Calimocho: On the Politics of Wine and Cola (Redux)

Roland Barthes & Andy Warhol

George Costanza & Jeremy Usbourne 

 

  

I. 

 

Recently, I was at an event with an American friend who doesn't drink; she prefers to sip mineral water rather than Champagne - although, on a hot summer's day, it's been known for her to ask for a Diet Coke with ice and lemon.  

 

Listening to her explain her secular preference to another guest reminded me of a post written back in 2014 on the politics of wine and cola [1], in which I considered the idea that opting for a soft drink over a glass of wine is in some sense a rejection of the snobbery and social complexity inherent in European culture.   

 

In the post, whilst I mentioned Warhol and George Costanza, I don't recall bringing Roland Barthes into the conversation and that is something I'd now like to do in an alternative version of the text; one that considers the concept of wine as a totem-drink and magical substance that transforms any occasion (even if it fails to tick the right boxes for those who value equity, inclusion, and sobriety above all things).  

II.  

  

Probably the most powerful argument for choosing a cool can of Coke over a fine glass of wine remains the one made by Andy Warhol. It's a cultural-political argument which posits the former as the embodiment of American democracy [2] and which stands in stark contrast to Roland Barthes's idea of wine as a quintessential sign of Frenchness - "just like its three hundred and sixty types of cheese" [3].  

 

The Germans have their beer; the Russians their vodka; and the English their cups of tea. But the French - of all classes - have their wine. Manual workers and intellectuals alike, enjoy a glass of wine with their lunch, says Barthes, thereby challenging the belief that it's something enjoyed only by a privileged elite.  

 

However, Barthes admits that wine is a foundational liquid that it grants the drinker a certain social belonging. Thus, to refuse a glass of wine and choose Perrier or Pepsi instead - certainly in a French (or European) context - is not just to exercise a preference, it is to commit an immoral (and incomprehensible) faux pas.   

 

This explains why George Costanza’s robust defence of Pepsi seems so (amusingly) outrageous [3]. When George exclaims 'No way is wine better than Pepsi', he is rejecting the idea that drinking wine is a moral imperative. George isn't just choosing a soft beverage, he's refusing to participate in the Old World ceremony where wine serves as a signifier of adulthood and civilisation. 

 

Warhol's argument for Coca-Cola communism - where the President and the bum drink the exact same product - strips away the mystical qualities that the French, according to Barthes, attribute to wine. While wine varies by terroir and price (creating the very hierarchies that George detests), Coke is a universal constant, requiring no expertise to consume.

 

This brings us rather nicely to the character of Jeremy Usbourne in the British sitcom Peep Show, whose discomfort at ordering a bottle of Barolo isn't just about the price - though that's a very real factor - it's due also to his knowledge of his own inability to perform the role of the wine drinker. Jeremy lacks the habits of the heart - i.e., that unearned cultural capital - that Barthes says allow a person to master wine's complexity. 

 

For Jeremy, wine belongs to a world he hasn't been initiated into. It's not simply that he doesn't know which wine to ask for, he doesn't know how to drink it and ordering a bottle doesn't transform the meal with Big Suze, it simply exposes him as someone who doesn't belong to her class [5]. 

 

Thus his preference for hot chocolate or Coke isn't merely juvenile - it's an unconscious alignment with Warhol's democratic Americanism over the performative demands of European wine culture. Ultimately, Jeremy feels he can drink hot chocolate or Coke without feeling judged, or looking like a dick in the eyes of those who, like Suze, have been initiated into the way of the grape.   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See 'Calimocho: On the Politics of Wine and Cola' (19 Sept 2014): click here. 

 

[2] See Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again) (Harcourt, 1975), pp. 100-101. The section in which Warhol praises the greatness of American society in terms of Coca-Cola (and ballpark hot dogs) can be read here. 

      What Warhol writes here is undeniably true and one senses something of this same patriotism and ironic egalitarianism of the market place born of a New World dislike for Old World snobbery in George Costanza's privileging of Pepsi over wine (see note 4 below).  

 

[3] Roland Barthes, 'Wine and Milk', in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (Paladin Books, 1973), p. 65.

