"Language Is A Virus" The Anarchives Volume 2 Issue 20 The Anarchives Published By The Anarchives The Anarchy Organization The Anarchives tao@lglobal.com Send your e-mail address to get on the list Spread The Word Pass This On... --/\-- PLATEAUS OF CONSUMPTION / / \ \ ---|--/----\--|--- The Biosemiotics of \/ \/ Consumer Fascism /\______/\ by Mark Burch burch@hawaii.edu -~ -~ -~ -~ -~ -~ -~ -~ -~ -~ -~ -~ -~ -~ -~ -~ -~ -~ -~ -~ -~ -~ PLATEAUS OF CONSUMPTION The Biosemiotics of Consumer Fascism Copylefted 1995 Mark Burch--incorporate these ideas into your lifestyle only as long as they stimulate you to higher levels of liberation "You think you'd rather hear about what you call 'life:' the growing organic Kartell. But it's only another illusion. A very clever robot. The more dynamic it seems to you, the more deep and dead, in reality, it grows. Look at the smokestacks, how they proliferate, fanning the wastes of original waste over greater and greater masses of city... Death converted into more death. Perfecting its reign, just as the buried coal grows denser and overlaid with more strata--epoch on top of epoch, city of top of ruined city. This is the sign of Death the impersonator." "These signs are real. They are also the symptoms of a process. The process follows the same form, the same structure. To apprehend it you will follow the signs. All talk of cause and effect is secular history, and secular history is a diversionary tactic...If you want the truth...you must look into the technology of these matters." "You must ask two questions: First, what is the real nature of synthesis? And then: What is the real nature of control?" --Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow A naked lunch is natural to us We eat reality sandwiches. But allegories are so much lettuce Don't hide the madness. --Allen Ginsberg INTRODUCTION: THE MENU This paper is a biosemiotic approach to understanding the last 500 years of global human relations in what is characterized as imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, and consumerism. These terms describe geometric and functional relations in a biosemiotic web that is coextensive with the biosphere of earth. Instead of considering food as culture, I invert the relation and consider culture as food. That is to say, the structure of much of our social relations and political economy is given by consumption. It's a dog eat dog world out there. Autonomous beings such as selves and cultures are digested and absorbed by precise mechanisms. Transnational capital (TNC) manufactures a culture of consumption in which its products go beyond extraneous commodities to being indispensable parts of our material culture. The strategies by which this is accomplished, such as commodity fetishism, are intriguing and in themselves reveal much about the interactions between cognition, culture, and physiology. The crux of my argument is that the consumer culture contains within it an oncomeme--a meme which causes proliferation of itself in much the same way that a oncovirus reproduces itself by taking over the communication processes of a cell and causing the cell to proliferate. This toxic culture devours the creamy semiotic filling of selves and cultures and leaves behind a hollow materialist shell which must consume in order to survive, to fill the void within. APPETIZER: THE BIOSEMIOTIC PARADIGM There are two types of relatedness in the organization of systems: autonomy and allonomy (Varela, 1979). Autonomy means self-law or self-government and represents generation, internal regulation, assertion of one's identity, definition from the inside out. Allonomy is synonymous with control, and represents consumption, input and output, assertion of the identity of other, definition from the outside in. Living systems can be understood as a nested hierarchy of autonomous systems, e. g., Margulis' theory of endosymbiotic evolution (Margulis, 1970). If one steps outside the usual anthropocentric definition of aliveness, one can see that there is a continuum of autonomous living systems from atoms, molecules, cells, organisms, and ecosystems to planets and solar systems. This is not a mystical or animistic belief; rather, for the sake of logical consistency, it is valuable to observe the homology between cellular metabolisms such as the citric acid cycle and nuclear metabolisms such as the Bethe cycle of hydrogen and helium in the sun (Jantsch, 1980). The homology between these metabolisms lies in the circularity of the connectedness of their elements. They are based on a circular logic of A implies B B implies C therefore C implies A. This is distinguished from Aristotelian logic: A implies B B implies C therefore A implies C. As will be seen later, Aristotelian logic is consistent with allonomous control, in which there is a one-way flow of information (instruction) vs. a two-way flow between elements of an autonomous system (conversation). The flow of matter in an allonomous system is linear: input/process/output. The flow of matter in autonomous systems is circular. One compelling symbol for autonomy is a snake eating its tail (Varela, 1979). This symbol incorporates not only circularity and self-reflexivity, it is an act of self-consumption. In cybernetics, it is called feedback regulation; I suspect the consumptive metaphor is not accidental. Thus consumption underlies both autonomy and control. The difference lies in the underlying motivation. In autonomous systems, consumption serves as interrelatedness and communication. In allonomous systems, the motive for consumption is coercion, manipulation, and exploitation. Autonomy does not imply solipsism. In the nested hierarchy of autonomous systems, called the holarchy by Koestler (1978), there is both analog and digital communication between the parts of a system and between subsystems. Within the system, communication is via analog signals (waves), for example glycolytic oscillations or frequency-coded calcium waves. Systems and subsystems are of different logical types and communicate digitally with levels above and below through the mediation of signs and symbols. Cell surface receptors can be looked at as digital to analog converters. On another level, a drum can also be looked on as a digital to analog converter. This feature explains why it is used in rituals involving category change (Knauft, 1979). This is the paradigm of biosemiotics (Eder and Rembold, 1992; Sebeok, 1976)--that biology, on all levels from genes to ecosystems, can be viewed as communication, and biological processes are