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• W2893880330 abstract "Roland Barthes decoded the mythology of margarine as a rhetorical speciesof inoculation. He described the promotional demonstration of margarine’sblemishes as a carefully cultivated virtue in a cultural vaccine that selectedcontingent over essential evil. Inoculation is one of seven principal rhetoricalfigures that Barthes develops to analyse the duplicity of bourgeois myths.Margarine’s commercial valorization takes place on the grounds of itsimperfections, as well as its secondariness in relation to butter. That is,margarine’s resemblance to butter entails that its simulacral features themselves become the foundation of its advantages, and of its delights in themouths of sceptics, despite their traditional dairy allegiances. The homeopathic vaccine of inoculation against greater evils that clears the way for itswidespread acceptance is not limited to margarine. Striptease, too, thinksBarthes, absorbs and familiarizes the fires of eroticism and in the processcreates a reassuring ritual accorded the status of a sport (dancing), a goodworkout (aerobic or cardio striptease), and even a career option.Readers of Barthes (1957: 44) on this point may wonder about the termsof reference of his analysis since the English translation exposes far too littleof the original essay’s focus on a specific French brand: ‘Astra’. Barthes’smargarine was the leading French brand (a product of Dutch agribusinessgiant Unilever’s French subsidiary Astra, after which the product wasnamed) and not a generic substance in a plastic tub. Indeed, the mythologicalstrategy of inoculation was also found to apply to plastic. Plastic has more incommon with margarine as a mythologized substance – triumphantly chemical, smooth and shiny – than striptease, even if they share the same rhetoric.In Barthes mythologies are nestled within mythologies – the essay’s title istranslated non-specifically (‘Operation Margarine’ and not ‘Astra’; Barthes,1972: 45), within the general rhetoric of an emerging promotional demonstration applicable to a variety of substances. One searches in vain for a ‘nologo’ moment in Barthes’s mythologies. Instead, it is left to his Englishtranslators to add a further layer of myth in the brand’s erasure.In typical fashion, Barthes revealed little about his specimens. ‘Astra’ is nodifferent in this respect. The dialogue he quotes is lifted from a print campaign for the margarine in circulation in the early to mid-1950s and itfeatured black and white full-page advertisements heavy on mock dialogueabout resistance to margarine. The promotional campaigns for Astra werecomplex and involved efforts to insert margarine into bread-and-buttersnacks (‘tartines’), the invention of a fictive cook, a kind of Franco-SwissBetty Crocker named Betty Bossi, author of a full range of cuisine-relatedobjects from newsletters and cookbooks to sponsored contests. By the late1950s this strategy had shifted to a full-colour print and poster campaignfeaturing Black Africans and the virtues of the product’s ‘tropical riches’.Barthes’s focus remained on an earlier, more overtly endocolonial ratherthan exocolonial, form of commercial solicitude.Make no mistake, however, it was Barthes who put margarine on thetable. Like a good Barthesean mythologist I am prepared to admit thatplastic, not margarine, was his ‘stucco’, the miracle of which later impressedBaudrillard as an ‘eternal substance’ (Baudrillard, 1993a: 53). Margarine’sshelf life is impressive, but is no match for plastic. In this paper I want to liftthe lid on margarine so that, in another promotional discourse, its relationalcultural calculus, to borrow Baudrillard’s (1998a: 27) felicitous term, may beheard. For Barthes taught us that margarine is before all else a relationalsubstance that speaks another name: ‘butter’. This is precisely what you canhear, if you listen closely, when the lid on a tub of margarine is lifted:‘butter’. And of course for Canadians and Americans of a certain vintagethis is also the promotional discourse of Parkay margarine of ConAgrawhose ‘Talking Tub’ muttered ‘butter’ as an act of provocation, and has beennattering since 1973. Of course, today margarine speaks butter’s name with a‘not’ – ‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter’!In order to follow this trajectory beyond these specificities I want to addBaudrillard to Barthes towards the product of a calculus of simulation thatanimates margarine’s history and carries its mythologies into the present.This is why a cultural analysis of margarine must involve an analysis ofbutter within a critical application of the concept of simulation. Margarine issimulacral and its history and destiny plays out this role in degrees of ‘likeness’ to the natural, original reference point of butter. But this paper doesnot simply rehearse this trajectory.Rather, what I want to argue is that butter – simplifying a materiallycomplex polycultural substance to be sure – is destabilized as margarine’sstatus as a counterfeit or fake is superseded. Margarine turns the tables onbutter not as it achieves perfection in the erasure of difference with butter,nor through butter’s exhaustion, for example, of legal means that preventmargarine’s drive for similarity, but as simulation perfuses the relationalcalculus of these objects. The game of appearances, if you will, of the unstableseparability of margarine and butter, which both have played out since margarine’s creation as ‘beurre economique’ in 1870 in France by HippolyteMege Mouries, becomes undecidable. This is a non-specific process of contamination. I do not want to attribute this mutual metabolization to butter’swaning mystique nor to margarine’s triumphal technological prowess ofreproduction. Neither am I adopting an explanation based on fatigue produced by legislative differentiation in conjunction with the lifting of codesprotecting butter’s integrity, and hence opening onto a profligate indifferentiation; and I am not playing the health card of shifting analyses ofnutritional value (margarine’s surging Mediterranean profile and butter’ssinking fattiness) that contribute to the pair’s implosion. To put this slightlydifferently: what if margarine is no longer obviously secondary to butter?And, what if butter is not longer primary in relation to its pretenders? Thatis, if simulation destabilizes hierarchy, what is the destiny of margarine andbutter?Both margarine and butter issue from models. Only a critical dredgingoperation in the histories of these substances can reveal the extent of butter’sstrategies for ‘real-ization’ (Hegarty, 2004: 51) that situates it in simulation.Still, the great chain of modelling is so long and intrusive as to go unnoticedas models are produced from market research, changing production processes, trends in artificial and natural additives, right into the mouth of theconsumer with the idea of ‘mouthfeel aroma’, a point made about bread, butone equally relevant here, by Victoria Grace (2002: 107). Butter is realerthan real, yet it remains resistant to this claim because it carries with itnostalgic obligatory symbolic attachments to traditional activities like dairying, to the necessity of milk, if you will, under the ‘sign of the cow’(Rynne, 1998). All of butter’s attributes are gathered under this rapidlyeroding sign: nature, farming, processes like milking, creaming and churning;richness, purity and uniqueness. Let’s listen to Margaret Visser (1986: 101-2)describe butter’s superiority. Writing of French cremeries, she observes:Butter appears packaged in the now-usual silver or gold foil, but oftenthe very best of it is still served from the motte – a huge shameless tower ofunwrapped voluptuousness, with gleaming facets where chunks of butterhave been cut with a wire to the specifications of the customer. … Butterin a motte is not squared-off, brand-named, labeled, and ‘industrialized’:it constitutes a monumental snub to the concept of margarine." @default.
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• W2893880330 date "2008-09-25" @default.
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• W2893880330 title "Better than butter: Margarine and simulation" @default.
• W2893880330 doi "https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203927052-12" @default.
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