Abstract
This pragmatic study addresses the question of the plural realities that emerge from perception, based on an empirical analysis of the tasting activity of wine amateurs and olfactory experts. Though they share the same requirement of rooting taste in the product under scrutiny, they also significantly differ regarding the constraints with which their tasting results have to comply: repeatability for experts’ tasting results, and activity contiunuation for amateurs. Both therefore foster the emergence of two contrasting realities: a stabilized one for experts; an ‘un-stabilized’ one for amateurs. Both happen to fit with the ‘fiction’ and the ‘reference’ modes of existence of Latour’s inventory, which extends and relaunches the analysis of the coexistence of activities initiated by the works on ‘boundary objects’ some decades ago. Finally, the notion of taste is reinterpreted as a translation operator between tasting realities.
I Introduction
Some years ago, as a young researcher, I conducted a research program designed to compare a large set of sensible and intelligible assessments of the tastes and textures of cheeses by two tasting panels employed by a well-known agri-food company: a panel of uninformed consumers used by the marketing departments, and a panel of experts in sensory analysis 1 that helped steer production. The result was clear: there was no correlation between the lists of descriptors used by the uninformed consumers and those chosen by the sensory panel experts (Teil, 1994, 1997). It confirmed the findings of Lehrer (1975) on the expression of the taste of wines. 2
Did that mean that my project, aimed at better connecting marketing studies of demand to the taste control of industrial production, was pointless? Was it just a failure of language, as Lehrer suggested? Or did experts and consumers live in two incommensurable taste worlds? If so, how could this be possible?
Lehrer’s study was followed by many more (Chollet and Valentin, 2000, 2001; Gawel, 1998; Lawless, 1984; Lelièvre et al., 2008; Sauvageot et al., 2006; Schiefer and Fischer, 2008; Solomon, 1990; Weil, 2007; Wolters and Allchurch, 1994), in which the issue was seen as a problem of coding, even of linguistic competence (Hopfer and Heymann, 2014). These researchers’ intention, beyond sensory performance, was to define the ‘communication value’ of expert or naive expressions of taste. 3 Lehrer (2009), who reviews their research, concludes that there is heterogeneity in the physiological perception of tasters which is smoothed out by language. For this reason, while making sense, the words used would not be able to convey a sensory message. She then distinguishes between scientific, objective language that has to be precise and have good linguistic coding, and other linguistic uses such as ‘critical communication’ (Isenberg, 1949) or ‘phatic communion’, that is, ‘language used to establish and maintain social bonds’, for which the question of truth is irrelevant. The historical work of Shapin (2012, 2016) tackles the relation of these different uses of language. He highlights the recent emergence of concerns about the scientific objectivity of wine-talk, which has led to its transformation insofar as the discussion on the objectified components of the aroma and taste of wines now takes precedence over more poetic comments. However, neither Lehrer nor Shapin addresses the possible difficulties that may arise out of the heterogeneity of the realities 4 – whether objective or not – stemming from the different ‘functions served by languages of connoisseurship’ (Shapin, 2012: 49).
D’Alessandro and Pecotich (2013) and Rodrigues et al. (2015) more explicitly link the scientific use of language to a perception that is also ‘objective’. They thus reduce the diversity of tasting reports to classical oppositions between epistemic and non-epistemic perceptions (Armstrong, 1973; Dretske, 1969), that is, a cognitively structured ‘belief’ of consumers as opposed to the pre-intellectualized sensory experience of experts, or a socio-cultural representation of experts’ objective reality. Yet this analysis brings us back to our initial question: how can we live in incommensurable worlds?
All above interpretations, which stand back from the representational dimension of language, renew the explanation of the divergence of sensory panels’ results. They are, however, less cautious with sensory perception, which is seen as a representation or belief about the sensible world, developed by a being with a sensitive body and cognition (Armstrong, 1961; Chisholm, 1957; Foster, 2000; Peacocke, 2001).
Throughout the 20th century several authors highlighted certain fundamental aporias of this representational theory which equates vision with visualization, as Ingold (2000: 282) so neatly puts it – in addition to the difficulties relating to the notion of ‘belief’ (Smith, 2001). James (1996 [1912]: 11–12), for instance, wrote:
The whole philosophy of perception from Democritus’ time downwards has been just one long wrangle over the paradox that what is evidently one reality should be in two places at once, both in outer space and in a person’s mind. Representative theories of perception avoid the logical paradox, but on the other hand they violate the reader’s sense of life, which knows no intervening mental image but seems to see the room and the book immediately just as they physically exist.