sign-mediated interactions. This approach is being used because of the interpenetration of the symbolic and material aspects of food, cuisine, and consumption. The title of this paper, "Plateaus of Consumption," refers to the different levels of analysis of the phenomenon of consumption from the material to the symbolic, and also refers to Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus (1987), the second volume of their compendium, Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The plateaus of consumption that I will consider include the consumption of food, commodities, identities, selves, cultures, and nations. APERITIF: THE BIOSEMIOTIC SELF The semioticist C. S. Peirce believed that the locus of the self was not inside the organism, but rather was to be found in its relations with others (Singer, 1984). Cohen (1977) proposes that selfhood is the unity, the sheer oneness of a person. Selfhood is achieved and maintained when one interacts with others with the totality of one's being. In the performance of a specialized, contractual role, the self is least involved. Maximum involvement of the self is through non-contractual, non-utilitarian non-rational roles, and the patterns of symbolic activities associated with these roles. The contractual element is subversive of selfhood, but in the symbolic act, we continually create and re-create our selfhood. Napier (1992) completes the picture by identifying the integrity of the self with its social immunity--self-defense or the ability to avoid soul loss--and connecting this to its immunological immunity. Thus he observes that marginalized groups such as left-handers and homosexuals tend to suffer more from immune system disorders. In the biosemiotic view of selfhood, the self system is a unity of experiential and symbolic relations between a person and the organisms and objects in their environment. The people in a culture relate their experience to each through symbols which are based on animals and plants in their immediate environment. Their body is constructed of food which is grown or captured locally, made ultimately of the elements of the soil upon which they live. Their houses are constructed by them of locally available materials. Their education is relevant to their survival, both immediate and long-term as a people, and is related in stories which involve local organisms, events and landmarks. Their medicine uses locally available plants. This totality of interrelationships of production, consumption, and symbolization creates the biosemiotic self system. It is an adaptive intelligence which asymptotically approaches wisdom. It is autonomous and autochthonous, rooted in both immanent ecology and transcendent mystery, in which autonomous selves have lots of room to grow toward self-realization. The biosemiotic concept of self is consistent with Dow's systems model with its hierarchy of ecological, social, self, somatic, and molecular systems (Dow, 1986). He used this model to analyze symbolic healing as a transduction of emotional communication (the link between self and somatic systems) and transactional symbols ( the self/societal link) (Burch, 1992). FIRST COURSE: FOOD AS FOOD The first plateau of consumption is the consumption of food for nutritional purposes. Even this mundane process is highly charged. Going without food for even one day is very stressful, and most of the activities of our lives are directly or indirectly concerned with obtaining food. On the other hand, being consumed is the stuff of which horror films are made. Because of the importance of consumption to our psyche, it is one of the major underlying structures of our behavior. And yet, because of its highly charged nature, it may be one of the most denied. Eating for the sake of nutrition is controlled by psychobiological mechanisms through brain centers located in the hypothalamus (Pinel, 1990). For example, lesioning of the ventromedial hypothalamus (VMH) in rats produces hyperphagia and obesity. Lesioning of the lateral hypothalamus (LH) produces aphagia. The dual center set point model says that the VMH regulates satiety and the LH regulates hunger. There are dual set points of blood glucose and body fat which govern the motivations to consume certain foods. This balance can be upset by interference from the cognitive cortex. The point is that nutritional consumption is feedback-regulated; symbolic consumption is not necessarily so regulated. SECOND COURSE: FOOD AS SYMBOL Food constructs not only the physical body, it also constructs the self through its symbolism and social meanings (Weismantel,1988). Food is a material substance, and it is also a symbol and a sign, with a multitude of private, social, and cultural meanings. The act of cooking transforms the food, but also the people involved, and lies at the intersection between the conceptual and material aspects of social life. In cooking, there is continual movement between a concept and its realization, between text and context, and between production and consumption (Weismantel, 1988). In biology, the form of symbiosis in which guest and host both benefit is called commensalism, which means to eat at the same table; with humans, commensalism is also a semiosis, a shared meaning. THIRD COURSE: CUISINE AS MEANING Levi-Strauss, in The Raw and the Cooked (1964), analyzed myth in terms of polarities such as raw/cooked, fresh/decayed, etc. What is more interesting for me is his observation that the process of cooking serves not only to make food more digestible, but also socializes it. Most people do not usually consume food in its raw state. There are dozens of processes employed to make food more acceptable to the human palate, and each one moves the food from wild matter to tame symbol. The function of these processes and utensils such as fork and spoon is to mediate the interaction between the raw food and the human consumer. Levi-Strauss believed that the two poles of human subject and physical world must be insulated from each other to prevent a short circuit. Another way to look at this mediation is that it increases the control over the raw matter. This is one example of mediated experience, which is widespread in human culture, and proliferates geometrically, as intermediaries are intercalated between intermediaries. Neuronal processing takes sensory data and converts it into perceptual interpretations. By a process of self-amputation (McLuhan, 1964), in which elements of our physiology are projected outward and become part of our culture, the media take over this