English- a skillfully exploited situation.  Experience is contingent upon exteriority.  A performance for the senses.

It is the primacy of sight belying the perceived oppositional apparatus of taste.  A verisimilitude unto a single perception, sight, whose supposed analog, taste, is only metaphorical- an emergent wilderness in opposition to the nature of things.  A likeness with a deferred, distributive ontology.  What discursive stratagem may disengage/liberate a conception from a literary/sensory historical locus like a shadow from its object as such?  To emerge, in the sense of deconstruction?

The Paradox of the Paradox of Universality

The first syntactical paradox is deployed simply to draw into question the logical or structural buoyancy or assertion of the paradox being advanced here- where the universal act of the subjective moralized assessment is pitted against the normalizing universality of simplicity at the cost of diversity.

Consider the seed. A moralized assessment mitigates a spectrum from the utilitarian to the minimal where nevertheless- and thus, universally- cultural, social, existential judgments are being levied upon empirical phenomena. There is no nested neural kernel operating independently of performative acts of subjectivities often founded in objective or collective seed banks. There is no foolish seedling- only a tangled membrane of generative subjectivities ultimately wrought by the filaments of social circumstances and preferences cast from the foundries of collectivities. 

Form to Fable

What is the pumpkin, if nothing at all?   In such countless commodified iterations as pumpkin bagels, pumpkin beer, pumpkin lattes, the pumpkin is just this, nothing at all- a sly sensory imagination of an orange gourd, a disjointed concept founded in a set of perceptions independent of the pumpkin itself where this tastes like that.

Like the empty space of a phantasmagoria, the taste or sensory mapping of the pumpkin has no ontological point or space of being- only shapes of nothingness assuming representational meaning through the morphologies of their boundaries.  There is no taste of the pumpkin, itself a muted palate flavors. What of liberation from this base to an arcaded superstructure of the senses?  The pumpkin only assumes an ontological registry through the conformations of nutmeg, clove, cinnamon, and all spice- a conformation when blended assumes the hollowed two-dimensional form of the pumpkin- a form through which taste travels like moving light onto a predetermined surface of receptors- and taste like shadows loom, jubilant miscreants of a long forgotten form, one bite closer to the end of an abstraction. When was taste liberated from form, transducing taste to shape, feeling to form?

Remembering Tastelessness

[image | Kelsey Conophy]

Orientations to words such as bland and tasteless are situated at the confluence of the senses and memory- impromptu rendezvous of mind with body- a menu where Descartes is seemingly let to pasture in fields of hidden permanence. Memories of things that are not there such as tastelessness require an a priori knowledge of taste- a fixed cartesian plot; a recollection of what isn't there; an expectation gone to seed meted out by the grist mills of ontological rupture. The process of recalling memories and their networks is itself an abstraction that's at once liberated from and founded in external fact- a quandary Parmenides may have discretely dipped his ladle in to in hopes of being sustained by emptiness. A coupling of taste and memory becomes a non-euclidean taste receptor where there is no agonist that stimulates a neural pathway- rather, it's a ghost, a specter, a phantasm of a molecule that excites the cascade of taste through the conformations of taste and memory- the image of the thing as itself moving easily between noumena and phenomena. Is it the performance of adjectives that index a priori phenomenological and cognitive experience; that intimate the inextricable network of operations suspended between taste and memory? Tastelessness calls to the block the authority of memory, the replication of experience- splitting the two, memory and experience, momentarily like the white from the yolk before the baker dips a light-as-air souffle into the dense aioli.  

Disciplining the Senses, or Socialness of the Senses

The construction of sensory experience and intellectual authority in the canopy management of sommelier training decants the connotations of power structures represented in the basal divisions of wine into old world and new world- where old and new world divisions signify topographies of intellectual predation and sensory perfection over Cartesian dissociations of sight, smell, taste, and ontologies. Terroir- place- becomes a deductive composite whose residue is an affect of finely filtered combinatorial assessments, sensory depositions of irrational, volatile constituents of being, and mitigations of phenomenological experiences coupled as agonist to the ligands of a constructed canon of imagined mythologies whose metaphorical pigments of queens and colonies stain deeper than anthocyanins

The intertextuality of a meso world field of experience, representation, interrogation, and imagination delimits this scope of Manichean constructed experience and authority to precipitate immobile historiographies insisting the frog be boiled slowly and to polymerize narratives independent of the exegesis of colonial rational domination- to suggest the presentation of wine as intuitive ecologies of the senses and not the social.   

