Consumer Cannibalism

<p>What I am proposing to do here is to take the use of cannibalism as critique of corporeal exploitation made infamous in Thomas Prest's A String Of Pearls (better known as Sweeney Todd) and Charles Dicken' Our Mutual Friend and extend it to explore how I can use cannibalism to configure the consumption and exchange of the human body in contemporary (post) consumer culture. To suggest cannibalism as the 'eitgeist' or religare of society in that we are all corporeally, as well as socially, inter-dependent. My interest is not only the success but also the failure of the cannibal metaphor in how it describes the post-Industrial, post (as Baudrillard suggests) consumer culture of the west as beyond or dislocated from the reality that all value ultimately derives from flesh.</p>