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Narcotica Have Always Had an Intimate Connection with Human Reality

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Narcotica Have Always Had an Intimate Connection with Human Reality INTRODUCTION ANNA ALEXANDER AND MARK S. ROBERTS Who will ever relate the whole history of narcotica? . It is almost the history of “culture,” of our so-called high culture. —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §86 HISTORY OF NARCOTICA Narcotica have always had an intimate connection with human reality. Desires exist that are not confined to the bare necessities of life and whose objects are more than “a palette of substances.”1 The euphoriant and narcotizing effects of agents of no directly nutri- tive value have been recorded from the very beginning of our history, in lit- erate and pre-literate cultures, in the East as well as the West. Western cul- ture—the Bible and heroic myths, Orphic cults and mysteries, as well as the history of testimonial writing—contains numerous references to these sub- stances taken solely for the purpose of their mind-altering properties. Their potential energy has conquered the earth and established communication between various peoples and races, in spite of dividing mountains and sur- rounding seas. These substances have filtered pathways between peoples of different worlds, from the tribal to the modern and have, moreover, opened passages that proved of use for many other purposes. According to Louis Lewin’s classic 1931 survey of the use of mind- altering plants—Phantastica—the discovery of the properties and uses of narcotic and stimulating drugs marks the beginning of culture in its primeval stage. He writes: 1 2 ANNA ALEXANDER AND MARK S. ROBERTS If it can be taken as a symptom of civilization when men’s desires, hith- erto exclusively confined to the bare necessities of life, pass beyond these limits, and the individual, no longer satisfied with the crude sustenance afforded by or wrested from nature, finds and delights in stimulants which mainly affect the central nervous system, then a suitable back- ground for such cravings must form part of the human constitution.2 Although the use of narcotica implies in and of itself a certain degree of observation, it is not until the middle of the nineteenth century that we begin to isolate the social-scientific problematic of addiction “itself.” Loaded with ethical value, modernity’s isolation of the phenomenon of addiction marks a radical break from the past, “a revolution in con- sciousness.”3 This occurred when narcotica—cocaine, morphine, codeine, opium—became increasingly available in the consumer phase of international capitalism and were introduced into medical science. The taxonomic pressures of scientific method witnessed the rise of a newly pathologized, and later criminalized, subject of drugs: “questions of acts crystalized into questions of identities and the drug-user became a drug addict.”4 In this extended paradigm of addiction, the “abstract space where substances and behaviors become ‘addictive’ or ‘not addictive’”5 is the space of the body itself. Unlike the space of inert material or biological existence—a space outside of history, culture, and sociopolitical life— the nature of the addicted body, under this definition of addiction “resides only in the structure of a will that is always somehow insuffi- ciently free, a choice whose volition is insufficiently pure.”6 The further extension of “addiction–attribution” to a wide variety of drugs over the first two-thirds of the twentieth century is a develop- ment that quite explicitly brings not only every form of substance inges- tion, but also more simply every form of human state and/or behavior into its orbit. In this high culture of modernity, any substance, any behavior, even any affect, may be pathologized as addictive.7 ADDICTION AND MODERNITY A few years ago, the U.S. media reported a remarkable breakthrough in the War on Drugs: a home drug detection kit, fully sanctioned by the U.S. FDA, that works more efficiently than any other previous kit. This fantastic little device consists of a selection of litmus tabs that can be dipped into a child’s urine samples and which could, with uncanny accu- racy and speed, detect illicit drugs like marijuana, hashish, cocaine, crack-cocaine, heroin and even an array of exotic “natural” substances. INTRODUCTION 3 Only drawbacks: the final results have to be confirmed by an outside laboratory, and you have to get your kid to piss in a flask. We open this collection of essays on cultural views of addiction and modernity with this “breakthrough” news flash because it symbolizes perfectly the punitive, prescriptive direction that the majority of societal and institutional views of drugs and addiction has taken. Most of the modern research into addiction and addictive practices has been shaped strictly by the disciplinary rhetorics of medicine, crim- inology, politics, and social psychology and psychiatry. Hence, the majority of studies and debates on the subject—though in many instances, substantial—has focused largely on the practiced, systematic control of addictive substances and their users. The modern referent of addiction, then, is