Some Preliminary Notes on a Tasting

[semiotic analysis of above image forthcoming]

On an afternoon inundated with a chewy extraction of salt hanging crystalline in the air– a salinity in the feverish cadaver that is humidity– occurred a confluence of systems, a social representation of an image and the image itself, a portfolio tasting as a representation of a glass of wine. To suggest that an intentional assemblage of individuals tasting a homologous panoply of wine within a deliberate space is a system is to suggest the attributes of this system, the phenomenological components (space, material, aroma) consist of the simultaneous multiplicities of perceived values, hidden spaces of meaning, aesthetic capital.

The pinot blanc as a wine to one is a greasy, pitchy, resin and to another is creamy, sweet, papaya and to another wet schist, cool gravel, anise– a chemically-evolving system whose esters and phenols change with the sounds, pressures, deformations of the room. Likewise,the pinot blanc is a component of the portfolio tasting that performs different phenomenological functions, an object on a table being poured into a glass by an individual who lends new contours to the morphology of the wine.

This system is self-regulating with its overall display of austerity of material, economy of proportion, and most conspicuously its half-full glasses tumbling to the floor to become smaller pieces of themselves, waking the eudaemonic life of the room from a parasitic, salty slumber into the complexity of experiences exploding in the glass and throughout the room as the wine is soaked instead, into the fibers of a cloth.   

Bernays et Bearnaise

A homonym that interrogates the intersection of a continuum that is enculturation– the collective and the corrective domains– the representation of a sauce that is at once one of embellishment and one of emulsion. A homonym whose form and praxis differs little even as its contours assume the deliberate topographies of a collective imagination and an intimate dinner– a sauce that rests suspended in a dynamic tension of egg and oil as well as a public imagination that rests suspended in a dynamic tension of desire dining upon itself.

The collective enculturation of the bearnaise is a heritability of the dinner table, the lineages of familial gastronomies, a discrete taxonomy of imagined traditions. This collectivity is the sauce as embellishment, the sauce that obfuscates and abstracts the banality of death we consume to give us life – an integument to the virtual representations of a former virility– a set of ingredients naturally selected to transmit and recreate the multiple conceptions of what we eat and what we imagine.

The corrective enculturation of the bearnaise is the emulsifier, the maintenance of a public inertia, the deliberacy of presenting a more singular conception of reality – where droplets of oil are like tiny public spheres on the verge of being broken, where tensile strength derives from a ceaseless appetite of desire.

Bearnaise, an enculturation, a sequence of code written with a grammar of effervescence that is periodically re-imagined by a Baudelaire, a This who sweep through the simmering chambers of illusion and dream to sublimate ulterior means of mending a broken sauce.  

anthropology of utilization

once predominantly the enterprise of beasts of burden, agricultural servitude has, in some instances, been replaced by technology.  as a result, the field of view for the carnivore has been diversified with a greater depth of field.  take the cow in korea.  once a cultural index of productivity and work in the rice fields, cows were regarded as servants and seen as equal to human servants, earning themselves a holiday during cow day of the lunar new year.  as reliance on the cow decreased, so did rise the frequency of cross-breeding for perceived values like intense marbling and high percentages of oleaginous unsaturated fat meat.  breeds like han-u and wagyu could not retain their culinary status if they were to be subjected to servitude.  

but with this shift has likely been a change in the cultural association and relationship we have with the animal- where the cow was once implement in the production of rice and nutrition, now it is primarily social and gastronomic.  while the purpose of the cow in both cases serves the furnishings of man, it is the interdependent narrative we have with the servant cow that adds an additional layer of value and care as compared to the allegorical, genetic commodity of cows today.

another question is what informs a culture's perception of value.  in the case of the han-u and wagyu, enhanced flavors, juiciness, and tenderness are the chemical and physical sentinels of fat and under-stressed tissue- attributes contingent on the freshness of the kill.  is it the proximity to the sentient, living being we are wantonly becoming ourselves- the closest derivative we can imagine to supplant the taste of our own fat and under-stressed tissue?  why is it not the gamey, tenderized saddle-cured strips from mongolian horsemen?  is it the intellectual and generational experience?

zizek would explain, the point is to avoid the properly fetishistic fascination of the content supposedly hidden behind the form: the secret to be unveiled through analysis is not the content hidden by the form of commodities but, on the contrary, the secret of this form itself.  the real problem is not to penetrate to the hidden kernel of the commodity, but to explain why work assumed the form of the value of a commodity, why it can affirm its social character only in the commodity-form of its product.

