Decentering Subjectivity in Everyday Eating and Drinking

Digesting Reality

Ali Lara

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000208764
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This important book offers a model to analyze the configurations of reality as manifested in everyday practices of eating and drinking in relation to the development of human subjectivity. The author uses concrete examples from daily life related to eating and drinking habits such as "eating tacos" or "taking a shot of mezcal", to offer an interface of interaction between body/mind and material entities connecting all scales of reality.

Borrowing scientific insights from molecular biology and neuroscience, combined with a touch of decolonial spirit, the author examines specific 'processes' and/or 'objects' triggered by eating and drinking events, such as the production of heat as you eat a taco, or the interchange of knowledge while drinking mezcal. The book develops an approach to human subjectivity informed by material and aesthetic encounters beyond the analysis of language, representation, and social structures and aims to contribute to the contemporary landscape of efforts decentering our understanding of both human and non-human affairs.

With its multidimensional exploration of our relationship with food, this is thought-provoking reading for scholars and students in critical psychology, philosophy, and the social sciences.

1Tacos and heat

In this first chapter I’m going to introduce the three scales of reality and show how they work when related to an everyday process, the production of heat. To explain the multiscalar nature of heat, I will rely on an everyday practice in Mexico City, eating street tacos. But why are heat and temperature a good starting point?

Experiences related to eating are intimately linked with temperature in a lot of ways, for example, the molecular process through which we “burn” the calories by metabolic combustion of sugar in a process is known as metabolism (Ong, 2012). We also use fire to cook, and this has been suggested to be the condition of possibility for the modification of human bodies and thus for the evolution of human kind (Whrangham, 2010). We organize the agricultural production of food in relation with climate change and the variable temperature of the seasons (Schellnhuber et al., 2006). In the aesthetic and affective domains, pleasure and enjoyment of food have also been associated with food’s temperature, like the pleasure of having hot drinks to counteract the cold environment (Lee et al., 2003). In general, the perception of the flavor of food changes in relation with temperature (Englen, 2012). Eating provides a clear example of a broad spectrum in which temperature is a relevant agency to be explained for its potential to modify the affective capacities of human and nonhuman bodies.

Temperature has recently been brought to affect studies by Vannini and Taggart (2014a, 2014b) under the label of thermoception. However, current approaches to thermoception focus on the conscious experience of production and regulation of heat and do not consider those events of production of heat that bypass consciousness and yet partake in the thermoception process and the human experience of heat. In this chapter, I draw on Whitehead’s philosophy to propose a speculative account of thermoception capable of integrating different events of production of heat through an analysis of the “division” of prehensions, in which each prehension is an event of production of heat needed to explain thermoception. To do so, I analyze the production of heat in the experience of eating tacos¹ at street taquerias of Mexico City. When eating, different temperatures connect, and new ones are created: the food’s temperature, the temperature of the human body, that of the atmosphere, and the new ones emerging from the interactions among them. However, eating tacos in the streets of Mexico City is a particularly illustrative case for the thermal processes involved on eating practices because, as we will see, the thermal dynamism involved in eating street tacos involves elements and processes passing by, bypassing and surpassing conscious awareness that has hitherto been the focus of the study of thermoception. Of particular interest in this chapter is the way prehensions of heat modify the capacity of the body to feel heat in the molecular, organic, and cultural scales of activity, and how the concatenation of the production of heat among such scales is at stake in the production of subjectivity, as well as the production of what I call heat emotions – anxiety in particular.

Recent approaches to thermoception address it as a process of active involvement with the modification of ambient and body temperature. Vannini and Taggart suggest that “this involvement is an expression of the capacity of bodies to be affected by and affect ordinary sensations such as thermoception – the bodily feeling of temperature.” Such an involvement in that processes, the authors go on, “is transformative” of the ambient and therefore they conceptualize it as “catalytic” (2014a, 65). Vannini and Taggart developed this insight by studying the production of heat in off-grid houses, in which heating the space demands dwellers be physically involved. As they explain “the functioning of off-gridders’ hot energy home systems heavily depend on a process of education of their attention” (2014a, 79). So thermoception here is something that you learn to regulate. The production of heat is understood as a dynamic process, “an interface” requiring bodily involvement through a “hub of activities” oriented to modulate the world; it is “a nexus of intersecting practices” and should be understood as “participation” in the transformation of temperature rather than passive “perception” (2014a, 66). That is to say, Vannini and Taggart’s thermoception is full of will; it is a conscious activity of physical involvement for the regulation of temperature.

