Ben Stewart The Performance of Produce What is the relationship between the site of consumption and the agricultural system that produced it? What do commodities perform of the history through which they came into being? Specifically in this paper I am interested in the apple market: in chang es that are currently taking place, as well as in the ways in which those changes are staged in the performance of selling apples. On the consumption side, my main focus is three markets in New York City: Dean and Deluca, Gourmet Garage, and West Side Mar ket. I also look at a subway advertising campaign. On the production side, I write from my own experience as an apple picker -- for eight weeks at Gould Hill Orchards in Contoocook, New Hampshire in 1992 -- as well as from a recent interview with Rick Lea dbeater, the owner of that orchard. New England is not the main apple-producing region in this country; as such, it might seem a strange site. However, I'm not interested in looking at it as the center of the apple market. Rather, I want to know how it pr oduces itself precisely as peripheral; this in the hope that the margin will tell us something about the workings of the center that we would not otherwise be able to see. As such, "center" in this paper does not refer to any agricultural region -- where would we find the center of apple production in this global market? -- but rather to a central marketplace that performs the sum of many intensive regions of production from around the world. I am viewing New York as the node that performs these global in puts; this in the belief that New York, as a global city, is a site through which we will be able to see the current trends of the market. My interest here is on the effects this produces in the periphery. First I will look into what the grocery stores th emselves can tell us about the market. The Grocers I observed the produce sections of three stores over a four week period in April 1998: Dean and Deluca, Gourmet Garage, and West Side Market. Dean & Deluca is as upscale as grocery stores get. While not quite a full grocery store, it does come close: it has a produce section, meat section, bakery, and they also sell specialty cooking supplies as well as kitchen hardware. One would be hard-pres sed to do all of oneıs shopping here but then that is not the point; itıs rather the place to go to get that extra-special thing. As such, the store is scopic pleasure at its height -- sponsored by the bounty of diverse forms and color that the site prese nts storewide. This is especially true of the produce department however: from horned melons to baby cantaloupes to ugly fruit to lotus root . . . what is offered is something akin to a living museum of exotic forms. While the other two stores do offer a wide variety of produce, the diversity of forms is not anywhere near that of Dean & Deluca. They have mangoes and papayas, fresh herbs, yucca root, okra, etc. But while this variety is astonishing in its own right -- and not something to be taken for granted -- it is little more than is to be found at any large supermarket across the country. So, what does this say about the relation of these three sites? I think we can see all three as part of a national trend towar ds the marketing of a wider variety of produce. While some of these items may have been available ten years ago, they were not available so readily. It now appears that both the supply and demand for these commodities has stabilized. As such, we can think of all three sites as expressions of capitalismıs need to expand and diversify. Certainly Dean & Deluca is the master signifier of this exotic spectacle -- itıs version of the performance of those forces being much more specialized -- but aside from this they are the same: all expressions of the same capitalist project. So, what then do these three sites perform of the agricultural system that produced them? Actually, not much. Aside from "Look Mom California carrots!", we are generally given little information about the origins of our produce. As far as apples go, the only example of this I observed in the last month was a sign at the Gourmet Garage asserting that their McIntosh originated from New York. Perhaps this lack of information is not so strange, but it becomes more curious in light of how hard it is to get su ch information when one actively seeks it. Apart from the varieties that are grown locally, none of the stores seem to know much about the origins of their apples. In fact, the only information Dean & Deluca gave me was that they don't reveal anything abo ut their suppliers. This is interesting in light of the fact that Dean & Deluca charges twice as much for their apples as the other two stores (table one). What is this money paying for? Where has value been added? Is it going to support small farms? Rain forests? Or is it going into Dean & Delucaıs coffers? We simply donıt know. (Table 1: 22 April 1998) Apples: price per pound Dean & Deluca Gourmet Garage West Side Market Braeburn $2 ----- ----- Cameo ----- $1.50 ----- Crispin ----- $.95 ----- Fuji $3 $.95 $1.29 Gala $3 ----- $1.49 Granny Smith $2 $1.25 $.89 Golden Del. $2 ----- $.79 Ida Red ----- $.95 ----- McIintosh $2 $.95 $.79 Red Del. ----- $.95 $.79 Rome $2 ----- $.79 We can however, explain some of the extra cost disparity by comparing apples between the sites. As we can see these prices were taken on 24 April 1998. Each store has seven different varieties of apples, although not all are the same. The total varieties at all stores is eleven -- however I'm sure this changes in relation to what the market has available. It is interesting that the two apples that are slightly more expensive at West Side Market -- Fuji and Gala -- are also the two that are more expensive at Dean & Deluca. However, the price differential is still more than twice as much in both cases. So, is the quality different? In terms of appearance, there is no question: Dean & Deluca wins hands down. But while it might seem that this cosmetic criter ia has nothing to do with quality of taste or freshness, this is not completely true: an apple that looks better is going to last longer. An apple that is displayed well is much less likely that to be cut and bruised, and these are major factors in determ ining longevity. Thus, the better looking apple often is the better apple. This is not a matter of what that apple might have tasted like compared to other apples in the orchard, but is rather a function of the character of the social environment through which it passed in order to reach the consumer. This is clearly one place where Dean & Deluca has added value to their product, although I would not suggest that it is enough to explain such a wide price differential. What then does all this mean? What are we to make of this excessive disparity of value? What also of the lack of information that these stores offer in relation to the origins of their apples? Is this something they are hiding, or do they rather simply l ack the information? What is the meaning of this gap between the system of production and the site of consumption? And what does it say in relation to what the grocery store performs? If the specificity of this performance is not about the origins of the commodities that fill those spaces, then what is it? We'll start with performance. The Performance of Produce There is clearly more to the performance of a space than simply what is in it. Grocery stores are curated no less than museums, however much they may appear otherwise. Itıs not just that Dean & Deluca takes better care of its apples; the entire produce s ection is framed more effectively than those of the other grocery stores. The general effect achieved there is that of an organic whole in which one part or section effortlessly flows into the next. Produce is mounded in wicker baskets. These baskets are very subtle and as such they accentuate the commodities rather than pull focus from them. There also seems to be an attempt to make the borders between different produce as arbitrary as possible. Different varieties are mounded against each other with no hard dividing lines. Here again, the subtlety of the baskets allows the display to take the focus; their shape allows for this ³excessive² stacking as their various shades of brown fade into the background against the vibrant colors of the produce. This i s in contrast to the other two sites where the demarcations are very rigid and square. Both Gourmet Garage and West Side Market use the original packing to display most of their produce and this creates a scene of well-ordered phalanxes. The parts do not flow into a larger picture, making each produce category distinct. Interesting differences: the physical differences in staging are not extreme -- a one-time investiture in wicker baskets -- and yet the effect produced is completely different. The latter produces a sense of rigidity -- of already framed, predetermined c onsumption -- while the former produces more of a sense of play. In this, Dean & Deluca provides a fantasy of the arbitrary -- of the chance encounter with the exotic object. This is not at all to suggest that Dean & Deluca is lacking in order. Indeed, q uite the contrary: it is highly structured. The point to be made here is that its structure provides the fantasy of chance, the fantasy of the random encounter -- as if the encounter between a capitalist subject and a horned melon in New York City could be anything but radically contingent. We all know that the possibility of such an relation is determined by a complex of economic and other social forces; and yet the very structure of the staging elides that sociality. Here we have the fetish before us i n fine form, for what is the fetish other than a socially constituted object that we treat as if it were the direct result of natural forces? It is always a situation in which we misrecognize culture as nature. We can understand part of the means through which this misrecognition is effected in light of our previous discussion of the storesı apparent lack of knowledge about the origins of their produce. I imagine that, for the most part, they do not readily hav e access to such