The advent of the sausage, the death of intuition
Eating well, today, has become an act of persistence and resistance. With the massive profusion of industrialized foods and the propaganda apparatus that drives their sales, it is no surprise that processed, frozen, instant foods and things that can be prepared in a microwave oven play an important role in the dietary base of a good part of the population. Naturally, with poor nourishment and a stressful routine, the body will fall ill. At this moment, enter the scientists, the industry of medicines and of “light” foods and the like, saying that this or that fruit is effective against such-and-such disease, or that a certain product whose name carries the prefix “bio”, “acti”, “nutri” is essential for good digestion, etc. This discourse adds financial value to healthy and once-common products, besides creating a new market of products that suddenly became indispensable to proper eating. So whoever wishes to eat brown rice will have to pay more for it than for white rice, whose fibers and nutrients ended up, through some industrial process, in the composition of some dog food. It is through this trick of market prestidigitation that a balanced diet — which our ancestors already knew to be the recipe for a healthy body — is transformed into a discovery whose merits belong to science and the food industry.
In the same way, feeding the spirit with good art, literature, music — culture — demands from the interested party good doses of effort and discernment. The cultural phenomenon is more evident than the alimentary one, and perfectly analogous. In some cases, however, it is more subtle. Take the example of Vik Muniz’s exhibition at MASP, whose merit — so it is said in the media outlets of largest circulation — was attracting a great number of visitors to the museum. Is the work of this much-hyped Brazilian artist really of a greatness capable of stirring the curiosity of thousands? And the works of the great masters of painting housed there — do they not possess such merits? What explains the abnormal flow of visitors experienced by the museum during the exhibition of our photographer, whom some say currently represents Brazilian art at its best? The answer probably lies in what people were told, in the volume of advertising and media devoted to this event, and not in the quality of the artist’s work — about which we will allow ourselves to infer, without false detachment: it sits considerably below the mediocre.
To make what we wish to demonstrate more explicit, we will resort to a literary example. The Orwellian 1984 offers us a frightening and depressing scenario, yet an interesting one for our comparative purpose. In the novel, popular food was terribly bland, watery and devoid of nutritional value. Moreover, everything that could be consumed in cultural terms was cheap serials, songs that were nothing but small variations on one same structure, pornography, state propaganda and — ironically, in our case — football. The result: an undernourished, intellectually deficient population, whose acts of subversion were limited to insignificances, such as affirming that two plus two made four, or copulating in secret with multiple partners. Are we really that far from such a reality?
We do not wish to insinuate here any kind of preconceived answer. However, worthy of note is the feeling left by all the efforts channeled into the promotion and sale of all this mysterious food, this cheap culture: they want us with our intestines full of garbage, and our heads crammed with other people’s ideas. It would not exactly be a problem, were they not debilitating ideas, whose visible results are stupidity and idiocy, as well as the death of intelligence and intuition. What can one apprehend of the world and of life, if the body is not sufficiently nourished to think and discern? And what will a consuming, passive mind intuit, if it only absorbs the silliest and most superficial?
If, on some happy day, we were to bury this whole system of perpetuation of stupidity, we would ask a sculptor to carve an enormous sausage on its tombstone. The sausage is a rather illustrative example of our food and cultural industry. Whoever is capable of swallowing a sausage is capable of swallowing anything. The secret embedded in the sausage is to ignore what one is eating. For if we placed on a plate, separately, a pile of the worst-quality offal, another pile of some binding agent, one of coloring and, to finish, a colorful casing in the shape of a little bag, we would hardly find a volunteer for the tasting. But if all this presents itself in a cylindrical, orange-toned, homogeneous form, inside a package stamped with a smiling chicken, we will be able to sell the infamous recipe by the ton in supermarkets, at a very accessible price. It is rather curious: how cheap they are, the sausages, the chicken steaks, the hamburgers. Needless to insinuate, again, what intention hides behind a low price and a flashy package. This whole market depends on the lack of discernment of those who do not distinguish the act of eating from the act of nourishing oneself, of those who do not care what they are digesting, as long as there is a final sensation of satiety, the famous full belly. Every meal of that kind is confirmation that we are apt to swallow whatever it may be, and thus we accustom our palate to the artificial flavor of these foods, and cease to appreciate whatever is not fried, has no preservatives, no excess sugar or whatever else. Ask the multitude of children addicted to fast food — hold the salad, please.
Evidently, this thought extends beyond the food market. Culture, technology, art, science, religion: they are all subject to this market logic and to the downward leveling of the human capacity for production, reasoning and discernment. Vilém Flusser captured this tendency, as early as the eighties, in a somewhat prophetic way:
“Our environment is one of stupidity never before seen. Foolish objects surround us: plastic pens, electric toothbrushes, illustrated magazines, billboard advertising. (…) The foolish objects, the ‘gadgets’ that surround us, program us in two different directions. We are programmed not to survive without them. And we are programmed not to perceive their stupidity. (…) The first programming has the effect that our intellectual level, and with it our aesthetic and political level, degrades. (…) The second programming has the effect of our incapacity to concentrate attention on the roots of the stupidity that surrounds us (…)”
But this is not only about ignoring the origins of what we consume and the reason we consume it. What is underway, apparently, is the deliberate cultivation of stupidity. Keeping to the field of the arts, to which we will restrict ourselves from here on, we can get an idea of how this phenomenon has spread to many, if not all, areas of human knowledge and creation. For it is from stupidity, and mainly from it, that artistic phenomena like Damien Hirst can arise — the man who sells animal corpses immersed in tanks of formaldehyde for a few million dollars. Or Gregor Schneider’s idea of exhibiting a person on their deathbed in an art gallery — “so that people lose their fear of death”. And it is not only about the stupidity of the artists, but also of the public willing to pay for these ideas — they are by no means isolated phenomena.
If artists really are the “antennae of the race”, as Ezra Pound suggested, our artists should be on alert regarding the signals received. For what is captured will inevitably contain something, little or much, of stupidity. Choosing to contribute to its growth is one of the possibilities — it was the path chosen by the two artists cited above. Another path would be: from the observation of this countless number of atrocious ideas, to know precisely what must be avoided, what must be fled from. The artist who wishes to contribute effectively, through art, to the resistance of intelligence and creativity will be a kind of new ascetic — and here we are risking a prediction, a tendency to which Pound was also attuned, as he showed in his ABC of Reading:
“Obviously, neither one man nor half a dozen of them can produce as many metrical triumphs in five years or in twenty as five hundred troubadours, with no cinema, novels or radio to distract them, produced between 1050 and 1300. And this holds for all the departments of art.”
Of course today, cinema, novels and radio are very little compared to the immense range of possibilities of “distraction” — the alienation from oneself — that exist. What we want to understand here is that a body and a consciousness fed with useless culture and bad food will hardly have anything to transform into relevant works of art. The garbage they sell us as food will not even give us a physiological structure capable of reasoning clearly. Nor will the deafening noise of ideas borrowed from market culture allow us to listen to ourselves with clarity. And the artist who does not listen to himself, who does not intuit, will not be able to contribute creatively to the survival of intelligence. Intuition — the first step toward inspiration, which transforms into art what lies dormant in the form of repertoire — is the artist’s first tool, just as poetry is the language of the poet, regardless of the idiom spoken. We will make no specific proposition to artists here, but we can give one generic piece of advice. If there is to be no creativity, let stupidity at least be avoided — by watching less television and eating fewer sausages. For, quoting once more, and once and for all, Flusser: “Nothing is more terrible than stupidity. Nothing deserves to be more feared.”