Documenting subjects: Performativity and audit culture in food production in northern Italy

Abstract

Linguistic labor in both verbal and documentary forms is essential to contemporary capitalist production, occurring across commodity‐chain processes and helping to produce particular neoliberal worker‐selves. In the case of food production, linguistic labor in the form of documentation is required at every stage of production to ensure food safety. These documents performatively constitute and effectively govern what they purport to depict. But they also exist in dynamic tension with moments of economic sociability, that is, consequential verbal interactions that permeate the production process. Such interactions may or may not be represented by the documents. In northern Italy the interplay between documents and sociability helps to produce notions like food safety and highlights the complex constraints and creativities that characterize modern food production. [documents, subjectivity, neoliberalism, audit culture, meat, food production, Italy] Il lavoro linguistico—sia nella forma verbale che in quella documentaria, che ha luogo nella catena produttiva e che contribuisce a generare specifici “lavoratori‐persone”, propri del neoliberalismo—è essenziale nella produzione capitalista contemporanea. Nel caso della produzione alimentare il lavoro linguistico, sotto forma di documentazione, è obbligatorio in tutte le fasi di produzione per assicurare la sicurezza alimentare. Questi documenti costituiscono performativamente quello che affermano di rappresentare e lo regolano efficacemente. Ma allo stesso tempo si trovano in un rapporto di tensione dinamica con i momenti di sociabilità economica, cioè, con le normali interazioni verbali che pervadono i processi di produzione. Queste interazioni possono o meno essere rappresentate dai documenti. Nel Nord d'Italia, il rapporto tra documenti e sociabilità aiuta a produrre nozioni come quella di sicurezza alimentare ed evidenzia i limiti e la creatività della produzione alimentare moderna. [documenti, soggettività, neoliberalismo, cultura dell'audit, carne, produzione alimentare, Italia]

Keywords and key words in AE

“…In Ahearn's () data, the word occurs in AE only in 2012 (used five times as a keyword), when it might have still been considered a trendy buzzword rather than the key dimension in anthropological thinking that it has become since. In AE ’s articles of the past four years, neoliberalism indexes a range of subjects, including the technomoral politics of NGOs, social movements, and the state in India (Bornstein and Sharma ), bread‐and‐butter politics in English council estates (I. Koch ), postneoliberal statecraft in Brazil (Biehl ), merit‐based financial aid for undocumented students in the United States (Flores ), audit culture in food production in Italy (Cavanaugh ), anthropology's role in critiquing the neoliberal university (Gusterson ), the racialization of US law schools (Tejani ), affective responses to the ruination of place in Algeria (Goodman ), and citizen science in the governance of radioactive contamination in Japan (Polleri ), among many other fascinating subjects.…”

The farming of trust:

“…As a technology of government that proliferated in the late 20th century, audit is designed to bring transparency and trust into relation with each other. Built on mechanisms that afford visibility and legibility, in which document keeping and inspections figure heavily, audit is supposed to generate other normative outcomes, such as public trust and accountability (Cavanaugh ). While audit culture is often thought to have emerged because of a “general decline of trust” (Brown , 746), audits themselves paradoxically demand that trust be placed in their procedures and conclusions (Strathern , 7).…”

“…Though documents are undoubtedly fetishized objects of audit practice, communicative encounters and interactions that take place between inspectors and food producers may be as crucial to production processes as the documents themselves. Among Italian heritage food producers, generating “economic sociability”—banter, laughter, and light conversation—with inspectors and other authorities proved vital to the functioning of neoliberal food production's audit cultures when documents themselves could “only ever partially represent what they were meant to capture” (Cavanaugh , 698). This sort of economic sociability, Jillian Cavanaugh (, 696) argues, helps produce what she terms “relationships of responsibility” that run parallel to, or buttress, “structures of accountability” established by documentary requirements of food safety inspections.…”

Linguistic Anthropology in 2017: It Could Be Otherwise

“…A great deal of work in linguistic anthropology has analyzed the semiotic processes whereby, in the contexts of nation‐state building and maintenance, variation and contingency of linguistic and social phenomena are erased or made to serve as foils for an essentialized unity. While such practices (and practices resisting them) remain relevant (e.g., Farquharson ; Karlander ; Westinen ), many of the works published by linguistic anthropologists in 2017 explicitly theorize and ethnographically situate political economies of language in contexts of neoliberal capitalism, in which linguistic and social variation are less erased than commodified (e.g., Cavanaugh ; Duane ; Heller ; LaDousa and Baldridge ; Leone‐Pizzighella and Rymes ; Lo and Choi ; Park ; Sharma and Phyak ; Weinberg ).…”

“…Both Gershon's and Urciuoli's projects entail attention to forms of surveillance enacted through, for example, paperwork and highly regulated meetings, which encourage workers and students to “consciously transform themselves” (Gershon , 228) in response to an institution's needs. Attention to the role of such techniques in splintering and reconstituting both tasks and workers is also taken up in Cavanaugh's () discussion of audit culture in food production. Based on ethnographic work with heritage food producers in Northern Italy, she focuses on the “linguistic labor” involved in the processes of documentation that are “required at every stage of production to ensure food safety” (691).…”