information: itıs too complex as well as being something unnecessary to keep track of. As such, itıs not as if we are dealing with a conscious attempt at deception; rather, the difficulty of having access to this information is written in to the very structure of our economy: while produce suppliers would know this information, we are a step removed, and would have a hard time even finding out who the suppliers are. This is not a task that the average consumer is ready to add to the work o f consuming. The problem we are engaged with is a result of the specific complexity of the structure of our economy: it is a result of the form of capitalism itself. Thus, the misrecognition is not solely the consumerıs, for part of it exists in reality itself: if the social agents experience capitalist society as something other than it really is, this is fundamentally because capitalist society presents itself as something other than it really is. As Maurice Godelier has put it: 'It is not the subject who deceive s himself, but reality which deceives him.' (Geras, 1986:75) Here, capitalism misrecognizes its own social character, which is to say that the market itself fails to realize the sociality of the forces that produce it. Instead, the unpredictable character of these social histories is associated with the alietory ch aracter of natural history. Culture gets conflated with, or ossifies into, nature. Since these forces are placed beyond our frame of reference, they can not appear as anything but nature; thus it really is as if nature has been placed there for us to find -- as if there were no sociality there before that particular staging. This does a lot to explain my own ambivalent relation to Dean & Deluca. Indeed, my own pleasure and anxiety around that site brings to mind of Marshal Berman's characterization of Walter Benjamin's fascination with the Paris arcades: His heart and his sensibility draw him irresistibly toward the city's [. . .] play of dazzling surfaces and radiant scenes. Meanwhile, his Marxist conscience wrenches him insistently away from these temptations, instructs him that this whole glittering wo rld is decadent, hollow [. . .] oppressive to the proletariat, condemned by history. He makes repeated ideological resolutions to forsake the Parisian temptation [. . .] but he cannot resist one last look down the boulevard or under the arcade; he wants t o be saved, but not yet. (Berman, 1982:146) This is an ambivalent position, this wanting to be saved but not yet. But it leaves me wanting to know exactly how that site is problematic: just what are the ethical concerns around this space? Is it ³oppressive to the proletariat²? I want to figure out more specifically how. Has it been ³condemned by history²? Indeed, what is wrong with this staging of diversity -- this massive display of seemingly endless complexity? We know that, e.g., Freud's model sees complexity as valuable: in his characterizati on of the drives, the life drives are precisely that which produces complexity -- anabolism -- while the death drives produce uniformity -- catabolism (Freud, 1989: 646). Of course Freud also suggests that the death drive is necessary for civilization to exist at all -- without some limit or bar, civilization would regress into something akin to a Hobbsian war of all against all. So perhaps we should be suspicious of this scene -- this scene that, while clearly part of concrete, material reality, is itsel f precisely the staging of a fantasy of no limit, no bar on desire. It posits a civilization without the discontents; utopia to be had for a mere three dollars a pound. Granted that the apples at Dean & Deluca are slightly better than elsewhere, but I wou ld argue that most of what one is paying for there is the quality of the fantasy. And certainly the high price also serves to add to the fantasy. But here again, what is wrong with staging a fantasy? And by what criteria do we begin to determine an ethics through which to critique fantasy, however concrete? First we need to understand a bit more about the purpose of fantasy within the human psychic frame. Psychoanalysis teaches us that fantasy is that thing which covers over disturbances: trauma, elisions, gaps; as such, fantasy is itself a signification that covers a failure to signify. While it stands-in for elisions, and while it therefore has a relati on to them, it is radically distinct from them. This is also what Althuser means when he asserts that, ³Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence² (Althuser 1971:162). Here the produce department i s that imaginary relationship -- what I am calling fantasy -- precisely insofar as it obscures the conditions of production. As such, the relation of production to consumption is that of elision to fantasy (ideology). The point here is not to critique the fantasy -- weıve already done that, it being the performance of the fantasy of no limit, no bar. Rather, I want to get at the reality that fantasy is covering over. The question here is one of how to distinguish between conditions of ethical and unethica l exchange. For