Kahn 1

Jack Kahn
Jack.Kahn@Pomona.edu
Kyla Tompkins
GWS 182
11/28/14
Alimentary Assemblages and the Racializing Machinery of Desire
We have never been entirely human. Even if we take humanity as a historically
produced phenomenon with real material effects, its contingent emergence relied upon the
management and operationalization of more inhuman registers of the bodys excitatory
capacities, upon appetites and relations that are not-quite-human. In other words, apparatuses of
inhuman orectic bodily forces (and the materiality of the sustenance which supply them) fuel the
relations of production which enable the materialization of humanity. I would like to consider
Nietzsches pronouncement in Thus Spake Zarathustra, You have evolved from worm to man,
but much within you is still worm, in order to implicate the more worm-like registers to our
species within racializing assemblages that emerge with the development of capitalism and
concurrent epistemologies that enable an understanding of humanity as unified and coherent
(3).1 Humanity has always been a colonial project structured upon the technologization and
dehumanization of racialized bodies in the production of corporeal excitation and desire within
apparatuses of domination that involve not just (de)humanized bodies, but also ecological
assemblages involving inhuman actors.
I find such an attention to the ways human hierarchy organizes in concert with alimentary
assemblages within Sidney Mintzs discourse on the emergence of the transatlantic sugar trade
within Sweetness and Power. Through Mintz, I locate the sugar trade as a critical moment during
the nascent stages of plantation slavery, wherein colonial assemblages envelop the materially
1

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Thus Spake Zarathustra: a Book for All and None. New
York: Algora Pub., 2003. Print.

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embedded capacities of bodies to excite and to labor. The fiction of a humanistic subject who,
with the faculties of his reason, overcomes his animalistic appetites and desires, imbricates with
the operations of desiring-production, compelling the world along particular trajectories through
those desires and passions which Man presumably possesses the virtuosity to overcome.
I would like to consider the human as an organizing formation within colonial
assemblages of consumption, desire, and domination. Humanity is not an essence, but a
discursive technology attached to bodies within racialized systems of domination. Zakiyyah
Jackson argues that [Man] is a technology of slavery and colonialism that imposes its
authority over the universal through a racialized deployment of force.2 Man or the human
is, for Jackson, a mechanism reified by the racial violences of colonization and slavery. The
human functions as an apparatus, as a set of practices and mechanisms that aim to face an
urgent need and to obtain an effect that is more or less immediate, reifying structures of
domination within the world (8).3 In other words, notions of humanity form an apparatus that
performs operations with material effects, responding to a given environment in order to achieve
a particular goal (organizing the world according to the logics of colonial domination). This
understanding resonates with Alexander Weheliyes proposal that flesh, viscus, is always already
imbricated in racializing assemblages that relationally determine the limits of the human
according to the operations of white supremacy and global hegemony: Habeas viscus suggests a
technological assemblage of humanity, technology circumscribed here in the broadest sense as
the application of knowledge to the practical aims of human life or to changing and manipulating

Jackson, Zakiyyah I. "Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and

Posthumanism." Feminist Studies 39.3 (2013): 669-85. Print.
3
Agamben, Giorgio. What Is an Apparatus?: And Other Essays. Stanford, CA: Stanford
UP, 2009. Print.

