I happened to reread the afterword of my 2008 book Bite Me: Food in Popular Culture. Some of the observations were naive, some were weirdly prescient (al least regarding the present state of the political discourse), others are still on point. This is (again) a Plea for Pleasure. Sorry for the jargon, by the way: I was just starting in academia…
A deep and practical understanding of the mechanisms of pop culture and the society of spectacle in general can become a very effective tool for political hegemony. The capacity of creating and spreading narratives that communicate in terms not only of rational priorities, but also of emotions, desires, and fantasies becomes a crucial weapon to have any impact on reality. Most of the time, we engage with market-driven culture in order to make its critique, to uncover its tight connection with consumerism, to debunk fads and fashions, or to demonstrate how pop culture actually fosters, solidifies, and naturalizes concepts and perceptions that sometimes hinder the development of free and thinking subjects. We all acknowledge that contemporary imagination is heavily based on consumption and commoditization. Nevertheless, there can be ways to ensure that somehow passive consumption becomes active enjoyment and then participation and choice.
To reach this goal in the field of food and food choices, it might not be enough to focus on what is good and right for the single citizen and for society at large, on what is nutritious and healthy for the body, and on what can help the environment in order to ensure the future of humanity. Although these are important objectives to which we should adhere in our everyday choices, there is one aspect that very often is left out in our intellectual discourse: personal pleasure. I am not implying that pleasure is not cultural and context-sensitive, just like desires and even fantasies are. Neither am I referring to any pre-symbolic dimension of our inner life, purely emotional and instinctive, that can act as an antidote to rationality. However, we often end up focusing on all those aspects of food that are connected with its function as fuel (for the body, for society, for the economy, for the planet), and we forget that subjective experiences play a key role in everyday life. Unfortunately, in the academic, intellectual, and even activist environment we are often very good at leaving the fun out of food. That is too bad, because I do believe with anthropologist Arjun Appadurai that “where there is pleasure, there is agency”. Pleasure is powerful, anarchic, self-centered, irrational, and emotional. It can constitute a very disruptive and subversive element in any social structure, as all past and present totalitarian propaganda machines have proven, since it can become a very effective tool to create consent. What if it were used not to bamboozle but to stimulate? The question is: How do we harness pleasure? How do we redirect desires and fantasies towards positive, constructive goals?
Twenty years ago a group of Italian intellectuals figured out that maybe, just maybe, food could represent a way to reaffirm one’s identity, to generate a different sense of community based on shared consumption, and to decelerate the rhythm of modernity. The Slow Food movement began in a small town in northern Italy, far from the places inhabited by the movers and shakers of pop culture, yet its powerful, simple concepts proved to be immediately and intuitively accessible to a vast audience. The core ideas refer to people’s daily experience, in particular the relaxed enjoyment of food in good company, with all those connotations of authenticity, nostalgia, and cultural heritage that stubbornly insist on being part of who we are, as hard as we try to debunk them. Over time, at least in Italy, the public mission of Slow Food has become so relevant, its involvement in big-time politics and economy so intense and visible, that sometimes pleasure seems to be forgotten. Now the goals are sustainability, the protection of the environment, and social justice, to be achieved through different structures of production and consumption. Many used to criticize the movement for being an expression of a certain kind of bourgeois sensibility, concentrating on private enjoyment and blind to the grim realities that clutch our world. Now it has redirected its operations towards new objectives, gaining wider recognition and more respect on the international scene. But is pleasure still there? Or has it become too low of a priority, when compared to more serious matters?
As intellectuals and citizens trained in a tradition based on empiricism, rationalism, and scientific principles, we get uncomfortable when it comes to desires, fantasies, and pleasure. We need to acquire new tools that allow us to stay relevant in the society of spectacle – possibly without making a spectacle of ourselves – by creating narratives based not on lies but on facts and truths.
Where could we get these new tools? I think we can actually learn quite a bit from pop culture. Being commercially savvy, mass-produced, and geared towards consumption, it has to relate to people’s imaginations, sometimes to capture elements from them and transform them into new forms, sometimes to spread or impose practices and discourses, sometimes simply to generate and negotiate new meanings at an exponentially faster speed. Market-driven culture has transformed not only our minds, but also our bodies, into an arena of an uninterrupted struggle for the heart and soul of consumers, an arena where interconnected webs of communication codes, practices, and ideas are formed, transformed, and destroyed.
By acquiring a better grasp of the dynamics of commercial culture we could redirect its mechanisms towards different goals. Are we capable of putting pleasure at the forefront, not to numb the intellect, but to let the mind participate more intensely in the life of the body? Are we ready to use our bodies and our senses as hermeneutic tools?
After all, most of our daily choices are definitely based not only on accurate pondering of pros and cons, but also on our mood, wishes, and even drives. As a matter of fact, our irrational modes of operation often trump the rational ones. As we discussed, the most recent research in neuroscience seems to point in that direction: even the decisions that we feel are most rational, the ones that are derived from our frontal lobes, are heavily influenced by those parts of the brain in charge of emotions and passions. Some marketers are fully aware of this: consumption-driven economies seem to turn increasingly into “experience economies,” whose goal is not only to provide commodities and goods, but also to ensure high added-value services and experiences (Pine and Gilmore 1999). Politicians know very well that, in contemporary democracies, truth and power belong to those who tell the better story (Duncombe 2007: 8). In other words, voters follow whoever is able to articulate their aspirations and their desires through symbols, images, and associations that make sense to them. Unfortunately, these elements are used at times to convey lies. Too often they have been used as propaganda by regimes that eventually strangle democracy.
Through food and the body, we can stimulate ourselves and others to think about our actual material physicality in time and space and to gain a sense of a lived place. Adopting Spanish sociologist Manuel Castell’s terminology, we can integrate the somehow abstract, often homogenized, and always economy-driven “space of flows” with a more personal, more aware “space of places,” our local environment where we make choices that influence not only our eating habits, but also our involvement with the economic and political aspects of food systems, with the cultural system that proposes various body ideals, and with contrasting social and political systems