10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17999
application/pdf
2038-3460
17999
1
en
Stefan Nicolae
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Annemarie Mol, Eating in Theory, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2021
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
14
Book Reviews
2023-09-26
2023-09-13
2023-09-26
2023-09-26
179-182
TS
Stefan Nicolae
2023/09/26
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17999
179
University of Trier
2038-3460
1
en
182
Annemarie Mol, Eating in Theory, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2021
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17999/16768
14
T/S                                                                                   BOOK REVIEWS



Eating in Theory
by Annemarie Mol (2021) Durham and London, Duke University Press, pp. 199.




Stefan Nicolae
University of Trier


   Readers eagerly waiting for some unheard of cooking tricks or thoughtful advices for Panta-
gruelian banquets will be bitterly disappointed. Speculative researchers of the role of food across
the ages or of the symbolic dimension of eating in practices of social distinction will also find An-
nemarie Mol’s study quite bland. Then Eating in Theory does not propose a theory about eating,
but, more pointedly, it “takes its cues from eating” (p. 5) as an inquiry into what (and not least:
how) academic reflections might gain while starting with and developing along eating situations.
At stake is nothing less but the immense – though intimidating – demand to “enrich exiting
philosophical repertoires” (p. 1) broadly used in the social sciences and the humanities. In other
words, Eating in Theory is a book of tensions within and departures from our own philosophical
equipment to address reality: it “shakes things up and creates openings” (p. 6). However, what
becomes different (and how) should we be prepared to start from eating in dealing with some of
the most serious themes of the Western thought as “being” (Chapter n. 2), “knowing” (Chapter
n. 3), “doing” (Chapter n. 4), “relating” (Chapter n. 5), and politics (Chapter n. 6)?
   The first chapter on “Empirical Philosophy” offers in a nutshell the complex framework of
the entire book and reads as a reconstruction of a threefold tension embedded in the philosophi-
cal tradition. First, Mol argues against understanding theory as a description of the world (p. 5),
or as she puts it, as “a grand scheme that holds smaller elements together” (p. 25). While phil-
osophical theories take up a transcendental stance that secures both their distance from imma-
nent realities and their critical capacities directed towards them (p. 15), Mol advocates instead
the “ostensible oxymoron” (p. 15) of an “empirical philosophy” that opens towards historical,
cultural, and material contingencies. Framed as an “exercise in empirical philosophy” (pp. 1, 15,
20f.) – a trademark of Mol’s approach (Mol 2002, 4ff.; 2008, 9ff.) – Eating in Theory avoids the
pit of a paramount (theoretical) explanation as well as that of an (empirical) plurality of “views”
on reality. It provides a perspective in which “different knowledge practices interfere with real-
ity in contrasting ways” thus rendering not a fragmented but a multiple reality, i.e., “different
ways of ordering, different versions of reality, all equally immanent” (p. 23). Accordingly, Mol
unveils therein a second tension between norms and facts, i.e., between the philosophical longing
for normativity and the desire of the empirical research to “represent reality as it is” (p. 14).
Without keeping apart “the is of empirical studies and the ought at stake in philosophy” (p. 15),

 CN TE OSCIENZA. tI alian Journal of Science & eT chnology Studies   © The Author(s) 2023
)14( p. 18279- ISSN 2038-46                                          Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
      DOI: 10.692/isn/179.2038-46                                    www.tecnoscienza.net
Nicolae                                                                                           180