processing and predigest our news for us. For a really bland diet, try Reader's Digest. We autonomous beings prefer reality sandwiches, and a well-known anarchist rag in the Bay Area is called Processed World in protest. In our everyday lives, we are constantly categorizing, pigeonholing, interpreting people, things and events in our lives. The raw chaos of life is washed, pounded, dried, cooked and served up as the cuisine of meaning. Other examples of mediation are the vast bureaucracies interposed between peasant and king, citizen and president, worshipper and god. A direct link between transpersonal psychology and politics can be found here. A mystic is one who desires a direct experience of God not mediated by a priest. An anarchist is one who desires a direct experience of governance not mediated by representatives. Hakim Bey, an ontological anarchist, has invented a philosophy called immediatism in recognition of this desire for unmediated or immediate experience. The problem of course is that intermediaries have their own agendas and needs which may be in conflict with the needs of those being mediated. In our representative democracy, it is important to ask whom is being represented. There is a principle operating here: objectification precedes consumption. It makes us queasy to think of munching on a still warm, twitching animal, so we must objectify it first, turn it into a symbol. Symbols are another form of mediation (Singer, 1984), but they seem to have a dual ability to inform or to control. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) note that the scientific process translates the flows, particles, and codes of the natural world into symbols, a process they call reterritorialization. Control over the flows is gained, but information is lost--the map is not the territory. The symbols must be organized with a specific logic, the logic of discourse, but that logic is projected back onto the flows as if were inherent there. As Bateson (1979) has shown, deductive logic, the logic of discourse, does not model causality accurately. The chains of causality in the natural world are circular, not linear. Before a piece of raw reality can be consumed, it must be controlled by objectification. Another example of this is the way in which women are consumed in our culture; they are objectified by being turned into a photographic image, or packaged in a pleasing way. The original meaning of "cute" is "cooked," from the French "cuit", and referred to sugar that had been processed (Mintz, 1985). Terms of endearment often involve gustatory metaphors: "sugar," "honey," "sweetcakes." Love may leave a sweet taste in your mouth, but sexual obsession is about devouring someone's identity, which is what is being artistically portrayed in vampire movies. That consumption is really the agenda is revealed in the porno movie when the male walks up to the female and says, "You look good enough to eat." Science, with its emphasis on detached observation, is really voyeurism ("I like to watch"). In Euripides' The Bacchae, Pentheus, the first observer, was torn apart and consumed by the Maenads when they caught him spying on their ritual. The punishment fit the crime, for observation is consumption. True ritual is totally participatory; there can be no observers (George, 1988). Thus the Balinese had to invent the Monkey Chant as a decoy to keep the tourists away from their real rituals. Mircea Eliade identified the observation/participation duality as profane/sacred. Anthropology is unique in that it tries to straddle the observation/participation duality, but ultimately it converts experience to symbols, so it is also engaged in the consumption of culture. Another aspect of objectification concerns commodities and advertising. Sut Jhally in The Codes of Advertising considers advertising to be the most influential institution of socialization in modern society. It structures the content of mass media, molds gender identity, creates needs and consumption of commodities, dominates political strategies, and controls cultural institutions such as sports and music. An even more insidious feature of advertising is that it is discourse through and about objects. It emphasizes the mediation of human needs through objects. Advertising pollutes the self image in several ways, by creating narcissistic anxiety about the ways we look, smell, and act, and the commodities we need to consume in order to be acceptable. Advertising has also been described as institutionalized lying, and creates false maps of reality. For the biosemiotic self, this causes semiotoxicosis, a pathological gap between symbol and reality. FOURTH COURSE: CUISINE AS HEGEMONY Philippa Pullar reports in her book Consuming Passions (Pullar, 1970) that the Roman emperor Vitellius once served a feast consisting of 2,000 fish and 7,000 game birds. One dish contained ingredients which had to be collected from every corner of the empire--pike livers, pheasant and peacock brains, flamingo tongues and lamprey milt. The dish, by virtue of the geographical distribution of its ingredients, served as a symbol of the hegemony of the empire over those lands. In much the same way, exotic cuisines, exotic commodities, and exotic women are colonial appropriations that serve to confirm power relations--it is clear who is consuming whom. Spices, in particular, became an early focus of colonial conquest because of the powerful preverbal symbolism they evoked. An essence, or essential nature of something, is also an aroma or perfume distilled from a material. Inasmuch as a spice could signify a cuisine and a cuisine could signify a culture, control of the spice trade was not only economic control, it was symbolic control of the essence of that culture. The roots of this concept lie somewhere between vertebrate/plant semiochemical interactions, the connections between perfume and magic (Gell,1977), and the direct innervation of the hippocampus by the olfactory nerve. The British used to have their own symbol of hegemony--to say that upon their empire the sun does not set. Implicit in this assertion is that the sun does not rise upon it either. Even as much as the sunset represents death, the sunrise represents renewal. Within a closed system of total control, there cannotthere cannot be any renewal. The autonomous snake, by consuming itself, renews itself. Lord Acton's statement that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely refers to this lack of renewal. I once constructed this syllogism as a humorous way of showing the contradictions