Public (E-Journal, York University)

Mandelblatt, Bertie

Where Ghosts and Tourists Dine" The Pure and the Hybrid in Louisiana Creole Cultures and the Explorers Club

Manning, Richard

English

The Oil We Eat: Following the Food Chain Back to Iraq

Goebel, Bryce

placing the unknown image: the intervention

Pettman, Dominic

On being Shallow: A Rather Breathless Theoritical Mashup

Longfellow, Brenda

Bollywood/Toronto: Transational Spectatorship

Nelson, Charmaine

The Fruits of Resistance: Reading Portrait of a Negro Slave on the Sly

McCaffery, Steve

Dark Ladies

Finley, Charles

A New Role for Cities? An interview with Jane Jacobs

Contributors 
Adrian Blackwell is an artist, activist, teacher, writer and urban architectural designer. 
His interdisciplinary practice concentrates on spatial problems in the contemporary 
city. Last fall he showed Monster at [relcycle in Hamilton. Kika Thorne and Adrian 
presented their collective work Ambience for a future city at the Future Cities conference 
in Hamilton. He is working with Larkin Architects and Weissbau on the architectural 
design of an affordable housing project in Toronto. 
Sam Dunn has researched and written on a wide range of topics, from heavy metal 
music and culture to homelessness to refugee health. Based in Toronto, currently, he is 
writing and producing the project "Metal: A Headbanger's History." He is also a 
musician and plays bass guitar for the thrash metal band Burn To Black. 
Harun Farocki was born in former Czechoslovakia when the Germans occupied it. 
He first studied theatre science and sociology before devoting himself to film. After 
his studies at the Deutsche Film - und Fernsehakademie in Berlin from 1966 to 1968 
he made educational films and politically committed documentaries. As a lecturer he 
has taught in Berlin, Hamburg, Manila and most recently in Berkeley. He has made 
over 90 films, among them many film essays and documentaries, and published 
countless articles. Since the nineties Farocki has been a frequent guest at film festivals 
as well as contemporary art exhibitions. 
Alex Ferentzy is an interdisciplinary researcher with interests in International Politi- 
cal Economy and Continental Philosophy. He is currently researching the impact of 
non-Euclidean Geometry on French Philosophy in the late Nineteenth Century as a 
precursor to the emergence of philosophies of difference in the Twentieth Century. 
Charles Finley is a PhD candidate in the Joint Programme in Communication and 
Culture at Ryerson University and York University. He has written on cities, technology, 
education and culture for the Annex Gleaner, Engineering Dimension and various 
online publications and for community radio. He is also a participant in the Visible 
City Project and Archive. 
Kirsten Forkert is a Vancouver-based artist, teacher, activist, and occasional art writer. 
Her recent work has been performative in nature, and has taken the form of walks 
and meetings with groups and individuals. Upcoming projects include Blind Spot, in 
collaboration with John Dummett, at Forest City Gallery, in London, Ontario, and work 
at GalCrie Optica in Montreal, and at the Next Wave Festival in Melbourne, Australia. 
Bryce Goebel is currently a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Programme in Social 
and Political Thought at York University. 
Richard W is an independent critic and curator and associate editor of FUSE magazine. 
Hadley Howes and Maxwell Stephens began collaborating in 1997, graduating 
together from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design the following year. They have 
exhibited across Canada and in the United States, and are currently finishing a Masters 
degree in media philosophy while crafting a verre iglomise' powder room. They 
would like to thank the B.C. Arts Council for their support. 
Jane Jacobs has published extensively on cities, the economy and society. Her best- 
known work is The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), a groundbreaking 
work that questioned the ability of the entire modernist planning project to create 
successful cities. Other publications have included The Economy of Cities (1968), The 
Question of Separatism (1980), Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), and Systems 
of Survival (1993). Her most recent work is The Dark Age Ahead (2004). 
Fuyuki Kurasawa is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of 
Arts, at York University. In 2003-4, he is a Fulbright Scholar and Visiting Fellow in 
the Departments of Sociology at Yale University and New York University. Kurasawa 
is the author of The Ethnological Imagination: A Cross-Cultural Critique of Modernity 
(University of Minnesota Press, in press) and of articles in a variety of journals, as 
well as a consulting editor for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Social Theory. 
Saara Liinamaa is currently a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Programme in 
Social and Political Thought, York University. Her writing and research combines 
interests in contemporary art, film, and urban culture. Her recent work addresses topics 
such as theorizing loss andlin the city, time-based urban art, spontaneous memorials, 
and virtual memorialization. 
An Te Liu is currently Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of 
Toronto. His work has been exhibited at Fotohof in Salzburg, Seoul Museum of Art, 
