Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Support the Prostates of Québec!

To the right is a low-quality photograph of an ad currently in circulation in the Montreal metro system. Its purpose is to encourage Montrealers to contribute money in support of research on and treatment of prostate cancer. The slogan at the top says 'Support the Prostates from Here!', which is to say from Québec, the prostates of Quebeckers. The image below is a sort of athletic cup adorned with a Québécois fleur-de-lys, atop which floats a circle that, in a stroke of graphic genius, seems to represent a halo and an elastic waistband at once. 

The slogan plays on a common plea often found in connection with fruits, cheeses, and other foodstuffs produced in the province: 'Soutenez les x d'ici', is, for any x, a way of saying 'Buy Québécois', support the provincial (or, depending how you see it, national) economy through your spending habits. 

The slogan also, in taking 'prostate' as a possible value of 'x', takes the reproductive systems of Québécois men as part of the total Québécois system of production, alongside the production of cheese and foie gras, and sees all of this production as contributive to national health and well-being, understood in the broad sense here in which these overlap with national pride and glory. 

Obviously, this ad inscribes itself in a long history of cross-hybridity between public health and nationalism. Alison Bashford argues fairly convincingly in her Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism, and Public Health of 2004 that large-scale public-health campaigns are in fact an ineliminable feature of modern projects of constructing national identity. 

What is particularly interesting here, though, is that the ad updates the old formula, in its echoing of the broader North American society's current preoccupation with defeating cancer through orchestrated, mass-scale public gestures of charity, and moreover does so with a pseudo-risqué wink and with a self-conscious, jocular avowal that in this day and age our body parts are not so much like cogs in the great national machine, as one might have seen in early Soviet vaccination propaganda, as they are like vendable commercial goods. 

Product Packaging and Nationhood

I enjoy spending time in those countries that are not big enough or important enough to have their own product packaging, and instead must share surface space with information in the sundry native tongues of neighboring countries. I remember standing in front of a microwave in Sarajevo, waiting for some ramen noodles to warm up, and thinking: Wow! I can study 20 languages at once, just skimming the ingredients of this so humble repast.

These noodles, in fact, were meant to be cast far and wide across a great swath of Eurasia, the entire part of it, in fact, that cannot be said to be truly either Europe or Asia, roughly from Albania in the west to Kazakhstan in the east. The languages one finds in between, marked out on the package by a little oval containing the official one- or two-letter country abbreviation ('H', 'RO', 'BH', 'KZ', etc.)  are mostly Slavic and Turkic, with some representatives of Eastern Romance (Romanian, Moldovan), Caucasian (Georgian), Ural-Altaic (Hungarian), and a few true isolates such as Albanian --the native word for which is 'shqip' and which evidently evolved as the only surviving descendant of ancient Illyrian--, thrown into the mix. And, except in those few cases where the alphabet is unknown to me, I can learn how to say 'sodium carbonate' in all of these! ('Sodyum karbonat', 'natrij-karbonat', 'carbonat de sodiu', 'nátrium-karbonát', etc.)

These noodles are not fit for consumption in Europe proper, where packaging, other than in the so-called 'ethnic' stores, is meant to mirror national identity, which since 1789 has been wrapped up in the modern collective imagination with language: no nation, in fact, without linguistic uniformity. Western Europe cannot let itself descend into Balkanic lawlessness! Why, the unpoliced linguistic macédoine of the products they allow to circulate there: is this not a testimony of past violence and a portent of more to come?

Of course, there are some complications. For one thing, there is at least one multinational state in Europe (Belgium), and it shares languages with three of its neighbors (most significantly, France and the Netherlands, but also Germany). This means that if you are eating corn flakes in Lille or Nancy, it is not entirely unusual to be told (at least in writing, which is for me a sort of telling) that these are not flocons de maïs at all, but rather maisvlokken. Now in Belgium one learns to live with this, if bitterly: I once had a Walloon girlfriend who proclaimed that she was 'assaulted' every time her eyes landed on the Flemish side of the cereal box. ('Walloon', by the way, like 'Welsh' and 'Vlach' and a number of other European demonyms, comes from an Old Brythonic word that meant, simply, 'foreign'; and foreign she was.) But when these bilingual boxes spill over from that queer kingdom into the glorious republic to the south, the reaction could very well be not indignation, but simply confusion. The French revolutionaries had to wage a brutal campaign against regional otherness to rid the new republic of Occitan and Provençal and Breton, and here we are more than two centuries later confronted with these obscene Germanic consonant clusters on our cereal boxes! This is not the sort of fraternité we had in mind!

