Fractal Subjects, Simulated Bodies, and Artificial Eating in Hyperreality
by Dr. Linea Cutter

“…you could say that the social is just like the sense of taste in American cuisine. It is a gigantic enterprise of dissuasion from the taste of food: its savor is, as it were, isolated, expurgated and resynthesized in the form of burlesque and artificial sources. This is flavor, just as once there were cinematic glamor: erasing all personal character in favor of an aura of the studio and fascination of models. Likewise for the social: just as the function of taste is isolated in the sauce, the social is isolated as a function of all the therapeutic sauces in which we float. A sociosphere of contact, control, persuasion and dissuasion, of exhibition of inhibitions in massive or homeopathic doses (“Have a problem? We solve it!”): this is obscenity. All structures turned inside out and exhibited, all operations rendered visible. In America this goes all the way from the bewildering network of aerial telephone and electric wires (the whole system is on the surface) to the concrete multiplication of all the bodily functions in the home, the litany of ingredients on the tiniest can of food, the exhibition of income or I.Q., and includes harassment by signals, the obsession with displaying the innards of power, the equivalent of the mad desire to locate crucial function in the lobes of the brain…”   –  Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, 29.

What’s for Dinner in Hyperreality?

“What should we have for dinner?”[1] For many, attempting to answer this deceptively simple question is challenging, and often evokes a cacophony of conflicting nutritional information. The stress borne of navigating the vast array of diet and fitness literatures, programs, websites, advertisements, and apps is intertwined with, and compounded by, the ongoing difficulty of distinguishing between “natural” and “artificial” foodstuffs and ingredients. As Baudrillard emphasizes in the epigraph above, today’s apparent collapse of epistemological and sensory categories is exemplified by the proliferation of seemingly indecipherable yet ever-growing ingredient lists on canned and processed foods.[2] Popular food writer and journalist Michael Pollan also notes the dangers and difficulties that accompany the contemporary freedom of dietary choice, noting that such decisions are complicated by the opaque “cornucopia of the American supermarket” and the industrial food production system, or the “bewildering food landscape where we once again have to worry that some of these tasty-looking morsels might kill us.”[3] Pollan’s point is emphasized by the fact that discoveries are constantly being made about the dangerous nature of certain foods, ingredients, and additives. This condition is especially exemplified by the frequent product recalls of popular food products found to be toxic or contaminated. Furthermore, recent studies demonstrate the ubiquitous presence of microplastics in food, water, and human bodies, causing scientists and medical experts to sound the alarm bells about possible serious (and deadly) health consequences.[4]  Not only is the selection of food potentially dangerous to the body in terms of toxic chemicals, microplastics, bacteria, and carcinogens, but, as emphasized by public health institutions like the World Health Organization (WHO), the incorrect selection of food can also lead to the development of obesity, which the WHO labels as a leading metabolic risk factor for cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

The combined pressure to restrict one’s food consumption habits to fit normative health (and beauty) standards, avoid the aforementioned risks, and steer clear of poisoning oneself through the ingestion of toxic ingredients and foodstuffs leads to an environment that Baudrillard would likely be unsurprised by given that he was writing at time where the distinctions between food, drug, and technology were being questioned and blurred, especially with the sweeping popularity of artificial sweeteners. One can perhaps speculate that sweetness is one of the artificial flavors that Baudrillard was thinking of when making the comparison between artificial flavors and contemporary social life. During the 1950s when Baudrillard was a young man, the infusion of cyclamates and artificial sweeteners into food products as well as the normalized consumption and sale of “dietetic foods” shifted the primary location of products which formerly had been under the purview of, and associated primarily with, the pharmaceutical market into the food market in the United States.[5] As one advertisement for Sucaryl, a popular “natural-tasting” cyclamate sold prior to the enforcement of the Delaney Clause (which was cited by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to ban the sale of cyclamates in the U.S. in 1969), reads: “Now remember, when shopping, ask for dietetic foods sweetened with Sucaryl…Now, more and more, you’ll find well-stocked dietetic food departments in your neighborhood stores.”[6]

Despite the earlier ban of cyclamates and subsequent concerns about the potentially carcinogenic nature of artificial sweeteners like saccharin in the late 1970s, artificial sweeteners continued to boom in popularity. Eventually, the divide between dietetic and non-dietetic sections would crumble, as the very idea of food shifted toward a popular understanding of “food as component of chemical ingredients” that could be modified in ways to increase the health of consumers.[7] The FDA’s introduction of standardized nutrition labeling in the 1970s was part of what food science and business historian Xaq Frohlich refers to as an “informational turn” in food politics that sought to address the “information overload” that accompanied the litany of new chemicals and ingredients on processed, pre-packaged, canned, and “diet” food products.[8] Standardized nutrition labeling assumed that nutritional information would trickle-down from experts to consumers.[9] According to this trickle-down model, consumers must diligently learn to interpret ever-expanding ingredient lists and food labels.[10] In contrast to the transparency that standardized nutrition labeling seemed to promise, the food architecture of choice in the U.S. became increasingly enveloped in a condition that food historian Anna Zeide refers to as an “intractable systemic opacity.”[11] Through advertising and nutrition labels, consumers would now need to pierce and “correctly” interpret the “more hidden than hidden,” or opaque food architectures of choice, in order to protect their health.[12]

The condition of “information overload” in the food system is something Baudrillard would likely identify as part of the “obesity of simulation,”[13] or the “bloated”[14] hyperreal communication systems that constantly try to quantify and calculate bodies, behaviors, and desires.[15] Baudrillard’s point about the logic of experimentation, or, in Baudrillard’s words, the modality of “trial and error,” permeating everyday life is especially apt when it comes to discussions about freedom of food choice.[16] In the age of Internet algorithms, users are constantly tracked by the websites and online content that they click, tap, or scroll. Online content, in turn, is constantly tested to maximize virality, engagement, and visibility. Algorithm-driven tailored ads and recommended social media content are often conditioned by what users engage with the most or have previously engaged with, including the food and diet related content that they view online. Baudrillard compares the majority of information that we are presented with today to a “line of products” that “obliges us to make decisions” so that we are not really reading the masses of information presented to us by various media but are, instead, “selective[ly] deciphering” it.[17]

Because of the contemporary speed and unending dissemination of (often conflicting) information regarding what and how to eat, food knowledge can only be, to borrow the words of Bernard Stiegler, memorized by “forgetting…effacing…[and] selecting what deserves to be retained from all that could have been retained.”[18] Because of this, Stiegler argues that we must rely on “hypomnesic objects” that aid and supplant human memory and willpower, including smart phones, GPS navigators, and other “devices using micro-and-nanotechnologies.”[19] Baudrillard also describes the increasing human reliance on, and exteriorization of core functions to, different technologies, writing hyperbolically that we now are able to preserve ourselves “under vacuum like frozen food” by relying on technical artifacts to place us in controlled, predictable bubbles of information.[20] For instance, digital algorithms that curate diet-related content for social media and Internet users based on the media they click on and engage with can select food options and “remember” diet and nutrition information for individuals. This makes the unending work of food selection and dietary decision-making appear simpler within a more clearly delineated architecture of food and diet choice that aligns with the “test” results that the user has communicated to the algorithm through their online viewing choices. Additionally, the substances one chooses to ingest often have a hypomnesic function aimed at supplanting human willpower in the stressful and dangerous morass of dietary choice. Low-calorie additives such as artificial sweeteners have such a hypomnesic function, as they promise to enable individuals to keep consuming sweetened products without worrying about the health consequences typically associated with the regular consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages and products, such as obesity and hypertension.

