The tongue in economy
I. Umami is not a spice, but a taste. In fact, it is the fairly unknown fifth basic taste, a complement to the better-known versions of sweet, sour, bitter and salt. It is sometimes described as “savoriness”. And although it seems to have been well-known in the praxis of cuisine for a long, long time, the scientific understanding of this taste has only recently caught up. Now, basic tastes are usually defined on the grounds of a specific biological fact – that our tongues have receptors for them. For quite a while science thought that the tongue contained four kinds of receptors, each roughly corresponding to one taste. Recently a fifth receptor, one that reacts to umami, has been discovered. This was clearly not the kind of information that headlines news broadcasts, and consequently most people seem not to be aware of the existence of this fifth basic taste. Seeing that umami is a very versatile taste, one that can enhance any other taste, this is a shame. However, professional chefs – particularly those proficient in brands of Asian cuisine – are well-aware of how umami can be used and consequently have developed a number of ways to titillate our taste-buds with this sensation. But what is most interesting here is the latter, rather than the former, fact. Umami, special and fairly unknown as it is, is merely a stimulating agent and can only make sense in a context of meaning. Without a specific neurological platform it can never achieve a place in culture, where meaning is then imbued into it. And it is this instrument of contextualization, this biological device of sensemaking, that is the subject here.
II.
Human life is still bestially concentrated in the mouth. Georges Bataille
The tongue represents all that is abhorrent to the studies of management and economy. This field, which sings the praises of the defined and the absolute, has its own peculiar relationship to that amorphous thing that Lacan called the Real – the thing which we do not wish to think, or which we cannot think. The tongue, slithering and moist, is instead both real and Real, for even though its physical reality is obvious and uncontested, its place in economy is something that traditionalist thinking of the economic would wish to hide away. The tongue simply does not fit the dry and ordered thinking of academic discourse, particularly not in the fields that want to talk of economy. It is fleshy, slick, and mucous – sponge-like and wriggling, not quite a muscle and not quite an organ. It is an uneven surface, all pocks and ridges, and occupies many positions. This capacity for being many things, of not being reducible to a single, simple essence, is of course what makes it repugnant to an academic field obsessed with order and the well-structured. The tongue of a lover, kissing and caressing, has little in common with the sharp rapier of the practicing trial lawyer. It can speak, kiss, scathe. Switching contexts pose no problem – the tongue can engage in business dealings or be used in sexual communion. Stuck grotesquely out of the mouth is turns into a taunt, used in a measured way it becomes the very image of control. The same tongue can go from sensuously licking the earlobe of a beloved to pragmatically testing the heat and viscosity of a dish being prepared. Tasting, testing and transforming, the tongue is an active part of the border of a human, a dweller in the borderlands between I and thou, I and the world outside. The ambiguous nature of this fleshy appendage, with its connections to both genitalia and intellectual faculties, makes it a truly fearsome thing for the reductive and trivial positions one can find in much inquiry into the economic.
A child, in forming her approach to the problem of an outside world, will constantly make use of her mouth and tongue. The sensitivity of the tongue, something which is a direct result of the amorphous makeup of this organ, makes it an excellent epistemological tool, a way to manage the problem of the subject in the world. Probing the borders of the world, a process later replicated by the onset of sexuality (by any other name) in the probing of the borders between oneself and others, the tongue assists the child in making sense of how a communication, an exchange, can take place. A baby slobbering over a toy is engaging in an exchange with the same – even though this communication is characterized by what Michel Serres has called bruit, the noise. Interactions between the tongue and objects is not a question of simply transferring information. Saliva, the manifold surface of the tongue, the play of the mouth cavity, all take part in trying to communicate with the wooden block the child gnaws and tastes. There is a flow of information, but this is not a question of information A going to taste-bud B, but a real flow, with eddies and turbulence and saliva and the multitude of wasteful, redundant flux that exists in any information transfer in the real world – Serres’s noise. Now, the tongue is in fact an extremely well developed device for handling this kind of “noise”.