The idea of a binational state, as product packaging reveals to us, is inherently strange. In fact, I feel like saying that product packaging in binational states itself serves as a testament to the fragility of the arrangement. If we may move from the Old World context to one with which I am slightly more familiar, I would like to hold forth a bit on the utter bizarreness of Canadian conventions in the labelling and marketing of commercial goods.

Anyone who comes to Canada and who cares about the richness of either English or French will quickly notice that both of these cultural-linguistic treasuries are, in the public display of them, anyway, greatly reduced. In order to be sure of saying exactly the same thing in both languages, Canadian product packaging invariably ends up saying nothing, or next to nothing, or something that really would have been better left unsaid. Thus for example we are told, and expected to passively agree, that 'Fancy Spinach' is 'Épinards de Fantaisie'. Of course, 'fancy' is etymologically a contraction of 'fantasy', which did come into English through French. But 'fancy' and 'fantasy' mean two different things today, and it is absurd to think that anyone has any 'fantasies' at all about frozen spinach. The high percentage of shared lexical items means that Anglo-French bilingualism is fundamentally different from, say, the Anglo-Chinese bilingualism of Hong Kong, or even the Franco-Netherlandic bilingualism of the earlier example, as it enables product packagers to squeeze two languages' worth of labelling into a seemingly continuous phrase, with the two languages' adjectives flanking a shared noun in the middle. This is supposed to save space, as well as the reader's mental energy, but it makes me furious. When I am told that I am eating 'Tomato Ketchup aux Tomates', I feel like like saying: Well of course I am! You already told me that!

It has been said of the Francophone and Anglophone communities in Canada that they are 'two solitudes', and some have pessimistically averred that this is the most we can hope for wherever two or more ethnies are crammed together into a single state (the worst, of course, is Sarajevo, where we started out). The two-solitude détente is perhaps most evident in what is often called 'generic' packaging (a strange designation, when we think about this term's origin in the taxonomical notion of genus). I do not want to dwell for too long on the strangeness of this species of packaging (for it is not a genus). That would bring us too far afield from our principal concern, which is, if I may put it this way, product packaging and nationhood. But I will just say that generics perform a striking counter-movement against the prevailing purpose of packaging in the capitalist world: while ordinarily packaging strives to the extent possible to conceal what is really contained within it, and to present it as not just the sum of its ingredients, but as something with what Walter Benjamin might have called an 'aura', generic packaging by contrast has as its sole aim the blunt declaration of the true nature of the thing or things it contains.

And it is here that bilingualism seems, momentarily, to do what it is officially supposed to be doing: communicating to us exactly the same thing in two different, non-overlapping word-worlds: peas & carrots / pois & carottes. It all seems so simple.

But even here, even when the aim is pure generic explicitness, the idiosyncrasy of what the Spanish rightly call 'idioms' (for to the extent that we are separated off in our own linguistic worlds, we are indeed idiots) shows itself soon enough. Next to the cans of peas and carrots, we find some mixed vegetables, which, curiously enough, are in French not légumes mixtes, but rather they are a macédoine de légumes. A veritable Macedonia of vegetables! They are the culinary equivalent of that demographic powder keg in Southeastern Europe, with pea next to chopped carrot next to diced potato, just as you might find an Albanian village next to a Serbian enclave that abuts an Aromanian district. The French and the English cannot be made to say exactly the same thing, not even in the blunt, literal language of generics. And this unharmonizability, one fears, is but the exact linguistic reflection of the irreducible discreteness of the can's various contents (this is not a mash, but a mix), which in turn is but the alimentary mirror of unending human conflict.

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Previously published in Kiosk Magazine.