As a consequence of media saturation, Baudrillard writes that the condition of humans is analogous to laboratory guinea pigs because they are forced to experiment on themselves through the constant selection of different products and technologies.[21] Although Baudrillard was not writing about food choice specifically, his description can easily be applied to the realm of dietary choice, as our nutritional health seems to be largely left to the workings of chance and self-experimentation due to the circumstances outlined above. The history of artificial sweeteners also attests to this condition of self-experimentation. For instance, when FDA announced in March of 1977 that it would ban the artificial sweetener, saccharin, due to Canadian studies that found saccharin to be carcinogenic in lab rats, approximately one million letters protesting the ban were received by members of Congress by December of 1977.[22] Historian Harvey Levenstein notes that pollsters at the time “reported that an overwhelming majority of the public opposed the ban.”[23] Consequently, Congress placed an 18-month moratorium on the ban, which it extended twice, in light of the public opposition.[24] The ban was altogether dismissed in the 1990s.[25] Many consumers viewed artificial sweeteners like saccharin as enabling them to obey the rigid dietary and ideal weight rule structures increasingly promoted in the mid-to-late twentieth century.[26] Indeed, in 1977, the same year as the impending ban on saccharin was announced by the FDA, the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs established dietary goals and guidelines that included the goal of reducing “sugar consumption by about 40 percent to account for about 15 percent of total energy intake.”[27] In the provided “Guide to Reducing Sugar Intake,” the recommendations listed in the initial February 1977 report focused on the reduction and elimination of products, whether it be soft drinks, baked goods, processed foods, and packaged foods, that may contain “hidden sugar” from the diet.[28] As an edible hypomnesic technology, saccharin enabled consumers to sidestep their own willpower and to decrease their calories, not through elimination, but instead, through the increased consumption of artificially-sweetened products.[29] Furthermore, artificial sweeteners were a “poison one could pick” amidst a sea of many potential poisons, with one letter-writer arguing that “…My life is one big cancer risk, which I am powerless to control. Surely, then, if I decide to take one further, very minor, risk of developing cancer, it must be my decision.”[30]

The present consumption of artificial sweeteners is still often portrayed as a risky dietary choice by public health institutions and recent scientific studies, demonstrating Baudrillard’s point about human guinea pigs.[31] Paul Preciado also uses the metaphor of human guinea pigs to describe modern subjectivity, referring to it as the “management of self-intoxication in a chemically harmful environment.”[32] Subjectivity denotes the possibility for lived experience within certain historical, political, and spatial contexts and configurations of power.[33] Preciado argues that today, subjectivity is primarily associated with one’s physical body and the injectable or ingestible substances that one primarily uses or consumes, including food.[34] To illustrate his point, Preciado writes that contemporary subjects can be referred to as “Prozac subjects, cannabis subjects, cocaine subjects, alcohol subjects, Ritalin subjects, cortisone subjects, [and] silicone subjects.”[35] In this vein, Preciado writes that modern subjectivity is perceived to be a “subject-body,” which functions as a “communication system” and a “technoliving system” that absorbs and is transformed by ingestible and injectable technologies.[36] Preciado summarizes the subject-body via the concept of “somatechnic,” which foregrounds the blurring of boundaries between the body and consumable technologies.[37] That is, as a subject-body, lived experience is primarily shaped by the way an individual views their body and chooses to display it to others. Fundamentally related to this is a popular interpretation of the body as a sign of one’s consumption choices, or as a communication system that displays how one chooses to modify their body through different foods, technologies, and other commodities.

 This is not dissimilar from Baudrillard’s argument about the imbrication of subjectivities, bodies, and technologies. Baudrillard contends that contemporary modalities of subjectivity are “fractal,” continuously seeking to reproduce “the smallest molecular fraction of [themselves]” via communication networks and increasingly miniaturized visual, virtual, and digital technologies.[38] Both Preciado and Baudrillard refer to aspects of the contemporary circulation of media as “pornographic” due to the way that bodies are continuously framed as transparent vessels from which their consumption practices should be read and displayed in detail for all to see.[39] What Baudrillard refers to as the pornographic hyperreality of constant communication “decomposes bodies into their slightest detail, gestures into their minutest movements,” thus creating fractal subjects.[40]

I argue that Baudrillard’s description of the fractal subject, defined in relation to the technologies it engages with, exhibits itself on, or ingests, is a subjectivity that Byung-Chul Han refers to more comprehensively as homo digitalis.[41] Homo digitalis is a subjectivity that understands itself as a self-project to be constantly modified through its consumption choices.[42] Homo digitalis is also a fractal subject defined by its expectation of continuous digital quantification and its interconnection with communication and information channels as well as advertising algorithms. This understanding of subjectivity represents a departure from Michel Foucault’s description of homo œconomicus, the “entrepreneur of himself,”[43] a point I will also detail in the following paragraphs since Han builds on, but also departs from, both Foucault’s and Baudrillard’s respective theorizations of power and subjectivity. Although Foucault and Baudrillard harbor theoretical differences that make their respective approaches seemingly unrelated and perhaps even incompatible at times, the critical intersections and differential points of emphasis regarding the nature of power and subjectivity are often productive, especially when it comes to understanding the current complexity of freedom of food choice.[44]

Below, I combine the theoretical insights provided by Foucault, Baudrillard, and Han to sketch out the primary characteristics of the contemporary mode of subjectivity that both Han and I refer to as homo digitalis. Throughout this theoretical sketch, I am informed by, and take for granted, Preciado’s insights about the subject-body as a somatechnic referenced above. Preciado’s insights complement Baudrillard’s and Han’s respective analyses of subjectivity, shedding light on how injectable and—importantly, for the purposes of this article—ingestible technologies are fractals through which subjects try to transform and reproduce enhanced versions of themselves. As part of this analysis, I examine Baudrillard’s arguments about simulation, hyperreality, and fractal subjectivity, as I believe his description of these processes illuminates why it continues to be so difficult to cultivate embodied relationships with our own bodies, food, and each other. Additionally, throughout this analysis, I apply Baudrillard’s and Han’s respective theorizations to my analysis of sweetness and what I refer to as “edible hypomnesic technologies” through the lens of artificial sweeteners. Han points to sweetness as a flavor that encourages increased consumption due to its association with pure positivity and pleasure, and this is a point that I will return to in the subsequent sections.[45] Lastly, I conclude by turning to popular culture to offer a final illustration of key transformations in the relationship between subjectivity, technology, and the hopes and anxieties surrounding the ingestion of artificial products. More specifically, I examine how the films The Stuff (1985) and Crimes of the Future (2022) prompt viewers to consider how contemporary modalities of subjectivity are produced through the potentially intoxicating technologies that they engage with and ingest.[46] My overarching argument is that the processes of simulation in the context of hyperreality that Baudrillard describes provide an important subtext to help us understand the difficulty (if not downright impossibility) of distinguishing between natural and artificial, as well as safe and toxic foodstuffs. The dietary cacophony of ever-changing food rules and guidelines is exacerbated by the simulation processes and the instantaneous communication networks that both Baudrillard and Han, in their own ways, theorize.

Simulation and Subjectivity

As noted above, beyond Foucault’s description of the entrepreneur of the self, Han argues that the contemporary neoliberal subject should be understood as a “self-project” that endlessly modifies itself in the pursuit of health, productivity, and achievement.[47] Here, I briefly detail Foucault’s theorization of subjectivity to emphasize how the fractal subject that Han describes through homo digitalis represents a new stage of subjectivity, consumption, and freedom of choice. Foucault’s notion of subjectivity designates the field of historical and political possibilities in which individual subjects “experience [themselves] in a game of truth” and define themselves as agents of knowledge-production but also as objects of knowledge to be interpreted, disciplined, and analyzed.[48] For Foucault, economic behavior is the primary “grid of intelligibility” through which both classical liberal and neoliberal subjects, which he refers to as homo œconomicus, are managed (both by societal apparatuses, or what he refers to as dispositifs, and by themselves). Foucault contrasts the neoliberal subject, or “entrepreneur of himself,” to the classical liberal subject, arguing that the classical liberal subject was the “intangible partner of laissez-faire” and economic exchange. He makes this distinction to indicate that the classical liberal subject retained a limited claim to freedom from governmental management (e.g., a claim corresponding to demands that the government keep its “hands” off of one’s personal property and natural rights).[49] The classical liberal modality of homo œconomicus is a subject that retains a sense of idealized Enlightenment-era responsible thrift and frugality. Additionally, classical liberal homo œconomicus is primarily concerned with calibrating its body and labor as an “abilities-machine” that can be compensated for its efforts “over a period of time by a series of wages.”[50] Here, in the “free market,” Foucault argues that the expectation is that every individual subject must trust their own calculations but also render themselves transparent in a marketplace that is guided by a “seeing” invisible hand whose permeating gaze is able to perceive each individual’s calculated pursuits but also can “draw together the threads of all these dispersed interests.”[51] The opacity or “invisibility” of the market is juxtaposed to and requires the transparency of the rationalized and calculated individual subject. The consumption of food through the lens of this subjectivity is primarily shaped by an impulse to reduce, as the emphasis on monetary thrift and responsible consumption leads one to view the body as an ability-machine that can be calibrated, and, at times, even reach a state of self-calibration (just like the economy) through the careful calculation and reduction of one’s weight. This view is reflected in the writings of early 20^th century physicians such as Arnold Lorand and Victor C. Vaughan, who argued that “the body is a machine” that required the careful selection of foodstuffs as “fuel.”[52] Vaughan also contended that food is “the material with which the wear and tear [of the human machine] must be replaced,” and he believed that the public should be educated so that they do not contaminate or intoxicate their own machines with “dirty, low-grade coal.”[53]

