Festivity: Thanksgiving vs Las Vegas

Georgetown Island, where we spend our summers, is 300 years old. Let the festivities begin!   Wherever there is celebration, there is food. Georgetown’s festivities began, naturally enough, with a birthday cake.

Festivity, despite its prevalence in history, is sort of fading in our age. We have embraced the 24/7-365 world. That means nonstop work, interspersed with diversion. Such diversion, It is important to add, offers a poor and false substitute for festivity. In fact, a defining trait of our time is the substitution of entertainment, pleasure-seeking, and diversion, for festivity.

Festivals are about a combination of factors:  (1) recognizing how we are part of something greater than ourselves, (2) appreciating the dependencies that characterize our lives, and (3) suspending our normal schedules to celebrate those interdependencies.

“Festivity” is at heart a religious affair. Why? Because its mode of responding is built around the nexus identified above: dependence, gratitude, celebration.  The wider world, which includes sources of nourishment, biological ancestors, political and social ancestors, along with the ability to bring about future generations, all of this is understood as a gift.  Within such a context, the festive dimension is fundamental.  The regular workaday efforts at making a living remove us, much of the time, from this festive awareness. They should not, however, completely occlude it.  

Such occlusion is more than ever prevalent today, dominated as we are by the 24/7-365 commerce-and-diversion lifeworld.  In the United States, Thanksgiving long remained a firewall, an inviolable witness to the festive.  Now, as that holiday gets overrun, nothing is left to block the new prototype: Las Vegas.  Here is a place where even major national and religious holidays never interrupt the commerce-and-diversion industry.  The resulting symbol for us: not the social grouping seated around a meal table, but rather the singular self seated at a slot machine.

How did we get here?  In terms of ideas,  the answer has to do with “philosophical anthropology,” the general way we define ourselves.  It is hard to deny that we are creatures of hunger. Hard also to deny that we are creatures of natality, i.e. we have been born. Hunger and natality, these set the stage for the dependence-gratitude-celebration triad that defines the festive.  

But hunger and natality mean dependence, an admission that we are beholden to forces outside ourselves.  Modern philosophy, post-Medieval philosophy, was a huge attempt to escape from dependence.  It was all about self-sufficiency.  To get there, intellectuals had to redefine the human being. This redefinition was rooted in a fantasy about human origins. The fantasy came to be known as the “social

contract” story.  The story starts not with birth from an actual female, not with hungry infants suckling at the breast, not with relatives and community members who are supplying food.  It begins with full grown individuals, portrayed as  “encapsulated selves” as critics call them. These encapsulated selves then agree, rationally and in terms akin to a commercial exchange, to enter into a contract and become social, members of a community.

  

Because philosophy forgot hunger and  natality, it drifted away from the genuinely “festive.” With self-sufficiency all the rage, the encapsulated human became the default position.  In addition, to the degree that humans forgot their hunger and natality, the world to which these connected them was also transformed.  It became more and more mere matter, stuff to be manipulated.  Humans began to understand themselves, not as woven into the fabric of things, but as outsiders somehow stuck in a  natural setting that was neutral, indifferent, waiting to be transformed and mastered.  Dependence, gratitude, celebration?  Not in this newer world.

So our time and that of the ancients sort of reverse each other.  Holidays like Thanksgiving lose their vibrancy.  The draw of Las Vegas becomes ever more powerful.

Food also takes on a different meaning. Fast food is what results from a world in which festivity has lost its primordial pull.  A traditional Catholic calendar identifies each day as a feast day.  Though they may not all be major celebrations, all meals, drawn from the earth’s bounty, shared with others, accompanied by gratitude, should be somewhat celebratory. By contrast, in our 24/7-365 world, pausing to recall how each day is really a feast day and each meal should be celebratory, these become the exception, not the rule.  

Philosophical shifts in self-understanding make major differences. Start with a physiological creature who is hungry, has been born, is thankful and thoughtful.  Then festivity is primordial. Start with an encapsulated self fascinated with self-sufficiency, set over against a neutral reality, a reality simply awaiting manipulation. Then the 24/7-365 world becomes our default condition.  Goodbye Thanksgiving. Hello Las Vegas.

