//The almighty hit: a brief analysis of modernity through the global circulation of sugar - 2023

[This text was read at an open studio event, "Almighty Hit," organised in Jangpura, Delhi, on March 17, 2023]

I will start by focusing on the topics of food, hunger, eating habits, their social behaviour and the formation of a sense of commonality through them. Then I will expand this to study the point where a food item infringes its boundaries and takes a form of pure surplus, to form a particular social organisation which we call modernity.

As per the history of dietary patterns, I am assuming that Human beings will eat anything as long as it is not poisonous. The possibility of our existence – both physical and metaphysical – is based on the reciprocal relation between hunger and satiety. With the concept of ‘the open’, Rainer Maria Rilke, hints at the boundary between the human (complexly conscious beings) and the whirlpool of nature, and describes the inaccessibility of humans into this open where all other creatures and animals are attuned and hypnotised by the song of the cosmos. The primal understanding of consumption then can be seen inseparably connected with the act of assimilating this alienating world. We just do not fill our stomach while eating; we fill our sense of self. The fragmented and hollow ‘I’ becomes certain of its existence in hunger, as the desire to eat something is the desire to be self certain in its primal form. However, this cycle moves to infinity, as the affirmation of the self vanishes again in the state of satiety. It is the primacy of consumption that infants know the world only through their mouths. Since the first way of social interaction for any human being is through his/her mouth, it becomes an organ in which we are thrown into to make sense of the world. Mouth is the first a-domesticated organ of the body. Food, on the elementary level, becomes the introduction of the world to us, and hunger becomes an urgent call to absorb this world in the self, which develops a sense of identification (laccan), belongingness, commonality and hence a community.

Eating is not a discreet individual practice. We do not just eat to be certain of us as an individual self; we also eat to be certain of us as a community. Since food organises our society, along with developing a sense of commonality, it also develops a sense of difference and maintains a fellowship of eating-together. A Polish-British anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski observes, “Man does not depend on the physiological rhythm of hunger and satiety alone; his digestive processes are timed and trained by the daily routine of his tribe, nation or class”. Where food has been a common denominator to cultivate an essentialised identity of a community, tribe, culture or nation, it has also been a point of cultural exchanges, communications and blending of borders. We share food; we offer it as a gift to maintain reciprocal relations across cultures. Marking this contradictory behaviour of food in a society, I would like to direct the attention towards Michel Foucault’s argument which was presented in his lecture the order of discourse. He argues that a discourse employs two internal contradictory principles to keep its regime intact. Fellowship of a discourse, on one hand, adheres to a secret appropriation and non-interchangeablity of its discursive elements, whereas doctrines on the other hand constitute a reversal of it and the mere diffusion of its discursive elements becomes its strength.

Seeing the nature of a discourse and the movement of commodities on a same plain, I would want to focus on the second principle, in relation to the expansion of an edible commodity across cultures and the implicit violence in its diffusion. Since what we eat influences our social conditions, and behaviours, I would focus on a particular edible commodity which has changed our social lifestyles globally in the past few centuries. I want to explore the global circulation of sugar as a commodity along with the rise of a distinct social order of European modernity. Moreover I aim to read this global circulation of sugar presupposing Anibal quijano’s (Peruvian sociologist) hypothesis regarding the complicity between modernity and coloniality that is the interrelation between the still persisting practices and legacies of European imperialism and the formation of modern social structures. In doing so, I will mark a connection between the colonial production of sugar and the rise of the new social order of modernism.

A Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz writes the history of sugar and tobacco in order to understand the history of his country. Before going into his contributions for the history of sugar, it will be important to pay attention towards the term he uses to mark its circulation. Ortiz uses the term ‘transculturation’ for the cross cultural movement of this commodity to replace the already used term ‘acculturation’ in order to avoid its problematic racial connotations. Acculturation, as a term, refers to the effacement of a culture and only the one way flow of the cultural elements from advanced to the less advanced culture. It maintains the power structure through a linear understanding of progress marking a temporal lag between the advanced culture and the so-called ‘primitive culture’. Additionally, it presupposes cultures as essentialised, static, and non-dynamic entities. To avoid the problematic racial baggage, Ortiz coined the term transculturation to show the reciprocal exchanges between cultures during colonisation. However, in the case of sugar, I would differ in this way.

