Technologies of Eating: Constructing Experience

In ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, Martin Heidegger sought to explicate the workings of technology (technē), not merely as a means to a productive end, but as an artistic process in and of itself. For Heidegger, technology is more than the ‘production’ of things; it reveals or discloses our very relationships to things, it opens out the space for consideration of the artistic and the poetic. Technē, however, is only half of ‘technology’, so to understand Heidegger’s thinking, it must be combined with his understanding of ‘ology’ (Logos), as explored in his seminal Being and Time. (1927). For Heidegger, there is an intimate relationship between the workings of art and the workings of technology, in that each discloses to us ‘truth’ (alētheia). The ‘work’ of art and technology (work as both noun and verb) are the means by which we uncover the state of things, their meanings and their operations. Or, rather, the work of art is technological: the poetry (poiēsis) of bringing-forth, of uncovering or revealing truth, is an aspect of the workings of technology. To consider the technologies of eating allows for an exploration of how ‘everyday’ experience is constructed through (rather than mediated by) technology. For Heidegger, technology and art disclose the ‘truth’; while this dates Heidegger’s work, it does not negate its usefulness. The idea of an absolute truth is certainly controversial and it is not my aim to discuss that here. Rather, we can reread Heidegger’s alētheia as unconcealedness: not disclosing truth, but exposing the workings of things.

Appropriately to a discussion of Heidegger, given his use of ‘disclosure’, in David Letherbarrow’s ‘Table Talk’,(2004) he writes, “Whether seen as a reenactment or repetition, each lunch or supper both recalls and prompts others. The meal’s extended temporality complements its levels of disclosure, from tacit to outspoken.”3 Leatherbarrow draws out the performance qualities of the meal, pointing towards the ways in which performance is enacted in the everyday and implicitly stating how the reenactment and repetition of the practices of the meal (including its utensils) transforms the ideological into an everyday practice. Rather than merely conceiving of cutlery and crockery as pragmatic devices, we can go further and explore how it operates as a technology of disclosure: how it maintains and therefore reveals a certain ideological position and history. As has been seen in performance studies, repetition has the power not only to solidify and reproduce, but also to make strange, and so at the heart of the meal experience is the means of exposing its construction. This article proposes to explore how the everyday experience of eating is framed and constructed through its technologies, namely cutlery, triangulating Heidegger’s understanding of technology with the everyday practices of eating and the work of food artists, Bompas & Parr, in their project with Heinz, which can be seen not only as a repetition and reenactment of the ‘everyday’ workings of cutlery, but an exposing and unconcealment of that very working.

Bompas & Parr are two food artists, who began their culinary artistry through working with jelly in 2007. Since then, they have moved to other food-based projects, each playfully exploring the possibilities of food, its construction and its artistic potentiality. Bompas & Parr’s work has largely been connected to businesses and institutions, including Johnnie Walker, Guiness, Selfridges, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Kew Gardens and the Museum of Sex in New York. Their work has played with the different aesthetic qualities of food, focused on taste and smell, as well as design and construction.4 In 2013, in collaboration with Heinz and Fortnum & Mason, Bompas & Parr created the Heinz Beanz Flavour Experience, described by the artists as a “choreographed gustatory experience”.5 They developed five different tasting bowls for five different flavours of Heinz beans, including curry, fiery chilli, garlic and herbs, barbecue and cheddar cheese. Each of the bowls was designed to frame the food in a particular way, bringing the flavours together with the tactile sensations of the bowl and a spoon that emitted a particular soundtrack while eating. The barbecue bowl was burned to form an outer charcoal layer, accompanied by blues music and sizzling sounds; the garlic and herb bowl was surrounded by smoothed, layered card with the jostling sound of cans and the rustling of garlic; the curry bowl was less literal, with spikes forming legs for the bowl, covered in a grainy texture accompanied by Bhangra music; the cheddar cheese bowl was made from yellow wax, with the same smooth yet slightly tacky texture, with the sound of strings and tambourines; and finally the fiery chilli bowl featured smoothed-off, metal, triangular spikes and the sounds of chopping and scraping.

In Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life,(1961) he marks out the importance of understanding the ‘everyday’. He writes that the ‘everyday’ is,6

For Lefebvre, the everyday is the intersection of the ideological-hegemonic and individual freedom, choice and creativity. It is the site where the ideological is transformed into the human. Using Heidegger, we can explore how art and technology intervene in this relationship and expose the construction of the everyday, the ways in which the ideological dimension is transformed into everyday practices. As noted by de Certeau et al in the epigraph to this article, food and eating form a key landmark for the individual, both between the self and the World and between the individual and the ideological. It is a site where discourses intersect, where histories, practices and narratives overlap, requiring a negotiation on the part of the diner. The everyday, the conventional or the status quo becomes second nature, allowing use without reflection, but the everyday has the potential to be ‘de-second-natured’.7 I argue that Bompas & Parr’s project with Heinz intervenes into the everyday, revealing aspects of the conventional use of cutlery, de-second-naturing the easy and stable relationship between theorisation and use, enacting a critique of the everyday. However, Bompas & Parr, while opening out space for the consideration of the grounding assumptions that underpin the ideological operations of the everyday, reframe experience within a particular Capitalist discourse of consumption. Heidegger’s technē and Logos are used as tools to explore cutlery as a technology and, coupled with Slavoj Žižek’s writings on ideology, allow for an explication of the framing of the everyday: how each frame brings certain ideas and practices into focus and the change of the frame, while exposing what was perhaps previously outside, sets up a new series of exclusions

[Logos]  gets 'translated' (and this means that it is always getting interpreted) as "reason",  "judgment", “concept", "definition", "ground", or “relationship”. […Logos] as  "discourse"      means […]: to make manifest what one is 'talking about' in one's discourse. The [logos] lets something be seen […].

For Heidegger, the logos ‘makes manifest in one’s discourse what one is talking about’. This is, of course, potentially problematic after post-structuralist critiques of the inherent meaning in language. There is no intrinsic meaning to text, only a series of citations that make language iterable within a horizon of meaning. However, we can make use of Heidegger in thinking about (artistic and everyday) practice. In this regard, the logos is the folding in of content into form. For technology, it is the ways in which the technē manifests itself in technology, the way it speaks about and reveals itself in its own work. Technē reveals its own ground, assumptions and relationships in its own work. It becomes its own discourse, its own logos, its own frame of understanding, as well as working as a challenge to other modes of framing.

Bompas & Parr’s work is grounded in an understanding of perception that is multisensory. Their work relies on this underpinning assumption that the senses combine in experience to produce experience. The Heinz Beanz Flavour Experience draws attention to their understanding of multisensory perception, drawing attention to it. In his writing on logos in Being and Time, Heidegger discusses the notion of synthesis:14

The logos is not merely the bringing-together of disparate things under a single discourse; rather, as with Žižek’s ideology, it is the underlying principle that allows the discourse itself to emerge from the togetherness of things. The process of revealing that it is at work in Bompas & Parr’s bowls is at once both a disclosure and a covering over of the continuity between the senses in perception. The bowl draws attention to, discloses, the ways in which we make sense through the combination of sensory perceptions and their related associations, allowing a meaning to come forth. However, it also attempts to cover over the discontinuities between the senses, the places where they do not easily sit alongside one another, where they are wrenched apart. While the curry bowl seems to work easily, with the grainy texture on the outside of the bowl, coupled with the sound of Bhangra music, drawing attention to the spices and their historic association with India, the cheddar cheese bowl is less successful in its intention to intensify a singular experience.

