Mapping Discursive Closings in the War on Drugs

ARTICLES BROWN MAPPING DISCURSIVE CLOSINGS 11

Mapping discursive closings in the war on drugs

MICHELLE BROWN, Ohio University, USA

Abstract This article maps the discursive closing of the most recent war on drugs through a series of case studies drawn from popular culture. This kind of work is performed in an effort to theorize the reﬂ exive role of structure and agency in criminological representation. Each of the three selected cases demonstrates important shifts in conventions of representation that are historically contingent and recursively embedded in developing understandings of the relationship between drugs, individual actors and larger structural forces of sovereignty, inequality, and criminality. Each highlights the nature of a protracted crisis of representation in popular narratives of the war on drugs, where individual actors, even in their most mainstream manifestations, are depicted as caught within complex institutional contradictions which often paradoxically afﬁ rm and subvert drug war contexts.

Key words discursive gap/closing; reﬂ exivity; representation; structure and agency; war on drugs

INTRODUCTION: A DRUG WAR MONTAGE

Narcotics have been systematically scapegoated and demonized. The idea that anyone can use drugs and escape a horrible fate is anathema to these idiots. I predict in the near future that right wingers will use drug hysteria as a pretext to set up an international police apparatus. (William Burroughs’s cameo appearance in Drugstore Cowboy (1989))

I promised the American people I would do something about the drugs pouring into this country. What do these drug dealers think? … That we’re powerless? … That they can keep doing this kind of thing and there’s no response ever? The course of action I’d suggest is a course of action I can’t suggest. The drug cartels represent a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States. (President Bennett (Donald Moffat) in A Clear and Present Danger (1994))

CRIME MEDIA CULTURE © 2007 SAGE Publications, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore, www.sagepublications.com, ISSN 1741-6590, Vol 3(1): 11–29 [DOI: 10.1177/1741659007074443] 12 CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 3(1)

If you start in with the war metaphors, I’m going to drive this car into a fucking telephone pole. (Barbara Wakefi eld (Amy Irving) to her husband, drug czar Robert Wakefi eld (Michael Douglas) in Traffi c (2000))

‘Fighting a war on drugs one brutality case at a time …’ ‘Girl, you can’t even call this shit a war.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Wars end.’ (Conversation between narcotics detectives Greggs (Sonja Sohn) and Carver (Seth Gilliam) on HBO’s The Wire (2003))

In the aftermath of 9/11 one emergent current of political drug discourse explicitly coupled terrorism with the drug trade. The National Youth Anti-drug Media Campaign (www. theantidrug.com), a preventive initiative launched by the White House Ofﬁ ce of National Drug Control Policy (ODCP) in 1998 to target adolescent youth, served as the primary conduit for this controversial campaign, itself a bipartisan partnership between civic groups, anti-drug lobbyists, faith-based programs, private corporations, and the federal government. Its ads aired heavily in the aftermath of September 11th across television, print journalism, and cyberspace. The campaign disseminated its message through images of everyday individuals (largely adolescent, middle-class, next-door-neighborly types of various races and both genders) expressing stark statements about the impact of their own drug use. One television commercial ran the following text, each line coupled with a seemingly innocuous face:

I helped murder families in Colombia. It was just innocent fun. I helped kidnap people’s dads. Hey, some harmless fun. I helped kids learn how to kill. I was just having some fun, you know. I helped kill policemen. I was just having fun. I helped a bomber get a fake passport. All the kids do it. I helped kill a judge. I helped blow up buildings. My life, my body. It’s not like I was hurting anyone else.