Ortiz marks a radical difference between the behaviour of tobacco and sugar considering the separate climatic and cultivating requirements and conditions for them. These commodities were also perceived differently for the discoverers of the new world, considering the former with the mistrust and the latter with the favour. In his words, “the traders arriving from the other side of the ocean had already fixed the greedy eyes of their ambition on one; the other they came to regard as the most amazing prize of the discovery.” Catholic priests of Europe saw tobacco as the offspring of Persephone (mother of the god of evil) and sugar as the daughter of Apollo (the sun god). However, despite having their own specific climatic conditions and cultural contexts, these two commodities behaved correspondingly in Europe when they were disconnected with their material conditions (land) and labour of production (through trans-atlantic slavery). In this sense, the movement of sugar to Europe did not reciprocate the cultural exchange but outstretched the power relation between the colonies and motherland persisting within the same phenomenon of acculturation.

The impacts of these stimulants, namely sugar, tobacco, coffee, tea and chocolate were drastic and paradigmatic on Christian world. Ortiz writes

“These stimulants reached the Christian world along with the revolutions of the Renaissance and the Reformation, when the middle ages were crumbling and the modern epoch, with its rationalism, was beginning. One might say that reason, starved and benumbed by theology, to revive and free itself, needed the help of some harmless stimulant that should not intoxicate it with enthusiasm and then stupefy it with illusions and bestiality like alcohol,...The appearance of these four exotic products in the Old World, all of them stimulants of the senses as well as of the spirit, is not without interest. It is as though they had been sent to Europe from the four corners of the earth by the devil to revive Europe when “the time came,” when that continent was ready to save the spirituality of reason from burning itself out and give the senses their due once more”

‘Reason’ in renaissance was saved, revived and praised at the peril of others. It was done so to the level that it became a marker of judgement for true discourse to develop a sense of social condition which can only be developed through the accumulation of “surplus”. “Modernity” as per Emmanuel Dussel “is a European phenomenon, but one which is constituted in a dialectical relation with a non-European alterity that is its ultimate content.”

Although sugar came from Cuba, coffee came from Turkey, Tea came from China, tobacco came from North America and with it the chocolate, but they all spoke the same language in Europe which is of surplus. I quote Ortiz again

“While in the 1620s only gentlemen had taken tobacco, by the 1690 it was a custom, the fashion, all the mode - so that every plow man had his pipe . . . What people liked most about these new drugs (tobacco among men, tea among ladies) was that they offered a very different kind of stimulus from the traditional European drug, alcohol. Alcohol is technically a depressant. Glucose, caffeine and nicotine, by contrast, were the eighteenth century equivalent of uppers. Taken together the new drugs gave English society an almighty hit; the Empire, it might be said, was built on huge sugar, caffeine and nicotine rush – a rush nearly everyone could experience.”

Since these stimulants do not address any concrete need of the body, they transcend their use value to an abstract value. This transcendence took place in the movement of the commodity from the colonies to the motherland. The desire to use these stimulants as mere supplements developed the sense of prosperity and progress that Europe achieved during the Renaissance through colonial extractions. It has transformed the act of consumption (the cycle of hunger and satiety) to what laccan calls as the surplus enjoyment: the desire of the surplus which is acquired with the implicit deficit of some others. In the modern age, the consumption takes a leap in a way that people started consuming not just to satisfy their substantial needs but to latch them for the endless desire of surplus.

The movement of the commodity soon reversed itself: this desire for surplus reached back to the colonies but with a transformation. Where missionaries, evangelists and other religious agents spread the Christian faiths, ideals and values in the colonies, the colonially extracted stimulants acted as the agents of modernity. (Keeping in mind the internal transformation Europe went through from Theo-politics of knowledge to Ego-politics of knowledge). Modernity as the social organisation of Europe which emerged, as I paraphrase Anthony Giddens from about the seventeenth century, started losing its provinciality and became worldwide influential. The stimulants which revived Reason in Europe proliferated in colonies and post-colonies with the token of emancipation. Thereby, paradoxically the emancipation of the colonies inevitably lies in their own oppression because to be modern is to desire surplus. Modernity, being the epistemic conception of coloniality, makes us desire the excess.