Mol looks at how “normativities and realities tend to be done together” (p. 154, footnote 35).
Not least through “ontonorms” – a concept Mol has coined, but now barely uses (p. 154) –
“normativity comes down to earth” (p. 23), being enacted in the “specificity and situatedness”
(p. 25) of empirical settings. Finally, Mol identifies a third tension pertaining to philosophi-
cal analyses: an insistence on “the human” as an “especially deserving kind of creature” (p. 2)
against other entities. Historically justified throughout perpetual intellectual quests for human
dignity (pp. 7-11), this “human exceptionalism” (p. 2) enables fruitful elaborations on central
values as liberty or freedom, but it also marks the way how “agency” or “subjectivity” are them-
selves conceptionalised when applied, for instance, to non-humans as these terms “have been
thoroughly informed by a particular understanding of ‘the human’” (p. 2). Therefore, the sym-
metric treatment of both human and non-human entities risks being eventually vitiated: while
“robbing ‘the human’ of his exceptionalism by spreading out his particular traits over the rest
of the world” (p. 3) it genuinely reproduces a hierarchical understanding of “the human” (p. 3).
In hierarchically praising the “thinking mind” and overall “thinking” against basic processes as,
e.g., eating or breathing (p. 3), the philosophical anthropology has perpetuated an ultimate – si-
multaneously transcendental and normative – reference for our current understanding of being,
knowing, doing, and relating. However, Eating in Theory resets this view along the exigencies
of an “empirical philosophy” bearing in mind, as Mol argues in line with Wittgenstein (p. 16f.)
and Foucault (p. 17f.), that “diverse socio-material formations and ways of using words make
different ‘realities’ possible” (p. 22). Against this background, especially this particular hierarchi-
cal understanding of “the human” ceases to claim for itself definitive characteristics and takes
instead its distinct place in the more analytically refined framework of multiple models of reality.
   Taken eating as reference, each chapter reads as a story, often deliciously garnished with im-
pressive empirical vignettes, of a departure from the “intellectual apparatus of the humanist phil-
osophical tradition” (p. 3) – epitomised by the works of Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Pon-
ty, Hans Jonas, or Emmanuel Levinas – towards “eating-inflected intellectual terms and tools”
(p. 6). Chapter n. 2 on “Being” departures, for instance, from Merleau-Ponty and his under-
standing of “the being of an embodied human in the center of a three dimensional world filled
with varied entities” (p. 29). Consequently, it is the “walker”, an icon of the “neuromuscular
version of the body” (p. 48), gradually discovering the world as he passes it through, and not the
“eater” with whom the philosophical reflection on being begins. Nevertheless, as Mol observes,
this difference has a huge analytical impact: “while, as a walker, I move through the world, when
I eat, it is the world that moves through me” (p. 49). Hence, the “model of being” (pp. 39, 43) of-
fered by eating is one of a limitless (and constant) exchange between “me” and the world: I “am”
at the same time “inside” and “outside” of my body (p. 33f.), being both “local” and “dispersed”
(p. 44f.), i.e., “not sharply bounded” (p. 92) as I cook, ingest, digest, and excorporate food.
   In some respects, the “walker” resembles the “knower” learning from a distance about
the surrounding world. Though “not always and not everywhere” (p. 53), thinking operates
along the classical epistemological difference between a “(knowing) subject” and an “(known)
object”. Opposing this divide, in Chapter n. 3, Mol argues that the “model of knowing”
emerging from eating is neither objective nor subjective but “transformative” (p. 55). It
transforms both the food and the eater as the encounter with an “object” (food) changes the
“subject” as well (p. 66): we come to know ourselves, our likes or dislikes, as well as our food
181                                                                        Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(1)

deeper and (more than often) differently as “the taste of foods is bound to affect the taste of
those who eat them” (p. 67). In other words, eating points at a “model of knowing that is not
about passively apprehending the world but, rather, about actively engaging with it” (p. 73).
   Chapter n. 4 formulates “a model of doing that does not just elude centralized control but
also defines individualism” (p. 77) as opposed to the idea of a “voluntary action”. Eating, as
Mol puts it, is not confined to an embodied (human) “doer”, but it is “always already tech-
nically and socially mediated” (p. 96) and consequently “a part of a diverse socio-material
practices” (p. 100) in which several others are already actively involved. Then “my eating” is
neither solely “‘my’ doing” (p. 77) nor can it be traced back to a hidden place inside my body.
Even digestion takes place “out of our bowels” (p. 91), as Mol shows, as it already starts as an
“extracorporeal” process (p. 92) at which farmers, cooks, kitchens, or even cook-books equally
participate in innumerable forms of growing, delivering, and preparing food. In this vein, the
“actor taking on the task of eating” (p. 100) is actually immersed in a “historically dispersed
collective” (pp. 93) of human and nonhuman entities.
   According to the idea of a “human exceptionalism”, “relating” is primarily considered in
terms of “family trees” (pp. 125, 143) and (human) “kinship” (p. 103f.), a form of together-
ness that might be extended to embrace both human and nonhumans. However, the “model
of relating” (p. 124) discussed in Chapter n. 5 brackets this standpoint (p. 122) and embraces
“my relating to nonhuman creatures” (p. 103), whether these constitute my food or are de-
pending on it, without the appeal to some “degrees of similarity” (p. 120). Mol understands
“relating” as “individual as well as collective relations of agreement” (p. 118), an agreement
with other entities to which I differently react while ingesting them, but also whose growth or
extinction I enhance or hinder through individual or collective consumption. Though eating
is a genuine “asymmetrical relation” (p. 120), feeding and eating, giving and taking are thus
neither good nor bad per se, but the normative profile of a “particular feeding/eating relation”
(p. 115) is constantly a matter depending on the specificity of the situation in which it occurs.
   If the previous chapters questioned the relevance of a hierarchical view of the “the human”
for understanding being, thinking, doing, and relating, in Chapter n. 6 on “Intellectual ingredi-
ents”, the politics becomes central. What if we put aside the normative (and transcendental) ori-
entation of politics (modelled along Hannah Arendt’s image of the “zoom politikon”; p. 127)
and consider instead a “politics of labor” (p. 129f.), of doings, tinkering, and care, in which facts
and material life, and not only theory are equally taken into account? Mol’s answer – echoing
her former thoughts on the “politics of what” (Mol 2002, 172f.) – points at the importance of
the “alterity (…) between different ways of organizing socio-material realities” (p. 132), i.e., at
the multiple ways in which multiple representations of “what is good” (p. 134) are enacted in
“ongoing negotiations: among humans, with other creatures, converting materials – obdurate
or fragile things – and the earth we share” (p. 137). As in Mol’s treatment of the “logic of care”,
the “good” is not given “before the act” (Mol 2008, 86) and it is not just a matter of “(discur-
sive) action” (p. 137). Instead, it shapes a new meaning of politics that is better prepared to deal
with human and nonhuman entities in the face of contemporary environmental problems.
   While every peak of Mol’s arguments is introduced in the book as “a lesson for theory”,
Eating in Theory contains itself “lessons” from one of the major scholars that is – luckily
for her readers! – still concerned with theoretical questions in STS. On the one hand, it calls
Nicolae                                                                                           182