In describing the transition to the neoliberal modality of homo œconomicus in the mid 20^th century, Foucault specifies that neoliberalism, as a technology of power, intensifies and extends the liberal rationality of the market into additional social practices and “domains which are not exclusively or not primarily economic,” such as family life, and importantly, food patterns and bodyweight stereotypes.[54] Neoliberalism is a set of techniques that govern human life in accordance with an atomizing logic of (free) marketization, and in Foucault’s view, a corresponding subjectivity or modality of homo œconomicus could be thought of as “human capital.”[55] Neoliberal homo œconomicus is no longer the “partner of exchange,” but instead, an “entrepreneur of himself” and “man of consumption,” who aims to produce (through consumption) “his own satisfaction.”[56] The spread of liberal marketplace rationality also involves an intensified drive toward the transparent quantification of the neoliberal subject as an ability-machine. Under neoliberalism, the individual subject starts to turn inwards to mine its body as an ability-machine, and as a source of profit for consumption. For neoliberal homo œconomicus, production and consumption become indistinguishably imbricated. The responsibility for the health and productivity of the population is placed squarely on the shoulders of individual consumers, as they are prompted to modify themselves and their actions to ensure that they can keep producing so as to consume more.[57] As opposed to the classical liberal homo œconomicus who could still distinguish between its individuality and its efforts (or enterprise) to cultivate its ability-machine as a source of capital investment, neoliberal homo œconomicus collapses the ontological boundaries between the individual and capital, and the individual and ability-machine (i.e., “human capital”).[58]

These boundaries between the individual and capital, and the individual and ability-machine continue to collapse with the emergence of the more contemporary fractal subject that Han refers to as homo digitalis. Because Han builds on Baudrillard’s theorization of hyperreality and technology in his description of homo digitalis, it is important to first detail Baudrillard’s diagnosis of the changes in communication technologies and consumption that lead to the processes of simulation he describes. In an environment characterized by instantaneous communication technologies that  Baudrillard refers to as “hyperreality,” signs of the real have become more “real” than reality itself.[59] Furthermore, in hyperreality, any value, trait, characteristic, or categorization becomes eminently interchangeable with its so-called binary opposite. For instance, “natural” sugar and artificial sweeteners are simulacra of sweetness, engineered to tantalize consumer taste and desire.[60]

As I pointed to above, for Baudrillard, contemporary hyperreality is characterized by a process of simulation that involves a “generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.”[61] Baudrillard refers to these models of the real as simulacra, and these simulacra attempt to represent or, rather, “simulate” some point of reference in a reality which no longer exists but as a mode of hyperreality. Baudrillard argues that the condition of simulation-induced hyperreality involves a “deterrence” effect in which certain models or media (such as Disneyland) are set forth and claimed to represent a (in the case of Disneyland, “childish”) deviation from the “real” world when, in fact, these so-called “deviations” are a fundamental part of today’s consumer-oriented hyperreality.[62] Deterrence effects or machines of this kind are everywhere in a hyperreal social context, and they seek to deflect attention away from the simulated nature of (hyper)reality by claiming that an objective reality and historical point of origin can still be found and still matter.

Baudrillard claims that the hyperreal techno-social world today has impacted the sense of taste in the United States. As noted in the epigraph, Baudrillard emphasizes this point by referencing the protracted ingredient lists on canned and processed foods, highlighting that these lists operate like deterrence machines by revealing the futility of disentangling the “real” from the “artificial” in relation to both ingredients and flavors. Again, for Baudrillard, these ingredient lists exemplify a process of “dissuasion from the taste of food: its savor is, as it were, isolated, expurgated and resynthesized in the form of burlesque and artificial sources.”[63] This too is key to “artificial” sweetness. Indeed, artificial sweeteners were first produced and normalized for consumer ingestion in the U.S. to simulate the taste of sugar (in beverages especially) during the World War II period when sugar rationing prevailed.[64] Since then, high-intensity sweeteners have become sweeter than sweet and, in a way, have turned into simulated modes of sugar (more sugar than sugar itself) as exemplified by the fact that artificial sweeteners have transcended the sweetening power of sugar. Currently, the FDA lists advantame as the sweetest of these high-intensity sweeteners, and it is 20,000 times sweeter than sugar (sucrose).[65] What the consumer is made to taste is thus increasingly the product of chemical (i.e., artificial) processes of hyperreal food construction, often resulting in the creation of what I refer to as techno-tastes. As demonstrated by Nadia Berenstein, the boundaries between “natural” and “artificial” (and, relatedly, the popular quest for “clean” ingredients) are far from objective distinctions.[66] In the 1950s, the advertising claims made by brands such as Sucaryl that artificial sweeteners no longer contained a “diet taste” or a “metallic ‘off’ taste” speaks to this cultivation of techno-tastes.[67]

For Baudrillard, phenomena that are often portrayed as “extremes” have become the hyperreal norm.[68] Artificial sweeteners also illustrate this point, as they shed light on how the neoliberal modality of homo œconomicus and its contemporary extension as homo digitalis are meant to consume. Through the lens of neoliberal homo œconomicus and homo digitalis, consumption is realized through what Han refers to as the extremes of compulsion and constraint. For Han, compulsion results from the unending freedom to improve one’s body and life circumstances through practices of consumption. Constraint is generated by the “internal limitations” that subjects place upon themselves, as they seek to optimize and exhibit their bodies as signs of responsible consumption and competitive achievement.[69] In other words, subjects must ensure that their consumption is constrained so that they do not exhibit signs of “excessive” consumption on what Han describes as their “self-project” bodies, or intoxicate themselves with substances that could result in sickness and the inability to “perform more and more.”[70] The compulsion and constraint pressures generated by neoliberal freedom of choice are realized in artificial sweeteners, since they allow one to keep consuming sweetness while avoiding the “unhealthy” effects typically associated with the excessive consumption of sweetness through sugar. Han himself speaks about sweetness as a flavor that corresponds to the compulsion of consumption under neoliberalism. More precisely, Han writes that sweetness is part of an “aesthetics of smoothening” that seeks to eliminate, or at least simplify, all forms of negativity, especially barriers to open and “free” communication and to the circulation of capital.[71] Han explicitly refers to sweetness as a “smoothening” flavor aimed at fostering active consumerism. Additionally, Han argues that health is “a form of expression of the smooth” and an “absolute value – almost a religion,” whereby embodiment fades into disembodiment as neoliberal subjects seek to eliminate negativity (of bad health, sickness, and death) by instrumentally modifying their bodies in an effort to elongate their life-spans.[72]