Appetite-Taste/Nature-Culture

Immanuel Kant once disparaged an Iroquois visitor to Paris for appreciating nothing other than “the eating houses.”  Kant wished to sort out humans guided by appetite from others guided by superior tastes.    A recent article in Aeon magazine deals with food metaphors relative to reading. It charts the trajectory from appetite to taste, suggesting how “In the 18th century, writers began to distinguish between appetite (the connection between reading and the body) and taste (connection between reading and the mind).”

“Appetite” is immediate and indiscriminate.  “Taste,” is selective, refined and mediated.  Appetite and taste may, in ordinary minds, be intermingled.  This would not do for Kant. Aided by free-standing substantives like “body” and “mind” his ideal was not proper integration of the bodily and the mental. It was the segregation of body and mind.  Physiological taste relating to food was suspicious because it remained intertwined with mere appetite.    The more elevated tastes would have little to do with food.  

The pattern here is familiar: (a)  a need to sort out better and worse; (b) mapping better and worse isomorphically with mind and body; (c) thinking that humanity, as the  Aeon writer put it, represents little more than a  “cesspit of ungoverned appetite;” and (d) subsequently, celebrating a power of domination, self-control, as the only hope for keeping appetites in check.

On the other side, there have always been philosophers championing  “natural” tendencies. They warned against substituting impositions of artificiality and convention.  The Stoics and Epicureans moved in this direction.  Their “follow nature” mantra was resurrected by a thinker like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, by Romanticism, and by various communal living experiments in the 1960s.

Both tendencies, the superior-taste crowd and the follow-nature crowd, share one commonality: they are autoreferential. This allows them an escape from risk and responsibility. The superior-taste position says says it’s all about the cultural conventions we have imposed.  End of story. The follow-nature school says, I am just following my own true nature. End of story.

What is absent? Risk and responsibility. These emerge with dependence,  hetero-referentiality. The latter asks of us that we respond to signs and signals coming from outside of us.   

The appetite/taste contrast is one version of the wider nature/culture opposition.  Are there ways to rethink this opposition? To break with autoreferentiality?  To embrace, rather than escape, vulnerability and dependence?  To emphasize the unending need for exploration, questioning, dialogue?  

The answer is yes, but the approach may be surprising--taking taste, this time actual physiological taste, seriously.   Such a taste is unavoidably hetero-referential.  It involves responsiveness, i.e. responding to signs and signals coming from outside of us. Some results: natural appetite and taste are not two contrasting forces. They are correlative.  Second, the “taste” that fosters well-being is neither a “construction,” an artificial, merely subjective imposition, nor is it merely hardwired. It is appetite cultivated, channelled,  informed by experience, experiment and tradition.   

“Taste” serves as a good model for hetero-referential responsibility because it cannot use either culture or nature as a final determining factor. Rather than calling on a single foundation, it always involves election among alternatives. This election, in turn, emerges from clues, indications, signs that are present in a world we have not made but on which we depend.   Taste  not only depends on factors apart from us, but is also, as scientists put it, “multi-modal” involving, as it does, taste buds, smell, tactility, family and cultural practices, visual clues, temperature and even sounds.

What does all this mean?  First of all, we have to reintegrate appetite and taste (also nature/culture).   Appetite requires taste, and by nature we require culture.  Second, when using “taste” metaphorically, we should not stray too far from its physiological, food-related associations.  Wanting to get beyond responsibility defined as election among alternatives, we tend to ignore the irreducibility of the multiple and seek some single criterion. This criterion then is utilized as a simple, straightforward guide which mandates a particular behavior.

When, by contrast, we remain close to the multi-modal understanding of taste, we are always (i) dealing with a multiplicity of factors, (ii) many of those factors involve an inseparable blend of nature/culture, (iii) our response is a melange which seeks a proper balance of factors, (iv) we must always take an active role in adjusting the balance, revising  and polishing it, engaging in an experimental back and forth that moves from worse to better, (v) all the while realizing that a perfect unity or un-revisable blend will never be achieved.  

Kant was right to emphasize, taste, just not in the way he envisioned it.

