Semiophagy (perhaps Coprophagy was so so yesterday) is
an interdisciplinary forum for scholars, artists, and activists to engage in semiotics, broadly construed. More than abstractly saying what signs are generally, Semiophagy pushes the concept of the sign toward questions of praxis. Instead of asking 'what' a sign is, it questions 'how' we discover and interpret signs in the first place.The same site promotes The Tupperware Blitzkrieg, elsewhere commended as -
Semiophagy aims to trace the being of signs from their phenomenological emergence to their existential significance, asserting that insofar as all signs must be interpreted, the search for every sign’s meaning is a creative urge expressed as art. This includes but is not restricted to philosophical and critical inquiries, visual works, pataphysical experiments, manifestos, comics, spoof ads and articles, dada, ethical treatises, as well as the history and myth of semiotics itself.
Simultaneously his most accessible and his most extreme book, Anthony Metivier's The Tupperware Blitzkrieg is a powerful concoction of sexual excess, self-deification and terminal violence. In this hallucinatory novel, plastic surgery, psychoanalysis and the pornography of American politics provide the hellish tableau in which Doctor Umbilico, founder of 'People for the Advancement of Lying' turned PCP swilling nightmare priest of the surgical ward, executes biomorphical atrocities culminating in the capture and radical transformation of an eerily Bush-like apocalyptic president. Multiple characters tell the story of this twisted visionary as he careens forward with his own maniacal pitch for world domination. As The Tupperware Blitzkrieg hurtles toward its unforgettable conclusion, Metivier depicts the most sordid aspects of contemporary commercial life in a complex, obsessive, often poetic and disquieting chronicle of aesthetic anomie, erotic entropy and the 'slurrealistic" threat of cosmetic inefficiency. No reader of Metivier's most inflammatory work to date will emerge unscathed.Hulm more modestly announces that
From his earliest writings Jean Baudrillard has been a media provocateur of such Nietzschean brilliance that it has blinded many theorists to the depth and originality of his critique of the news business and television in the DisInformation Age.In a Baudrillardian pomoland presumably terms such as 'smarting', 'resentment' and 'accurate' presumably don't need to mean what one might think they mean or indeed mean anything at all.
In addition to smarting at his accurate and aphoristic barbs about current affairs production, mainstream media feels even stronger resentment at his dismissal of the industry’s claims to be a major force in shaping public consciousness. For Baudrillard, scientific jargon, Wall Street, disaster movies and pornography have deeper impact on our imaginations than the news industry. Television and written media, he wrote in 1970, have become narcotic and tranquilizing for consumers in their daily servings of scary news and celebrity fantasies. Only 9/11, he later declared with his usual withering acerbity, has been able to break through the nonevent barrier erected by media to the world.