This kind of paternalistic offi cial discourse overtly couples a deresponsibilized individualized image of recreational drug use (‘just having fun’, ‘all the kids do it’) with the violent imagery of a structural form of violence, terrorism (and a politicized, gendered sub-text – ‘my life, my body’). In many ways, this kind of campaign alludes to the major conventional parameters for dominant drug discourse in the USA – techniques focused upon a responsibilization of the individual, the privileging of a narrow conception of free will, a solely and completely rational actor, alongside stark binary oppositions of good and evil. These constellations BROWN MAPPING DISCURSIVE CLOSINGS 13 create easy linkages by which, semiotically, to chain individuals to the structural concerns of criminality, violence, and terror. These ads, however, were quickly parodied through a counter campaign launched by Lindesmith’s Drug Policy Alliance, eventually resulting in the ODCP’s cancellation of the ad campaign.1 Part of the Drug Policy Alliance’s strategy in condemning the anti-drug ads included criticizing the jump in logic made when linking non-violent drug using Americans to acts of terror. These leaps are not unusual in the cultural vocabularies surrounding drug use in the United States, but rather constitute the classical mode of representation – a superfi cial and asociological approach to explanation, albeit one that is routinely widespread and available in the cultural discourses surrounding drugs. In the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, as images of human desperation and violence achieved widespread coverage, local and state political offi cials closed up discursive gaps founded upon structural inequality and poverty, race and class, by resorting to individualized frames of blame, labeling looters and those engaged in violence as drug addicts.2 Signifi cantly, these discursive closings depend upon a privileging of individualism with its emphasis upon a culpable free will and simultaneously a distinct form of sociological denial, characterized by a common cultural inability to articulate the relationship between individuals and social structure. Consequently, these kinds of performances, as cultural contradictions, constitute compelling settings for criminological analysis. Strategically, they permit us the opportunity to explore how drugs are invested with meaning and how drug wars are made or unmade culturally, primarily through invocations and explorations of the relationship shared between the state and its drug-using or drug-dealing citizens. We are also permitted by way of such analysis to engage in a larger theoretical enterprise that defi nes the terms of social scientifi c study – a continuing conjugation of the relationship between individual agency and social structure – and our ability or inability to articulate/represent that relationship. The relationship between individuals and society, albeit the central project of social scientifi c thought, remains highly contentious in cultural vocabularies. Those ‘private troubles’ of C. Wright Mills’s sociological imagination and their relationship to historically contingent public issues and increasingly complex social institutions remain among the most diffi cult of relationships to articulate. A focus upon the individual, of course, privileges particular notions of agency, free will, and rational choice. The social, on the other hand, demands a sophisticated language which privileges not simply relationships and interaction but complex accounts of fi elds of interaction and the reasons why practices achieve durability and institutional status, amidst expansive networks of social actors and engagements. More signifi cantly, it demands as well an account of the ways in which these confi gurations are contextualized through conditions and choices into convergent social forces, such as poverty, inequality, and criminality. A vocabulary which privileges the individual will depend in its social reactions upon accountability, responsibility, blame, and punishment. Perhaps, moreover, this vocabulary will perceive any discussion of the social conditions of individualism as denial or worse, an excuse. Pathways, trajectories, and explanations of social problems, then, will depend fundamentally in these contexts upon a denial of the social. One of the arguments in this article, however, revolves around the idea that such denial is not easily maintained in cultural practice – that these gaps between individualistic orientations and the structural relations that defi ne modern life 14 CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 3(1)

are diffi cult to leave open and thus constitute perpetual sites of anxiety and negotiation in the construction of meaning. Negotiating these kinds of discursive gaps culminates in a fundamental tension between private and public where the linkages and networks which make up social life are experienced in a fi eld of uncertainty, one in which ambiguity serves as a central social axis. For Anthony Giddens, this phenomenon is imagined as a form of structuration – a complex of processes that permit simultaneous reproduction and innovation, where action is constrained and enabled. Giddens’s notion of the duality of structure highlights the recursive maneuver at the heart of structuration where action shapes and is shaped by overarching structures that are continuously reproduced and revised. This refl exive aspect of modern life, so central to the work of most contemporary social theorists (Bourdieu, 1977; Giddens, 1990; Beck, 1992; Bauman, 1998), gives careful attention to the institutional structuring of knowledge and the contests that ultimately feed into the distinctive features of particular logics in social practice. Here social practice is continually revised in light of new knowledge and more information, a process which is seen as constituting the driving force of modernity. For Giddens (1990), ‘sociological knowledge spirals in and out of the universe of social life, reconstructing both itself and that universe as an integral part of that process’ (p. 16). Refl exivity ‘is introduced into the very basis of system reproduction, such that thought and action are constantly refracted back upon one another … The refl exivity of modern social life consists in the fact that social practices are constantly examined and reformed in the light of incoming information about those very practices, thus constitutively altering their character’ and providing for the possibility of social transformation (p. 38). The highly refl exive and recursive character of late modernity is further argued to fuel new insecurities and uncertainties as science and knowledge accumulate in malleable and often contradictory ways. Such a tendency in society possibly indicates less about risk and danger and more about particular sites of uncertainty, discursive gaps in cultural understandings, that are not yet named or understood. Drug discourse constitutes precisely such a site. Drugs are peculiar things in cultural representation, often directing us to sites of fear, trauma, and indeterminacy in public discourse, consequently subject to dramatic exaggeration, revision, and reinterpretation (Rogin, 1987; Lenson, 1995). Because drug representations are fundamentally caught up in processes of structuration, always at the core of drug representation is a problem of signifi cation. Questions surrounding the primary cultural frames of drug representation reveal this problematic: why were (and still are) crack /cocaine and individuals associated with its use and distribution so easily demonized in public rhetoric? More generally, why have chemical substances historically been so susceptible to the framing of political crises and moral panics in the United States? Why is the essential image of drug use and the user an excessive one, subject to a total loss of control, essential to the politicization of crime? What is to be made of the fact that this use is historically and publicly attached to groups of ethnic and political minorities, whose persistent demonization forces them into the categories of ‘other’ and the ‘dangerous class’? Why are contemporary drug representations almost always bound up with notions of sovereignty – national defense, security, and the frames of war? And, BROWN MAPPING DISCURSIVE CLOSINGS 15

