by Dwight Furrow
Flavors are nomads. They lurk in disparate ingredients and journey from dish to dish. They cross generations and geographical borders putting down roots in far-flung locations, pop up when least expected, and appear in different guises depending on specific mixtures and combinations. Flavors are a molecular flow continuously reshaping each other in reciprocal determination.
The task of gastronomy is to understand this complexity. But how? As I noted in a previous post, there appears to be no global similarity space mapping relations between flavors/aromas and no rules governing how they should be combined. Are there strategies for grasping this contingency and complexity?
In general, we humans have developed two strategies for dealing with complexity. The first, macro-reduction, is of ancient lineage. We develop a taxonomy of categories into which we can neatly slip any object we encounter, carving nature at its joints, as Plato wrote. Any phenomenon can be understood as a particular instance of a general category which can then serve as a norm to judge whether the phenomenon in question is a good example of its type.
In the food world, this means we think of flavors in terms of the ingredients and dishes in which they appear, which are then grouped according to the culture from which they emerge. We divide the world of cuisine into “Italian food,” “Chinese food,” “Mexican food, etc. and these categories guide our expectations about what food should taste like.
Preferences are a function of what we’re accustomed to, “the flavors of home,” or when eating outside our culture of origin, they are determined by whether those expectations about what “Italian food” or “Chinese food” should taste like are met. In its extreme form, this encourages culinary nationalism. Food becomes an expression of national identity to which certain dishes exclusively belong. Boundaries are formally or informally policed and battles over authenticity are heartfelt and common.
But macro-reduction was never adequate for understanding the food world. The vast differences between the cuisines of sub-regions and locales call into question the idea of a national cuisine. (There are serious debates about whether there is something called “Italian cuisine” that doesn’t run roughshod over vast regional differences.) Cuisine has always been dynamic. But, today, the increased pace of global communications, the mixing of populations, and the widespread availability of ingredients make this approach even less plausible with debates over authenticity increasingly becoming tedious distractions. Our preferences are no longer confined by geographical borders. Even the concepts of individual dishes are breaking out of national boundaries—the variety of preparations called “gazpacho” today have little resemblance to the almond/bread or tomato-based cold soups indigenous to Spain or Mexico. For many contemporary chefs, “hollandaise” refers not to a mother sauce but to a canvas.
The second strategy for reducing complexity, micro-reduction, is of a more recent vintage. It attempts to reduce complexity by showing it is the product of simpler, more readily definable, elements. Flavors and aromas are after all chemical compounds, and we know a lot about how chemical compounds bond and interact. Hence the current interest in the science of flavor, flavor pairing theory, and gastrophysics as explanations of our food preferences. This discourse has been enormously useful in explaining how our sensory mechanisms work to produce taste sensations, and some knowledge of food chemistry is now essential for chefs creating new dishes. However, the hypothesis that we prefer dishes in which ingredients share flavor compounds (flavor-pairing theory) has not been confirmed since it cannot explain the prevalence of dishes that rely on contrasting flavors. Furthermore, it is peculiar to assume that science can definitively answer questions that are, fundamentally, questions about aesthetics. Aesthetic properties are of course dependent on underlying physical properties. But no account of the chemistry of color blending, the properties of light absorption, or the mechanics of color perception will explain why we find a Rothko painting beautiful. Similarly, our enjoyment of Chef Morimoto’s “Buri-bop” is unlikely to be reducible to an immediate chemosensory response.
Notice that both reductionist strategies fail because they ignore the role that differences play in the constitution of entities. Simplification via reduction of either sort imposes a false unity on the data, a useful, efficient strategy when the details don’t matter, but in gastronomy the details matter.
Is there a theoretical approach that doesn’t rely on macro-reduction or micro-reduction that might help us understand the world of gastronomy? For my money that would be assemblage theory, a contemporary elaboration of a late 20th Century collaboration between French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the social theorist/psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, focused largely on the ontology of social relations.
An assemblage is a collection of heterogeneous elements that function together as a network. The elements may be sub-atomic particles, physical objects, persons, social groups of various sizes, events, speech acts, signs, ideas—or ingredients in a dish. What matters is that the elements exist in dynamic relations with each other and, as a result, produce emergent properties that are not reducible to the properties of the elements. Wetness is a property of water that is not shared by individual water molecules. Elegance is a property of a musical passage not shared by individual notes. Emergence (weak emergence for those familiar with these debates) limits the explanatory power of micro-reduction since the whole is, in a sense, greater than the sum of its parts. A dish or a meal has a variety of properties such as innovative, distinctive, comforting, harmonious, or in the French-style, that are not simply an aggregate of the dish or meal’s components although the components play an important causal role in generating those properties.
But neither are these emergent properties best understood as general properties of an assemblage.
The problem with general properties or essences has long been understood. They don’t reach the identity of an individual and thus have not proven useful in contexts such as personal relationships or aesthetics where individuality matters. A person may be talented, ambitious, born in New York in 1957, and a Mets fan but no such list of general characteristics will describe what makes a person that distinct individual she is. And no list of aesthetic concepts will capture what makes Monet’s Waterlilies a great painting. Similarly, the proliferating differences within evolving food traditions as well as different ways of making most dishes suggests that general properties or essences will not make sense of the food world. There is no essence of a pizza apart from the disparate, continuously evolving preparations that people have chosen to call “pizza.”
