The ability to struggle politically is materially constructed by the minerals we ingest through food. Through epidermal methods, lotions are applied to the skin. Through embodied practices: movement, breathwork, massage, sauna. This means that beyond a moral or ideological impetus to divest from certain entities as compulsory consumers, we also have a responsibility to acknowledge that our consumption of certain goods—produced by the corporations we hate—also effectively curtails our ability to resist them or to survive them.
Most of the minerals we consume at this point in Europe and America require a transaction. Both consumption as currency and consumption as ingestion can be sites of play, improvisation, and experimentation. And yet we are also compelled to participate in this terrible infrastructure: ingesting toxins beyond our control, being genetically predisposed—because of what the people who gave birth to us were made of, because of what they had to eat and endure to make us at all.
Through Hortense Spillers’ concept of the flesh. Through Stella Dadzie’s archival research into the nutrients that were either categorically present or categorically absent from certain diets. Certain eating regimens in Jamaica, Grenada, and Barbados under English colonial rule. Certain minerals and their presence, or absence, affect perception, and maybe even behavior.
You could choose not to consume sugar, not because it might make you fat, but because you know that you have easy access to sugar because of the infrastructure that was the transatlantic slave trade. Or because sugar encourages inflammation. Unwanted and chronic inflammation is associated with many diseases. Because this infrastructure of European design also means that the attending of our own bodies must be entrusted to professional specialists, could minimizing inflammation in the body be one of the most delightfully anti-capitalist things we can do?
Stress. Trapped emotions. The nervous system. These are also infrastructure, for our perception of what is possible, for our perception of what is threatening, for our ability to tolerate and embrace change and uncertainty. If we follow this logic, we might reframe enclosure, or rather property itself, as a stress response: a mechanism of control designed to mitigate a low tolerance for feelings of fear as they arise in the body. And yet stress is not evenly distributed. It accumulates differently across the various nodes of this social order, which means the body that cannot afford to tend to itself is also the body conscripted into that order’s reproductive mechanisms.
Which is why pleasure must be added to the tools we use to struggle against financial capital. Pleasure, improvisation, experimentation, and play are material aspects in the political struggle. Consumption as ingestion becomes, then, a very important lens through which to understand why certain instruments of financial capital, famine, enslaved labor, and genocide can become implicated in social arrangements where these instruments are not concretely present. The political and the bodily are not separate registers. They never were.
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This contribution was first presented in the frame of the conference "What Is Infrastructural Critique?” co-organized by KKP (Sofia Bempeza and Annette Krauss) together with Danny Hayward and Rose-Anne Gush, and hosted at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, in October 2025.
- Cover Image:
Mariuccia Secol, Tudia, 2012. © Mariuccia Secol. Courtesy of the artist’s family and Galeria Monopol, Warsaw. Photo: Bartosz Górka.
