[Post]Human? - The Individual is Present

Figure 1. Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present (Portraits on Flickr, 2010). 

    Depending on what you know about people that work in the hospitality industry, you might know that everyone who works together acts like one, big family. You could even say we are post-human. We work together as a "collaborative consciousness that they call into being - "Hive mind" (McNeill, 2012, p.74), as without this aspect of our work selves there would be no communication. Kuttainen (2016) stated in this weeks lecture, "All narratives are networked in that they are intertextual", which would mean that to know the entire narrative, you must first know everyone else's in the network. It is not surprising to realise that everyone knows everything about each other, down to their private lives, because we spend a lot of time with one another outside of work. Not only does this lead to a panopticon effect, but that we as chefs, are individuals as products of each other; making us post-humans.

       I also argue that being a chef requires a lot of humanistic aspects as well as post-human ones. Without a strong sense of individual agency it would actually be impossible to become a good chef, because being your true self is extremely important in creativity. It is what gives your cooking a sense of individuality to create dishes with a personal style. A good chef is not just a worker, but an artist. It is not as easy as you might think to come up with new exciting ideas every few months or a menu change. If you watch the remarkable TED talk by Marina Abramovic, a performance artist who has been creating for over 40 years, you will see how her sense of identity was constructed through her art. Just as many different people (including the ones in the photo who were participants to her performance), shaped who she is now, it is because of this network of participants that she has learned how to express her individual agency. 

I draw this connection to show how any artist, regardless of whether they are internationally renowned, or working at your local restaurant, use aspects of both humanism and post-humanism to shape their identity and the world around them.  

References 

Abramovic, M. (TED). (2015, May). An art made of trust, vulnerability and connection.  [Vodcast]. Retrieved       from: https://www.ted.com/talks/marina_abramovic_an_art_made_of_trust_vulnerability_and_connection

Kuttainen, V. (2016). BA1002: Networked narratives, week 6 notes [PowerPoint slides] Retrieved from: https://learnjcu.jcu.edu.au/

McNeill, L. (2012). There is no "I" in network: Social networking sites and posthuman auto/biography. Biography 35(1), 65-82. doi10.1353/bio.2012.0009

Portraits On Flickr. (2010). Marina Abramovic: The artist is present. [Image]. Retrieved from: 

    http://hemi.nyu.edu/hemi/fr/e-misferica-72/levine