Publications by Siobhan Watters
This article discusses the implications of the 2013 EU horse meat scandal, not only for consumers... more This article discusses the implications of the 2013 EU horse meat scandal, not only for consumers, but all actors in the food supply chain, including governments and retailers. Nearly 200 beef products sold in the EU were found to contain horse meat, but the scale of the supply chain made investigating the source of the adulteration extremely challenging. Moreover, the proportions in which meat is produced allowed the horse meat to mingle with beef unnoticed—only DNA testing could sort one being from the other. To analyze this case of mistaken identity, I use Guy Debord’s theory of the spectacle, as it provides a useful conceptual framework for discussing how appearances mediate various levels of commodity circulation and consumption. The article also draws on Marx’s value theory, for concepts such as the commodity and exchange-value form the basis of Debord’s theses on the spectacle. I conclude that the spectacle of packaging, price, and the supply chain leaves us prone to risks far more fatal than any concern the horse meat adulteration posed to European beef-eaters.
Conference Presentations by Siobhan Watters
My paper will argue that our food systems not only sustain life, but serve as a horizon for the u... more My paper will argue that our food systems not only sustain life, but serve as a horizon for the understanding of what 'life' is. Food and how it is produced establishes the ontological position of the human visa -vis other beings. Our food systems continually break down, however, and communicable diseases (e.g. the avian flu) break the 'species-barrier.' As Mary Douglas observes, when such " monstrous births occur, the defining lines between humans and animals may be threatened " (Douglas 1980:39). However, the 'monstrous births' of any system are endogenous to them; according to Douglas, what appears to originate outside of the system is a product of the systematization process itself (1980:39). Indeed, humans have continually broken species-barriers in order to guarantee reliable food sources—we drink another animal's milk, for example, calling into question how these species-barriers are defined, and how feeble those definitions can be. Like the technologies of Dr. Frankenstein, appropriations of and interventions in nonhuman biology are intended to overcome the precarity of human life and our bodily shortcomings. This paper was in part inspired by the manga and anime series, Knights of Sidonia, where the human classes of a post-earth civilization are genetically modified to photosynthesize the majority of their energy needs. I ask, if humans are so changed that they no longer procure and eat food as they have done for millennia, will we be human anymore? In this sense, I consider food from a posthuman perspective, not only thinking the human to its endpoint through its relation to food, but also taking up the posthumanist project in decentering the human and considering the complex relationship we have always bore to other species and technology, troubling any essentialist notion of the human.
Last year, at this conference, I discussed how distinctions between nature and culture, and human... more Last year, at this conference, I discussed how distinctions between nature and culture, and humans and animals, can arise from the technical processes of food production (see "Food as an object of cultural technical study "). Drawing on the work of cultural techniques (e.g. Siegert 2015; Vismann 2013) and Levi-Strauss' The Raw and the Cooked (1970), I argued that the relationship between humans and food is primary to how the human understands itself and forms part of the ground of human ontological systems. I'd like to take this argument further today, to a system-level perspective of food production and beyond, to a posthuman future where food no longer resembles what we know it as today, and because of this, where the human as such arguably ceases to exist, as the ground upon which it has defined self and species is transcended. I'm responding both to fictional future food visions and aspirations towards technical solutions to our current food-related crises.
In this paper, I define cultural techniques and discuss how food production may be analyzed from ... more In this paper, I define cultural techniques and discuss how food production may be analyzed from a cultural-technical perspective. Citing the work of Bernhard Siegert (2015; 2013) and Claude Levi-Strauss (1991;1970), I show that some of the same techniques which produce food have also been fundamental to the emergence of culture and the human as such: namely cooking, agriculture and animal husbandry, and techniques of eating. Though these techniques form the basis of what we know as food, they remain, to quote Levi-Strauss, “on the margin of the semantic field which embraces all food products” (1970:267). They escape representation, which arguably, is why food technologies are neglected by media studies, despite the rapid advancement of information and communication technologies in food production, processing, and distribution. This is what makes cultural techniques particularly suited to discussing food as an object of media theoretical analysis, food being something that is typically represented in the media, and not interrogated for its own ability to mediate, transmit, or reproduce culture on a technical level.
