`Luxury' and `necessity' have suffered from the substantialism
with which cultural concepts are frequently imbued. If consumption
involves a dialectic of desire, then the difference between luxury and
necessity is only the semantic difference between the position of the
subject in the following phrases: `You need two litres of water a day
to stay healthy'; `you need a good spanking.' `Need' in the latter, if
not in the former, is the want of the Other (a form of demand),
demonstrating the disjunction between the subject of enunciation
and the subject of the enunciated. If there is such a disjunction, then
there is certainly no clear way of distinguishing between luxury and
necessity. This part of the theoretical framework of The Poetics of Spice
is informed by ZÏ izÏek's fusion of psychoanalysis and ideological
analysis. These features of the social symbolic order are what is left out of
Berry's The Idea of Luxury. While Berry sees objects as capable of
shifting their status as luxury items, his empiricist and sometimes
nominalist approach to the argument, anxiously disavowing the
extreme nominalism of Jean Baudrillard, cannot show how `luxury'
is not exclusively located in the object or in the subject, like the
components of a machine on the one hand, or an aspect of the soul
on the other. Apprehending luxury as a lived relation to capitalism
would show that the category works between these two. If the relationship between subjects and spices were to be
annotated using Jacques Lacan's `mathemes', two formulae would
be needed:
(1) `S| _ spice', showing the subject (barred `S', because the subject is
never fully present to itself ) constituted by its relationship to objet
petit a, that obscure object of desire
(2) but also, `spice _ S|', the formula (or matheme) of need or
demand, where the object of desire appears to be giving the
orders.
The quality of a spectral voice that hails the subject to far-away
horizons, the curious `in-between' status of spice as object and non-
object, is summed up in the difference between these two annota-
tions. The Idea of Luxury approaches this ambiguity when Berry cate-
gorises luxury according to negative criteria: the luxurious is what
you do not need, what could be replaced by any other commodity.[29]
However, despite this negative categorisation, The Idea of Luxury does
not realise the paradox of this superposition of negativity and
positivity. It posits the luxury object as more and less real than other
objects, infinitely substitutable and unrequired, an unattainable
condition that forms the substrate of advertising language. Max
Weber's assumption that Protestant asceticism `restricted consump-
tion, especially of luxuries' needs to be challenged: the ideological
role of luxury is not necessarily coterminous with what is put into
one's mouth. The point of advertising language, for example, is not
necessarily just to make a consumer purchase a product. Otherwise
it might be assumed that Satan's role suits everyone: there is plenty
of enjoyment with no enjoyer. The Protestant religions, pushing
towards Benjamin Franklin's conception that time is money, had no
time for consuming spices, just for pushing them on others.[30]
This is
where a literary-critical approach has an edge over a sociological
one.
spice notes
There is a passage on money in Timon of Athens, of which Marx was
fond. In his misanthropic desperation, Timon is digging in the earth
for roots in iv.iii.24-5, for `Who seeks for better of thee [the earth],
sauce his palate / With thy most operant poison.' A dialectic is being
established around the topoi of poison/cure, and meat/sauce, or
spice; a dialectic that suits the vegetarian hermit Timon has become.
It is a dialectic familiar elsewhere in Shakespeare, such as in Lady
Macbeth's famous lines about all the perfumes of Arabia being
incapable of sweetening her guilty little hand (Macbeth v.i.49-50). But
Timon finds gold in the miasmatic fecundity of the earth, reminding
him of the social and symbolic order he has left behind:
Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold? No, gods,
I am no idle votarist. Roots, you clear heavens!
Thus much of this will make black white, foul fair,
Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant.
Ha, you gods! why this? What, this, you gods? Why, this
Will lug your priests and servants from your sides,
Pluck stout men's pillows from below their heads -
This yellow slave
Will knit and break religions, bless th' accurs'd,
Make the hoar leprosy ador'd, place thieves
And give them title, knee, and approbation,
With senators on the bench. This is it
That makes the wappen'd widow wed again -
She whom the spital-house and ulcerous sores
Would cast the gorge at this embalms and spices
To th' April day again. Come, damn'd earth,
Thou common whore of mankind, that puts odds
Among the rout of nations, I will make thee
Do thy right nature. (26-44, my emphasis)[31]
In his search for stability and unitary meaning Timon ignores the
reversibility of the tropes employed here: if white can be made black,
then surely black could be made white? The picture of gold knitting
and breaking religions, or the remarrying of the `wappen'd widow',
exemplify this reversibility. But Timon is also evoking an image of
corrupted nature glossed with false artifice. The language of authen-
ticity and alienation must have appealed to Marx. The irreversibility
Timon requires of the tropological scheme he has set up is achieved
in the lines about embalming and spicing the widow `To th' April
day again'. The association of spice with the woman's body is
common. In The Miller's Tale, Chaucer has Absolom address Alison:
`What do ye, hony-comb, sweete Alisoun,
My faire bryd, my sweete cynamome?
