Profanating Gastro-Normativity

This article explores the making and tasting of wine through the anonymous processes of nonhuman consumption that participate in the production of its relational ontology (the terroir) and shape its visceral encounter with the human tongue (taste). First, the author defines a notion of consumption that is neither reduced to the human, the subjective, or the phenomenological nor dematerialized into sociocultural or politico-economic anthropic schemes. Second, he explores wine’s terroir as a prism through which to challenge the two main ideologies that frame the contemporary wine world: a normative territoriality premised on spatio-legal frameworks, and a consumer-oriented marketing approach. Third, the author introduces the natural wine movement, an umbrella term loosely gathering different wine makers who share a common reaction against those ideologies. In the constellation of thinking, making, and tasting that constitute the movement, he finds the lineament of a strategic materialism that aims to make visible and is open toward the agency of the nonhuman matter, and which does so by addressing simultaneously wine’s terroir and taste, by means of profanating their taken-for-granted normativity. The article concludes by suggesting that this strategy may hold promising insights for implementing radical food politics in the age of agro-industrial capitalism.

Naming in Multichannel with Beeps in the Strong Model

In this paper, a system of anonymous processes is considered that communicates with beeps through multiple channels in a synchronous communication model. In beeping channels, processes are limited to hearing either a beep or a silence from the channel with no collision detection. A strong model is assumed in which a process can beep on any single channel and listen on any specific channel during a single round. The goal is to develop distributed naming algorithms for two models where the number of processes is either known or unknown. A Las Vegas algorithm was developed for naming anonymous processes when the number of processes is known. This algorithm has an optimal time complexity of O(nlogn) rounds and uses O(nlogn) random bits, where n is the number of processes for the largest group. For the model with an unknown number of processes, a Monte Carlo algorithm was developed, which has an optimal running time of O(nlogn) rounds and a probability of success that is at least 1−12Ω(logn). The algorithms solve the naming problem in new models where processes communicate through multiple channels.

Theatricality and Drifting in the Anthropocene

This essay proposes a new way of reading the Situationist notion of dérive (drift) in the Anthropocene by thinking of it as an operation that is geological in impetus, a sense of movement caused by an agentic earth. Equally, it looks to offer an alternative and expanded theory of theatricality in which the theatrical is no longer associated with theatre per se. On the contrary, it is now seen as a mode of representation that deterritorializes spectators by placing them in the midst of groundless flows and anonymous processes. In the same way that the earth in the Anthropocene is figured as a dynamic and unstable planet, so drifting and theatricality, when brought together, radicalise our extant understandings of the stage by allowing it to become motile, a terrestrial force. Here, the ecological potential of theatre is not found in staging plays about climate change or insisting on site-specificity, but in thinking through the geological power of theatricality, its capacity to exist as a type of plate tectonics. Such an expanded understanding of theatricality explains why instead of paying attention to a specific theatre production or even to the medium of theatre in a restricted sense, I examine how, in their 1958 text and image collaboration Mémoires, the Danish artist Asger Jorn and his friend Guy Debord were able to transform the page into a stage – to theatricalize and geologize reading. In an attempt, simultaneously, to expand and undo itself, the article is not content to conceptualize its argument, it looks to theatricalize itself, to become a kind of drift, a geology of writing.

Anonymous glory

Hannah Arendt’s political theory is often understood to rest on a celebration of action, the memorable words and deeds of named individuals, over against the anonymous processes constitutive of ‘labor’ and ‘society’. Yet at key moments in The Human Condition and The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt seems to signal a different relationship between political action and anonymity; and she does so in part via citations of the novels of William Faulkner. Using the apparently contradictory notion of ‘anonymous glory’ as a heuristic, this essay reconsiders Arendt’s political thought through readings of the novels she cites, A Fable and Intruder in the Dust. The essay argues that, for Arendt, a conception of action adequate to the scale of modern social power must somehow be both indelibly tied to individual deeds and immersed in a processual field that is indifferent to the needs for meaning or purpose or satisfaction that individuals bring to what they do; and that Arendt’s engagement with this problem both complicates the relation of action to its supposed opposites, and makes it more difficult to conceive of action’s recovery as a reliable source of theoretical or political redemption.