In fact, tastes may even be understood as such noise, as fundamentally unnecessary information. Even though people sometime claim that certain tastes exist as signals – bitter denotes poison, sweet denotes quickly acting carbohydrates – this explanation seems contrived. Even though it may be true that early man learned to realize that the sensations derived from certain berries could be linked to positive effects, such information is obviously a case of creating meaning rather than a case of efficient transfer of information. Honey is sweet, and gives quick energy, but the energy effect would still hold true even if we found sweet tastes fundamentally revolting. What we can see here is a very complex problem: Divorcing the actual, biological tastes from their culturally ascribed meanings is tasking. For instance, both nightshade and ethylene glycol (an ingredient in anti-freeze) are sweet-tasting and fatally poisonous. Quite a number of roots and berries taste bitter, but are still highly nutritious. Still, as a culture we have taken to reacting with pleasure to sweet tastes and some wariness to bitter ones, and one suggested reason for this is because children seem to enjoy simple, sweet tastes more than complex bitter ones. This observation is however in marked contrast with other ways we view “good” taste. The complex taste of a Chateau Lafite 1971 and a well-matured Camembert, for example, stand as an example of tastes that children assumedly would not enjoy. All the while, when our tongues are confronted with such multifaceted tastes, we react with pleasure. Here, the noise becomes evident. For the simple signals of sweet, sour, bitter and salt (oh, and umami) in fact exist only in our simplified models of the world. For although this structure, this organization of taste, drummed into our minds from childhood on, is elegant in its simplicity, it actually says little of how taste functions. A simple lump of sugar, dissolving on a tongue, sends wave upon wave of information into the tongue, for even though the main receptors to react are those hardwired to “sweet”, the other receptors partake in the flow of information, in the noisy transfer.
The tongue, aided by our olfactory faculties, processes even the simplest things in a way far more complex than our models of organization can capture. It is an organ of excess, of too much information, and through this also part of the creation of human civilization. Were tastes simply a case of linear, purified information – one for sweet, two for bitter, three for umami – the human mind would never have been confronted with the problem of how broiled meat tastes. This taste cannot be presented in a formulae: two parts sweet plus one part bitter and five parts umami. Instead, it is a sensation requiring an almost magically sensitive device of sensemaking – the tongue. At the same time, the existence of this device attached to the human system demanded much of the primate brain. All the senses, combined with the birth of language, made it necessary for the brain to develop too. Out of such things, cultures are born.
III.
What is the taste of culture? The coffee presently sloshing through the cavity of my mouth carries with it far more than can be captured by trying to describe it as hot, acrid and pleasant-tasting. It tastes of mornings and break-times, comfort and work. Compare this to the taste of a lover, lingering on the tongue and in the mind, a layered affair where the physical realities of sweat and secretions are overlaid with romanticized notions and idealization. My love tastes of paradise and joy, residual comestibles and exocrine glands…
As an observation, the fact that taste is a function of both physical and cultural elements might seem trivial. However, studies of organization and the economic nexus often works from the implicit assumption that we can draw clear boundaries between the biological and the socio-cultural. As a result, much of e.g. management studies is a remarkably bloodless affair, devoid of the sweaty brow and the smell of urine so common in the workplaces of our great nations. Often, this seems to be due to a feeling that bodies and the biological are really just grist for the economic mill, mere effects. In a line of argumentation remarkably close to Michel Foucault’s notion of the body created through clinical gazes and power/knowledge-regimes, the discourse of business rarely acknowledges the possibility that bodies could be more than that which is affected by organizing. The manifold devices of the world of organizations may be passively acted upon by such bodies, like a grain of sand can create unwanted friction in an engine, but bodies are seldom afforded any real agency. And even when they are, as in discussions of resistance and less-than-docile bodies, this agency comes not from within the body, but from that primus motor of our thinking, the intentional actor.
What is interesting about the tongue is that it shows us an alternative position to this issue of agency. Michel Serres has in his usual idiosyncratic way argued that the philosophy has concentrated on understanding our second tongue, language, whilst the first one, the tasting tongue, has been ignored. He has, following this, stated:
All around us language replaces experience. The sign, so soft, substitutes itself for the thing, which is hard. I cannot think of this substitution as an equivalence. It is more of an abuse and a violence. The sound of a coin is not worth the coin; the smell of cooking does not fill the hungry stomach; publicity is not the equivalent of quality; the tongue that talks annuls the tongue that tastes or the one that receives and gives a kiss.
Still, here the tongue that tastes is here afforded a primacy, a romantic notion of origins that I’m not quite prepared to accept. In Serres, the tasting tongue seems almost atavistic, a remnant of an earlier, purer age, and the annulment that he seems to claim is enacted by culture is to me a curious continuation of fallacy of the social being the adversary of the biological. What the tongue, to me, instead shows is how a biological “platform” – if such a crude and mechanistic word can be used – can be a place from which cultural and social mores develop. Receptors, developed over millennia, part of a nervous system attached to a physical brain with a wondrous capacity for development, all these are biological facts and certainties. While my tongue and the tongue of a Amarakaire tribesman are not the same thing, and the way we appreciate the taste of a macadamia nut may differ greatly once the brain has processed the impulses sent, the fact that both of our cultural reactions to the taste of the nut is mediated and made possible by the physical characteristics of the tongue is incontestable. Note that this does not mean that I believe all tongues to be biologically identical, simply that all tongues have biological properties. Neither do I want to explain everything by pointing back to neural activity and taste-receptors. Instead, it is the wandering across boundaries, the seamless interplay, the acting manifold of the tongue that entices me.
