Consuming Behaviour

© John Desmond

First published, January, 2026

Grianan Publishing,

John’s Brae,

Shrove, ROI, F93E7R9

Cover design © John Desmond (with thanks to Alan Gillies)

Chapter Eight: The Consuming Body

Introduction

The body, traditionally the female body, has long been the site for a huge array of commercial applications that cater to every aspect of appearance, ranging from routine attention to one’s hair, nails and feet, to exfoliation, Botox, eyebrow threading and ‘brazilians’ and to more lasting and consequential applications, such as piercing, tattooing and ‘cosmetic’ surgery. Added to this are crazes for gym routines, fitness wearables, muscle-building products, marathons and so on. Competition is frenetic; it is no longer sufficient for bragging rights to have run just one marathon, given some know-it-all will surely point out that someone, somewhere, has already run more than 600, and that another ran one marathon every day for fifty days! Thinking of climbing Everest? They’ll tell you that someone has already climbed it more than thirty times and that another climbed Everest and Lhotse, another 8,000 metre peak, in less than ten hours, completing five 8,000 metre peaks in 24 days!

Looking for endurance? Why not try customised events such as Iron ManTM, Tough MudderTM or somesuch. Interested in sports? Forget the Olympics, aim instead for the Enhanced Games! Talking about enhancement, ensure that you are up to the mark by combining your everyday attention to appearance, marathon running, Tough Mudding and so on with daily ingestation of hundreds of pills, including Human Growth Hormone (HGH), combined with a ‘paleo’ diet, to ensure that what Saint Francis called the poor old donkey that is your body doesn’t die prematurely from all the stress “you” have loaded onto it. Of course, you may think that the old donkey is such a drag that it ought to be dispensed with entirely if humanity is ever to leave this doomed planet.

Looking at all of the above madness from Mars, the barren planet that some earthlings desperately want to settle in as an escape from the only planet in the universe that has a viable atmosphere, a curious alien might well wonder, what on earth is going on? The human body has long been the pre-eminent site of value mined by marketing practitioners. For Jean Baudrillard (1998) it is the most dazzling item in the consumer package. In The Mechanical Bride (1967a) Marshal McLuhan describes how from the dawn of modern marketing advertisers divided the female body into a series of lucrative problem-zones, from head to toe. That the body is a dumb automaton for exploitation by the mind which somehow controls it has a much longer provenance, dating in European thought at least to the time of the seventeenth-century philosopher Rene Descartes. Descartes was concerned to develop a sound basis for science, which he argued must be based on the principle of radical scepticism, doubting everything that cannot absolutely be verified. Following considerable deliberation, he concluded that the only statement he could make with certainty was that he existed because he was a thinking being,

I became aware that, while I had decided thus to think that everything was false, it followed necessarily that I who thought this must be something; and observing that this truth: I think therefore I am was so certain and so evident that all the most extravagant suppositions of the sceptics were not capable of shaking it…I therefore concluded that I was a substance, of which the whole essence or nature consists in thinking, and which, in order to exist, needs no place and depends on no material thing; so that this ‘I’, that is to say the mind, by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from the body (Descartes, [1640] 1968: 54).

Descartes’ conclusion has since had profound implications for the western understanding of science, the body and indeed for the definition of what it is to be human. If reason is the essence of what it is to be human, then one can only be judged as being fully human if one is deemed capable of conscious rational thought. So called Cartesian dualism relates to the distinction made between the mind, the rational thinking self that Descartes thought he had located in the pineal gland, which he distinguished from the animal body, conceived of as an unthinking, machine. One consequence that persists to this day is the widespread assumption that pain can only be experienced by rational individuals and is lacking in animals that are considered as unfeeling brutes whose bellows and cries are simply reflex actions. On similar grounds it was not thought cruel to treat those judged insane as beasts of burden, because it was assumed that they neither feel pain nor cold (Taylor, 2009: 122) and human infants were operated on without anaesthetic until at least 1985, whilst animals continue to be slaughtered in their hundreds of millions (D’Silva & Turner, 2005: 48; Dumbrowski, 1997: 140).

The philosopher Daniel Dennett (1978) who is famous for the idea of the mind as a computer, made Descartes’ question relevant to the concerns of today by devising the thought experiment of the brain in a vat. Dennett imagines that he is asked to partake in a mission to obtain nuclear material, a task which his body can withstand but will have lethal consequences for his brain. To facilitate the mission his brain is surgically removed from his body and immersed in a vat of nutrients from whence it communicates with his body by radio signals. Dennett uses this example to ask questions such as Where am I, in my body or in my brain? What would the experience be like if the radio communications failed and my brain became entirely disembodied, blind, deaf and dumb, immersed alone in the vat? The dual relation between mind and body has often been explored in film and science fiction. The Matrix (1999) presents Neo who believes he is an able-bodied computer hacker, which we discover is an illusion fed by a giant simulation, as he is in fact immersed in a vat of nutrients and his limp body is used to sustain the artificial intelligence that generates the matrix.

Some time ago science fiction writers William Gibson and Bruce Sterling described a potential near future, where developments in biotechnology would radically slow the ageing process enabling (some) people to live for double their lifespan or perhaps for even longer. In Neuromancer (1984) William Gibson reflected the disparagement of the body by the real-world Extropians who dismiss it as “meat” no longer fit for purpose in the age of stellar exploration. In the ‘wired’ universe, the argument goes, humanity must dispense with the wet, slow, vulnerable, body which drags down the mind. This was the vision offered by Stelarc, a performance artist who became famous in the 1990s who desired to take the body to its limits, seeking to push it to the state where it is no longer a body as we recognize it. This has recently been translated into real life research through the action of nerds such as Bryan Johnson who, rather than trying to save the planet from the climate and extinction crises, are instead pouring tens of billions of dollars into research in the hope that they can radically extend their lifetime. More radical still are arguments for the form of immortality described by Gibson (2011) in Idoru, where individuals upload “their “selves” onto the internet.

While the sentiments expressed by Stelarc and the Extropians may seem rather extreme, the prevalent image presented in conventional and social media is of a smooth, hard, invulnerable body against which the reality is viewed by many as an object of hatred, with disgust and shame. McLuhan’s observation of the fragmented body intensified from the 1970s aided by the development of the Nautilus™ gym system and more recently of wearable technologies, inaugurated by Fitbit™ in 2007. Given advances in biotechnology, even mainstream medics now proclaim a ‘new dawn’ for the body. For over thirty years, developments in medical technology have effectively decoupled sex from reproduction.

In 1990 when I started teaching undergraduates, as a reflective exercise I would periodically issue questionnaires relating to perceptions of body-image, and although many expressed a concern over some part of their body, it was extremely rare to find a desire to undergo plastic surgery to remedy this. Over the years the number grew somewhat possibly because the stigma against body modification was reduced by the airing of popular television programmes such as Ten Years Younger and media coverage of celebrities who had “work” done. In the UK the most common procedures were breast augmentation and breast reduction, blepharoplasty and rhinoplasty. Most striking was the huge gender imbalance, with women accounting for 94% of all surgeries. The reality of plastic surgery is often different to the media portrayal. While this has been a lucrative market for the corporations that make them, faulty breast implants poisoned many thousands of women in the USA and in Europe. The operation itself has its dangers as it often requires a general anaesthetic. Joanna Briscoe who watched plastic surgery operations to gain insight for her novel on the desire for a perfect body was shocked by the violence of the operation: ‘the surgeon’s hand right inside the woman’s face, punching and tearing her separated skin only anchored at the nose and mouth’ and wondered whether such mutilation is a more extreme example of how women cope with the frustration and stress of everyday life in the modern world.

While exercise ultimately results in creating a hard, muscled body, there are some aims which exercise on its own will not achieve. One perceived block to the acquisition of the ‘perfect’ physique (machine-body) for men and for women is body-hair. Bikini waxing is standard practice for a number of fashion models and film-stars and increasingly with ‘ordinary’ women, while that of waxing chest-hair is reported to be catching on quickly with some segments of the male market.

A principal aim of this admittedly long and complex chapter is to reflect on Descartes’ understanding of the body from four perspectives comprising, socio-cultural explanations; affect theory; phenomenology; and neuropsychoanalysis. Best known are the socio-cultural explanations provided by Michel Foucault, Rom Harre, Norbert Elias and Pasi Falk and by culturally oriented consumer researchers. Several of these authors provide rich accounts of the transition from the pre-modern period when the individual body was clothed in a ‘second skin’ provided by community to that of the modern isolated individual.

While some critique the Cartesianism in they perceive in the work of others, it might be argued that they might themselves reflect more sufficiently on their own “mentalistic” assumption that there is no limit to discourse. Such assumptions are directly countered by the second explanation which focuses on the emotional body described by Affect Theorists such as Brian Massumi, which is almost the mirror image of discourse theory as it presupposes that affects are immediate and are unmediated by culture.

The final explanations provide more complex accounts that move beyond a binary distinction between mind and body. Shaun Gallagher (2005) argues from a phenomenological perspective that we should look to the body-schema as the base for the development of the body-image and of human language. Last but not least for consideration is the radical neuropsychoanalytic explanation developed by Mark Solms and Jaak Panksepp (Solms and Panksepp, 2012), in which embodiment is key to the establishment of higher levels of self. Seen in this light one might reverse Descartes to argue that the problem is not so much located in the body, whose processes operate silently in the background to ensure that we adapt to challenge presented by an ever-changing environment, but rather the self, which dumbly overrides its self-interest by prioritizing its self-coherence over the demand that it corresponds to the reality in which it finds itself.

Social Theories

The body today is a battleground and a contested site over which health professionals struggle to contain “epidemics” of obesity and starvation disorders. The ingestion of food is deemed a medical issue; television is saturated with programming about cooking, while fewer adults than ever cook at home and fewer families eat together. Medicalization extends to exercise; with “bigorexics”, “addicted” to body-building. In the UK some engage in the current craze for ultra-marathons while at the same time six million of their fellow-citizens fail to achieve just one brisk ten-minute walk, once a month. How can such diverse “developments” be reconciled?

This section offers two broad social explanations of how western Europe got to this state based on Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias who provide complementary accounts of the spread of the Cartesian separation of mind from body. Foucault discusses the shift towards bio-power during the seventeenth century, as the body of the emergent modern individual became subjected to discipline and control in settings ranging from the household to the factory and clinic where she was presumed to act as a calculating machine. Elias provides a complementary account, describing the armouring and closure of the civilised body in the modern era as emotional expressions which had earlier been allowed free rein became subjected to control and self-censure. Foucault’s account of the transition from discipline to biopower is discussed first and Is followed by that of Norbert Elias that was outlined in chapter one, which traces the change in western Europe from “we” identity to “I” identity.

Foucault: From Discipline to Biopower

Michel Foucault is particularly known for his explanation of changes in power relations in Europe that occurred when the pre-modern absolutist state gave way to the establishment of the modern nation-state and the latter was transformed into the neoliberal state of the present day. Like Norbert Elias, Foucault argues that these changes came about through the exercise of bodily discipline. However, his explanation is spatial, based on the role played by bio-power, which is exercised over the population in general and over the individual body. The following necessarily curtailed account provides a brief snapshot that stresses Foucault’s focus on the spatial layout of institutions such as prisons, hospitals and schools and factories that were constructed during the early modern period and designed to enable the exercise of a bureaucratic disciplinary regime over the bodies of the prisoners, patients, children and workers they contained.

The Discipline Blockade

In absolute monarchies the King or Queen had absolute control over their subjects whom they could condemn on a whim to torture and death, often with savage brutality. The absolute power of the sovereign was greatly curtailed in the emerging nation state, where citizens were presumed to have rights and interests and were accorded freedom of choice to rationally evaluate alternatives. New forms of power arose in this context based on principles of rationality and knowledge. Firstly, guided by the Cartesian assumption that only those who behave rationally are fully human, those presumed to be lacking in rationality were considered unfit to belong to society and were sequestered, locked away in specialist institutions designed for the purpose of reform. Foucault describes the process he calls the discipline blockade that occurred in seventeenth century Europe, which involved the systematic identification of all those considered irrational and therefore abnormal, including; beggars, petty-criminals, tramps, prostitutes, the old, the lame and lunatics, who were confined in newly built poor-houses, asylums and prisons which were designed for maximum surveillance and control of their inhabitants.

Disciplinary Power

At the same time as the above Foucault describes how the general population was subjected to a regime of disciplinary surveillance which began with the bourgeois family itself. Parents were asked to train their children to be useful to the state as fitting subjects for further education. The medical profession warned parents to be constantly vigilant against the dangers of childhood masturbation which was considered to damage the moral and physical makeup of the individual. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, disciplinary surveillance spread from modern army barracks into homes,, schools, clinics and factories to enable the constant surveillance of the soldier, child, patient or worker (Foucault, 1977). Discipline was exercised through the visual examination by identifying those who did not measure up to the norm. Foucault suggested that the Panopticon developed by Jeremy Bentham operated as the perfect disciplinary apparatus, which made it possible for a single gaze to see everything constantly. A central point would be both the source of light, which would illuminate everything but would mask who was (or was not) behind it.

Within disciplinary spaces behaviour was oriented around the need to measure up to the norm, where the main motivation was the fear of being branded abnormal. The means for measurement was the examination, which most will think of in relation to the context of education, but which has a much wider significance in this explanation. Examinations were used to determine if a person was normal or as deviant or insane and in need of confinement. Such examinations are used today for purposes of classification such as to determine whether or not a person is suffering from a mental disorder, if they are fit to legally drive a motor-vehicle, or can avoid military service. It is important to note the need for constant self-questioning and self-examination engaged in by those subjected to such processes.

Biopower

Foucault argued that a new technology, biopower that is complementary to disciplinary power emerged in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Where disciplinary power is directed to the surveillance, training and control of the individual body, biopower uses statistical forecasts of macro variables such as life expectancy and the ratio of births to deaths with the aim to ensure that sufficient workers are available to maximize output. The creation of healthy bodies necessitated an understanding of what was normal and the isolation of those considered abnormal, such as the perverted adult, the hysterical woman and the masturbating child. As a consequence, the state and its agencies, including the medical establishment, church groups and voluntary organizations gained a considerable amount of knowledge of (and therefore power over) the bodies of individuals. Charles Booth carried out a detailed study between 1886 and 1903 entitled, An Inquiry into Life and Labour of the People of London, resulting in the publication of a detailed map, which identified areas of poverty, high immigration, prostitution and drug use, the progenitor of what is now called geo-demographic segmentation.

Discussion

The ultimate aim of discipline exercised in the family, the school and the clinic was to inculcate self-regulation, self-mastery and self-control in the individual who was otherwise free to do as they desired. Self-mastery has become a major challenge for individuals in an era when food is plentiful, cheap and fattening. Zygmunt Bauman (1995) distinguished health from fitness, to argue that a discourse of fitness has replaced that pertaining to the healthy body. The two terms are quite different, and people associate them with different places – the clinic and the gym. The clinic is where you go if you feel unwell, the gym is where you go if you want to become fit. Many people who visit clinics do so because they have placed their systems under untoward strain since the fitness programme, they have been pursuing has placed too much strain on muscle, bone or on their cardiovascular system.

While the healthy body comes in a diverse array of shapes and sizes, the fit body is determined by ‘the look’ defined by the fashion images of popular athletes, supermodels and rock-stars. More and more the ‘fit’ body is becoming shaped like a machine. In gymnasia the body-machine is checked for BMI (Body Mass Index) and cardiovascular measurements, and a fitness ‘programme’ is then designed for the novice to follow. The Nautilus suite or its equivalent splits the body into muscle groups involving the hips, buttocks, thighs, calves, back, shoulders, chest, upper arms, forearms, abs and neck. The person who regularly uses such devices is encouraged to think of his or her body as a work of art. Wall to wall mirrors encourage the individual to constantly look at and judge their body. Nowadays fitness trackers transfer the surveillance of the gymnasium to the wrist strap, prompting constant preoccupation with a range of metrics which can be shared on social media.

Bauman died before the craze for supplements started which developed many years ago amongst body-builders who sought to build muscle mass. What is now becoming mainstream is the constant monitoring of the microbiome by specialised businesses which prescribe a regimen that can stretch to more than a hundred pills a day, in response to deficiencies detected in essential nutrients. Related to this is the proliferation of weight-loss drugs which are supposedly targeted to individuals who are obese but are available to all.

Rom Harré: The Body as a Work of Art

Rom Harré (1989) writes of being struck by what many would consider an unusual analogy, between the practices of male body builders and those of custom car enthusiasts. Body builders are not merely interested in fitness but in transforming their bodies which they sculpt as works of art. Their efforts are based on the Exaggeration Principle; ‘if big is good, huge is better’. The bodybuilder regards his or her body very much like specialist breeders regard their dogs or custom car builders their cars. The Exaggeration Principle is applied to improving the size and definition of muscle groups by using Nautilus machines or perhaps free weights. The same technique of isolation and development of individual parts is evident in the custom car cult. For example, exhaust manifolds and tyres are isolated conceptually and then grossly exaggerated. This differential emphasis gains its effect by leaving the rest of the machine essentially unchanged. Harré argues that a latent symbolism of power underlines both the bodybuilder and the custom car enthusiasts. It is not the engine itself that is displayed but the implicit marks of its potency – the exhausts through which the sound of the power comes and the tyres through which it is transformed into acceleration.

Scrutinising the body and focusing on how to best develop its component parts is not limited to male body builders. Such scrutiny is scarcely novel, particularly amongst children who are particularly sensitive to physical features, that they think makes them appear different to others, which they come to think of as defects. This is apparent in Schouten’s (1991) ethnography of nine people who had aesthetic cosmetic surgery. Participants reported that their negative body images had emerged during adolescence, with some remembering that their parents had criticized their bodies when they were children. Six of the nine informants underwent plastic surgery at a time when their lives were in flux or transition, following or anticipating life events including childbirth, career choices, divorce or even death of a close relative. They described plastic surgery as s a means of regaining control of the self by reintegrating the self-concept and erasing the dissatisfaction which the person had experienced with their body. Most reported that their self-esteem had improved significantly as a result of surgery, leading to feelings of self-confidence and increased attractiveness. One woman remembered feeling dissatisfied with her breasts from the age of twelve, following which she had begun to avoid ‘feminine’ pastimes and dress. She even sought out a ‘male’ occupation in oil exploration. However, when she and her husband settled down and she became pregnant and then had a child, her small breasts made her feel incomplete as a woman. Augmentation mammoplasty allowed her to make a complete transition to womanhood. Others used the surgery as a means for precipitating further self-change. For example, one woman who had a rhinoplasty and a chin implant felt that her increased self-esteem enabled her to escape from an unhappy marriage and to build a new life.