      Obviously, the Greeks, Italians, and Spanish feel exactly the same about wine; that it's not just as an alcoholic drink, but as an essential part of their daily life, culture, and cuisine (they also love their own cheeses just as much as the French, even if they don't produce as many types or consume as much).  

 

[4] See the fifth season episode of Seinfeld titled 'The Dinner Party' (1994), dir. Tom Cherones and written by Larry David. Click here to watch the relevant scene on YouTube. 

 

[5] Click here to watch the scene with Jeremy and Big Suze at the restaurant in the fifth season episode of Peep Show titled 'Burgling' (2008), dir. Becky Martin, written by Jesse Armstrong, Sam Bain, and David Mitchell.   

 

 

Notes from the Human Zoo 1: The Myth of the Great Family of Man

Today, along with freak shows, bear pits, and public executions, ethnological expositions - aka human zoos - have pretty much been consigned to the shameful past on the grounds that they are cruel, degrading, and racist.

Far be it from me to dispute or deny this; for it's true that the displays often emphasized the ethno-cultural superiority of white Europeans over non-white, non-European peoples deemed to be primitive and inferior, if not, indeed, subhuman. But it seems to me that the contemporary myth of universal humanism that posits a single Great Family of Man sharing a unified history is equally pernicious and, in fact, shares a similar logic.     

Roland Barthes explains how this moralised and sentimentalised myth functions in two stages:

"first the difference between human morphologies is asserted, exoticism [or what we now like to term otherness] is insistently stressed, the infinite variations of the species, the diversity in skins, skulls and customs are made manifest [just as in the human zoo exhibitions] ... Then, from this pluralism, a type of unity is magically produced: man is born, works, laughs and dies everywhere in the same way; and if there still remains in these actions some ethnic peculiarity, at least one hints that there is underlying each one an identical 'nature', that their diversity is formal and does not belie the existence of a common mould ... a human essence ..."

This is the lyrical neutralisation of men and women and the suppression of a history wherein we find not merely colourful, superficial differences, but stark injustices.

Thus, whilst it might seem to be an advance to be accorded equality and granted legal rights - it's certainly prefarable to being exhibited in the monkey house - one still needs to exercise caution and constantly look for signs of the ancient imposture exposed by Barthes.

The human zoos may have closed - but the system of values that opened them continues to operate.   

See: Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, (Noonday Press, 1991), p. 100. A pdf of this book can be read online by clicking here. 

For part 2 of this post on the case of Sara Baartman, click here. 

For part 3 of this post on the case of Ota Benga, click here.   

On the Mythology of Wood (with Reference to the Case of Larry David)

Tile coaster by cafepress.co.uk 

I.

According to Wikipedia:

"Wood is a porous and fibrous structural tissue found in the stems and roots of trees and other woody plants. It is an organic material, a natural composite of cellulose fibers that are strong in tension and embedded in a matrix of lignin that resists compression."

Mankind has been using wood for millennia; as fuel, as a building material for ships and houses, and for making a wide variety of other essential objects (including tools, weapons, furniture and totem poles). Peoples everywhere love it for its firmness, its softness, and the natural warmth of its touch. Wood is not just an organic material, it is also a poetico-magical substance.

But high regard for wood, including the pleasure of its feel, is one of the things on which I differ from Larry David. The latter not only respects wood, he reveres wood and is considerate of it as a material, refusing to discriminate between types and grades of wood. Pine, walnut, or oak - it doesn't matter - Larry holds all wood in equal esteem.   

But in so doing, of course, he's subscribing to a certain mythology and reinforcing what Barthes terms a hierarchy of substances - a way of thinking in which certain natural materials are privileged over man-made ones, particularly those belonging to the family of plastics.


II.

As I wrote in a very early post on this blog with reference to marble contra plastic, the fact that certain materials, including wood, retain their high-ranking status within such a hierarchy and continue to be used by craftsmen and manufacturers who want their work to be seen as belonging to a long and noble tradition, means nothing to me. I prefer synthetic substances, such as laminate flooring, for their democratic cheerfulness and affordability, free from cultural pretension and snobbishness (even if bourgeois in origin).