Merleau-Ponty (2012 [1945]: 33) subsequently rejected both intellectualist and empiricist interpretations of perception, denouncing their two symmetrical shortcomings:
Empiricim cannot see that we need to know what we are looking for, otherwise we would not be looking for it, and intellectualism fails to see that we need to be ignorant of what we are looking for, or equally again we should not be searching.
Latour (2004) pointed more precisely to the founding postulate of these theories of perception: the existence of a ‘prematurely unified’ sensible world, external to the perceiver. This postulate reduces differences between perceptions to beliefs or a ‘subjective’ distortion of the reality, which only the ‘objective’ perception of scientists can reveal. According to this paradigm, the heterogeneity of naïve and expert tastings reflects the lack of objectivity of perception and the deficient linguistic coding of the former. However, as Smith (2001) and Latour (2004) pointed out, this conclusion is tautological: it only repeats its founding postulate of a single reality that reduces perception a priori to a positioning between truth and belief, or objective-true and subjective perception. To avoid this, it is necessary to turn to alternative interpretations of perception.
Perception as Construction of Reality
Critics of representational theory share a common standpoint: reality is not a result of perceptual interaction between a predefined reality and subjects but a result of experience. Gibson (1986 [1979]) offers a noteworthy yet unfinished attempt in psychology, aimed at discarding the notion of a sensory stimulus and its determinism. Nevertheless, as Ingold (2000: 168) convincingly states, he does not escape the etic/emic divide. Gibson’s affordances appear as guides allowing the constructing of reality to finally meet the already-there reality.
In line with the work of Berger and Luckmann (1966), social constructivism sets itself the task of accounting for the construction of reality. However, authors with approaches as different as those of Gieryn, Stengers, Massumi, Latour and Coccia have similarly warned about the impossibility of constructivism escaping relativism on one side, and socio-constructivism on another. In the first instance, it fails to account for the specificity of different constructions of reality, such as scientific facts; in the second, it reduces constructed reality to the symbolic only (i.e. non-material), or turns into an ex-post ‘de-constructivism’ from which material objects are excluded.
To avoid this, these authors propose to replace constructivism with the idea of ‘composition’ (Latour, 2003: 42), production, or establishment (‘instauration’) (Souriau, 1956), while building on pragmatism. In his outline of a pragmatist alternative to Kant and Descartes, James (1996 [1912]: 216) lays the foundations of a radical constructivism. The subject does not transcribe the object that he or she perceives into another substrate; there is no discontinuity between the perceived object and the real object: ‘Thought and actuality are made of one and the same fabric, which is the fabric of experience in general.’ Here, perception becomes another name for the experience that establishes sensible reality. James, however, stays with the method without going into a detailed account.
Some psychologists and philosophers, namely Mead and Morris (1972 [1938]) and Merleau-Ponty (1964, 2012 [1945]), have further explored and discussed the emergence of the world through an active perception, and have thus profoundly revisited perception. More recently, authors inspired by Science and Technology Studies (STS) have pursued the analysis by rejecting both the understanding of perception as the simple ‘recognition’ of an already-there-empirical-world and a pure mind-made construction of it: Latour (1986) and Lynch (1988) on scientists, Bessy and Chateauraynaud (1993) in the case of auctioneers, Goodwin (1994) on lawyers and researchers, and Hennion (2001) and Teil and Hennion (2004) on amateurs. All of them give an account in ‘real time’ – and not as an ex-post deconstruction – of the assessment and evaluation activities that guide the emergence of objects in the various activities of these actors: amateurs do not like likable things, they make themselves like the things they like (Teil, 2004). 5 However, just as STS had to explore the intricacies of scientific activity to reinterpret the notion of truth, so too the pragmatic study of perception requires that the role of the ‘body’ be made explicit while perceiving.
Having a Body
Phenomenology attempts to think of perception as the emergence of objects. Merleau-Ponty (2012 [1945]) explains how the ‘true cube’ becomes detached from its visual perspectives in the exploratory activity that grasps it again and again. This reflection leads him to consider the ‘body’ involved in this activity. He points out that it is fundamentally different from the objects that emerge from activity, insofar as it refuses to be explored; it is not ‘distanceable’, nor is it objectifiable. Merleau-Ponty is not, of course, talking about the body we are ‘made of’, but about that unexplorable, active, feeling and affected body that he calls ‘the own body’.