An explanation based on Foucault suggests that body modification is engaged in as a paradoxical response to the operation of the prevailing discourse in society. In this explanation, those in Schouten’s study are responding to the discourse surrounding the societal ideal of health and fitness. While the act of working on the body or having it sculpted may bring them a sense of completion, power and control, it also effectively reproduces the system of power that led them to have the operation in the first place. For example, Hilary Radner discusses Jane Fonda’s decision to have plastic surgery as part of what she labels the ‘paradox of the feminine culture of the body’. In this view, women purposefully enter into exercise programmes such as the ‘Jane Fonda Workout’ and may decide to have plastic surgery to gain the feeling of control over their bodies. In engaging themselves in this process, through getting ‘fit’ they are fitting themselves out for the world of work and in society at large where the tanned, slim, smooth body is valued. The paradox is that while this may increase the feelings of worth and power of the person who develops a ‘fit’ and ‘sculpted’ body, it also reproduces the values of fitness. Placed at a remove from itself, the whole process is shocking. Fonda relates her shock when told that a Vietnamese prostitute felt she could raise her prices if she ‘Americanized’ her face and body through cosmetic surgery,

I was shocked into the realization that I myself had played an unwitting role as a movie star and sex symbol in perpetrating the stereotypes that affected women all over the world.’[Fonda, in Radner, 1997: 128].

While the similar case of ‘Prince Valentino’ is described later, perhaps more shocking is that Fonda herself subsequently opted for the same course of action. While Radner’s paper was published long before the social media explosion, it is argued that the pressure on individuals to conform to ideal images has greatly intensified since the introduction of smartphone applications such as Snapchat and Instagram. One key difference between the scenario Radner is discussing and today’s social media context is that in those days it was Fonda’s body that was out there on display, whereas today everyone using a smartphone application acts as a broadcaster of his or her own image which they project out into media space where it becomes public property for constant scrutiny and comment by others. Members of “i-Gen” were constantly aware of being on show, even when asleep and are particularly sensitive to being shamed and embarrassed on social media platforms (Twenge, 2017).

Norbert Elias: The Body and the Habitus

While discipline is central to Foucault’s explanation of how power over the body came to be exercised in the early modern era, Norbert Elias explains the mechanisms by which these disciplines were enacted. From chapter one, Elias’s core argument is that feelings of shame and embarrassment emerged as important means to regulate social conduct in a social climate where power relied for its effect on self-discipline. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries social control by brutal force gradually gave way to the exercise of internal self-monitoring and control of one’s own behaviour. Rather than resorting to brute physical punishment, the individual was now subjected to the more subtle form of pressure exerted by the development of a system of ‘manners’ based on politeness. Elias offers an example of this important turning point in behaviour, recounting how the Bishop of Verona sought to change the behaviour of a certain Duke Richard who had come to dine with him. While the Bishop considered Duke Richard to be a ‘well-mannered man’, he noted that the Duke exhibited a single but deadly fault – at dinner he smacked his lips too loudly when eating. Following the dinner the Bishop sent an emissary, who was known to have particularly good manners acquired at the courts of the great, to visit the Duke. During the course of a conversation with the Duke, the emissary gently pointed out his bad habit (of loudly smacking his lips) as a ‘favour’ to the Duke. For Elias, this:

polite, extremely gentle and comparatively considerate way of correcting is, particularly when exercised by a social superior much more compelling as a means of social control, much more effective in inculcating lasting habits, than insults, mockery, or any threat of outward physical violence (Elias, 1994: 65).

Elias explains that during this period of transition, people might still openly break wind or speak enjoyably of it or defecate openly. However, in eighteenth-century France there was a growing demand that natural functions such as urinating, defecating and sex be removed from the view of others. Strict control of bodily impulses and emotions was at first enforced by those of high rank on their social inferiors and then gradually trickled down through the various levels and layers of society. Eventually the task of training young children to conform to these social expectations became the primary function of the family.

Elias documents the growth in such controls through the number of manuals that became available for the regulation of ‘civilized behaviour’. Fifteenth century manuals advised the reader that,’ It is unseemly to blow your nose into the tablecloth’; ‘Do not blow your nose with the same hand that you use to hold the meat’. The handkerchief first originated in Italy during the Renaissance and diffused due to its snob value. Erasmus noted that in the sixteenth century, handkerchiefs were more widely available but not much used and advised that a person should use two fingers to blow and wipe their nose and if any snot fell out of the nose, they should discreetly tread upon it. By the eighteenth-century, use of the hands and fingers was still common, the handkerchief was widespread amongst the upper class, although it was not thought proper to look into it after evacuating one’s nose. By the mid-twentieth century, the use of a handkerchief was taken very much for granted. However, what kind of handkerchief was used and how it was used, was important.

Pierre Bourdieu (1984) who developed Elias’s concept of habitus was also keenly aware of how culture shapes the minutest bodily dispositions. In his study of France in the 1960s Bourdieu illustrates differences in the habitus of men and women by contrasting women’s delicate use of Kleenex tissues to men’s use of the big cotton handkerchief.

It would be easy to show, for example, that Kleenex tissues, which have to be used delicately, with a little sniff from the tip of the nose, are to the big cotton handkerchief which is blown into sharply and loudly, with the eyes closed and the nose held tightly, as repressed laughter is to a belly laugh, with wrinkled nose, wide-open mouth and deep breathing (“doubled up with laughter”), as if to amplify to the utmost an experience which will not suffer containment, not least because it has to be shared, and therefore clearly manifested to the benefit of others (Bourdieu, 1984: 192).

There are two lessons to be learned from the above. The first is that even the most mundane and apparently trivial physiological function may be used to mark complex social differences and that subtly different products are used to mark differences in gender and social class. Second, such markers change over time and are related to control over bodily expressions. One might suggest that this observation can be generalized across the range of bodily expressions for men and for women and that it is not limited to Western societies. Within society, gender is thus an important factor in determining the degree of self-control that is to be expected of a person in a given situation. Elias argues that the societal demand that women repress and control their bodily expressions across the entire range of behaviour has had severe consequences for their mental health and for that of society.

Pasi Falk (1996): From the Open Body to the Closed Body

Norbert Elias, whose explanation was introduced in chapter one, links the development of Cartesian dualism to the transition from a “we” to an “I” identity in the early modern period. Growing individualization in court societies led to increasing psychologization, such that the individuals came to identify themselves with the private operations of his or her mind which came to be seen as distinct from the body. Furthermore, behaviour that once might have been enjoyable, such as farting in public, was now thought inappropriate and caused shame and distress at one’s own behaviour and embarrassment or mortification if witnessed in that of others. Indeed, even the signs of embarrassment, such as squirming, or blushing, were subjected to strict self-control.

Elias explains such dramatic changes relating to the topology of the self (psychogenesis) to changing relations between groups in society (sociogenesis). The growing vigilance about one’s body and its processes became more acute when one had to live and work amongst strangers, many of them hostile. Pasi Falk (1994) developed the similar argument that the ‘I’ identity comprising the individual self is a modern development as in traditional societies the relations between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the self were construed differently. The inverted ‘C’ shape in Figure 8.1 (a) illustrate how in traditional communities a person is held in the same way that a young child is held in embrace of its mother. Falk places great emphasis on food, explaining that rituals surrounding food are extremely important in the traditional community, by simultaneously creating the group-self (the collectivity which emerges as the meal is shared) and the individual self (the person who eats the food, who is at the same time eaten into the community). Figure 8.1(b) illustrates the shared meal or communion by means of which the community re-creates itself, forming a powerful group self that constitutes a second skin for each of the individuals it enfolds. The wide band in Figure 8.1(c) illustrates the barrier between the community, which protects its members within from strangers who are outside the community.

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Figure 8.1: The Traditional Eating Community (Reproduced from Figure 2.3 (Falk, 1994: 22).

Figure 8.2 illustrates the predicament of the modern isolated individual. In Figure 8.2(a) the foetus (the inverted ‘C’ shape) is shown contained inside the mother. Figure 8.2(b) depicts the intermediate state when the child becomes partially aware of separateness, of the presence and absence of the mother. Note that this same shape is used by Falk in Figure 8.1(a) to illustrate how the person is held within the second skin of the traditional community. Falk explains that while members of traditional eating communities were undoubtedly individuals in that they developed a sense of personal autonomy, they did not achieve, nor indeed desire a sense of identity, as this is known today.

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Figure 8.2: The Emergence of the Modern Individual (Reproduced from Figure 2.2 (Falk, 1994: 17).

Figure 8.2(c) illustrates the development of a separate identity whereby the child separates from the mother and those other close networks of family and community. What is characteristic of modern identity that is lacking in traditional communities, is the hole which appears at the centre of the separated individual. This void or gnawing emptiness at the heart of the self represents the lack of the mother and the withdrawal of the second skin of community. Although the individual is no longer tied into the community and so is freer to interact with strangers in the marketplace and in society at large, this lack can result in a rootless and futile desire to be rejoined with that which has been lost. In this view, which is very close to that described by Lacan, the identity of the modern individual is based on something which is ‘inside’, but which is missing. Thus, if the concept of identity refers to a sense of wholeness, completeness or continuity of the self then, according to this view, the quest for identity (for wholeness and completeness) is doomed, as once a person has separated from the mother and from community he or she cannot be rejoined to them. This separation results in freedom, the freedom to be ‘yourself’, to be whoever ‘you’ want to be, unconstrained by the ties of community. But this freedom is paid for by the price of separation. As a result, the modern person is forever haunted by the idea that they are empty inside. It is emptiness at the centre of the self that provides the motive force for the individual’s illusory search for lost wholeness and identity.

The difference between a member of a primitive eating community and the modern individual is topological in that the former is largely contained inside the second skin of the community, while the latter has a hole in the centre. Food plays a key role in Falk’s explanation. The sense of community which envelops the identity of the member of the primitive eating community is based on the ritual shared meal (communion) as an integrating mechanism. The ritual sharing of food, and its physical incorporation, functions in traditional societies simultaneously as an act whereby the partaker is incorporated or ‘eaten into’ the community; eating together (com) the same bread (panis) transforms eaters into companions. The closeness of such companionship means that the community is thought of as being part of the self. In such communities the bodies of its members are open, as the community itself forms a buffer between what is regarded as being ‘inside’ and what is ‘outside’. The transition to modern society shows a decline in the eating community which is reflected in the decreasing importance of the ritual meal,

Shared meals as such do not disappear: the family meal still prevails to some extent (usually at weekends) and people dine out (or in) with their friends. However, the role of the meal as a collective community-constituting ritual has been marginalized – even in the case of the nuclear family. On the other hand the integrative function of a modern meal resides primarily in the other oral dimension, that of speech and communication (in distinction to communion), aptly exemplified by a “dining out” situation in which every individual partaker makes his or her individual choice of course in the menu (Falk, 1994: 25).

Traditional ritual meals should be eaten silently. For example, during the ritual meals of the Kwakiutl, talking about food while eating is rigorously forbidden (Falk, 1994: 36). In contrast, Falk notes that the primary characteristic of the modern meal is not the food itself, but rather the conversation. Those who partake in a modern meal are no longer ‘dissolved’ into a unity by means of shared and incorporated food but are rather linked together by means of conversation. The shift from eating community to modern meal is thus expressed as one from the passive incorporation of food, which simultaneously ‘eats one’ into the community, to the modern situation of ‘dining out’ where each makes his or her choice from the menu while contributing to the conviviality of the event. What is remarkable about popular television programmes such as MasterChef and The Great British Bakeoff is the although they are supposedly about food, the ingredients used are treated generally as a commodity with none of the thanks, nor regard for their provenance once a feature of traditional community.

Falk argued that the event is still shared, but the link between the partakers is now primarily constituted by the words that are exchanged rather than the food which is silently incorporated. This reflects a change whereby the tight bond which unites the members of the eating community, in the market society this is replaced by a much looser connection, in sharing a common system of representation, through the conversations by which people reciprocally respect the individual autonomy of others. Falk places great store by this shift from proximate communal passive incorporation to distant, individual and active acts of self-expression. Looked at from today’s perspective, social media has further removed the individual from the food they consume and the other they share it with – if in fact they do share it - which is now valued not for how its taste but for how it looks.

Closing the body

Falk’s (1994) account portrays the individual as playing an active role in the construction of their body. As already noted, his explanation is based on the decline of community and the rise of the autonomous, vulnerable individual. He contends that, with the decline in the eating community, the bidirectional nature of eating, whereby this is simultaneously a means of incorporating food and of being eaten into the community, is lost. Identity retreats from the group-self to be contained within the contours of the individual’s body. As the second skin of the community peels away, the isolated individual is motivated by a powerful desire to rid the self of a terrifying feeling of emptiness. The modern individual self eats (consumes) both material and symbolic signs which are associated with self-protection, with incorporating the good things of life so that he or she may become whole once more.

The individual thus proactively reaches out and grasps at images that offer the illusion of wholeness. In a consumer society, many of the images which are consumed are commodities that hold out the promise of filling up and protecting the self. However, the satisfaction these offer is transient and the modern self is doomed to continue on a course of grasping and incorporating images which are absorbed into the self and which over time are discarded in favour of new ones. A vast range of products signify the promise of protecting, caring for and insulating the self. The messages on the product labels are simple, powerful and to the point: ‘Use me, consume me and you will be OK. Use me in the morning before you go to work and I will protect you; use me at night when you want to ensure that no unsightly stains or odours may escape from my betraying body, use me and allow me to go to work’.

Discussion

There is broad support for the view that cultural influences on the degree of openness of body. Elias (1991) argues for a spectrum of identities from “We” to “I” societies, where American individualism lies at an extreme and Falk (1994) draws a distainction between the open body and the closed body. For instance Fiske (1991) describes how the body of the individual member of the Piaroa is open towards other members of the tribe, except for brothers-in-law who enter the group from outside. In contrast, psychologists have found that North American parents treat their own children in an analytic way as autonomous and independent individuals, whereas in Japan the approach is holistic and open to the other, laying stress on interdependence and mutual goals.  Where North American parents emphasize the need for physical separation of parents from their children, Japanese infants almost always sleep in the same bed as their parents, sometimes into late childhood. It is argued that these differences lead to different forms of exteroception, or attention to the external world.  Americans focus attention on specific objects and pay little heed to context, whereas Japanese use a dispersed attentional strategy which gives equal weight to the object and its context (Duffy & Kitayama, 2010: 57). 

Stephen Mennell: Diet, the disciplining of appetite

Stephen Mennell’s (1991) discussion of the civilization of appetite also complements that of Norbert Elias. Appetite is not equivalent to hunger but represents the idea that all hunger is to an extent psychological. Mennell describes the lavish feasts held by nobles in medieval Europe. The banquet for the enthronement of Archbishop Nevill at York in 1465 included one thousand sheep, two thousand pigs, one thousand geese, four thousand rabbits, fish and game by the hundreds, numerous kinds of bird, and twelve porpoises. Such great banquets are highly misleading as a guide to medieval patterns of appetite, which were often relatively frugal and were largely dependent on the rhythms of what the seasons had to offer. Often people had to fast at times of scarcity and as part of their religious observance. Mennell notes that the oscillation between feasting and fasting paralleled the extreme emotional volatility of medieval people noted by Elias (1994). This reflected the general precariousness of life during a period when few were entirely sure of where their next meal was coming from. By today’s standards, life was very insecure. Mortality rates were high, brought on by epidemics of disease, by fire or as the result of crop failures resulting in famine.

From the above, the exercise of self-control over the appetite was not a major problem for the vast majority of people in the medieval period. However, by the mid-eighteenth century, gluttony among the wealthy became the exception. Mennell explains this change as the result of the increasing security, reliability and variety of food supplies. As more food became generally available, so the elite sought to distinguish their appetite from those who were their social inferiors. In parallel to the development of the system of manners described by Elias (1994), the nobility began to value quality over the quantity of food and the ability of chefs to invent an elaborate variety of ever more refined dishes. This enabled the elite to maintain their social distance, which gave rise to a powerful desire to emulate or copy this behaviour by the bourgeois class. Mennell recounts how the mid-eighteenth century was a time of gastronomic controversy, when those who defended the old style of cooking based on quantity argued against what they considered to be the pretentiousness of nouvelle cuisine (1991: 144). By this time, larger segments of the bourgeois copied the courtly models of refined and delicate eating, stimulating the nobles to further refine their etiquette and their dishes.

Eventually those who wrote on culinary matters for the bourgeoisie emphasized the need for a discriminating palate and scorned any notion of a quantitative display of food. They promoted the idea of moderation which they linked with health. Mennell notes that although dieting for health and slimness became a prominent concern in mass circulation publications like women’s magazines only after the Second World War, the ideal of the slim body-image had begun to appear in elite social circles considerably earlier. Thus, Mennell attributes increasing self-control in the governance of appetite and in the cultivation of a slim body-image to the emergence of, and changing relations between, social classes. The middle classes came progressively to define themselves and their bodies in relation to a model which moderated its eating, and which maintained a slim and healthy body, in contrast to the working classes who focused on the quantity of cheap, filling food..

Language Cuts into the Body

Although dated, the study by Verba and Camden (1987) remains insightful as they explore the linguistic construction of the body. The authors conducted focus groups with middle class American women to explore the changing dimensions of the body and particularly the meanings they attributed to thinness and food. That participants associated thinness with not eating much, was unsurprising. However, they also associated being thin with health, wellness, being in control and high self-esteem, which do not necessarily follow, as one can be not thin or not fat and still be healthy. Verba and Camden’s participants linked fat to being out of control, unhealthy, diseased and lacking in esteem. Their further finding, which is both interesting and troubling, is that their participants considered descriptions such as “not thin”, as signifying not being in control, not healthy, not well, not desirable and not esteemed. The authors found that, ‘regardless of how they actually looked, those women who perceived themselves negatively were more inclined to evaluate their own body as not thin or fat’. Their participants’ identification as being fat or not thin was not related to the physiological reality of their actual appearance but to their psychological state (ibid.: 169-170).

The women divided foods into two types, contrasting delicious food from nutritious food. It is noteworthy that these are not actual opposites, as food can be delicious and nutritious. However, the women associated delicious foods such as pretzels, cheese, deep fried foods and beer with filling, sensual and tempting food. Foods considered nutritional were on the other hand perceived to be spiritual and close to nature, being raw, boiled, steamed, stir-fried and as a source of vitamins. The authors linked the sharp distinction that their subjects made between delicious (sinful) food and nutritious (spiritual) food as deriving from the peculiar brand of Christian Puritan morality that developed in the United States. Moreover they suggest that their participants walked a tightrope between an intense desire for the delicious food which they considered was forbidden them because it would make them fat, and the nutritious but bland food, they felt they ought to eat. Food in this culture thus invited contradiction, to be either pure, natural and wholesome or to be weak and sinful. The authors surmise that a potential but flawed “solution” to this perceived difficulty is to engage in bulimic behaviour by binging on delicious food and then inducing oneself to vomit before it takes effect. Another solution to which the food industry has devoted increasing attention is to make fattening foods that are also nutritious!

