{"title":"The London Consortium: a Select Bibliography","authors":"Francis Gooding","doi":"10.1111/criq.12692","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12692","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"64 4","pages":"49-51"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44719154","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
<p>Standing on the south bank of the Thames, today, its chimneys reconstructed, its brickwork restored, its roof replaced, Battersea Power Station betrays few of the troubles that plagued its development and redevelopment (Figure 1). Like many of London’s power stations, Battersea began as two separate units: Battersea A, the western wing, opened in 1933, and Battersea B, the eastern wing, in 1955. Unlike many of these other power stations, however, in which the ‘B’ building formed an <i>ad hoc</i> response to rising energy demand, and often came to stand for the complex as such (what we today know as Bankside, or as the Tate Modern, is in fact Bankside B, Bankside A having been demolished in 1959), Battersea A and B were planned together from the start, two parts of the same building. ‘Battersea Power Station, as it stands, is a dream only half come true’, wrote one journalist in 1937. ‘Not until all that corrugated iron has been stripped away and another building of the same size has been joined to it, with two more gigantic chimneys pointing to heaven, will the whole dream be realized.’<sup>1</sup> The fourth chimney, granting the building its iconic symmetry, would not be completed for another eighteen years.<sup>2</sup></p><p>Other early observers described the power station as a ‘cathedral of bricks’, a ‘temple of power’, these epithets reflecting not only a certain fossil fetishism, a quasi-religious awe at the scale of energy exploitation, but also the brute reality of Giles Gilbert Scott’s design, which had to complement St Paul’s Cathedral, across the Thames, and appease the Archbishop of Canterbury.<sup>3</sup> The smokestacks at either end of Battersea A were thus to be perceived as twin spires. Gilbert Scott gave the building its grooved brickwork and neoclassical chimneys, while architect James Theodore Halliday could take credit for the control room’s gleaming art deco interiors, no less marvellous than the frontage. Situated directly opposite the St Paul’s, we ought to note, Bankside had to show still greater deference to the cathedral. Gilbert Scott (who had been brought onto the project after his success at Battersea) therefore designed it with a single chimney, topped off at a lower height, to obscure St Paul’s as little as possible.<sup>4</sup> The aesthetics of Battersea and Bankside arise from a simultaneous mimicry and self-effacement, aspiring to the image of the cathedral while genuflecting before it.</p><p>Battersea Power Station is now arguably a cultural icon on a par with St Paul’s. As the new owners’ signage reminds visitors, the station once supplied a fifth of London’s electricity, and it could claim to be the largest brick building in Europe. But the social function of the power station today is quite different. As I write, the transformation of the building and its environs into a gentrified multi-use complex – into luxury apartments, offices and shops – is almost complete. The process of the power station’s rede
