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I've got the second best title in the
world, there's a guy who works in the
Natural History Museum and he's the
curator of Cockroaches
Have, but I get invited to more
parties, say, hey, well, thanks
for your for coming and
for the opportunity to put our heads in
the same space around food
and literature.
And Agritech, thanks
for the introduction.
Yeah, I'm a literary critic and it's
great to be able to bring literary
criticism and technical ethics
together of the Congress.
And one of the things I've noticed about
C3 events is that
solutions often seem to present
themselves at the intersections of
different kinds of knowledge and
practices.
So I'm going to be talking about how the
arts engage ethically and
politically with the technovation
of the food chain, the chain of
flow of sustenance from
field to dinner plate.
Now, this is an interdisciplinary talk,
but don't worry, I won't be claiming
quite that poems
and paintings are, you know, sort
of computational machines for working
out social policy, because I would be
crazy. Right.
But if I'm not willfully misunderstanding
Yoshio's excellent talk on the
computational universe, it
seems that a likely candidate for the
substrate of consciousness
is the nominal, you know, the realm of
ideas.
And that's precisely where art
and literature lives.
So, you know, it's it's the ideal place
for a deep processing of of
ethical issues, the big issues
like food and tech.
But I'm going to start with a general
point.
In 1783, the
English poet George Krab
de D
described the brutal reality of
of of equal access to food.
And this is how he put it, where plenty
smiles a lot.
She smiles for few.
And those who taste not yet
behold her store are as the slaves
that dig the golden or the wealth around
them makes them W4.
Maybe that sounds familiar because
if crab fell through a wormhole
and arrived in the present day, it feel
depressingly at home.
In 2014, almost a million
people in the UK were forced to rely
on food banks.
So it's amazing that while Agritech
is bringing all kinds of awesome new
capabilities online from synthetic
food to sit Genex
and Agri Robots,
an all party report concluded this month
that hunger now stalks
the UK.
Actually, there were more than enough
calories to go around, but the
equivalent of 50 million meals
a month went not to the hungry, but
straight to landfill or the incinerator.
Now we can talk about the regulations
that compel supermarkets
to do this right.
And we can play with the
idea of regs that might stop them from
doing it.
But actually, there is another
layer of debate underneath that,
because what we seem to be witnessing are
not just in Britain is the new
socialization of hunger,
hunger presented as the inevitable
consequence of austerity,
hunger that allows us to believe
in austerity, hunger
as a as a deeply embedded subroutine
of cultural capitalism.
So where's Agritech in the equation?
Well, it seems to be where we're placing
our faith.
That's the European Parliament.
The UN adopts a rather more
conceptualized position seeing
tech as the as the key
link between humans and nature.
But what I and my co researchers,
Jane Archer, also a literary critic,
and Syd Thomas, a plant
geneticist, suggest in our new book
is that art and literature already
provides that deep processing
link between humans and the biophysical
world.
Moreover, that art opens
a shared space of imagination
that can be as radical as we need
it to be.
Food security. It's a deceptively
simple term, but it's a dauntingly
complex problem and it encompasses
landownership, soil, climate,
climate change, markets,
policies and any solution
lies at the intersection of a number
of disciplines.
We've got to bring together food
producers, scientists, agritech
distributors, planners and
we argue artists and writers.
But first, we have to rescue
some of our canonical authors from the
heritage industry, authors who
were once sharply critical of
orthodox power have been
repackaged as our national
poets and painters and are given back
to us in ways that make their art
appear to support the codes
and values of the dominant interests
that they once challenged.
So literary criticism can help us there
with our counter narratives, because
the truth is, many of our best
known painters and writers, their
relation to the politics of hunger
to early forms of agricultural
technology was a lot closer than
ours, and their experience is relevant
to the big actions that we need to
define and take.
Consider William Shakespeare.
So last year we made the newspapers
also in Germany with some research
on Shakespeare's business dealings,
and we argued these dealings informed
Shakespeare's representation of
food and bio resources in the
plays.