a necessarily pejorative one: addiction is a socially deviant, unacceptable behavior that must, in virtually all respects, be feared, ferreted out, and contained. And the addict, as the subject of his or her addictions, tends to become largely vilified and eclipsed. But, as we demonstrate here, the complexity, creative value, and diversity of addiction considerably surpasses this rather limited discipli- nary view of its limitations. When seen from a broad cultural perspec- tive, addiction emerges directly alongside modernity, haunting the vari- ous discourses of digression, dissent, and the transcendence of the commonplace so often associated with the modern era. Who could even imagine the advent of modern literature without the addictive, visionary excesses of writers like Baudelaire, Rimbaud, De Quincey, Poe, Bur- roughs, Ginsberg, or Artaud; or, for that matter, modern culture without its perennial outsiders, its incorrigible addicts, its defaced subjects: the smokers, tokers, overeaters, the alcoholics, the insane and “eccentric,” and so on? HIGH CULTURE High Culture is a collection of chapters on precisely these socially mar- ginalized addictive practices and discourses so central to modernity. It is the first comprehensive text to address addiction with its multiple effects on and extensions into art, literature, philosophy, psychology, and the field of culture in general. Indeed, culture, viewed from this modern perspective, is a remarkably complex process; it can be seen as a way of life, an instrument of expression, and as a literary and artistic tradition. Moreover, culture is always shaped by language and by lan- guage’s multiple and various discursivities. And these discursive lan- guage formations are particularly important with regard to the study of 4 ANNA ALEXANDER AND MARK S. ROBERTS addiction. For, viewed from the discursive perspective, addiction can no longer be treated fully in terms of a concrete substance or system to which the subject is uncontrollably drawn, but rather must also be seen as an aleatory operation akin to that of language production itself. The culture of addiction is precisely a self-constituting and self-evac- uating world that absorbs the complete and complex notion of “cul- ture.” It is also a culture whose value for potentially shedding new light on the very notion of modernity is absorbed and reflected by this vol- ume. In the context of addiction and modernity, “culture” emerges as a kind of hinge or threshold concept: it is to be found somewhere between a psychic or lived interiority manifested in the subjective experience of the addict’s altered states of consciousness and a more medical and sociopolitical exteriority, that is, the context of addiction and addiction attribution, which in turn constitutes the background of the subject’s experience of interiority. If we speak of addiction as though it stood for a clearly defined reality, at the end, a paradox and an enigma. The difficulty in our mod- ern lexicon is that one can adopt neither a nominalist nor a conceptu- alist view of addiction. Although addiction is traditionally seen as something that happens with the incorporation of a foreign substance, it cannot possibly be confined to a concept or notion of addiction as substance use/abuse itself. Rather it involves an experimental field that is both dependent and independent of the world, the substance, the plant, the chemical, and the prosthesis. It is this field we have named “addiction.” Thus, the works collected here belong to a language of (by and about) drugs that ranges from the literary to the scientific, the inti- mately personal to the generally collective, and that spans more than a century of often scandalous, often electrifying, discourses on the sub- ject of addiction. Divided into two parts that deal separately with the inner (literature, philosophy, and the arts) and the outer (sociology, psychology, and media) worlds of addiction, the text also challenges the division, by emphasizing the fact that drugs “are animated by an outside already inside.”8 Both parts will therefore utilize the inner and outer worlds. The division is, moreover, useful when following a disciplinary path along this fully interdisciplinary network of pathways through what Derrida terms our “narcotic modernity.” The text, moreover, combines a high level of theoretical competence across both of its parts: Philosophical and Literary Reflections on Addic- tion and Sociocultural and Psychological Reflections on Addiction. To enhance the value of the collection, these parts can be further broken down. Contributions from several authors in Part II could, therefore, be INTRODUCTION 5 categorized as philosophical (e.g., Guattari, Alexander, Lingis, Wilshire, and Elster), while contributions listed in Part I profit from a distinction between philosophical reflections (e.g., Derrida, Allison, Shapiro, and Clark) and, because they are so utterly nonidentical, literary reflections (e.g., Weiss, Clej, Marder, and Nealon). PART I In the first part of the book, Philosophical and Literary Reflections on Addiction, each one of the chapters points to a body of literature arising in tandem with modernity.
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