Gastropoetics, text generation, and the body

This paper will explore Memmott and Rettberg's Gastropoetics as a humanistic challenge to the grammar of language, platform, and text generation. The impulse is to situate such works within the tradition of dada and futurist performance, where obvious antecedents can be found. However, in the age of platform dominance, the meaning of experiments in absurdity and embodiment take on new meaning, as platform spaces do the work of aestheticizing the absurd conditions produced by the Taylorization of social life. Where industrial processes once disturbed the lifeworld of human craft and technique in the process of industrialization, the cultural world at the most minute level is subject to the proletarianizing process, and its reassembly into an economic model is now the work of the platform spaces. In other words, Platforms do the ideological work of normalizing social collapse as progress towards the rationalized reorganization of body politic into "taste communities" and other post-digital demographies. While Gastropoetics is a marginal practice, these culinary experiments explore the relational dynamics of cooking, hospitality, and eating as persistent humanistic practices, even as such practices are increasingly mediated by emergent practices like "food selfies" and other performative taste practices. Key to understanding the appeal of gastropoetics is the ad hoc nature of human production and consumption (see de Certeau's "everyday life") performed under the constraints of the generated menu, of the platform, and of the mnemotechnical system itself.