Assemblage theory explains why essentialism misses the mark and provides an alternative. Essentialism demands a logical analysis of an object’s identity that fixes the object as a finished product and describes the necessary and sufficient conditions that make it what it is. But such an analysis passes over in silence the fact that no entity is a finished product since everything is continuously changing—it’s the rate at which something changes that contributes to its character. What makes something a distinct individual is its process of development, the singular events that explain the emergence of its properties and the trajectory such an emergence follows. Identity is path dependent, a product of the contingent interplay of forces acting on capacities.
Thus, assemblage theory argues that an assemblage is not merely a collection of components that function together. It is also an arrangement of powers, capacities, and tendencies—a transformation matrix. It’s the movement in these powers, capacities, and tendencies that explain developmental processes and ultimately the properties that individuals temporarily acquire. These powers, potentialities, and tendencies are not fully actualized (since they are potential) and thus are not well captured as identifiable entities with fixed properties.
Assemblage theory highlights the importance of examining the connections, interactions, and flows between the various components within an assemblage. Unlike our traditional understanding of entities and their combination into groups, assemblages are fully relational, contingent, and heterogeneous and in constant transformation.
There are three key features of assemblages that make assemblage theory useful for conceptualizing the world of gastronomy. The first is that assemblages function via multiple levels of reality and no particular level takes automatic priority. Our food preferences are explained by chemical, biological, psychological, environmental, and aesthetic factors as well as the influence of language, images, many levels of cultural and economic phenomena, and the histories of each of these factors as they intersect through an assemblage. Assemblage theory captures this complexity.
The appropriate level of explanation depends on one’s interests and the relevance of the regularities and mechanisms to be found at each level. But assemblage theory also looks for patterns that cross and move between domains of inquiry without imposing a hierarchy on them.
The second feature important to the study of gastronomy is that assemblages are composed of heterogeneous elements, and that heterogeneity is preserved when explaining the interaction of the elements. Thus, assemblage theory resists the false unities that inhibit our understanding of cuisine. Individuals live within cultures and traditions but don’t lose their individuality despite these influences; local norms and foodways remain distinct from national traditions even as they contribute to them; and ingredients and their flavors do not disappear within the unity of a dish. Flavors are, as I said, nomadic and depend as much on contrast and tension as on similarities and harmonies.
The third feature is assemblage theory’s focus on processes of individuation rather than general properties in capturing the distinctiveness of individual entities. Individual entities in the world of cuisine—chefs, cooks, diners, dishes and recipes, and all variety of food cultures and traditions—are understood not as bearers of general properties but as ongoing processes with distinctive histories and guided by singular events that produce the endless proliferation of differences that characterize the world of cuisine.
There is, however, an obvious problem that assemblage theory must confront. The entities that we now propose to call assemblages have some sort of unity. They are not random collections of mere things but function together as a network. Individual persons have a unity that distinguishes them from others. Social groups that embody food traditions include many differences but there must be something that holds them together that makes referring to them intelligible, and dishes have a unity that gives them coherence and intelligibility as aesthetic objects. How does assemblage theory account for unity?
Assemblage theorists argue that all assemblages share processes across the various levels of explanation that account for both stability (less variation and hence more unity) and change (greater variation and less unity). Deleuze and Guattari label these processes territorialization and deterritorialization respectively. The relative influence of these two processes at work within assemblages accounts for the degree of unity or disunity exhibited by an assemblage. Manuel Delanda, the primary contemporary proponent of assemblage theory, thinks of these processes as parameters that can be dialed up or dialed back. Dialing up territorialization increases unity while dialing up deterritorialization reduces unity. Both processes can be at work simultaneously in various parts of any system.
Thus, entities (understood as assemblages) are neither eternal nor vaporous and their degree of stabilization will change depending on interactions within the assemblage and well as with its environment. The most important thing to know about an entity is that ratio of stabilization and destabilization and the forces that influence it.
This brings me to the main advantage assemblage theory brings to a theory of gastronomy. Our food preferences and the food traditions in which they are embedded are driven by two conflicting desires—a desire for familiarity and a desire for variation. Without familiarity food, which we take into our bodies, might seem threatening or at least too off-putting or alien to generate pleasure. But without variation food is boring and the appetite suffers. Dish design and development, the flux of ingredients and recipes as they change through time, discourses and communication about food, the ideas and images that food generates, and most importantly, the continuities and discontinuities of our food preferences over time are at bottom ways of managing the conflict between familiarity and variation.
The master concepts of assemblage theory—difference and repetition, territorialization and deterritorialization, strata and lines of flight, the actual and the virtual—are designed to model and actively engage with the tensions between familiarity and variation and thus can be leveraged to understand this fundamental tension in the world of cuisine.
In an interview, Deleuze said: “A theory is exactly like a box of tools.” I doubt he had in mind fixing matters of the table, but a good toolbox should be prepared for anything.
For more on the philosophy of food and wine consult American Foodie: Taste, Art, and the Cultural Revolution and Beauty and the Yeast: A Philosophy of Wine, Life, and Love