Artists Space in New York and Mercer Union in Toronto. He is represented by the 
Henry Urbach Architecture Gallery in New York. 
Brenda Longfellow has published articles on feminist film theory and Canadian cinema in 
CineTracts, Screen, CineAction, and the Canadian Journal of Film Studies. She is a co- 
editor of the anthology Gendering the Nation: Canadian Women Filmmakers. She has 
also directed Our Marilyn, an award winning experimental documentary, and Gerda 
(1992), a feature drama on the life and times of Gerda Munsinger. Her most recent 
film is the critically acclaimed Tina in Mexico (2002), a feature documentary on the 
silent film star and photographer Tina Modotti. 
Corwyn Lund has been making sculpture, installation, video, and furniture in 
Toronto since 2000. 
Janine Marchessault has published widely on film, video, and new media technologies 
and is a founding editor of Public. Her most recent publication is McLuhan: Cosmic 
Media (Sage, 2004). She holds a Canada Research Chair in Art, Digital Media, and 
Globalization at York University. 
Steve McCaffery's latest volumes of poetry are Bouma Shapes (Zasterle Press, Canary 
Islands) and a two-volume set of selected poems, Seven Pages Missing (Toronto: 
Coach House Press). His latest critical books are Imagining Language (with Jed 
Rasula, MlT Press) and Prior to Meaning: the Prtoosernantic and Poetics (Northwestern). 
He teaches at York University and is founding Director of NACIP (the North American 
Centre for Interdisiciplinary Poetics). 
Pierre Ouellet is a PhD candidate in Social and Political Thought at York University 
where he is completing a dissertation entitled Urban Poetics and the Mimetic Imagination: 
Images of the City in Que'becois and Canadian Poetry - 1868-1967. 
Dominic Pettman has taught literature, media, and cultural theory at the University 
of Amsterdam, the University of Geneva, and the University of Melbourne. He is the 
author of After the Orgy: Toward a Politics of Exhaustion (SUNY, 2002) and the co- 
author (with Justin Clemens) of Avoiding the Subject: Media, Culture and the Object 
(forthcoming, Amsterdam University Press, 2004). 
Manuel Piiia holds a Mechanical Engineering degree from the Vladimir Polytechnic 
Institute, Vladimir, Russia. Piiia began as a practising artist in 1990 after working for 
several years in the engineering field. His work has been exhibited in a wide variety of 
international venues. Manuel Pifia joined the University of British Columbia's 
Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory in 2003 as an Assistant Professor 
of new media. 
Brian Poole is currently teaching at the Institute for Comparative Literature, Freie 
Universitat Berlin, where he hosted the ninth international Bakhtin Conference. He 
was a member of the editorial group that worked on the Russian edition of Bakhtin's 
collected works. 
project3media is an open concept Web-based collaborative project in which artists and 
designers work together in order to share and grow as a group of creative individuals. 
The project originated in 2001 on the Web, and has expanded to host many art 
events, charity fundraisers, and live visual projections throughout the Toronto area 
and most recently, in Vancouver. The collective is continually exploring how the Web 
can be used as a basis for collaboration between artists and designers. 
Christine Shaw is an artist and an independent curator. She has produced site-specific 
installations, participatory environments, and architectural interventions for public 
spaces and galleries and is currently developing a networked series of collaborative 
curatorial projects. She is a past member of the Board and Editorial Committee for 
FUSE magazine. She would like to acknowledge the support of the Saskatchewan Arts 
Board. She is a doctoral candidate in Social and Political Thought at York University. 
Christopher Smith spends his time facilitating courses for the Anarchist Free Univer- 
sity of Toronto (www.AnarchistU.ca), and helping organize initiatives for the Toronto 
Public Space Committee (www.publicspace.ca). A doctoral candidate in the YorkIRyerson 
Joint Graduate Programme in Communication and Culture, he currently holds the 
Graduate Fellowship for Academic Distinction. 
David Harris Smith is a Toronto artist and filmmaker. His large figurative paintings 
have been exhibited and sold throughout Canada and the United States. His current 
collaborative project Listening:Viaduct, with composer Bentley Jarvis, traces an array 
of social and physical forces emanating from Toronto's "suicide" bridge - the Prince 
Edward Viaduct. 
Jeff Thomas is an Iroquois/Onondaga photographer now living in Ottawa who has 
works in major collections in Canada, the United States, and Europe including the 
National Gallery's Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Smithsonian 
Museum of the American Indian, and the MusCe de l'Elys6.e in Lausanne. His most 
recent solo shows were Scouting for Indians in New York City and Geronimo was 
Here in Buffalo. 
Kika Thorne is a Torontonian. Recent exhibitions include Zones at the Art Gallery of 
Hamilton; The disorder of things at the Kino Arsenal, Berlin; 25hours, Barcelona; 
Artcity, Calgary; and Old Habits Die Hard in Berlin, Norwich, and Oslo. She has 
written for MIX, FUSE and C Magazine, VTape, the AGO, and the Canadian Cultural 
Centre in Paris. She and Adrian Blackwell will exhibit 1 :l over 1:300 in Houston in 2005. 


