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A Genealogy of Cake: A Thread
#CakeTwitter #Cake
1/ https://twitter.com/r2_b2_/status/1282350181690810373
#CakeTwitter #Cake
1/ https://twitter.com/r2_b2_/status/1282350181690810373
While genealogy has no factual or true beginning, this video from Tasty marks a recent shift in the cake discourse. https://twitter.com/tasty/status/1280966608933003264
Using a theoretical tool from feminist scholar of science, Karan Barad, I attend to the “cuts” btwn the categories of human observer, object (cake), & apparatus of knowing (twitter) to make theoretical headway on the phenomenon of cake-human relations. https://twitter.com/skoog/status/1282125660572483585?s=21
But why cake? & why now? I argue this recent attention to cake points out a new ontological basis of everyday life, where flesh and flour enter into uncertain relation & modern categories of cake and Man are collapsing. But 1st, some historical context: https://twitter.com/evillanelles/status/1282063274083782659?s=20
Cake and it’s analogs, like bread = flesh, have been important religious symbolism. https://twitter.com/pleasebegneiss/status/1282153113265135616?s=21
In Greek/Roman society, cake and Man were not yet seen as separate. https://twitter.com/zang808/status/1281345811687903235?s=20
If we interrogate history, we see proof that a new politics of cake has been on the rise for several centuries. Let them eat cake, indeed. https://twitter.com/filmcal/status/1282070128478257153?s=20
However, the confectionary origins of Western society, where Man was constructed as separate from the rest of cake, can be traced to Enlightenment projects. https://twitter.com/cum1047/status/1282155694611992582?s=20
So, why now? In the era of “fake news,” anti-science rhetoric, deep fake videos, and the obnoxious self-vicitimization of the privileges ruling classes, we can no longer be certain what is and isn’t real, or what is and isn’t cake. https://twitter.com/DiscreetLatino/status/1282338307196751874?s=20
New uses of science and technology contribute to the post-humanism of this moment. The blurred between the human and non-human mean that human technology, like surgery, are being used to intervene on grape- I mean, cake. https://twitter.com/eliseybell/status/1282324366605385729?s=20
Therefore, this genealogical perspective on cake attends to the most recent ways the politics of cake offers a kind of loop in history. https://twitter.com/futurehasbeen/status/1282188988560752640?s=21
So, why cake? There is an emerging realization that we are all cake under capitalism: consuming & consumed, perishable yet enduring in its ability to take on new cultural forms around the world. Cake is a metaphor of our own consumption under capitalism. https://twitter.com/alplicable/status/1281998782905933829?s=21
This video drives home the point that there is no difference between human, animal, and commodity. https://twitter.com/alexE_617/status/1281687046986387456?s=20
As people awake to their own precarity, they have begun to interrogate their own confectionary nature. “Am I cake?” “Are you cake?” such questions are nascent signs of the collapse between commodity and consumer. https://twitter.com/yajpeg/status/1281607228135559168?s=21
We have proceeded to consume ourselves and the ones we love. A kind of cakey capitalist cannibalism. https://twitter.com/roysenotes/status/1281622239717335041?s=21
However, cake disrupts the teleology of class revolution. It offers a new and arguable more revolutionary end to the classical Marxist tale of the proletariate rising up to overthrow the bourgeois. (here, cake does not pretend to not be cake) https://twitter.com/MMacdaibheid/status/1282415202756112385?s=20
As cake, the proletariat ultimately consume themselves and the super-structure of society crumbles like coffee cake. https://twitter.com/eroticartpop2/status/1282035356083171328?s=20
Academy Award winning film, Parasite (2019), by Bong Joon-ho demonstrates this kind of self-consuming nature of the proletariate. However, it also reaffirms the moral distinction between the proletariate and class traitors. https://twitter.com/miovies/status/1282052321279696898?s=20
This shift in our cultural understanding of the self-consuming nature of cake inevitably leads to a new sexual politics: an erotics of cake. https://twitter.com/primov__/status/1282084126875693062?s=20
As this new erotics of cake further queers the relationships between humans, sex, reproduction, and food, it also inevitably disrupts the social reproduction of the family…. https://twitter.com/Kristen_Arnett/status/1282002946125778946?s=20
…familial bonds…. https://twitter.com/Zacattacker11/status/1282313342355337216?s=20
…platonic partnerships…. https://twitter.com/ckimberlinjr/status/1281996767735820289?s=20
…and human-animal companionship. https://twitter.com/WCBusch/status/1282100239298555905?s=20
The globalizing and totalizing tale of cake capitalism Twitter witnessed a shift in the discourse about the #Anthropocene to the Cakethropocene. https://twitter.com/momappreciator/status/1281798926991978496?s=21
“These times called the [Cakethropocene] are times of multi-species, including human [and cake], urgency.” -Donna Haraway, Baking with the Trouble https://twitter.com/jennilame/status/1282033285644693510?s=20
However, it is also critical that we attend to the ways cake does not define our everyday lives. How there continues to be ontological life, like this tissue box, beyond cake. https://twitter.com/andrew_durso/status/1282036308127481857?s=20
What Dipesh Chakrabarty would call History 2 and what Anna Tsing would call a patch, I call a “Bundt hole” in the Cakethropocene. These examples of non-cake offer critical cracks in hegemony of cake capitalism. https://twitter.com/momonahan/status/1281280745600933895?s=20