In 2004, a special issue of Body & Society focused on embodiment, the acquisition of a body. Two of the contributors in this special issue deviated somewhat from the theme: Latour and Despret. They shifted the focus from ‘body’ to ‘affect’, but without returning to a study of interactions. They analyzed affect as ‘affectuation’, to use Berg and Akrich’s (2004) play on words; that is, an effectuation through affect (Despret, 2004): ‘Acquiring a body is thus a progressive enterprise that produces at once a sensory medium and a sensitive world’ (Latour, 2004: 207). But this process does not result in a ‘constructivist’ embodiment as developed in the other articles of the issue. It is synonymous with ‘being alive’, that is, being engaged or caught up in an ‘a/effectuation’, a ceaselessly renewed process of reality production. In this interpretation, the ‘own body’, to use Merleau-Ponty’s term, is therefore not an emergence; Latour (2004: 206) makes of it ‘an interface’, a concept that needs to be clarified.
To be alive, or to have a body, he says, means: ‘to be moved into action by the contrast between two entities’ (Latour, 2004: 209); it is therefore to be engaged in a process of emergence of reality which is fed by differences. This process is supported by various pieces of equipment: just as legs establish a world to walk through, sensory organs and an odor kit establish a world to smell, recorded music establishes a world to listen to, and telescopes and the accumulation of hours spent scanning and describing the sky establish a world to see. And all the emerging realities are constantly changing, along with the activity and the equipment employed. This detour through the ‘body’ allows us to refine the pragmatist view of perception as life, an equipped activity of a/effectuation. Experience does not produce a body associated with or supporting a perceiving subject; it is perception.
Returning to our introductory problem, does this pragmatist stance allow us to reinterpret the differences between experts and consumers? To answer this question, this article proposes to turn to a terrain that lends itself a little better to examination. Rather than consumers, I have chosen to compare wine lovers to experts in sensory analysis, both of which have the advantage of developing an ‘intense’ tasting activity. 6 The reduction to one limited sensory dimension makes the comparison of the two processes of reality production easier and the divergences more salient. Realities are ‘productions’, that is, outcomes of complex activities fed by a variety of interacting beings, material or not, collective or not, ideational or not. Still, reality production is always a re-production of a reality ‘in-the-making’. The use of the hyphen indicates that a re-production is not a ‘reproduction’ unless one would intend it to be.
Throughout the text, I take full advantage of the polysemy of the word taste. In everyday language, it is a synonym of flavor and encompasses olfaction and taste stricto sensu; it applies equally to the taster and the tasted product, and fits with rankings of preferences and inventories of qualities differentiating between flavors. In a nutshell, it accounts for the variety of the tasting productions, without presuming too early on what the forthcoming differentiations in its signification may turn out to be.
The article starts with an analysis of the way experts and amateurs depart from ordinary experience and feed a particular ‘interest’ in food or wine flavors. The second part focuses on the performance olfactory experts must achieve to produce objective ‘flavor descriptions’ of food products. The following section turns to wine lovers’ practices and their various requirements with respect to their perception. After comparing the particular regimes of existence enacted by the sensory experts and the wine lovers, I come back in the last part to the notions of perception and body.
II Challenging the Immediacy of Perception
Amateurs and experts are not ordinary ‘consumers’ and the more they practice and develop their activity, the more they differentiate themselves from them. But this gradual differentiation requires an initial start that triggers their activity.
The discussion of tastes, of likes and dislikes, whether with regard to food, drinks, or any other sensory experience, can be both an ordinary and a favorite conversational topic. Tastes often guide consumption – one buys and drinks what one likes – and equip social relations. We wonder what a person’s ‘tastes’ are before choosing a gift or offering food. Tastes and qualities are not definitive and their inventory is updated ad hoc. A wine consumer I met, who definitely preferred red to white wines, was surprised when he enjoyed a white Portuguese Vino Verde. On another occasion he noticed that he disliked a wine that he had considered to be one of his favorites. His conclusion, however, was not that his tastes had changed this time, but rather that the brand had ‘gone downhill’ due to its success. This gustatory activity of so-called ‘ordinary’ wine drinkers calls for two comments.
First, ‘ordinary’ wine-drinkers consider tastes to be a ‘given’, immediately revealed through experience. They see them as a matter of ‘perceptive faith’, as Merleau-Ponty (2012 [1945]) puts it, which is not a belief. It is not associated with any alternative ontological ‘norm’. It is a ‘faith’ because the reality it establishes is obvious and unquestionable, which makes it radically different from sensory experts’ reality.
