Conspicuous Consumption The Figure of the Serial Killer as Cannibal in the Age of Capitalism

THE AIM of this article is twofold. First, following on the heels on someof my previous work on memory and imagination in the cinema (seeLefebvre, 1997, 1999, 2000), it posits a conceptual model for the way ideas, conceptions or feelings – that is, anything that makes up the life of the mind – are represented or ‘figured ’ in memory with the help of the imagina-tion. Second, it uses this model to begin to outline what I believe constitutes part of our culture’s ‘memory-image ’ of the serial killer in both fact and fiction. As we shall see, the content of this memory-image focuses on the cannibal and the rhetorical function that cannibalism has played ever since the term was introduced to the Western imagination during the late Renaissance. In previous work, then, I have shown how certain conceptions of memory – especially those that were developed in ancient Greece and Rome and which informed rhetoric as well as those associated with the Renais-sance’s artes memoriae – were useful for conceptualizing what happens to our semiotically processed worldly experiences (ideas, feelings, etc.) when they are committed to memory. The basic idea that I have put forward is that human memory, unlike silicon chip memory, is not simply a passive storehouse of information where items are preserved without alteration in a term-to-term coded relation. Human memory, instead, is poetic memory; it is an active process whereby relations are created by way of the imagination. What we commit to memory, in other words, must have an iconic dimension (as do all signs, according to the semiotic theory of Charles Peirce) whose emergence requires the faculty of imagination (the faculty of creating images, likenesses). Through this iconic dimension the ‘memory-image ’ is connected to whatever we wish to remember, but it also connects to other images stored in memory with which it shares some character and inscribe