然而，我认为对巴特西发电站的投机性重建的比较研究很有意义，不仅因为它阐明了反乌托邦流派的内部发展——“影响力的焦虑”弥漫在后奥威尔式反乌托邦中——还因为它也有望告诉我们一些关于在英语反乌托邦中获得牵拉的各种环境主义的东西。在奥威尔的《一九八四》中，自然的乌托邦式的价值增值与作者对城市化和机械化的态度是分不开的，例如，本文的下一部分将会展示。但雷德福所削弱的恰恰是乡村和城市之间的情感对比，而Cuarón则利用我们将燃煤能源基础设施与社会进步联系在一起，来强调他的后工业反乌托邦的贫瘠和惰性。关注能源基础设施在反乌托邦文学和电影中的表现，是在论证生态关系与学者们长期以来认识到的政治和经济关系一样，是该类型的核心。奥威尔在《通往维根码头的路》(1937)中不无恼怒地写道:“社会主义，通常被认为是与机械进步的概念联系在一起的，它不仅是一种必要的发展，而且本身就是一种目的，几乎是一种宗教。”奥威尔在《通往维根码头的路》(1937)中描述了英格兰北部工业地区工人阶级的生活。最容易接受社会主义的人，也是那种对机械进步充满热情的人。12奥威尔在这里用惯常的概括性写作;当他确实在寻找例子时，这些例子显然来自乌托邦传统。因此，奥威尔把一些最尖锐的批评留给了h·g·威尔斯，后者的乌托邦(他特别想到的是《像神一样的人》(1923)和《梦》(1924)，尽管同样的主题在《现代乌托邦》(1905)中已经出现了)把未来想象成“机械进步的更快发展”，并把自己置于更接近奥尔德斯·赫胥黎的位置，后者的《美丽新世界》(1932)不仅戏剧化地描绘了一个完全机械化的福特主义文明，但也假定了这些创新与共产主义之间的联系——最明显的是，这一点可以从其人物的命名(伯纳德·马克思，列宁娜·克朗)中得到证明。显然，对奥威尔来说，城市化和工业化的进程，以及(或许对我们来说最重要的)机器力量的崛起，是值得哀叹的，而不是值得庆祝的。《通往维根码头之路》对机器文明提出了至少五项批评:人类将不再能够满足他们“努力和创造的需要”;自然将变得有序、规范、合理，这样“就不会出错”;人类有机体将退化为令人厌恶的“柔软”;机器会腐蚀审美趣味;机械化将在它自己的势头下自动前进社会主义知识分子鼓吹一种“唯物主义的乌托邦”，在那里机械化是目的而不是手段，他们要为把工人阶级推向法西斯主义负责，而法西斯主义似乎是“欧洲文明中所有美好事物的最后一道防线”困扰奥威尔的不仅是机器文明的到来，还有这种前景激起的一种法西斯集体主义的反动欲望，表面上看，它是反对完全机械化的愿景的。值得在这里停下来注意的是，奥威尔在《通往维根码头之路》中的分析肯定忽略了一点，即法西斯主义知道自己的机器崇拜形式。以意大利未来主义者对速度、电力和工业的赞歌为例，其中发电站体现了一种新的审美理想。马里内蒂在1914年写道:“没有什么比一个巨大的、嗡嗡作响的发电站更美丽的了，它能承受像山脉一样高的水压，还有像地平线一样广阔的电力，被压缩到四个配电柱里，上面布满了仪表、控制面板和闪闪发光的杠杆。”15 .一年前，未来主义建筑师安东尼奥·圣埃利亚(Antonio Sant ' elia)绘制了一系列水力发电厂图纸中的第一张。比他更著名的La citt<e:1> Nuova项目更浪漫的是，Sant 'Elia的蠕虫视角图把发电站变成了巨大的堡垒，无法通行，令人望而生畏正如保罗·戈德伯格所指出的，圣埃利亚的建筑预示着弗里茨·朗的《大都会》(1927)中高耸的城市景观，而后者反过来又对反乌托邦电影产生了深远的影响但我们也可以从这些未来主义者对工业主义的赞美，到巴特西电站控制室奢华的装饰艺术风格的内部，与建筑简朴的外观形成鲜明对比，找到一条直接的联系。奥威尔对机械的厌恶也塑造了他对文学形式的概念。
{"title":"Cathedral of Power: Battersea Power Station in Dystopian Visual Culture","authors":"Harry Warwick","doi":"10.1111/criq.12691","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12691","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Standing on the south bank of the Thames, today, its chimneys reconstructed, its brickwork restored, its roof replaced, Battersea Power Station betrays few of the troubles that plagued its development and redevelopment (Figure 1). Like many of London’s power stations, Battersea began as two separate units: Battersea A, the western wing, opened in 1933, and Battersea B, the eastern wing, in 1955. Unlike many of these other power stations, however, in which the ‘B’ building formed an <i>ad hoc</i> response to rising energy demand, and often came to stand for the complex as such (what we today know as Bankside, or as the Tate Modern, is in fact Bankside B, Bankside A having been demolished in 1959), Battersea A and B were planned together from the start, two parts of the same building. ‘Battersea Power Station, as it stands, is a dream only half come true’, wrote one journalist in 1937. ‘Not until all that corrugated iron has been stripped away and another building of the same size has been joined to it, with two more gigantic chimneys pointing to heaven, will the whole dream be realized.’<sup>1</sup> The fourth chimney, granting the building its iconic symmetry, would not be completed for another eighteen years.<sup>2</sup></p><p>Other early observers described the power station as a ‘cathedral of bricks’, a ‘temple of power’, these epithets reflecting not only a certain fossil fetishism, a quasi-religious awe at the scale of energy exploitation, but also the brute reality of Giles Gilbert Scott’s design, which had to complement St Paul’s Cathedral, across the Thames, and appease the Archbishop of Canterbury.