Unlike the above consumers, experts in sensory analysis start by challenging ordinary experience a priori and putting its ‘appearances’ to the test. Amateurs share this difference. Still, their questioning of experience is less a systematic doubt than an exploration of wine, which intensifies their tasting activity substantially and thus enriches the resulting reality of the wine. But amateurs are rarely collectors who are interested only in the inventory of the variety of wines. Their exploration of tastes is often accompanied by a reflexive questioning and testing of quality that to some extent brings them closer to the experts (Teil, 2021).
Both amateurs and experts share a common gap with ‘ordinary’ or ‘common’ ways of ‘perceiving’, as studied in phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty, 2012 [1945]), sociology (Bourdieu, 1980; Thévenot, 1994), and sensory anthropology (Gélard, 2016; Pink, 2011): perception is no longer straightforward and immediate; nor are tastes unquestioned characteristics of objects or subjects. It is instead an activity from which another gustatory reality emerges.
Yet, as longstanding controversies between amateurs and scientists (Allard, 1999; Bar-Yoshafat, 2013; Barthes, 1975; Mount, 2006; Peynaud and Blouin, 1996; Santos et al., 2019; Star and Griesemer, 1989; Verlaine, 2010) suggest, amateur and expert activities do not lead to the emergence of the same realities. Scientists claim that amateurs ‘like’ rather than ‘know’; amateurs conversely accuse scientists of producing a reduced understanding of objects: ‘a wine is not made to be sniffed, it is made to be drunk’ says Jayer (in Rigaux, 2012: 15). These claims, however, say little about the divergent realities emerging from scientific knowledge on the one hand and passionate knowing on the other. This article aims at making it more explicit.
Scientists’ and Amateurs’ Differentiation
Hennion and Teil (2004) interpret the difference between amateurs and ordinary drinkers as the special ‘attention’ that amateurs pay to the wine they drink, unlike other drinkers. This is also the interpretation of James in Principles of Psychology. Attention appears there as a kind of regulation of the sensory and intellectual flow between consciousness and unconsciousness which brings out and selects certain sensory or intellectual aspects. However, this notion is still very much influenced by the interpretation of attention as a cognitive capacity to transform perception; it is therefore hardly compatible with the pragmatic interpretation discussed here.
Yet James (1892: 227), citing Helmholtz, also emphasizes the capacity of ‘attention’ to renew perception: ‘If we wish to keep [attention] upon one and the same object, we must seek constantly to find out something new about the latter’. Helmholtz points to a rupture, a change of disposition or activity: the object-interested and attentive person engages in an activity that renews reality. However, as with the idea of attention, we must avoid thinking of this renewal as the action of a subject. To this end, Latour (2004: 207) turns the process on its head. While commenting upon the sensory change experienced by a trainee during his or her apprenticeship, he says that before expert olfactory learners started the training and ‘became interested’, ‘the chemicals [. . .] bombarded their nostrils to no avail’; afterwards, they were ‘effected by the influence of the chemicals’.
This interest in or departure from the perceptual evidence initiates the activities of both the amateur and the scientist, leading thus to a change in experience. However, as Pomian (2003) explains, amateurs and scientists have gradually become differentiated. Centuries ago, in Europe, the immediacy of perception was challenged by ‘specialists’ who owned or were at the head of collections of objects gathered or accumulated over time; these ‘curious’, ‘erudite’, ‘knowledgeable’ or ‘amateur’ people were concerned with the inventory and recollection of all remarkable and extraordinary features of the world (Pomian, 1987). With the Enlightenment, this understanding of ‘curiosity’ started to split into two different notions: the curiosity of scientists in search of nature’s regularities and ‘truth’, on the one hand, and an erudite curiosity which marveled at nature’s diversity, on the other. Allard (1999) explains how the Enlightenment philosophers, while promoting the ‘true’ appreciation of art, turned the activity of erudite connoisseurs into an endless, shallow and ridiculous need for possessions.
Amateurs and scientists have since developed distinct regimes of activity with divergent understandings of perception and its accuracy. In sensory analysis, a scientific discipline that developed throughout the 20th century, ‘true’ perception must be protected from undesired influences and biases. Amateurs, on the other hand, engage in the exploration of selected types of objects, plants, mirrors, wines, etc., which leads them to accumulate sensory experiences, yet with different constraints. The two activity regimes they feed are discussed in each of the following two sections.
