Katya Mandoki
Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana
Social
contagion and the concept of culturome:
biomedical metaphors in understanding culture
KEY WORDS: contagion, culture, autopoiesis,
biosemiotics, systemic, virology, cultural disease
Precisely here, in this very block, five
hundred years ago, a colossal process of contagion took place. Here stood the
architectonic complex dedicated to Tezcatlipoca, one of the main deities of the
Aztec pantheon up to 1521. Here, in 1524, lived Jerónimo de Aguilar --the first
European to learn the Maya language and of crucial help as translator to the
conquistador Hernán Cortés. Here also did the Viceroy Don Antonio de Mendoza
establish the House of the first printing press of the
Back then, during the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, it was impossible for European explorers and conquistadors to
foresee the epidemiological consequences of their expansion to the 'new world',
affecting tenths of millions of natives who lacked immunity against European
diseases reducing the indigenous population, as in the case of Mexico in 95% , from
16 800 000 in 1532 to 1 075 000 in 1605. (Bora & Cook 1962-63, 5, cited in
Semo 1973, 29). We may add malnutrition and distressed life conditions plus
ecological damage in the introduction of bovine herds that destroyed the cornfields,
basic source of nourishment for the Amerindians. For Fray Toribio de Benavente
and Fray Motolinía there were 10 'plagues' that reduced indigenous population:
1) diseases, 2) deaths in the process of conquest, 3) famines after the
destruction of Tenochtitlan, 4) abuse and exploitation 5) overpayment under
duress, 6) unhealthy conditions in the mines, 7) forced labor for building
Mexico City, 8) slavery, 9) mistreatment in agriculture and mining, 10) the
utilization of Indians in Spaniards' conflicts. (Semo 1975, 33).
Contagion within the Inca and Aztec empires
was, as we well know, not only viral but cultural, taking specifically two
forms: catechization and castilianization. Amerindians were compelled to speak
a new language and massively injected with Catholicism for generating
antibodies against their original pagan beliefs. This cultural contagion was
enforced and spread throughout a great part of the continent radically changing
values and views for all coming generations. If such extensive transformation
was possible half a millennium ago, we can hardly imagine the potential of mass
persuasion and cultural contagion enabled by contemporary media technology and
the ongoing process of globalization.
To understand the complexity of
cultural contagion must first define it as the process of transmission,
reproduction and propagation of cultural practices such as ideas, habits,
attitudes, values, emotions, modes of interaction and perception between a
source of transmission and a target or host. We can distinguish epidemic from
endemic contagion, the former when this process is rapid, sudden and widespread
involving a significant change of the previous state of the organism and the
latter when it is relatively stable and keeps reproducing similar patterns on
the long term.
What theoretical tools do we have to analyze
these processes of cultural contagion? Around the 1970’s the phenomena of
cultural transmission began to be explored from a biological approach by
diverse authors among which the most salient are F.T. Cloak (1973, 1975),
Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman (1973), Campbell (1974), Wilson (1975) and Dawkins
(1976) with his proposal of memetic theory derived from genetics. Dennett is
one of the main heirs of Dawkins’ theory and propagators of memetics along with
Blackmore (1999), Aunger (2002) and the collaborators of Journal of Memetics (1997 to the date) such as Lynch. Several
tendencies of analyses exist at the moment that apply a biological or
neodarwinist perspective to the cultural phenomena beginning by Edward Wilson’s
sociobiology, Cosmides and Tooby’s evolutionary psychology, and the diverse
currents of the memetics (genetic and epidemiologist) some of which begin to
offer concrete results in empirical, quantitative and comparative analyses (cf.
Gatherer).
With the concept of "meme" (mental
equivalent to gene, related to mimesis, memory, or meme , as in “same” in French), Dawkins (1976: 251) designates
cultural replicators that jump from a brain to another by imitation, “tunes, ideas,
catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building
arches". In his second edition the author refines the term defining it now
as "unit of resident information in a brain". Nevertheless, the
serious conceptual problems and deterministic implications of the concept
"meme", the " morally incorrect" reverberation of the idea
of a "selfish gene", and the fact that a zoologist, rather than an
anthropologist, approached the theory of the culture, generated a particularly
aggressive reaction (we could qualify it as “academic immunity”) that has
partly prevented the development of this theory (cf. the virulent attack by
Midgley 1979).