<sup>3</sup> The smokestacks at either end of Battersea A were thus to be perceived as twin spires. Gilbert Scott gave the building its grooved brickwork and neoclassical chimneys, while architect James Theodore Halliday could take credit for the control room’s gleaming art deco interiors, no less marvellous than the frontage. Situated directly opposite the St Paul’s, we ought to note, Bankside had to show still greater deference to the cathedral. Gilbert Scott (who had been brought onto the project after his success at Battersea) therefore designed it with a single chimney, topped off at a lower height, to obscure St Paul’s as little as possible.<sup>4</sup> The aesthetics of Battersea and Bankside arise from a simultaneous mimicry and self-effacement, aspiring to the image of the cathedral while genuflecting before it.</p><p>Battersea Power Station is now arguably a cultural icon on a par with St Paul’s. As the new owners’ signage reminds visitors, the station once supplied a fifth of London’s electricity, and it could claim to be the largest brick building in Europe. But the social function of the power station today is quite different. As I write, the transformation of the building and its environs into a gentrified multi-use complex – into luxury apartments, offices and shops – is almost complete. The process of the power station’s rede","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"64 4","pages":"117-137"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12691","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48362732","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
<p>Middle children are alleged to be calmer than first-borns because they make their entry in the second act – even if it is also in a sense <i>as</i> the second act – of a play that has already been going for some time. They assume that everybody else on the stage knows their lines and cues. Many inaugural enterprises depend on the shared confidence that others involved in them know why they are there and what they are doing, even if you don't. It often turns out that everyone was assuming all along everybody had access to a script. My own arrival on the scene of the London Consortium followed in this tradition. Paul Hirst who had been the Academic Director of the Consortium since its establishment in 1998 had been planning to retire in 2004, but died very suddenly a year before. I had been appointed as Academic Director a year in advance to understudy him but found myself taking on the role in October 2003.</p><p>I do not recall the Consortium ever issuing anything like a mission statement, though there would certainly have been shared scorn at the idea that this was the kind of thing on which an academic programme ought to spend its time. Yet many of those involved in its activities spoke and acted as though there were in fact a shared understanding and commitment to what the Consortium was for. But though there was a great deal that was missionary about the Consortium, I was never convinced that there was ever anything that could plausibly act as mission control, or indeed as a Major Tom.</p><p>It was often said that the Consortium was opposed to the relativism that was supposed to hold sway in the humanities, and when I once let slip that I thought I would have, under <i>peine forte et dure,</i> to describe myself as a relativist, it was akin to owning up to drinking my own bathwater, which I suppose relativism must have seemed to some to resemble. But the antirelativism of the Consortium was a thing of will rather than settled principle (I think I can, I <i>know</i> I can), since nobody was ever likely to agree on, let alone articulate, what the grounds of nonrelative and unrevisable truth and value were supposed to be, apart from the negotiation and articulation of value itself, which is oddly enough more or less what relativists think, or relativists of my criminal stripe.