we know that there are a variety possible production systems behind the produce department of any given grocery store -- and indeed, I am certain that most such scenes are not a monolithic expression of one system, but rather a conflux of different systems and forces. How to sort them all out? I will begin to try to sort some of them out here. However, one further caveat before I continue: this critique is not an attempt to get rid of the fetish. The fantasy will not disappear once the disturbances it covers over have been critiqued. We know, as Peggy Phelan asserts, that ³learning to see is training in careful blindness² (Phelan, 1993:13). When the condition of possibility is itself a limit upon possibility, how can any act of exchange, be it linguistic or economic, ever hope to see itself tr ansparently? In this sense fantasy is always necessarily operative within any human frame of reference: there is no getting out of it once one is in. Nor is it something from which we even want to be freed. Indeed, the function fantasy serves in coverin g over trauma is a necessary one. The first task, it seems to me, is to figure fantasyıs relation to the productive systems it supports more consciously. Towards this end, I will begin explore the elisions that our fantasy covers over. Advertising: The Performance of the Gap In 1997, the state of Washington ran an advertising campaign on the New York City subway system. On the plaques above the seats were pictures of train windows outside of which were apple orchards. There were also four different posters in the larger plaq ues (the size that holds larger advertisements and subway maps). These read: - Washington -- the best apples on earth. - About as far from New York as you can get. - A quick tour of our assembly line. - Proof that mother nature always did like us best. Each of these four posters had more pictures of apple orchards. In the rows between the trees were 15 bushel picking bins, some full of apples, some half-full. Strangely missing from these pictures of the ³assembly line²: the workers. Are we to therefore assume that ³mother nature² is the one picking the apples and delivering them, pristine, to our store shelves? Is this the ³proof that she always did like us b est?² Even as we are well aware that the perfect apples that land in our grocery baskets are products only culture would love -- let alone recognize. And what of this strange industrial metaphor? Is this conflation of nature and a fordist model of product ion something that is possible as long as one gets far enough away from New York? And what sort of apple would such a union of industry and nature produce? Would such an apple still be able to serve its metonymic function as signifier of the founding crim e of Christianity? Would it rot? We all know that in unmediated nature, part of the appleıs purpose is to rot. Of course, once the concept of mother is tethered to nature, then we have the possibility of myth. Suddenly reality is never the same again; sud denly, from where we now stand, it becomes hard to remember that the apple is supposed to rot. Now, I am not attempting to claim that that the mother was the first myth: who can say? What I am interested in is the fact that the mother is clearly the myth at the bottom of that advertisement -- the myth that narrates and frames the position of the apple as a metonym for an impossibly socialized, not to mention utilitarian, mother nature. Thereıs more: If we look at this advertisement from the opposite direction we get a reading that is equally important. In a strange way, this ad tells the truth about itself, for is there not a sense in which mother nature does love us best? Indeed, how could she not, given that she is nothing but our own fantasy; given that she is everything we imagine nature should be? Indeed, is this fantasy of the bountiful mother not tied to the fantasy that Dean & Deluca presents to us more concretely? Further, doe s the ad not perform precisely the fetishistic misrecognition discussed above? I.e. the displacement in which social forces -- e.g. workers -- are misrecognized as natural? In this sense the workers are elided, but in a particular way that itself performs our own (the consumerıs) objective relation to the commodity. This is to suggest that the workersı conflation with mother nature is precisely the fantasy set up in the act of exchange. This ad is clearly not about people -- can we even imagine who they would photograph in those scenes? -- but it does perform our own disavowal of the fact that human labor is a sine qua non of the process of transferring apples from tree to bin unharmed. Indeed, that our apples arrive in increasingly good condition perhap s lends support to the fantasy that no human hands have a hand in delivering them to us. For certainly we know that human labor is needed for that to happen but still . . . it very act of exchange makes it appear as if this were not the case. This brings us to the issue of labor: who picks? We know that a migrant, largely Mexican, labor pool is required to deliver the harvest of the