Comments on: Tastee Wheat

By: Kyle Bickoff

Kyle Bickoff — Tue, 19 May 2015 05:49:08 +0000

Hi Manon,
That’s a really great prompt and set of questions. I think your question about Tastee Wheat is a smart one. While the idea of ‘taste,’ is an interesting one, it’s similar to questions like, “is the red I see actually the blue you see” and vice-versa. While there are suggestions that varying amounts of color rods and cones in the eyes (http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120209-do-we-all-see-the-same-colours) actually can affect the way we perceive colors, there have been similar sort of notes on taste as well. BUT, the most interesting answer to these questsions doesn’t speak to the biological, but rather the hypothetical, as you suggest. Tastee Wheat, while it tastes like slop is meant to be ‘objectively real’ in the context of the film, while the brands, and the steak, and the wine, in the film might taste pretty good, they’re false. Within the matrix, there is no ‘original’ steak, and the taste of steak is just a copy with no original (Baudrillard’s third level of the sign-order). And the collection of these abstractions are what Cypher chooses to embrace. Although the hyperreality of the matrix is a false, constructed reality, it seems ‘more real’ than ‘reality’ to Cypher, and thus he accepts it. In the context of the film this is not noble, by any means–particularly since he betrays and murders his colleagues in order to acquire it–but given the circumstances, like Leonard Shelby, he prefers to believe in this hyperreality.

By: Ruth

Ruth — Mon, 11 May 2015 20:04:34 +0000

So, part of the problem of defining a real is that it depends on individual perceptions of what the real is. When we talked about Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell part of our debate considered how much individual perceptions affected our relationship with the reality surrounding us. I am skeptical of how far attributing individual perceptions to definitions of reality can go, like the endless debates that occur when asked if we all see the same color blue, since it creates an impossibility of ‘knowing’ and limits experiences to the individual. It is obvious to say that limiting reality (or the absence thereof) to the individual takes away from the experience of the collective, but I’m wondering if this is part of why the matrix (or any border between reality and hyper-reality)broke down.
The matrix operates on the collective minds of the people who inhabit it. similarly, outside the matrix also operates on the collective community found in Zion, but even in a smaller scale, on the inside of the Nebuchadnezzar. Part of what builds the community is their collective experience of being ‘outside’ the matrix and a collective assumption that they have escaped, But, as Morpheus and Cypher both point out, in different ways, their experience of the ‘real’ and the ‘alternate’ real is still reliant on their perceptions. The enforced collectivity within the matrix has only been traded for a social collective that for some, Cypher, is still unsatisfactory.
When the conversation of Tastee Wheat happens it brings up the issues of what is real and what isn’t and if a ‘real’ even exists, but also, how ‘reality’ is a mix of individual and collective experience. Like Kayla points out, we have individual tastes based on brands and ideas of how things should taste, but those brands also involve a collective. Brands might advertise towards certain groups of people, different regions have different ideas of what food is good and markets change from place to place. That, way the collective comes to understand the brand as a group and have expectations about it. The individual’s experience with the product/object is still separate but heavily influenced and affected by it.
Reality becomes questionable when the individual and the collective come to odds against each other, but like trying to escape the matrix, escaping the collective mind is impossible. Even though the individual might be aware of the influence of the collective it still influences their perceptions even as a negative sort of experience, being driven to do something because it is the opposite of the group is still being influenced by the group. I am tempted to argue, after this very long exposition, that Tastee Wheat tastes like whatever you want it to, but your experience of tasting will always be infected by a collective understanding of what Tastee Wheat should taste like. In the same way, reality is whatever you perceive it to be, but that perception is always experienced through the lens of the collective experience. We question reality because we see different versions of it all the time going on around us. Hyper-reality, or alternate reality, hides a hope that somewhere, there is a space where the individual can experience a real without the infiltration of the collective, or, within a collective with the same perceptions and experiences as the individual.

By: Collin Lam

Collin Lam — Mon, 11 May 2015 14:51:58 +0000

Also, this is great. It’s the article that I mentioned about pumpkin spice lattes and Baudrillard’s simulation/simulacra.

http://www.critical-theory.com/understanding-jean-baudrillard-with-pumpkin-spice-lattes/

By: Collin Lam

Collin Lam — Mon, 11 May 2015 14:50:06 +0000

I have always loved the “Tastee Wheat” moment in the Matrix. For the characters in the movie, they have lost all potential, original referent for taste or any sensory experience. The distinct lack of agriculture in the “desert of the real” is supplanted by the agricultural endeavor of the machines to “grow” people. The sources of object sensation, such as Tastee Wheat, chicken, the sun, or what-have-you, can only be imagined as objects of language-based source code by the machines, who can only approximate the experience of those objects. Hence, why “chicken tastes like everything.” Taste and sensory experience become a purely cognitive experience based on approximations of a reality that is not there. But, the question then remains: is taste and sensory experience something more than a purely cognitive experience? Like Morpheus says to Neo:

What is real? How do you define ‘real’? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then ‘real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.

What marks “real” sensation, if sensation is an always already cognitive event? Like Kayla points out, we only know what to expect of “wheat” from its juxtaposition against “Tastee Wheat.” Our understanding of our own sensory experience comes from the realization of difference. The feeling of the sun on your skin is no different in the “real” world than it is in the Matrix, but it is different from standing under a light bulb. We know through something being what it is not. It is turtles all the way down. I think the question that always arises for me is: if our experience of the world is indistinguishable from simulated experiences, why are we so fascinated with the “real” experience? Is festishization of the “real” or “real” experience only a way to generate a system of power between those who have and those who have not?

By: Kayla Harr

Kayla Harr — Sat, 09 May 2015 00:37:24 +0000

I appreciate your entire analysis of Tastee Wheat and the lack of referents in The Matrix, but I am especially interested in your final questions. Mouse’s point about the lack of an accessible referent for Tastee Wheat in the film’s world seems directly applicable to our own experience. In our world, a product’s particular taste, quality, and authenticity is essentially determined through brands, labels, and advertising. A particular set of signifiers is all we have to determine our understanding of the signified, but in reality, there is no real signified to access independently that can confirm to us the characteristics of the authentic product. We don’t know what’s real, we only know what we are told, and in a consumerist society, it seems that the external signifiers of brand and packaging do the telling.

In the film, Mouse is able to theorize about the real taste of Tastee Wheat because he’s imagining the machines trying to simulate something that once existed in the real. But what does it mean for Tastee Wheat to be real? Can it ever be real, or does the very specificity of its role as a particular brand-name product that is representative of taste and wheat disclose its inherent position as simulation? In a way, the name Tastee Wheat owns up to the fact that it’s a simulation, an alteration of something that is presumably real (wheat). The name itself tells us how the wheat is supposed to taste, and indeed the way food products are represented in general instills in us our only understanding of how they should taste, creating a set of expectations, purporting to belong to the real but based on the simulation, that we use to assess the authenticity of other products. We can observe how this functions in the comparison between brand-name and generic products, marked by a simulation of difference that makes us prefer the brand-name and convince ourselves that physical (real) differences exist that allow us to distinguish between the two.