</p><p>The other thing that the London Consortium held out for, consorting a little oddly with this abstract antirelativism, was interdisciplinarity. I once heard Mark Cousins explain (swayingly, at a party, where many of the articles of faith of the Consortium tended to be articulated) what our kind of interdisciplinarity meant, and it has stayed with me, as a standing rebuke to the claims of interdisciplinarity that have now become grimly and greyly orthodox throughout the academic world. I have come to think that the promotion of interdisciplinarity has actually become a method of theme-control, ensuring that everybody marches in time to the same tunes, sung in the sa
据称，排行中间的孩子比排行第一的孩子更平静，因为他们是在第二幕登场的——即使从某种意义上说，这也是一出已经上演了一段时间的戏的第二幕。他们认为舞台上的其他人都知道他们的台词和暗示。许多初创企业依赖于一种共同的信心，即参与其中的其他人知道他们为什么在那里，他们在做什么，即使你不知道。通常情况下，每个人都认为每个人都可以访问脚本。我自己也遵循这一传统来到伦敦财团的现场。保罗·赫斯特自1998年成立以来一直担任该协会的学术主任，他原本计划在2004年退休，但在一年前突然去世。我早在一年前就被任命为学术主任，为他代班，但在2003年10月，我发现自己接受了这个角色。我不记得联合会曾经发布过任何类似使命宣言的东西，不过，如果有人认为这是一个学术项目应该花时间做的事情，肯定会遭到大家的嘲笑。然而，参与其活动的许多人的发言和行动似乎实际上对该联盟的目的有共同的理解和承诺。但是，尽管联盟有很多传教士的东西，但我从不相信有什么东西可以合理地发挥任务控制的作用，或者实际上作为汤姆少校。人们常说，该协会反对应该在人文学科中占据主导地位的相对主义，当我有一次说漏了嘴，我想我应该在peine forte et dure的名义下，把自己描述为一个相对主义者时，这就像是承认喝了自己的洗澡水，我想相对主义在某些人看来一定很像。但是，联盟的反相对主义是一种意志，而不是既定的原则(我认为我可以，我知道我可以)，因为没有人可能会同意，更不用说阐明，非相对的和不可修正的真理和价值的基础应该是什么，除了价值本身的协商和阐明，奇怪的是，这或多或少是相对主义者的想法，或者是我这种犯罪倾向的相对主义者。伦敦联盟坚持的另一件事，有点奇怪地与抽象的反相对主义联系在一起，就是跨学科。我曾经听过马克·考辛斯(Mark Cousins)解释(在一次聚会上，他的语气有些摇摆，因为很多联合会的信条都是在聚会上被阐明的)我们的那种跨学科意味着什么，这句话一直萦绕在我的脑海里，作为对跨学科主张的一种永恒的谴责，这种主张如今在学术界已成为一种冷酷而灰暗的正统。我开始认为，跨学科的推广实际上已经成为一种主题控制的方法，确保每个人都及时地以同样的曲调，用同样的语言演唱。自从跨学科成为人文学科的黄金标准以来，什么时候人文学科在方法和观点上比现在更统一了?相比之下，马克宣称跨学科不是宗教信仰的问题，因为跨学科的重点不是原则上的跨学科，也不是在所有可能的情况下。相反，跨学科是一个不舒服的选择，强加给任何学者，他们渴望更认真地研究一个给定的主题，这必然需要一个学科的资源，尤其是一个声称拥有其专有权威的学科。要成为跨学科的人，就是不要对那些对你所关注的主题有有趣看法的人视而不见，只要你肯费心去寻找。出于这个原因，这个联盟最好的，也是最具原则性的，不是它的原则，而是它的实践。令人惊讶的是，无论当时还是现在，该联盟都是完全逆潮流而动的，它最初是一个面向博士生的项目，要求博士生每学期上两门授课课程，为期六周。在北美的研究生院，教学课程的设计是为了将那些经常参加各种各样的混杂的本科课程的学生同化为哲学、生物学或艺术史等学术协会的成员。研究生们必须学习这么多年的这些课程，以至于那些最终不得不提交保罗·赫斯特(Paul Hirst)所说的“束缚的蓝色怪物”博士论文的人，已经太老了，再也不会有逃跑的念头。 伦敦财团的课程时长为六周——足够长，足以让人有一点上瘾的可能性，但又不至于让人陷入完全依赖的痛苦——并且有意为那些从英国大学毕业的学生设置有趣的障碍，这些学生已经获得了单一荣誉学士学位，并认为自己已经准备好进入自己选择的学术教会。只是在博士课程运行了几年之后，为了响应英国资助机构的要求，申请博士资助的申请人应该参加一个“研究准备”的硕士课程，联合硕士课程才从博士课程中逆向工程出来。从那以后，我多次推荐这种倒过来的方法，当然是徒劳的。几乎比讲授这些课程更令人兴奋的是这些课程的设计方式。他们总是合作教学，虽然你通常要选择你的教学伙伴，但有时更像是《实习医生风云》中的狱友，或者歌曲中医院病床的偶然礼让(“我有一个朋友躺在我对面/我没有选择他，他也没有选择我”)。我们集体决定，天知道是怎么回事，因为像往常一样，我们可能对我们认为它的重要性有不同的看法，总是在三年之后停止这些课程，就像那个关于维多利亚时代人洗澡频率的古老笑话一样，不管我们是否需要。更重要的是，课程没有优雅地逐步淘汰，一次一两个，这本来是合理和有效的，而是像斯大林时代的委员会成员一样，整群人都出来射击。这一过程需要每三年召开一次课程发展会议，会议持续了几天，在一个烟雾弥漫的房间里进行，这是我们预防时期的当前居民可能无法想象的。布莱希特认为，允许观众在剧院吸烟会鼓励批判性的反思，但联合会课程开发会议上的龙式吸气和呼气倾向于产生大麻烟的激情强度。在为期六周的课程中，他们会就各种各样的话题提出数十个建议，其中大多数都会因其可预测性、可信性或胆怯性而被大声否决或嘲笑。最终，在冒烟的废墟中，有四条赛道被选中在接下来的三年里运行。在我成为学术主任之前的学徒岁月里，我的工作是指导这些课程通过伯克贝克学院的一个专门负责质量保证的委员会。我不记得是不是在这个委员会上，题为“屎与文明”的课程因为害怕会激怒《每日邮报》而遭到反对，但我已经习惯了告诉人们保罗·赫斯特(Paul Hirst)酸酸苦辣的“事物的秩序”替代方案，所以现在放弃了。其中一些课程可能对今天的读者来说不像当时那样具有煽动性，但如果认为这是因为他们在他们的时代之前，而不是完全超越了这个时代，那就好了。我们总是尝试开设一门精读课程，专门选择一篇重要的文章，因为它要求阅读，因此对你有好处。之所以选择斯多葛主义这门课，正是因为这是一门新生不可能了解多少的课程。这些课程之所以古怪，正是因为它们在一个标榜自己与当下痴迷的文化研究有关的项目中显得如此古色古香(该协会的盲点之一是它对流行文化话题的强烈厌恶，尽管我经常试图把它们偷偷带进去)。其他课程则提供了一些隐晦的方式来应对那些已经开始显得令人厌倦地存在和正确的担忧。全球变暖是通过极地探险、冰淇淋和滑雪的历史来分析的。在天灾想象完全成为主流文化惯例的20年前，汤姆·麦卡锡(Tom McCarthy)和奥拉·萨兹(Aura Satz)出色地开设了关于灾难的课程，作为一个拙劣的官僚调查委员会。我自己的习惯是，除了显然是为了钱，我尽量不写那些有既定课程背景的话题，但我总是试着想象一些研究主题，人们也必须想象一些新的关注方式，这属于这些课程所建议的分配。这也助长了我自己试图在学生和同事中诱导的卡罗里安之痒，让他们去思考不可能的事情——可能是荣耀，或者是不可思议——去思考。 我希望，为本期《批判季刊》收集的记录和记忆将有助于让他们确信，伦敦财团实际上并不全是一个梦，它们本身就证明，说出这是什么梦并不完全超出人类的智慧。