And it upset a lot of people who were
actually quite happy with
their image of Shakespeare as a safe
writer, somebody who wrote on the big
abstract themes like love,
ambition and envy.
In fact, that sanitized
PR version of Shakespeare
began from an early stage.
This is his funerary monument in
Stratford, and it presents a familiar
picture of a man of letters,
his arm poised pregnancy
quill in hand above
a velvet writing cushion, complete
with golden tassels.
But actually, this isn't the original
version of the monument.
It's an 18th century refurbish
and it responds to Shakespeare's
by then already developing a
reputation as a national poet.
Now, the original monument, which was
commissioned by people who actually knew
Shakespeare, remembered a rather
different man, a grain
merchant, a tax avoider,
a tax dodger, a man who used
the profits from his plays to
invest in the grain markets,
which at a time of famine,
Shakespeare hoarded in that all important
piece of agritech a barn,
and he hoarded it there until
the prices rose
and he was prosecuted for it.
Oops.
For that, again, he
was prosecuted for it.
Now, in the original monument, the
velvet writing cushion is a
sack of corn
and those golden tassels
are actually roughly
tied as the barn roughly
tied edges.
So not tasseled, but roughly tied.
And maybe it won't surprise you then to
know that references to food prices
and the societal impacts
of in equal
access to food
abound in Shakespeare's plays.
And we should take them seriously.
But let's consider these themes first in
a contemporary novel, Daniel Suarez
is thriller Freedom TM.
It was published in Germany as
Darknet, and I'm
sure many of you will know it picks up a
year after Suarez's first
novel, Deman, a year after
Matthew Matthew Sobell, the
mad hacker.
Was there any other kind?
Has unleashed a bot on the world's
multinationals, including a thinly
veiled Monsanto.
And out of the chaos darknet communities
have risen and in a key setpiece
near the beginning, Suarez, who is
of course a technology consultant,
gives us a vision of a man,
of a story, of a tech based food
and energy independent society.
So thanks to my daughter for making this
slide over the slide.
So in it, farmer Fosun Hank
Fosun shows us around one
of the new darknet farms.
And with a sweep of his arm, he describes
a green vista of tech led
sustainability.
Phosphenes own daughter is glimpsed off
to the left, instructing
the newbies in high hybridization
and genetics, while other darknet
farm workers are out in the grass
prairies, all with D space colleagues
floating above their heads visible to
anyone who's wearing dark glasses.
So I read the passage out.
Fosun turned into the farm's long
gravel driveway.
There was an ornate D space 3D object
in the shape of a cornucopia bursting
with vegetables and fruits hanging above
the entrance.
He looked out to several acres of green.
We use a mix of crops and animals to
recharge fertility.
We're raising the animals on grass, not
corn.
It grows naturally here on the prairies,
so it's turning solar power into
beef. No fossil fuels necessary.
It's all an integrated, sustainable
system.
So this is a nice and fairly standard
topic vision.
I'd like to live there right, right in
that slide, but
technology isn't the answer
and the novel seems to know it's not the
whole answer, because the dark side
of deep space is
the dark side of the fab labs.
And the the remote sensing is
the anti-hero Loki Stormbreaker,
whose lethal drone motorbikes
eviscerate anybody who
opposes the vision.
So the tech in this apparently idyllic
scene of sustainable community
is half in sight and half
out, occupying entangled
positions on two sides of an ethical
boundary.
Actually, Suarez's vision of
a tech driven agrarian
utopia isn't fanciful.
Much of the text already with us or its
emergent the last 20 years
have seen incredible advances in
synthetic biology.
Think human bacteria, cheese,
vertical farming, gene productivity,
geotech, new modeling techniques for
phenotypes linked to sustainable
animal productivity, drones
that monitor nitrogen levels in fields,
productive farming, agri informatics,
open source farms and
Mittie.
They have an open ag project which is
working towards the creation of the
Global Agricultural Information
Commons.