My paper looks at the use of communication technologies by Occupy Sandy, a relief network develop... more My paper looks at the use of communication technologies by Occupy Sandy, a relief network developed initially by Occupy Wall Street activists to address the devastation of Hurricane Sandy. In moments of rupture like these, certain phenomena reoccur that suggest that the civic base is activated by a deeply ingrained ethics to help one another. At the same time, from the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, to Mexico City in 1985, Katrina in 2005, and Sandy in 2012, a sad trend of government ineffectiveness and reactionary response points to disaster’s rare effect of leveling structures of domination and disrupting the status quo. A struggle between autonomous, bottom-up organization and top-down authority inevitably ensues. These moments also offer examples of how the civic base use communication technologies in potentially revolutionary ways. I will theorize communication technologies as the objectification of social relations, and therefore, always already a social force and potential revolutionary tool. To do so, I tie together the theories of Marx on machinery, the fetish, and Marcuse’s discussion of technology and needs in One-Dimensional Man (1964). I also take a few notes from Marcuse’s Essay on Liberation (1969), where the philosopher discusses the formation of new aesthetic subjectivities, latently, and in preparation for revolution. Occupy Sandy organizers and volunteers demonstrated, how preparation, in practice, and as a mode of thinking, may culminate in large-scale, effective organization. As I will discuss, preparation, like mutual aid, education, and direct action, are long-standing tenets of anarchism, all of which were grounding principles of the Occupy Sandy relief effort.
In this paper, I bracket food as the most constitutive element of the worker’s reproduction to ca... more In this paper, I bracket food as the most constitutive element of the worker’s reproduction to capital because it arguably also represents the first site of capitalist accumulation. Without the commodification of food, there would be no wage labour or basis for exploitation. By accelerating value accumulation through food production, however, capital is rapidly undermining the ground of its own being as well as ours. My paper will analyze this crisis of capitalism using Marx’s theory of the subsumption of labour under capital, arguing that it can be applied to edible matter, as can be shown with the examples of genetically modified seeds and animal protein. I use the concepts of durability and distance from food regime theory to better articulate the shape our food commodities take under the coercion of capitalist imperatives.
Talks by Siobhan Watters
For the published version of this paper, see: https://www.academia.edu/16302941/The_Spectacular_O... more For the published version of this paper, see: https://www.academia.edu/16302941/The_Spectacular_Origins_of_the_EU_Horse_Meat_Scandal
We are currently faced with a scale of industrial food production that has reached inhuman proportions; even our mediated forms of oversight (e.g. quality control, food inspection, sensor technologies) cannot fully capture all the movements of inputs and outputs across the globe. The 2013 horse meat scandal in Europe made this very clear. Nearly 200 beef products sold in the EU were found to contain horse meat, but the scale of the supply chain made investigating the source of the ‘contamination’ extremely challenging. The proportions in which meat is produced—disassembled and ground up, distributed, and reassembled from thousands of animals—allowed the horse meat to mingle with beef unnoticed. Only DNA testing could sort one being from the other.
Using the theory of Guy Debord, this paper will focus on food packaging, arguing that it is less about informing the consumer than it is a spectacle, as well as the opacity of the supply chain and the contribution of each to the horse meat scandal. While the spectacle belongs to the realm of sight, its reach goes much further. That is why the horse meat scandal is striking: it allows us to see a rift in the spectacular veil of commodity production but also to acknowledge how its effects extend to the body. As I will outline in my exposition of the scandal’s timeline and initial outcome, one of the first considerations when news of the adulteration reached government officials was whether it was one of fraud alone or a risk to human health as well. In this instance, it was judged that it was an example of food crime, and that only the sensibilities of the public had been offended. But there is yet a darker lining to this story, when if something so seemingly substantial as horse flesh can mix imperceptibly with beef flesh, then one can only imagine what other invisibles could pass through the supply chain and into our bodies unnoticed.
Master's Thesis by Siobhan Watters
In predominantly service and information-based economies, the pivotal role food plays in the main... more In predominantly service and information-based economies, the pivotal role food plays in the maintenance of life has arguably become neglected as an object of ethical and political contemplation. We often fail to realize that the incarceration of food by the commodity form degrades the food object itself as well as guaranteeing continued dependency on the wage. In a generalized commodity society, labour power is the only thing a person has to sell in order to buy her bread. This leaves us vulnerable in the event of an environmental crisis because we do not have direct access to food sources.
The capitalist mode of distribution forms the limits of possibility for humans and other beings. This thesis argues that, without direct access to the means of subsistence, the subject is limited in her movement and interactions with others, except where the universal equivalent grants her access to go.
Course outlines by Siobhan Watters
Course Papers by Siobhan Watters
An extended version of my conference paper, Capital's Means of Subsistence, in which I argue that... more An extended version of my conference paper, Capital's Means of Subsistence, in which I argue that Marx's theory of subsumption applies to the matter processed under capital, as well as labour. This paper considers relationships of food and power using food regime theory and the Frankfurt school (Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer), tied together by themes of domination, distance, and durability.
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Publications by Siobhan Watters
Conference Presentations by Siobhan Watters
Talks by Siobhan Watters
We are currently faced with a scale of industrial food production that has reached inhuman proportions; even our mediated forms of oversight (e.g. quality control, food inspection, sensor technologies) cannot fully capture all the movements of inputs and outputs across the globe. The 2013 horse meat scandal in Europe made this very clear. Nearly 200 beef products sold in the EU were found to contain horse meat, but the scale of the supply chain made investigating the source of the ‘contamination’ extremely challenging. The proportions in which meat is produced—disassembled and ground up, distributed, and reassembled from thousands of animals—allowed the horse meat to mingle with beef unnoticed. Only DNA testing could sort one being from the other.
Using the theory of Guy Debord, this paper will focus on food packaging, arguing that it is less about informing the consumer than it is a spectacle, as well as the opacity of the supply chain and the contribution of each to the horse meat scandal. While the spectacle belongs to the realm of sight, its reach goes much further. That is why the horse meat scandal is striking: it allows us to see a rift in the spectacular veil of commodity production but also to acknowledge how its effects extend to the body. As I will outline in my exposition of the scandal’s timeline and initial outcome, one of the first considerations when news of the adulteration reached government officials was whether it was one of fraud alone or a risk to human health as well. In this instance, it was judged that it was an example of food crime, and that only the sensibilities of the public had been offended. But there is yet a darker lining to this story, when if something so seemingly substantial as horse flesh can mix imperceptibly with beef flesh, then one can only imagine what other invisibles could pass through the supply chain and into our bodies unnoticed.
Master's Thesis by Siobhan Watters
The capitalist mode of distribution forms the limits of possibility for humans and other beings. This thesis argues that, without direct access to the means of subsistence, the subject is limited in her movement and interactions with others, except where the universal equivalent grants her access to go.
Course outlines by Siobhan Watters
Course Papers by Siobhan Watters
We are currently faced with a scale of industrial food production that has reached inhuman proportions; even our mediated forms of oversight (e.g. quality control, food inspection, sensor technologies) cannot fully capture all the movements of inputs and outputs across the globe. The 2013 horse meat scandal in Europe made this very clear. Nearly 200 beef products sold in the EU were found to contain horse meat, but the scale of the supply chain made investigating the source of the ‘contamination’ extremely challenging. The proportions in which meat is produced—disassembled and ground up, distributed, and reassembled from thousands of animals—allowed the horse meat to mingle with beef unnoticed. Only DNA testing could sort one being from the other.
Using the theory of Guy Debord, this paper will focus on food packaging, arguing that it is less about informing the consumer than it is a spectacle, as well as the opacity of the supply chain and the contribution of each to the horse meat scandal. While the spectacle belongs to the realm of sight, its reach goes much further. That is why the horse meat scandal is striking: it allows us to see a rift in the spectacular veil of commodity production but also to acknowledge how its effects extend to the body. As I will outline in my exposition of the scandal’s timeline and initial outcome, one of the first considerations when news of the adulteration reached government officials was whether it was one of fraud alone or a risk to human health as well. In this instance, it was judged that it was an example of food crime, and that only the sensibilities of the public had been offended. But there is yet a darker lining to this story, when if something so seemingly substantial as horse flesh can mix imperceptibly with beef flesh, then one can only imagine what other invisibles could pass through the supply chain and into our bodies unnoticed.
The capitalist mode of distribution forms the limits of possibility for humans and other beings. This thesis argues that, without direct access to the means of subsistence, the subject is limited in her movement and interactions with others, except where the universal equivalent grants her access to go.