The Emotional Body

In recent years there has been something of a backlash against conventional social scientific explanations which are criticized as being overly cerebral, as they focus on the consumer as a conscious rational processor and effectively ignore the brute fact that we are embodied. Influenced by Jean Piaget, Western mainstream western psychology argued that there is no natural connection between the self and others and the infant only gradually becomes aware of the existence of other people. Social constructivists too have argued that infants are originally selfless and only come to acquire selfhood by engaging in social interaction. Arguably in such understandings the body acts simply as the container which houses the mind. As mentioned earlier, the ‘brain in a vat’ is a favourite mind-game for philosophers who ruminate over the potential implications that would arise if a person’s brain were to be surgically removed from their body and sustained by immersion in a bath of nutrients, but able to communicate with the body by radio signals. What would the situation be, they wonder, if the radio communications failed one day and the brain was entirely disembodied, blind, deaf and dumb and immersed alone in the vat?

Here I briefly outline two broad counter-arguments to the social constructivist position outlined above. One which emphasizes the previously neglected power of the emotions has two strands; firstly in contending that the emotions are innate; and secondly, that our supposed rationality is fundamentally governed by the power of affect. The second counter-argument is that humans are innately inter-individual as we are linked fundamentally to others. This argument also consists of two related strands, consisting firstly, of the discovery of the mirror-neuron system in Macaque monkeys, and secondly, of experimental evidence that even newborn infants can imitate complex cross-modal gestures.

Facebook received a lot of negative media attention following publication of a study that manipulated the emotional content of newsfeed directed at 689,000 users. When the moderators reduced positive expressions, those who received them produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts. Conversely, when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite reaction occurred (Kramer et al., 2014). The authors interpreted these results to support the argument for large scale emotional contagion, such that the emotions expressed by others directly influence our own emotional expression. This finding coupled with knowledge of the pervasive role played by algorithms that are designed to monetize engagement largely by stimulating negative emotion, may help explain the simultaneous growth in revenue for organizations such as Meta and increasing social disquiet and fragmentation. That said, understanding the emotions so as to better manipulate them has long been essential to the practice of marketing. Chinese traders of old were reputedly aware that an enlarged pupil signifies arousal and learned to manipulate the size of their own pupils as a sales technique. However, it was not until the early twentieth century, that the emotions were subjected to systematic study by marketing science. John Broadus Watson, an academic at John Hopkins University was particularly interested to understand the role played by fear, arguing that humans are not born afraid, but rather that fear is learned as a conditioned response to a stimulus. Watson demonstrated this in his infamous experiments on the nine-month-old ‘Little Albert’. Albert had no fear of a white rabbit with which he played contentedly. In one experiment Watson struck a metal pipe with a hammer behind Albert when the baby was stroking the rabbit. Albert began to cry and later became distressed on any occasion when the rabbit was brought near him. Robert also became distressed by anything that was rabbit-like, such as items that were white, or soft and fluffy. Watson named this effect stimulus generalization. When Watson joined the advertising agency J. W, Thompson in 1920, he found that his colleagues were already well-versed in using fear to advertise a range of products.¹

The Fear “Appeal”

The formula behind the construction of a fear “appeal” is quite simple. First, invent a problem; then dress it up in obscure scientific or medical language; then promote the problem using expert testimony to provide credibility; finally, offer continued use of your product as a solution to the problem. Stanley B. Resor took over the advertising agency JWT in 1916, believing that the only thing consumers respond to is fear. He was approached by the owners of Listerine, a surgical antiseptic who wanted to broaden their market. Resor did not advertise Listerine as preventing “bad breath” but resurrected the ‘cod’ Latin term ‘halitosis’ to imply a medical function. The campaign was successful because nobody knew what halitosis was, but everyone knew that one could be acutely embarrassed in front of one’s peers if one did not use Listerine continually. Although Listerine continues as a powerful brand presence today, most users are unaware that several experts say it does not work. For instance, Dr. Richard Miller of the U.S. National Breath Center wrote that both alcohol and non-alcohol versions of Listerine dry the mouth excessively, enabling the bacteria that cause bad breath to flourish.²

Lifebuoy toilet soap employed a similar theme to the above. It was invented in England by Lever Brothers in 1895 and subsequently became one of the biggest selling brands in Britain and the USA. Sales took off when Lifebuoy was advertised as the cure for “B.O.” (Body-Odour) - described as the problem even your best friend wouldn’t tell you about. Yet again the campaign featured unfortunate women who could not get married because of they were unaware they had B.O. Similar tactics are used today to market “functional foods” such as “probiotic” drinks, containing “good bacteria”, in Yakult’s case, “Lactobactillus Casei Shirota”, which are of dubious benefit to consumers.³

G. Clotaire Rapaille features in The Men who made us Spend⁴, as the marketing consultant who advised General Motors on the development of the Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV) of which the Hummer formed the prototype. Rapaille says he told General Motors, “It’s a weapon that says, “don’t mess with me – if you do, I’m going to crash into you and kill you!” Rapaille contends that our most powerful primal instinct is for survival, and that the car forms a protective barrier that makes us superior in a very dangerous world. SUVs quickly became the fastest growing segment of the car market. While they offer security, choice is guided by emotion rather than rationality. SUVs are more likely to rollover than standard cars.⁵ They cause more injuries than other vehicles and also contribute to the

In the television series Madmen, Don Draper the creative director of Stirling Cooper made the memorable quote, ‘Advertising is based on one thing; happiness is “freedom from fear” It’s a billboard on the side of the road that screams, “It’s okay… you are okay.” The formula is like a play where the consumer is the damsel in distress, the villain comprises something frightening that might happen to her and the product is the hero who saves the day.

Affect and Emotion

Despite early interest in the power of emotion in marketing and its continuing use in practice, marketing academics have since generally side-lined the study of the emotions in favour of the narrower view that the consumer operates solely as a calculating machine (O’Shaughnessy & O’Shaughnessy, 2003: 4). Until relatively recently this was the prevailing view in the social sciences where the focus was on cognition, language and discourse. Charles Darwin (1872) treated the emotions such as anger, fear and disgust as separate discrete entities, or modules. He argued that facial expression is the means by which emotions can be recognized and moreover, that facial expressions of emotion are universal across cultures and indeed that emotions can be found in several species. Taking his lead from Darwin, Silvan Tomkins (1962), studied the role of facial gestures to express emotion. Tomkins developed a two-level explanation which distinguishes emotions from affects. Affects are described as innate physiological reactions to intensities of experience and form the biological substrate of the emotions, while the emotions are culturally influenced perceptions and interpretations of affects. In this understanding affects are felt in the body and our psychological makeup expresses them as feelings.

Tomkins describes nine affects that manifest in facial expressions; distress-anguish; interest-excitement; joy; surprise; anger-rage; fear-terror; shame-humiliation; disgust and dissmell. From Darwin (1872), he suggests that facial movements evolved to signal emotion; for example, fear, which is a response to a threat to survival is expressed by wide open eyes, tense lower eyelids and hair standing on end, particularly at the nape of the neck. Tomkins’ theory was extended by Paul Ekman (1972) who argued on the basis of cross-cultural research on facial expressions that humans possess a universal basic set of basic affect programmes. This explanation, based on hundreds of cross-cultural studies seemed to provide evidence that the emotions can be universally read from the face and now forms the taken for granted conventional explanation of the emotions as taught in textbooks (Gendron et al., 2014).

The Tomkins-Ekman theory as it is known is consonant with what is called the James-Lange theory of the emotions. The latter is named after the psychologist William James (1884) and the physiologist Carl Lange, who argued independently of each other that the source of the emotions is physiological. In this view the emotions arise as responses to physiological reactions to the environment. For instance, consider that you are walking alone in the deep twilight when you hear a rustle in the trees and as your steps quicken, your heart begins to race and as a shiver runs down your spine, you interpret your reaction as fear.

Affect Theory

Affect theory arose as a critique of the prevailing focus on cognition, culture and language in the social sciences which have long been hostile to arguments that aspects of human behaviour is innate. In the “turn to affect” a number of social scientists began to agree with arguments that affects are innate and are phylogenetically older than cognitions given that they are shared across species. While affect theory is complex, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, whose theories are not discussed here, the nub of the argument advanced by Brian Massumi (1995) and others (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010), is that affect are intensities that operate at a sub-personal level to influence our behaviour outside of consciousness, such that the body-brain has already formed a thought and begun to act on it before rational intentions are formed.

The affective turn describes the argument that in a decision context the emotions are more powerful than cognition as they are more fundamental and work independently of, and in advance of, rational evaluation (Massumi, 1995). It is important to note that Massumi distinguishes affects from feelings. Affect is often used as a synonym for feelings which are associated with parts of the body other than the brain, such as the heart, spleen and kidneys. However, Massumi argues that affects are not feelings, nor are they emotions, but rather they refer to sub-personal intensities that operate as precursors to personal feelings and emotions.

Massumi (1995) refers the reader to a study of children’s response to a short film which he cites as providing evidence that language and affects comprise different systems. He then refers to what is called “the half-second delay”, the term coined to describe the results of a series of studies conducted by Libet (1979; 1985), who asked subjects to flex their finger and then record on a clock when they made the decision to do so. Libet found that the flexes came 0.2 seconds after the decision was clocked, but an EEG machine registered brain activity 0.3 seconds before the conscious decision was made (Massumi, 1995: 30). This prompted Massumi and others (Bargh & Earp, 2009) to argue that Libet’s finding has enormous significance because it proves that free will is an illusion, as the exercise of conscious free will does not consist of forming intentions but rather of vetoing them after they arise,

It should be noted that in the mysterious half-second, what we think of as "higher" functions, such as volition, are apparently being performed by autonomic, bodily reactions occurring in the brain but outside consciousness, and between brain and finger, but prior to action and expression (Massumi, 1995: 90).

Massumi then argues that intention forms not in the mind but in the body, which is already anticipating whatever it is that the conscious self retrospectively decides.Thus Massumi and other affect theorists follow the James-Lange argument, that emotions follow from affects, as expressed by Highmore (2010),

The bruising that I experience when I am humiliated by a loved one is both literal and metaphorical: I am bruised, I sit slightly slumped, more weary and wary, yet this bruising also reaches inside, I feel internally battered. Could you possible “feel” that you were in love if you could not feel your beating heart climbing into your throat or your palms sweat? Would I really be moved by a tragedy if I did not feel rivulets of tears trickling down my cheeks?⁶

In the above, the emotions are described as fundamentally embodied, such that the Extropian vision of a ‘brain-in-a vat’, capable of leading a fully human life, free of the ‘meat’ of the body, appears fanciful in the extreme. This is consonant with the argument that as social animals, human physical proximity to others is essential. For instance, in iGen, Jean Twenge (Twenge, 2017), attributes rising instances of loneliness, depression and suicide to the distancing effects of social media and the lack of face-to-face interaction.

In line with the James-Lange theory, supported by Libet (1979; 1985) we only become aware of our emotion after the event. It is argued that automatic triggering of emotions by a logo or a piece of music bypasses rational evaluation and makes us feel different. Anna Gibbs (2010) argues that consumers of media are affected at a pre-individual level by the Nike swoosh and the McDonalds soundbite, She argues that these signatures, or logos, whether in sound or image form, generate feelings that mobilize the body’s capacity for synesthesia, in which affect seems to act as a switchboard through which all sensory signals are passed. Toyota’s ‘‘Oh, what a feeling!’’ maps the image of a jump in slo-mo and ends with a freeze frame onto an arrangement of notes that mirrors the jump’s rising contours and then seems to cruise out over an edge Thelma and Louise–style, before evoking the thrill of the G-force with the falling scale of ‘‘Toyota.’’ Both sound and image trace the typical pattern of arousal and plateau of the discrete affect of joy (Gibbs, 2010: 192).

Affect theorists promote synaesthesia and the simultaneity of sensory experiences of daily aspects of consumption which they argue cannot be explained by language. Gibbs describes,

sitting by the window in a café watching the busy streetscape with the warmth of the morning sun on my back, I smell the delicious aroma of coffee and simultaneously feel its warmth in my mouth, taste it, and can tell the choice of bean as I listen idly to the chatter in the café around me and all these things blend into my experience of ‘‘being in the café’ (ibid.: 200/201).

For Gibbs, affective contagion is at the heart of mimetic communication. The innate affects described by Silvan Tomkins are communicated rapidly and automatically by the face and the voice. She notes that it is difficult not to smile when we see another person smiling and thus to elicit the same affect. Tomkins argues that affects are transmitted by the face and through the timbre of the voice in ways that are instantly recognizable to others. Humans are expert readers of faces, much of which takes place outside of consciousness. Affect theorists focus on the power of affective intensities generated by what others might deem incidental, such as images, facial expressions, or the cadence of a voice. The timbre of the voice or the hairdo convey a magical property that opens us to manipulation. It is these much more than rational arguments that sway our choices. Given most affect theorists are American, it is not surprising that they have drawn on the unusual appeal of recent US presidential candidates for inspiration. Massumi (1995) refers to Ronald Reagan, whose fumbling verbal style and discordant image were the butt of many jokes, but who nonetheless became president. Massumi argues that Reagan’s success could never have been secured by rational evaluation nor indeed by emotionally engaging voters, but was rather achieved by the power of affect, communicated by the timbre of his voice, which signified confidence (ibid.: 101-103). Nigel Thrift refers to the importance of a hairdo, referring to Hillary Clinton’s hair, which she recognized in a speech at Yale in 2001, “Pay attention to your hair…because everyone else will!” (Thrift, 2010).

Writing years before the first election of Donald Trump, William Connolly asks, “What is the connection today between evangelical Christianity, cowboy capitalism, the electronic news media, and the Republican Party, in the USA? Connolly wants to understand the unlikely coalition of interests between the rich and powerful and poor white voters. He focuses first on the extremely narrow view of “Christianity” peculiar to the hard-right in the USA which bypasses Christian messages of forgiveness and love for neighbour to communicate a terrifying, apocalyptic vision of the Second Coming of Christ. This divides the ‘saved’ from others who are damned as ‘sinners’, where the ‘saved’ are identified with those resentful middle-aged whites who live in the depressed cities of the rustbelt. Connolly argues that the right-wing media acted as a powerful resonance machine to stir the emotions and feed the resentment of this “left-behind” segment who railed against political correctness, environmental concern and immigrants, in line with the agenda of the rich and the powerful,

The existential bellicosity of those infused with economic greed reverberates with the transcendental resentment of those visualizing the righteous violence of Christ. One party discounts the future of the earth to extend its economic entitlements now, the other to prepare for the day of judgment against nonbelievers. These electrical charges resonate back and forth, generating a political machine more potent than the aggregation of its parts. They find expression in the promise to plunge millions into a fiery hell. (Connolly, 2005: 976).

Working class resentment is stoked by ‘shock jocks” from Fox News and other right-wing media outlets. Connolly argues that what is important is not what is said but the affective impact, “the poster boy expresses its temper in his facial expressions, timbre of voice, insistent interruptions, demand for unquestioned authority and accusatory style” (ibid.: 876). Connolly describes the effect on the 100,000 crowd at a race track when George Bush emerged from the only SUV in an entourage, “to an incredible roar of approval”, as an illustration that images cut directly into the “soft tissues of affect, emotion, habit and posture’,

The crowd responded to the SUV as a symbol of disdain for womanly ecologists, safety advocates, supporters of fuel economy, weak-willed pluralists, and internationalists. Bush played upon the symbol and drew energy from the crowd’s acclamation of it. Resentment against those who express an ethos of care for the world was never named: a message expressed without being articulated. In sum, seemingly peripheral cues such as facial expressions, hairstyle, tone of voice and the SUV have profound effects on the “soft tissues of affect, emotion, habit and posture as well as the upper reaches of the intellect” (Connolly, 2005, 873).

Affect theory was given a major boost following publication of Emotion Circuits and the Brain (2000), by the neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux where he describes the neural pathways linked to the “fear system”, located in the amygdalae, which are the almond shaped organs that form part of the limbic system deep in the brain’s sub-cortex. LeDoux’s heavily cited paper reinforces the argument made Brian Massumi (1995) that affect works autonomously, prior to language and consciousness.

Discussion

The above briefly outlines two main theories of the emotions. The Tomkins-Ekman theory proposes a set of innate basic emotions that exist across cultures on the basis of empirical cross-cultural research on responses to facial expressions. This is supported by the neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, who described the operations of the “fear system” in the brain and by Jaak Panksepp, who describes the set of basic affect programmes which he argues underlie the expression of emotions in humans and animals. Secondly, affect theorists such as Brian Massumi argue that affect programmes which developed earlier in the evolutionary history of our species operate efficiently at a sub-personal level in advance of higher-level cognitive processes whose role is simply to provide post-hoc personal rationalizations. They argue in support of the James-Lange theory, that emotions are culturally influenced perceptions of innate bodily affects. Together these arguments de-throne cognition in favour of embodied emotions. They raise profound and interlinked questions; are the emotions innate? Is there an emotional self that is separate from a cognitive self? Are the feelings we experience representations of prior body states? Can our emotions be manipulated without our knowledge and if so, does this mean that we lack free will? These important questions are the subject of continuing controversy in philosophy and the social sciences which are briefly introduced below.

Are emotions universal and innate?

It is argued that the emotions are largely separate from cognitive processes because they are innate phylogenetically older and are shared across a wide number of species. In this view emotional responses move quickly and efficiently ahead of consciousness which provides post-hoc rationalizations for action. This depends on the idea that there are a number of basic emotions which are shared across cultures and indeed across species. Paul Ekman and Carroll Izard argue in line with the Tomkins-Ekman theory that basic emotions are shared across cultures by people with different languages and beliefs, who judge facial expressions of emotions such as anger, contempt, disgust, fear, sadness and surprise in similar ways (Ekman, 1994). However, this research has been criticized on two methodological grounds by Fridlund (1994). Firstly, on account that the researchers provided the terms to describe facial expressions, raising the possibility that respondents would not have agreed if they had been allowed to use their own words, and secondly, because the research consisted of forced choice responses.

The above criticisms are argued to have, “fundamentally undermined Ekman’s claims for the universal nature of the basic emotions (Leys, 2011: 470). Fridlund offers an alternative explanation that facial expressions evolved to help us communicate our motives in an interindividual context. Margaret Wetherell (2012, Ch. 2) argues that the idea of innate basic emotions seems credible as these accord with our common-sense understanding. That said, she disagrees with the pre-packaging of discrete emotions by Ekman and others who adopt a “one size-fits-all” approach which assumes that, “bodies always and everywhere speak just English, since it is English-language terms that define and parse the emotion categories assumed to be innately programmed.⁷

Fridlund’s critique was subsequently rebutted by Ekman and his colleagues (Keltner et al., 2003: 420). In a comparative study of Americans and the Himba ethnic group from Namibia, Gendron et al. (2014) asked half of their participants to sort a group of faces into piles based on a set of emotion words (is the expression angry, sad, fearful and so on), whilst the other half was asked to freely sort the faces into piles and then to label the piles they had created. The researchers confirmed Fridlund’s suspicion that providing emotional words as labels does strongly influence the results. In contrast to the received wisdom, the results of the free-sort task indicated clear cultural differences in emotion perception between Americans and the Himba. The authors’ conclusion, that facial expressions are not universally recognized in discrete emotional terms challenged years of research and so it is not surprising that the debate continues. However, the social theorist Ruth Leys cites evidence that today many, indeed most, psychologists working on emotions now believe that Ekman and others were wrong to argue that the emotions are driven by a small number of innate affect programs.