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the human environment (12).4 Weheliye argues that humanity functions as a technolofical
apparatus, oriented toward the achievement of particular endsinfluencing lives and worlds
according to the (de)humanizing logics of racialized hierarchy.
The bodies vivified or mortified by the machinations of biopolitics are, according to
Weheliye, not managed through the construction of race as a purely discursive formation, but
always performatively racialized within material-semiotic assemblages. Within the racializing
assemblage, one cannot disentangle matter from meaning, denying the existence of bare life or
a substance prior to the construction of the racialized body:
If racialization is understood not as a biological or cultural descriptor but as a
conglomerate of sociopolitical relations that discipline humanity into full humans,
not-quite-humans, and nonhumans, then blackness designates a changing system
of unequal power structures that apportion and delimit which humans can lay
claim to full human status and which humans cannot. Conversely, white
supremacy may be understood as a logic of social organization that produces
regimented, institutionalized, and militarized conceptions of hierarchized human
difference (3).5
Weheliye posits that racialization emerges from an assemblage of apparatuses which
performatively materialize bodies as humans, not-quite-humans and non-humans, thus cementing
and naturalizing hierarchies of difference within the fabric of the social world. Processes of
living and bodily being enmesh with apparatuses of racial hegemony, those practices and
mechanisms through which white supremacy operates, organizing social and bodily words
according to their belonging within racialized strata of human difference (8).6 Weheliye writes
that human life is intimately bound to processes of racialization in which scopic differentiation
forms an integral link in the great chain of human life according to racializing assemblages
4

Weheliye, Alexander G. Habeas Viscus. Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and

Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke UP, 2014. Print.
5
Ibid.
6
Agamben, Giorgio. What Is an Apparatus?: And Other Essays. Stanford, CA: Stanford
UP, 2009. Print.

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(72).7 Living participates within racializing assemblages, enfolding human life within racialized
apparatuses of domination. For Weheliye, racialized subjects are not simply interpellated by
white supremacist ideology, but imbricated materially within racializing assemblages.
Therefore, race materializes in bodies not simply through discourse or psychic structures of the
mind, but in the totality of practices and functions which make race meaningful in structuring
racialized regimes of domination.
Racializing assemblages envelop the procedures of life itself, from the psychic to the
carnal, within material-semiotic networks that organize the world into hierarchies of human
difference. Living and sustaining life, to the most visceral register of bodily being, participate
within (and can therefore resist) racialized assemblages that categorically determine the human.
Racialized assemblages, therefore, connect the bodys pleasures, sensations, appetites and desires
to the militarized colonial violences, regimes of production, and structural exclusions that reify
and enable hierarchized human difference. Therefore, even the viscera tangle with the
machinery of race-making apparatuses of domination. For this reason, I turn to eating as an act
which connects bodies, substances, energies, and drives within assemblages. On eating,
Elizabeth Probyn writes: Rather than simply confirming who we are, eating conjoins us in a
network of the edible and inedible, the human and non-human, the animate and the inanimate. In
these actions, the individual is constantly connecting, disconnecting, and reconnecting with
different aspects of individual and social life (17).8 Eating joins energetic vitalities, bodies,
matters, subjects, markets, modes of production, meanings, lives, animals, objects, and worlds.
Eating, the need to eat and the pleasures which eating enables, participates in social life, linking
7

Weheliye, Alexander G. Habeas Viscus. Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and

Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke UP, 2014. Print.
8
Probyn, Elspeth. Carnal Appetites: Food/Sex/Identities. London: Routledge, 2000.
Print.

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political actorsenabling and effecting assemblages which connect bodies according to

hierarchies of racialized human difference.
Through its tendencies and potency, the alimentary forces of the human animal effects
the world through its participation within racializing assemblages. Desire, therefore, binds with
processes of racialization, orchestrating bodies within apparatuses of domination, and organizing
racialized regimes of labor and consumption. I find an attention to the ways orectic desire
entangles with productive race-making regimes of capital accumulation within Sidney Mintzs
Sweetness and Power, which traces the emergent European taste for sugar during the
establishment of transatlantic sugar trade and the plantation slave system that accompanied it.
Mintz shows how excitatory forces of bodies organize race-making colonizing apparatuses that
respond to urgent needs (to support nascent relations of production and racializing regimes of
slavery) during the advent of transatlantic trade. Like Probyn, Mintz argues that consumption
links bodies within alimentary assemblages: "The first sweetened cup of hot tea [had
consequences] for upon them (kindred events) was erected an entirely different conception of the
relationship between producers and consumers, of the meaning of work, of the definition of self,
of the nature of things" (214).9 Meaning arise from the relations between bodies, commodities,
resources, laborers, and consumersand from these networks of relation materialize
transformative effects. The emergence of sweetened tea, a commodity brought to market by
networks of transatlantic trade and regimes of slave labor, had, for Mintz, vast material and
psychic effects. Through eating and drinking, assemblages of human meaning cement into
selves and worlds. The endowment of cultural meaning enables the structures that transform
sugar from a resource to a commodity intimately linked to life (as a sweetner for ones daily cup
9

Mintz, Sidney Wilfred. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History.
New York, NY: Viking, 1985. Print.

