The Invention of Taste i SENSORY STUDIES SERIES Series Editor: David Howes ISSN : 2052–3092 As the leading publisher of scholarship on the culture of the senses, we are delighted to present this series of cutting-e dge case studies, syntheses and translations in the emergent fi eld of sensory studies. Building on the success of the S ensory Formations series, this new venture provides an invaluable resource for those involved in researching and teaching courses on the senses as subjects of study and means of inquiry. Embracing the insights of a wide array of humanities and social science disciplines, the fi eld of sensory studies has emerged as the most comprehensive and dynamic framework yet for making sense of human experience. The series offers something for every disciplinary taste and sensory inclination. Published Titles: Michael Bull and John P. Mitchell (eds), R itual, Performance and the Senses François Laplantine, T he Life of the Senses: Introduction to a Modal Anthropology Forthcoming Titles : Rupert Cox, The Sound of the Sky Being Torn: A Political Ecology of Military Aircraft Noise Alex Rhys-Taylor, Food and Multiculture: A Sensory Ethnography of East London ii The Invention of Taste A Cultural Account of Desire, Delight and Disgust in Fashion, Food and Art Luca Vercelloni Translated by K ate Singleton Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc LONDON • OXFORD • NEW YORK • NEW DELHI • SYDNEY iii Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC 1B 3D P NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Italian in 2005 © Luca Vercelloni, 2005 and 2016 English language translation © Kate Singleton, 2016 Luca Vercelloni has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identifi ed as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-i n-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN : HB : 978-1-4742-7360-2 e PDF : 978-1-4742-7361-9 ePub: 978-1-4742-7362-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-i n-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Refi neCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk iv CONTENTS Preface: Accounting for Taste vii David Howes Acknowledgments xv Introduction 1 1 The Success of a Metaphor 5 2 Pleasures and Morals 15 3 The Birth of Aesthetics and the Bifurcation of Tastes 39 4 The Arts of Happiness: A Journey Through Impure Tastes 73 5 The Economy of Taste in Consumer Society 95 Notes 159 Bibliographies 177 Index 191 v vi Preface: Accounting for Taste David Howes This book is about one of the more fascinating developments in the cultural history of the senses: the invention of “taste.” It is written by an interdisciplinary scholar of the fi rst order, a man who moves comfortably across the disciplines of history, philosophy and sociology. The fact that Luca Vercelloni is also a brand expert, and founder of the international consulting fi rm Brandvoyant, gives him an added insight into contemporary tastes. His account is accordingly a “history of the present,” an archeology of the genesis and proliferation of a peculiarly modern sensibility. To give some historical background to this account, Aristotle identifi ed taste as one of the fi ve senses, but characterized it as “a form of touch,” hence lacking autonomy. In the ensuing centuries, as the idea of a hierarchy of the senses was elaborated, taste was grouped with the “lower,” “bodily” senses of touch and smell, as opposed to the “higher,” “intellectual” senses of sight and hearing. Due to its association with self-indulgent sensuality, it was subject to extensive moral regulation.1 To be a gourmand—that is, one who revelled in the pleasures of the palate—was to commit the sin of gluttony, one of the seven cardinal sins. With the increasing secularization of society in modernity, gustatory indulgence would lose much of its negative connotation and associations. Vercelloni relates, in one of the many revelations of this book, that a number of former “sins” were in effect recast as “virtues”: the sin of vainglory was reconstituted as personal ambition, the sin of sloth was recast as leisure, and the gluttonous delight in fi ne foods was converted, on the one hand, into gastronomy, and, on the other, metaphorized as the sense of discernment, of beauty. According to Vercelloni, this transformation of vices into virtues was a key element in the coming to be of modern society. The transformation or bifurcation in the meaning of taste, which appears to have originated in sixteenth-century Italy or seventeenth-century Spain (there is some dispute), unfolded gradually and reached its apogee in the eighteenth century. That century has come down to us under various names: the “Age of Reason” or “Enlightenment,” but also the “Age of Sensibility,” and, of course, the “Century of Taste.” The German philosopher Alexander von Baumgarten played a role in the doubling or reconstitution of taste as the aesthetic sense by introducing the term aesthetic. This term was derived vii viii PREFACE: ACCOUNTING FOR TASTE from the Greek aisthe¯sis (meaning sense perception) to refer to the capacity to discern the unity in multiplicity of sensible qualities, without recourse to reason. The new “aesthetic” sense was accorded a variety of names in English until, thanks to the interventions of Alexander Pope and David Hume, it became known as taste.2 However, it is another German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, to whom we owe the most infl uential and indeed transcendental account of this new faculty, as elaborated in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. Why taste? Vercelloni asks. Why not refer to this newly-theorized sense of beauty as a “third eye” or “inner ear”? It would appear that what commended the metaphor of taste to the thinkers of this period was the presumed spontaneous and pre-rational as well as subjective character of this sense. De gustibus non est