Contributors

McFarlane, Scott Toguri

Introduction
SCOTT TOGURI MCFARLANE
"Eating Things" is delivered to your hands by the force of a striking paradox:
never has the subject of eating achieved a more pervasive celebrity; and never
has it been more riddled by notoriety. These days, the celebrity and synergetic
branding achieved by Nigella Lawson, Jamie Oliver, Emeril Lagasse and other
star chefs of The Food Network has been matched by the feverish notoriety of
mad cow, avian flu virus, foot-and-mouth disease, carcinogenic trans-fats and
e-coli poisoning. On the one hand, there are events such as last summer's Pain
Couture by Jean Paul Gaultier, an exhibition of haute couture made of bread
that transformed the basement of the Carrier Foundation in Paris into a tem-
porary bakery run by some of the country's top bakers. Commentators gushed
that Pain Couture captured the essence of France: its love of couture and cui-
sine. I'm sure the foodies and fashionistas were out in force. On the other
hand, there were piles of farm animals burning in the fields of Europe, North
America and China. The bourgeois fantasies of eating well, maintaining a
healthy body and living glamorously are being amplified-even as the scene of
eating is infected by a myriad of biochemical transmissions.
Historically, this riddled scene of eating has been demarcated through the
calculation of calories and the tracking of both infection and the work of bio-
chemistry in general. The essays in "Eating Things" by Charmaine Nelson and
Bertie Mandelblatt describe, in part, how a vast biopharmacopoeia of plants,
animals and people was renamed, relocated and re-ordered to constitute the
labour force and slavery fueling both colonialism and a nascent industrial
capitalism. The rising bourgeoisie extracted itself and the modern body from
this general biopharmacopoeia. The history of this capitalist extraction, as
Ron Benner, Matthew Clement and Richard Manning will attest, is ongoing.
Manning's "The Oil We Eat: Following the Food Chain Back To Iraq"
describes the attack on Iraq in relation to the biochemical resources required
to fulfil the petrochemical demands of American agricultural practices sus-
taining the nation's eating habits. But the essay also suggests the mobilization
of geologic forces and the biochemical compression of fossil fuels, "so that
every calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten."
The tracking of expenditures required to produce food converts the scene
of eating into a panorama of what is increasingly understood as culture-less
biochemical exchange. Within this spatialization, it is difficult to locate the
9
one who eats. The fact is that our digestive tracts are lined with bacteria,
most of which are helpful strains of e-coli. Eating is therefore not a process
conducted by a discrete, individual body but is instead, an effect of a con-
stellation of biochemical exchanges. It has been said that we are donuts:
hollow from our lips to, well, our other puckered lips. Our insides are out-
side, and along the peristaltic surfaces of exchange, others carry out a lot of
shitty work. Chris Woods' Krispy Kreme suggests the worshipping of American
fast food. But perhaps the bodily associations of the symbolic donut suggest
that 'Americanization' needs to be rethought in relation to the work of a bio-
chemical generality across a myriad of permeable surfaces and compacted
times. So who, or what, eats? And how does one locate a biochemical scene
of eating haunted by meaning and culture?
Again and again the specter of the 'body' is conjured and disappears
across the spatialized scene of eating. The demand for proper labeling of
genetically engineered food taps the anxiety symptomatic of a scene of eating
haunted by meaning and culture. Anxious consumers, it is argued, have a
right to know what they are putting in their bodies. But cloning and the
transferring of genes from one species into another raise the question of what
a consumer's 'body' is in the first place. The 'body; if there is one, seems an
event amongst others of biochemical exchange. As the genes of humans are
inserted into the cell lines of pigs, the call for better labeling offers no relief
from taxonomic ruins as the cornerstone of the liberal bourgeois public
