The Free Play of Cliche: You are what you eat

“They say” that “you are what you eat”.

If one is privy to evolutionary storytelling, there exists a narrative which can supplement this cliche: at one point the organism which preceded us, and many other expressions of life — whatever that really is — once produced many chemicals for themselves. Equipped with the capacity for all manners of chemical transformation, “biological systems” would manipulate molecules to produce new and varied molecules. Yet, once diets complexified there became a great deal of redundancy.

If system A makes x and system B makes x as well, there may be no need for system A to continuing producing x if B is consumed with a high enough regularity.

It seems that eventually biological systems experimented with forgetting how to handle certain chemical processes because whatever they were eating had figured the trick out. In such a way, the cliche “you are what you eat” can be refigured as “what you eat can reveal which problems you have offloaded onto those around you.”

There is a curious sort of forgetting that goes into the act of habitually eating something when viewed along this particular angle. Through the coupling of repeated contact we call “consumption” one comes to lose oneself through the integration of another self.

I’d like to take some time to knead the idea that something such as E Coli, a bacteria, can be considered to have a self of some kind. Let us regard that self as the totality of all chemical transformations, sensory sensitivities, and responses that the E Coli can exhibit. In the presence of a certain chemical, molecular machinery kicks into gear to enact chemical modifications and adjustments. We can imagine this process as a network coming online along some paths. If this E Coli which we are imagining has produced some quantity of a genes, maybe somewhere along the pathway, there is feedback to turn off this process. Then, the actions and expressions of certain realities fold back upon the generative process affording determinate outcomes.

In order to illustrate this point in less alien terms, if there is a board that must be nailed to some other surface and it can be done with just a few nails, it is rather silly to collect 100 nails to do the job. When one knows what the job at hand will require, they can control the amount of resources they generate or forage for in order to dissolve the problem.

Returning to the cliche in focus: what really is eating? The metabolism of glucose appears to be one of the most well studied and interpreted situations in the realm of narratives and narrative production termed biochemistry. Given what has been spoken on this matter, one may possibly offer the point of view that ultimately eating is the process of modifying and breaking down a chemical into other useful chemicals. For example, electrons are stripped from glucose and stored in other molecules for later as it is turned into two copies of pyruvate. For this to occur, a number of complex and specified molecular machinic structures known as enzymes are employed. Enzymes, being ultimately proteins, must be produced and expressed like any other protein via the gene and all the regulatory mechanisms which observe it. This can be costly, and given that biological systems are always working with limited access to resources and energy, it is typically assumed that the reduction of the cost of continued existence is generally desired. Therefore eating, which may be imagined as originally comprised of the capture of relatively simple molecules from beyond the membrane of a single celled organism grew to become the integration of the disintegration of other organisms.

Therefore, we may view eating from another light: it is the decomposition or disordering of other systems. Then maybe “you are what you eat” can be rethought of as “you supported exactly by that which you destroy.” Of course, this destruction prefigures the continual re-construction of oneself. Yet again, this moment of forgetting within the self-as-network given sufficient repetition from external integrations presents a curious moment because one clearly does not destroy everything one consumes: something may be kept intact strategically. Through sustained integration of another’s expressions, one may disintegrate some swath of the self-as-network. This allows the limited energy and resources of the self-as-network to be directed elsewhere to new problematics. Then we may see ourselves as forming upon the sedimentation of a large deposit of forgotten problematics that we absorb the solutions to “unconsciously.”

Though I certainly must spend more time meditating upon the following, the endosymbiotic theory of multicellular organisms is certainly a striking event given these ponderings. One way to spin the story is that a biological system integrated without any manner of disintegration another biological system. A membrane then came to absorb another membrane-ed system. A veritable nesting was brought forth. Not only this, but those scientific storytellers known as biochemists have gone so far as to suggest that pyruvate(that which glucose is transformed to) is further processed in this incorporated(integrated body) system to yield more configurational potential to the broader biological system. Therefore, may we hit up the cliche again with difference as “You are what you integrate, for this extends more power of disintegration and further complex integration.”

There seems to an odd situation unfolding within the story telling of the bio-molecular Images: wherever there is a membrane, there seems to be more power afforded to the network-as-self. It is thought that simpler bacteria have less potential in modification and integration, and they lack a membrane around their “genetic material.” One only wonders what advantages the more complex cellular systems are affording by having bounded their “genetic material” within a further membrane. Could we pose the question that “You are what you eat, but this only goes as far as the processes which the network-as-self can exert which is conditioned upon the series of nested membranes one is ultimately comprised of”? Even within something as a single human cell, one typically finds many bounded network-as-selves which are attuned to certain problematics.

I’d like to refactor the cliche in question then as “You are what you can comfortably forget” — to be just a bit more exact: “You are the problems that you can forget without risk of disintegration.”