Free Will and the Emotions

Brian Massumi (1995) drew extensively from the experiments by Benjamin Libet (1979; 1985) as the evidence base to support his argument that sub-personal affects work efficiently in advance of conscious intentions which are effectively post-hoc rationalizations. Shaun Gallagher (2005) and Ruth Leys (2011) have each criticized the basis of Libet’s experiments. This is firstly, because tasks that Libet asked his subjects to perform such as moving a finger, are of the kind that we normally conduct automatically. Whether playing a piano, or typing, we are not consciously aware of the multitude of movements we make, but this does not mean that we do not intend them. The assumption that the actual decision to move a finger was made by sub-personal processes ignores that there was always also a conscious level context for this, in that subjects knew which action to produce.⁸ Leys quotes from Shaun Gallagher (2005) whose argument account of the body schema is discussed in the next section, that it is only when a person loses motor control due to damage to their body schema that the conscious body image is brought into play, which is the situation Libet placed his subjects in. As is discussed further below, From Gallagher (2005) argues that intentional actions are governed by the body image whereas motor movements are controlled by the body schema.

Cartesianism and Emotions

Affect theorists claim that their explanation effectively undermines Descartes dualistic split of mind from body. However, Ruth Leys argues that although they condemn the split between mind and body, affect theorists actually perpetuate Cartesianism. This is because they first construct an abstract picture of the mind as separate from the body, which they then critique. Because they insist that emotions and cognition operate as separate systems and not in common, they exaggerate the differences. For example, in relation to Libet’s experiments they first assume the existence of a disembodied consciousness and then when the experiment suggests this comes too late to account for the movement, they conclude in dualist fashion that intentionality has no place in the initiation of the movement of the finger (Leys, 2011: 457).

Are Discrete Emotions Located in the Brain?

Joseph LeDoux’s (2000) discovery of the “fear system” in the human brain which he linked to the amygdala seemed to provide definitive proof that the neural correlates of discrete emotions can be found in the brain. This finding was in line with the argument developed by Jaak Panksepp, whose argument is discussed in the section on psychoanalysis, that emotional circuits are located in phylogenetically older brain structures. Le Doux’s work on what was called the “emotional brain” had a huge impact well beyond the confines of science.

This ‘locationist” account, described as such because it locates fear in just one brain region, was challenged by Lindquist et al. (2012), who argued from a psychological constructionist standpoint that the amygdala plays a role in a distributed network that determines whether or not a stimulus is emotionally salient. While the evidence associating the amygdala with fear was based on the observation that rats freeze in response to fear stimuli, Lindquist et al (ibid.) provided the more general argument that that working alongside other brain centres, the amygdala is involved when external stimuli are uncertain or arousing.⁹ Following an extensive review of the literature on cognition and emotion, Le Doux then revised his locationist argument to argue that the architecture for emotions is more about "process" and less about brain structure (LeDoux and Brown, 2017). From this he argued that while emotional experiences may originate in subcortical regions and non-emotional experiences may originate in cortical regions, both types of input are ultimately processed by cortical circuits in the cerebral cortex and so arise from one brain system.

The Phenomenal Body

Phenomenology focuses on a first-person perspective, relating to the ‘mineness’ or ‘for-me-ness” of experience. However, as Shaun Gallagher (2005) points out in discussing the situations where we are aware of our body, many important processes are prenoetic or hidden from us as they occur outside of phenomenal experience, occurring automatically and without our conscious attention. (ibid.: 2). A major challenge for Gallagher’s discussion of the body is that different theorists attribute different meanings to the same terms. Conceptual confusion applies to two important concepts, the body schema and the body image. Gallagher makes an important contribution by clarifying these concepts and in weighing up the evidence to support his conclusions. He argues that while the body schema and body image are closely related, these systems are different and so can to a large extent be specified and demarcated from each other. His core argument is that the vast amount of academic interest has been on the body image, which is linked to exteroception, enabling us to take our body as an object amongst others and about which we form beliefs and intentions. Much less time has been devoted to consideration of the more primitive body schema, which he argues is innate as it is formed before we are born, and consists of sensory motor capabilities that operate without awareness through the modality of proprioceptive, or tactile awareness.

Figure 8.3. The Body Schema and the Body Image

Figure 8.3. The Body Schema and the Body Image

The Body Schema

It is commonly believed that an individual sense of self does not develop until the infant is capable of recognizing her mirror image, or its equivalent. Such thinking informs Lacan’s description of the “mirror stage” and the rouge test for self-recognition. However, Gallagher (2005) argues for the existence of a neglected primitive body schema that is phylogenetically prior to the body image and which acts as the base for its development. Here movement, or proprioception, plays a crucial role in providing a body-centred spatial frame of reference for this primitive sense of self. Indeed, before we are born, our capacities for perception and behaviour have been shaped by our movement in the womb. The body schema describes how we move through the world, comprising, ‘a system of sensory-motor capacities that function without awareness of the necessity of perceptual monitoring’ (ibid.: 24). The body schema has nothing to do with beliefs or with perceptions about our body but consists of those sensory and motor functions that collectively work to maintain our posture, and govern movement.

Gallagher uses the case of Ian Waterman as an example to illustrate the importance of taken-for-granted proprioception in guiding our taken-for-granted movements and also to illustrate the separateness of the body schema from the body image. As an adult Ian suffered from neuropathy and so lost the ability to stand, sit or move his limbs (ibid.: 43-45). For the first three months after he had lost these abilities Ian was unable to control his movement. Gallagher explains that because of his loss of proprioception due to the damage incurred by his body schema, Ian was forced to rely on vision to gauge where his limbs were and consequently, he could not control his movements in the dark. Because vision is linked to the body image and is separate from the body schema, Ian had to relearn how to make the smallest movement. To begin with when he tried to move a leg, it would act unpredictably and only gradually became subject to conscious control. In order to walk, Ian had not only to think of where he was going but also had to use his sight to ensure that his posture was upright and that his leg was in the correct position to move forward. It took two years of trial and error for Ian to learn to walk again. Gallagher explains that Ian lost a large part of his body schema which was permanently damaged as a consequence of neuropathy. However, by exerting extreme effort, Ian was able to rebuild a minimal body-schema by engaging higher-level functions that serve the body image.

Gallagher argues against the Cartesian idea of a “brain in the vat”, for instance that which is presented in The Matrix. The idea that humans could exist quite happily if our brains were sustained in a bath of chemicals, or wired to silicone is popular among the Extropians and others who refer to the body disparagingly as dispensable ‘meat’. Gallagher argues to the contrary that the mind is fundamentally embodied and that the body schema plays a central role in experience, cognition and action. The body schema provides the conditions to make perception possible, feeding into a range of cognitive abilities and also acting to constrain intentional consciousness in a number of ways. Importantly, the pre-reflective body schema provides the platform on which our egocentric point of view is constructed; “The body and its environment work together to deliver an already formed meaning to consciousness.¹⁰”Indeed hidden prenoetic roles of the body schema that operate behind the scenes may be even more important than our conscious attitudes, because they make perception itself possible.

Gallagher illustrates the above through the example of reading, which is a fundamental form of ‘consumption’ that is not often referred to by consumer researchers, where in order to make sense of a piece of text, our eyes must scan the top half of a line of print rather than the bottom half – try this out yourself by covering the top of this line (ibid: 139). In situations where reading is difficult, one’s body adjusts without conscious awareness, by shifting posture and peering closer to the text. By comparison to other species, the human body has its strengths and limitations; for instance, we cannot see in the ultra-violet or infra-red spectra; our sight is better than that of a dog, but our sense of smell is much poorer. Human perception and attention cannot be separated from the body’s upright posture, reflected in the command to “sit up and pay attention!”. When we listen to a sentence with head and eyes turned right our performance in recall is better than when they are turned left (ibid.: 141). The activities we engage in from walking to climbing Everest are made possible only because of schematic adjustments made by the body that enables us to walk, run, or catch a ball and indeed these things happen despite the fact that there is a discrepancy between our conscious size-estimation of our body and that of other objects, which form part of our body image (ibid.: 141).

Discussion

Not long ago Gallagher’s argument for the existence of an innate body schema would have been dismissed out of hand. Up until recently, most theorists followed William James’ (1890) contention that the infant’s experience is a “blooming, buzzing confusion” and that perception must be learned. Moreover, it was assumed that perception is modality specific, in other words, movement and vision are separate systems which take time to coordinate. For instance, an infant may know that a ball is round by feeling it, or by seeing it, but it takes time for them to realise that each mode relates to the same object. This is a complex process. For instance, in order for me to imitate you sticking out your tongue requires 1. That I observe you sticking out your tongue 2. I am aware that I have a tongue situated in the same place, even though I cannot see it 3. My visual system communicates to my motor system to stick my tongue out and 4. The motor system complies with this. Jean Piaget called this process invisible imitation, in that it involves using parts of the body that are invisible to the infant, in this case the tongue. Consequently, he argued that invisible imitation only becomes possible by the age of 8-12 months because it relies on the existence of a coherent body schema (Gallagher, 2005: 68). Gallagher cites evidence from two quite different sources relating to newborn imitation and the mirror neuron system (MNS) respectively, in seeking to undermine this understanding and in support of his argument for the existence of an innate body schema,

Newborn imitation

Given the assumption that intermodal communication takes time to develop, the finding by Andrew Meltzoff and Keith Moore that infants just a few hours old are capable of such complex behavior came as something of a surprise. The experiment by Melzoff & Moore (1983) was based on a sample of forty newborn infants ranging from one hour to seventy-one hours of age. The experimenter presented each infant either a mouth-opening gesture or a tongue protruding gesture over four minutes, alternating with a passive expression every twenty seconds. The results showed that infants imitated the adult behavior. A further experiment selected forty infants less than seventy-two hours old, who were shown tongue protrusions and sideways head movements, which demonstrated that the infants systematically imitated the movements presented to them. The babies made a significantly larger number of tongue protrusions when shown this behaviour rather than the head movements and vice versa (Meltzoff & Moore, 1989). A final experiment consisted of four conditions where an adult showed either a passive face, an open mouth, tongue protrusion from the middle of the mouth, or tongue protrusion from the side. Tests with the same infants were conducted over three days, with one delay of twenty-four hours. The results indicated that imitation occurred not only immediately but also after the delay of twenty-four hours. The authors also found that infants improve their performance over time (Melzoff & Moore, 1994).

Gallagher (2005) argues that the results of the above experiments are convincing, as they seem to measure genuine imitative behavior and not mere reflex action (ibid.: 72). The results suggest that contrary to Piaget, even newborn infants can exercise invisible imitation by moving parts of their body in response to interpersonal stimuli. Gallagher concludes that these studies provide convincing evidence for intermodal communication and for the existence of a primitive body schema that is present at the start of life, but which develops more fully with experience over time (Gallagher, 2005: 72-/74).

The Mirror Neuron System (MNS)

Gallagher (2005) cites a second body of evidence from biology to support his argument that the ability for intermodal communication is innate. Mirror neurons were discovered by chance by Vittorio Gallese and his colleagues in the course of their research on the activation of motor brain cells in macaque monkeys (Gallese & Goldman, 1998). The researchers found that a specific set of neurons fired when a monkey engaged in a behaviour such as picking up a peanut and eating it. They then made the chance discovery that when a researcher picked up a peanut to hand it to the monkey, the same neurons fired that fired when the monkey itself actually grasped a peanut. Given that each instance of acting and observing involves the same neurons, they were given the name ‘mirror neurons’. Mirror neurons both perceive and act upon the world. When the monkey observed the researcher picking up the nut it was not simply watching this action (perception). At the same time, the mirror neurons were simulating the motor reactions that would be involved as if they were also picking up the nut.

Simulation theorists argue that mirror neurons help us to translate our visual perception of the other person’s behaviour into a mental plan of that behaviour in ourselves, that enables us to predict their thoughts and actions. This is not just a mental inference but recreates the state that matches that of the target person (Gallese & Goldman, 1998: 498). Mirror neurons work nonconsciously and automatically although they may shape conscious behaviour.

Simulation theory provides one explanation for Theory of Mind (TOM), which is related to mindreading, or our ability to read the intentions of others. In this view I use my mind as a model to evaluate others, judging their behavior on the basis of my simulation of what it would be like to be them if I were in their situation. Thus, the arguments made by Gallese and Goldman (1998) are a form of simulation theory. The alternative explanation for TOM is called theory-theory (TTOM). Theory theory was developed by Cosmides and Tooby (1995) whose argument for the existence of domain-specific modules is discussed in chapter three. With Simon Baron-Cohen (1995), they argue we come equipped with a Theory of Mind Module (TTOM), that is specific to reading the minds of others. In this view mindreading evolved during the Pleistocene period because humanity is a cooperative and competitive species and so over thousands of generations evolution selected for modules that enable us to infer the internal states of other people from their outward signs (Tooby & Cosmides, 1995 xvii). It is important to mention these two theories because Gallagher (2005) disagrees with both explanations. Gallagher argues that both theory theory and simulation theory are Cartesian in that they assume that we form mental representations of others.

Simulation theory fits Gallagher’s interest best because the discovery of mirror neurons is strongly suggestive of an innate capacity for intermodal communication to read the minds of others. Thus, when we perceive another person’s actions, that perception is registered in the mirror neuron system as if they were our own actions. However, he disagrees with the assertion that this is not a direct interaction with the other person but rather, “an interaction with a simulated model of himself, pretending to be the other person” (ibid.: 202). Gallagher argues that there is insufficient evidence to support the contention that there are two steps in the process, where the first step is perception and the second step involves the creation of a simulated model. Instead, perception and simulation are part of the same process and there is no need for any form of internal model. Thus, when an infant imitates a facial gesture there is no need for them to simulate the gesture internally, because “It is already simulating it on its own face. Its own body is already in communication with the other’s body at prenoetic and perceptual levels that are sufficient for interpersonal communication” (ibid.: 223).

Discussion

Meltzoff & Moore (1977, 1983) argue that the imitated behavior they observed could not have been learned by the babies and was highly unlikely to consist of reflex actions. If they are not these, they must be imitation. Susan Jones (2009) makes the point that this strongly supports a nativist stance, that newborn imitation is only possible if infants inherit knowledge about their own abilities and action and how these map onto the bodies of others. Reviewing the evidence, Jones found that tongue-protruding behavior, was most often studied and provided the best evidence in support of infant imitation. However, this is not a good guide as tongue protrusion occurs spontaneously in infants. She concludes by arguing that support for this strong nativist claim for infant imitation, “is not compelling and we should proceed on the assumption that they do not” (Jones, 2009, 2327).

In relation to mirror neurons, the ability to simulate others, experiencing their actions as if we are acting this out ourselves is fundamental across the spectrum of our behaviour as consumers. Imagine travelling home late at night and one person makes it onto the last bus, which is pulling away to look down on another person helplessly running alongside. Great theatrical and sporting occasions rely on this ability, as does our capacity for hero-worship. As we observe the world, we are also simulating what is going on, experiencing this as if we were doing so. Watching a keeper dive to the corner of the net, a guitarist playing a riff, or a dancer executing a perfect move, we experience the sensation for ourselves. We aren’t simply watching, but simulating, a form of vicarious experience. That we mimic every move of our heroes on stage, screen, and on the field of sports helps explain how the “self” interacts with others and extends to avatars.

The title of The Myth of Mirror Neurons (2014) can mislead, because Hickok is not suggesting that the mirror system discovered in macaque monkeys is a myth. Rather, his argument is that this has been inappropriately extended to human behavior – and to thirty-seven areas of mirror neuron research including sexual orientation, cigarette smoking and drug abuse in addition to the spectator sports mentioned above. While many of his arguments are technical, a main concern is that although macaques possess an MNS, they do not possess the higher-level functions of humans such as language. Secondly, imitation in humans is very different to that of macaques. While there is speculation that the potential for human imitation is inherited, he argues that mirror neurons must work in a different way in humans than in monkeys. Monkeys only respond to goal-directed actions such as reaching for food, which human infants do not possess. Jones (2009) advises caution should be exercised in relation to arguments that human newborns are pre-wired with mirror-neurons.

The Body Image

Gallagher (2005) explains that the body image is related to the body schema in important ways. The body image is directed towards exteroception, or perception of one’s body as an object amongst those of other people in the external environment. The body image consists of a complex of perceptions and intentional states and attitudes pertaining to one’s body, the content of which is produced intersubjectively. This includes the body percept, or the subject’s perceptual experience of their own body, the body concept, or conceptual understanding of the body and body affect, or one’s emotional attitudes towards one’s body (ibid.: 25). Gallagher illustrates the difference between the body schema and body image by citing a case of unilateral neglect due to a stroke suffered by a woman I call Annie. Following her stroke Annie no longer noticed the left side of her body. Subsequently she did not dress the left side, nor comb her hair on the left side. However, her motor abilities were normal. Annie walked normally, although she did not notice if the slipper on her left foot came off while she was walking and used her left hand to button garments. Gallagher argues that Annie’s body schema was intact but her body image had been damaged on the neglected side (ibid.: 25).

Gallagher is not suggesting that there are two separate bodies. Rather, the two overlap in important ways, although the body schema is the point of origin for perception. Because attention is structured to focus on a figure that is distinct from its ground, the body image appears in consciousness with certain parts emphasized or singled out. The body schema enables us to engage in complex actions that require us to judge where our bodies are in relation to other objects so that we avoid damaging ourselves. For instance, we are normally adept at engaging in conversation at the same time as manoeuvring around objects in our path or ducking to avoid a low-hanging tree branch. In contrast, the body image relies on visual perception, by which amongst other errors of judgement, we overestimate the size of our “own” body relative to other objects (ibid.: 33). This may help explain why the body image is usually an object that is loved or hated to some degree.

To illustrate the above point Susie Orbach (2009) describes the case of Andrew who despite having two perfectly functioning legs, desperately wanted to have them amputated. During therapy Andrew mentioned that as a young child he had felt lonely and unloved, spending hours looking out of the window. He recalled a friend of his mother who limped, and a schoolmate who nimbly got about on crutches after a bout of polio in addition to which he recalled a copy of Life magazine that showed children with polio who were enjoying themselves playing ball. Orbach reflects that through such images Andrew had begun to long for, “a body that physically mirrored his emotional hurt and damage. A body that might evoke some concern” (ibid: 23). As he neared puberty Andrew experimented by squeezing his two legs into one trouser-leg and walking with crutches.

On a generic level, the neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran explains cases similar to Andrew’s, featuring apotemnophilia, where individuals express a strong desire to have a healthy limb amputated, as due to representations of that body-part being absent from that person’s body-image representation, whilst at the same time the sensory input from the body schema is intact. Explained in Gallagher’s (2005) terms, the discrepancy between Andrew’s body image and body schema leads to feelings of alienation and aversion to the limb (Oberman, Winkielman & Ramachandran, 2010: 214).

