Tomato bashing

Résumé 0

Supreme irony: current research on tomato bashing is still based on a spoof paper written by Georges Perec. His 1974 publication entitled Cantatrix Sopranica L. focuses on the lyrical impact of tomato throwing upon female opera singers. Beyond the game that consists in poetically and ironically contributing to this editorial field and mimicking the postures of academic speech, there remain epistemological consequences exceeding the references intertwined in the text under study. To further the investigation beyond irony, we must start again from somewhere below it, for irony seems, in and of itself – but can irony, a distancing process per se, be read in itself? – to terminate the investigation. Rather than adding to the parodic commentary of a scientific parody, we shall take this spoof as an opportunity to deal with the counter-psychic coordinates of interlocked failures: the failure of the artist under attack; Perec’s mock failure, which is meant to deride the stylistic wreck of academia; the frosty reception of his paper (so entombed in its Perecquian bibliographical maze that it misses many a blind spot, such as the industrial dimension of the morphologic standardisation of tomatoes, the cultural history of vegetal projectiles, the complex relations between science and literature, etc.) and, after too many attempts, our own failure in relishing the Perecquian concentrate and rigorously assessing the quality of the throw or/and ductility of the projectile in relation to the antisimplicity of the gestural parameters, the internal and external motives initiating such attacks and how the victim can be stimulated into broadening their range of theatrical pleasures, the reactivity of the spectators that do not have any tomato, of those whose tomatoes remain un-thrown, of those using alternative projectiles or/and opting for alternative targets, and the historical aspects of this practice (from the evolution of aesthetic punishments to the commercial and agricultural genealogy of the tomato, as well as the political and poetical consequences brought about by the successive standardisations that have been operated on various scales).