Bompas & Parr describe the cheddar cheese bowl as,15

The cultural associations and connections between the various elements of this experience are less securely tied together in the conventional horizon of meaning. There are elements of the production (the use of a cheese wire, the particular brand of can, the reading of the music as ‘reminiscent of Elgar or Holst’) that are not explicitly within the work, but only bare that signification for the artist. This is not to deride the work itself, although there is an argument to be made around the commercialisation of the work (which I will return to), but rather draws out how the signification of the work for the artists is not the same as the work itself. The work begins to pull itself apart by virtue of the artists’ reading not being formally present in the work itself. The logos that holds the dish together is not a synthesis, whereby the elements are combined under a wider cultural discourse, but is an idiosyncratic reading that leaves the dish unstable to the uninformed reader.

In Lefebvre’s Critique,16 he writes,

In other words, conventional biography is not enough to understand the operations of either the everyday or the artistic work. The artists’ intention is not enough to produce an understanding of the work; the understanding must also explore the external action of the workings of the work. The cheese bowl does not operate only in the way that the artists conceive, as a unified experience, but rather operates in the in between spaces opened up between the sensory stimuli. There is a deferral of meaning that takes place in the work, where each sensory element gains its meanings in its interrelations with the others. For Bompas & Parr, the idea of ‘cheddar cheese’ is enough to hold the dish together. For the uninitiated consumer, the ground on which the work rests is not this unifying concept, but rather the ways in which the different senses speak to one another, and with one another, to create an experience that refers to itself, to its multiple parts. In this way, even the aspects of the work that might be considered ‘static objects’ (the bowl, the spoon), begin to unravel, to unfold in time and to become unstable. The bowl sits somewhere between touch, sight and smell; the spoon between touch, sight and sound. Neither is a static object that can be ‘understood’ in its entirety in an instant. It takes on a temporal quality and begins to reveal, by drawing attention to the multiple sensory strands, the ways that meaning oscillates between the senses and is constructed in that in between space. The technology at work here uncovers the epistemic temporality of knowledge, through the artwork, referring to itself in displacing the absolute location of meaning, dispersing it across itself.

The in between state of the work, caught in a temporal unfolding, requires a frame in order to be made sense of. The dish not only troubles the everyday, conventional understanding of the immediacy of perception, but also draws itself together again through a foundational assumption of the multisensory appreciation of eating. The technology of eating (the devices by which we present and consume food) operate as an oscillation between technē and logos, shifting back and forth between the exposing of epistemology and its construction respectively. However, while these bowls by Bompas & Parr explore this individual experience of consumption, they also cover over the processes and economics of production and consumption within which they are produced and consumed.

In Leda Cooks’ article, ‘You Are What You (Don’t) Eat’, she mirrors de Certeau et al in discussing how food is a politically loaded site of intersecting discourses. 17 She writes,

In Bompas & Parr’s bowls, the artists draw attention to particular aspects of the production and consumption of the food. The barbecue bowl draws attention to the process of cooking; the garlic and herb bowl makes reference to ‘raw’ garlic (through the papery garlic-like-skins around the outside); the curry and cheese bowls to ingredients (and not their production before this stage); and the fiery chilli bowl to the assumed sensation of the sharpness of chilli heat in consumption. No one of the bowls makes reference to capitalist framing of the food as a mass-produced product, nor any mode of production that sits within this (the cultivation of agriculture, the factories in which the products are transformed and tinned, the shipping and selling of the product). Bompas & Parr, not necessarily knowingly, enter into the discourse of ‘localism’, where the importance of food is in its locale and its connection to the land, and not to the capitalist processes of production, which remain hidden. Indeed, the company Heinz, begins to distance itself from its own modes of production in its product, via its mediation through the artists Bompas & Parr and the particular store that stocked this work (Fortnum & Mason). In the same way that Daniel Spoerri sold cans of food in a gallery to expose the celebrity culture of the artist and the signature as the mark of the artistic status18 (following in the lineage of Duchamp), Bompas & Parr are the artists whose signature, which pervades the packaging and consumption of the food-work, legitimates the work as a work and masks over the mass-consumption and commercialisation of experience. While the framing of the bowls may work through various aspects of the process of consumption and appreciation, it also leaves out of frame the political and economic dimension of the everyday.