of philosophy: Virtue is knowledge--Socrates Knowledge is power--Bacon Power corrupts--Lord Acton therefore Virtue corrupts. The contradiction lies in the use of the same word power for two different relations. The power referred to in the first two lines is autonomous power, power from within or spiritual power. The second kind of power is power over others, domination. The first kind of power is generative, the second kind corrupts. A modern aspect of cuisine as hegemony is the way that US foreign policy has redrawn the map and dictated life in other countries for the sake of our consumption. The history of colonialism was directed by the need to consume spices, sugar, coffee, and tea. The needs for these commodities were created in the process; what were once luxuries are now necessities, through a process of habituation and addiction. In Central America, we have 'banana republics,' and in the Middle East, lines were drawn in the desert to concentrate oil-bearing strata in the hands of a few easily controllable families. We do not eat oil, but it is indirectly consumed, because some of the energy it supplies would normally have to be supplied by human food consumption. FIFTH COURSE: CONSUMPTION AS DISEASE In the eighteenth century, consumption was a wasting disease, including, but not limited to, tuberculosis. In the nineteenth century, consumption of commodities became a cure for social ills (Agnew, 1983). In his article, "Consumption: A disease of the consumer society?," Roy Porter (1993) examines the changing views about consumption (i. e., tuberculosis and other cachexias) and its relationship to consumption of food, drink, and goods. The consumptions were declared a peculiarly English condition, the morbus anglicus, a disease of epidemic proportions. Benjamin Marten declared that no country was more productive of consumptions than England. Most of these early writers (who in the main leaned toward Christian asceticism) attributed consumption to riotous living, excessive consumption of food, drink, and sex. Once consumed only as medicines or luxuries, coffee, tea, and tobacco were also added to this list as they became habits, necessities, and addictions. For an English doctor named Beddoes, consumption was caused by a fetishization of culture, in which the body was neglected in the pursuit of wordly success. Those interested in a holistic understanding of the current epidemic of wasting categorized as HIV/AIDS/ARC would do well to review the history of consumptive diseases and society's views towards them. Pathological metaphors about consumption and waste tend to cycle through our society as if it were an millenial bulimic: binge and purge every hundred years or so. SIXTH COURSE: CONSUMPTION DYSFUNCTIONS There are a number of psychophysiological dysfunctions that involve consumption: obesity, anorexia, bulimia, alcoholism, and other forms of substance abuse. Although the etiology of these disorders is complex, I propose that in general they result from the self's experience of being consumed. In family systems that involve alcohol or sexual abuse or toxic shame or guilt or other forms of non-acceptance of a child's identity, the children's identities become absorbed or denied and the child creates a false self. This creates a semiotic void in the child's self system, and the child unconsciously decides that 'consume or be consumed' is the law of the jungle. This is the 'hungry self' (Chernin, 1985). Interestingly, the hypothalamus is thought to be a likely locus of mind/body transduction (Moerman, 1991). The hypothalamus regulates most consumptive behaviors, and it is likely that twisted symbolizations of traumatic experiences could be projected from the cortex to the hypothalamus to cause disorders in consumptive behavior. Feminists implicate the values of patriarchal society, which defines women in terms of their relation to men, as one of the causes of anorexia nervosa (Banks, 1992). In order to be healthy, the self needs to be unconditionally accepted in its own self-image. If it is striving to be accepted in terms of an external image, it will always be off-balance. This is the 'body-image disturbance' theory of the etiology of anorexia nervosa (Thompson, 1990). Turner (1984), on the other hand, implicates capitalistic values of unlimited consumption as one of the causes of eating disorders. SEVENTH COURSE: THE CONSUMING SELF The totality and integrity of the biosemiotic self system in persons and cultures must be destroyed by capitalist culture in order to turn people into consumers, and to access resources controlled by other cultures. It does this by a two fold process of digestion: first it must find the seam in the glassy unity of the self system (individual self or culture). Since every self system is constructed of binary opposites, there is a seam running along its outer surface. By a process that Bateson called schismogenesis, a double bind is imposed on the culture in the form of political and economic imperatives. Existing conflicts and weaknesses in the culture are magnified and the culture slowly splits into two. The second process is the imposition of matter and information from the outside, in the form of goods, medicine, food, education, and advertising. This loosens the microscopic bonds between individuals, and alienates people from their own culture and from their own self. Each external idea or commodity is a small wedge that acts as a digestive enzyme. The circular snake is linearized, and aligns with the imposed ideological field like a magnet. As the local production system is subverted to the aims of capitalism, a counter flow of nutrients returns to the capitalist center--sugar, coffee, rubber, etc. Thus we can see that the colonial state is like a starfish--it everts its stomach and digests a clam, first by opening the shell (schismogenesis) and then digesting the contents. Perhaps this explains the symbolism on the US flag: the stars refer to the starfish nature and the stripes refer to the linearization of circular, autonomous systems. Incidentally, the US flag is almost identical to the corporate flag of the East India Company (Fuller, 1985). This proves to me that there was no American revolution, which would explain a lot of things about US foreign policy. The process referred to above, in which external matter and information is imposed upon a culture, needs to be examined in more detail. It is sometimes called foreign aid, or tele-education, but can be more accurately described as nutritional and medical imperialism, and image