Following Vannini and Taggart’s ethnographic approach, Allen-Collinson and Owton (2015) also subscribe to the importance of studying the possibility of controlling and being aware of thermoception. They conduct autoethnographic and autophenomenographic research to address what they call “lived heat” through “warming up and thermoregulation” (2015, 3) as experienced and accounted by women receiving physical training in distance running and boxing. Phenomenological approaches to different cultures of heat also have been conducted using “participatory observation” to explore the way one intentionally warms up and cools down before and after dancing (Potter, 2008). Phenomenological sociology has been used to address the sensory dimension of heat on athletes practicing distance running and scuba diving (Allen-Collison and Hockey, 2010). Even Ong’s elegant proposal on the aesthetics of heat in architectural design highlights “our ability to control heat [as] the basis for subsequent development of human culture, technology and society” (2012, 10, brackets mine). More or less explicitly these approaches share in common the claim for a consciously driven management of bodily participation in the thermoception process. It is then rather surprising to find that all the aforementioned studies found inspiration in Classen’s (1993) explanation of Tzotzil’s cosmology of heat in Mexico. Although they all evoke Classen’s Tzotzil to argue the relevance of studying heat, they fail on recognizing that a cosmology is a version of the universe including different scales of organization and plenty of agency – that is, of the capacity to affect – and all of which are connected to each other: from the hot sun to the chili peppers and the spiritual heat of the chaman providing thermal order to space and time. In Tzotzil cosmology, thermoception is not a process mediated – let alone regulated – by human conscious. It refers to the flux of heat across the universe in which many forms of heat agencies bypass consciousness and yet participate in the modification of the capacities of the human body (affect) and the production of human (nonconscious) subjectivity that are important to fully understand the affective experience of heat. By citing Classen’s Tzotzil cosmogony of heat, current approaches to thermoception are rushing away from such a cosmological understanding; they rather stay close to approaches that allow them to operationalize methodologically the study of heat. So they stay with another favorite, Ingold, as he allows them to approach heat as an “involved activity, in the specific relational context of their practical engagement with their surroundings” (2011, 10), and thus heat is again under the domain of human conscious activity as the epicenter of these “surroundings” from where such an “engagement” is managed.

Before I move to explain how I will expand thermoception out of the conscious domain, it is worthy to note that such an obsession for conscious regulation has its origin in the understanding of the “human body as organism”.² This idea, Clough (2008) has argued, is embedded in scientific discourses from late nineteenth century, especially in thermodynamic laws³ and the belief of the organic tendency to homeostatic equilibrium. These scientific discourses were the condition of possibility for emergence of the so-called disciplinary society. Disciplinary science, Parisi and Terranova explain

was intrigued by the movements of solids, objects falling through spaces, but also by the constancy of energy and its irreversible processes marked by accumulation and discharge, The disciplined body is the thermodynamic organism, the hierarchical organizations of organs, bounded within a self, crossed by currents of energy tending towards entropy and death.

(Parisi and Terranova, 2000)

The human body, thus understood as an organism operating upon thermodynamic laws, was thought to work strictly to reach homeostatic equilibrium. To be able to do “work” and preserve equilibrium (and participate then in the economic system of production and reproduction), the human body needed to be understood in this strata of organization in which it is an organic whole body. Such an organism, Parisi and Tarranova explain “is determined by consciousness and is the place where consciousness operates. It is the most visible and molar aspect of the human body” (Parisi and Terranova, 2000, np). The body as organism provided as well a “bio-physical pattern through which the organism came to be conceived as homeostatic” (Parisi and Terranova, 2000, np); it is, with a fixed consciousness concerned with the regulation of the temperature. The organism is then “defined autopoietically as open to energy but informationally closed to the environment, thus engendering its own boundary conditions” (Clough, 2008, 2).

Studies on thermoception focus on the production of heat as a “capacity to do work” (Vannini and Taggart, 2014) or a sort of conscious regulation of bodily heat (Potter, 2008; Allen-Collinson and Owton, 2015) or controllable thermal conditions of the ambient (Ong, 2012) because they all share the idea of a body as an organism looking for homeostatic thermal equilibrium. However, if there is any legacy to affect studies, it is precisely the consideration of new advances in science and technology, particularly those in relation to new scales of organization of matter with their new logics that define control society. Late twentieth-century advances in quantum physics and molecular biology generated understanding of levels of organization of life and matter working outside of thermodynamic laws and under far-from-equilibrium conditions (see Prigogine and Stengers, 1984; Clough, 2004). As a consequence affect studies have been able to generate new understandings of the body such as the “turbulent body” (Parisi and Terranova, 2000) or the “bio-mediated body” (Clough, 2008). These proposals share in common the critique of the autopoietic body on the basis of techoscientific contributions that understand the body as open to information. In addition, further advances in new materialism (Bennett, 2010; Barad, 2014) have made important contributions to acknowledging the agency of matter and in consequence have provided a base to rethink human subjectivity in relation to material interactions free of conscious deliberation.