The approach I will take here is
somehow different from the above. Based upon Maturana and Varela’s autopoiesis
theory, Jakob von Uexküll’s biosemiotic derivations and cognitive semiotics’ heuristic
use of metaphors, my proposal here is that viral contagion can serve as a
metaphorical mapping for understanding processes of cultural transmission. Metaphorical
projections are not only literary or rhetorical devices but, as Lakoff and
Johnson (1980, 2000; Johnson 1987) have amply argued, they are basic components
in everyday communication and common understanding as well as heuristic tools
that have accompanied the development of philosophical and scientific
knowledge. Diverging from dualistic portrayals of Culture as opposed to Nature
or as ‘superstructure’ opposed to economic ‘structure’, as well as “public vs
private mental representations” versions of culture (Sperber 1996), we will
explore culture as an organic body that emerges directly from biomes and can
thus be conceived under the concept of ‘culturome’.
For this biological mapping to culture we will apply Varela and Maturana’s view
of a continuum through ‘autopoietic units’ encompassing cellular, pluricellular
and plurinidividual or social organisms.
The necessary condition for contagion
from source to target is the latter’s specific matching receptors for the
source’s message to penetrate. The HIV virus, for example, targets T4
lymphocyte cells but penetrates only through a molecule called CD4 on the
surface of these cells. CD4 molecules are thus the matching receptors or gates
through which this virus can penetrate and implant its message transforming the
host cell’s genetic information. Other cells having CD4 molecules can also
serve as recipients to this virus. In this sense, the necessary condition for viral
contagion is the matching between agent and receptor.
On the cultural level, to understand
how a political candidate can manage to mobilize potential voters to favor him
with their vote, how a commodity such as a carbonated sweet drink can achieve
worldwide massive consumption or how relatively mediocre pop singers can sell
millions of copies of musical recordings, this viral analogy is enlightening. Receptors
emerge from what Jakob von Uexküll (1957) defined as the ümwelt or perceptual world of an organism. The clue is the matching
process that Aristotle understood so well in his rhetoric when he urged the
speaker to use maxims “due to the want of intelligence in his hearers, who love
to hear him succeed in expressing as universal truth the opinions which they
hold themselves about particular cases” (Aristotle Rhetoric 1395). These strongly held opinions are the receptors through which the orator’s
ideas can penetrate the audience’s attention, provoke sympathy and spread his
message (as HIV spreads its genetic material within lymphocytes after penetrating
CD4 molecules).
Aristotle says that ‘the theory of
rhetoric is concerned not with what seems probable to a given individual like
Socrates or Hippias, but with what seems probable to men of a given type’
(Aristotle Rhetoric 1356b). It is
clear that receptors like Socrates and Hippias are too rare to be useful when a
quantitative action of consensus in a democratic forum is required. The speaker
must target instead the common denominator or ‘men of a given type’, i.e. the
common majority type, to get desired results. The agent must pattern his message
to match, penetrate and take advantage of available receptors. In this sense, a
promise of perspicuity will never be as successful as a promise of happiness,
since there are more receptors craving the latter than the former. Political
and commercial marketing is always focused upon available dispositions or
receptors’ configuration to ensure penetration and contagion. This strategy,
first intuitively deployed, is rapidly acquiring greater degrees of
sophistication by the use of market research and polls that detect receptors’
dispositions.
Fabrication of messages with the
calculated pattern to match receptors is a common practice in everyday face to
face interactions as well as in the media, politics and various areas of social
exchange; more specifically, in psychological engineering employed by marketing.
This process is bi-directional, as Marx acutely realized in the case of production
which does not only create an object for the subject, but a subject for the
object. The contagious agent not only fits its potential receptor, but the
receptor is in turn changed and conformed to the product or agent often with considerable
efforts to match certain agents.
The most eloquent illustration of
this process is the present cyberworld epidemic, an adaptation that has been
particularly difficult for the elderly but which has nonetheless prevailed by
both seduction and coercion as a professional requirement. This cyber epidemic,
however, would not have spread so rapidly without the transformation of Windows
software that made PC functions perceptible rather than purely intelligible.
Those who have worked on computers before Microsoft remember the inhospitable pitch
black background with green letters and the complicated DOS protocols that
contrast the present designers’ ‘user friendly’ variety. The cyber-epidemic has
transformed lifestyles, language, social relations, modes of exchange and
consumption, of leisure and work time expenditure, of political, familial,
economic, professional, didactic and sexual practices, in short, all areas of
westernized cultures.