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of tea), connecting consumers to colonial networks of production and producing accompanying

models of selfhood.
Mintz investigates not only the power of culture to endow natural resources with social
meaning, transforming them into commodities, but also how economy links with ecology in a
causal relationship such that one influences another: "I don't think meanings inhere in
substances naturally or inevitably. Rather, I believe that meaning arises out of use, as people use
substances in social relationships. Outside forces often determine what is available to be
endowed with meaning" (xxxix).10 The resources available within a given environment shape
social worlds by structuring organizations of bodies through their tendencies to desire and their
capacities to labor. Cultural meaning, for Mintz, mediates such transformations. Investigating
the various associative meanings of sugar over time, Mintz argues: "Sugar has been associated
during its history with slavery, in the colonies, with meat in flavoring or concealing taste; with
fruit in preserving; with honey as a substitute and rival" (7-8).11 Mintz argues that sugar, in
addition to its ability to stimulate the senses, had many practical applications. The meaning of
sugar, however, attached not only to its use, but also to the productive modalities which enabled
its widespread consumption: plantation slavery within the imperial colonies of the New World.
Therefore, the sensation of sweetness entangles with colonization and the institution of slavery
formations permitted by categorical hierarchies of human differencedemonstrating how
sensorial experience participates within racializing assemblages.

Regimes of plantation slavery (and the racializing assemblages that organized them)
enabled the large-scale extraction of nonperishable and refined materials from quick growing

10
11

Ibid.
Ibid.

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tropical grasses, which met the growing demand for sugar, making sweetness more accessible to
those in the colonial metropolea phenomenon which came to signify class uplift and the
promise of industrial modernity and colonialism to improve the lives of citizens within the seat
of empire. In this way, the desire for a single sensation, sweetness, which arises from a single
commodity, sugar, drove widespread social, ecological, and military transformations: "A single
source of satisfaction sucrose extracted from sugar cane for what appears to be widespread,
perhaps even universal, human liking for sweetness became established in European taste
preferences at a time when European power, military might, and economic initiative were
transforming the world" (xxv).12

Desire for sugar, Mintz argues, arose largely from the material

quality of sugar to excite the body, as a response to their pre-existing starch-centered diet
involving unpredictable quantities of nourishment and widespread malnutrition, and, later, for
conspicuous consumption of sugary foods associated with social elites. This demand created a
market for commodities cultivated in the New World, supporting relations of racialized slave
production, and compelling European military force to secure more colonized land to meet rising
demand for plantation goods: "vast new sources of demand were being opened in England and
Europe demand created by a sudden cheapness when these English plantation goods brought a
collapse in prices which introduced the middle classes and the poor to novel habits of
consumption... (63).13 The expansion of military might, colonization, and the establishment of
racialized slave labor participated in the creation of a new consumer culture where the desires of
consuming bodies could be met by nascent regimes of transatlantic tradeestablishing and
reifying hierarchies of human life into the fabric of the world. New ways of life and practices of
consumption within the metropole emerged within an assemblage that engangled them with the
12
13

Ibid.
Ibid.