colonization. But first, it is necessary to examine the relationship between imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism, and their hidden assumptions about power and physiology. There are interesting correlations between imperialism and Cartesian logic. They both assume that there is an absolute center or absolute criterion for evaluating the importance of something. Imperialism and capitalism are inseparable, in that both rely on recontextualizing other cultures to the periphery. Capital is both the concentration of wealth and the center of government, and derives from the Latin caput, meaning 'head.' Capitalism is a head-centered world view indistinguishable from Cartesian philosophy. Descartes not only divided the affective and cognitive components of the mind, he declared that one cannot trust the emotions. Emotions are visceral messages, delivered to the brain from the periphery by the autonomic nervous system, that give one information about the relation between one's external environment and internal state, and the appropriate motivational response. Not trusting your emotions leads to alcoholism or schizophrenia. Cognition is a computation based on an internal representation derived from input from the five senses, four of which are located in the head. According to McLuhan (1964), the Western world view is dominated by visual processing, so its cognition is narrowly derived from the visual mode. The neurophysiological processing carried out by the visual cortex is called on-center, off-surround, which enhances edges in visual perception and enhances content over context, figure over ground, or center over periphery in cognition. Thus one can see that the underlying structure of our political economy is dictated by our cognition. There is no dark conspiracy behind the military-industrial complex--it follows from having one word, capital, mean both the center of government and the center of industry. The violence done to indigenous people by our cognition is not abstract--1,942 nuclear bombs have been exploded in their sovereign territory (our periphery) under the guise of "nuclear testing." This is nothing less than all-out nuclear war against the indigenous nations of the world, but this fact is utterly denied in nuclear discourse (Kato, 1993). Biomedicine is also based on Cartesian dualism. Western culture's attitudes toward the body are replete with metaphors which confirm the power relations of imperialism: The body is colonized and enslaved by the mind, which tries to extract as much work from it until the body rebels (collapses or becomes sick). The rebellion is quelled by silencing the body's communications (symptoms). A conspiracy of control and disinformation in the guise of religion crushes the body's will even further by blaming the addictions of the mind (the seven deadly sins) on the body. Addiction is the result of linearizing an autonomous self system and its circular feedback regulation. Borofsky (1975) analyzed the relation between social organization and ideas about disease, and he found a correlation between the locus of authority and the locus of disease. Interestingly, this correlation does not hold for Western culture, for the locus of authority (the head of state, capital, men, or the mind) usually blames the periphery (marginalized social groups, the poor, women, the body) as the source of the problem (social unrest, poverty, hysteria, disease). The importation of biomedicine into a culture breaks one of its relations to its ecology and makes it dependent on system of medicine that promotes the accumulation of capital and the commodification of health (McKee, 1988). It leads to a consumption of medical products that makes the capitalists healthy, but not the indigenous culture (Paul, 1978). R. D. Laing, in his book, The Politics of Experience, details the ways that we make each other insane by invalidating each other's experience. This is carried to extremes in the culture of science and rationality, in which individal subjective experience is invalidated in favor of "objective" experience. Objectivity, however, is a tool of domination, because it is subjectivity in a state of denial. Objectivity is subjectivity up to which someone is not owning. Anthony Wilden, in his book System and Structure quotes Franz Fanon: "For the colonized person, objectivity is always directed against him." I wonder how history would have turned out if there had been a French philosopher named Deschevalles who proclaimed "Senso ergo sum"--that would have put the horse back before the cart. It would be best to summarize all of this with an example from Mattelart's book, Multinational Corporations and the Control of Culture (1979). Samoa was chosen as a guinea pig by the Ford Foundation to test their tele-education project. The programs during the day were educational; at night it was Disney and Bonanza. The expert in charge of the project reported that in the beginning, the Samoans imported nothing, but now they were importing all sorts of foreign food. "No one can live on papayas, coconuts, and bananas forever." The Samoan lifestyle began to change, too. Once content with sharing their income, food, and clothing, now they want to save their money individually to buy luxuries like washing machines and cars. They abandoned many of their old customs, and have become more US-oriented than before. The Samoan system is claimed to be the most successful educational television in the world. Mattelart's comment was "this cynically pastoral presentation of the age-old act of imperialist aggression as the awakening of the natives to the benefits of a sterile modernity needs no comment." The upshot of all this is that corporations create an artificial culture whose fetishes and totems are not organisms from one's ecology, but commodities (Schiller, 1989). These images are implanted as icons in the map of reality that is the self, and govern one's cognition and motivation. Virtual reality is the logical endpoint of this commodification of our experience. This culture is ruthless in its one-dimensional alignment of people along the gradients of consumption. It is ideological and economic totalitarianism in which one must believe that the system is good because it delivers the goods (Marcuse, 1964). EIGHTH COURSE: CORPORATE STATE AS AMOEBA Borofsky (1975) noted that there are homologies between the body and the state, as in "the body politic" and "head of state," the "long arm of the law," and so on. One can observe functional analogies between the industrial state