Plastic may be a disgraced material with a purely negative reality - the product of chemistry, not of nature - but it enables the euphoric experience of being able to reshape the world and endlessly create new forms and objects, limited only by our own ingenuity and imagination. It doesn't necessarily allow one to live more beautifully or more truthfully, but I'm bored of these things posited as supreme values and of being bullied by our grand idealists who mistakenly equate them with the Good.


See:

Curb Your Enthusiasm, Season 7, Episode 10, 'Seinfeld', dir. Jeff Shaffer / Andy Ackerman (2009). To watch the relevant scenes on YouTube, click here.  

Roland Barthes, 'Toys' and 'Plastic', in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, (The Noonday Press, 1991). Click here to read this text online.  

Note: the early post I refer to was 'Why I Love Mauro Perucchetti's Jelly Baby Family', (1 Dec 2012): click here.  

Carry on Plautus: The Romans in Films and on TV

Frankie Howerd and other members of the cast trying hard 

not to titter on the set of Up Pompeii (BBC TV 1969-70)

According to Barthes, the method favoured by Hollywood to signify Ancient Roman masculinity is the insistent use of a particular hairstyle. In MGM's 1953 adaptation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, for example, all the male characters are wearing fringes: 

"Some have them curly, some straggly, some tufted, some oily, all have them well combed, and the bald are not admitted, although there are plenty to be found in Roman history. Those who have little hair have not been let off for all that, and the hairdresser - the kingpin of the film - has still managed to produce one last lock which duly reaches the top of the forehead, one of those Roman foreheads, whose smallness has at all times indicated a specific mixture of self-righteousness, virtue and conquest."   

The fringe and forelock method, says Barthes, is a sign system operating in the open that not only affords the actor instant historical plausibility, but also provides the audience with overwhelming evidence that they're watching a realistic on screen portrayal of Ancient Rome. Even the non-Romanness of Anglo-American faces doesn't overly distract or amuse; everyone is reassured by this simple technique.

But, one might ask, what of the Roman women; how is their femininity signified within popular culture (and the pornographic imagination)?

Unfortunately, Barthes doesn't provide us with an answer, although he does note how, in the same film, Portia and Calpurnia are both awoken during the dead of night and their "conspicuously uncombed hair" not only expresses their nocturnal surprise, but their inner turmoil and vulnerability (he calls this a sub-sign in the category of capillary meanings).

Given his interest in the language of fashion, I suspect that, had Barthes chosen to analyse this subject, he'd almost certainly have done so in terms of clothes and make-up and related his remarks once more to the cinema. But for someone of my generation and background, growing up in late-sixties/early-seventies Britain, the key point of reference and source of all knowledge about the world (be it true or false, laudible or reprehensible), is television.

Thus it is that my idea of the typical Roman matron was formed by Elizabeth Larner as Ammonia in Up Pompeii. And my stereotypical fantasy of saucy Roman sexpots is similarly shaped by the nubile young actresses in skimpy outfits performing alongside Frankie Howerd, including Georgina Moon as Erotica.  

However, whilst Up Pompeii can be discussed from many critical perspectives, I'm not sure it's possible to read it semiotically. For its signs lack any ambiguity and are neither extreme nor intermediate in the Barthesian sense of these terms.

In other words, Up Pompeii aims neither at realism nor artifice; nor even the duplicity peculiar to bourgeois art (i.e. the hybrid form of naturalness). Viewers are not asked to believe in what they're watching, but neither are they obliged to suspend disbelief; they're simply invited to enjoy the show in all its Carry On style campness and vulgarity. 

Barthes would probably have found it boring; not even a degraded spectacle. But I've a suspicion that the Roman playwright Plautus, whose Greek-style comedies relying upon crude puns and stock characters such as the scheming slave and lecherous old man inspired the writers and producers of Up Pompeii, would have laughed at the antics of Lurcio and company ...

  
See: Roland Barthes, 'The Romans in Films', Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, (Hill and Wang, 1978), pp. 26-8.