Slow Death and Food as Art

A few years ago, when I was still at my previous University, I wrote a paper about the social and political implications of Walter Pater’s theory of aesthetics. I took my starting point from his “Conclusion” to The Renaissance, a book in which he blends art history/criticism with storytelling. The essay in question offers an impassioned argument for the appreciation of art as the best means for giving meaning to human life. With this kind of perspective, it is easy to see how the kind of “argument against abstraction” made by Walter Benjamin that Dr. Alvarez notes in her essay can take an aesthetic view such as Pater’s for cultural elitism that “disintegrated (invalidated) real, gritty, working-class experiences” (Alvarez 212). At the same time, and this was more or less the thesis of my paper, Pater’s aesthetics offers a way of countering the biopolitical and efficiency-mad version of modernity that trails in the wake of capitalist growth, which often contributes to the negative aspects of these gritty lives. The overtly theoretical opening of Lauren Berlant’s article shows us what’s at stake in this social system, and Striffler’s article on the Tyson Chicken factory gives a good picture of what it might look like. But to go back to the other side of the argument again, Striffler’s article does show us that the workers in the chicken factory have lives with meaning beyond their work (both in the sense of being outside after their shift ends, but also in the connections and consciousness that the drudgery itself creates). This is where, perhaps, Pater’s argument has a blind spot: he writes at one point that it’s “not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses?” (188), but then later argues that “art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake” (190). A beautiful sentiment, but if we philosophize in abstraction that this quality is only available through art, the dichotomy between it and the drudgery of the factory worker is hard to overcome.
Rather than oscillate between these apparently dichotomous viewpoints, I think we can find a common thread in their purpose. Pater’s aesthetics and some of the theorists we have read so far appear to share the view that meaning can be granted to everyday activities through the work of memory. This would be the value of a piece of art: that it recalls for the artist or viewer that moment of experience that led to the piece’s creation in the first place. Thus, he can validate the work of art itself, while still arguing that experience, and not its fruit, is what matters in life. This bringing the past into the present in order to give it meaning resonates with Luce Giard’s article on cooking, when she tells us that the meaning of everyday life grows as it reconstructs memories. “perhaps that is exactly what I am seeking in my culinary joys: the reconstruction, through gestures, tastes, and combinations, of a silent legend as if, by dint of merely living in it with my hands and body, I would succeed in restoring the alchemy of such a history” (Giard 321). The silent legend being the overlooked work of her grandmother’s generation of women, her work in the kitchen participates in a reciprocal process of meaning-making in which her life is enriched as she recalls the value of those women’s lives that the profit-oriented, slow-death model of modern life attempts to hide from view. To the extent that Pater’s aesthetics gives us a similar reciprocal process, the two may be closer in significance than might be initially apparent.