verbalizing seasons

[image: autumn, currier and ives | hand-colored lithograph]

historically, the kelantanese of north malaysia have based their descriptions of their agrarian seasons on their personal preferences for seasonal fruits.  musim buah, or fruit seasons, may vary widely from one individual to another, and so, the descriptions of the seasons- the productive morsels of the earth and farmer that cultivate language and memory.  concomitant, the pomegranate rectifies the intersection of autumn and winter, the persimmon dithers the trajectory of venasszonyok nyara summers

markets impromptu, 02

[image: djemaa el fna, marrakesh where, by nightfall, food vendors replace berbers dancing around cobras and the sublimations of snake oil merchants, condensing into stalls where chefs form the nucleus of the diversity of edible interactions.  it is in the evening that the senses reach their apogee in marrakesh]

marrakesh is an ancient city whose main plaza and evening market, djemaa el fna, is surrounded by a disorienting labyrinth of street, alley, and souk- large, enclosed marketplaces.  there exists two distinct categories of market in marrakesh, the permanent and impermanent, the open and the closed- with both occupying space in the city's temporal fingerprint.  where the permanent, enclosed souk in the streets and alleys feel admittedly like a distorted, non-euclidean maze irreduceable to a series of points on the city's plane, the impermanent are under the sunlight of the plaza, observable from the surrounding balconies- lucid moments to be enjoyed concurrently.

[image: the gaucho, 2006 | the lath-like roof of the main souk in marrakesh.  the fenestrations of wood and tin traverse the alley from one building to another, casting light against shadow and affording respite from the sun] 

pleasure in the souk is found in the shadows, where the intersections of light and dark illuminate the geomancies of commerce, where the chartesian labyrinth is embedded within the city itself, where noticeable interactions with architecture occur, and where the fragments of sunlight make light discreet- a granular synthesis of continuity and uniformity in a built landscape of mystery and discovery.   

surface & substance, 02

[image: jean-baptiste debret, o entrudo no rio de janeiro, 1823 | the above folioes are seen throwing lemons and spraying water as part of their celebration, not an uncommon use of the surplus at hand.  a barthesian exercise in hermeneutics, rich beyond the visible, surface narratives- the myth and reality of imperialism; the intersection of moderation and excess, hunger and appetite; an historical interpretation of the entrudo party in brazil]

what role did the mask have in shaping carnival's edible effluvia?  how important are public spaces in hosting celebratory anathema and sustaining its excess- a seemingly endless miasmatic buffet punctuated by lent?  reducing a complicated circuitry of many causal agents into two agents, viz. mask and marketplace, while problematic, may help rarefy and illuminate the system, the organism, of communication that is experienced at carnival- using space and object to better understand the grammar and protean form of an annual feast.

masks were a critical object in the grammar of carnival- creating an almost single layer of anonymity among classes within public spaces; ideally, restructuring identity into a social isomorphism; lending the body, or being, of the wearer to the personification of myth.  the surplus of anonymity afforded by masks in a group is related to the surplus of food in that the two could be enjoyed in rabelaisian excess, both consumptive, projective, and missive, without being recognized.  the novel social isomorphism delimits the notion of class hierarchy, to an extent, assuming the same anonymity- the uncertainty of recognition.  and, the personification of myth, again, ideally, is the moment when the formal limits of myth crystallize from the ether of the abstract. 

[image: 1831 plan of piazza san marco in venice, italy | 12th century herringbone brick and stone inlays are believed to have marked market stall lines, only to be replaced in the 18th century by a geometric design that serves to visually reinforce the position of st mark's basilca]

the marketplace pulls the individual from their home, a necessary component in the delimiting of class hierarchy in the instance of carnival.  away from the semiotics of a home space and into what foucault described as a heterochrony and what bachelard described as space thoroughly imbued with quantities, the anonymous ghosts in a public space culminate as normalized components in the same ideological ambience- ambience in that carnival was initially constructed and monitored as a social vent by ruling parties, a benevolent olive branch for a brief period of social entropy.  

what develops, then, is a dependent system of mask on market, market on mask.  the individual needs the group participation to realize the diffused anonymity, and the group needs the anonymity of individual to sustain the celebration's  nature.  experiencing the correlation of these two dependent agents illuminates their simultaneity- the individual is at once his or her self, as well as a representation of that self.  the group then consists of the simultaneity of the self and its representative. 

markets' vernacular, 01

[image: the gaucho, 2005 | a public meat market of syntagma square, athens.  the color balance has been saturated with greens to connote a cronenweth technique- an other-wordly, nitrogen-rich green ether seeping from the polarized eurekan clarity of the solitary bulb]

embedded within the problematic notion of a national culinary identity are the dialects, the colloquial, the different layers of reality- with the lingua franca being food.  concealed behind the glass, beneath the butcher paper of many markets, and within the tidy rows of our imperial consumerism is the inherent alienation of commodified speciation- the effect our preferences and ideology have on the linkable relationship of our ubiquitous protein sources to the beings from which they arose.  what are the effects that this abstracting of life has on our culture's culinary vernacular, on the ways we empathize with the anthropological layers of our world?  far from an exception, this market in greece, and many in morocco, provide a clear representation of the being from which we may choose to feed.  and more, require of the cook and kitchen a certain skill, commitment, and solidarity.