COOKING UP - INTESTINAL ECONOMIES AND THE AESTHETICS OF SPECULAR ORALITY

This paper aims to make a psychoanalytical contribution to a cultural studies understanding of the logics - and fantasies - of commmodity co nsumption in the visual culture of late capitalism. Taking up the meta phor of the gut as a discriminating organ and of cooking as a textual production, we examine the relations between oral and ocular consumpti on, and between aliment and excrement, as expressed in two films from the 1980s which are centred around themes of food and money. Adrian Ly nne's 9 1/2, Weeks and Peter Greenaway's The Cook, The Thief, His Wife ann her Lover employ quite different aesthetics and display contrasti ng inflections of what we call 'the edible complex'. The first fantasi zes wealth as enabling an unstructured excess of consumption that can only end in exhaustion; the second reaffirms the structured distinctio ns associated with 'quality' in a class-divided society where wealth a lone does not secure status or legitimacy. From a feminist perspective , the male characters in each text are interesting examples of masculi nities not organized around the phallus, but around anal and oral erot icisms and a more primitive oral morality.