The cases of Annie and Andrew described above show how beliefs and feelings develop about the body, where the body image is taken as an object that we can love or hate. Gallagher argues that anorexia stems from an abnormal body image (Gallagher, 2005: 30). On the other hand, loved objects are incorporated into the body image. The idea that the self can be extended by prosthetics is centuries old and has been elaborated by Sigmund Freud (1914) and Marshall McLuhan (1960), amongst others. When cycling, skating or driving a car, the wheel acts as an extension of the foot; the computer keyboard and joystick for the hand, and so on. For this to happen the body must itself first be grasped as an object. This is demonstrated in the “rubber-hand illusion”, where through the use of mirrors subjects were led to identify with an artificial hand by feeling sensation in their real hand when the artificial one was tickled (Botvinick & Cohen, 2000). We are susceptible to identify with the illusion that the body of a mannequin is “our” body (Petkova & Ehrsson, 2008). Just as one takes the real, physical body as the first object, so one can cathect that of another, such as an avatar. Belk recognizes this in commenting on the virtual self;

That is, whether they are expressed through material or virtual goods, our external identity and internal sense of self are imaginary constructs or working hypotheses subject to constant reform. (Belk, 2013: 479).

Proteus effects are named after the Greek god who can take any form he wishes, providing a useful analogy for the multiplicity of identities a person can assume online (Denegir-Knott & Molesworth, 2010). A taller avatar increases confidence not just in the virtual world but also in the real world, whereas a physically fit avatar leads the individual to exercise more. (ibid.: 482-3).

Conversely, a real part of the body that continues to exist in the mind can play havoc for a person whose limb, say a hand, has been amputated. In this situation the body image preserves the image of the hand which may be experienced as a phantom that is extremely painful. Pain in sufferers was relieved by the ingenious use of mirrors, creating the illusion that the subject was once again able to clench and unclench his real hand (Ramachandran & Ramachandran, 2000), or even when seeing the hand of another being massaged (Oberman, Winkielman & Ramachandran, 2010: 215).

Language and the Body

Phenomenologists argue that language is a modality of the human body which is generated by movement. When two people are speaking to each other they frequently engage in gestures; even congenitally blind people do this. Some argue that gesture acts simply to supplement speech. Similarly to Michael Tomasello (2008) whose arguments are discussed in chapter three, Shaun Gallagher (2005) argues that gesture plays a much more fundamental role which ties us to other people and which literally helps us shape meaning. Despite that Ian Waterman, whose case is discussed above, could only move his limbs by conscious effort when he had sight of them, his gestures seemed entirely normal. Gallagher conducted a detailed study of the reasons behind this and concluded that expressive movements such as gestures are not part of the body schema but are the movements on which language depends (ibid.: 126).

Williams, Huang & Bargh (2004) have argued similarly that instead of the abstract mind, or “brain in a vat”, we should look instead to the body as the source of many of our most important concepts. Higher mental processes are grounded on top what Gallagher (2005) describes as the body schema. Scaffolding is the process by which new higher-order concepts are formed or scaffolded onto elementary perceptual and motor processes. For example, the preverbal infant’s observation that people and animals can propel themselves through space builds the concept of agency. Linguistic concepts are scaffolded or constructed onto pre-verbal schemas. Before the infant can understand the concepts “in” and “out” she must first process their meanings via image schemas. Thus “forward is good and backward is bad” because the mouth, eyes, nose and ears are towards the front of the body and we move more easily when going forward (Clark, 1973; Shepard, 1984). Similarly, due to our upright nature, being “up” is good and “down” is bad. People process words that signify positive emotions more readily when these are presented in the upper part of a screen rather than the lower half (Meier & Robinson, 2004). Warmth is one of the most important factors in social judgement and is associated with affection because of the infant’s experience of being held close by caregivers (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). In a famous study, the description of a person as “warm” or “cold” significantly altered impressions of a speaker; the “cold” person was described as less generous and antisocial (Asch, 1946).

Another study underscores the powerful influence of bodily imitation on behaviour. It is well known that people will usually try to resonate or harmonize with in-group members but not with members of out-groups (Hove & Risen, 2009). Would harmonizing actions with members of out-groups reduce bias? White subjects were asked to view video presentations of black people sipping water from a glass. Subjects were divided into two groups, one of which observed the behaviour, whereas the other group was asked to imitate it exactly. A later study which measured their hidden racial preferences showed typical favouritism for whites over blacks. Those who synchronised their behaviour did not (Inzlicht, Gutsell & Legault, 2012; Cialdini, 2007: 195).

“Look Upstream”

By arguing that the body schema develops in utero, prior to birth Gallagher (2005) invites us to think of the effects on the developing foetus of products consumed by the mother. Salutogenesis, turns the question framed by medical practitioners around, “from saving people from drowning downstream to looking upstream to see who or what is pushing them in the river” (Antonovsky, 1979). The consumer research literature includes articles that discuss pathogenesis or the causes of morbid behaviours such as addiction and compulsion. For example, the effects of alcohol consumption by the mother on the developing foetus can result in Foetal Alcohol Syndrome and related disorders (FASD). FASD is a spectrum, disorder which manifests in the most severe cases in a distinctive facial appearance, stunted physical growth and deficient brain growth. It is not trivial, given that a meta-analysis of research conducted within schools found that between two percent and five percent of younger school age children in the USA and some European countries showed symptoms of FASD.

It is also now understood that a variety of common household products containing ingredients that are consumed by the mother can have profound and long-lasting effects on the development and looks of their child. The in utero effects of endocrine disruptors are twofold. So-called “brain drainers” include lead, mercury, organophosphates, flame retardants, PCBs, PFCs, alcohol, pththalate plasticizers and anti-microbials. It is estimated that these have contributed to a cognitive environment that has reduced IQ by 7 to 10 points over a hundred year period (Demenix, 2017; Cho, 2010) and influenced the increase in autism spectrum disorder (Philipatt et al., 2015). So called ‘gender benders’ such as Bisphenol A (BPA) mimic oestrogen and are present in 80% of teenagers (Demenix, 2017). All of these products are found in human food, furniture, non-stick pans, cosmetics, clothing and water. Anti-microbials for instance are found in deodorant, mouthwash, creams, UV filters, nail polish whilst surfacants such as Teflon are found in fast food packaging and in stain-resistant clothing. In one study the authors argue the need for urgent examination of the regultation of common household chemicals (Fini et al., 2017).

Research has recently turned to the effects of microplastics on human health. A study of plastic in the cardiovascular system of 304 patients found polyethylene in the carotid artery of 58% of the sample with 12% having polyinyl chloride in addition to ‘visible jagged edged foreign particles”. The authors concluded that these concentrations of microplastics and nanoplastics led to a heightened risk of heart attack, stroke and death.¹¹

Case Study: High Speed Motorcycling 

 Stephen Murphy (2016) points out the irony, that despite advocating research on the experiential aspects of consumption (Holbrook & Hirchman, 1983; Thompson, Locander & Pollio, 1989), most published research on experiential consumption does not focus on experience but rather on its representation, image, or moral purpose. This is inevitable if research is based on interview data, given that our only access to the pre-noetic functioning of the body schema and body image is via language, which operates at the level of reflexive consciousness.  Much research into high-speed motorcycling, which was Stephen’s chosen area of study, has focused on the USA and the Harley-Davidson brand (Joans, 2001),  to explore brand subculture (Schouten & McAlexander, 1995) and the rebel image of the brand (Schembri, 2008). Stephen’s challenge was to go beyond these to understand the role of the body in the experience of high-speed motorcycling. He decided that in order to write about it he would have to learn to ride a high-speed motorcycle.  In the beginning, rider handbooks, magazines, DVDs and YouTube clips provided useful information in terms of grasping how riding techniques should be performed.  

Upon transitioning to the saddle of the motorcycle, however, Stephen quickly recognised the important distinction between having a cognitive appreciation of how techniques should be performed and actually putting this knowledge into action. He realised that only through doing and performing, could he truly claim to have knowledge of the riding techniques. Based on this understanding, Stephen began to focus on the ways in which aspiring motorcyclists develop their skills.  

Anyone can sit up on the saddle of a motorcycle and snap the throttle until the bike is doing 100 mph. Speeding in a straight line is easy. Learning the techniques that you need to control these immensely powerful machines is a very different story. To master a high-speed motorcycle, you’ve got to develop skills and that takes time and practice   

In the clutches of the high-speed experience there is no time for conscious thought or cognitive reflection. For example, to develop ‘a feel’ for the technique of high-speed cornering the rider must know, without thinking: postural stance, road positioning, when to change gears, when to break, the right time to ease off the throttle and when to snap it again. To perform riding techniques successfully, the rider must be capable of instantaneously drawing all of this understanding together as a whole. 

Practice leaves its traces in the aspiring motorcyclist’s bodily memory. Over time, with repetition, techniques become naturalised in the body to the extent that reactions to the environment become largely automatic. This transformation is essential in terms of negotiating the high-speed experience because it allows the thought processes of the reflexive mind to recede to the background, enabling all of the rider’s energies to become absorbed in the pre-reflective, present-focused task of negotiating the motorcycle at speed.  

You need to invest a lifetime practicing, working your way up the ranks and just getting better before you’re ready to ride even a 600, much less a 1,000. Sport Bikes are called that for a reason, riding them is a sport. Were you a starting quarterback for an NFL team the first time you played football? Don’t expect to be able to operate a fast motorcycle until you invest an equal amount of time and practice into becoming a two-wheeled athlete. Bikes like the Honda CBR250R, CBR500R and Kawasaki Ninja 300 are specifically designed as tools to help you practice and develop skills.  Once you’ve mastered one of them move up to something like a Kawasaki Ninja 650 or Yamaha FZ6R. 

High-speed motorcycling necessitates more than just practical knowledge. It requires a particular embodied intentionality. ‘Zoning in’ to the task of high-speed motorcycling encompasses a ‘tuning out’ from internal dialogues, such that the motorcyclist begins to embody the flow of the motorcycle and the rapidly unfolding environment. This is the ‘sensuous rhythm of action and reaction” (Crossley, 2004: 46) that is required to negotiate the high-speed experience. 

Stephen’s research illustrates that consuming bodies are more than just carriers of symbolic meaning. Bodies are, first and foremost, the site of experience. 

His research helps us to recognise that experiences cannot always simply be consumed. Oftentimes, bodies must be primed in order to receive experience; this necessitates skill acquisition and learnt alterations in perception on the part of the consumer. Within the experience economy (Pine and Gilmore, 1998), the marketplace has taken on a central role in shaping the ways that consumers learn how to use their bodies.  

The Neuro-Psychoanalytic Body

In this section I offer a brief snapshot of neuropsychoanalysis which can be seen as a response to calls for an evidence base on which to judge the basis of psychoanalytic theory and the effectiveness of psychodynamic therapies. The following account is mostly based on the collaboration between neuro-psychoanalyst Mark Solms and neuroscientist Jaak Pansksepp (for instance, Solms & Panksepp, 2012) which I have modified to an extent by including the contribution of Martin Conway (Conway et al., 2004). I also ‘mix it up’ a little by pulling in some observations from Jacques Lacan and others to help illustrate some difficult points. where I think these can add to the explanation. The contribution by Solms and Panksepp is germane to this chapter because of the central role played by embodiment in their account, which replaces Freud’s concepts of id, ego and superego respectively, with the internal body, the external body and the declarative self. There are broad equivalences between the internal body and the external body, and Shaun Gallagher’s (2005) concepts of the body schema and body image, in that the internal body and the body schema are concerned with interoception and proprioception,while the external body and the body image described by Gallagher are concerned with exteroception. As is discussed further below, for Solms and Panksepp (2012) the internal body and the external body represent two ways in which the body is represented in the brain.

Consciousness

The neuropsychoanalytic understanding of consciousness developed by Solms and Panksepp (2012) differs from Freud (1927) and from William James (1890) who each believed that consciousness arises from the engagement of perceptual systems with the outside world. It is noteworthy that Joseph Le Doux (1999), whose theory of affect theory is discussed above, subscribed to the understanding of William James (1890). This view of consciousness is also advocated by prominent theorists such as James Russell and Lisa Feldman Barrett (1999), who argue on top of this that the emotions are neither universal nor innate but are socially constructed. In contrast, the neuropsychoanalytic understanding based on empirical research conducted by Jaak Panksepp argues that consciousness is a property of the internal body, which Freud called the ‘id’, as constituting the core self.

This has resulted in a fruitful and unresolved debate between Barrett and Panksepp, where the former contends that consciousness arises as a product of higher-level processes, and the emotions can only become conscious if they are registered or ‘read out’ by the higher-level cortex, whilst Panksepp argues that primary affective consciousness persists even when higher level forms of self-consciousness linked to cortical brains systems have been damaged. The basis for Panksepp’s argument seems strong as he discovered that children whose cortex is almost entirely missing can experience pain, and also can experience emotions “excessively”. Additionally, these individuals who should be lacking in consciousness if Barrett is right have been found to have distinct musical preferences and to possess the ability to distinguish between different people, environments and interactions.

The consciousness of the internal body is interoceptive, concerned with monitoring our internal state. It is affective in that it registers what “it feels like”. Solms and Panksepp link phylogeny to ontogeny by arguing that during the course of development consciousness extends from the affective core to higher formations of the self. As mentioned above this explanation is quite different to Freud, for whom the basic emotional drives for mastery and eroticism comprising the id are unconscious. Solms and Panksepp argue in contrast that these are not only conscious but comprise the font of all consciousness. It is worthy of note that phenomenologists such as Shaun Gallagher (2005) whose explanation is discussed earlier also argue for a core experiential self, but on somewhat different grounds. In the neuropsychoanalytic explanation affective consciousness registers the primary state of being of the subject. Perception and cognition arise later as secondary and tertiary formations, which primary consciousness gradually feels its way into, attaching to sensory modalities in a manner similar to that described by Freud (1914), who likened it how the pseudopodia of an amoeba palpates the world (Solms 2018a).

The neuro-psychoanalytic perspective on consciousness is expressed as dual-aspect monism which explains internal and external conscious experience as two sides of the same coin, or two observational states. In developmental terms affective consciousness, “I feel like this…”, refers to the largely interoceptive felt experiential state of the core self. This is then extended outwards into the lived exteroceptive world, enabling the organism to determine, whether things are going better or worse there such that exteroceptive consciousness takes the form, “I feel like this about that” (Solms, 2019c). Thus at a higher level my background state of consciousness tells me that I exist, while my identification with the image I see reflected in the mirror tells me that it is me (Solms, 2018).

The Free Energy Princple (FEP)

It is not surprising that Mark Solms has incorporated the Free Energy Principle developed by Karl Friston into neuropsychoanalysis, given that Sigmund Freud came up with his theory of libido from the same source. Like Freud, Friston was influenced by von Helmholz’ (1825) ruminations on the second law of thermodynamics (Tran The et al., 2020). Freud (1914) generally focused his argument on our investment of emotional energy into those objects (constituting people and things) that we love which enable us to survive and thrive. Such investments provide us with stability and control over our environment. The exception to this is in the situation of psychosis, where due to impaired development, the individual cannot make the necessary investments of psychic energy into the world, who consequently suffers from a constant fizzing feeling of ‘too-muchness” of raw free energy.

Friston argues similarly to Freud, that the main purpose of the self is to preserve a sense of balance by reducing free energy that arises from surprise (Solms, 2018a, 2018b, Solms & Friston, 2018). According to the Free Energy Principle (FEP), humans, in common with all other organisms are driven to actively and continuously work to avoid dissolution, acting to minimizing entropy by maintaining a stable interaction with their environment. Expressed in developmental terms, with each step from learning to crawl, then walk, cycle, drive and perhaps even to fly, we greatly expand our range of movement and control and thus serve the ultimate aim to make the world more predictable and to reduce the effects of surprise.

The preferred state of the world for all organisms, including humans, is quiescence, when all our needs are met automatically. The Free Energy Principle (FEP) posits the existence of a rudimentary ‘ego” or “working self” that recognizes the boundary that separates the organism from its environment, (which Friston calls a Markov boundary), that has a mechanism which monitors its state of being in relation to its environment by maintaining an ongoing episodic record of interactions. In particular this system is attuned to monitor and detect surprise and to bind the free energy that is released.

From the above, for us humans, as for all organisms, the reduction of surprise is engaged in by largely sub-personal processes of the “ego”, or “working self”, that houses a generative model of states of the world against which it tests predictions by actively sampling sensory input from the environment. When predictions turn out to be successful, the self and environment are attuned, but novel or uncertain states of the world give rise to prediction-error, leading to surprise, instigating a negative emotional response that produces free energy, instigating a re-evaluation of beliefs and causes. The main aim of the developing ego or self is thus to ensure that needs are met by maintaining adaptive correspondence to reality. When applied to human beings, this does not always work out in practice!

The threefold hierarchy developed by Solms and Panksepp (2012) is illustrated in Figure 8.2. It should be borne in mind that the Internal Body, External Body and Declarative Self overlap but are shown separately in the figure for clarity.

Figure 8.2. The Neuropsychoanalytic Conception of the Self

Figure 8.2. The Neuropsychoanalytic Conception of the Self

Relations between the internal and external body are hierarchical and interdependent. The brain systems for the internal body are phylogenetically older than those of the external body which wrap around this core. The right-hand-side of the figure shows the bottom-up influence of the primary processes of the internal self which press upwards to influence our thoughts and fantasies. The left-hand-side depicts the role played top-down processes to filter and inhibit information coming from below. The flow of experience at the primary level is separated into objects or image-representations at the level of the external body which are then re-presented in linguistic terms at the tertiary level.

Solms and Turnbull argue that consciousness is complex as the affective consciousness of the internal body “it feels like…” is different from that of the external body which develops object representations such that, “I feel like this, about that”. The further development of tertiary cognitive awareness is far removed from the emotions experienced in the core self of the internal body so that we have a “curious inability to know what is driving our actions’. From Freud, they argue that unconscious processes operate at two levels. Given that the goal of all learning is to automate mental processes, a descriptive unconscious arises to reduce uncertainty and to increase predictability. When tasks are mastered - think of riding a bicycle for instance – the relevant algorithm is automated. On the other hand repression operates at the level of the declarative self as the removal of declarative awareness from conscious cognition with the effect of reducing episodic cognitive processes to associative ones (Solms & Turnbull, 2012: 168/169).