And there's some amazing research into
agri robots
at the European Agri Robots
Network, where Simon Blackmore's
team is working and they're producing a
new lightweight generation of
robots that follow the contours of fields
rather than forcing farmers to plant
in straight lines to suit all the
machinery.
And these robots spray only the
part of a field that actually infected
with disease rather than the whole field.
My own university, in the wake of
recent European food hygiene
and fraud scandals such
as horsemeat, has developed
hyperspectral analysis techniques for
detecting contamination of meat
using fluorescent markers.
Aberystwyth is also home to
a major plant breeding and
phenomics lab, kitted out with high
resolution metabolomics technology,
and that uses content plant phenotype
to design smart crop varieties
that are more resilient to changing
climate.
So it's a brave new world
of knowledge led development
that should improve not only food safety
but also access to food,
but to return to Fosun farm.
Suarez's vision of a knowledge
led sustainable future
registers tremors of anxiety
precisely about the tech that supposed to
sustain it.
And in that respect, the novel belongs
to a long tradition of art
and literature depicting scenes of
agricultural work and one
of the best loved.
The weird and we'd argue most
misunderstood examples
is John Constable's painting
The Healing Again
from 1821.
And it's a visual precursor to Suarez.
The passage I just read out belongs in
this tradition.
The Hay Wayne is one of the world's
most recognizable paintings
and seems to offer a calm
representation, a comforting
representation of abundance and
timelessness, and in many ways
it's come to stand for the establishment.
And for that reason, it's been the target
of of subversion.
In 1980, the artist Peter Kennard
hacked it to make the hay wane
with cruise missiles.
And a last year, a member
of the British political group Fathers
Four Justice glued a photo
of his son pixellated there
on the canvas.
But ironically, we've lost the ability
to perceive the paintings own
radical politics.
So let's look more closely.
In the foreground is a piece of then
contemporary agritech canon laden
hay wagon, an example of how
art delivers back to us in
a material sense, a
sense of how we fit into the human race
in the idiom of the technology
of the time we find ourselves in angry
robots. Now he wins then.
But despite the paintings popularity,
it's every bit as radical as Suarez's
novel, and it's making more or less
exactly the same point
because the hay wagon has a far more
contentious counterpart
tech that's also just out of sight, but
definitely not out of mind.
And it's actually the key to the nexus
of social, political and
economic energy
that's being coded into this famous
canvas.
Well, let's take a step back.
The first thing we need to know is that
the painter, John Constable,
was the son of a miller and a
landowner, and it's his father's
fields, his father's tech,
his father's workers that
we see in the painting.
And indeed, a cynic might say that the
the role of public art on this scale
is is precisely to inculcate
us into the values
of a world of concentrated wealth
and sharply demarcated
society.
But leaving Constable's own politics
aside for the moment, let's try to listen
to what the paintings actually telling
us. Let's produce a counter
narrative, because almost everything
we've been told to think
about this idyllic scene and
everything we've been told by all those
biscuit tin lids and mobile phone cases
is actually wrong, starting
with the paintings official catalog
description, which tells us that the
heroine is standing in the water.
If the wagon stationary, it's not because
it's been posed esthetically
for us.
If anything, it looks like it's become
stuck, perhaps in mud.
The river swollen from the rain that's
already begun to fall further upstream.
Constable painted the highway
in an unusually wet year, and
it caused big problems for farmers in the
region. And it drove down laborers
wages, including the wages
of everyone we see in that painting.
Now, the wagon should be going hell
for leather as becomes clear once
you realize there's not one
but two HEYNS.
So the title of the painting is also a
little bit dodgy.
There's a second one. It's off to the
right. It's tiny.
And while one is loading, the other
is unloading.
Because what Constable's depicting here
is dynamic process, not
a sentimental still life.
So we know where the wagons going.
But where has it come from, where has it
just unloaded its hay
and the candidate that's usually offered
is Constable's Father's Watermill
itself?
But mills grind wheat
and barley, they don't mill, hey, you
can't mill, hey,
know, the piece of tech that's
out of sight is behind
Constable's easel?
It's a barn.
That's the tech the painting
struggles with.