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Product Packaging #2

Note, added August 2, 2011: You are probably here because you clicked through from some mass-scale, assembly-line link provider such as The Browser or The Morning News. Though their selection criteria remain utterly mysterious to me, occasionally these people link to my work, whereupon the traffic to my site quintuples like the Dionne children. But why not take some curatorial initiative of your own, dear readers? This website is a great place to start. In fact, the great majority of other posts you'll find here are vastly more interesting than this little bagatelle about Yocco the Hot Dog King. I recommend for example this essay on the philosophical history of dogs, for starters. If that doesn't do it for you, something else will. But you simply must stay a while.

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Surely there must be a name, in advertising parlance, for the figure of the anthropomorphized food item that happily consumes a non-anthropomorphized version of itself? I first noticed Yocco years ago when driving through central Pennsylvania, and I admit he's haunted me ever since. What could he be thinking? What would existence as Yocco, the Hot Dog King, be like? 

He is delighted, it is clear, but does his delight flow from the fact that human beings, the true anthropomorphs, enjoy eating his lesser brethren, the hot dogs that were destined to remain mere hot dogs? Or is he delighted because he himself is free to eat his lesser brethren? Do they constitute him, like the subjects of Hobbes's Leviathan? Is Yocco aware of this? Does Yocco not know what, exactly, he is? And, if he does, does it not horrify him?

Of course, autophagy is an old trope of advertising. We see it in abundance on the signs outside barbecue joints: the pig joyfully digging into a plate of pork, or, even more absurdly, the pig delighted to present itself as an already prepared pork product. Now the former possibility is not all that unverisimilar: pigs do resort to cannibalism regularly and without qualms. They will eat their own offspring alive, if circumstances dictate; and they will certainly eat pork by-products if these are what industrial agriculture puts on the menu.

But the second figure, the figure of the pig as pork that delights in being transformed into pork: that is something that warrants pause. The image from the advertisment for the Auvergne sausagemakers was so captivating that for a long time I did not even bother with the text. It is only now, in looking at this ad for the first time after  many months, that I begin to wonder: why is it a virtue of sausage that it does not cause 'fatigue'? Was sausage consumption something that was thought, in traditional French culture, to tire a person out? Anyway, it's clear that the cochon d'Auvergne is above all delighted to be serving himself, delighted at his own transformation, which is here conceptualized not so much as death, but as a moving on, up the scale of being, towards a higher purpose. It is true reincarnation, with an emphasis on the carn-.

And all the more so, when, as in Yocco's case, the animal by-product not only relishes its by-product status, but is transformed by his own consumption of other animal by-products into something that is no longer by-product, but rather an articulated being, with a face, limbs, perhaps internal organs. Some sort of cycle has been completed in Yocco, whose regal nature seems to flow from his spontaneous re-organization into a properly organic being, a being that can be considered not just qua mass but also qua structure.

This completion of this cycle proves remarkably effective for the sale of animal by-products, particularly for consumption by children. Consider the dinosaur chicken nugget. Scraps of who-knows-how-many birds are brought together to form the effigy of a single bird ancestor, a single bird ancestor, that is, which, like Yocco, can be imagined to have all its working parts in order. It is in fact a very simple form, all that is really discernible are a head and a tail, perhaps two or three legs, but this already gives the imagination enough to perceive it as a structure rather than a mass, as a being rather than a congeries of flesh from multiple beings. And this is enough to give it a  regal presence on the child's dinner plate: even the gentle, vegetarian brontosaurus, who never ate meat but is now thrown into being as meat, seems to be a sort of king.

Here we have something even more complex going on than in the case of either Yocco or the cochon d'Auvergne: an individual of an extinct species that is given new life, both as an individual and as a species, through the molded remains of several individuals of an extant species. Does it know what exactly it is? If it does, does this horrify it?

None of these figures --need I point out?-- comes up in the packaging and vending of the foods of the vegetable kingdom. We have the Mannerist masterpieces of Arcimboldo (which I've never liked, for what it's worth), showing men as arrangements of fruit. But this is trompe l'oeil; it's an attempt to show how you can make one thing look like another. Yocco by contrast involves no trumpery. What is of interest here is not making one thing stand in for another, not a relation of resemblance, but rather one of constitution. Meat, (gen. carnis, nom. caro) constitutes  a  body, while fruit can only ever stand in for the body. Meat serves itself in the service of a higher cause, and the regal symbol of this higher cause is meat reformed into an animate, articulated being.

I suspect there is much more to be said about the similarities between the take-out bag from the central Pennsylvania hot-dog joint and Abraham Bosse's frontispiece for Hobbes's definitive work on the body politic, which would take us a long way toward understanding our peculiar relationship to animals and the meat they produce. But I'll leave this as a mere soupçon, for now, as I've already gone well beyond the original scope I had set up for this occasional series of reflections upon product packaging.

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Product Packaging #1

When I spend, as I often do, several days in a row without human contact, it starts to seem to me that the principal function of language is to describe, in written form, the contents of commercially available food items. This is more alienating than one might at first think. For not only are the descriptions entirely impersonal (even when, as is often the case on children's cereal boxes, fruit rolls, dinousaur-shaped chicken nuggets, etc., the vocative is amply deployed), they are also thoroughly cynical, disingenuous, and obfuscatory. One encounters bizarre instances of double negation, as when sugarless gum announces that it is 'not non-caloric'. One encounters outright tautologies, like the mini-boxes of raisins that announce that, as if by some mysterious cosmic coincidence, there are only 100 calories per 100-calorie serving. In Great Britain, I'm told, one might even encounter, in the frozen-foods aisle, a cryo-preserved creature bearing the following label: "Trout. Ingredients: one trout. Warning: contains fish."

The mention of raisins in the penultimate example recalled to mind another quandary: it has long been curious to me that there is in many languages no lexical distinction between the dried version of a fruit and the natural, unprocessed version (and indeed in English for many fruits, such as apricots, apples, and so on, there is no distinct term). In French, for example, both grapes and raisins are raisins (one can add raisins secs to make the difference explicit adjectivally), and both plums and prunes are pruneaux. This deprives French of a good deal of humor potential, for raisins and prunes are inherently comical, but they must be named in order for the joke to get across. I noticed recently in the United States that certain packaging-savvy agribusiness prune producers have taken to calling their product 'dried plums'. In transforming their product into something that, like dried apricots, is not a shriveled, deconstipating, senior-citizen-targeted thing-in-itself, but only a state of a perfectly respectable fresh fruit, they have foreclosed on the possibility of any prune-themed ribaldry. One wonders --and I really don't know, but here am only speculating-- whether the appearance of distinct names for the dried forms of fruits is not a cyclical feature of natural languages, which are by turns euphemized out when the humor potential of the dry-form term overwhelms any possibility of speaking of its objective utility as a foodstuff.

But what I really wanted to talk about was a more general feature of product packaging. I have before me a box of Sunny Crunch brand Müesli (that e after the umlauted u looks redundant to me, but that's a topic for another day). On the front there is an image of a spoon full of the product being held inches above a bowl, also filled with the product, sitting on a rustic wooden table, and flanked by a sack of oats, some coconuts, a pineapple, what appear to be cacao berries, and what looks like a sort of horn-o'-plenty out of which all of these goods bountifully pour. Beneath the picture, in fine print, we read: "Serving suggestion / Préparation suggérée." We see this message on product packaging more or less every time there is a display of the food that differs from the actual form the food takes within the packaging itself. These words thus seem to be there as a sort of disclaimer, as if to warn some hypothetical rube that when he opens the box, he will not find a spoon being held over a bowl upon a rustic table flanked by a horn-o'-plenty, etc., but instead will only find a bag of inchoate müesli. This is not reality, the warning says, but only a potentiality, and it's up to you to make it a reality. But exactly how many mistakes would one have to be making about the nature of reality in order to mistake the serving suggestion for the package's actual content? What would one's conception of reality have to be like?

This is a good illustration of the first lesson I would like to draw about product packaging in this ongoing series of reflections: in its over-literalness and its zeal for non-misrepresentation, it takes its hypothetical addressees as far stupider, far more disconnected from the actual properties of things, such as the insides of cardboard boxes or the contents of a trout, than any actual package-reader could even conceivably be. I fear moreover that this is but an extreme case of the inevitable outcome of a deployment of language that takes literalness as its supreme purpose, and that feels obligated to offer immediate apology for its perpetual lapsing into embellishment.

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