In Maturana & Varela's (1992)
terms, medical pathology deals with first and second-order autopoietic units
(respectively the live cell and pluricellular organisms or individuals). Third
order units for these authors are social phenomena, from social insects
like termites, wasps, ants, and bees to primates. We will focus exclusively
human, third order autopoietic unities, the only one which universally develops
a variety of cultural offshoots.
Maturana and Varela (201) define
cultural behavior as follows: 'By cultural behavior we mean the
transgenerational stability of behavioral patterns ontogenetically acquired in
the communicative dynamics of a social environment.' The key element defining
culture for these authors is stability. Communication is a natural
process of exchange with the environment in animal as well as human species. We
exchange verbal and non verbal actions as we exchange commodities, work, and
labor in the market by being constantly immersed within a process of metabolism
and interaction with the material and cultural habitat for the production and
reproduction of our life. Cultural behavior always takes place in and depends
upon a given cultural habitat. Cultural habitats are constructed and inherited
from one generation to the next, as in Hannah Arendt's key category of 'Work':
The work of our hands, as distinguished form the labor of
our bodies --homo faber who makes and literally 'works upon' as
distinguished from the animal laborans which labors and 'mixes with'-- fabricates
the sheer unending variety of things whose sum total constitutes the human
artifice [...] Their proper use does not cause them to disappear and they give
the human artifice the stability and solidity without which it could not be
relied to house the unstable and mortal creature which is man. (Arendt 1998, 136)
Here again, as above with Varela
& Maturana, is the idea of stability. Culture stabilizes human life, endows
intersubjectivity to our understanding of the world and literally houses human
beings as a concrete mental and corporeal habitat. As biomes are units
of the natural environment, I will define culturomes as equally site
specific units of cultural environments. While biomes are natural, spontaneous habitats,
culturomes are also natural habitats but constituted by mental, corporeal and
material practices. It is only natural for human beings to produce culture in
every location and any period. Culturomes are mental habitats, which does not
mean they only exist in the mind, but for the mind. These are
ontogenetically and filogenetically built and transmitted through language,
beliefs, traditions, rituals, artifacts, everyday practices and customs of
eating, sleeping, housing, working, acting, and interacting. Hannah Arendt's
three basic human categories of work, labor, and action are consequently all
inscribed within each culturome as it defines how, where, when, and who labors,
works, acts, speaks, and lives.
Gregory Bateson(1972, 258) has
insisted on the importance of habit in learning processes by releasing our
limited capacity of conscious attention to focus upon more variable phenomena,
and thus making the organism more capable to respond to environmental change.
He credits Samuel Butler for the insightful 'hunch that something like 'habit'
might be crucial in evolution'. Bourdieu's (1984) concept of habitus or
disposition also naturally emerges from these cultural habitats. Peirce's
(1955) recurrent idea that Nature has the tendency to take habits indicates
that, as habitats engender habits, habits also engender habitats.
What is common to both biomes and
culturomes is that we dwell in, feed from, depend on and act through them. The
relative continuity between Nature and culture allows us to project knowledge
we have on biomes into culturomes. Disasters are possible not only in the
former but in the latter as well.
Culturomes, as habit engendering
habitats, basically grow from biomes to house humans, but continue to be
generated from and interact with other culturomes through an ever increasing
degree of complexity. The scale may vary, but regardless of their relative
size, culturomes can be tracked across varying scales, epochs and sites, from
Paleolithic hordes and Roman empires to the present Tarahumara communities or
mara salvatrucha gangs as well Head Managers of Mitsubishi Corporation. What
all these culturomes have in common is that they are consensual,
conventionalized units of survival and cohesion to its members for establishing
a sense of order, a form of material and psychological subsistence, a locus for
identity production and for dealing with unpredictability. Culturomes must
optimally convey collective and individual health, which in Arendt's words
involves the 'stability and solidity' necessary for our balance, development,
reproduction and interaction by providing common references for the
intelligibility of the world, of ourselves, and of our near and distant
neighbors. Above all, culturomes must provide flexible pathways that link the individual
to the community where it belongs for the sake of the survival of both, second
and third order unities.
Stability, however, is not always a
reliable symptom of health, particularly when it becomes inflexible and loses
plasticity. There are stable pathological states in which we may clearly
diagnose a case of endemic cultural disease due, precisely, to rigidity.
Whereas culture always depends on stability, there are instances in which
established culturomes reproduce social diseases. Also, certain culturomes are
generated for the survival or its members based mainly upon a predator dynamic.
These are priority cases that concern cultural pathology.
As
Varela and Maturana write, '[...t]he changes that result from the
interaction between the living being and its environment are brought about by
the disturbing agent but determined by the structure of the disturbed
system.' (1992, 96 emphasis in the original text) For cultural dissemination, it is essential
that an organic or structural coupling between patterns and dispositions be
accomplished. Contagion is therefore the result of an organic coupling between
disturbing agents or aesthetic foci of contagion and related dispositions in
the structural identity of the disturbed systems.
Understanding
the determinant role of matching dispositions, the issue is how to understand
and enhance culturomes' own immunity against disease. This is the point
historians have insisted in stressing. History is, or must be, like the
antigens' record kept by the antibodies' memory within the organism's
immunological system. Such susceptibility is far from being understood and
prevented; it is only confronted and controlled by political pressure and
police force. As the individual mind and the immunological system are memory
based recognition devices directed to adaptation and survival (Edelman 1992,
ch. 8), so are culturomes and educational institutions on a larger scale.
Whereas
susceptibilities may pass unnoticed and be taken as weak empirical evidence,
symptoms of disease are salient and manifest if adequately interpreted as index
to diagnose malignancy in all cases of clotting, agglomeration, stiffness,
intolerance, and undue stress over certain parts of the social body. Without contagion foci's proximity
(which can be imaginary as a
promised paradise after death to terrorists, or real as a promised coverage on
national television to criminals) open sores in psy-ecological susceptibilities
enfeebled by resentment, isolation, and affective deprivation can remain
dormant, be treated in its initial stages and perhaps even heal through timely
strengthening of meaningful social ties. As oncologists do not treat melanoma
merely by burning its eruptions on the skin but through a systemic approach
over the whole second unit body and the strengthening of its immunological system, third order
unities’ diseases require an equal systemic and immunological approach and not
merely a mechanical ad hoc apparatus like the penitentiary. We must devise
means to understand, access and develop these social immunological systems over
the purely indictive, and the optimal approach would be the development of a
cultural pathology. This would enable the possibility of blocking receptors to
destructive material by detecting contagious patterns that hide socially
destructive messages. The first step is a paradigmatic shift in cultural
studies that would implement the means to track Trojan mechanisms such as both,
medical and cybernetic virus, which precisely like the Trojan horse, use an
aesthetic disguise to match, penetrate and infect third order unities.
Marxist
ideological analyses, hermeneutics and critical theory have attempted to reveal
hidden deleterious ideological contents under apparent benign disguises. The
paradigmatic case of trojan disguise in third order unities was Marx’s
detection of capitalism’s malignant snatching of surplus value from workers
under the benign disguise of legitimate “profit”. The ideologization of profit
is still and more than ever, a cultural virus that beguiles third order unities
into a diseased state ready to sacrifice it all for its sake: workers’ well
being, their health and quality of life,
employment for thousands imposing infrahuman working conditions and long
term environmental disasters. A vaccine against this malignant cultural virus
of profit is urgently needed, but will never be devised until a systemic and
organic approach to culture is developed.
Virology and molecular biology have
unknowingly applied semiological mappings, such as informational and signic approaches,
to explain processes of infection and transmission of genetic material in which
sign activity takes place. It is equally possible to proceed the other way
round by examining semiosis at the macrolevel of culture through a biological
and virological mapping. We can explore the applicability of the concept of
‘contagion’ not only for maintaining social stability but also as to their
negative effects related to what can be defined as cultural disease. This implies characterizing cultural pathogens in
terms of the foci that ignite them and the susceptibilities that breed them and
detecting pathomorphic symptoms that attest cultural maladies. Despite inherent
complexities, a differentiation between malignant and benign contagion is
required. The problem we must ultimately face is whether cultural disease in a
social body can be adequately defined, diagnosed, relieved, and prevented. The
challenge: to attain results in cultural studies akin to those spectacularly
achieved by medical research. A challenge, if not a dream.
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