Ferran and Heston OR Julia and Alice

I’ve just returned from a conference on food aesthetics where, no surprise, the food/art connection took center stage.  Use the expression “food art” and what comes to mind?  Well, not really food.  Still life paintings can be beautiful to admire.  They do little for hunger.

  During the 1960s food was used in happenings, happenings far from the experience of the table.  One included a scene of “women licking jam off a car.”

Another  called “meat joy” involved young writhing bodies interacting with dead chickens, fish and each other.  More recently, Felix Gonzales-Torres produced a sculpture made of candy in brightly colored wrappers, a work commemorating the death of Gonzales-Torres’ partner.

What do these have in common? Ordinary eating is bracketed. When Chefs are hailed as artists they tend to be those who have “elevated”  cookery from the realm of the everyday.  Ferran Adria’s molecular cooking and Heston Blumenthal’s playful creations have allowed them to drift upward.  

Seems sensible enough.  “Sensible enough” though, is precisely what sets philosophers going.  It means that among a possible range of  options, one has become so central that others are forgotten. Thinking, envisioning other possibilities, is then blocked.  

“Art” offers a paradigmatic case.  I often ask students to identify favorite artists. The responses: Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Goya, Pollock,  Monet.  I then indicate how the question was not about favorite painters, but artists.   The sedimented sense of “Art” is well symbolized by the unquestioned and thus unreflected upon assumption that painting is what should primarily come to mind when we discuss “Art.”

Such an understanding of Art  (upper case “A” is important) emerges within a specific philosophical take on things. This particular take characterizes humans as essentially spectators to the world.  Those arts which are most “spectatorial” then move to central prominence.    

The inherited philosophy devalorizes the everyday world of ordinary practices.  Beauty is outsourced.  To the museum, the concert hall, the theatre. This is what allows the complementary conceptualizations “fine” and “applied” to emerge. As a corollary, fine and applied are inversely related.  Works “tainted” with utility, arts like  weaving, pottery, architecture, ritualistic dancing, landscape design and cookery, fall to a secondary status.  

Changing the complementary labels I would say that, in the inherited framework, the only way that  the operative  arts can rise in stature, is to approximate the spectatorial ones.  Heston Blumenthal’s Artist credentials are evident when he re-envisions  sugary, frozen treats of his youth, transforming them into  savory concoctions which stun, surprise and wow his patrons.  Similarly, when a diner bites down on one of Ferran Adria’s liquid “olives” there is surprise, wonderment, astonishment.  Above all, the experience must move well beyond a regular, normal repast.  

But that is to violate one of the great injunctions of creativity: working within constraints while making excellence real.  A vase that is exceptionally lovely but not functional falls short in this regard. When we think of operative creativity as that which offers the best combinations, combinations which include utility, then judgments about what counts as fineness become more suitably contextualized.  There is no longer need to copy the spectator arts in order to achieve fineness.  For the operative arts, living beauty in  day-to-day existence becomes a major desideratum. It also offers special challenges to creativity, challenges that cannot be bracketed.

If this is the case, the contemporary way of selecting food artists highlights the wrong exemplars. We tend to fasten on those who can most imitate and emulate the spectatorial arts, the Adrias and Blumenthals.  If we emphasize day-to-day beauty, stressing the conjunction of beauty and use, insisting that fuller, more replete beauty lives in this combination, a combination requiring high levels of creativity, other models come to mind.  I am thinking in particular of Julia Child and Alice Waters.  What both of these chefs aimed at was  food that looks like food, tastes like food, satisfies hunger, encourages conviviality, is complex, and delicious.  Waters specifically named her restaurant after a hospitable, generous fictional character.  She hoped a meal at her restaurant would be like a convivial dinner at home.

What is important here is how the particular experience, which is participational, tied to nutrition, and associated with sociality, is brought to its highest culmination, a culmination that does not force cookery to mimic the spectator arts.  The operative arts can achieve levels of fineness at the highest level. They serve as models for the rest of us.  They also set a standard for living beauty rather than outsourcing it.  In these regards it seems to me better to celebrate Julia and Alice, not Ferran and Heston.