Craving Assemblages: Consciousness and Chocolate Desire

Abstract

In this paper, I use the case of a craving for chocolate to explain that a craving is a desire for food emerging from a process whose components exceed conscious awareness, and thus the idea that desire is something that can always be consciously controlled and resisted must be overcome. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's notion of assemblage, I propose that understanding desire requires considering the distribution and heterogeneity of agencies participating in the event of the production of desire. I will suggest that the role of the brain in the production and reproduction of desire is crucial if we want to develop more sophisticated ways to consciously deal with our desire for food. I will introduce the difference between molar and molecular strata of organization operating within the assemblage of the craving to understand what kind of process should be triggered in order to deal with our desire for food. I end the paper by suggesting that focusing on the aesthetic properties of food in the generation of pleasure can be a powerful conscious resource for producing what Malabou calls brain plasticity.

The sagacity of the surround: The casual sex-assemblages of young adults

“…Ours is certainly not a novel approach as this perspective has been applied to a diverse ensemble of sociological arenas: economic markets (Cochoy, 2007), childhood development (Stratigos, 2015), neoliberalism (Berlant, 2011), spirituality (Sanders, 2019), classrooms (Leafgren, 2013), porn (Fox and Bale, 2018), and eating (Lara, 2018), just to name a few. However, by taking into consideration the “various techniques, tools, bodies and bodily organs … zones, passages, surfaces, interiors, extensions, orifices, and cavities” (Thanem, 2010: 93), our approach avoids treating casual sex as an input → output model (i.e.…”