IV.
Hunger ist Hunger, aber Hunger, der sich durch gekochtes, mit Gabel und Messer gegeßnes Fleisch befriedigt, ist ein andrer Hunger, als der rohes Fleisch mit Hilfe von Hand, Nagel und Zahn verschlingt. Nicht nur der Gegenstand der Konsumtion, sondern auch die Weise der Konsumtion wird daher durch die Produktion produziert, nicht nur objektiv, sondern auch subjektiv. Die Produktion schafft also den Konsumenten. Karl Marx
In order to explore this manifold, take the interplay between your tongue and a lover. Kissing, an activity sadly absent from much of academic discourse (although not unknown on the conference circuit), is obviously a cultural affair. We are inundated with notions what a romantic (or merely hot) kiss is supposed to be. Historical imagery, literary descriptions, flowery language, famous cinema kisses, small-talk and confessions have all aided and structured our understanding of a kiss, and as a consequence, our experience of a kiss is culturally colored. A kiss is, in more than one way, not just a kiss. At the same time, even though the sensation thereof is filtered through layers of culture and social mores, there is a specific physical aspect to it all. The skin that is touched, the other tongue met, the sensation of the other captured by that incredibly sensitive communicative organ. The tongue senses, it tastes, it interacts. And these sense-reactions, often referred to as base sensations, are not simple. The tasting tongue handles much more information than language can describe, but this form of sensemaking is not a question of either the physical or social. It is both, for in the processing of “noisy information” the tongue sways between the two, in the same manner the tongue traverses the boundaries between I and thou, the inner and the outer. The kiss is both a cultural affair and a physical act, extremely intimate and tied to a social network of meaning. And in its own way, the humble tongue handles this traversion, mediates the physical and moistens the social.
This swaying, this refusal to be just one thing, is what is abhorrent to the mode of thinking practiced in e.g. business schools. By being different from itself, a biological thing that processes information and mediates culture, the tongue may well be part of economy but not part of the thinking thereof. And by being so steadfastly physical, so wet and spongy, so connected to our base desires as well as to our chatting, bullshittin’ selves, it forces us to look to our bodies, ourselves. Thinking of economy has been occupied with cleansing, creating flat surfaces and smooth models, and the slithering thing that follows us everywhere is exactly the kind of thing this thinking has tried to banish. Still, people chat, sample a jalapeño popper, suck on their thumb when they’ve banged it, give head, lick envelopes, and eat, eat, eat. The tongue, that prime communicative medium, is ever-present in economy, but to the thinking thereof it is truly a viper, a worm at the heart of the economic. And whereas the notion of economy being created by intentionally acting individuals requires some notion of decision or drive, and thus has steered us towards imagining rationality and calculation as innate parts of enterprising behavior, the tongue represents immediacy, reacting regardless of our intentions. This infrangible nature scares us, for regardless of our wishes – and management studies is a theory of wishes and wants – it will behave as it wants. In front of this uncontrollable organ, organization theory cowers.
For while it is true that e.g. organization studies has talked, almost incessantly it seems, of things connected to the tongue – language, rhetoric, discourse, narratives – this has always been done in the purified sense, a sense where the mouth that speaks has not been allowed to sully the elegant modeling and reducing of the phenomenological world. And here Serres point becomes important. Talking of language without talking of the tongue is obviously a violence, a deadening of the faculties. Reducing the mouth to an automaton of discourse is a brutal act of denigration, of positing that which we find easy to think about as that what is important to think. The tasting tongue, capturing the subtle and sublime informational flows from umami, is in fact engaging in an act many times more complex than mere talking, and possibly an act that is far more important to economy. Without discernment, the capacity to order things in the world, the capacity to desire or dislike, the constitutional differences in the world would never have started that symbolic interplay we now call our culture. And without the tongue, much of our discernment would be lost. Further, without this discernment, the very notion of wants and needs, of demand, of consumption would simply not exist. Marx might be right in saying “die Produktion schafft also den Konsumenten,” but in much the same way, the tongue does part to play in creating economy, and it should be acknowledged. As itself, as biological, as cultural, as the real tongue of economy.