ﬁ nally, what is really at stake in the visual enactment of social reaction against drugs – what is the speciﬁ c relationship envisioned between the individual and the social, between the agent and structure? These questions are the starting points for a fuller theorization of drug discourse, which begins from the assumption that the war on drugs is not really about drugs, but about key sites of cultural indeterminacy and the anxieties that surround them. Consequently, in matters of representation, drug war imagery provides a complex site from which to work through key discursive gaps in knowledge reproduced through sociological, criminological, and media frames. Moral panic approaches are perhaps the most central example of this recurrence. The mode of media production and analysis most essential to drug imagery, moral panic approaches have been widespread in their application in criminology. As the predominant theoretical legacy in the study of crime and culture, social constructionist perspectives dominate theoretical perspectives as evidenced through the classic and frequent invocation of Jock Young’s The Drug Takers (1971), Stanley Cohen’s seminal work in Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972) and Hall et al.’s classic Policing the Crisis (1978). These studies and their contemporaries are centered inevitably upon the misrepresentation of crime and the manufacturing of ideologically dominant perspectives. Each is centered upon myth busting where dominant discourse about crime is consistently exposed as inconsistent with particular crime realities and this incompatibility as a source which often exacerbates the social problems underscoring criminality within political and public forums. This trajectory is largely directed toward the articulation of misrepresentation where evidence persistently points to a lack of congruity between crime realities and their mass-mediated image. Moral panic approaches consistently demonstrate this obsession with the ‘real’ vs. the mediated. But, as Simon Watney (1987) argues, the real is always and inherently mediated:

Moral panic theory is always obliged in the ﬁ nal instance to refer and contrast ‘representation’ to the arbitration of ‘the real’, and is hence unable to develop a full theory concerning the operations of ideology within all representational systems. Moral panics seem to appear and disappear, as if representation were not the site of permanent struggle of the meaning of signs. (cited in McRobbie and Thornton, 1995: 564)

I propose an alternative starting point for a dialogue about what the work of media and representational analysis means in criminology. This kind of approach hinges upon the acknowledgment of a key assumption:

The media is no longer something separable from society. Social reality is experienced through language, communication and imagery. Social meanings and social differences are inextricably tied up with representation. Thus when sociologists call for an account which tells how life actually is, and which deals with the real issues rather than the spectacular and exaggerated ones, the point is that these accounts of reality are already representations and sets of meanings about what they perceive the ‘real’ issues to be. These versions of ‘reality’ would also be impregnated with the mark of media imagery rather than somehow pure and untouched by the all-pervasive traces of contemporary communications. (McRobbie and Thornton, 1995: 571) 16 CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 3(1)