Oddly enough, then, the question of metabolism brushes against the question of memory. Again, thinking with the idea that there is a limit of information processing that biological systems may engage with, the only way to grow more complex and powerful is to be able to forget as many things as possible while still being aided by the impacts of memory as embodied by another network-as-self. Could it be that the entire advantage of the network-as-self is to be found in the power of effective forgetting more so than effective memory? Is this forgetting conditioned upon the repetitions of that which is external to the membrane of the network-as-self? Does a biological system grow exactly where it can rest and sleep — where it can stop laboring and exhausting its potential into actuality to some end?

You are what you eat — and what you eat is what you can forget. What you remember stands in the way of what you can become. What is an autotroph: that which makes its own food: that which must continue the work of not only metabolism but also the construction of the molecules to exhaust. It cannot risk forgetting this; it cannot risk letting the activation of the sub-network of the network-as-self waste away forever. Yet, in the process of photosynthesis we cannot forget that it is the photon which initiates the cascade. Therefore, even autotrophs do not hold the memory of the entire physical universe — they outsource something of themselves to what appear to be rather elementary particles, given the stories of physics. The plant forgets the photon, and I forget B vitamins.

Without light(for long enough), that which the plant must continually re-encounter since it cannot simulate or express it for-itself, the plant shall starve. Yet, it is not so simple. Evolutionary storytelling once again may aid us in considering something essential: fungi broke into the rocky surface of the Earth thereby liberating the space for plants to burrow onto the dryer parts of this planet. Fungi have provided connections and broader networks between plants. As a result, in some situations where a plant cannot get enough sunlight, other plants will share their nutrients with that plant through the information highways of fungi. Therefore, even autotrophs have the capacity to not be necessarily so “auto”, not so “individual”. And so then here we may re-encounter the cliche anew as “You are what others share with you.” Is it the case that the network-as-self can only support itself via others given the limits of memory? Is it the case that the only way for a network-as-self to even prefigure itself as something distinct from everything else is exactly by coupling to others?

The network-as-self then may be viewed as something that can only stably exist by virtue of intimacy with other networks-as-selves. Biological systems, always already collective and embodied within the physical world, are subject to the informational constraints of matter itself. What can particle physics reveal about biological systems if they themselves condition themselves upon what they may forget given these alien particles? The inside, then, may be seen as nothing more than an excluded exterior which excludes itself by way of forgetting.

Is forgetting the “Dark Matter” of the expression of matter which we can examine empirically? I say dark because within a network-as-self, we shall never see the illumination of pathways which express that which has been productively forgotten — yet there still is a definite impact upon how the illumination and expression the transformation of matter comes about. Can any form of regulation be understood without exactly these dynamics of productive or expressive forgetting? Can anyone come to terms with who and what they are without interrogating what they have forgotten during the course of their development and differentiation? Does every individuation come at the cost of forgetting the deeper, recurrent pre-conditions of that individuation? Does it matter if we have a full atlas of all genetic informational processes without turning our attention to everything beyond the membrane which impacts how that membrane and the network within has come to configure itself?

To veer into less certain waters, James Clerk Maxwell — that theoretical genius of the electron dance — could not grasp decision making because he did not debase human thought enough to view it as embedded in the physical laws of information. Can we understand anything of what the electric signals within our own bodies and brains without first coming to terms with the suspicion that we are more so defined by this dark matter of forgetting than anything we can observe via experimentation upon the form-ed network-as-self? Do we mistake the deeper metaphysical situation for something not worthy of attention when we limit ourselves to the empirical and reductive methods? Could it be that the world will forever be beyond our full grasp, for the dark matter which animates us cannot be fully understood without its own immobilization? To integrate it may very well be to disintegrate it…self-understanding as the mutliation of the self?

Can we reformulate the cliche as “You are the questions you seek the answers to and the problems you attempt to solve” for you disorder the world in search of those answers — some of which may never be settled given that the question itself may only be posed from this mangled, forgotten position that the network-as-self has access to…

Empirical means have exerted themselves in search of questions pertaining to race, gender, and morality. Yet in doing so, do they only cement the confusions of this social world? How many eugenicists thought they were onto something concrete when in fact they were forgetting that these language games were constructed by long obscured histories and not “God Given” or “Natural”?

What does it take to reach the humility to understand that we only exist by virtue of what we can forget, and that which we allow one another to forget is critical. How often do we stain our ideas of the “Natural” with those problems we only face by virtue of the violence in the world which we have seemed to have forgotten in becoming ourselves? What is “knowledge” in the face of the primacy of forgetting, in light of the fact that what comes to light is conditioned upon what has remained dark and hidden for so long?

“You are what you eat,” yet have we forgotten how any of this food comes to our plate and why we desire this dish in place of that other dish? Which questions of ours are better abandoned than pursued: if forgetting is primary must we not be strategic with what we hope to remember?

Which limits are we to transcend if we have others in mind, given that our network-as-self is conditioned upon sparse coupling with these others? Whose soil does my self come to form itself upon and within?