III Smelling ‘Objectively’
The activity of the experts, who are ‘interested by’ and ‘in’ smells, is equipped with instruments and techniques such as odor kits which contribute to their production of a rich olfactory world (Teil, 1998, 2019). Still, the interested olfactory experts also actively question and put sensory evidence to the test by submitting their tasting results to a series of scientific constraints in order to produce a ‘true’ taste.
A ‘Reliable’ Olfactory Classification Instrument
Even though olfactory experts are human instruments, they must demonstrate the reliability expected from any measurement instrument, that is, general accuracy, which guarantees comparability of the different measures and repeatability (Pritchett Mangan, 1992).
When it comes to reliability, repeatability is a keystone found throughout all sensory evaluation manuals. In the authors’ psychophysical understanding of perception, objects have ‘pre-existing’ and ‘intrinsic’ characteristics which, due to ‘external influences’, generate variable ‘representations’ of the objects. Repeatability in odor classification is therefore interpreted as the result of an ‘uninfluenced’ and ‘un-muddled’ perception of the object’s stimuli that is a ‘true’ sensory representation of the object’s odor itself. Stabilized repeated tasting accounts can therefore be said to be ‘descriptions’ of the real taste (Latour, 1987). However, this performance is the result of an active ongoing training and monitoring of the sensory panelists.
The Stabilization of the Tasting Results
To achieve repeatability, all future panelists undergo ‘a lengthy, disciplined and uniform course of training and exposure [. . .], with the intention of converting variable human observers into reliable measuring instruments’ (Lawless, 1984: 122). The assessment of repeatability nevertheless requires that tasting results be made comparable. As Phillips (2016) and Shapin (2016) show, experts use odor languages specifically designed as a code, to draw a univocal link between words and a particular sensory experience. In doing so, they select olfactory notes of interest and standardize individual experiences, thus facilitating their comparability.
The tastings take place in the booths of sensory analysis laboratories where light, sounds, surrounding odors, ambient temperature, dishes for presenting food, sample temperature, time of day, physiological satiety of the body, and so on are regulated and standardized. Even the sensory apparatus of the tasters themselves is monitored. Fribourg and Sarfati (1989) enumerate the long list of prohibitions imposed on olfactory experts: no perfume, cosmetics, smoking, or activities that may alter the functioning of their sensory organs in any way. Standardization includes the calibration of the individual panelists on their panel and also, more widely, within the larger experts’ collective. Once comparable, the repeatability of the tasting results can be assessed and enhanced through training. Tasting is, however, not a deterministic operation. Like any other measuring instrument, sensory panels and panelists are subjected to continuous monitoring with regard to accuracy, discrimination, and repeatability, to identify any ‘shifts’ or ‘drifts’ affecting their olfactory activity.
All the above training, standardization, precautions, and maintenance allow sensory panel members to objectify and name sample odors according to a predefined olfactory language in a repeatable enough way. Yet the achievement of repeatability also requires that ‘recalcitrant’ data be sidelined.
The Sidelining of ‘Hedonism’
Noble et al. (1984: 108) argue that hedonic assessments ‘generally have different meaning to each individual and cannot be readily defined or standardized [. . .]. This requirement eliminates terms such as well-rounded, good or bad, (un)balanced, rich, vinous, young, old, etc.’ in the case of wine. Objects in the ‘objective’ pre-existing world can have wooden, dewy, or rubbery shades, but not good or bad ones since, as Hume (1957 [1765]) puts it: ‘Beauty is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty’.
According to the psychophysical theory of perception, hedonistic values are created through strictly human processing by the person perceiving the stimuli emitted by the object. They are therefore psychologically, culturally, and socially produced, and then biologically translated into sensations of ‘pleasure’. Hence, the term ‘hedonism’ (Cabanac, 1971). This is the justification put forward by sensory analysis for the a priori exclusion of hedonic evaluations.
As Goodwin (2000) and Coopmans et al. (2014) point out, scientific ‘representations’ are never exhaustive; they sort out and focus on ‘relevant’ differences for which the present study suggests an interpretation. Still, relevance has a special meaning here. Hedonic assessments refer to a set of olfactory assessments, which sensory analysis does not manage to make repeatable. They therefore need to be excluded from the ‘relevant’, that is, ‘objective’ sensory data, along with all recalcitrant criteria, such as those listed in Noble’s above example.
