barricades and the lady with heart trouble

“Women were taught how to be good consumers by buying the best products for the best price, just as any factory purchaser would do for his business. This disciplinary logic of the household made for an immediate association between protection of the home from an invasion of anything inferior or impure, and fear of the consequences of failure. Not only would an inability to stem the invasive tide of germs have a physical consequence for the health of the family, it would also cause a collapse of identity and social position.” (Critical Art Ensemble in Tactical Biopolitics 2008: 418)

In speaking to the discussion of fear and bodily boundaries presented in Bioparanoia and the Culture of Control, I would like to draw your attention to an ad that appeared in the June 1934 edition of McCall’s magazine.

The enlarged text can be read here

This ad, which features a forlorn woman puzzling over her marital woes, is framed as thirteenth in a series of “frank talks by eminent women physicians.” This makes it appear as though it is an authoritative health discussion rather than a product advertisement, obscuring the financial motives behind it. Indeed, as the above quote highlights, there appears to have been a conflation between consumerism and cleanliness, and keeping up with the Jones’ was both a monetary competition and a moral act. Failing to heed one’s mandate of maintaining medical-grade hygiene in all spheres of life (including the euphemistic “marital hygiene”) could lead to a “wretched marriage”, and all the social stigma that came attached.

In discussing the germ frenzy, CAE argue that growth of the disinfectant industry relies on “wasted activity – cleaning that which no longer needs cleaning” (419). Not just that which no longer requires it, but that which never did require such efforts also must fall under the industry’s advertising domain. Areas of the body that are now referred to as self-cleaning, often using metaphors of ecological balance wherein various species of bacteria and yeast coexist in unending competition (including this one  which refers to it as a life-long relationship we have with our “sea of microorganisms”) became the target of a series of ads for products such as lysol, or marvel hygiene spray . For such ads to be effective, however, fear must be instilled. The vagina has “hidden folds” where germs lurk threatening to turn marriages sour. The fear of gossip threatening ones social standing is used in this ad, which ironically frames douche use as a sign that “prudishness is as obsolete as the hoop skirt.” Happiness is a disinfected vagina.

Or a sterile one, which leads me to an aside about how Lysol was also used as a spermicide to regulate timing of pregnancies. Interesting how at a time when having kids was expected, semen was likened (through practical necessity I’m sure) to germs….

In the quest to achieve a new standard of purity, the inner folds of the body were subject to increasing standards of cosmetic attention (Lysterine was developed originally as a general antiseptic and became marketed as a mouthwash just after the first World War). That was then…

While douching is no longer recommended by doctors, the antiseptic push continues. Lysterine, for example, has continued to find ways to embed its fight against halitosis into a variety of products. And for that nasty bacteria that grows in our sticky sweaty armpits? First there were deodorants, then antiperspirants and now we are starting to see clinical strength treatments against perspiration appear on the shelves of drugstores (for ladies who don’t just glisten, they sweat!). No longer can we simply mask our stink with other stinks as the increase in chemical sensitivities pushes more and more places to instill rules against chemical scents (a trend I will not be fighting against!).  We can no longer mask our stink.  We must fight it.  We are forming barricades. Antiseptics keep germs out as we block our pores to keep sweat in.

In discussing this history, CAE argues that “eventually the antiseptic era of medicine gave way to the aseptic era, in which bacterial contamination was intentionally and actively avoided, and antiseptics were used as a second line of defense. This was the upside” (417). While avoiding infectious disease is most certainly a laudable goal, I question whether avoidance of the dirt and grime that makes us human is being circumvented a little too much. In addition to the immune defense argument provided briefly in the text, I would like to put forward another trend:  the increasing use of birth control methods among women that sharply reduce menstruation, such as depo provera.  By beginning this post discussing the history of Lysol in vaginas and ending it with a discussion of how menstruation is increasingly becoming optional I am not trying to argue that women are still afraid of losing social standing due to a lack of feminine hygiene.  I do, however, think that these barricades are becoming a bit intense, and I fear the next norm of personal hygiene.  It worries me when our own bodily processes become a choice and keeping up with ideals becomes more expensive and exclusive.  That being said, when I see you all on Thursday, I will be wearing deodorant.

criminal digestion

For this weeks post I would like to direct you toward this article on the sea slug in New Scientist:

Solar Powered Sea Slug Harnesses Stolen Plant Genes

The article that accompanies it makes no mention of horizontal transfer in any other organisms except to say that “Greg Hurst of Liverpool University in the UK says that DNA jumping from one species to another is not unheard of but that normally the DNA does not appear to function in the new species.” Moreover, it is possible that they are passing the gene on to the next generation, producing both a lateral and vertical transfer of genetic material. What intrigues me the most about this particular article is that it highlights how scientists are imagining the genetic material that the slug is laterally acquiring as property of the algae, and the slug’s eating patterns as agentive (and immoral?) genetic practices. The slug is not simply acquiring genes, it is stealing them! That the transference of genes is thought of in propertied language is inherent in the term “kleptoplasty” used to describe “the phenomenon of stealing”. Despite the focus on “theft” and “stealing” in the article, the wikipedia entry for kleptoplasty refers to it as “a symbiotic phenomenon whereby plastids from algae are sequestered by host organisms”. The morality embedded in the term is thwarted through emphasis on the symbiotic relationship between organisms. Is this language usage an example of symbiopolitics? Helmreich advances Paxson’s discussion of microbiopolitics to include such interweavings of biological organisms, defining it as “the governance of relations among entangled living things” (Helmreich 2009: 15). In this article, new categories of biological agents are formulated and evaluated (not just according to anthropocentric criteria, but as anthropomorphic agents/criminals), though no discussion of human behavior enters into the discussion in this article. Interestingly, eating algae is not referred to in moralizing terms, but the incorporation of genetic material is. Genetic material is not merely a component of organisms, but property that each organism has exclusive rights to. Such a distinction between amoral and moral descriptions of organismic processes suggests to me that this phenomenon may be being experienced as a threat to the present classification paradigm.

n another article on the same enigmatic green sea slug in Wired highlights exactly that aspect: its ability to shake up boundaries between kingdoms. This article’s title says it all:Green Sea Slug is Part Animal, Part Plant

Echoing the shaking up of the tree of life caused by the platypus’ discovery in the 19^th Century described by Helmreich (78), the slug, which is “shaped like a leaf itself” (a phenomenon also noted and also not well attended to in the New Scientist article) disturbs the flora/fauna barrier in a way that Zardus is quoted as referring to as a “fusion of plant and an animal”. Such an example suggests that polyglot categories (81) will indeed be necessary as scientists continue exploring genetic material.

eating animals shaped like other animals…

In this weeks post I would like to discuss a marketing phenomenon that has puzzled me for quite some time: the marketing of processed food in animal shapes. I can think of several instances of this, from zoodles commercials featuring a small child excitedly squealing “I just had a hippopotamus for lunch” to the amazingly bizarre animal shaped chicken nuggets I once spotted in a grocery store freezer http://www.brakebush.com/ZooCrew.htm animal crackers, and vegetarian fake meats like tofurky or Dr. Praegers animal shaped vegetarian chicken nuggets. The plethora of products of this nature (particularly the animal shaped chicken!) suggests that animal consumption may indeed have a place among Taussig’s public secrets, at least among children. Indeed, the use of animal shapes by a company making food for vegetarians speaks to the disconnect between animals as cute and cuddly farm (or zoo) creatures and the food that appears on our plate, a disconnect that Shukin quotes Vialles as arguing that smell management plays an integral role in (2009: 63). Covering it in breadcrumbs surely aids in this project.

In conversation with the double entendre of rendering posed by Shukin (that is, meaning both making copies/models and the boiling down of animal remains), I would like to draw your attention toward a piece of poorly digitized nostalgia:

This video features Bill Cosby and a gaggle of children playing with Jell-O. As they pick up pieces of brightly coloured recycled animal parts cut into the shapes of animals (and interestingly, human lips, as a child gigglingly replaces her own lips with a bright red jell-o copy), the previous “first nature” existence that the product is made from is completely obscured. While this product doesn’t come pre-shaped as animals, the commercial suggests that animals are chief among the shapes they envision the consumer will cut into the product. Shukin argues that the market “fetishistically imbues commodities with a semblance of vital life while materially reducing life to the dead labor and nature of capital” (2009: 58). It appears that Kraft foods, the makers of Jell-O, did not feel that the market had imbued their product with enough life. As such, this “second life” animal product was made to remain more strongly glued together for the purpose of prompting children to reanimate the colorful Frankenstein’s monster of animal parts. What would Galvani have made of the idea to use the inherent electricity of children to induce “excited motions” in the dead? (145)

Imperialist nostalgia, Rosaldo is quoted as arguing, encompasses “an attitude of reverence toward the natural [that] developed at the same time that North Americans intensified their destruction of their human and natural environment” (278). Not all animals seem to fall into this category, however, as reverence toward animals we refer to as “livestock” are hardly revered. The children in the Jell-O commercial were not shown making shapes of cows or chicken, but birds in flight and dinosaurs, which, along with exotic animals only seen at the zoo, seem to be the preferred beasts of childhood necromancy. Indeed, the animal shaped chicken seems to point toward a disjuncture between those we eat, and those we pretend to eat (but would be horrified to see on our plates for real).