Awaketh, leman myn, and speketh to me!' (512-14)[32]
The passage alludes to the Song of Songs, the Western urtext for the
poetics of spice. In his discussion of the passage from Timon in Specters of Marx,
Derrida omits an analysis of the reference to spice. Derrida under-
stands the significance of the metaphorical substitution of prostitute
and capital, for later in his study of the ontology of the commodity
form he writes: `It is in thinking of this original prostitution [of the
commodity]' that Marx liked to quote Timon.[33]
Because the
commodity cynically equates everything, it resembles Timon's spicy
gold. But in his earlier analysis of Timon Derrida misses what he
elsewhere calls the pharmakon, the tropologically unstable mark here
incarnated as spice, despite its relevance to any discussion of the
spectrality of money. By not exploring this reference, Derrida cannot
show how it encapsulates something highly significant for his
reading of the notion of the commodity fetish. It is the notion of the fetish which is so elegantly captured in the
transitive use of `embalms and spices'. The spicing of the body
appears to move it in two directions at once, forward and backward,
to resurrection and to youth. `Embalm' connotes an immersion,
bestowing a richness and depth upon the body. Additionally,
however, spice is imagined as the opposite of what bestows depth: a
coat, coating, surface or appearance. An embalmed body has no
organic insides. Marx's frustration and fascination with the asym-
metry between surface and depth, an asymmetry that is the mark of
the fetish, illustrates the power of the agency of spice. There is
something uncanny here, for embalming brings a corpse to life, just
as Tamburlaine in Christopher Marlowe's play (1590) mourns
Zenocrate:
Though she be dead, yet let me think she lives,
. . .
thou shalt stay with me
Embalm'd with Cassia, Amber Greece and Myrre . . .
(II Tamburlaine ii.iv.127-30)[34]
There is also a temporal dialectic here in the asymmetry between
fleeting flavour and embalming which endures. - `Spicing'/`embalming' is best understood in terms of `marking'.
The spice-marked body becomes uncanny, suggesting that the Other
is self: the spiced corpse is dead but it is vivid - or as Lacan would
put it, S| _ a, the matheme for fantasy. The uncanny sensation arises
that we are a corpse, that subjectivity is a kind of embalming. When
police searched the kitchen of the late twentieth-century cannibal
Jeffrey Dahmer, so the story goes, they found nothing but the
refrigerated flesh of his victims and . . . condiments; no fruit,
vegetables, cereals or dessert. The spiced corpse remains a potent
image, hovering outside the bounds of food-as-nutrition. In the
following chapters, ideologies of marked products being consumed
by unmarked consumers will be investigated - Europeans eating
exoticised Eastern food - as will ideologies of marked food flavouring
unmarked food: spice and meat, for example, two signs uniting in
the strongly transumptive sign of the Eucharist, as shown in the work
of Camporesi and Carolyn Walker Bynum. Thus the still-current
fantasy arises that other cultures spice their food to disguise the taste
and stink of rotting meat, a logical extension of the notion that a
marked commodity can flavour an inert, unmarked substance: a
spiced corpse. The idea of a spiced corpse becomes significant in the
analysis of Keats and Percy Shelley.
Eighteenth-century dictionaries such as Johnson's and Sheridan's
associate spice with small quantities and aroma. Johnson's use of
`production' equates spice with artifice:
`1 A vegetable production, fragrant to the smell, and pungent to
the palate; an aromatick substance used in sauces.
2 A small quantity, as of spice to the thing seasoned.'[35]
The Oxford English Dictionary's seventh definition of spice is `a trace,
touch, dash, specimen'.[36]
Thus Keats's phrase `tinct with cinnamon'
(The Eve of St Agnes, 267) could be paraphrased as `spiced with
spice'.[37]
This is the reflexive quality of the poetics of spice, in which
spice appears to be a species of the set whose name is itself. Derrida's observations on the spectrality of capital bring into play
the notion that marks, traces, touches and dashes are not real or
unreal but quasi-real. Quasi-reality opens up a third realm, not of
things or of thoughts but of the reality of desire. Derrida punningly
refers to the reading of these signs as `hauntology', since it is a
spectral realm. The definition of spice does not simply entail a listing
of the positive attributes of the commodity. This is what the sociology
of the commodity would do. The luxury commodity is not just an
`incarnated' sign, as Appadurai calls it, but is spectral. The luxury
commodity is in the realm of the signifier but also somewhat spookily
`really there': a sign of incarnation. `Incarnation' then is a more
bizarre concept than Appadurai's use of it suggests. Spectrality
suggests the supernatural, a different, parallel order of materiality. In
horror fiction, ectoplasm is not of this earth, nor does it belong to
the realm of the ideal; it is quasi-material, transcendental, a sublime
object. (The strongest instance of luxury's incarnation in the twenti-
eth century is surely the spice in Frank Herbert's Dune (1965).)
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