{"title":"Consorting","authors":"Steven Connor","doi":"10.1111/criq.12685","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12685","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Middle children are alleged to be calmer than first-borns because they make their entry in the second act – even if it is also in a sense <i>as</i> the second act – of a play that has already been going for some time. They assume that everybody else on the stage knows their lines and cues. Many inaugural enterprises depend on the shared confidence that others involved in them know why they are there and what they are doing, even if you don't. It often turns out that everyone was assuming all along everybody had access to a script. My own arrival on the scene of the London Consortium followed in this tradition. Paul Hirst who had been the Academic Director of the Consortium since its establishment in 1998 had been planning to retire in 2004, but died very suddenly a year before. I had been appointed as Academic Director a year in advance to understudy him but found myself taking on the role in October 2003.</p><p>I do not recall the Consortium ever issuing anything like a mission statement, though there would certainly have been shared scorn at the idea that this was the kind of thing on which an academic programme ought to spend its time. Yet many of those involved in its activities spoke and acted as though there were in fact a shared understanding and commitment to what the Consortium was for. But though there was a great deal that was missionary about the Consortium, I was never convinced that there was ever anything that could plausibly act as mission control, or indeed as a Major Tom.</p><p>It was often said that the Consortium was opposed to the relativism that was supposed to hold sway in the humanities, and when I once let slip that I thought I would have, under <i>peine forte et dure,</i> to describe myself as a relativist, it was akin to owning up to drinking my own bathwater, which I suppose relativism must have seemed to some to resemble. But the antirelativism of the Consortium was a thing of will rather than settled principle (I think I can, I <i>know</i> I can), since nobody was ever likely to agree on, let alone articulate, what the grounds of nonrelative and unrevisable truth and value were supposed to be, apart from the negotiation and articulation of value itself, which is oddly enough more or less what relativists think, or relativists of my criminal stripe.</p><p>The other thing that the London Consortium held out for, consorting a little oddly with this abstract antirelativism, was interdisciplinarity. I once heard Mark Cousins explain (swayingly, at a party, where many of the articles of faith of the Consortium tended to be articulated) what our kind of interdisciplinarity meant, and it has stayed with me, as a standing rebuke to the claims of interdisciplinarity that have now become grimly and greyly orthodox throughout the academic world. I have come to think that the promotion of interdisciplinarity has actually become a method of theme-control, ensuring that everybody marches in time to the same tunes, sung in the sa","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"64 4","pages":"14-19"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12685","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45255236","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The London Consortium: a Personal History","authors":"Colin MacCabe","doi":"10.1111/criq.12696","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12696","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"64 4","pages":"4-13"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49520510","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