It's the tech that adds value to the
grass that's being harvested.
The tech, which is Shakespeare knew,
turns a crop into data,
abstracting it from a field and from a
local economy into the realms
of markets and price
indexes.
And it's the tech which for that very
reason was the first thing to get burned
down in times of food
unrest.
Basically, Constable's father is
making a killing off the backs of those
low paid haymakers.
And Waggoner's, this painting isn't
so much art, it's evidence.
And those Waggoner's are doing their best
to get going again for good reason,
they want to keep even their low paid
jobs because while we may not have
a low key stormbreaker, we do
have an approaching storm.
And as an agricultural journal from
the period explains,
it was the haymakers and Waggoner's
responsibility to get the crop
in dry.
So this isn't a mythic field.
It's not timeless.
It's not a patriotic image of
old England with a sentimental,
historically stranded piece
of farm equipment in the foreground.
Rather, the field and
constable's painting itself exists
at the troubled intersection of agrarian
market economics, social
ethics and Agritech
Agritech that privileged
landowners while disenfranchizing
workers and whole communities
because behind the unseen barn
further back is a region of
England that was still recovering from
violent food riots
five years earlier, which had seen many
Herrick's and barns burned down
to local agricultural workers were
hanged and others were transported
to Australia.
And just one year later, in 1822,
the region erupted again in so-called
blood bread or blood riots.
And perhaps some of constable's
own workers were were involved
in that direct action.
So the longitudinal story then that
art and literature is telling us is
unambiguous.
A dysfunctional food chain
has only one outcome food unrest
and in an age of information on a
potentially massive scale.
So, of course, then we're right to look
to tech, to increase yields and
to reduce environmental impacts
of agriculture.
But if we're going to develop the
resilience we need as we attempt
to manage the biophysical world
in the in the difficult times that are
surely coming, what William Gibson's
new novel, The Periphery, calls
with infinite irony, the jackpot,
the simultaneous arrival of climate,
capital and crop disaster.
Then we need to expand our thinking
about food systems into the imaginative
world because the alternative isn't
pretty and it's already happening.
As Constable and his father knew
only too well, the canonical response
to hunger is the food.
Right.
And the situation in the UK at the moment
is particularly incendiary around
food banks, because as
in Crabb's poem, which we saw at the
beginning, at the same time as the
new underclass of the hungry
is driven to charity handouts,
it suffers the indignity of watching
as the top few percent enjoy
what Thomas Piketty calls vertiginous
growth.
In 2012, London experienced
a week of rioting in the media,
almost without exception.
Scandalously, the action was
presented as senseless
violence by mindless thugs
in pursuit of branded trainers
and flat screen TVs.
In fact, the first shop to be looted
wasn't a TV warehouse.
It wasn't a designer bag outlet.
It was the Clarance convenience store.
And here you can see young men
clambering over the counter, chocolate
bars and water bottles in their pockets.
The London riots or uprising, as
some prefer to call them in its
early stages, at least started out
as a traditional food riot.
So moving to an end, though,
the so-called food prices social
unrest hypothesis suggests that
large scale discontent around the world
can be mapped with chilling precision
onto indexes of staples like
rice and wheat.
And the food price index
measures the monthly charge
a change in international prices
of a basket of food.
And basically, if that goes above 210,
you get riots across
the world.
Now, this includes crowd action
with obvious food connections like the
the 2008 Mexican tortilla
riots.
But the 2011 Arab Spring
and the 2013 Gezi Park
protests also map neatly
onto these spikes and prices
of staples and commodities are projected
by the fans own figures to rise
by 40 percent over the coming decade.
So to conclude then, we're not
facing a food crisis
for the first time and we're not facing
it alone.
Literature and art has processed
many such moments of emergency,
examining food crisis in deep,
imaginative space from Shakespeare's
play Coriolanus, where Rome's
corn supplies are withheld from the
plebeians much as Shakespeare
withheld corn in the Stratford area
to Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games
trilogy.
And let's end with The Hunger Games.