The Internal Body

The internal body that humans share with other mammals is innate, consisting of ancient autonomic processes concerned with interoception, that occur in the lower, more ancient, part of the brain. For Solms and Panksepp (2012) this is the site of the ‘body-as-subject’, (not to be confused with ‘the subject’ of language discussed by social theorists). The internal body is the site of moment-to-moment phenomenal experience that aims to maintain our internal state of bodily equilibrium, serving core interests of survival and reproductive success. It consists of homeostatic affects such as hunger and thirst, and of innate emotional affects resulting from action. It operates through the pleasure principle by responding positively to that which produces pleasure, reacting violently against anything that provokes disgust and displeasure. It should be noted that this assumption, that phenomenal states of the body-as-subject are experienced affectively, is contrary to the “James-Lange” theory of the emotions discussed above in relation to affect theory. In the neuropsychoanalytic explanation pleasurable and unpleasurable experiences signify respectively, what is positive and negative for our survival and reproduction and act to condition approach or avoidance behaviour.

Given the above, we humans are not born as blank slates, but come equipped with innate needs that are regulated autonomically up to a particular set point, beyond which they require mental intervention. Panksepp describes the seven universal emotional “survival tools” in capital letters to distinguish them from socially conditioned emotions. The basic emotions are; foraging for resources (SEEKING), reproduction (LUST), protection of the body (FEAR and RAGE), maternal devotion (CARE), separation distress (PANIC/GRIEF) and engagement with others in our circle to build relationships and to establish dominance (PLAY).

Panksepp argues that the specific way in which an emotion is felt serves a particular purpose by motivating us to promote our survival and reproductive success. For instance, SEEKING does not generate pleasurable feelings of consummation but rather increases the appetitive drive that leads us to seek further rewards. Rather, satiety involves the PLEASURE system, which utilizes the SEEKING system for its hedonic ends. SEEKING thus motivates animals and humans to turn to the outside world for pleasurable experiences to explore and forage for the real objects that satisfy felt needs. Expressed healthily this leads to feelings of engagement and active agency and conversely, when dampened, it can lead to feelings of ‘deadness’. Overall, even a primitive organism requires some form of an ‘I’, or ‘working self’, consisting of an executive function that monitors free energy by calibrating the extent to which its needs are currently being met. Additionally it requires a short-term processing system whose role is to monitor and maintain what Martin Conway describes as adaptive correspondence between the internal state of the organism and its environment and of some kind of episodic memory system to keep a record of short-term processing. From this while affects are inherently subjective, they are directed toward interactions with the environment as, “I feel like this about that”. At this basic level of the core self the ‘that’ does not comprise an object in the sense of an image as this requires the further engagement of exteroceptive consciousness.

To reiterate, Solms and Panksepp argue differently from Freud in two very important and related respects; firstly, by arguing that feelings are produced by lower brain processes; and secondly, that the internal body is conscious. Whereas Freud attributed consciousness to the cortex or ego, the authors argue that individuals are fully conscious of their emotional state, which, “is an intrinsic function of lower regions of the brain’ (Solms & Panksepp, 2012: 163).

The External Body

Solms and Panksepp argue for an important difference in the consciousness of the internal and external body where exteroceptive consciousness is concerned with the formation of objects. The external body is itself an object that is, “in short, an external, stabilized, detailed representation of the subject of consciousness. It is not the subject itself. This description of the external body is similar to Gallagher’s (2005)description of the body image described above.

The external body points to a differentiation between the “I” of moment-to-moment awareness and the “me”, which can be viewed amongst other objects as an object for self-reflection. If the core emotions prepare us like all animals to engage actively with the world, to engage with conspecifics and to learn what to approach and what to avoid, the developing external body begins to construct stability by extending its control over the environment through the construction of objects of perception and cognition that can be turned over in the mind. Experimental research has found that vision dominates touch and proprioception, as an object that is made to LOOK larger is also FELT to be large (Rock & Victor, 1964). Rock, who coined the phrase ‘visual capture’ to describe the phenomenon argued that the brain assigns different weights to different sensory inputs and that vision dominates touch (Gibson, 1962).

Object Presentations

A key function of the external body is to transform object presentations into word presentations. Explained in relation to the Free Energy Principle, exteroceptive consciousness adds solidity to the experience “I feel like this…about that’, by providing shape and definition to those objects which comprise the ‘that’ (Solms, 2019c). The construction of an object such as the image of the “triangle” shown in Figure 8.3 is not a given of nature, but rather is an achievement, that may be imperfectly executed.

For instance, Peter Fonagy and Elizabeth Alison (2016) describe the case of ‘Mr K’ to illustrate the failure of an individual to construct stable object representations. As a child,￼

Figure 8.3. Illustration of an Object Presentation

Figure 8.3. Illustration of an Object Presentation

Mr K was raised in a cult environment where he had been severely neglected and ignored by his parents. As an adult he presented to the authors as suicidal and ‘on the verge of a catastrophic breakdown’. During sessions he was uninterested in his internal state and his conversation was erratic and discontinuous. The authors reflected on Mr K’s ‘staggering’ lack of self-recognition and self-consciousness, describing an individual who was trapped in a ‘confusing and random flux of sensory givens’ and was unable to form a coherent object.

The authors link this to proprioception to argue that the ability to form an adequate object requires an ‘inner horizon’, so that for example, when reaching for a book, or sitting on a chair we have an idea that the unseen sides of the book have a specific character, and that the chair has legs, so that we can safely sit on it. Secondly, the object has to be synthesised as an object that has a sense of wholeness or coherence that can enable it to be communicated to others. The authors argue that this process is usually facilitated because consciousness has an intrinsic tendency to work towards coherence and integration.

Mirroring Identification

As explained above, the external body does not own consciousness, nor is it the seat of consciousness, because consciousness is a property of, and is located in, the internal body. Rather, consciousness extends from the internal body to the external body from which it then extends to higher levels of declarative awareness. Difficult to comprehend, the self is an illusion, albeit a strictly necessary one. The external body is itself an object par excellence that is oriented towards exteroception, where the surface of the body is grasped holistically as a container, or gestalt. The contention that our perception of the self-contained body-image as a possession; “me”, or “my body” as perceived in a mirror, or as it appears to others is widely shared (Lacan, 1988, Solms & Panksepp, 2010; Featherstone, 2010). This is a mental projection of the surface of the body, which arises as a composite made from sensory circuits and projection zones. By forming an external, representation of the subject of consciousness, the external body plays a critical role in stabilizing the fleeting representations produced by the internal body, by means of which a stable identity, ‘that is me’, is maintained’ from moment to moment. Consciousness of the external body as an object, when we look into the mirror and exclaim “that’s me!”, is quite different from the consciousness of the internal body. It is noteworthy that this argument that the body as an object differs from arguments by consumer researchers that the body is not an object but rather is an event (Patterson & Schroeder, 2010).

Virtual Selves

There are similarities and differences between aspects of the argument presented by Solms and Ramachandran (2012) and that made by other psychoanalysts. Those writing from a Lacanian perspective would be disturbed by any attempt to conjoin psychoanalysis to neuroscience. On the other hand, as is discussed in chapter seven, Lacan devoted considerable time and energy to exemplify the body as an object that is grounded in an imaginary relation. For instance, Lacan (1975a, 1975b) presents us with a diagramme that shows two real objects, a vase and a bouquet of artificial flowers, situated between the viewer and a concave mirror. The vase is situated on top of a box in line of sight of the viewer while the artificial flowers are suspended out of sight. By situating the viewer within a cone formed by the reflection of the flowers and the vase, the viewer perceives the flowers to be situated in the vase. The image appears solid but the appearance of the flowers in the vase is phantasmagorical.

Lacan employed the illusion of the flowers and the vase as a metaphor to illustrate his argument that from an early age humans adopt an imaginary relation to objects in the world. The result is an “illusion of reality, a real illusion”. Like the subject who perceives the disunited flowers and vase as arranged one within the other, the infant prematurely mis-recognizes her fragmented body by identifying with the model of a whole and masterful ideal-ego. For the infant, identification with the body-image in the mirror as “me”, closes-off the openness to the other and establishes a boundary between the self contained by the image and others. Not all infants are positioned in this way; the eye will not always be within the cone As a consequence some will see only a lonely bunch of flowers, which may lead to a psychotic outcome.

There is speculation in consumer research concerning where the boundary lies between the physical body and technology, especially in relation to the spillage of identification with online avatars into real embodied purchase behaviour (Solomon & Sheth, 2014). The mystery behind this evaporates when one dispenses with the dichotomy real/ virtual, between real life and virtual life, when one comes to accept that the supposedly “real” body is itself an image based on a projection of the surface of the body. Ernest Dichter used the mundane example that consumers, “want suds in detergents not being able to forget the stereotypes of soap” (Dichter, 2008: 86), to illustrate profound idea of the impossibility of effecting an unmediated relation being between a person and a thing-in-itself.

That humans must always relate to concepts or ideas of things seems absurd in relation to varieties of touch, for instance the strange attachment that seems to exist between men and old worn clothes, but nevertheless there is a rudimentary form of language at work here. Bailly (2013) mused on the ubiquity of “selfies” to argue that the relation between the “I” of the young person is no longer the constantly shifting image one once glimpsed in a mirror but is rather an image that has already been processed and photoshopped as a pre-made external image that closely fits the ideal ego. The image thus has veracity in that others can see it and indeed can rate it so that nowadays the Other represented by the plane mirror, has been replaced by the multitude of small others who are alter egos and sources of hatred.

While Solms and Panksepp (2012) go nowhere near so far as to quote Lacan, they do mention the large body of evidence that has accumulated which confirms not only that one can grasp one’s own body as an object, but that one can do the same with mannequins and phantom limbs. For instance, in the “rubber-hand illusion” (Botvinick & Cohen, 2000) subjects reported feeling sensation in their real hand as if emanating from an artificial one. Additionally, subjects readily accommodate to the illusion that a mannequin is “their” body (Petkova & Ehrsson, 2008). Conversely, a real part of the body which continues to exist in the mind can play havoc, as for instance when a hand is amputated, the external body may preserve a phantom hand, which is experienced as extremely painful because the “hand” is perceived to be clenched tight. By the ingenious use of mirrors Ramachandran was able to relieve this pain in sufferers by creating the illusion that the subject was once again able to clench and unclench his real hand (Ramachandran & Ramachandran, 2000).

Self-Extensions

The above offers examples of the investment of energy into objects that extend the stability and control of the self. This process was first described by William James (1890) and then by Sigmund Freud, (1927) and Ernest Dichter (1966) and was applied to the context of consumer research by Russell Belk, (1988). By taking “our” body as the first object, the external body provides the basis for our subsequent identifications with the huge range of objects we use as prosthetics, from roller-skates, to bicycles, cars, planes, drones, spacecraft, and avatars. As proposed by Freud (1914) and explained by Ernest Dichter in relation to identification with commodities,

Individuals project themselves onto products. In buying a car they actually buy an extension of their own personality. When they are “loyal” to a particular brand, they are loyal to themselves. In turn, objects have specific psychological effects on respondents. The cars respondents owned or wished to own decisively influenced their pattern of behaviour. Inanimate objects also deeply influence interpersonal relationships. It was found that specific products an individual possesses often influence the reaction of other individuals towards him in a specific way. Inanimate objects thus possess a definite psychic content, a “soul” which plays a dynamic emotional role in the daily lives of individuals within the context of their social value system (Dichter, 2008 [1960 orig.]: 87).

There is more to the external body than the extended self. The powerful illusion of a singular purposeful core self in control of our actions is necessary as “authorship of actions requires the illusion of a unified sense of self” (Hood, 2012: 134). However useful this may be, it can lead us to over-attribute positive outcomes to our self rather than to others or to the situation. (ibid. 483). Freud argued that the external body is modeled on mimesis, most notably the internalization of the ‘imago’ of parents as the first ideal-ego. This first identification forms the basis for subsequent idealised identity projects. From mountain-men to Burning Man¹² and from breadwinners to man-of-action heroes and beyond (Holt & Thompson, 2004), the imaginary provides an inexhaustible seam for consumer researchers to mine and turn into symbolic capital.

Self-coherence

Investment of energy into identification with one’s mirror-image is a prerequisite for the establishment of self-coherence and for self-esteem. While affirmative, this also inaugurates a paradoxical and often troubling state of affairs at the tertiary level as the working self tries to reconcile the reassuring self-coherence provided by the self-image to the demand of attending to reality. The representation identified in the mirror as, ‘that is me’ that comes from outside is compelling, as the image appears masterful and self-contained by comparison to the internal sense of fragmentation and overspill. Mirroring forms the basis for the seesawing dual/duel relation described by Lacan (1988) in relation to the Imaginary formation.

By comparison to the flow of excitations emanating from the internal body, the external body appears self-contained and powerful. In what way is the external body a necessary illusion? In everyday usage the statement “I know this like the back of my hand’ is employed to indicate the range and depth of one’s knowledge. Yet research indicates that people who do not suffer from any apparent body image distortion (i.e. “normal” subjects) nevertheless systematically distort the position of their hands, positioning the knuckles further forward than they actually are (Longo, 2015). The external body is necessary because we do not relate to the world as it is but filter it through the lens of perception, which enables us to adapt to our environment. The Gestalt theorists developed a set of key principles that inform exteroception by codifying and simplifying the stream of experience. Closure is an important gestalt principle by which sensory systems act to complete incomplete objects; proximity groups objects that are presented close together into wholes; while the similarity principle leads us to group similar things together.

Embodiment and Disembodiment

One reason why the experience of schizophrenia can be so frightening for the individuals who suffer from this condition is because they frequently describe their difficulty in forming a coherent sense of embodiment, suffering instead from a constant fizzing excess that is linked to the feeling that their skin is too thin.¹³ And for those lucky enough to experience the sense of being at home in their body, given that the body can be taken as an object, it follows that it can also be lost. A shade of this vertiginous feeling is to be found in the transitivity of infants who confuse themselves with others, such that an infant who hits another then bursts into tears into tears. Most adults are attuned to the idea that the body-image is naturally ours and do not give this a second thought. Koubová (2014) provides a fascinating insight into the strangeness of the body-image that ensues when individuals are stripped of their symbolic roles and identities by simply being asked to stand in front of others. The initial encounter, “is usually described by participants as a situation of the deepest confusion, chaos, uncanny experience, frustration, embarrassment, fear, anxiety, threatening exposure, and emptiness”. She notes how participants continually see themselves from the point of view of the others who observed them.

Disembodiment is like being a spectator of one’s actions and is explained as a form of splitting of the self as a temporary reaction to danger, such as one moment when you are driving along and then the car begins to skid, when time seems to go into slow motion. It was commonly thought that this effect is a consequence of our brains working faster, although an ingenious and cruel experiment by Stetson et al. (2007) suggests that instead we create a much denser series of memories of the event. This explains the phenomenon of “flashbacks” leading to post-traumatic stress. One can generalize from this to explain why time seems to slow when we are on holiday. We lay down dense memories during this short period when we are in an unfamiliar environment and engaged in lots of activities. On the other hand our routine life at home seems to move much more quickly.

Another form of disembodiment described by Giddens can occur when an established routine is disrupted. We learn to “bracket” social life by attending to what is salient and ignoring what is not. This frees up consciousness to attend to novel challenges. The daily routines we share with the others in our lives form the bedrock of our experience. These routines can be disrupted and become invalid leading one to behave as if one is a spectator outside of oneself. For instance, if one partner in a marriage has an affair and plans to divorce the other, but does not tell them, the familiar routine they once engaged in is now false and invalid and appears distant. Where there is greater dissociation, this can have the appearance of a false self, such that the body feels manipulated by a self that is beyond it (Giddens, 2001: 59). In conditions of strain or separation the, “individual enters a temporary schizoid state, and becomes detached from what the body is doing or what is done to it.’ (ibid.: 60).

Inhibition

Inhibitory processes are necessary to enable higher levels of the self to operate and here I mention some in relation to the inhibition of the emotions and of perceptions. Freud had argued that the subject can respond in different ways to the societal and cultural demand that they give up the pleasures associated with the internal body. He came up with three basic character structures of which the neurotic structure is that which is most prone to the inhibition and repression of desire, In contrast, the psychotic structure is lacking in repression as the subject forecloses or violently repudiates the societal injunction. The third structure describes the perverse relation in which the subject disavows their castration . While in Lacan’s formulation as read by Slavoj Zizek this can involve an attempt to realise the law by invoking it in an excessive manner to gain jouissance, such preoccupations are far from those discussed here.

Inhibition of Emotion

I should first distinguish inhibition of emotion from emotional inhibition, where the latter describes dysfunctional verbal and nonverbal interactions between individuals (Traue, Kessler & Deighton, 2016). In contrast, the inhibition of emotional expression is necessary for our day-to-day functioning and survival. Most prominently most of us will be familiar with the superego developed by Freud as the “policeman in the head” that acts as the representative of society to police our emotions, restraining our expression of aggressive and sexual impulses. This was described in chapter one in relation to Norbert Elias’ argument that the civilizing process entailed the gradual displacement of aggression and violence from the external social world into the private internal world of the individual psyche. The similar argument made by Pasi Falk (1994) in relation to the closure of the body in modern society is discussed earlier in this chapter.

Research seems to confirm what most of us know intuitively that there is a two-way relationship between inhibitory control and the emotions. Once, when driving through a snowstorm I experienced periodic bouts of fear and elation linked to the conscious realization of the necessity to push these down in order to concentrate. On the flipside, an emotional experience can occasionally be overwhelming. While the role of inhibitory control in relation to the U-shaped curve arising from the use of “fear appeals” by advertisers has been known for decades, a key aspect of ‘experiential marketing’ has been to manage the delicate balance between threat, fear and thrill. A primary expectation of the curated ‘consumer experience’ is to provide the thrill of adventure whilst limiting the risk to the client’s life and limb in relation to which the arresting account by Buckley (2016) illustrates how good qualitative research can reach the parts that quantitative approaches can fail to reach. Through vivid descriptions of engagement in kayaking, heli-boarding, surfing and mountain-climbing Buckley illuminates the shifting boundary between thrill and fear, and of the vital appearance of a deep sense of concentration in the face of life-threatening situations. In the following excerpt he offers several examples from his personal experience of hang-gliding to describe experiences when thrill begins to turn towards fear,

In one, an error in harness attachment caused over 100 involuntary stalls in 10 min, before I could reach the ground. In another incident, I was hit by a powerful storm front lasting 15 min, and crawled into the nose wires of the hang-glider to maintain tenuous control. Under normal flight conditions this would cause a nosedive and crash. In a third incident, I crashed into a 30m tree and fell out backward and upside down, still attached to the hang-glider. In a fourth, a military jet flew beneath my hang-glider, at supersonic speed. There was no thrill in any of these, but very intense awareness.

On one occasion when heli-boarding he recalls,

In another, I made an emergency stop in soft snow, 20 cm from a 30-m vertical cliff onto rocks. Recalling this still produces a cold sweat.

Sensory Inhibition

Sensory inhibition is a necessary function of the central nervous system which acts to filter out irrelevant information so as to prevent the cortex being overloaded. This is more often recognized when it fails to work. For instance, it has long been known that those diagnosed with schizophrenia are likely to be heavy users of tobacco, with reports that eighty percent smoke up to thirty cigarettes every day. Studies suggest that nicotine can play an important role in sensory gating for these individuals.