Consquently, in this piece, I engage in a specifi c employment of media analysis. Although I am interested in analysis as a means through which to ‘examine the cultural life’ of the institutional practices surrounding crime and punishment, including the cultural politics of criminology – how popular culture communicates specifi c kinds of knowledge (Sarat, 2001: 211) and upholds particular ideologies (Surette, 1992; Pfohl, 1994; Young, 1996; Rafter, 2000), ultimately I feel these are strategies which are largely preliminary and carry with them monolithic notions of ‘society’ and ‘consensus’. My approach assumes that in order to theorize how those representations are fundamentally bound up with social practice, one must interrogate how images are recursively caught in the reproduction and reinvention of social knowledge and ideology, sites of permanent struggle (Hall, 1980; McRobbie and Thornton, 1995; Manning, 1998). I do this through an application which examines several popular yet complex efforts at the discursive closing of the war on cocaine. By discursive closing, I do not intend to imply that cocaine no longer constitutes a key social problem in particular settings, nor that social reaction has ceased to conceive of the substance as a key social problem. Rather, it is my contention that other kinds of wars and drugs have taken on greater precedence in political and public agendas. More signifi cantly, discursive closing implies that the popular confi guration of the most recent war on drugs is defi ned by efforts to close off unsettling absences that are inevitably exposed in any depiction of the relationship between individual actors (drug dealers, users, and enforcers) and social structure (race, class, gender, crime, and poverty), albeit in very distinct ways. This closing is marked by a constellation of cultural performances which gradually cycle into distinct strategies and trajectories of representation, each addressing differently, while building upon the conventions of the other, the chronic contradictions that leave Americans suspended in a war on drugs that seemingly never ends. Three performances which map the complexity of this tendency are the Hollywood productions of A Clear and Present Danger (AC&PD) and Traffi c, followed by HBO’s original series, The Wire. What this article provides is an examination of how, through select cultural performances such as these, we see knowledge being built, knowledge that, in its most mediated forms, is ill-conceived as an ‘emptying’ of meaning from social lives (or a break between the real and the image) but rather, like all modes of knowledge, typically imports ‘dense but inadequate meanings’ into those lives (Wynne, 1996: 60).

A CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER

Based on the popular Tom Clancy (1990) novel, A Clear and Present Danger (AC&PD), begins with the discovery of the murder of a wealthy banker/personal friend of the President and his family in the South Carribean. The fi lm, from the start, is framed fundamentally in terms of the individual agent. Clancy’s hero, Jack Ryan (Harrison Ford), is called in by CIA Director Admiral James Greer (James Earl Jones) to solve the murder. Ryan quickly links the murder to the structural contexts of international drug traffi cking, money laundering, developing narco-states, and the Cali Cartel. The President, personally enraged by his friend’s death, tells National Security Advisor James Cutter (Harris Yulin) that, although he cannot publicly declare this, the drug cartels ‘represent a clear and present danger to BROWN MAPPING DISCURSIVE CLOSINGS 17 the national security of the United States’, marking the drug traffi ckers as national threats and enemies, accentuating the peculiar collusiveness between drugs, national security, and war. The fi lm is useful in depicting formally the manner in which different kinds of knowledge are accumulated and the complex stakes which sit center stage when these often oppositional kinds of knowledge converge. For instance, after Ryan’s conversation with the President, Cutter enlists the aid of CIA Director, Robert Ritter (Henry Czerny), who covertly hires a renegade ex-patriot commando, Clark (Willem Dafoe), to conduct paramilitary operations against the Cali Cartel in Colombia. This secret policy is classifi ed ‘Operation Reciprocity’, a euphemism which contains the retributive undertones and individualistic framework of blame underlying the wounded personal and national identity expressed in the President’s initial anger. The President is portrayed throughout the fi lm as confl ating personal sentiments with national concerns, combining these factors in one package as a direct threat to the sovereign power of the USA. However, AC&PD poses this military reorientation as problematic through the juxtaposition of knowledge. For this reason, it marks a fundamental shift in popular mainstream drug war imagery of the period as it launches not only an internal critique of US drug policy, but refers to the recursive character of social practice where US international relations and foreign policy have contributed to key confi gurations of the drug war. This fi lm creates this meaning through one main editing device: crosscutting. This strategy creates a heterogenous space, depicting separate spatial events which are occurring in time simultaneously. Although a foundational feature of classical continuity editing, crosscutting nevertheless expresses the potential to push mainstream narrative conventions: creating tension and suspense, building different kinds of knowledge. A particularly powerful rhetorical device, crosscutting provides the viewer with information that diegetically is not fully accessible to all characters. In such a manner, it mimics the complex way in which various kinds of knowledge circulate in daily social practice among various kinds of actors. In AC&PD, this editing strategy is instrumental to the creation of narratives that counter the ‘offi cial’ version of events. When the newly promoted Ryan, now acting CIA Deputy Director (in place of the ailing Greer), goes before the Senate to request anti-drug funds to ‘help’ the Colombians fi ght the drug war, this scene is intercut with American troops being dropped into the Colombian countryside. As the unknowing Ryan gives the Senate his word that this funding will take the form of supply and advice only with no covert military action, one senator reminds him of a similar situation and its escalation two decades ago with a little known country in Southeast Asia, a reference to Vietnam. These scenes are framed in opposition and followed by the renegade Carter sending Cutter a congratulatory email, saying, ‘You’ve got your own little war’. This brief series of scenes establishes the convention through which the fi lm problematizes military involvement in the war on drugs, a problematization that depends upon audience awareness of a discursive gap, an ironic tension deriving from the different kinds of knowledge that are given expression in different contexts. As Ryan slowly unravels the depth of corruption and involvement of the President’s administration in this foreign ‘war’, he visits Greer in the hospital and relates his disgust at this insidious aspect of his new ‘political’ knowledge. As the former deputy director 18 CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 3(1)

lies on his deathbed, he tells Ryan, ‘You took an oath, if you recall, when you fi rst came to work for me, and I don’t mean to the National Security Advisor of the United States, and I don’t mean to the President. You gave your word to his boss. You gave your word to the people of the United States and your word is who you are’. Ryan is clearly marked here by the fi lm as the bearer of national identity as the torch is passed from Greer to Ryan in a manner that will prove essential to the closing of the gap. In perhaps the most crucial symbolic series of scenes in terms of national identity, the covert operations troops are sacrifi ced to the cartel and decimated in the jungle in segments which are crosscut with the funeral of James Greer. The President delivers Greer’s eulogy, describing how he ‘devoted his life to his country and family’, a man of ‘knowledge, honesty, integrity, and courage’. He adds, ‘never at all was he deluded in thinking one man could solve the ills of the world’. Greer was ‘part of a unit’, dedicated to the preservation of the ideals of his nation, all of which is narrated over the ambush of American troops while Ryan silently grieves at Greer’s graveside. The sequence evokes a powerful double image of the symbolic death of America through the corruption of its ideals and principles at home in the highest political offi ces, while simultaneously marking Ryan, individually, as the remaining body of the state. It is here that the offi cial and hidden plots of the fi lm begin to intersect through a convergence of different kinds of knowledge. In a tense confrontation, Ryan presents Ritter with evidence of his corrupt behavior, to which Ritter replies that the world is not black and white, but ‘gray’ – the gap exposed. Ryan responds with disinterest in this distinction, as he is more concerned with the difference between ‘right and wrong’. At this point, his ineptitude and idealistic oversight are reclaimed as the lost moral aspects of American national identity. Ryan is made potent again, as he returns to Colombia, enlists Clark’s help, buys a helicopter, and rescues the remaining American soldiers imprisoned by the Cali cartel. Ryan makes a successful return home and confronts the President with his own involvement in the undercover operations. The fi lm concludes with Ryan beginning his testimony of the truth at Senate hearings – a maneuver which is indicative of the closing of a discursive gap that is again also refl exive, both reintroducing and reaffi rming legitimacy in state power. It is through AC&PD’s use of crosscutting for ironic purposes that the fi lm challenges, albeit in an inevitably compromised manner, the dominant discourse of drug demonization. In its juxtaposition of offi cial and covert stories of the war on drugs, conventional lines between heroes and villains are blurred as it becomes evident that members of the President’s administration are manipulating the war to suit their own ends. Appearing at the essential conclusion of the Bush administration’s declared War on Drugs, the fi lm represents the ways in which, culturally, drug discourse was already being revised through refl exive strategies surrounding the gaps that perpetually occur in the conjugation of structure and agency. However, because these frames assume an ‘offi cial’ versus a ‘real’ covert narrative, larger issues concerning the relationship between structure and agency are conveniently redirected. Part of this alteration occurs through one of Clancy’s favorite plot devices: the crisis of credibility experienced by the post-Cold War American state. Amidst a late modern, increasingly global context, drugs become useful benchmarks for exploring (and exploiting) the pervasive feelings of anxiety, trauma, and insecurity BROWN MAPPING DISCURSIVE CLOSINGS 19 which attend discussions of state borders and sovereignty (Giddens, 1990; Beck, 1992; Bauman, 1998; Girling et al., 1999; Garland, 2001). As the fi lm illustrates, the state’s punitive and militant faces appear in their most extreme invocations when the state is most vulnerable (in President Moffatt’s words, ‘What do these drug dealers think? …That we’re powerless?’) and, more signifi cantly, are likely in social contexts where individualism is privileged in the negotiation of discursive gaps. In such a society, we approach a fundamental aporia – an absence in the cultural vocabulary – which in its most troubling moments exposes the state’s increasing deligitimacy while simultaneously facilitating its expanding authority through a culturally produced nostalgia that demands, in the face of failure, more direct, responsive, immediate, individualized action (Garland, 2001). In such a confl icted and contradictory setting, discursive gaps are closed through the preservation of the nation/state often through the heroics of a single individual. Consequently, in AC&PD, exposure, disruption, and the alteration of drug war discourse are at best tentative. The fi lm is never thoroughly able to question the legitimacy of drug demonization, as it resorts to this same drug imagery to motivate plot confl icts, pitting the singularly good against the singularly evil. And in keeping with this, the fi lm can never fully abandon the military metaphors which have so restricted the public debate about drugs. Rather, in the story’s conclusion, as Ryan rescues American hos- tages, the fi lm provides a space for the military re-enactment of classic American frames of captivity and rescue, facilitating the reclaiming of a lost individualized masculinity and national identity in the war on drugs.