and an organism, perhaps a large amoeba-like creature. Primary resources are consumed by steam shovels which resemble a mouth with teeth. Factories take in the resources and process them into products, which are input into other factories wich process them ultimately into commodities. Factories in their appearance and function resemble intestines, which process food into excrement. Consumers put themselves in the position of consuming someone else's excrement, which may explain the weirdness of buying and selling commodities. In the case of buying a new or used automobile, the underlying structure is that the salesman literally sees how much shit you can swallow. The Freudian Ferenczi has already determined that money is deodorized dehydrated excrement that shines (Brown, 1991), so why not commodities? It's a fair exchange after all, and might explain why they are called commode-ities. The head of the amoeba is populated by those who own the means of production and capital. Those who determine what enters the mouth of the amoeba must have good taste, and a good nose for business. As one moves down the organism from producers to distributors to jobbers to wholesalers to retailers, one moves down a linear gradient of wealth and power, a vast flow field, each level consuming the excrement of the one above. At the anus of the organism, is the landfill or the toxic waste dump. During my years of promoting recycling programs, I have noticed a curious resistance to recycling even when it is economically compelling. I believe there is an imperative to consume in our culture, to continue the linear throughput of matter. Recycling would just stagnate the flow and slow down economic growth. There is confirmation in popular fiction and music for this image of the corporate state as a consuming monster. Chief Broom in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest called it 'the combine.' Steppenwolf called it 'the monster,' and Pink Floyd called it 'the machine.' The state consumes not only earthly resources and human selves, it consumes whole nations. In the film, Manufacturing Consent, a French photojournalist was being interviewed about her experiences in East Timor during the Indonesian invasion. She said that she had to leave because it was clear that the Indonesians were going to "digest" the East Timorese. FOOD FOR THOUGHT: COGNITION AS DIGESTION Capitalism's emphasis on the head may be due the power of the mouth to devour. Interestingly, the mouth is used both to consume and to speak. The relationship between discourse and consumption used to be, "Don't talk with your mouth full." Now we can talk about the discourse of consumption and the consumption of discourse. McLuhan (1964) invokes the myth of Cadmus to explain the power of the print medium to incite militarism by the linearization of thought. Cadmus is credited with the invention of the alphabet, an event that is symbolized by the sowing of dragon's teeth, from which sprang an army of soldiers. The letters of the alphabet resemble teeth in their compactness and linear order. The alphabet meant power and authority and control of military structures from afar, which "put teeth into" the colonial empire building. The linear order of the alphabet made possible the development of logical analysis. Analysis, like digestion, consists in breaking things down into their component parts to make them easier to assimilate. I know this is hard to swallow, but mull it over for awhile, ruminate about it, and be prepared to regurgitate your answer ("mull" means to heat and spice, as in "mulled wine," and rumination and regurgitation are obvious digestive metaphors). NINTH COURSE: LYNDON LAROUCHE WAS RIGHT! Mary Douglas, in her book The World of Goods (1979), attempts to construct an anthropology of consumption. In her view, goods function as a communication system and serve a double role of providing the means of subsistence and drawing the lines of social relationships. In a healthy economy, the exchange of goods emphasizes as much the qualitative value of things (use value or prestige value) as their quantitative value (exchange value). Douglas argues that the essential function of consumption is to make sense of experience. In an autonomous system, production and consumption reaffirms the value of the self and gives meaning to its experience. The western mercantilism system, with its emphasis on currency, exchange value, and profit, subverted this function to one based on coercion and control. Goods became tools of domination, exploitation, and ultimately addiction. This is aptly illustrated by an incident discussed by Sahlins (1988). The British East India Company introduced tea into Britain, and the British quickly became addicted to it. The British craving for tea resulted in a flood of silver going to China. The Chinese had no use for British manufactured goods, and accepted only silver in exchange for tea. Britain restored their unfavorable balance of trade by introducing opium to China and getting the Chinese addicted to it. The advantage of opium as a commodity is that the demand for it is almost inelastic. The British got their silver back and eventually fought a war in 1839 to enforce their illegal trade. This event confirms the coercive nature of mercantilism (Schivelbusch, 1992), and shows that their ultimate aim is addiction--if manufactured commodities do not work, try opium. Lyndon Larouche was right--the Queen of England was a drug dealer. Incidentally, Margaret Thatcher was a food technologist, and her job was to see how much air could be pumped into ice cream before it collapsed. TENTH COURSE: GEOPHAGY REVISITED--THE CONSUMPTION OF PLANET EARTH BY TRANSNATIONAL CAPITAL The last two decades have seen dramatic changes in the world. There has been the fall of communism, the "victory" of capitalism, and even talk of "the end of history." There has been a rise in globalism, concern for the environment, the biosphere, and biodiversity. The symbol of Gaia as the whole system of Earth is gaining acceptance, and symbols of the earth are everywhere, on Burger King and McDonald's products and on "environmentally friendly" paper grocery bags. Is this a good sign? James Lovelock, one of the originators of the Gaia hypothesis, is quoted by Myrdene Anderson (1990) as saying that Gaia is an empty sign with nearly infinite capacity for signification, but is filling up mostly with rubbish. The planets proliferate; we have Planet Hollywood and Planet Reebok--"where there are no limits." Masahide Kato (1993) claims that the earth