The condition known as HPPD (Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder) has been found in those whose vision has been impaired through use of Lysergic acid (LSD). Where normally subjects will perceive the image on the left-hand side a person with HPPD sees an image that is closer to that on the right.￼

Figure 8.4. Failure of Inhibition in HPPD

Figure 8.4. Failure of Inhibition in HPPD

This is because these individuals have lost the ability to inhibit contamination of the white disc by the yellow aura (Abraham, 1982). Greg W. described his unsettling experience two weeks after an “anxiety-filled LSD trip’ when, ‘Everything sparkled and glinted with dots like a noisy TV screen. My hand looked like it didn’t belong to me. When I moved it, long streaks trailed behind.”

Those living in urban environments generally take for granted the ability to see two-dimensional images as if they are three-dimensional. The Müller-Lyer illusion measures depth perception. Look briefly at the two lines in Figure 8.5. Is one line longer than the other? If so, which? Most people, when asked, will say that the top line appears to be longer than the other, even though when measured it turns out that the two lines are exactly the same length. That one part of “me” knows that the lines are the same length while another sees them differently, signifies that two contradictory ideas about the same object exist at the same time in the unconscious. Here there is inhibition of the knowledge that the lines are the same. Why?

Figure 8.5. The Müller-Lyer Illusion

Figure 8.5. The Müller-Lyer Illusion

The Müller-Lyer Illusion was once cited as evidence that basic cognitive processes are universal and innate domain-specific modules (Fodor, 1983). However, it is now argued that this perception is shaped by cultural learning. When asked how much longer line B should be to make it the same length as line A, North American students stated that it should be one-fifth longer. At the other extreme, the San people of the Kalahari desert correctly identified that the two lines are of equal length (Segall et al., 1966; Henrich et al., 2010: 64). One explanation is that this enables individuals who live in “carpentered” environments to automatically perceive 3D representations from 2D images. Europeans and North-Americans like others from largely urban environments are born and raised into spatial contexts that are ‘carpentered’ with lots of right-angles. The illusion may help explain the finding that Western women prefer high-cut swimsuits with edges over alternatives as they create the illusion that the wearer has longer legs (Morikawa, 2003). Adding weight to the argument that some perceptual processes involving the external body are learned is the observation in western cultures that schizophrenics lack the ability to process such perceptual images automatically but compensate for this lack by engaging in a bottom-up strategy (John & Helmsley, 1992).

Inhibition and Individuation

Solms and Panksepp argue that individuation is a property of what Tulving (2005) described as the autonoetic self, involving meta-cognition where the self can take itself as an object for reflection from a third-person perspective. In Freud’s lexicon this relates to the role played by the ego-ideal by which we become truly human subjects who are capable of self-reflection and self-constraint. The relationship between inhibition and individuation can best be observed in situations where it fails to operate. Individuals with a diagnosis of schizophrenia have expressed feelings of severe estrangement from their bodies, from other people and from the surrounding world. In such situations familiarity with bodily routines and with the body itself breaks down and the mind acts as if it is an observer and the body is a machine. Loss of self is often accompanied by the feeling that one’s skin is too thin and that one is too open to the world, leading to experiences of transitivism between the self and others. What may be happening is that these individuals experience problems in inhibiting the mirror neuron system and so cannot reliably distinguish whether or not it is ‘me that is acting in a given situation or if it is someone else. Others report feeling closed and separated from the world, as if by a pane of glass, some to the extreme that they no longer know who they are, or even if they are a person at all. ¹⁴ They see this as their biggest or core problem, and often judge their other difficulties to have arisen as a consequence of this fundamental loss.

The Declarative Self

Solms and Panksepp discuss the declarative self as a tertiary formation that transforms object presentations into symbolic word presentations which represent abstract relations between concrete objects of thought. This third person perspective enables the subject to think about abstract things that can be shared with others rather than images, and the syntactic structure of language also enables them to think about things in a temporal context as: “first I will do this, then I will do that.” Because the declarative self stabilizes core consciousness by transforming affects into object representations and then into verbal object representations, we ordinarily think of ourselves as being conscious in the latter sense. Solms and Panksepp’s account squares with that provided by Tulving (2005), for whom consciousness is layered or scaffolded. In this understanding, core consciousness of the internal body described by Solms and Turnbull is equivalent to the anoetic self at the subjective or phenomenal level described by Tulving, (2005). On top of that sits the noetic self which is an object at the perceptual level which takes the body and itself as objects. At the top level the autonoetic self describes the conceptual or re-representational level of the self as perceived from a third person perspective.

Because of its relation to these prior formations, the self of everyday cognition is largely an abstraction which the authors note can be a cause of some confusion. Given that this is the locus of what social researchers describe as “the subject”, it is common to think of this along Cartesian lines as the conscious self that is able to give reasons to account for its actions, when in fact most of its operations are non-conscious and occur automatically. The declarative self might house the two systems described by Kahneman (2011) including ‘System 2’, the slow effortful process of conscious problem solving and “reflexive” decision making together with the automatic, fast and efficient processes of “System 1” thinking. Expressed in these terms Solms and Panksepp argue that the simple answer to the “400 millisecond delay” between a person moving their thumb and “deciding” to move it observed by Benjamin Libet, is that this involved different levels of the self. Daniel Kahneman (2011) would have argued that “System 1” which ‘decided’ to move the thumb before the “decision” was made by “System 2”.

To recap, the third level of the self is scaffolded onto the primary core self and the secondary external self. At the intermediate level the ego transforms affects into objects and then into the verbal object re-representations that form the basis of everyday cognition at the higher level. The distinctive role of the reflexive self has capacities for language, autonoesis and meta-cognition. Reflexivity works largely unconsciously to connect the personal more fully to the social context in relation to the capacity for action based on self-reflection (Beck, 2009). This is mainly unconscious.

Subject to Language

It is useful in this context to open the discussion out to acknowledge that there are several ways in which to understand the role played by language in the formation of the self. As described in an earlier in this chapter, the origins of language are to be found in expressive movements such as gestures that give shape to meaning and link us to others (Gallagher, 2005: 126; Tomasello, 2008). In social research language is more often referred to as the locus of the “subject” envisaged in structuralist and post-structuralist thought, which posits the individual as a subject in the dual sense, as constituted by culture, and as subjected to its norms and to its regime of power. Here culture is envisaged as a procrustean grid organized according to binary oppositions that cuts into and moulds the bodies of its subjects (see for instance, Foucault, 1976).

From a psychoanalytic perspective the body is made intelligible by the cultural grid that is placed over it, so that in the course of development the pleasures demanded by the internal body are progressively subjected to inhibition through regulation and constraint as the subject is fitted out for life in the family and at school and is socialized into roles in the wider society. The demands of the internal body are then ‘clipped’, to use a term often found in psychoanalytic discourse, as its demands are reordered towards what are perceived to be socially desirable ends. While acknowledging the invasive power of cultural institutions in organising the body, psychoanalysis also attends to the role of language in stabilising the world of its subjects by providing meaning and identity, for instance, at a basic level by enabling us to name and to communicate knowledge about our aches and pains, ailments and afflictions that would otherwise remain un-nameable and cause us pain and harm. Cultural institutions provide access to historical stocks of cultural knowledge which greatly enhance the subject’s ability to adapt to environmental change.

Mental Time Travel

The reflexive self has the unique ability for autonoesis, conscious recollection of personal happenings, or autobiographical memory for short. In the process of thinking the noetic capacity of the external body retrieves knowledge stored in semantic memory by reconsolidating prior beliefs. Although we may know things about the world including things that happened in our past, “there is an essential difference between knowing that something is such and such, or occurs so and so, on the one hand and remembering that one had a particular experience (witnessed, or felt, or thought something) in a particular place at a particular time” (Tulving, 2005: 16). Autonoesis in this view comprises the ability for mental time travel that creates vivid and detailed re-experiences of events from one’s past (Tulving, 1984). Tulving (2002) also argues that proscopic chromesthesia, the ability to imagine a personal future, is key to autonoesis relating to the anticipation of thinking about and making plans for our personal future (Tulving, 2005: 17). This is just one variant of prospection which can also involve simulation, prediction, intention and planning. In this account episodic memory is the highest form of consciousness that temporally extends the self, enabling one to imagine oneself in the future and to remember past experiences from a first-person perspective.

To summarize the above, autonoetic awareness of the declarative self adds to abilities for meta-cognition, to think about thinking and remembering (Tulving, 2005). The self is further extended by enhancing the ability for one to travel through time by projecting further into possible futures and to develop a sense of continuity over time. While Martin Conway generally agreed with the above he disagrees with Tulving in one fundamental respect by arguing that episodic memory is older than semantic memory. One can understand his point because as described above, the internal body, involves a crude form of ‘working self’ involved in monitoring and tracking adaptive correspondence, retaining episodic information that enables us and other animals to operate effectively over a short timespan by reducing free energy that can arise from surprise. Conway (2005) posits that this ancient system is overlain by a more recent system comprising conceptual memory which sits above episodic memory, providing a context to organize these otherwise short-term memories in ways that support the self in its pursuit of long term goals.

Conway describes how a major challenge arises as the self is caught between two conflicting demands, on the one hand, the demand for self-correspondence, to keep an accurate record of moment-to-moment experience so as to minimize the release of free energy; and the simultaneous demand for self-coherence, to maintain a coherent and stable record of the self that extends beyond the present. This is discussed further next.

The Self-Memory System (SMS) (Conway, 2005)

The Self Memory System (Conway & Pleydell Pearce, 2000) is a conceptual framework which emphasizes the interconnectedness of self and memory. Here the self is conceived of as a complex set of active goals and associated self-images, collectively referred as the working self, for which memory provides a database. The relationship between the working self and long-term memory is reciprocal as autobiographical knowledge constrains what the self is, has been, and can be, while the working self-modulates access to long-term knowledge. The working-self is equivalent to Freud’s conception of the ego. Expressed in terms of the Free Energy Principle the aim of the working self is to minimize free energy by constructing a model of the subject’s environment which it then uses as a base for comparison with incoming information as a means to reduce prediction error. Goal processes involve an ideal standard and as means to assess discrepancies that arise between actual and desired states of the world. Goals are arranged in a hierarchy of processes and sub-processes that drive thinking, and the degree to which goals are attained or not is expressed as emotion (Conway, 2004: 494).

The SMS accords episodic memory a role that is close to sensory experience, whereas the long-term self contains semantic memory records consisting of the abstract and conceptual knowledge of a person’s life. Episodic memory directly serves the working self, which is focused on short term goals, operating largely unconsciously to produce brief sensory-perceptual-affective summary records of experience that are available for integration into the long-term self (Conway, 2008). Many episodic memories are created in the course of each day as we switch from one task to another and generally these are not retained unless they have a connection to the long-term self. Episodic memory plays a key role in the process of goal achievement by keeping an accurate and up-to-date record of recent activity over a broadly twenty-four hour period, after which some memories are integrated

into more abstract autobiographical knowledge structures. A map of the complex set of processes involved is shown in Figure 8.6, followed by a brief description of key term.

Figure 8.6. Conway’s Self-Memory System (SMS)

Figure 8.6. Conway’s Self-Memory System (SMS)

The Working-Self. The working self is a complex set of control processes, of which one aspect is the generation of mental models which support the coherent realisation of goals.¹⁵ Goals and sub-goals are processes that generally work non-consciously and involve an ideal state of the world and a mechanism which constantly assesses the discrepancy between this and the actual state. When a goal is not reached, this generates affect and cognition. Episodic Memories play a key role in maintaining a record of events. However only key autobiographical memories are retained into the long term.

The Long-Term Self. This contains the knowledge that directs the working self to attend to specific goals and consists of the conceptual self and the autobiographical knowledge base.

Autobiographical knowledge base. This contains information about the periods in one’s life and also general knowledge and interacts with the episodic memory system to create specific autobiographical memories. Lifetime periods relate to particular overarching goals in life, for instance, our time at college, early married life, or one’s first job. The base also includes the life-story schema, which refers to how personal stories are constructed within particular cultural contexts (‘my life as a woman in the twenty-first century’ or ‘my life as an influencer”. This contributes to the development of a richer life story which is a key aspect of identity (McAdams,1985).

The conceptual self. The conceptual self consists of the conceptual spectacles through which we view the world. This shares something with Personal Construct Theory developed by George Kelly (1955) in that it consists of abstract knowledge about the self that we contextualize in relation to our autobiographical knowledge which is grounded in significant episodic memories of specific experiences. Conway et al. (2004) cite the example of an individual who believes himself as ‘practical’ rather than ‘intellectual’, who might have a lifetime period representation of his time at university as being largely negative. The conceptual self involves declarative semantic knowledge that is separate from episodic memories. It appears to be a robust memory system that is more fixed in consciousness than other systems. Consisting of the set of processes by which we construct a self-image and mental model of the self, the conceptual self greatly extends our ability to access general memories through time. The formation of self-identity seems to be linked to the auto-noetic ability to think about thinking that forms from late adolescence into early adulthood (McAdams, 1985). This enables us to become time travellers in the sense that we form a narrative identity by which weaves together particular episodes of autobiographical memory into the evolving story of our lives. A sense of diachronic coherence emerges through narrative identity, as we sew together sequences of key events over time. What is called the “¹⁶ bump” is the period when aged between ten and thirty years of age, most autobiographical memories have been found to be recalled. This seems to hold up in relation to our most memorable consumption choices as the age people later recall they were when they watched their favourite film (Holbrook & Schindler, 1989) or read their favourite books (Larsen,1996). Janssen, Chessa, and Murre (2007). One explanation for this is that this period in a person’s life is critical for the formation and maintenance of a stable self (Erikson, 1950).

Narrative identity also provides thematic coherence by organizing the stories we tell each other about the events in our lives concerning relationships, sports, politics, entertainment, holidays and so on. Themes can enable access specific episodic memories that we can share with others in relation to an important event such as the process of buying a house. They also can bind us to others with whom we share the master narratives provided by our common culture. For example, in one study the author found marked differences in the master narratives of Israeli and Palestinian youths, with the former recounting predominantly redemptive stories while the latter related tales of contamination and tragedy (Hammack, 2008).

The authors describe how for those individuals who suffer amnesia due to brain damage, the conceptual self can preserve memories that are inaccessible to other memory systems. This contains non-temporal models of the self, such as self-scripts and possible selves and attitudes, values and beliefs. These are drawn from socialization through our interaction with family, friends, faith groups and teachers that help us define ourselves in relation to other people and to the world at large.

Scripts and Self-Defining Memories. Scripts are abstract structures within the conceptual self that contain templates for sequences of actions, affects, and outcomes (507). “According to script theory, SDMs are memorial representations that ground narrative sequences of actions, affects,and outcomes in specific autobiographical memories” (508). While many episodic memories will fade, self-defining memories are associated with major developmental goals and are most active when these goals undergo change in relation to developmental challenges through the lifecourse presented by growth, autonomy, achievement, intimacy, generativity, aging, and loss, and the existential problems they address (Erikson, 1959; 1963).

Adaptive Correspondence versus Self-Coherence

Autobiographical memories serve two equally important potentially conflicting functions, for adaptive correspondence, and for self-coherence. Consistent with the Free Energy Principle adaptive correspondence seeks to ensure that memories correspond to ongoing experience by which the working self keeps track of where it is in the current goal space. For example, when returning home, I wonder where I left the key to the front door? Hundreds of similar episodic memories may be formed each day of which just a few will be retained for the long-term. Alternatively, the Self-Memory-System (SMS) aims to preserve the coherence and consistency of our current self-image. Conway argues that in the ‘healthy’ individual, self-coherence occurs by making memories that are consistent with our current goals, self-images and beliefs about our self that are supported by memories of specific experiences. This raises the question as to how the working self reconciles the potentially conflicting demand for self-coherence with that of correspondence to reality? Conway suggests that this is managed through adaptive coherence which is, ‘an optimum level of retention for any given experience that maximises fitness and survival’. However, as is discussed next it seems that especially when a person has suffered trauma, the demand for self-coherence will usually win over that for adaptive correspondence.

Self-Coherence Trumps Adaptive Correspondence

Conway discusses cases ranging from child sexual and childhood neglect and PTSD, to highlight how memories can be inhibited, distorted, or even falsified to preserve a coherent self-image. While some of these cases lie outside the purview of consumer research, it can be argued that they serve to provide insight into the processes that may be at work more generally in less traumatic circumstances. Additionally some cases such as those which describe the traumatic memories of people involved in road traffic accidents do focus on aspects of consumption, or rather, on the consequences that can follow from this. Below I briefly describe some cases to illustrate some general points.

Conway discusses cases of several individuals suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) following road traffic accidents as illustrations of the powerful role played by the SMS in seeking to maintain a coherent self-image by inhibiting dissonant episodic memories. In one, a professional driver was a back-seat passenger travelling in a car with his wife when the car was involved in a high-speed collision, after which his wife was rendered unconscious. The man subsequently experienced guilt and flashbacks and the intrusive thought that he should have warned the driver of the impending crash. Over many weeks, following visits to the crash-site and access to police records, the man discovered that there was no way in which he could have warned the driver. As this realization dawned, his intrusive memories and anxiety diminished. However, he did not return to professional driving and needed further therapy even to be able to sit in a car. Conway argues that a key issue for this man was that the accident clearly demonstrated that one can never be in control when driving. This was so destabilizing to the man’s sense of self that it was preferable for the working self to manufacture a distorted memory than to acknowledge this fact about control and the implications this held for his future life. During therapy it transpired that his ability to be in control had been a major factor in his choice of career to be a driver. Following the crash it was easier for the working self to distort the memory of the event to maintain his belief in control which effectively maintained the illusion of control, rather than enabling him to go about the challenging process of changing the mental model of his construct system.

Conway also discusses the case of a woman suffering from PTSD who had been involved in a road traffic accident and had no memory of the telephone call she had made to her husband shortly afterwards when she had told him, “I am OK. Meet me at the hospital’. He had replied, “Why are you at the hospital if you are okay?” She had reaplied, “I have hurt my legs but it’s not too bad’. In therapy the woman had no recollection of the phone call. She eventually recalled that at the time of the phone call she had been terrified that the medics might have to amputate her legs. This was linked to an older memory of having to tell a friend whose father had been involved in an accident that his leg would have to be amputated. Although her legs had been damaged, the woman made a full recovery. When as the result of a long course of therapy she began to remember the details of the phone call, she was reportedly amazed that she had forgotten the ‘details’. Conway argues that what was inhibited in this instance was a threatening negative self-image, ‘of an amputated and disabled self’ that was pushed down in order to maintain coherence of the existing self (Conway, 2005, 607).

Conway et al. describe the cases of Ruth, Mnemsoyne and Violet to illustrate more disruptive effects of episodic inhibition that can occur as a consequence of extreme instances of trauma. Ruth is described as having a “secure and autonomous” style who can easily access autobiographical memories as part of a coherent self-narrative. For instance, she recalled a potent self-defining memory from when aged twelve or thirteen she went shopping for shoes with her mother, with whom she had been particularly stroppy, dismissing all of her mother’s suggestions out of hand. Ruth clearly recalled her mother’s exasperated response, ‘If you don’t stop being like this, I’ll cry in the middle of the shop!’ And then it just dawned on me, what I’d been doing…I think that was the start of me thinking, I have to be nice to people."

