Tasting the Affect

The reason I chose Ben Highmore's "Bitter After Taste: Affect, Food, and Social Aesthetics" alongside our other readings is simply because I love to eat and I thought perhaps placing this first exploration of affect in the context of something I enjoyed would somehow magically make me understand.  I'd just be relishing a bowl of sweet potato stew and suddenly draw links between my satisfaction through comfort food and a general bettering of mood from the sustenance and this huge nebulous topic of affect.  Let's just say that I'm not sure if I understand affect any better, but I completely gorged myself on all sorts of gastronomic delights trying to figure it out.  Here is what I am thinking at this point:

AFFECT = MESSINESS

It is overlapping, moving laterally and backward, connecting bodies and surfaces, potentially uniting others against some others, and sticks and slides.  While it is not contained within objects or bodies (not just human - could be land, thought, etc.), they can be inspired by or infused with affect (Ahmed).  Emotion seems too familiar in our everyday language to fully grasp what it means in terms of affect; "emotion" is a contained idea and seems like a closed definition whereas affect reopens this notion of connectivity and psychic fusions that are lost in the colloquial renderings of emotion.  Rai's phrasing "ontological reworking of ecologies of sensation" honors this reconsideration of emotion's power in making changes to our reality. 

Returning to Highmore's article, when we talk about affect we are talking about the guttural pulls that undermine all the ego and super ego socialization and ideological influences.  Although affect is not separate from or uninfluenced by these things, it marks a return to the physical body - blood, guts, wet, smelly, warm, REAL body.  When we experience anything it is not through a singular sense; everything is connected.  So let's say you sit down with me and my stew and I graciously offer you a bowl, you accept, and here is what follows:

• You grasp a warm bowl in both your hands and hold it because it is too hot to eat.
• Steam will rise from the stew both allowing you to smell the peanutty undertones and kissing your face with another kind of heat.
• You will look into the bowl and see a thick, rich orange with chunks of sweet potato, speckles of green celery, and a smattering of red bell pepper.
• When you finally take a bite, the secondary texture of chopped fresh peanuts will interrupt the initial smoothness of the stew.  Finally, a zing of lime that is only apparent after you swallow will overtake your exhale.
• The mouthful of stew will warmly travel down your esophagus and into your tummy, eventually warming up your whole body.

Now that's just me breaking down the physical sensations, perceptions, and registers that  you might feel.  Highmore considers this arena of sensorial perception and sensual expression beneath an umbrella term "social aesthetics" that highlights all the entanglements between bodies (121).  Now sharing a bowl of stew would be something that brought us together, but that isn't necessarily an interesting affect conversation (just the sign of an amazing afternoon).  Highmore mores the discussion to DIStaste.  Distaste is "revolt, physical nausea, vomiting, and retching...it's signaled through a register of affects sliding from condescension to disdain to scorn, and contempt" (124).  This pertains to schismogenesis, or the intensification of cultural differences or rivalries upon a period of closer contact between two distinct cultural groups or cultural factions (127).  As Gregory Bateson wanted to know, why don't cultures actually melt into this metaphoric melting pot when they are alongside one another?  In fact, oftentimes, the rivalries between two cultures will escalate.  The reason boils down to....

ETHOS - "the expression of a culturally standardised system of organization of the instincts and emotions of the individuals" - like so much that we talk about in cultural studies, or at least when we're lackadaisically throwing around "social construction," it needs to be recognized that just because something is abstract or on the surface or imaginary does not mean that it does not have real life, concrete elements and effects.  This is true of gender, ethnicity, so on and so forth, up to and including ethos, which can be linked to class.  Ethos includes the ways we do things, our forms of perception, affective intensities, and more.  Highmore refers to it as the "distribution of the sensible" (128).  It's due to the particular ethos of a culture that groups will rub one another the wrong way at an almost instinctual level; the differences between these core, everyday emotions and practices are too much to handle - blending or melting is not happening.

Ethos can be changed, but it requires sensual, affective pedagogy.  I highly recommend checking out the story about a lad eating the spiciest vindaloos when he was out "going for an Indian" (133).  After sending back the dish because it wasn't spicy enough, Javed, the restaurant owner, added the chilis that the English man insisted upon regardless of the fact that it ceased to be an Indian dish anymore - the meal was something else both in ingredients, taste, and experience.  The young Brit returned later to discuss what happened to his back end after consuming all the explosive chilis and this is a scene of sensual pedagogy.  I'm not doing it justice because it's straight up so good without my stamp on it.