sphere-the discrete modern body-haunts its own ruins. Martha RosIer and
Fred Wah are particularly attuned to the weathered taxonomies and spectral
bodies marking the scene of eating. RosIer's Semiotics of the Kitchen presses
the difference of the alphabet and kitchenware taxonomy against a woman's
tossing, violent, bored and ecstatic body movements in ways that anticipate
the stuttering disjunction of the body written as a genetic code of biochemical
exchange in general: ATCGATCG...
The presence-absence of the body is the flickering mode of an eating sce-
nario that is haunted by meaning and culture-ATCGATCG-a spatialized
scene of biochemistry divested of its taxonomic force. Something of this
haunting thingliness is prodded by Renay Egami's Spellbound and Frozen
Memory, and by Chih-Chien Wang's photographs of everyday food items
and the body. Both illicit a phenomenological engagement even as they seem
haunted by narratives of movement, travel, sexuality, genetic engineering,
cultural and personal associations, pain...
The contributions of Adam Zaretsky, Hiromi Goto, Chris Bracken and
Elspeth Probyn specifically address issues of caring, power and ethics as they
relate to a scene of eating troubled by the question: how do we eat with
10
respect to others? The selections from Susan Kealey's Case Histories 1989-
1991 draw from Case Records of the Massachusetts General Hospital and
put the discourses of medicine, infection, blood relations, hospitality and an
engulfing biochemistry alongside what seem to be snapshots of family and
friends. In one case, a man complains of abdominal pains and is asked what
he has consumed, and in the other, a dog has bitten a woman. How is it,
ask these patient scenarios of eating, that we care for each other in an
increasingly medicalised society?
These days, society is also increasingly measured by biometric identifica-
tion systems. They are the new borders and lines of defense for a nation and
its citizenry, at the expense of human rights and liberal ideals based on the
discrete soulful interior of the individual body. It seems timely, therefore, to
ask how the thought of 'us' is arising in relation to biochemical spatialization.
As Heidegger suggested, we gain our bearings in space through buildings,
whose etymology encompasses both edifices and ways that we cultivate, pre-
serve and care for (build up) the soil. Buildings are the markers by which we
dwell in the world. So what are the buildings by which the scene of eating
takes place in relation to biochemical spatialization?
The dwellings of Lee Ka-sing, Alain Paiement, Lisa Robertson, Liz
Magor, ]im Drobnick and ]ennifer Fisher all radically rethink the relation
between architecture and eating, and provide general starting points for a
much-needed rethinking of the eating polis. Further, by asking how a scene
of eating takes place and is secured in a spatialized biochemistry, these
contributions help rethink what is meant by "food security."
"Eating Things" ends with Lee Friedlander's photographs of olive trees in
Spain. As I stared at the constellations of his photos, my thoughts flashed to the
Generalife Gardens in Alhambra and then to the work of the Al-Andalusi
School of Agronomy. The learned experimental agronomy of this largely Arab
school was, after the second Crusades, incorporated by the Spanish to improve
their food security and diet. But the drift of my far-too-simple nostalgia was cut
short by the memory that American policy makers-after 9/rr, the crumbling
of buildings and the subsequent dissemination of anthrax through the mail-
changed the meaning of "food security." Previously, it concerned ensuring that
citizens had an adequate food supply; it now suggests food secure from
bioterrorism-and millions are being diverted from traditional public health
programs into those run by military and law-enforcement agendas to ensure
just that. Though it might not be phrased as such in official circles, it seems the
Arab world is now seen as a threat to the security of biometric America's oily
food. The scene of eating is changing, and it is just that that is hanging in the
fiery, sun-splashed constellations of those weighty olive branches.
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Introduction

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