Homo Digitalis and the Body as a Network

Baudrillard’s arguments articulate forms of transparency that characterize Foucault’s neoliberal homo œconomicus, and, beyond Foucault, Han’s homo digitalis.[73] Baudrillard argues that discourses surrounding obesity demonstrate the superfluous nature of a body that has been completely quantified and rendered transparent in digital networks that he refers to as bloated, “obese and cancerous systems.”[74] Similar to Preciado’s point above, Baudrillard argues that “bodies have become networks and…thread their way through a network” because communication systems process every aspect of the body, including desires and pleasures.[75] Further, he argues that the physical body of the fractal subject has entered a “metastatic phase” due to the digital multiplication of the subject through the many miniaturized representations they make of themselves and communicate in a “series of instants.”[76]

For Baudrillard, through round-the-clock communication networks, the subject is fractally multiplied through their many audiovisual and digital representations, and rendered completely transparent to the point of becoming obscene.[77] To clarify his conceptualization of obscenity, Baudrillard writes that, in pornographic hyperreality, bodies become hypersexualized and obscene due in large part to the fact that “every image, every form, every part of the body” is now displayed through the proliferation of close-up images and the “serial multiplication” of details (something that Han also focuses on through his analysis of “selfies”).[78] Ultimately, then, Baudrillard argues that “transparency explodes into a thousand pieces, which are like shattered fragments of a mirror,” and this mirror has “given way to a screen and a network,” of which the body is a principal part.[79] The techno-body has become a terminal, or transparent envelope that holds and projects many miniaturized fragments of the self.

Baudrillard’s theorization of disembodiment and the fractal multiplication of the body in hyperreality demonstrates how homo digitalis constantly is encouraged to be “into” their bodies, and to quantify themselves to the point of disembodiment. To this point, Baudrillard writes that currently, the objective “is not to be nor even to have a body, but to be into your own body” and desires.[80] Similar to Baudrillard, Deborah Lupton and Nolen Gertz have also described how contemporary digital quantification and the self-tracking (especially of diet and fitness) technologies and practices result in the metaphorical and seemingly literal dissipation of the physical body.[81] Ultimately, digital representations of the body and the numbers used to categorize it become just as real as, and perhaps even more real than, the physical body.[82] That is, in the contemporary context, the fractal subject-body is always already imbricated in digital quantification technologies. Gertz writes that self-tracking practices and the digital quantification of every aspect of the body reveal that, “In fact, there is no person behind the numbers. At least not to the extent that ‘person’ means anything other than what is measurable, what is translatable into data.”[83] Lupton emphasizes a comparable point, writing that contemporary miniature self-tracking technologies make it difficult to tell “where the body ends and technology begins.”[84]

At the time he was writing, Baudrillard pointed to television as a primary example of the micro-processing of bodies and desires, and he noted that bodies themselves had become accountability-oriented “monitoring screens” that aimed to reproduce “fractals” of themselves through consumption, transparent self-exhibition, and constant, instantaneous communication (which is also why Baudrillard describes advertising as the contemporary architecture that permeates all aspects of life).[85] In today’s social media setting, the will-to-become-an-advertisement for fractal subjects is perhaps even more obvious. It can be seen through the rise of brand and lifestyle “influencers” that operate on television, but more so online (something which Baudrillard only started to perceive by the timehe wrote his last essay). Nonetheless, this trend underscores Baudrillard’s description of the fractal subject’s body-becoming-a-monitoring-screen. Baudrillard further argues that, in contemporary hyperreality, Foucault’s theory of panopticism is no longer relevant. The panopticism of the disciplinary regime that Foucault describes through reference to Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon is a prison system which functions through the internalized norms of conduct that are produced by external institutional architectures of civil society. Baudrillard argues that this type of societal surveillance and self-discipline no longer occurs as a result of the disappearance of, dispersal of, and resulting inability to distinguish between the expert “gaze” and the synoptic multiplicity of gazes of the networked mass of television viewing subjects.[86] Han rightly notes that Baudrillard’s critique of panopticism appeared in the 1980s. Thus, Baudrillard “could not [have] know[n] about digital networking, of course,” and specifically about the dense web of social media platforms that crisscross the Internet, such as Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok.[87] Building on Baudrillard’s thinking, Han claims that, with digital networking, a return to panopticism is taking place. But (as Baudrillard had started to perceive) it is not a Foucaultian panopticon that re-emerges today. Instead, it is a new aperspectival mode of panopticism since (unlike in Foucault’ panoptic model of disciplinary power) there is no longer any central point from which a normalizing gaze is thought to originate. Han writes that “aperspectival, penetrating illumination proves more effective than perspectival surveillance because it means utter illumination of everyone from everywhere.”[88] With today’s digital aperspectival panopicism, self-surveillance practices more easily permeate accountability-oriented social networks, and crucially so in the case of those networks that focus on eating practices, food selection, dietary health, and fitness or exercise. In relation to artificial sweeteners, a deterrence system of sprawling ingredient lists and simulated flavors co-exists with and interpenetrates an aperspectivalpanoptic system of accountability-oriented social networks whereby artificial sweeteners function as hypomnesic objects that allow one to mitigate the potentially harmful effects of consuming sweetness.

Han usefully complements Baudrillard’s notion of fractal subjectivity (and related concepts). More precisely, as I indicated previously, Han  writes that “today, we do not deem ourselves subjugated subjects, but rather, projects: always refashioning and reinventing ourselves” through consumption.[89] He first refers to homo digitalis as a subjectivity enmeshed in online communication, cultivating its identity online but also valuing its ability to veil its online profile to participate in virtual discussions anonymously.[90] Han speaks of this condition as isolating, juxtaposing the potential of broadcast media (and its correlate subjectivity, Marshall McLuhan’s homo electronicus) to draw people together in communities against digital media’s tendency to place individuals in the somewhat paradoxical information bubbles that are both overly transparent and, at times,  strategically anonymous. Han argues that even when homo digitalis is strategically anonymous in online conversations, it is still a fractal subject that “works ceaselessly at optimizing” its online profile.[91] This condition of strategic anonymity and cultivated transparency is reflected throughout the digital “swarm” that Han identifies, and also connects to my overarching points about the hyperreal communication of food knowledge. Luce Giard writes that food information is often codified and communicated anonymously, pressuring consumers to:

know how to read and trust no longer in a personal and empirical savoir faire [“know-how”] that comes from a traditional structure, acquired through long apprenticeship, within the familiarity of an elder, but in a collective scientific knowledge, codified in regulatory statements and transmitted anonymously. You have to believe in the wisdom of state-controlled regulations whose how and why escapes you, in the vigor and efficiency of inspections that ensure their observance. Each person must support through belief the entire edifice, must believe the norms to be in accordance with one’s own interest and the indications placed on packaging to be truthful.[92]

Like Baudrillard, Giard emphasizes the difficulty of distinguishing between true and false information. Because of this, Giard holds that individuals can no longer draw upon “a personal and empirical savoir-faire” of food selection or preparation due to the extensive, almost indecipherable lists of ingredients on food labels, along with the shifting regulatory and scientific statements that characterize how foodstuffs are grown or produced, prepared, packaged, labeled, and sold.[93] Giard’s argument can be related to Stiegler’s claim that humans have exteriorized their practical know-how, or “savoir faire,” to digital hypomnesic technologies. Because subjects must rely on their own discretion to parse through the often anonymously created food “facts,” controversies, and swarths of diet, fitness, and nutrition information circulating in the digital swarm, the consumption of substances that have a hypomnesic function like built-in “diet” foods, additives, and medications (such as Ozempic) can perhaps help individuals minimize the fear of making incorrect dietary choices. These edible hypomnesic substances can also ensure that homo digitalis continues to exercise responsible “constraint” as they cultivate their body as a self-project through their endless food consumption choices.