West Coast fruit industry. How much of this population is illegal -- and more than likely underpaid -- is hard to say. But is this the only story of apple picking labor in the United States? East coast farms also have labor demands that can not be met by the domestic market. As such, I turn now to New Hampshire, where I will explore both the particularity of that situation as well as draw some more general conclusions about the character and meaning of this work. Labor So, how is the labor shortage dealt with on the East coast? Most of the workers in this situation are Jamaican; it is a federal program that brings the farms together with the workers: this is what's called the H2A program: you see we don't have here on the East coast the labor pool they have on the West coast; that drifts legally or illegally up from Mexico. So, this program [H2A] has been going on for a number of years. People pay -- I think it's in excess of $600 per man now -- for travel, to get them to and from the farm. (Leadbeater, 1998) Rick Leadbeater -- the owner of Gould Hill Orchards where I worked in New Hampshire -- is one of the few still able to hire domestic workers: ³I know that there's a farm over in Vermont that does. There's one, perhaps in the London area that's still try ing to, but to be perfectly frank, if others didn't have Jamaicans I would not likely be able to do what I'm able to do² (1998). And even in his case, most of the workers hired, though domestic, are not local. When I was there, out of ten pickers, three w ere from West Virginia, two from Ohio, two from Georgia, and one from New York City. What does this mean? and what does it suggest about our economy? Here, I want to engage with a speculation Leadbeater made about his employees, namely, that ³some of them are migrant I suppose, in the eyes of the law, but I think they donıt consider themselves as such² (1998). This becomes interesting when we begin to consider the extent to which so-called marginal -- informal -- jobs are nevertheless necessary to the continued production of our economy. Indeed, is not this informal work constitutive of what we expect our apple industry to produce? Saskia Sassen poses some questions for us here that unsettle our usual assumptions about economic development: One can ask what is the place in an advanced urban economy of firms and sectors which appear to be backward or lack the advanced technologies and human capital base of the leading industries? Are they superfluous? (Sassen, 1996:24) While Sassen is referring here to specifically urban economies, I believe her questions are related to our current topic of discussion. Let us be clear: this relevance is not simply due to the fact that this ³backward² labor is a condition of possibility for apples to be available in the city. Rather, I believe her point, in this case, is also valid for the economy in general: the theories that dominate explanations of advanced economies, whether neo-classical or Marxist, posit that as development proceeds, informal income-generating processes and relations of production will disappear. These theories suggest the gradual incorp oration of all aspects of work into formalized market relations. (Sassen, 1996:34) Sassenıs point is to show us the ways in which the formal economy needs the informal economy. Rather than being a contradiction that will eventually be folded into the formal economy, its is actually part-and-parcel of the whole. If we must think of thes e situations as two separate parts of the economy, we need to at least understand the ways in which they support and constitute each other. For clearly we can see that the apple economy defies easy incorporation into what most people consider formal work. In the first place it is labor intensive -- a more physically demanding job than that to which most people aspire. And second, it only has a demand for eight weeks out of the year. What is one to do with the rest of oneıs life? In short, it demands a fl exibility of lifestyle that most individuals in this society do not have. The possibility that one can do this job is probably a good indication that one does not fit within the usual categories that our economy demands. And yet this does not change the f act that the work still needs to be done. Of course, staying afloat as an orchard is a more complicated matter than simply getting all of oneıs apples harvested, no matter who picks them. While we certainly need the informal economies to cover holes and gaps within the formal, this is not in any way to suggest that such patching offers any guarantee of economic success. In our current transnational market, the terms that decide who will succeed and who will fail grow increasingly complex. Earlier in this paper I suggested that capitalism needs t o diversify in order to continue to produce itself. In the last part of this paper I wish to question this assumption. While this is clearly true at some levels of the system -- e.g. there is plenty of evidence in the grocery stores analyzed above to supp ort such a claim -- at other levels this assertion contradicts