symbol which is appearing everywhere is the new corporate logo of transnational capital (TNC), because it signifies the role of the strategic gaze in constructing a homogeneous social totality. In line with the principle outlined above, that objectification precedes consumption, it is clear that Earth is poised to be consumed. I feel that the fall of communism is a sign that the hegemony of TNC is complete, so that it no longer needs the false duality between the US and the USSR (Derrida has even analyzed the Beatles song, "Back in the US, Back in the US, Back in the USSR...and Georgia's always on my m-m-m-m-m-mmind!" in terms of this false dichotomy) to serve as a vice which crushed the non-aligned nations. As to the new globalism, it is a one-dimensional globalism, definitely on the terms of TNC. There is zero tolerance for deviance. Just as deviance has been increasingly medicalized (Conrad & Schneider, 1992), and medicine is governed by militaristic metaphors, so US militarism is governed by medical metaphors. We don't fight wars any more, we conduct "surgical strikes." Antibiotics were the "magic bullets," and bombs look like giant pills. The concern for biodiversity is limited to potential products, cures for cancer, AIDS, etc. which may lay undiscovered in some rain forest plant. The only way to preserve cultural diversity is to have the natives produce some commodity for consumers to buy--rugs, clothes, or "rainforest crunch." Americans are cultural omnivores, and the background conversation is still dominated by consumption. DESSERT: CONSUMER CULTURE AS ONCOMEME A cell is a biosemiotic community. There is a center, occupied by the nucleus, and a periphery, bordered by a membrane. Hormones and neurotransmitters are signs that are received by and through the periphery and are transduced into analog signals or make their way to the nucleus, where they initiate longer term changes in the cell's metabolism. The DNA in the nucleus of a healthy cell is in two-way conversation with the periphery, contrary to the early dogma which stipulated a one-way flow of instructions from the DNA. A cancerous cell, however, is in one-way communication and proliferates out of proportion to its place in the organism. There is a two-step process by which a cell becomes cancerous and grows into a tumor. The first step is carcinogenesis, and results from DNA damage; the second step is tumorigenesis and results from the cell being cut off from communication with cells at its periphery, which activates genes called oncogenes. Alternatively, an oncovirus can insert an oncogene into the cell's DNA and cause the cell to proliferate. An oncogene usually codes for a truncated receptor, that generates signals for cell growth and proliferation without feedback control (Darnell, et. al., 1990). The transformed cell becomes aggressive and can kill other cells. The growing tumor can secrete growth factors which redirect blood vessels and initiate vascularization. Finally, specialized cells can metastasize and colonize other tissues of the body. Cancer, once thought to be an anarchistic riot of cell growth, is actually a highly organized system, in which a part assumes control of the whole. One can see that there are homologies between the imperialist notion of center and periphery and capitalism's uncontrolled economic growth, and the processes which are involved in tumorigenesis. I believe that consumer culture also proliferates itself by similar mechanisms. By image colonization and pseudo-objectivity, external memes are planted in the self system and reproduce by echogenesis. People are alienated from each other and their culture by a discourse of objects. Education and socialization consistently repress the individual. The autonomous self is faced with a double bind--conform or be marginalized ("If you are not with us, you are against us."). In conformity the self withers away, leaving a false self which is hollow and hungry and born to shop. In marginality, you get to keep your self, but you can't do much with it, because there is no reflection that validates it. In South America, this loss of self is called 'soul loss' (Crandon-Malamud, 1990). Taussig analyzed capitalist development in South America and its effects on the workers there. These workers experienced the evil inherent in the capitalist relations of production and fetishized it in the image of the devil. The contract with the devil symbolizes an economic system which forces people to trade their souls for commodities. In the consumer culture, commodities are intrinsically good--'goods'--; in non-capitalist societies marginalized by the system of production, 'goods' lure people into a double bind which is ultimately bad for them. Consumption is truly the modern religion if one realizes that credit and debit come from Latin words meaning belief and necessity, respectively. In most religions, God is the locus of faith and necessity, but in the consumer religion, money is that locus. POSTPRANDIAL RUMINATION: WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN? One can tell that we are a materialistic culture by our language: matter matters, as in "What is the matter with you?" or "It doesn't matter." When Feuerbach ("fire stream" in German) said, "Matter is eternal," he doomed us to another sort of double bind. By replacing an infinite mystery with finite matter as an object of worship, it is implicit that we must consume an infinite amount of matter to consummate the relationship. The contradiction is that we don't love matter. It seems we must despise it, because we turn most of it into trash. Milan Kundera, in his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, bemoans the uglification of the world, a planetary process he blames on people feeling bad about their excrement. The law of entropy ('verwandlungscontent' in German) says that matter is transformed. It is a desperate act of control to fix matter as eternal and unchanging. Descartes is credited with the mind/body duality, but this is a misnomer. The duality is actually head/body, because the hidden assumption is that the mind is located in the head rather than distributed throughout the body, ecosystem or universe. The paradox of human existence is really not the mind/body duality, but a sign/signal duality. That is to say, unlike other semiotic systems which communicate by digital signs between levels and with analog signals within levels, the human self communicates with digital symbols (words) and analog signals (body language) simultaneously. A double bind results when the meanings of these two messages conflict (Bateson, 1979). The American double bind is trying to attain autonomy through 'rugged individualism'--masochistic self-control and self-denial directed towards perfecting one's self in an external image. As an autonomous being growing up in America, I can attest that it is a very anti-individual society. There is intense pressure to conform to a discourse and a social contract of covert interpersonal aggression. A better way to attain autonomy might be through self-acceptance. The society as a whole has the dynamic of the anorectic, in which ascetic values lead to a distorted self-image and disordered consumptive behavior. REFERENCES Agnew, C. 1983. "The consuming vision of Henry James," in Fox and Lears, 1983, pp. 65-100. Anderson, M. 1992. Concerning Gaia--Semiosic production of/in/by/for our planet," in Biosemiotics. The Semiotic Web 1991, ed. TA Sebeok. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin. Banks, CG. 1992. 'Culture' in culture-bound syndromes: the case of anorexia nervosa. Soc. Sci. Med. 34:867-884. Bateson, G. 1979. Mind and Nature. A Necessary Unity. Bantam Books, Toronto. Borofsky, R. 1975. Power, authority, and disease. Brewer, J. and Porter, R. 1993. Consumption and the World of Goods. Routledge, London. Brown, NO. 1991. Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis. University of California Press, Berkeley. Burch, MT. 1992. Weaving the vital flow: biocultural perspectives on ritual healing. Typescript. Chernin, K. 1985. The Hungry Self. Women, Eating, and Identity. Times Books, New York. Cohen, A. 1977. "Symbolic action and the structure of the self," in Lewis, 1977, pp. 117-128. Conrad, P. and Schneider, JW. 1992. Deviance and Medicalization. Temple University Press, Philadelphia. Crandon-Malamud, L. 1991. From the Fat of our Souls. University of California Press, Berkeley. Darnell, J., Lodish, H., and Baltimore, D. Molecular Cell Biology. W. H. Freeman, New York. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus--Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Douglas, M. and Isherwood, B. 1979. The World of Goods. W. W. Norton & Co., New York. Dow, J. 1986. Universal aspects of symbolic healing: A theoretical synthesis. Amer. Anthropologist 88:56-69. Fox, RW and Lears, TJJ. 1983. The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880-1980. Pantheon Books, New York. Fuller, B. 1981. Critical Path. St. Martin's Press, New York. Gell, A. 1977. Magic, perfume, dream...in Lewis, 1977, pp. 25-38. George, DER. 1987. Ritual drama: between mysticism and magic. Asian Theater Journal, 4: 127-165. Jantsch, E. 1980. The Self-Organizing Universe. Pergamon Press, New York. Jhally, S. 1987. The Codes of Advertising: Fetishism and the Political Economy of Meaning in the Consumer Society. Frances Pinter, London. Kato, M. 1993. Nuclear globalism: Traversing rockets, satellites, and nuclear war via the strategic gaze. Alternatives 18:339-360. Knauft, BM. 1979. On Percussion and metaphor. Current Anthropology 20:189-190. Koestler, A. 1978. Janus--A Summing Up. Random House, New York. Laing, RD. 1967. The Politics of Experience. Ballantine Books, New York. Levi-Strauss, C. 1964. The Raw and the Cooked. Harper & Row, New York. Lewis, I. 1977. Symbols and Sentiments--Cross-cultural Studies in Symbolism. Academic Press, London. Marcuse, H. 1964. One-Dimensional Man. Beacon Press, Boston. Margulis, L. 1970. Origin of Eukaryotic Cells. Yale University Press, New Haven. McKee, J. 1988. Holistic health and the critique of western medicine. Soc. Sci. Med. 26: 775-784. McLuhan, M. 1964. Understanding Media--The Extensions of Man. McGraw-Hill, New York. Moerman, DE. 1991. Physiology and symbols: the anthropological implications of the placebo effect, in The Anthropology of Medicine: >From Culture to Method (L. Romanucci-Ross, DE Moerman, LR Tancredi, eds.), pp. 129-143. Bergin & Garvey, New York. Napier, AD. 1992. Foreign Bodies--Performance, Art, and Symbolic Anthropology. University of California Press, Berkeley. Paul, JA. 1978. "Medicine and imperialism," in The Cultural Crisis of Modern Medicine. J. Ehrenreich, ed. pp. 271-286. Monthly Review Press, New York. Pinel, JPJ. 1990. Biopsychology. Allyn and Bacon, Boston. Porter, Roy. 1993. "Consumption: Disease of the Consumer Society?," in Brewer and Porter, 1993, pp. 58-81. Pullar, P. 1970. Consuming Passions--A History of English Food and Appetite. Hamish Hamilton, England. Sahlins, M. 1983. Cosmologies of capitalism: the trans-pacific sector of 'the world system.' Proc. Brit. Acad. LXXIV, 1-51. Schiller, HI.1989. Culture, Inc. Oxford University Press, New York. Schivelbusch, W. 1992. Tastes of Paradise. A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants. Pantheon Books, New York. Sebeok, TA. 1976. Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs. University Press of America, Boston. Singer, M. 1984. Man's Glassy Essence. Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Taussig. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism. Thompson, JK. 1990. Body Image Disturbance. Pergamon Press, New York. Turner, B. 1984. The Body and Society. Explorations in Social Theory. Blackwell, Oxford. Varela, FJ. 1979. Principles of Biological Autonomy. North Holland, New York. Wilden, A. System and Structure. EPILOGUE: HUNGER I only find within my bones A taste for eating earth and stones When I feed, I feed on air, Rocks and coals and iron ore. My hunger, turn. Hunger, feed: A field of bran Gather as you can the bright Poison weed. Eat the rocks a beggar breaks The stones of ancient churches walls. Pebbles, children of the flood. Loaves left lying in the mud. Beneath a bush a wolf will howl Spitting bright feathers >From his feast of fowl Like him, I devour myself. Waiting to be gathered Fruits and grasses spend their hours The spider spinning in the hedge Eats only flowers. Let me sleep! Let me boil On the altar of Solomon. Let me soak the rusty soil And flow into Kedron. --Arthur Rimbaud http://www.lglobal.com/TAO/ ___ ___ ___ / /\ / /\ / /\ / /:/ / /::\ / /::\ / /:/ / /:/\:\ / /:/\:\ / /::\ / /:/ /::\ / /:/ \:\ /__/:/\:\ /__/:/ /:/\:\ /__/:/ \__\:\ \__\/ \:\ \ \:\/:/__\/ \ \:\ / /:/ \ \:\ \ \::/ \ \:\ /:/ \ \:\ \ \:\ \ \:\/:/ \ \:\ \ \:\ \ \::/ \__\/ \__\/ \__\/ -------------------------------------------------------------- To receive the Anarchives via email send a note to Majordomo@lglobal.com with the message in the body: subscribe anarchives To get off the list, send to the same address but write: unsubscribe anarchives Also check out: