Banana Bread

Love banana bread, but hate recipes that invoke confusing dichotomies between crisco and salt? Love that wet, ‘cakey’ taste, as opposed to the flakey, dry banana ‘bread’ you often find in supermarkets? Then this is the recipe for you!

Recipe:

• 1 cup of sugar.
• 1 cup of brown sugar.
• 1 1/2 cups of flour.
• 1 tbsp of vanilla.
• 1 cup of crushed walnuts.
• 2 eggs.
• 1/2 cup of sour cream.
• Handful of raisins.
• 1 stick of butter.
• 1/2 tsp of salt.
• 1 tsp of baking soda.
• 3 mashed, ripe bananas.

Instructions:

• Set oven to 350° F.
• Mash bananas in bowl; set aside.
• Mix eggs, butter, sugar, brown sugar, vanilla, and sour cream in separate bowl.
• Stir in flour, baking soda, raisins, etc., and mashed bananas from first bowl into above bowl.
• Pour mixture into greased [cooking spray] loaf pan.
• Bake for approximately 50 mins - 1 hr. Keep a close eye on the bread; the color will be a dark golden brown.
• Enjoy!

—Bryan Klausmeyer 2 Comments

Bromatological Materialism and the Meals of Late Capitalism

In an article published today in The Times, Kim Severson claims that the “entree is dead.” From this statement, I think we can learn a lot about the ideology of late capitalism. In Tarrying with the Negative, Zizek famously argued that it was perfectly embodied by a certain kind of Spinozism: to paraphrase K-Punk, Spinoza’s rejection of deontological ethics for an ethics based around the concept of health is perfectly embodied in his reading of the myth of the Fall and the foundation of Law. Spinoza argued that because the Jews were primitive at the time, it was necessary to formulate the commandment as “Thou shalt not…,” as a performative command, yet for any reasonable person it was necessary for it to be grasped as constructive. This of course simply refers to a scientific or objective statement, such as “Thou shalt not eat from the tree of life because the apple is poisonous and will harm you.” In Zizek’s view, Spinoza’s move both deprives the grounding of Law in a sadistic act of scission (the cruel cut of castration), at the same time as it denies the ungrounded positing of agency in an act of pure volition, in which the subject assumes responsibility for everything.

The collapse of the patriarchal big Other thus deprives a signifier of attaining the position of Master Signifier or S₁. For instance, Spinoza does not posit, “Do not smoke!,” but rather, “Smoke, but…” The “but” that replaces the primitive “thou shalt not” is instead a prohibition masked as a universal objective statement. Why is this significant to late capitalism? The imaginary absence of the Nom du père (Name-of-the-Father) likewise results in the absence of the non du père (no-of-the-father). The disappearance of prohibitive castration at the symbolic level precludes the normal formation of the subject’s identity. What the subject loses with the absence of the Name-of-the-father is her or his relation to their jouissance and thereby the basis for a deontologized Kantian ethical system (see Zizek’s analysis of Lacan’s article “Kant avec Sade.”). Thus, rather than adhering to an ethics of jouissance or an “ethics of the Real” (see Alenka Zupancic), we have schizophrenic subjects who are unable to relate to their jouissance because of the hidden prohibition within Spinozism. Take for instance several fundamental aspects of Western culture under late capitalism: the obsession with fad diets, exercise and objects deprived of their malignant contents (such as decaffeinated coffee or war without casualties).

Here we can begin to see the constructive nature of our own dietary patterns that are the result of a certain kind of ideological construct. Rather than having an entree constitute the bromatological cathexis of our unfettered jouissance, operating as a kind of objective correlative to the Master-Signifier (S₁), we’re left with a multitude of dishes, none of which directly register as the objects of our desire (object-little-a):

“I think the entree has been in trouble for a long time,” said the chef Tom Colicchio. “Eating an entree is too many bites of one thing, and it’s boring.”

And of course we should make the vulgar Marxist point that the collapse of the entree as big Other is typically associated with bourgeois dining in the West. Rather than siding with multiculturalists who view it as the perfect opportunity to enjoy the Other’s food, to pathetically attempt to directly enjoy the manifestation of the Other’s schematized jouissance, we should locate the point at which the multiculturalist radically breaks with the Other’s desire: for instance, cultures wherein the consumption of certain endangered species is considered a delicacy. Moreover, we should make the obvious point that we only enjoy the Other’s cuisine qua our own preparation of it, thereby reifying our own schematization of jouissance. Thus, the multiculturalist call for the world to enjoy each other’s cuisine is actually a call for the barrier between all culture’s schematization of jouissance, a delimiting point of intersecting jouissances that designates the injunction, “This is our space and that’s yours.”

How then should the Left struggle against the manifestation of tapas-style dinners as the essence of bourgeois decadence? Not by bringing back the purely “phallogocentric” concept of the patriarchal big Other, marking a return to post-Victorian style cuisine. Instead, the Left should question the restaurant that claims to be the harbinger of our enjoyment, yet instead of allowing us to retain fidelity to our desires, the restaurant acts as the object-instrument of our desires, delimiting the meals to what is only on the menu. In that sense, the restaurant owner is the totalitarian leader whose superego injunction to “enjoy” at the beginning of every meal is actually the functioning of a sadistic tormentor who, given our current sociopolitical predicament, knows that we never can.

—Bryan Klausmeyer