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dehumanizing regimes of plantation slavery that made them possible. Market demand, therefore,
participated in the restructuring of social worlds within racializing assemblages.
Demand for commodities, within Mintzs analysis, operates as relays of desire within
colonizing assemblages of meanings, geographies, bodies, appetites, weaponry, colonies,
nations, social practice, and material relations of production: Since sugar seems to satisfy a
particular desire (it seems, in doing so to awaken that desire yet anew), one needs to understand
just what makes demand work: how and why it increases under what conditions (xxv).14 For
Mintz, the conditions which create demand figure importantly within his analysis. Demand is
not just a natural result of the inherent preferences of consumers, but always already involved in
environmental conditions. The desire for sweetness, therefore, imbricates with ones cultural
and environmental milieu, emerging not from the natural tastes of rationally self-interested
consumers (as classical economics might imagine), but within material-semiotic relations which
territorialize the virtual capacity of bodies to experience pleasure. Mintz argues that desire,
while emergent from the bodys capacity to find sugars consumption rewarding, embeds within
material apparatuses which produce the demand for certain commodities, an understanding
which resonates with Deleuze and Guattaris notion of desiring-production.
Rather than placing the personal unconscious within the psychic organism (as Freud
does) Deleuze and Guattari understand the unconscious as material, as immanently constituted
within relations of production and the materiality of bodies themselves: in reality the
unconscious belongs to the realm of physics; the body without organs and its intensities are not

14

Mintz, Sidney Wilfred. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History.
New York, NY: Viking, 1985. Print.

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metaphors but matter itself (283).15 Desire, therefore, emerges from the material, libidinal
energies of bodies and organized by the operations of production. So, for Deleuze and Guattari,
the relations of production collaborate with the production of subjects through the machinic
management of their orectic tendenciesHence everything is production: production of
productions, of actions and of passions productions of consumptions, of sensual pleasures, of
anxieties, and of pain (4).16 Production, for Deleuze and Guattari, functions not as a means of
answering to the unconscious drives of consumer which originate in a psychic realm prior to the
mechanisms of capital, but a virtual force that territorializes the abstract tendencies of bodies
(their capacities to sense, to feel, to desire, to labor, to reproduce), reifying the virtual along
directional flows which enable the materialization of totalizing discursive hierarchies and the
means of production: Machinic-desire is the operation of the virtual; implementing itself in the
actual, revirtualizing itself, and producing reality in a circuit (474).17 Desire (and the market
demands enabled by its forces) contribute in the production of social worlds, of lives, through the
ways it connects bodies to realities and transforms both through those connections. Social
meaning both directs and arises from the interface between bodies and substances, mediating
corporeal connections that produce visceral actions and pleasures.

Mintz traces how desiring-production shaped demand for commodities, thereby

transforming social life by mediating the connections between bodies and substances. For
Mintz, sugar performed various functions which transformed life within England and Europe
during the establishment of transatlantic trade, not just because of the various cultural meanings

15

Deleuze, Gilles, and F lix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1983. Print.
16
Ibid.
17
Land, Nick. "Machinic Desire." Textual Practice 7.3 (1993): 471-82. Web.

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attached to sugar but form how those meanings tangled the effects of sugar on the body.
Reminding of sugars stimulatory properties, Mintz writes that, "sugar for a great part of our
population is a stimulant, a source of immediate energy, if not inspiration, whether it is turned
into alcohol or consumed raw" (177).18 Sugar, as a stimulant, enables the human bodys
capacities to experience not just pleasure, but its tendency to excite. Sugar provided energy for
the bodies of European laborers within nascent regimes of industrialized urban labor, making
them more productive while also exciting the senses. Through the consumption of sugar, the
bodys excitatory capacities influence market activity and therefore global economies,
influencing modes of production much like how changing productive modalities influence which
goods are available for consumption. Desiring-production orchestrates economies of sensation
through the capacities of sugar to excite and of laborers to experience stimulation. Through the
production and consumption of sugar, the force of the human bodys excitation shapes social
worlds (by affecting the lives of laborers, in the metropole by providing a stimulant with which
to assist the laboring body in industrial production, and in the colony, by supplying demands for
sugar with the labor of slave bodies) and global ecologies (by allocating more and more land for
agriculture to meet market demands). Additionally, the material properties of sugar as a
substance participated in the transformation of European urban life during the development of
colonial transatlantic trade: "In this perspective, sugar was the ideal substance. It served to make
a busy life seem less so; in the pause that refreshes, it eased, or seemed to ease, the changes back
and forth from work to rest; it provided swifter sensations of fullness or satisfaction than
complex carbohydrates did; it combined easily with many other food, in some of which it was

18

Ibid.