The fact that psychophysical theorists of perception can talk about disturbances is a direct consequence of the particular structure of the empiricist experience as underlined by Merleau-Ponty (2012 [1945]): the world-to-perceive is pre-existing, and can thus serve as a reference – albeit unattainable – to evaluate the respective adequacy of the different perceptions ‘describing it’. Experts’ repeatability ‘allows’ sensory analysis to interpret the smells they account for as resulting from the samples. This formatting, which transforms an internal ‘feeling’ into the effect of an ‘external cause’, is not just a matter of interpretation or a way of looking at perception; it crucially depends upon the expert’s performance on the objectivity criteria, and the exclusion of all those (classifications, participants and panels) that do not perform well enough. Amateurs also develop a way of knowing, which nevertheless complies with other constraints.
IV Exploring Wine and Its Qualities
Like the experts, amateurs are interested in the taste of wines. They describe themselves as open-minded explorers of diversity whose tastings enrich the reality of wine tastes. However, just as the repeatability of experts can deteriorate at any time, so too the passion of amateurs is likely to wane if not adequately nurtured (Teil, 2021).
Amateurs not only multiply wine tastings, they also strive to push back obstacles that might limit their exploration. To magnify their perception of quality and its many differences, they procure increasingly sophisticated tasting instruments, such as smell-intensifying glasses, decanters to oxygenate young wines or decant old ones, thermometers to adjust the wine’s temperature, spittoons to delay the effects of alcohol, and odor languages to account for the variety of the wine tastes. To alleviate the pressure of prices, they follow auction sales and watch for disfunctions of the market or delays in price reputation adjustments. Endeavoring to avoid confining their consumption to particular sets of wines, they suspiciously question their own tastes in search of possible social framing, and protect themselves from ‘social determinations’ or ‘arbitrary taste norms’ through blind tasting protocols. Finally, they sideline their personal likes, dislikes and habits.
A Momentary Attraction to Science
Language plays an essential role in amateurs’ activities, where it highlights the variety of tasting results. Faced with this diversity, it is quite common, at first, for amateurs to try to acquire a ‘trustworthy’ perception, backed by professional expertise and the techniques of sensory analysis. They thus start to learn tasting and accurate wine language by purchasing guides, enrolling in courses, and assessing their tasting proficiency through blind tests. Sometimes, this drives the activity to a dead-end when the tasters feel they are unable to achieve sufficient proficiency and consequently give up. More often, ‘true’ perception soon appears as a ‘reductionist’ point of view, or even an arbitrary norm, which puts a double brake on their exploration of taste, ruling out the question of good quality and limiting their exploration. Despite this distancing from science, blind tasting remains a crucial technique. It supports an important requirement: being able to taste wines oneself, in order to assess them. Taste must be a co-production of the taster and the wine. Amateurs’ exploration cannot consist in imagining, inventing, or dreaming of the wine world. The denunciation of ‘label-drinkers’, those individuals who just repeat what others think about the wine, echoes this imperative.
The ‘Un-stabilization’ of Experience
Throughout tasters’ exploration, the range of wine tastes expands and amateurs’ tastes change. Their tasting activity usually unfolds following a ‘career’ or ‘trajectory’, which reflects changes in the wines – and amateurs’ tastes as well as their tasting tools and techniques.
The accumulation of tasting experiences contributes to increasing amateurs’ mastery of its organization. The consumption rules and equipment previously required to magnify perception and shield perception from influences are turned into techniques to control these influences in order to present a wine at its best. This pragmatic turn extends amateurs’ wine exploration from the discovery of wine taste complexity to the production of tastes through well-mastered practices.
Yet this increasing mastery does not constitute steps towards a more precise understanding of tasters’ own taste and a more accurate quality assessment. Once the normative understanding of tasting is outdated, differences in assessments are seen as evidence of some of the multiple
But even so, amateurs’ passion does not open onto a limitless realm and activity; it is sapped by repetition, predictability and boredom, which they endeavor to prevent thanks to revirginization techniques like momentary abstinence, for instance. The refreshed examination of wine, awaiting unexpected manifestations, new facets, and surprises, contributes to fueling the ceaseless renewal of wine that keeps their passion alive. This is also when they again resort to blind tasting, but for new purposes. When the result of a tasting threatens to be foreseeable, they use it to renew tasting, by depurating it from all preconceived ideas. While blind tasting is a major support for the stabilization of sensory experts’ ‘true’ perception, in amateurs’ hands it prevents any crystallization of experience and serves to keep it unstable. In both cases, continuation of the activity needs discarding irrelevant experiences that do not fit with the constraints they impose on it: scientific reliability and repeatability for the former, renewal for the latter.
