Eating With The Eyes: The Spect-Act And Cooking Shows as Semio-Affective Modulators of Career Development and Life Projects
- Author (as listed in source)
- Cristian Jofre-Barrera
- Venue (source-reported)
- Routledge
- Status (source-reported, not externally verified)
- In press
This work is not yet published. Stage and venue are reported by the author. Bibliographic details come from the author’s CV and have not been externally verified.
This chapter reads cooking shows as semio-affective modulators of life projects and career trajectories. It proposes the spect-act: the recursive coupling of watching and acting in the interval the screen opens, where held-back action allows an affective and semiotic rehearsal of voices and futures. Drawing on constructive memory, the Deleuzian virtual, dialogical analysis and intelligent career theory, it links viewing to career capital, while noting that the screen cannot supply procedural mastery.
Cooking programs operate as semio-affective modulators that recalibrate meaning and anticipation within life projects and career trajectories. Located at the intersection of the psychology of food and cultural psychology, the analysis proposes the concept of the spect-act to name the recursive coupling between spectating and acting that unfolds in the interval opened by the screen, where the inhibition of immediate action makes possible an affective and semiotic rehearsal of voices, positions, and futures. Memory, reconceived in the constructive tradition (Bartlett, 1932; Wagoner, 2017, 2024), operates as imaginative reconstruction grounded in an affective attitude rather than as the retrieval of inert traces. The Deleuzian virtual (Deleuze, 1968/1994) designates a dimension of the real that insists in the tension between the factual present and unattainable images, reorganizing the present rather than postponing it toward an imagined future. Dialogical analysis (Bakhtin, 1986; Gillespie & Cornish, 2010) renders explicit the heteroglossic texture of the utterance and the perspectival layers through which the viewer is interpellated. Intelligent career theory (Arthur, Claman, & DeFillippi, 1995; Zikic, 2014) links the semio-affective process to the formation of career capital across motivational, social, and dispositional dimensions, while procedural mastery remains the province of deliberate practice that the screen cannot supply. Algorithmic platforms, reality competition formats, and influencer economies make the spect-act visible at work; resistance, audience differentiation, and the prolongation of viewing into everyday decision constitute its open horizon.
Keywords: Spect-act; Virtuality; Life project; Career development; Psychology of food