Abstract
Abstract Contemporary class formations increasingly exceed language and, therefore, defy the usual word-centric, text-based approaches of discourse studies. As Bourdieu famously observed, class-sustaining enactments of distinction and taste are often enacted outside language through banal “techniques of the body” such as people’s ways of walking or ways of eating. In this vein, my paper presents a social-semiotic analysis of the particular role menus play in materializing taste, both gustatory and social. However, rather than taking the obvious tack of addressing their linguistic content or typographic design, I focus on their haptic, experiential properties; for example, their shape, size, weight, density and other textural, tactile or material features. As a critical-empirical focus, my core evidence is an archive of Business Class menus from 18 international airlines; it is here that eating practices are explicitly framed as distinctive and superior. The significance of any text cannot be properly understood by simply attending to its straightforwardly representational meanings; its sensory and sensuous materialities must be addressed too. This, I propose, is where some of the most subtle but powerful status-making happens – the seemingly harmless, throw-away moments where privilege/inequality arises, invariably obscured but assuredly naturalized.
Highlights
Materiality, materialism and the euphoria of privilegeThe aeroplane presents itself as a perfect site for studying contemporary class formations.3 With their intensive, often spectacular staging of status and distinction, international airlines have certainly been for me an opportunity to pin-point and unpack some of symbolic-material economies at the heart of contemporary life
In the style of social semiotics, I want to examine how privilege is constituted through materialities – the deployment of banal and spectacular artefacts or things; this is the stuff of material culture
Moving closer to tactility, we find everywhere the visual and/or photographic representation of surfaces
Summary
Class menus collected from 18 major international airlines. Menus are, in Mondada’s (2019: 118) terms, key “artefacts” in the orchestrated “material ecology” by which the meal and its social meanings are constituted. (see Thurlow 2020, on the far-reaching, rippling context of a Business Class meal.) Regardless, the menu is surely an integral prelude to any performance of fine dining; it is as I will show in just a moment, often something remarkable or commentworthy for passengers.. (see Thurlow 2020, on the far-reaching, rippling context of a Business Class meal.) Regardless, the menu is surely an integral prelude to any performance of fine dining; it is as I will show in just a moment, often something remarkable or commentworthy for passengers.2 It is just the kind of recognizably “texty-text” (i.e. print documents) of the type many discourse analysts favour and which I would like to complicate. The goal is to consider how an object like the menu is sensed through bodily contact and experienced emotionally
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