This language thing

So, a while ago, my apartment-mate had a supper and asked me to help pull out the table. Now, the thing's sticking out, and I want to suggest to her that we push it back together. I don't know quite what the English idiom is for that, and lots of funny German occurs to me, meaning roughly "squish it back to how it was," "reestablish its prior dimensions," "make it not stick out so much." All of those funny utterances, suitably translated, would solve the problem -- and, to a considerable extent, language just is about solving problems. I think if it were taught that way, it would save a lot of misery and get more people talking: generally, with even a rudimentary vocabulary and uncertain grammar, you can get must things done that you want to do if you just wing it and if you are willing to look slightly stupid.

There is, of course, more to language than that. A favourite book from a couple of years ago was The Elegance of the Hedgehog, a picture of language as an elaborate dance, an achievement of culture, a way that the people who care about doing things right recognise each other. That is, of course, also part of the story. Foreigners caught in another language world are caught between the two models: they have to solve problems or they never find the bathroom, get what they want to eat, and they also have to gradually figure out what the beauty of the thing is and move along with it. That's tricky, especially in Austria, because there are so many foreigners, and so much odd language around. The problem solving aspect threatens to dominate. Also, English forms keep popping up as normative, as the way that new words and expressions are being formed. 

Re-search as re-hearing

From a city garden near Karlsplatz in Vienna.

Re-search

I return to Vienna with this odd mission, to help some people interested in issues of sustainability and food security with their teaching and research by producing non-research video that explores issues around food. I am being essentially invited to meddle.

I had no idea about research when I first came here; I just collected impressions and had thoughts about them. I am not much more advanced now, except I am better about writing things down and keeping photos and videos and in general keeping records, since I now know that important things may seem trivial at first glance and also that thoughts get lost. 

My method, for the bulk of the relevant activity here, is to go to a rural area and do a cluster of interviews with people who are guided by ideas in their farming, food preparation, and food distribution activities. This work reminds me of every real kind of research I have ever done. It is always the same: one hears very similar stories, very similar rationales for actions, over and over again, and it seems important to notice both what keeps coming up and what small differences show up. 

Here’s one example: mostly, people justify their preference for local produce in very contemporary terms. It’s safer, it supports the local economy, the quality and freshness are superior. Occasionally, one hears also about how farms have always been pretty self-sufficient, how that has always been an ideal, and about how the countryside kept the cities alive during the war, about the importance of maintaining a local capacity for producing food. Sometimes, one also hears, in this very prosperous country, the worry, familiar to us in the US, that social security will go bankrupt and that old people will be dependent on their gardens and their gardening skills. 

One thinks initially about coming to understand how new ideas about sustainability and food security have taken root in rural areas. One hears a lot that sounds very contemporary. However, it may be that the key to the success of these ideas is partly that they are not new at all, that they connect to very long-term concerns in Austria. 

How Ideas Travel

Goethe wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther partly as a warning about the dangers of extreme feeling, such as the romantics cultivated. There was allegedly a wave of suicides copycatting the suicides in Werther: Goethe was not a good warner, but he was an awfully good depicter. Maria Theresa got worried and, just to be safe, banned Goethe entire. This shows up in Wikipedia as a partial explanation of why there is a hundred-some year hole in Austrian literary production. 

People find such meddling funny, partly because they don’t think much about the power of ideas. One of my heroes, Cordwainer Smith, pictures the ideal government as having two important jobs: preventing the export of religion and preventing the export of news. He was a China expert and knew something about what ideas do when they get loose. 

Anybody who thinks and writes is morally bound to know something about how ideas travel, for the same reason that anybody who shoots a weapon is morally bound to know something about who might be standing in the line of fire. We have examples in front of us of how fast ideas propagate: Facebook, the economics and aesthetics of Apple, the connected world. All of these revolutions were accomplished so fast and so thoroughly that most people cannot imagine what it was like before the revolution. That’s how idea-revolutions work; they wipe out the history of their predecessors, make the earlier thoughts unthinkable, except by antiquarians. 

So, I have come here to Austria to see what is happening with ideas about food. Knowledgable people all over the world are worried; the current food-ideas lend overwhelming support to patterns of shipping, consumption, toxification, and land-use that have frightening consequences, projected a few decades into the future. Lots of people would like to see food ideas change. So, intellectuals make gambits: they put ideas out - regional food, slow food, respect for animals, food security. Some of these get taken up, here and there, in advertising, in policy, in the operating rules of idealistic farm and retail businesses. 

One doesn’t need interviews like mine - long, rambling conversations with farmers and gardeners and merchants - to study these idea-gambits: they are well defined in various literatures. Interviews are useful for seeing what happens to ideas as they enter the minds of individual people, as they become part of how people make meaning of their lives through conversation and sometimes conversion. Do the ideas fit with other stuff?  Do they get domesticated, or do they remain on the fringes of people’s lives? (How often do food decisions really reflect a concern about buying local products: once a week or once a day?)  Do they combine with apparently unrelated ideas? (Does ‘eating organic’ come to be seen as a species of ‘conspicuous consumption?’ ) Are they linking up with powerful ways of thinking that are already central to people’s motivations? (Does the idea of food security combine with old memories from the war, about the time when the country fed the cities while the rebuilding was happening?)