What is clear for both affect studies and new materialism is that material relations from small scales of activity (molecular and quantum) do not work under the same logic as autopoietic organisms; molecules do not follow thermodynamic laws, nor do they pursue any kind of homeostasis. As Parisi and Terranova explain it,

It is with the emergence of complexity theory that disequilibrium becomes a principle of reality. Rather than a return to the primary cause according to a linear development which regulates the origins of life, the perception of a body through complexity theory and molecular biology involves a break with its physiology. In these terms, a body no longer corresponds to the fleshy representation or phenomenon of the human subject, but rather is opened up to particles, waves and attractors, which constitute it as far from equilibrium system.

(Parisi and Terranova, 2000)

Once science has made its contributions, accounting for human subjectivity also requires a different philosophical frame that can include the logics of molecular organization rather than neglect them as a “pure science” that may not relate to human subjectivity. Alfred N. Whitehead refers to this possibility of exclusion as “the bifurcation of nature”, and his whole speculative project was fully devoted to overcoming such a trend that is so present in Western anthropocentrism (Shaviro, 2014a). Whitehead’s philosophy is particularly helpful here, if not yet to get close to Tzotzil’s cosmology of heat, at least to propose a speculative account of thermoception able to expand the explanation of human experience of heat beyond its conscious affairs. Whitehead’s radical ecology accounts for “causal efficacy” among organisms of different grades of complexity without giving privilege to perception, which “is confined to ‘high-grade organisms’ that are ‘relatively few’ in the universe as a whole. On the other hand, causal efficacy is universal; it plays a larger role in our own experience than we tend to realize, and it can be attributed ‘even to organisms of the lowest grade’ ” (Shaviro, 2011, 281).

For Whitehead, the universe is full of events that he called “actual occasions” or “actual entities” organized in different levels of complexity or “societies”. Those actual occasions come to be by virtue of their relations with other actual occasions through a process of multiple prehensions. In Whitehead’s philosophy prehensions are “concrete facts of relatedness” and in general “each process of appropriation of a particular element” (Whitehead, 1985, 219). Shaviro describes Whiteheadian prehensions as including both “causal relation and perceptual ones – and [Whitehead] makes no fundamental distinction between them… . Whitehead’s key term prehension can be defined as any process – causal, perceptual, or of another nature entirely – in which an entity grasp, registers the presence of, responds to, or is affected by, another entity” (Shaviro, 2011, 281, brackets mine). Prehensions as an act of response have also been articulated by Clough as preconscious and pre-individual, “a kind of knowing, an affective knowing, prior to individuation and consciousness” (Clough, 2012) Then, prehensions are not a human-exclusive property; they are rather affective enactments with vector qualities, connecting what is here with what is there (see also Parisi, 2004). Regardless of its nature, any actual occasion can be divided into different prehensions participating in its becoming. As Whitehead explains, “[E]ach actual entity is analyzable in an indefinite number of ways. In some modes of analysis, the component elements are more abstract than in other modes of analysis. This mode of analysis will be termed the ‘division’ of the actual entity in question … that mode of analysis which exhibits the most concrete elements in the nature of actual entities” (Whitehead, 1985, 19). What is most relevant of this kind of division analysis of prehensions is the idea that each prehension reproduces the qualities of the actual entity and then inherits particular qualities proper of its own eventness.

In what follows in this chapter, I will embrace this idea of the analysis of division of different kinds of prehensions to articulate my speculative account of thermoception. Division analysis of prehensions is the analytic device I use to advance beyond the current accounts of thermoception centered in organic-conscious-homeostatic activity. To do so, I will describe the particularities and relations of three different levels of prehension that actively participate in the thermal experience of eating tacos in Mexico City: molecular, organic, and cultural. Each of those prehensions is, in its own way, an event of production of heat that concatenate to each other to give shape to the subjective experience of thermoception. O...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Digesting reality
• 1 Tacos and heat
• 2 Veganism and politics
• 3 Chocolate and desire
• 4 Wine and time
• 5 Mezcal and knowledge
• 6 Toward a multilayered model to digest reality
• References
• Index