PIERLUIGI BASSO FOSSALI

	NICOLA PERULLO L’altro gusto. Saggi di estetica gastronomica, Ets, Pisa, 2008

In a recent interview, (1) Nicola Perullo argued that ‘being a mode promoted by the marginal senses [taste and smell], the least talked about, the least implicated with the consumer system, the gastronomic experience could realign the subject with the world in terms of a nondumbing down’. L’altro gusto, (The Other Taste), the title of Perullo’s latest book, can be interpreted above all as a reversal of perspective in which taste, an internal sense apparently incapable of distancing things, becomes the fulcrum of a re-semanticization of the world, a motor of knowledge and intensity, a bulwark of ‘sustainable sentience’. Taste is de facto the most alert, perceptive tool against simulation, imitation, adulteration and substitutional overexcitement, because it is, if nothing else, activated as a co-implication between the flesh of the subject and the matter of the world. In taste the sentient is released in a communion of destinies between body and food that cannot be explained by their origins.
This is why Perullo is able to forcibly argue that the sensory experience and the actualization of a productive memory of the food come together as one: in taste, unsustainable pleasure is pleasure that originates in a corrupt way and inevitably perverts the value of the experience in progress, leading either to the removal of that experience or to a false consciousness. The gastronomic experience is other insofar as it becomes an epicenter of denials, of nonacceptances of purely nominal values. It ascertains competences and discovers specific textures and it reassigns convincing identities. It seems to me that, in Perullo’s latest book, we have a sort of esthetics of gratitude, which on the one hand recovers the disciplinary tradition of a philosophy of sentient knowledge, while on the other developing an ethical overlapping of that which cannot be substituted, of irrefutable identities. It is an implicative esthetics that sets out strategically from food to rediscuss, to achieve a new equalization of relations between man and environment, in which interrelations become assignments and— without fear of using the term—responsibility. As Perullo has already argued in Per un’estetica del cibo (For an Esthetics of Food), (2) food ‘is a major vector of connective knowledge’. L’altro gusto is thus the hidden face of knowledge that calls into question the different disciplinary ‘solos’ to inject convergent light. Only from this confluence is it possible to recognize the prismatic appearance of qualities. (3) These latter are the fruit of an indivisible coupling of subject and world, of culture and nature. This is why the esthetics of taste is emblematic; it is implicative and synthetic, by no means disaggregational or analytical. Gastronomic esthetics calls together the other disciplines to achieve a new synthesis, to put together the pieces of a picture in which culture cannot appear as something that restores order to the chaos of the material and psychic environment.
The infusion of the spirit into matter is the philosophical vice that needs to be erased by an esthetics of gratitude, in which the world predelineates, educates and codetermines values in partnership with the subject that experiences it and lives it.
The works of Tim Ingold, in particular The Perception of Environment, are thus an important point of reference for Perullo: knowledge and flavor are born of an active relationality between subject, object and environment. ‘The form of the artifact evolves within what I have called a field of forces’, hence it interweaves relations and enters into textural patterns that may to a certain extent correspond to it, building relations of tensive equilibrium or association/dissociation. Nothing is further away from this theoretical perspective than an esthetics of admiration, of the confining of artifacts in museums or the cult of recipes. ‘The artifact, in short, is the crystallisation of activity within a relational field’. (4) For this reason, precisely because ‘the concrete action of the work has a narrative quality’, (5) precisely because its precarious stability is the fruit of care, judgment and skill in relation to the material forces that will combine to determine the results, the signification of the artifact has to disseminate itself according to its origin and destiny.
This origin and this destiny cannot be centered only on the individual, reduced to being a consumer who the more he is ‘standardized’, the more he is bound for solipsistic wellbeing. They must be traced to an implicative community narration, in which their urge to know and taste encounters the experiences of others and develops into a socialization of feeling and sensitization to the social that remotivate the need for taste education and training. (6) These are the themes that draw Perullo’s book very close to Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food Nation. The two texts share, above all, the translation of categories oxidized by history and common sense into cognitive processes that are active and rooted in direct experience, and thus avoid the risks of taxonomic and ideological judgment and self-confirmatory evaluation. ‘That of “good” is not an analytical concept, but a primitive predicate; that is to say that it is not explained through causes but described through motives. A motive has no foundation outside itself, it is its own reason [...]. To “explain” and motivate good, I have to describe a whole form of life.’ (7)
Perullo’s book testifies to the fact that a subject apparently lateral to the history of a discipline such as gastronomy can turn into a disorienting point of view, so much so that it becomes a passepartout to open a series of questions of huge magnitude. In this sense, the ‘empiric’ and implicative esthetics should not, in our view, linger over old questions tied to the artistic dignity of gastronomy. Above all, the idea of reconceptualizing art from gastronomy is much less promising than making gastronomy a platform for wide-ranging issues that call into question a critical repondering of links between body, identity, territory, between archeology of artifacts (in Foucault’s sense) and community destinies.
Perullo defines ‘gastronomic esthetics [as] the study of and reflection on the experience of food acts and objects’ (8) ‘which spreads out in a complex interweave between pleasure, hedonism, body, physiology, necessity, culture, education, society, history’. (9) What it is interesting to stress is not only the subject of study as the epicenter of a network of relations that require interpretation, but also the position of the gastronome cum esthetologist, who has to introject these experiences, live them directly through his own body in a continuous ‘to and fro’ vis-à-vis reflective knowledge.
There is no longer room in Perullo’s book for a preceptism of ‘esthetic distance’ or concern over generalizations. Indeed, even the ‘gastronomy’ label shackles, or should shackle, the author, who appears particularly fond of a science of characterization, in which it is not types that ask questions of the scholar, but individuals, not classes but the non-substitutable specificities of products.
In this book, Perullo has numerous merits, one of which is his interconnecting of tastes: taste as the modal channel of sensation, taste as the qualitative stratification of the object and, finally, taste as training to appreciate a form of life. From all these angles, the book reconciles a historical reconstruction of problems with the actuality of their necessary critical convergence. The knowledge gathered is not used to legitimate underestimated themes, it is the latter that set theory a challenge, hence the question of a revival of research is unraveled ex nuce. Research comes over as profoundly lay in Perullo’s, without constrictions or leanings towards one school or another, hence the suggestion of a possible ‘grammar of good’ may be accompanied by a narrative conception of the unfolding of experience. (10) As a semiologist, I obviously find this direction promising, as I do the problematicization that innervates the whole book with regard to taste communication and its autobiographical implications.

NOTES

1) ‘Gustarsi il mondo’, in Diogene, June 11, 2008, p. 55-58.

2) Nicola Perullo, Per un’estetica del cibo, Centro Internazionale Studi di Estetica, no. 78, 2006.

3) Ibid., p. 24.

4) Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment. Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, New York, Routledge, 2000, p. 345, quoted in Perullo 2008, p. 136.

5) Ibid., p. 347.

6) Cf. Perullo (2008, p. 116).

7) Perullo (2008, p. 118).

8) Ibid., p. 16.

9) Ibid., p.17.

10) Ibid., p. 79.