itself. We need to begin to interrogate what we mean by diversity, for it is not a transparent term. The Vicissitudes of Diversity What is a small farm to do in the face of a world market? When I was picking apples at Gould Hill, they were working on their own apple variety, the Hampshire, which they have now patented. They had also just built a large controlled atmosphere storage f acility in order to be able to sell apples more profitably in the off season. For the last two years however, the orchard has lost money. Leadbeaater states: most of the European countries, the common market, have some strict quotas of production, and if they by accident exceed it, then that fruit goes to State-owned processing plants that basically produce a very good concentrate or frozen concentrate. And th at sort of establishes the floor of the market. For instance Veri-fine. [. . .] They can get delivered to their loading dock, very good concentrate from Europe -- and also I guess Israel; and also in some cases the Southern hemisphere -- they can get the stuff delivered on their dock for less than, for less than if we gave them our apples for free. Theyıre nice in that they do take our fruit, but itıs at 4 1/2 cents per pound which -- if you run the math -- barely getting a new dollar for an old by the ti me you pay someone to pick it, haul it in and dump it in a truck.(1998) There is also heavy competition from the Southern hemisphere: Our whole industry is going through quite a change. There is now essentially a world-wide apple market. [. . .] The southern hemisphere is producing a lot of fruit. [. . .] And that comes in fresh at about the time when controlled atmosphere storages here would be getting a premium price. These are subsidized growing situations, so the price is significantly lower than what I would hope to get [for what I've had stored] for five, six, seven months. (Leadbeater, 1998) With such a market also comes the demand to grow inordinately large fruit. Trees have to be cut back further to allow more light in, and these oversize fruit also bruise much more easily. The situation also demands changes in the orchard itself: ³Varieta l interests and changes are happening too. [. . .] Weıre adding things like Gala, Fuji -- some of the things youıre starting to see coming from the Southern hemisphere weıre playing with here² (1998). Then add to this a situation in which the local grocer y is able to take better care of its fruit, able to offer a better product: our retail, which is really our bread and butter, is also not growing because I think the quality of the fruit in the supermarkets has improved. It's not that critical to go to the farm anymore to get really good fresh tasting stuff. Usually when I go sh opping I check out the produce, and their ability to keep things well has greatly improved. You don't see stacks of apples sitting out in the middle of the floor anymore, you see them in refrigeration, and you see them being rotated. The quality is ever so much better than it used to be ten years ago. So that also reduces -- specifically for me -- demand, retail. The person who [. . .] doesn't what the ultimate apple, but wants a really good apple can get it someplace other than here. And that's new. The influx of production from the Southern Hemisphere has brought with it a stability that capitalism likes: fresh apples all year around, and at low cost. It has also been a source of new varieties -- e.g. the Gala's and the Fuji's -- which as we can se e from table 1 are fetching the highest prices. But this appearance of diversity simultaneously signifies a consolidation that potentially reduces diversity. Part of the problem here is that the fads of the market move within a different time frame than d o the demands of running an orchard. What we have here is a case, not of the arbitrariness of the signifier, but rather of the contingencies of the signified -- i.e. of the historical, economic contingencies through which a given variety comes to have val ue. Even if Fuji's and Gala's are planted now, there is no guarantee they will still be profitable by the time they mature. How then, in this situation, is an orchard to stay afloat long enough to have a chance to offer its own contribution? Diversity is rarely, if ever, transparently so. It is usually foreclosing some other possibility. This then is precisely the disturbance that we need the fantasy to cover over -- namely, that capitalism's inner workings work against itself; especially in this highly c omplex version of capitalism to which we are currently subject. Works Cited Althuser, Louis 1971 Lenin and Philosophy. New York: Monthly Review. Berman, Marshall 1982 All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. New York: Penguin Freud, Sigmund 1989 The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay. New York: W.W. Norton. Leadbeater, Rick 1998 Personal Interview. 26 April. Phelan, Peggy 1993 Unmarked. New York: Routledge. Sassen, Saskia 1996 Rebuilding the Global City. In Re-Presenting the City, ed. Anthony, D. King. New York: New York University Press.