In contrast to Ruth’s clear recollections, Mnemsoyne described how memories would just flood into her head, describing her mother’s alternating violent rejection and over-protectiveness and her parents’ unreasonable expectations of her abilities. In particular she recalled a particular incident where she had been performing in a play when suddenly it all went wrong and she could only think of how disappointed and embarrassed her parents would be. Her memories were interspersed with “rambling,” or extensive descriptions of loosely related general events and commentaries. The authors describe how these memories were so intrusive that they overwhelmed her capacity for adaptive correspondence to attend to the routine tasks of daily life.

Violet on the other hand could only provide “bland” descriptions of her parents but could not support these with any specific memories, although from her descriptions it was inferred that they were “aloof and unavailable”. She could only recall three self-defining memories that were general, descriptive and emotionally flat. The authors argue that the need for self-coherence hindered Violet’s ability to form links between her autobiographical knowledge and episodic memory. This defence operated to sequester detailed memories of experiences from the working self that might be destabilizing and threaten its goal structure and the belief structures of the conceptual self. It also allowed the construction of versions of the self and other (‘as if’ versions), that were “not constrained by remembered reality”. These reportedly ‘mildly delusional’ self-other conceptualizations supported a version of interpersonal reality that did not threaten the goals of the working self.

Conway discusses how the SMS may not only distort memories but can create false memories and beliefs to maintain self-coherence. Although false memories are especially observed in instances of psychological illness and brain damage, he argues that they may be a feature of all autobiographical remembering. This is evidenced by the ease with which memory is open to manipulation from outside through the creation of false memories that reinforce the self-image. However, while false memories can be induced to preserve the existing self-image, he argues that it is almost impossible to induce memories that do the opposite by undermining active goals of the self.

Discussion

The above ties together contributions from neurologists, neuropsychoanalysts and psychologists in a bid to provide a general if rather crude outline as a basis for what a neuropsychoanalytic account might offer to scholars in consumer research. While some will no doubt be put off by the attempt to provide a scientific basis for research into this area others may find some its insights attractive yet challenging.

Accessing sub-personal processes

The vast majority of the processes described above in relation to the ‘‘internal body’ (Solms & Panksepp, 2010) and the body-schema (Gallagher, 2005) are ‘sub-personal’, raising the question of the extent to which such experiences are open to investigation of ‘embodied experience’ by consumer culture theorists such as Thompson et al., (1989)? There is a difficulty in that the declarative self, which is a tertiary formation is at a far remove from the operations of the internal body and the external body. Although the declarative self has access to subjective feelings experienced by the internal self, reflexive consciousness has limited access to the whys and wherefores of this experience, although it has little hesitation in providing post-hoc rationalizations of these. One of Descartes’ errors, perhaps perpetuated in the assumptions undergirding CCT research, was to pit the rational conscious ‘mind’ against a ‘body’ presumed to be dumb.

Implications for consumer research?

Automaticity. If the Free Energy Principle is correct in stating that the preferred state of the organism is quiescence, such that its needs are met automatically without the need to arouse consciousness, this questions the neoliberal assumption that the ideal consumer should be active and constantly vigilant and on the lookout for the best deal. Another implication, which is now widely recognised, is that most of our needs are met automatically as consciously learned processes becomes routinized. You are no doubt familiar with the annoyance experienced when the internal layout of our favourite store has been altered so that we must slowly learn where to find goods. Related to this, automatic processes run ahead of conscious awareness which then offers post-hoc rationalizations as to why “we” engaged in this or that behaviour.

The Subject. Although some consumer researchers implicitly recognise different forms of subjectivity, this can lead to problems when it is not made explicit. For instance, although Patterson and Elliott (2002) recognised that we are bodies and have bodies, Patterson and Schroeder (2010) later argued that the body is an event or process and not an object. This has implications for the “me” that is acting. Researchers frequently evoke a unidimensional conception of the ‘subject’ and then proceed to describe ‘non-conscious’ or ‘unconscious’ influences on their behaviour. This is especially so with social researchers. For instance, the account by Sarah Grogan, who provides an illuminating and well-researched account of body image could be strengthened if she recognised that individuality involves a complex arrangement of interrelated layers that involve emotions and perceptions as well as cognitions and cultural influences. For instance, the engagement of both processes relating to the external body and reflexive self may help explain findings that while individuals are often highly critical of media representations of the body, they are also responsive to such portrayals.

Consciousness. By arguing that the internal body comprising Freud’s ‘id’ is conscious, neuro-psychoanalysis separates itself off from the mainstream of psychoanalytic thought and indeed from widely held understandings that consciousness is a product of higher level brain systems espoused by such as that of Feldman Barrett. For example while Lawrence and Poehlman (2017) argue the need for consumer researchers to revise their assumption on the processes guiding consumer choice, self-control and persuasion, so as presumably to better understand the role of ‘sub-personal processes’ they adhere to the view that consciousness is a product of higher-order cortical functions and there is no sense that there is a debate to be had here.

From a neuropsychoanalytic perspective, marketing can play a role at different levels of the self, for example, a primary aspect is to keep us ‘wanting’ or SEEKING. In this respect Solms et al. (2012) offer an alternative explanation of addiction to that provided by Berridge, Venier and Robinson. (1989). Marketing practitioners also directly target fear and higher-level emotions such as shame and embarrassment. There are a myriad ways too in which marketers seek to shape perception through pack-design and most importantly body image. Additionally, consumer research demonstrates how effectively marketers have been in providing symbolic resources for the construction of the self and as a repository of memories and in relation to which studies of the “reminiscence bump” (Rathbone et al, 2008, 2017) potentially yield useful insights.

General Discussion

In the consumer research literature skin emerges is an organising theme for studies in a range of settings, for instance, its use in fetish culture (Schroeder & Borgerson, 2003); the perceptions of Indian consumers of advertisements for skin lightening creams (Karan, 2008); the depiction of tattoos in advertisements (Bjerrisgaard, Kjeldgaard & Bengtsson, (2012); the motivation and meanings attached to the decision to have one’s body tattooed (Patterson & Elliott, 2002; Roux & Belk, 2012) ; or as a reflection on skin as a permeable and often fragile boundary between inside and outside, self and society and the realisation of identity and marketplace culture (Patterson and Elliott (2002); Roux & Belk, 2012).

The argument that higher forms of consciousness are constructed on top of these sensory modalities is similar to that offered by Solms and Panksepp (2010) and to Gallagher, (2005) for who touch and smell form part of the body schema while sight is aligned with the body image. Bradshaw and Chatzidakis (2016) also draw on Ernest Dichter who argued that clothing, curtains, rooms and dwellings play a role similar to skin by forming barriers to protect what is inside from the threat of contamination that comes from outside.

Culture and the Body

Arguments from across the social sciences advocate the importance of cultural influences on the degree of openness of the external body. Elias (1991) argues for a spectrum of identities from “We” to “I” societies, where American individualism lies at an extreme. A similar distinction is made by Falk (1994) whose distinction between the open body and the closed body is discussed in the first part of this chapter. Psychologists have found that North American parents treat their children in an analytic way as autonomous and independent individuals, whereas in Japan the approach is holistic and open to the other, laying stress on interdependence and mutual goals. Where North American parents emphasize physical separation with their children, Japanese infants almost always sleep in the same bed as their parents, sometimes into late childhood. It is argued that these differences lead to different forms of exteroception, or attention to the external world. Americans focus attention on specific objects and pay little heed to context, whereas Japanese use a dispersed attentional strategy, which gives equal weight to the object and its context (Duffy & Kitayama, 2010: 57). Fiske (1991) describes how the body of the individual member of the Piaroa is open towards other members of the tribe, except for brothers-in-law who enter the group from outside.

Cartesianism

The dominant image of the role played by the body in the Western world has been shaped by Christianity which made a distinction between the material body and the immortal soul, the idea being that the body was of this earth and provided a source of temptation for the everlasting soul. The body thus had to be disciplined, purified and mortified so that it could make a fitting place for the Spirit to reside. The Enlightenment rationalists maintained this duality but changed its emphasis from a spiritual to a more material basis in differentiating between the mind and the body, This was manifested in Descartes’ argument that the human being consists of two substances, comprising the mind, as a thinking non-extended thing that is different in kind to the body, which is an extended, non-thinking thing. From such thinking there developed the argument that both internal and external nature should be tamed through being subjected to the discipline of the mind. The duality between mind and body facilitates the way in which the body can be viewed as an object, so that the ‘brute’ body and ‘brute’ nature must be contained, disciplined and controlled and In consumer culture the armoured, hard machine–body is an object par excellence.

Descartes’ distinction between mind and body gave rise to ‘the mind-body problem’, as to how such different substances can exist in one being. Against this view Damasio (1994) argued that consciousness is fundamentally embodied, because awareness consists of what one’s bodily state is, in relation to one’s environment. Feeling is essential to what Damasio calls core consciousness, referred to here as the internal body, which responds keenly to feelings of pleasure and unpleasure. The routine demands of the internal body arouse the external body to automatically serve its needs in the outer world – and indeed this is seen as a major problem today, in an era when fatty and sugary food is plentiful and cheap. In a similar argument Friston (2016) turns Descartes on his head to argue that, ‘I am therefore I think’. By this he means that any organism that is enveloped in a Markov blanket (a statistical boundary between inside and outside) can be considered conscious, because it actively infers the causes of its sensations through its aim to minimize uncertainty and to avoid the release of free energy arising from its relation to its environment.

Marketing and advertising researchers have been critical of the Cartesianism in advertising images that portrays the body as a corrupt and flawed container for the mind, pointing to the limitations of  machine and container metaphors that fail to account for the feelings that make us human. (Thompson et al., 1989; Joy & Venkatesh, 1994; Hirschman, 1990; Patterson & Schroeder, 2010).   Roux and Belk (2017) reflect this in stark terms, citing Foucault’s description of the body as, ‘the place to which I am condemned’.  Indeed, this is how informants to their study described their ‘original’ bodies, for whom tattoos are liberating and who regard their skin as a canvas on which to create a heterotopia, a place of perfection against the chaos that reigns in the world.

While Roux and Belk (2019) reserve judgement on the question of Cartesianism, others are more critical. Thompson and Hirschman (1995) argued that decisions to undergo plastic surgery are underlain by a Cartesian duality that is ingrained in the view that the mind controls the body, and in particular, of a youthful inner self that is constrained to inhabit an ageing body.  They argue that this duality underlies the consumption ideology promoted by the cosmetic, medical and fitness industries whose products are framed as providing the means to take control of one’s life.  

Several authors attribute the pervasiveness of Cartesian thinking to the taken-for-granted assumptions that operate implicitly through language. For instance, Thompson et al. (1989) argue the need to transcend Cartesian machine and container metaphors that pervade traditional consumer research which assumes that events outside the container are objective while those inside it are subjective (ibid.: 134).  Thompson and Hirschman (1995) go further, by advocating a post-structuralist stance that questions the Cartesian dualism between mind and body which is further reflected in stereotypes of male and female.

Patterson and Elliott (2002) advance a different explanation from the above by arguing that the concept of embodiment can help overcome the artificial division between body and mind through the recognition that we both ‘are’ bodies and ‘have’ bodies.  However, while they implicitly acknowledge that this distinction necessitates two perspectives, they might have gone further to develop a layered account of subjectivity which includes an internal body (lived experience) and an external body (object formation). 

Informed by the psychoanalytic perspective of Didier Anzieu, (1989) Bradshaw and Chatzikadis (2016) liken the skin to an onion that consists of a series of layers that radiate outward from the dermis to the conceptual realm. Their argument is similar to that of Pasi Falk (1994), who described the open body as being enclosed by the ‘second skin’ of the traditional eating community.  It is tempting to relate this to the conceptual scheme devised by Sean Gallagher (2005) described above by suggesting that the ‘skin ego’, which the authors argue arises from proprioception and is constructed from sensory modalities of touch, smell and sound, might be linked to the development of the body-schema.

From a neuro-psychoanalytic perspective the body is at once the subject of lived experience (the experiential self of the internal body), an object (external body) that exists in the world like other objects, and an object for reflection for the thinking, or reflexive subject from the perspective of the tertiary formation of the declarative self.

From this perspective it is unsurprising that individuals interviewed by consumer researchers readily provide a “Cartesian” view of the self by detailing the various shortcomings of ‘their’ bodies, comprising the ‘meat’ or “carcass” to which “they” are chained.

As described above the neuropsychoanalytic argument is that it is not the ‘meat’ that is the problem but the self that disparages it. According to this explanation the internal body actively strives to act in our overall interest to reduce free energy by seeking adaptive correspondence to the challenges presented by the environment. Problems arise when at the third-level the working self prioritizes self-coherence and actively inhibits information about the world by distorting information and memories, even to the extent of making up false memories.

From the above, theorists from different perspectives now agree that the body is essential to the enterprise of being human and that Dennett’s notion of a disembodied brain in a vat which overlooks the intricate relations between the body and the conscious mind which develops from this. Against this understanding a powerful fantasy of the body as disposable ‘meat’ developed from the early 1990s.. In the ‘wired’ universe, the argument goes, humanity will no longer require the ‘meat’ of the vulnerable, weak body that acts es a drag on the power of the mind. This is the vision described by the science fiction author William Gibson and shared by Stelarc, a performance artist who desires to take the body to its limits, to push it to the state where it is no longer a body as we recognize it. Billionaires such as Bryan Johnson and Elon Musk seem to have read Gibson’s work, not as science fiction, but as something that is desirable that they can realise. Inspired by works such as Idoru (Gibson, 1996) several now believe that they can become just like the ‘brain in the vat’, as technological developments will enable them a form of immortality by uploading their consciousness to hyperspace.¹⁷.

Fundamental Differences and Grand Narratives

If anything the above discussion illustrates that there are differences between rival explanations at virtually every level. These extend to differences in the theorisation of consciousness itself from the behaviourist explanation advanced by Feldman-Barrett to the idea that this is an innate property of the internal self. Some argue that the emotions are innate, fundamental to all being and key to experience whilst others argue that that we have to learn emotional responses that are ‘read off’ at higher levels of the self. Higher up the metaphorical ladder theorists differ as to the role played by episodic memories which play a key role for Tulving (1984, 2002) but are displaced by self-defining memories in the explanation offered by Conway (2005). Given disagreement at every level it is fair to ask if it is in any sense sensible to try to advance a general model such as those developed by Gallagher (2005) and by Solms and Turnbull (2012)? Given that my answer is obvious, it is up to you to decide. However at a time when specialisms are becoming ever narrower, leading to silos of knowledge, an argument can be made for the need to try to grasp something of the whole and the inter-relation of the parts that make it, whilst recognising the complexity.

Normal bodies?

Consumer research tends to focus on the normal consumer, or at least to assume that we are all the same, whilst psychoanalysis argues that the idea of normality is exaggerated. While this is under-researched one could argue that hearing voices in one’s head is relatively normal, as it is reportedly experienced by between 5% and 25% of the population.¹⁸ Many people, not only those labelled schizophrenic, experience visual or auditory hallucinations at some stage in their lives. If this psychoanalysis may offer an alternative explanation to those from biology and social constructionism.

Bodily boundaries are of central importance for individuals suffering from schizophrenia who often report that their body is dissolving as their skin is too thin, experiencing states of high bodily excitation of an excessive ‘too-muchness’ of bodily experience that they can try to expiate through self-harm or the administration of opiates. Leader describes the case of a patient who had effectively instated the flat she lived in as her body. She had not cleaned the flat for for years and lived amid piles of rubbish whose walls she had smeared with blood, urine and faeces, describing the flat as not “like” her body, but simply as her body.¹⁹

From the above discussions one cannot simply assume that one ‘has’ a body that is somehow separate from ‘us’. Gallagher (2005) illustrates how the body schema affects all manner of actions including our ability to read. Additionally, given the number of processes involved and the potential for body image distortion, one cannot take for granted that Identification with one’s body image will be a smooth process.

The previous chapter briefly discussed consumer research on the experience of pain involved in having one’s body tattooed or in Tuff Mudding and so on. There seems to be a complex relation between pain and the body image, as a study found that by comparison to a control group, those suffering severe chronic spinal pain reported a disrupted image of their back; ‘(f)ive patients were unable to clearly delineate the outline of their trunk and stated that they could not ‘‘find it” (Moseley, 2008: 239). Darian Leader argues that a bodily symptom may serve many purposes some of which may index psychological trauma of loss. He cites a study of 95,467 people which found that the highest mortality rates followed directly after bereavement.²⁰. Noting that there is no simple correspondence between the experience of loss and illness he describes “anniversary symptoms’ where “deaths, anniversaries and logics were tied up in a logic that involved several variables all at once”, such that an individual would fall ill when they reached the age at which a parent had died.²¹

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¹ See Kreshel, (1990).

² https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/marketing-campaign-invented-halitosis-180954082/

³ Fredua-Agyeman & Gainsford (2014).

⁴ http://bobnational.net/start-session?entityID=https://idp.st-andrews.ac.uk/shibboleth&target=http://bobnational.net/record/245728/media_id/246612

⁵ NHTSA (2006). Status of NHTSA’s Research on Occupant Protection in Rollovers. NHTSA / HATCI Research Meeting, 1st March. See also findings that SUVs cause more harm to others in crashes (Robinson et al., 2025).

6 Highmore, 2010, 120).

⁷ Wetherell, (2012, 145).

⁸ Leys, (2011, 456).

⁹ See also Leys, (2017: 301-2)

¹⁰ Gallagher, (2005, 139).

¹¹ Source, Meister, K. (2024). Measuring Nano/Microplastics in Human Immune Tissue. Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

Kara Meister who was lead investigator the study suggests avoiding non-stick and plastic cookware,, wearing clothes made of natural fibres, and seeking out plastic-free toiletries and cosmetics. The also recommends using glass jars rather than plastic containers and metal foil rather than plastic wrappers. Why is it that individuals and not corporations or governments have to bear the burden here?

¹² Bellk & Costa, (1998); Kozinets, (2002).

¹³ Leader, (2011, ch. 3).

¹⁴ Fuchs, (2005). See also Lie et al., (2021) for a more general discussion.

¹⁵ Conway, (2005, 493)

¹⁶ Rathbone et al, (2008, 2017).

¹⁷ They seem to have forgotten that Idoru (Gibson, 1996) also has a dark dystopian character and that in the unlikely event this were to come to pass, “they”, whatever “they” come to be, may not get what they once had ardently wished for.

¹⁸ While this statistic is mentioned quite frequently it is hard to pin down the sources. This is mentioned by Leader, (2011) the . Volpato et al. (2022) mention this as “common” but do not provide any statistics.

¹⁹ Leader, (2011, ch 3, 88). My italics.

²⁰ Leader, (2007, 81).

²¹ Leader, (2007, 84).