Here's my abstract for the conference:
God is Good. A Theology of Spontaneous FermentationHow is the vast majority of all the commercially available wines made, today? By adding sulphites to the crushed grapes in order to kill most of the bacteria and wild yeasts on the grapes. In a next stage, the fermentation will be performed by adding a cultured and clean yeast strain. These practices are sustained by a rhetoric of taste, consistency (and sometimes health), in which nature is deemed as fundamentally untrustworthy. However, some old/rediscovered practices in winemaking, beer (lambic/gueuze), bread (sourdough) and cheese prove differently: that we cannot attain the same level of complexity and richness in taste by adding cultured yeast/bacteria, after initially killing all the wild ones. They prove that what is actually at stake in the schism between spontaneous and non-spontaneous fermentation is the possibility of a large-scale industrial production and profit-making.
In this paper I delve into the rhetorics of modern, cultured/controlled fermentation (and food production) by examining some of the epistemological and theological premises on which the practices of fermentation are built. My main guide in this investigation will be the theological (meta)critique of Kantian theory by Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788), who unveiled (almost a century before Marx) the complicity of our modes of knowing and producing, demonstrating that the ‘pure’ practices of modern knowing are far from neutral epistemological operations, but that they are the ideological complement of capitalist production; With Hamann, I will counter this complicity with a different, more organic epistemology and with a plea for more organic modes of production.
Of course, this paper presentation will be accompanied by
a tasting of lambic.
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