<p>The confectionery industry is the epitome of processed food: the point at which physically consumable entities most clearly overlap with synthetic objects. This is reinforced by the fact that confectionery is consumed for pleasure rather than nutrition; low on the scale of necessity, it exemplifies the commercially constructed needs that characterise consumer society. Confectionery represents the peak of alimentary superfluity just as it exists at the peak of the dietician’s food pyramid, and according to these principles, I explore the mechanisms and dynamics that condition its consumption. After a brief history of processed food and the confectionery industry, I outline how synthetic food is inherently a commodity according to Marx’s definition, before drawing upon the writings of Jean Baudrillard to delineate the complex relationship between consumption, sign and play in the confectionery industry.</p><p>Food processing has been around for millennia, and Chris Otter remarks that it is ‘misleading to regard the industrialisation of food as a purely “modern” phenomenon’.<sup>1</sup> Methods of food preservation such as salting and smoking date from primitive societies, and heating food is already a modification of it. An article in the <i>Scientific American</i> traces a timeline of food processing from roasted meat (1.8 million years ago) to bread (30,000 years ago), chocolate (1900 BC), sugar (500 BC), coffee (mid-1400s), carbonated water (1767), corn flakes (1894), MSG (1908), spam (1926), chicken nuggets (1950s), high-fructose corn syrup (1957) and lab-grown meat (2013).<sup>2</sup> While food processing is a spectrum, this spectrum demonstrates certain thresholds of change, and the examples from corn flakes onwards indicate more chemically complex ingredients as well as advanced and mechanised methods of food manufacture. It is evident that food is becoming ‘increasingly synthetic’, a shift which Otter situates in the context of industrialisation and the transition from an organic to a mineral economy.<sup>3</sup> Whether this is a primarily positive development in reducing global food scarcity, or whether there are negative implications for health, is a vast and separate topic of discussion. I wish to focus on the semiotic implications: the synthetic nature of many modern foods, combined with advances in packaging materials and presentation, has led to food progressively resembling non-consumable objects, causing a shift in the ways in which individuals relate to it.</p><p>The specific domain of the confectionery industry has undergone similar transitions. Laura Mason discusses how the origins of sugar consumption, derived from the skill of refining cane juice, can be traced to India over two thousand years ago.<sup>4</sup> This was denoted by the Sanskrit words <i>sakkar</i> and <i>khanda</i>, which form the basis of ‘sugar’ and ‘candy’; both the words and the skill of refining sugar were transmitted westward across Persia and the Midd