I connect Han’s multifaceted descriptions of different aspects of contemporary subjectivity across his scholarly repertoire to the online, fractal subjectivity that he refers to as homo digitalis in his book, In the Swarm: Digital Prospects. Han refers to the present modality of subjectivity as post-Cartesian, writing that,  in contrast to René Descartes’ argument that philosophical reasoning could shed light on the “true” nature of divine existence and the “real distinction between the soul and the body,” the post-Cartesian homo digitalis is defined by its expectation of continuous digital quantification and its interconnection with constant communication and information channels as well as advertising algorithms.[94] The post-Cartesian subject is totally defined by the customizable nature of the physical body, thus inverting  the Cartesian “I think, therefore I am” and transforming it into “I am, therefore I think,” “I am, therefore I shop,” or, better yet, “I am, therefore I eat.”[95] Drawing on Han’s as well as Baudrillard’s, Gertz’s, Lupton’s, and Preciado’s related arguments above, I argue that this post-Cartesian homo digitalis that Han describes is encouraged to think of itself as a body-becoming-calorie count. Indeed, in writing about present forms of quantification, Han highlights the primary role played by the fingers in the use of smart phones and their ability to perform the social “liking” function, arguing that “the word digital points to the finger (digitus). Above all, the finger counts. Digital culture is based on the counting finger…the digital age is totalizing addiction, counting and the countable…Today, everything is rendered countable so that it can be transformed into the language of performance and efficiency.”[96]

 Ultimately, homo digitalis represents an intensified quantification of the neoliberal modality of homo economicus (the “entrepreneur of the self”), as the communication technologies that homo digitalis is expected to use are increasingly fractal.[97] That is, as homo digitalis, subjects are compelled to reproduce countless digital representations of themselves via increasingly miniaturized technologies that require constant attention, engagement, and consumption.[98] Unlike the written and audio-visual broadcast technologies utilized by neoliberal homo œconomicus, digital technologies require the subjectivity of homo digitalis to operate as an interface of participatory digital technologies that blur the lines between the production and consumption of information.[99] For homo digitalis, the “entrepreneur” and the “self” can no longer be disentangled, as every aspect of the self must be quantified, exhibited, and customized (as a self-project) to maximize the subject’s competitive marketability as an object of (instead of simply as a source of profit for) consumption. Homo digitalis is also akin to what Preciado refers to as a somatechnic since, as mentioned above, the boundaries that were thought to separate subjectivity, the body, and technology have now collapsed (perhaps as a result of hyperreality and its simulacra, as Baudrillard might argue too). More than a liberal or neoliberal abilities-machine, homo digitalis is a subject-body, or what Han might refer to as a “project-body,” that is meant to be completely customizable and is designed to function as a terminal of constant information. Baudrillard provocatively writes: “You want to consume –O.K., let’s consume always more, and anything whatsoever; for any useless and absurd purpose.”[100] Baudrillard’s hyperbolic point here echoes Han’s argument that the neoliberal logictransforms citizens into consumers, as they must consume more and more in order to produce and manage their somatechnic self-projects.[101] The compulsion of production that characterizes Foucault’s description of homo œconomicus “expresses itself in the compulsion of communication” for homo digitalis.[102] For homo digitalis, freedom is realized within data’s constraints because, as both Baudrillard and Stiegler note in their own way, contemporary hypomnesictechnologies encourage individuals to completely discard their own willpower in order to follow calculated algorithms of advertising-infused advice. Or, consumers can offload their willpower onto edible hypomnesic technologies that promise to help them avoid the bloated network of diet and nutrition information constantly confronting them.[103]

Becoming Plastic: Consuming Edible Technologies in Popular Culture

Two illustrations from popular culture offer a final way to accentuate some of the key arguments I have developed with regard to the transformations that have taken place in the deployment of neoliberal subjectivities (homo œconomicus and, now, homo digitalis) and corresponding relationships between the body, technology, and food consumption. These two illustrations are films in the horror and science fiction genres, and they focus on seemingly fantastical relationships between humans and the consumption of new and bizarre foodstuffs. Following Fabio Parasecoli, I suggest that the way that food choices and eating patterns are portrayed in popular culture “may reveal interesting aspects of our relationships with the body and, more specifically, with eating and ingestion.”[104] Popular culture artifacts do not simply represent our relationship with reality. Instead, often, they help to produce the very processes and phenomena that make up the historical and political fields of possibility that we perceive to be the “real,” and within which contemporary modes of subjectivity increasingly are constituted.[105] Indeed, as Baudrillard (among others) has noted, the distinction between the “real” and the “fictional” (especially the “cinematic”) can no longer be meaningfully determined.[106] I also reference the two films below to offer examples of how the hopes and anxieties surrounding the marketing and consumption of artificial products are reflected in, but also produced by, popular cultural media.

 The first film I wish to highlight is The Stuff (1985), written and directed by Larry Cohen. The film begins with an opening sequence at an Alaskan petroleum refinery that shows the accidental discovery of a white yogurt-like substance that gurgles out of the ground. The surprised refinery worker who finds the substance immediately tastes it and exclaims: “it’s so smooth…that tastes real good…tasty! Sweet!”[107] The worker immediately discusses the potential of selling it given its smooth and sweet qualities. The substance is subsequently mass-produced and marketed under the name, “The Stuff,” and is portrayed as a tasty low-calorie diet dessert that is “healthy” to consume. Colorful advertising messages for “The Stuff” circulate through billboards, in supermarkets, and on television, captivating consumers and prompting them to buy it. As the film progresses, more and more people become addicted to “The Stuff,” and it eventually becomes the only thing that most people are stocking in their refrigerators and eating. Eventually, “The Stuff” completely transforms those who consume it into hollowed-out zombies. “The Stuff” turns out to be a dangerous, active substance that has the ability to move on its own and attack people.

In an interview about the film, Cohen portrayed The Stuff as a satirical critique of advertising and American consumerism. Cohen asserted: “I saw people…being victimized by products that end up being harmful to them” by either killing them or leaving them with a lifelong illness.[108] According to Cohen, The Stuff is meant to show how dangerous products disseminated by multinational corporations benefit from lax U.S. governmental regulation.[109] Cohen argues that the marketing, distribution, and sale of these harmful products should beg the following question: “are you eating [the products] or [are they] eating you?”[110] In the film, a radio broadcast by a rogue militia ultimately reveals the true nature of “The Stuff” to the public, and it is removed from the market. However, the owners of “The Stuff” try to re-brand “The Stuff” as “The Taste” by including only twenty-percent of the zombifying, addictive substance in a new dessert product. Although their plan is seemingly thwarted by the film’s protagonists, “The Stuff” remains in circulation in the form of a drug that continues to be sold by criminals on the black market.

Ultimately, The Stuff portrays advertising media as hypnotic technologies that lead consumers (who are passive victims) to ingest a foreign (but “natural”) substance that ends up possessing and killing them. As a sweet-tasting low-calorie food that was found by accident, “The Stuff” can easily be compared to artificial sweeteners given that the first artificial sweeteners (such as saccharin and early cyclamates) were sweet-tasting, low-calorie sugar substitutes that were also accidentally discovered in laboratory environments. As referenced at the beginning of this article, the safety of artificial sweeteners was hotly contested, as exemplified by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) citation of the Delaney Clause from the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to ban the sale of cyclamates in 1969 due to the fact that they were perceived to be a potential carcinogen. I suggest that the anxieties about the power of the advertising industry and the circulation of new food additives and technologies reflected in Cohen’s film illustrate key aspects of the subjectivity of neoliberal homo œconomicus. Additionally, The Stuff graphically depicts the pervasive desire for low-calorie diet products and the accompanying potential risks of these products that consumers must constantly mitigate. Neoliberal homo œconomicus (and its current extension as homo digitalis) must manage its body and avoid auto-intoxication by responsibly interpreting advertising media and accumulating enough knowledge to be able to identify potentially harmful foodstuffs. In the 1970s and ‘80s, individuals had to rely on broadcast media such as television and radio for advertising messages regarding new consumer products while at the same time turning to broadcast media for updated information regarding the potential harms of those products.