V Contrasting the Endless Scientific and Passionate Productions of Reality
For sensory experts as well as amateurs, wine taste is a matter of concern, which experts transform into matters of fact, and amateurs into matters of passion. A detailed examination of the activities that produce them makes it possible to clarify their differences.
Even though wine amateurs’ and experts’ activities lead to contrasting results, they share a certain number of features. For both, reality is not taken-for-granted: tastes are not straightforward givens. All these tasters are engaged in an activity aimed at particular tasting performance where taste is co-produced by wine and taster, and true or complete knowledge is never achieved. This makes their activity appear as an endless quest. Dedication and interest, which amateurs as well as scientists consider to be a necessary psychological characteristic, is the signal that there is ongoing activity; there is still something to explore in wine and truth has not yielded all of its secrets. The result of their endeavors is also unpredictable: amateurs are never sure of the results of a tasting, while experts likewise search for truth without knowing in advance where it lies.
In both cases, olfactory or taste reality is the emerging result of their continued activity. Amateurs’ passion strengthens step by step, with the erosion of tastes, qualities, and consumption rules, all seen as predictors of the wine experience, while expert tastes, on the contrary, become ever more affirmed with the accumulation of experience. The work of sensory analysis science illustrates the emergence of a unique sensible reality, which reliable tasters can ‘recognize’ once stabilized. It is the very purpose of sensory sciences to run reliable tasting instruments, to make taste explicit and achieve its stabilization to make it describable. Amateurs, however, endeavor to keep taste somehow floating, uncertain, undetermined. Their passion dies when faced with a world that is set, just like panel members fail when unable to produce the world identically.
Experts’ efforts to perform reliable smells of objects lead them to multiply the tastings, yet their results are strictly ranked as more or less reliable data by the reliability tests. Amateurs’ tasting results, on the other hand, accumulate without any strongly coercive ranking. Therefore, because they are not unified, the realities that emerge from amateurs’ tastings are multiple and elusive.
This progressive divergence between matters of fact and matters of passion is fostered by different assessments of advances in their activities: scientific reliability on the one hand, taste renewal on the other. Experts, who endeavor to increasingly stabilize their perceptual experience, produce a stabilized tasting reality. In contrast, amateurs, who constantly ‘un-stabilize’ their experience of wine, fostering newness, surprise and uncertainty, continuously allow renewed tastes and reality to emerge.
The knowledge of amateurs is not that of experts. However, the difference coming out of this study is not a matter of the shibboleth of Latour, Stengers and Despret (Latour, 2004) that characterizes good science. Amateurs question the world in a particularly open way. But the knowledge they derive is not good science, open to unexpected answers, as opposed to the ‘bad’ science pinpointed by the above shibboleth. Furthermore, the stabilization of scientific knowledge is never definitive and always subject to critical reopening of questions that had provisionally been closed, as does Despret. The vitality of science is nourished not only by a deepening of truth, but also by the re-questioning of its objects, which revives the stabilization process. The difference from the experts lies more in the absence of the very singular requirement of science to add to the exploration of the world its stabilization.
Reality Production Regimes
The pragmatic stance adopted in this study was worthwhile, for it helped to deepen the difference between experts and amateurs, and revealed a mode of production of reality by amateurs that is not a failure of science. It resituates perception and its production of reality in the activity, with its different collectives, equipment and constraints, and confirms the importance that Latour (2013) grants to the constraints of veridiction in his inventory of modes of existence.
Unsurprisingly, the olfactory experts’ work corresponds to Latour’s scientific ‘reference’ regime and its own veridiction constraints: scientific reliability. The present analysis emphasizes the activity, tasting protocols, instruments and tests necessary to produce a stabilized ‘nature’. Amateurs’ un-stabilized tastes, on the other hand, illustrate the ‘fictional’ regime and its particular renewal constraint. ‘Fiction’ in Latour’s analysis refers not to imagination but to fabrication. Amateurs continuously fuel a process of regeneration of tastes, which is not only fed by the amateur: tastes have to result from tasting that is a co-contribution by the taster and the wine – a prerequisite they share with sensory experts. Thus, the reality of wine lovers does not oppose an ‘invented’ intellectual work with a verified material construction of experts.
Finally, the pragmatic interpretation of this study provides another explanation of our starting issue. The absence of correlations between the tasting comments of expert and ‘ordinary’ tasters is therefore surprising only in light of the realist postulate which makes the mistake of imposing the constraints of the scientific regime of reality production on another regime of activity.
