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Vertices and horizons with sugar: a tropology of colonial power.

By the globalization of its presence in countless foods and drinks, sugar rapidly appropriated a unique place in modern history from the mid-seventeenth century onward. From a localized cultigen whose high price restricted its use to mainly aristocratic elites, the application of slave labor and capitalistic methods transformed it into a commodity of near-universal consumption. Along the trajectory of its phenomenal growth it so colonized human consciousness as to define the very criterion of taste. The material relations synthesized in the developments just outlined assume palpable form as the fruits of a desirable body. That body, the sugar cane, would play a central role in shaping the economies of both producer and consumer societies. The economic history that linked the fortunes of the West Indian colonies to the metropolitan European powers is an exemplary narrative of dependent relations. Likewise, the kinds of textual economies produced by the real and imagined properties of sugar composes an equally compelling narrative attesting to the secular and metaphysical power of the product as commodity and cultural signifier. Systematic analysis of colonial discourses in which sugar is thematized reveals languages heavily informed by tropes mirroring the growth of knowledge and continuing inquiry into the nature and properties of bodies. The distinctive richness and complexity of the themes and constructions to be found in these texts define a micro-economy of colonial West Indian discourse. Textual production mimics the economic even as the economic interpenetrates the textual: sugar confects the terms of its own textualization from the sensible properties of its consumed body and the signs of its symbolic value, even as it affects the relationships of those human agencies involved in its production. Read theoretically as a cultural signifier, sugar tends to produce symbolic relations that may be described in terms of vertical and horizontal hierarchies. The vertical pattern tends to appear in economic and political contexts where the fixing and preserving of total or exclusive hegemonic orders is a functional imperative. Typically, such contexts are coded with the motives of exclusion and threat. The horizontal tends to persist in social and cultural contexts where metonymies of binding and bonding, hybridity and slippage are produced to image symbolic resistance and contestation. This contrary gesture works to undermine the pretensions of the vertical, so that the vertical is often absorbed into the horizontal. Enacting what is perhaps the most destabilizing effect of sugar tropology, this gesture ironizes colonial power with the hybridity of its own desire. The key terms forming the conceptual basis of this essay (vertical and horizontal, metonymy and tropology) situate the discussion theoretically in poststructural formulations bearing on the interrelationships existing between systems of language and the production of the unconscious in the lived practices of history and culture. Viewed here as a complex signifying system, sugar functions to a considerable degree like a language to constitute itself and the colonial culture it supported. As such, this theory of sugar participates in the founding propositions of Saussurian linguistics where the vertical stands for the systematic structure of language (langue) which provides the full complement or inventory of elements, and the horizontal stands for selection and arrangement of elements in a given sequence or context (parole) (1) While a cogent account of the disparate subjects (authors and texts) and contingent relations (competing social and political agencies) of the essay demands separate exposition of vertical and horizontal effects, an equally cogent account of their interdependence compels attention to the dynamic that consistently draws the one into the operational field of the other. This interdependence offers a focal point for grounding the essay's critical figures of metonymy and tropology in the discourse of psychoanalysis. …