The vegetarian fake chicken in the shape of animals continues to confound me. Described on one website as “cute (and dare we say) even cuddly” http://www.hungry-girl.com/chew/chewdetails.php?isid=538 suggesting that the link between eating animals and eating animal shapes does not occur to the seller. Discussing another irony, Shukin argues that “resource and animal conservation discourses need to be examined for how they may inadvertently advance rather than antagonize the hegemony of capital” (70). I question what can be done outside of, or adjacent to capital in such a way that does indeed antagonize. My sister’s kids are fond of a brand of organic cereal called “envirokids” that teaches them about habitat conservation, and a percentage of sales goes toward the WWF. This is likely exactly the type of product that Shukin would argue still operates within the rubric of capital. So I ask, what does a model look like that does not, and still is responsive to the needs of this exhausted populace?

Capitalizing on sleep deprivation … ?

“Throughout the 1970s theorists of the new right called for a radical restructuring of the US economy. In order to reassert its world dominance, it was claimed, the United States would need to move from heavy industry to an innovation-based economy, one in which the creativity of the human mind (a resource without limits) would replace the mass-production of tangible commodities” (Cooper 2008: 18). The second report of the Club of Rome argued that “limits to growth were time-like rather than space-like (p16).

Since the ’70s, it would seem, there has been an increasing acknowledgement that the human mind does indeed have limits, and they are indeed those of time. It seems that if we go too long without rest, we break down, as the incalculable number of articles that discuss the relationship between sleep deprivation and poor learning attests (see for example: http://www.torontosun.com/news/canada/2010/02/18/12934411.html and http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/7285527/AAAS-A-nap-after-lunch-boosts-the-brains-learning-capacity.html from the past couple weeks). Possibly more worrisome, at least to the media it seems, is that it may also make you (gasp) FAT! (http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/A-Sleep-Weight-Connection-shows-Sleep-is-essential-stay-thin-85817767.html)

That’s where this invention steps in to save our ailing minds and bodies:

That purports to allow you to achieve the equivalent of a full 8 hours of sleep in the time it takes to have a power nap through a cap that sends magnetic pulses to an area of the brain in order to produce slow wave sleep.

The full article can be read here: Sleep Machine

While this is still very much in the research phase (a number of papers have been published since this article assessing the impact of magnetic pulses to generate slow waves and its impact on later wakefulness) with no commercial applications yet, comments to this article such as this one:

speak to the perceived intersections between sleep, labour and the economy, particularly since this is a UK publication, a part of the world where they demand (and receive) considerably more vacation time. Indeed this echoes Cooper’s paraphrasing of Marx that the “capitalist promise is counterbalanced by willful deprivation, its plenitude of possible futures counteractualized as an impoverished, devastated present, always poised on the verge of depletion” (p20). The increasing attention to sleep in the media, and the exhausted fear that this device will signal the 23 hour workday suggests that much of humanity (as resource)  is indeed on the verge of depletion. The article frames the invention as a way to help insomniacs, yet it does point out the contradiction that the device doesn’t help people fall asleep, but instead changes their brain wave patterns once they are asleep to get rid of those pesky and inefficient other two NREM stages. While this device is hardly comparable to the amazing possibilities attributed to extremophiles, it does follow recent biology in its attention to “the limits and possible futures of life on earth” (p. 20), and as such, the promissory future hinted at that a power nap could soon “mimic the restorative benefits of 8 hours of rest” should be taken as seriously.

Through these assumptions about what stages matter for sleep’s rejuvenating powers, and the attempt to manipulate the brain into going into these stages instantly instead of cycling through the stages several times a night, these scientists are trying to crack the code to humanity’s daily limit to productivity. Indeed, this invention posits the brain as something that can be hacked into to receive greater gains from a smaller time period.   This prompts me to ask the following questions:  what would happen if we were able to make productive use of an extra 6 hours a day without suffering any decline in performance? Would our lives be enriched or would it raise the bar for what we are expected to accomplish in a day? Is this an example of commercial interests expanding into the sphere of ‘life itself’, as Cooper has argued? Would this promise of more life out of life be accompanied by a move to devalue life (as Cooper argues on page 49)? And if such a technology were indeed perfected, would it follow the same fate as ARVs in the third world, or would it follow the outsourcing of production, creating more violently exploitative factories?