Biochemistry of Desire: The Biosemiotics of Advertising to Bacteria

Abstract

The identification of human agency with our desires often comes at the price of overlooking the entourage of agents that draw us to our moods, feelings, thoughts, and behavior. This essay attends to the interactions between our symbionts – mutualistic, commensal, and parasitic – that through their secretions, create microbiome ecologies prone to respond to certain inputs and repel others, investigating forms of non-symbolic advertising that directly hook into human biochemical receptors. Although commercial food advertising is normally considered a branch of cultural semiotics aimed at the human superorganism rather than at our endosemiotic constituents, I argue that biochemical stimuli, especially the alkaloids in scents, are sought by specific groupings of bacteria, fungi, amoebas, viruses, and other microorganisms, by extension becoming philic or phobic to the human host. The biosemiotic economy of desire and affect which advertising engages, precipitates use and ingestion of physical materials feeding and reconfirming the responses of certain microbiota, rather than playing on human sociological anxieties alone. In many ways such advertising responds to, creates, and maintains biochemical ecologies sought by our micro-inhabitants – often to our detriment.