Ideas are like viruses. They mutate in minds, in small ways. We have a terrible fear that certain viruses will become airborne. Many people have the hope, that organic agriculture will become airborne. Whether out of fear or out of hope, it seems awfully important to study with a microscope what happens to ideas in the culture media of minds and communities — what happens, that is, in the mind of a third generation baker in Bad Zell and around the Stammtisch in Gasthof Ahorner at Sankt Thomas am Blasenstein. 

Watching Edible City with Austrian Students

Last night, I saw a documentary called Edible City, http://www.ediblecitythemovie.com, about efforts in Oakland, California and other places to establish community gardens on unused land. It began with the hard truths about fossil fuel use, about the future of the middle class way of life, with its foundation in cheap food and an international food market system. I saw the film at WUK in Vienna, counter-culture centre with performance spaces, theatres, a school, and workshops - a nicely repurposed old building that attracts idealistic kids. I had gone there to meet a student who was returning to his grandparents’ farm. He fed me new grapes and herbs from a basket. The people were so familiar: from meetings in South Minneapolis, many trips to new farms, CSAs, hopeful new city gardens. 

When I left the movie, during the testimonial time — “we tried this, and it really worked, but it’s harder than you think,” — I was hungry, and not much was open that would be fast, so I stopped at a wurst stand by the subway. Wurst stands are cheap fast food, tastier than we have, but clearly part of the Other System. It was natural to stop. I was getting mildly squirrelly from not having eaten.  The stop set up the opposition in my mind: “The Truth” versus “What’s Natural.”

I also thought: why am I doing interviews the way I do? Here was a little documentary with nice graphics to present the underlying economics, which a bright pig could grasp, and pleasant people endorsing sensible solutions. What more is there to do, besides remaking  Edible City a thousand times, just to repeat the food message, and also to apply the same template to species extinction, nuclear power, the loss of rural population, air pollution. One could do a whole film festival of documentaries that present the truth; after those are all made, what need is there to do anything different? It can be a nice hobby to keep doing interviews, but where is the need? 

I think some of the guests on my television show come on the show wanting to contribute their own version of “Edible City” to the world, to blow the trumpet once more for truth. And what I am trying to do both allows that and thwarts it, or re-directs it. Messages work best when they are pithy; my interviews go about an hour. Also, I ask for the personal story first, the origins story. And then, I don’t usually edit, so the point people want to make is not lifted up out of the conversation. It coexists with everything else. From one standpoint, what I make is just: bad documentaries, examples horrible for video classes, exercises in self-indulgence at the other extreme from the discipline of documentary production (in company with, I might note,  Frederick Wiseman and David Susskind). 

So, what is the point? When the truth and what is natural diverge, as they usually do, there are several possible responses, all aimed at producing a new natural state — beloved carrot and celery stands by the subway entrances. These include: new laws (stricter wurst regulation), a change in public opinion and attitude (big posters to celebrate the carrot), and, hardest of all, a redirection of the whole cultural life, away from scarcity, from haste, from stress, from emphasis on the future — so that a person coming out of a film at 9 wouldn’t feel rushed to get home, wouldn’t be concerned to eat the cheapest thing available, wouldn’t rush through his meal barely tasting the food. Such a person might find it natural to stop at a little veggie restaurant, chat with the waiter, sample the new dishes. Most plausible solutions to the problem sketched in Edible City are some combination of these three: laws and public relations in concert leading to changes in the cultural landscape.

This does work. For better and worse, it does work. Vienna doesn’t have a big pigeon problem, that I’ve seen anyhow, maybe because some combination of pigeon control and the pr campaign “Doves are really just flying rats” has changed their place in the city. It is no longer cool to sit in the park and feed the pigeons. So one can imagine one’s role as a public intellectual: beginning a process of ethical and scientific consciousness-raising leading to intelligent social engineering — something very appropriate for the city of Franz Joseph. Most ethical leadership seems to fit this formula. It’s not a bad formula.

So far as I can see, it’s the formula that everybody we get to hate also used. Think: “Birds are evil” in China; think “Protocol of the Elders of Zion.” That should at least give us pause.

My concern is with two matters. First, I am concerned to find the roots of motives, before they get amalgamated into ideologies and movements, to see what the first expressions are. Also, I am concerned to show the exercise of a muscle, the action of saying, “Why am I doing what I am doing? Where did that come from?” (In some body work, you have to show people what is required to move just one muscle, by itself.) I agree that change is important, that Edible City to some extent tells the truth, but I want change to have such deep roots that it can stand against the formidable resources of those who are basically users of humanity, or corporate robots with very simple programming.

Also, when I was a kid, I learned a lot about food and agriculture, by osmosis from university extension brochures, conversations between enlightened and unenlightened farmers, and very colourful health studies books detailing the four basic food groups.  What ties all the stuff I learned together is that it was, on contemporary standards, all wrong, and inhumane, and unsustainable. And the combination of brochures and classes for farmers and health texts brought about just the revolution that landed us in this mess. I don’t want to be part of the next wave of taken-for-granted stupidity.