Katniss Everdeen,
the figurehead of rebellion against the
repressive state, remarks
it must be very fragile if a handful
of berries can bring it down.
But the fact is, political
and power systems have often been
challenged or overturned
by the decision to eat or not
to eat.
Thank you for listening.
Great, let's start with a question from
the Internet.
No, so sorry.
That was amazing, the little guy.
Thank you. Very interesting.
I would like to ask you, are
you going to do some research in the
prehistory of food production
and food consumption?
Hmm.
Well, we our project goes back
to thirteen eighty something to Chaucer.
That's where we started.
We're looking at the Canterbury Tales as
a game of food. Basically,
once you start looking in canonical art,
which I guess we've we've been taught to
assume is safe and comforting, you
start to see all sorts of interesting
things.
But I should say the reason why we're
doing it and why actually going back to
prehistory would be really interesting
is because before we can start putting
into effect the kind of benefits that we
can expect from Agritech, you know, we
need to change headspace.
And I think Zheglov is absolutely
right. When he criticizes Thomas
Marchetti's capitalism of the 21st
century, he says it's utopian,
it's utopian to say that the the
solution to the problem of wealth
outgrowing economic output
is simply to redefine
the ratios of distribution.
You know, sort of the rich pay more tax
and the and the poor get more benefits,
because if you do that, capital simply
moves or you get other knock on effects
that inevitably ends up privileging
wealth.
So the real challenge, as you says, is
that you have to change.
You have to create the right conditions
that enable you to enact things like,
say, you know, taxing wealth
at 80 percent.
And literary criticism can be a really
powerful tool in bringing about those
conditions. And I think the further we
push the analysis back, the richer
the data is going to become.
So thanks for the question.
Yes, thank you.
Beautiful talk, and since I'm writing a
book, a book on violence,
of course, curious on
if you can help me with two questions.
First of all, how old are bonds?
When do they appear?
And that leads me to the second question,
because the way you depicted bonds
here is that they are sort of like an
intermediary space between the
agricultural world and the market.
So that would make them pretty moderate,
right?
In my view.
I always thought the bond is
different from the warehouse is
not really something like a warehouse,
which is intermediate intermediary space
where the market comes to a stop until,
you know, some demand calls for the
good to be called out and so forth.
So I wonder, what's your take on
on on the position of the bond in this?
You know, longer history of capitalism
is.
Oh, it's a great question.
And again, a sort of it's a question with
sort of a long detuned or momentum.
OK, so I think, you know, you're you're
decent on rising bond from warehouse, and
you're right to do that. The bond
occupies a different position in social
space.
And I guess we think of warehouses, don't
we, as more to do with imports
and exports, maybe.
Yeah, I mean, great, we need to do that.
I mean, we we haven't actually
focused the entire study on
on on the physical space of the barn,
but more of the barn, as I say
conceptually, is that mediating point
between markets and communities.
Yeah. Thanks for the.
Thank you.
And
I have a question, I will try to
articulate it well.
Probably fail, but
with Shakespeare's time and
then the time of the painting
and compared to
the status quo,
that layer of people between
an aristocracy and
the nobility and
basically indentured serfs
was a difference in perception of
how close or how far.
They were to this abyss
and where
would you be reading?
Where would you be reading for
expressions of this in contemporary
literature?
OK, yeah, so it's not a good question.
In the position of the surf is
interesting and it interests me.
I think the German word is Buli bagenal.
Right. So
the there was a bishop in the
18th century who joked that the only
thing a surfer possesses is a hungry
belly.
You know, it's a sick joke.
It's a terrible joke. And I think in part
valances. A question, how close were
serfs to the abyss?
Yeah, they were right on it, clinging
on by their fingers at particular points.
Yeah, yeah,
that's that's my answer to that
very close, yeah.
Yeah, I'm sorry, that's got to be it.
Yes, signal from the back.
No, no, no. We just sorry that
wasn't aimed at you at all.
Um, I'm so grateful for you to
have you here.
And, um, well, let's
have a big applause again.
And thank you so much for.