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also used" (186).19 The interactions between sugar and the body, through sugars capacity to
stimulate the senses and excite ones energetic capacities, enabled broad social transformations
within Europe. Desire for sugar emerged from the effects it brought within the cultural milieu of
the modernizing colonial metropole. Sugar, through its capacity to ease and excite, made life
within the industrial metropolis more liveable, thereby creating desire for the sweet substances
which treated the busy lifestyles brought by those very structures which made them accessible.

Through desiring-production, the tendencies of the human body compel particular

networks and connections, shaping environments and cultural meaning by calling upon what
Beatriz Preciado refers to as potential gaudendi, or the (real or virtual) strength of a bodys
(total) excitation. This strength is of intdeterminate capacity; it has no gender; it is neither male
nor female, neither nhuman nor animal, neither animated nor inanimate (41).20 Potentia
gaudendi, the total power of the body to excite or experience pleasure, fuels relations of desiringproduction through the trade of commodities, such as sugar, by enlivening bodies, creating
sensations and desires, enabling colonial relations of domination that organize transatlantic trade.
Sugar, therefore, through its stimulating qualities, operates within racializing assemblages,
participating in the reification of hierarchized human difference.
Unlike Preciado, Mintzs analysis resonates with an understanding of bodily excitation as
not outside to human difference, but intimately linked to it, as an organizing structure within
structures of colonial domination enabled by racializing assemblages. The material qualities of

19

Mintz, Sidney Wilfred. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History.
New York, NY: Viking, 1985. Print.
20
Preciado, Beatriz. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the
Pharmacopornographic Era. New York: Feminist at CUNY, 2013. Print.

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sugar as a substance affected life within the colonial metropole just as its cultivation shaped the
lives of those enslaved to make it accessible to the European market, meaning that vital
properties of sucrose drove social change not only through their capacity to stimulate desire, but
through the effects it had upon bodies within racializing assemblages. Those humanized within
racialized hierarchies of human difference interacted with sugar in vastly different ways from
those poised within those enslaved by the plantation system which brought it to market
meaning that racializing assemblages determined whether ones body would be shaped by its
production or its consumption, participating in the creation of racialized sensations, racialized
pleasures, and the racialized body. Through desiring-production, economies of affect
transformed social worlds within a circuitstimulating, enslaving, comforting, and controlling
bodies within an assemblage. Therefore, by wielding the more visceral, inhuman registers of the
bodys capacity to excite or experience pleasure, economies of sensation and desire participated
within racializing assemblages that organize the species into laborers and consumers, citizens
and outsiders, colonizers and colonized, human and not-quite human. Therefore, even while
culture presumes the exceptional qualities of man from other animals, it is through those more
animal registers of his being that enable those regimes of domination and desire which make his
imagination possible.

Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. What Is an Apparatus?: And Other Essays. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP,
2009. Print.
Deleuze, Gilles, and F lix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota, 1983. Print.
Jackson, Zakiyyah I. "Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and
Posthumanism." Feminist Studies 39.3 (2013): 669-85. Print.
Land, Nick. "Machinic Desire." Textual Practice 7.3 (1993): 471-82. Web.

Kahn 13

Mintz, Sidney Wilfred. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New
York, NY: Viking, 1985. Print.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Thus Spake Zarathustra: a Book for All and None. New York:
Algora Pub., 2003. Print.
Preciado, Beatriz. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era.
New York: Feminist at CUNY, 2013. Print.
Probyn, Elspeth. Carnal Appetites: Food/Sex/Identities. London: Routledge, 2000. Print.
Weheliye, Alexander G. Habeas Viscus. Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black
Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke UP, 2014. Print.