for a reflection on our methodological presuppositions on ontology, epistemology, agency,
interaction, and politics in which a hierarchical understanding of “the human” went “into
hiding” (p. 25). From this perspective, Eating in Theory does not simply break with a “long
overdue” (p. 140) classical view of philosophical anthropology, but it sharply reconstructs its
explanatory efforts and develops alternative research instruments. For the STS-community
this sounds as a plea for more openness towards the intellectual resources nurturing its work
and for a more critical view of its own concepts and arguments.
   Besides, within the framework of “multiple versions of reality”, Mol sets forth and enlarges
her own contribution to the long-lasting debate on the “ontological turn” in STS (Woolgar
and Lezaun 2013). The congruent ideas (Bischur and Nicolae 2014) of multiple enacted real-
ities and normativity that Mol has developed along the vocabulary of “politics” (Mol 2002),
of “logics” (Mol 2008), and of “ontonorms” (Mol 2013) now reach a more encompassing
profile. Then the multiple “eating-inspired models” (of being, knowing, doing, and relating)
aim both at retrieving the multiplicity of the socio-material settings of eating situations and at
how these might be approached. Put differently, Eating in Theory calls for a reflexive “empiri-
cal philosophy”, i.e., an inquiry focused on STS approaches, on “our words”, and “the worlds
they carry with them” (p. 141) – a situation in which these approaches themselves are treated
as models of enacting reality. In this view, Mol’s book also touches upon some of the most
pressing problems facing the STS scholarship: what model of reality are we set to formulate
and how well equipped are Science and Technology Studies for facing the challenges of envi-
ronmental catastrophes? How do multiple models of reality relate with each other and how
are we prepared to discuss theoretical and methodological differences?
   Years ago, Annemarie Mol funnily stated that she took a term (“logic”) from philosophy
and “ran away with it” (Mol 2008, 9). And her “run” was impressive. Now she kindly invites
us to do the same with her own terms: “if you happen to find them inspiring”, she writes, “run
with them, and put one or two of them to work in your own writing” (pp. 25, 143). Hence, it
is up to us, in STS and beyond, to become more attentive to the gems embedded in her work.
And eventually start running with them!


References

Bischur, Daniel and Nicolae, Stefan (2014) Annemarie Mol: Multiple Ontologien und vielfältige Körper,
   in Diana Lengersdorf and Matthias Wieser (eds.), Schlüsselwerke der Science & Technology Studies,
   Wiesbaden, Springer VS, pp. 247-256.
Mol, Annemarie (2002) The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice, Durham, Duke University Press.
Mol, Annemarie (2008) The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice, London, Routledge.
Mol, Annemarie (2013) Mind your plate! The ontonorms of Dutch dieting, in “Social Studies of Science”,
   43(3), pp. 379-396.
Woolgar, Steve and Lezaun, Javier (eds.) (2013) The wrong bin bag: A turn to ontology in science and
   technology studies?, in “Social Studies of Science, Special Issue”, 43(3), pp. 321-40.