disputandum—“there is no accounting for taste,” as the saying went, with the implication that in this fi eld “to each his own” applies. This construction agreed with the rising tide of individualism, the cult of sensibility, and the burgeoning infl uence of an empiricist mindset that undermined the Platonic idea of Beauty. Henceforth, the experience of beauty could only be a matter of perception, not an objective quality. It was against this backdrop that the term taste was metaphorized—i.e., borrowed from the sphere of the palate and applied to the realm of aesthetics. In the course of this transposition it was also severed from sensory pleasure. The purifi cation of taste was the work of Immanuel Kant. Vercelloni emphasizes that the puritanical and totalitarian, though resolutely egalitarian, account of taste as based in “disinterestedness” proposed by Kant was but one construction among others, even if it would prove the most enduring. There was also the more hedonistic and conciliatory though distinctly élitist account proposed by Hume, which centred on the sensibility of the educated gentleman or “Man of Taste.” For Kant, however, the judgment of taste—as related particularly to the fi ne arts—had to be disinterested, universal, necessary and pure, which is to say impermeable to pleasure and need. Hence the famous line: “whoever declares something to be beautiful wishes that everyone should approve of the object in question.”3 In this way, beauty (or the experience of “spiritual” pleasure which derives from it) was isolated, sealed off from the body, and what is merely agreeable or useful, and came to center on the elevation of the mind. In a new variation of the religious strictures on sensuality, everything turned on the “continence of desire” or taming of inclinations, the “snuffi ng of sensuality,” as Vercelloni puts it, in the cause of intellectual refi nement. The elevation of sensibility decreed by Kant was motivated by ideology. It was tied to the Enlightenment dream of a society based on the principle of universal rights and mutual respect in which each subject “gives the law” to him- or herself voluntarily. On this account, taste (aesthetic taste, that is) promotes upward integration and the edifi cation of the subject, in contrast to the ancien régime, where taste was the preserve of an élite, modeled on the unrestricted gratifi cations of the aristocracy. However, there was a contradiction embedded in this construction. On the surface it appeared to PREFACE: ACCOUNTING FOR TASTE ix be open to every man, and held out the possibility of consensus, the emergence of a shared sensibility. But this construction obscured the underside of the judgment of taste, which entailed the rejection of all that is facile, childish, vulgar or “primitive.” Viewed from this angle, taste can also be seen as a force for discrimination downwards. To have taste, a certain savoir vivre, as the bourgeoisie would come to defi ne it, could serve as a source of “cultural capital,”4 which was the very antithesis of disinterestedness as conceived by Kant. Vercelloni is adept at exposing the contradictions embedded in the Kantian doctrine of “pure” taste, with its emphasis on controlling (or sublimating) desire “for the betterment of sensibility and manners.” But he does not stop there. Rather, he plunges into an exploration of various “lesser” manifestations of taste, which developed as the term spread to encompass discernment in other domains besides the fi ne arts—most notably food and fashion—on its way to becoming the most ubiquitous disposition of the nascent consumer culture. The taste of the palate and taste in clothing were dismissed or belittled by Kant on account of their seemingly ephemeral and whimsical character—their lack of continence and consistency. But these “impure” tastes, with their accent on frivolity or excess (i.e. distance from necessity) would win out over the aesthetics of solemnity and distance championed by Kant on account of their link to the post-Enlightenment penchant for self- fashioning and privileging of personal identity over social equality. To understand this shift entails delving into the other meaning of the adage De gustibus non est disputandum, which is hidden from us today because of our ignorance of the premodern cosmology on which it was based. Vercelloni’s archeology of gustatory perception indicates that the reason there could be no disputing taste was due to medieval dietetics. The latter regimen was informed by humoral theory, which held that the temperament of each individual was determined by the balance of humors in the body, which, in turn, was often assigned an astrological basis. The task of the cook was to blend the hot or cold, wet or dry qualities of the food served up to match or modulate the temperament of his patron. In this view, there was nothing temperamental (in a modern sense) or fi ckle about taste. Individual tastes were cosmologically conditioned, hence given in the order of things, intrinsically incommensurable, and therefore impervious to disputation. Of note in this connection was the curious phenomenon of the “silence of taste”5 in the fi rst cooking manuals and recipe books (dating from the mid-seventeenth century) which contained the seeds of the discourse of gastronomy. The authors of these books did not rationalize their concoctions in terms of the pleasures they afforded (that would have been immoral), but referred instead to the Providence of the Creator, or the therapeutic benefi ts of different foodstuffs. Taste (gustatory taste, that is) was muted, and, aside from providing recipes, the food writing of the period dwelt mainly on the rules of comportment (table manners) and the visual order or architecture of the banquet, as if the repasts concerned were intended more as feasts for the eyes than the palate. It was not until the latter half of the eighteenth