As illustrated by a 1977 report released by the U.S. Council on Children, Media and Merchandising, the solutions proposed by governmental bureaucrats to address the power of potentially harmful food advertisements on television remained at the level of advertising regulation and supplementation. For example, one primary suggestion was to supplement food advertisements with government-produced nutritional graphics that would portray the body as a robot comprised of different nutritional values and calorie counts.[111] Broadcast media do not require individuals to function as active “terminals” or interfaces of “information,” since they receive information that is coded and de-coded for them, and then re-coded and delivered to them in the form of a one-way broadcast.[112] Because of this, even though, as a subject type, neoliberal homo œconomicus is an entrepreneur of itself, and it mines its own body (taken to be an ability-machine) as a source of profit for consumption, there is still a divide between production and consumption in terms of the information that is constantly being produced by broadcast companies and subsequently received by consumers.[113] Although I keep in mind Carolyn de la Peña’s point that advertising messages are a congealment of consumer and corporate desires, as demonstrated, for example, by the letters from consumers that flooded the U.S. Senate in 1977 to protest the FDA’s announced ban of saccharin, I also argue that broadcast media store and disseminate information in a way that does not fully integrate the consumer’s body and its active involvement into the process, thus introducing divisions among those who are in charge of the creation, the production, and the consumption of information.[114]

However, and importantly, these divisions become completely blurred in neoliberal homo digitalis, whose subject-body (or “project-body”) is now indistinguishably imbricated in the digital communication technologies and edible hypomnesic technologies that individuals are constantly prompted to participate in and consume.[115] Here, with regard to the subjectivity of homo digitalis, another popular cultural illustration is useful. The film Crimes of the Future (2022), written and directed by David Cronenberg, makes the points I wish to emphasize about the neoliberal subjectivity of homo digitalis very clear. Crimes of the Future is set in a dystopian future when human evolution has resulted in a mutation of human bodies and organs.[116] This mutation has made it difficult for many individuals to consume and ingest food in a “normal” manner. The protagonist of the film, Saul Tenser, possesses a body that is customized and augmented through surgery, and otherwise reliant on technological devices.[117] Tenser’s body constantly produces new organs that he exhibits theatrically through open surgery performances in which his partner, Caprice, uses a surgical machine to display and tattoo his organs in front of an audience. In relation to the consumption of food, Tenser needs a special chair to assist his digestion since he is unable to eat on his own. The chair functions by contorting Tenser’s body in specific ways to help him chew, swallow, and digest his meals. In Crimes of the Future, technology is always already part of the body, so much so that, at the end of the film, the body has evolved to ingest synthetic materials such as bars of plastic. However, some individuals still die when attempting to eat bars of plastic since their bodies have not fully evolved to withstand the ingestion of synthetic materials. Despite the fact that Tenser knows that he may be killed through his initial decision to eat a bar of plastic, he tries it anyway to see if it will provide a solution to the digestive troubles he is experiencing within his body. Tenser successfully consumes the plastic bar, and the film reveals that there is a large subset of individuals like Tenser whose bodies have evolved to consume plastic without the aid of the chair-feeding technologies. That is, the ingestion of synthetic materials is actually portrayed as the solution to the digestive problems that individuals like Tenser have been experiencing since their evolved bodies and accompanying new organs have now rejected organic foodstuffs. In fact, Tenser’s body reaches a point where it can only receive true nourishment from synthetic materials.

Crimes of the Future offers an exaggerated picture of the customizable and completely transparent nature of the subjectivity of homo digitalis. The film displays how the body is constantly opened up for and exhibited to an aperspectival panoptic gaze, and always imbricated in technologies that both aid it and transform it. The normalization of the risks that come with food choice in hyperreality can be seen in Tenser’s consumption of plastic, even though he knows that it might prove to be fatal. But instead of avoiding it, he recognizes that experimenting with a potentially toxic substance is possibly no worse than ingesting the “organic” substances that his body has already started to reject. For homo digitalis, substances such as artificial sweeteners, appetite suppressants, and other “artificial” substances that contain potential health risks function as edible hypomnesic technologies and offer a way for individuals to completely move beyond the consumption of “harmful” or addicting foodstuffs (that also are sources of risk) in order to overcome the problems that they experience within their bodies. For the subjectivity of homo digitalis, bodies, communication technologies, ingestible (and injectable) hypomnesic technologies can no longer be meaningfully disentangled from each other.[118] Furthermore, as Stiegler argues, unlike broadcast media, digital communication technologies invite the active participation of consumers, which results in the disintegration of the division between the production and consumption, as well as between “receivers” and “senders,” of information.[119] Beyond an abilities-machine, then, homo digitalis is a terminal and an interface of constant information that can only remember by forgetting. In other words, homo digitalis remembers how to be healthy and to monitor its body by selecting a combination of particular food rules from an infinite expanse of rules and nutritional information that are constantly being disseminated on the Internet, by relying on digital hypomnesictechnologies to select and remember relevant information, or, better yet, by directly ingesting hypomnesic technologies that embody redemptive modes of willpower (without, however, having to use or rely on willpower anymore) and allow the individual to transcend food temptations and dieting difficulties.

Baudrillard’s description of the fractal subject ultimately sheds light on the disembodying nature of digital modes of communication that encourage homo digitalis to quantify, exhibit, and reproduce increasingly miniaturized representations of itself to the point of pornographic transparency (as Baudrillard would put it). By displaying and tracking its body through and across many digital platforms, homo digitalis always already communicates its relationship with food to others, all the more so since its body is always primed to be read as a “sign” of one’s relationship with food. The contemporary subjectivity of homo digitalis is equated with one’s technologically-entangled body and the techno-intimacies between individuals and food in which one’s relationship with food is often mediated by a screen (or perhaps a chair, as in Cronenberg’s film) of algorithmic food “truths” that one must pick between and rely on.[120] For example, in an effort to select “healthier” and sugar-free foodstuffs and beverages, an individual may choose information that portrays artificial sweeteners as “safe” sugar substitutes and discard the collections of information that point to the risks of, and condemn, the consumption of artificial sweeteners as harmful, dangerous, or even deadly.[121] For Stiegler, like Giard, the memorization of these constant streams of information, in print, audio-visual, and digital form, results in a loss of savoir faire, or embodied “know-how,” and, more generally, of savoir vivre, or “knowing-how-to-live-well.”[122] The discussion of fractal subjectivity throughout this article highlights the continued struggle to cultivate embodied ways of engaging with food in a condition characterized by simulated flavors in hyperreality. Baudrillard’s insights about simulation and hyperreality can help us make sense of the continued difficulty of making food choices in a food system where categories such as “natural” and “artificial,” as well as “safe” and “toxic” seem indistinguishable and interchangeable.

Endnotes

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[1] Drawn from Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin, 2007), 1.

[2] Jean Baudrillard and Dominic Pettman, Fatal Strategies, New Edition (Los Angeles, CA : Cambridge Mass: Semiotext, 2008), 29.

[3] Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 1 & 4.

[4] Kornelia Kadac-Czapska, Eliza Knez, and Małgorzata Grembecka, “Food and Human Safety: The Impact of Microplastics,” Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition 64, no. 11 (April 25, 2024): 3502–21, https://doi.org/10.1080/10408398.2022.2132212;

Max Kozlov, “Landmark Study Links Microplastics to Serious Health Problems,” Nature, March 6, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00650-3;

Stephanie Dutchen, “Microplastics Everywhere | Harvard Medicine Magazine,” Harvard Medicine: The Magazine of the Harvard Medical School, Spring 2023, https://magazine.hms.harvard.edu/articles/microplastics-everywhere.

[5] Carolyn de la Peña, Empty Pleasures: The Story of Artificial Sweeteners from Saccharin to Splenda (The University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 39.

[6]Abbott Laboratories, “Calorie-Saving Recipes with Sucaryl: Non-Caloric Sweetener for Reducing and Diabetic Diets” (1957), 1 and 31. The advertisement specifies that “Sucaryl, very simply, is a natural-tasting sweetener which contains no calories”;

Xaq Frohlich, “The Informational Turn in Food Politics: The US FDA’s Nutrition Label as Information Infrastructure,” Social Studies of Science 47, no. 2 (April 1, 2017): 145–71, https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312716671223;

De la Peña, Empty Pleasures, 70 & 142. De la Peña writes that “in 1965, as increasing numbers of nondiabetic consumers began using cyclamate-sweetened diet foods,” the FDA cited the Delaney Clause, which was a “1958 amendment to the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act that prohibited the use of carcinogenic substance in the U.S. food supply,” to ban the sale of cyclamates in 1969 due to concerns following the discovery that the consumption of cyclamates led to an increased risk of cancer in laboratory rats.

[7] Xaq Frohlich, “The Rise (and Fall) of the Food-Drug Line: Classification, Gatekeepers, and Spatial Mediation in Regulating U.S. Food and Health Markets,” in Risk on the Table: Food Production, Health, and the Environment, ed. Angela N. H. Creager and Jean-Paul Gaudillière, 1st edition (Berghahn Books, 2021), 317;

This is especially exemplified by a 1980 Sweet N’ Low sample advertising booklet that encouraged distributors to place Sweet N’ Low’s low-calorie breakfast drink mix next to a popular sugar-infused Tang breakfast drink mix that was sold by General Foods Corporation. Both “low-calorie” and sugar-infused “regular” products were increasingly sold in the same sections in grocery stores. Sweet ‘N Low, a registered trademark of Cumberland Packing Corporation, “1980 Advertising Proofs for Sweet ’N Low” (Cumberland Packing Corporation and Bernard Food Industries, 1980), Sweet ’N Low and Butter Buds Promotional Materials, 1979-1985, Box-Folder 1, Folder 3, Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA.

[8] Frohlic, “The Informational Turn in Food Politics,” 145.

[9] Ben Fine, The Political Economy of Diet, Health and Food Policy, 1st edition (London: Routledge, 1998).

[10] Frohlich, “The Informational Turn in Food Politics,” 147.

[11] Anna Zeide, Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry, First edition (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2018), 9. Zeide emphasizes that, in relation to the history of the canning industry specifically, the very “metaphors of ‘transparent’ and ‘opaque’ suggest just how difficult it has become for interested consumers to understand food production….the complicated steps of production, processing, distribution, and marketing obscure the source of American food, building a wall between producers and consumers.” See Zeide, 4-5;

Nadia Berenstein, “Clean Label’s Dirty Little Secret,” The Counter, February 1, 2018, https://thecounter.org/clean-label-dirty-little-secret/. Berenstein points out that the so-called “transparency” of standardized nutrition labeling is often misleading as a whole host of ingredients are labeled “clean” and “natural” often on an arbitrary basis.

[12] Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, 7.

[13] Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, 27.

[14] Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, 28.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Phil Beitchman, Paul Foss, and Paul Patton (New York City, N.Y., U.S.A: Semiotext, 1983), 121.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Bernard Stiegler, “Memory,” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. W.T.J. Mitchell and Mark B.N. Hansen (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), 80.

[19] Stiegler, “Memory,” 83.

[20] Jean Baudrillard and Jean-Louis Violeau, The Ecstasy of Communication, New Edition (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext, 2012), 36-38.

[21] Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, 115-116.

[22] De la Peña, Empty Pleasures, 70 and 142;

Harvey Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America, Revised Edition, First Edition, Revised (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 172 and 201.

[23] Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty, 201.

[24] Ibid. This was also as a result of a National Academy of Sciences’ (NAS) study that “reported that saccharin was a weak carcinogen shown only to affect rats.”

[25] De La Pena, Empty Pleasures, 174.

[26] De La Pena, Empty Pleasures, 169.

[27] Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, United States Senate and Nick Mottern, Dietary Goals for the United States, First Edition, (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, February 1977), //catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/002942186, 44.

[28] Ibid, 45, 47 and 52.

[29] De La Pena, Empty Pleasures, 169. To emphasize this point, De la Peña writes: “letter-writers believed that their appetites were dangerous without saccharin, and that saccharin had become the one substance that enabled them to find equilibrium between sufficient pleasure and appropriate weight.”

[30] Cited in De La Pena, Empty Pleasures, 155. Novak to FDA, March 10, 1977 (#425. Cd1, v12), FDA Records.

[31] Rachel K. Johnson et al., “Low-Calorie Sweetened Beverages and Cardiometabolic Health: A Science Advisory From the American Heart Association,” Circulation 138, no. 9 (August 28, 2018): e126–40, https://doi.org/10.1161/CIR.0000000000000569;

Anahad O’Connor, Aaron Steckelberg, and Laura Reiley, “How Fake Sugars Sneak into Foods and Disrupt Metabolic Health,” Washington Post, accessed April 3, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/interactive/2023/sugar-substitutes-health-effects/.

[32] Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, trans. Bruce Benderson, English-Language Edition (New York, NY: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2013), 360.

[33] Cressida Heyes, “Subjectivity and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Key Concepts, eds. Dianna Taylor (New York: Routledge, 2011), 159. Here, I borrow Cressida Heyes’s concise description of the term’s general philosophical use.

[34] Preciado, Testo Junkie, 35 & 207.

[35] Preciado, Testo Junkie, 35.

[36] Preciado, Testo Junkie, 139.

[37] Preciado, Testo Junkie, 78, 139, and 159. Preciado specifically writes that ingestible disciplinary “technologies become part of the body: they dissolve into it and become somatechnics.” Preciado here emphasizes the blurring of boundaries between the body and technology under neoliberalism, as the two are fundamentally intertwined. Preciado specifies that along with Susan Stryker, a group of scholars at Macquarie University also coined the term “somatechnic.”

[38] Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, 23-24 & 38.

[39] Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, 26-27;

Preciado, Testo Junkie, 35-36.

[40] Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, 41.

[41] Byung-Chul Han, In the Swarm: Digital Prospects, trans. Erik Butler (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017), 11.

[42] Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, 1st edition (Stanford, California: Stanford Briefs, 2015), 46-47.

[43] Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, First edition (New York: Picador, 2008), 226.

[44]Jean Baudrillard and Sylvere Lotringer, Forget Foucault, New Edition (Los Angeles, CA : Cambridge, Mass: Semiotext, 2007), 34-36.

[45] Byung-Chul Han, Saving Beauty, trans. Daniel Steuer, 1st edition (Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA: Polity, 2017), 18.

[46] Preciado, Testo Junkie, 35.

[47] Han, The Burnout Society, 46-47.

[48] Michel Foucault, “Michel Foucault,” in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984, Volume 2: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion and Paul Rabinow, 1st edition (New York: The New Press, 1999), 461.

[49] Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 226 & 276. Foucault writes, Foucault especially points to Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations as offering a key articulation of the classical liberal subject.

[50] Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 224-225.

[51] Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 279.

[52] Victor C. Vaughan, “Introduction,” in Dr. Arnold Lorand, Health and Longevity through Rational Diet: Practical Hints in Regard to Food and the Usefulness or Harmful Effects of the Various Articles of the Diet (Philadelphia: F.A. Davis Company, Publishers, 1912), v. 

[53] Vaughan, “Introduction,” vi. In line with Foucault’s description of the classical liberal subject as homo juridicus, Vaughan notes that the government held a responsibility to secure “proper food to eat…for all citizens, the poorest as well as the richest.” He goes on to write that “A government which permits the sale of injurious foods, or allows the price of proper foods to be manipulated by any man or combination of men for financial gain, is not serving its citizens in a just, wise, or human manner. But, Vaughan emphasizes the personal responsibility of the individual, arguing that while “we may have good laws upon these subjects, but they will not be adequately enforced until the public becomes properly educated along these lines. The purpose of this book is to contribute to this much-needed education.”

[54] Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 323.

[55] Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 220. Foucault argues that this discourse of neoliberal subjectivity as human capital can especially be seen through the writings of Theodore Schultz as well as Gary S. Becker (among others). Foucault argues that in the U.S. context, the first attempt to “introduce labor into the economic field” came with Schultz’s 1971 publication of Investment in Human Capital (and Becker published a book with the same title in 1975).

[56] Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 219, 226 & 296.

[57] Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 270-271.

[58] Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 220 & 226.

[59] Baudrillard, Simulations, 2.

[60] Baudrillard, Simulations, 2 & 11;

Michael Moss, “The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food,” The New York Times, February 20, 2013, sec. Magazine, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html.

[61] Baudrillard, Simulations, 2.

[62] Baudrillard, Simulations, 25.

[63] Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, 29.

[64] De la Peña, Empty Pleasures, 36.

[65] Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, “Additional Information about High-Intensity Sweeteners Permitted for Use in Food in the United States,” FDA (FDA, February 20, 2020), https://www.fda.gov/food/food-additives-petitions/additional-information-about-high-intensity-sweeteners-permitted-use-food-united-states.

[66] Berenstein, “Clean Label’s Dirty Little Secret.”

[67] Abbott Laboratories, “Calorie-Saving Recipes with Sucaryl: Non-Caloric Sweetener for Reducing and Diabetic Diets” (Abbott Laboratories, 1957), Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA.

[68] Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, 7.

[69] Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, trans. Erik Butler (London ; New York: Verso, 2017), 1.

[70] Han, The Burnout Society, 38.

[71] Han, Saving Beauty, 2 & 10.

[72] Han, Saving Beauty, 5, 13, and 45. Han asserts that “Today, the body is in crisis. It decomposes not only into pornographic body parts, but also into sets of digital data. The digital age is entirely dominated by the belief that life can be measured and quantified. The ‘Quantified Self’ movement also shares this creed. The body is equipped with digital sensors which register all body-related data. ‘Quantified Self’ transforms the body into a control-and-surveillance screen”;

Byung-Chul Han, The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering, trans. Daniel Steuer (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), 1.

[73] Han, In the Swarm, 11.

[74] Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, 12.

[75] Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, 33 fn.

[76] Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, 24 & 149.

[77] Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, 24-25.

[78] Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, 20 & 40-41. Baudrillard writes that “Today the scene and mirror have given way to a screen and network. Today there is no longer any transcendence or depth, but only the immanent surface of operations unfolding, the smooth and functional surface of communication”;

Han, Saving Beauty, 12.

[79] Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, 20 & 38.

[80] Jean Baudrillard, America (London: Verso, 1989), 35. This also connects to Han’s theorization of the achievement subject’s in-bodied experience.

[81] Nolen Gertz, Nihilism and Technology (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2018);

Deborah Lupton, The Quantified Self, 1st edition (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2016).

[82] Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, 90. Baudrillard writes: “such is our destiny as the polled, the informed, the measured: confronted with the anticipated verification of our behavior, absorbed by this permanent refraction, we are never again confronted with our own will or that of the other…each individual is forced into the undivided coherence of statistics.”

[83] Gertz, Nihilism and Technology, 93.

[84] Lupton, The Quantified Self, 71.

[85] Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, 20, 25, 39, and 67. Hence, the idea of fractal bodies or subjects. Baudrillard describes advertising as an all-encompassing architecture: “advertising invades everything…today architecture is just that: huge screens upon which moving atoms, particles, and molecules are refracted. The public stage and public place has been replaced by a gigantic circulation, ventilation, and ephemeral connecting space.”

[86] Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, 34;

Baudrillard, Simulations, 49-54.

[87] Byung-Chul Han, The Transparency Society, 1st edition (Stanford, California: Stanford Briefs, 2015), 45;

Han, Psychopolitics, 8-9. Han writes that the Internet often functions as a digital panopticon.

[88] Han, The Transparency Society, 45 and 49.

[89] Han, Psychopolitics, 1.

[90] Han, In the Swarm, 11.

[91] Ibid.

[92] Luce Giard, “Gesture Sequences,” in The Practice of Everyday Life, Volume 2: Living & Cooking, by Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol, trans. Timothy J. Tomasik (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 209.

[93] Luce Giard, “Gesture Sequences,” 208-209.

[94] Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Donald A. Cress, 3rd edition (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993), 2-4;

Byung-Chul Han, In the Swarm, 11.

[95] Byung-Chul Han, Topology of Violence, trans. Amanda DeMarco (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2018), 107.

[96] Han, In the Swarm, 35.

[97] Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 226;

Caroline Alphin, Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction, 1st edition (Routledge, 2022), 42;

Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, 38-41.

[98] Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, 23-24.

[99] Stiegler, “Memory,” 83.

[100] Baudrillard, In the Shadow of Silent Majorities, or the End of the Social (New York: Semiotext[e], 1993), 11;

Again, in my view, both Baudrillard and Han bring Foucault’s point about the imbrication of production and consumption into the contemporary period, demonstrating that “neoliberalism makes citizens consumers”;

Han, Psychopolitics, 10.

[101] Han, Psychopolitics, 10.

[102] Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present, trans. Daniel Steuer, 1st edition (Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA: Polity, 2020), 13.

[103] Stiegler, “Memory,” 68.

[104] Fabio Parasecoli, Bite Me: Food in Popular Culture (New York: Berg Publishers, 2008), 2.

[105] Parasecoli, Bite Me: Food in Popular Culture, 3. Parasecoli argues that “Pop culture happens to be the arena where new narratives, changing identities, and possible practices become part of a shared patrimony that participates in the constitution of contemporary subjectivities.” Additionally, Parasecoli writes that “I believe pop culture constitutes a major repository of visual elements, ideas, practices, and discourses, that influence our relationship with the body, with food consumption, and, of course, with the whole system ensuring that we get what we need on a daily basis, with all its social and political ramifications.”

[106] Baudrillard, Simulations, 25;

Jean Baudrillard, “Virtuality and Events: The Hell of Power,” trans. Chris Turner, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies 3, no. 2 (July 2006), 7. Baudrillard argues that “the films produced today are merely the visible allegory of the cinematic form that has taken over everything – social and political life, the landscape, war, etc. – the form of life totally scripted for the screen…Reality is disappearing at the hands of the cinema and cinema is disappearing at the hands of reality. A lethal transfusion in which each loses its specificity.”

[107]The Stuff, directed by Larry Cohen (Beverly Hills: Larco Productions, 1985).

[108] Matt Raub and Staci Layne Wilson, “Larry Cohen Attacks Consumerism with The Stuff,” This Week in Startups, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpfCmf_y8gc.

[109] Ibid. Cohen specifically points to food companies, the pharmaceutical industry, and cigarette companies.

[110] Ibid. Cohen states: “So, constantly today you see about medications being pulled off of the market because they are killing the people they are supposed to be helping or giving them lifelong illnesses that they will never get over, and pharmaceutical companies are doing this right and left, and the Federal Trade Commission ‘okays’ products too quickly and then they find out that [the products] are doing stuff that is detrimental to people.” Cohen lists cigarettes as a primary example.

[111] Council on Children, M., United States. Congress. Senate. Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs. (1977). Edible TV, your child and food commercials. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off.

[112] Stiegler, “Memory,” 64.

[113] Stiegler, “Memory,” 77.

[114] De la Peña, Empty Pleasures, 7;

Stiegler, “Memory,” 76-77.

[115] Preciado, Testo Junkie, 79.

[116] Crimes of the Future, directed by David Cronenberg(Toronto: Serendipity Point Films, 2022).

[117] At one point in the film, Tenser gets a zipper installed into his stomach so that it can be unzipped to view his organs.

[118] Preciado, Testo Junkie, 79.

[119] Stiegler, “Memory,” 83.

[120] Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, 38-40.

[121] Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, “Additional Information about High-Intensity Sweeteners Permitted for Use in Food in the United States,” FDA, February 20, 2020, https://www.fda.gov/food/food-additives-petitions/additional-information-about-high-intensity-sweeteners-permitted-use-food-united-states;

Anahad O’Connor, Aaron Steckelberg, and Laura Reiley, “How Fake Sugars Sneak into Foods and Disrupt Metabolic Health,” Washington Post, March 7, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/interactive/2023/sugar-substitutes-health-effects/;

Cori Brackett and J.T. Waldron, Sweet Misery: A Poisoned World (Sound and Fury Productions, Inc., 2006);

Mary Nash Stoddard, Deadly Deception: Story of Aspartame: Shocking Expose of the World’s Most Controversial Sweetener (Dallas: Odenwald Press, 1998).

[122] Stiegler, “Memory,” 68;

Bernard Stiegler, For a New Critique of Political Economy, trans. Daniel Ross, 1st edition (Malden, MA: Polity, 2010), 30.