Back to Immediate Realities
Ordinary consumers add another mode of existence of reality to the inventory; they are not engaged in any exploration as such, and their veridiction constraints are also very different. Their immediate reality flows with the unfolding of activity.
Amateurs and experts differ from ‘ordinary’ consumers because they engage in an activity of production of taste reality where taste is no longer a ‘given’. The activity of the latter involves a system of veridiction that is much less explicit than that of the former. It has nevertheless given rise to numerous proposals that make taste reality the product of habitus or acculturation.
Bourdieu’s (1980) essay on practical sense clearly illustrates this mode of veridiction: the continuity of action that causes to exist. 7 But the course of action can be interrupted: the ‘sense of the game’ becomes meaningless, reality loses its immediacy, becomes uncertain, and must be reconstructed to allow the action to be resumed. Unlike experts and amateurs, however, the in-stabilization of experience is not followed by a re-production according to an alternative mode of veridiction.
Interconnected Realities
Following Merleau-Ponty and his claim that ‘being-in-the-world’ is not the result of a world-perceiving body, this analysis has tried to account for a variety of realities that emerge from experience without resorting to the notion of ‘body’. This has allowed emphasis on definite core features of the collective activity at work, while producing reality. But contrarily to what the lack of correlations between amateur and expert tasting comments may suggest, the realities stemming from different activity regimes do not stand as independent productions. This is where tastes come back into play.
The diversity of realities that emerge from experience does not enclose the actors in idiosyncratic watertight bubbles, impervious to any external understanding, as a commonplace of perception would have it. Nor do the proliferating realities of amateurs dissolve entirely in the maintenance of social links or ‘phatic communion’, as Lehrer (2009) maintains.
Unquestioned reality is neither common nor individual. Reality simply is, until some failure or disagreement requires its contributors to re-produce it. However, in this re-production process, the verbalization of reality participates in the intermingling of experiences. The notion of ‘taste’ is a crucial resource in this respect. The wine drinker in the introduction presents himself as having particular ‘tastes’. Is this a way of claiming an identity? Or is it an introduction to his gustatory reality? His ‘tastes’ that he tells me about are a product and an essential driver of the action, insofar as they allow me to adjust to his reality. Whether with regards to cinema, music, or wine, do we not choose the critic based on their ‘tastes’, which allow us to translate their comments into another gustatory reality?
The pragmatic standpoint brings out a broader interpretation of the idea of ‘taste’. Tastes are no longer a subjective representation of an objective reality, nor an embodied culture or social structure, but an instrument of translation that articulates and entangles different gustatory realities, an essential kingpin of collective life. And this situation is most likely not peculiar to either wine or taste. The arsenal of psychological traits that we deal with does indeed suggest a similar translation between realities.
This reinterpretation of the notion of taste, which would bring it closer to a ‘boundary object’ (Star and Griesemer, 1989), contributes to redefining the field of research in the sociology and anthropology of taste by placing the emphasis on living together rather than on questions of identity. However, the ‘boundary object’ dimension of taste should not be reduced too quickly to an instrument for coordinating activities between different ‘social worlds’, as suggested by Trompette and Vinck (2009, 2010). It strips taste of its reality, just as reducing language to a mere tool for social interaction strips it of its capacity to signify. Fujimura (1992) sees this as an effect of the overly narrow focus of works on ‘boundary objects’: they concentrate on cooperation with scientists and do not address the issue of stabilizing scientific facts. Their emphasis on the tools used both to coordinate action and to produce experiential accounts leaves open the question of the activity-emerging realities and their coexistence. The use of blind tasting by amateurs and experts is enlightening here: depending on the activity regime in which it is used, the same tasting protocol contributes to the emergence of realities with modes of existence as divergent as fiction and reference. Yet the flexibility of the tool does not ensure the possibility of translations between realities.
Re-produced realities interpenetrate, articulate, hybridize and, more simply, coexist, and thus contribute to what Latour (2004: 213), taking up the term coined by James (1895: 10), proposes to call the ‘multiverse’, in other words ‘the universe freed from its premature unification’. The integration of the question of modes of existence into the above analyses should make it possible to explain in greater detail the possibilities of articulation, interpenetration or coexistence of the activities and realities produced. This would enable us to re-examine, for example, the declining pre-eminence of scientific reality, as well as the comparison of other non-scientific modes of existence.