{"title":"The Sweet Shop and the Toy Shop: Consumption, Sign and Play in the Confectionery Industry","authors":"Elena Violaris","doi":"10.1111/criq.12634","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12634","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The confectionery industry is the epitome of processed food: the point at which physically consumable entities most clearly overlap with synthetic objects. This is reinforced by the fact that confectionery is consumed for pleasure rather than nutrition; low on the scale of necessity, it exemplifies the commercially constructed needs that characterise consumer society. Confectionery represents the peak of alimentary superfluity just as it exists at the peak of the dietician’s food pyramid, and according to these principles, I explore the mechanisms and dynamics that condition its consumption. After a brief history of processed food and the confectionery industry, I outline how synthetic food is inherently a commodity according to Marx’s definition, before drawing upon the writings of Jean Baudrillard to delineate the complex relationship between consumption, sign and play in the confectionery industry.</p><p>Food processing has been around for millennia, and Chris Otter remarks that it is ‘misleading to regard the industrialisation of food as a purely “modern” phenomenon’.<sup>1</sup> Methods of food preservation such as salting and smoking date from primitive societies, and heating food is already a modification of it. An article in the <i>Scientific American</i> traces a timeline of food processing from roasted meat (1.8 million years ago) to bread (30,000 years ago), chocolate (1900 BC), sugar (500 BC), coffee (mid-1400s), carbonated water (1767), corn flakes (1894), MSG (1908), spam (1926), chicken nuggets (1950s), high-fructose corn syrup (1957) and lab-grown meat (2013).<sup>2</sup> While food processing is a spectrum, this spectrum demonstrates certain thresholds of change, and the examples from corn flakes onwards indicate more chemically complex ingredients as well as advanced and mechanised methods of food manufacture. It is evident that food is becoming ‘increasingly synthetic’, a shift which Otter situates in the context of industrialisation and the transition from an organic to a mineral economy.<sup>3</sup> Whether this is a primarily positive development in reducing global food scarcity, or whether there are negative implications for health, is a vast and separate topic of discussion. I wish to focus on the semiotic implications: the synthetic nature of many modern foods, combined with advances in packaging materials and presentation, has led to food progressively resembling non-consumable objects, causing a shift in the ways in which individuals relate to it.</p><p>The specific domain of the confectionery industry has undergone similar transitions. Laura Mason discusses how the origins of sugar consumption, derived from the skill of refining cane juice, can be traced to India over two thousand years ago.<sup>4</sup> This was denoted by the Sanskrit words <i>sakkar</i> and <i>khanda</i>, which form the basis of ‘sugar’ and ‘candy’; both the words and the skill of refining sugar were transmitted westward across Persia and the Midd","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"64 3","pages":"107-126"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12634","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45152125","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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