TRAFFIC

Traffi c is a fi lm that emerges from the ironies and ambiguities of previous drug war representations. Fraught with fundamental contradictions, it is a narrative which, like its predecessors, is caught within the constraints of structure and a stubborn insistence upon individual agency, but effectively utilizes these contradictions to expose the social impacts of these very limits. This critique is situated within the formal structure of the fi lm itself (similarly to AC&PD) as it maps the invisible holistics of a war on drugs, its networks of ever-expanding inter-relationships, through a tight mingling of multiple plot lines. Traffi c invokes and popularizes a narrative strategy (now apparent in fi lms like Crash, Syriana, and Babel) built around a large complex cast of characters all of whom are presented as human and thus fl awed rather than solely good or evil. Soderbergh’s fi ltered, often over- exposed viewpoints cue us to the complex lives of his characters amidst intersections in the global dimensions of the circulation of labor, law, power, and capital implicit in the drug trade, where geographic location (and narrative exigesis) is mapped through color – the arid, pale yellows of Mexico; the cold, sickly grey-blues of Washington and Cincinnati; the effusive, tropical schemes of San Diego. This complex confi guration is, surprisingly, easily transferred from Alistair Reid’s 1989 British mini-series (Traffi k – broadcast in the USA on Masterpiece Theatre) which mapped the migration of heroin from Turkey to Europe, a transplantation which emphasizes drug traffi cking as a useful metanarrative in a contemplation of boundaries. 20 CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 3(1)

In its American incarnation, a fi lm where main characters pass each other at busy intersections in Tijuana, Mexico City, San Diego, Cincinnati, Washington, DC, and the USA/Mexico border, crossings become the central gesture in the fi lm’s most ambitious project, the incorporation of the trajectories of numerous individual lives and deaths into one larger social narrative that transcends geopolitical boundaries. This use of borders as the fi lm’s essential framing device is a crucial theoretical maneuver in that whereas the frontier implies a state center and a unidirectional movement of power, borders are permeable, perpetually being traversed, and thus tend to have a decentering effect. Here, in the transition between different times and space, identity becomes suddenly more fl uid – a transformation which affords strategical analytical possibilities, a means through which to situate notions of difference and agency within larger structures of power and knowledge. Akin to AC&PD’s crosscutting strategies, these border crossings permit the accumulation of different kinds of knowledge and experience in connection with the War on Drugs. However, Soderbergh’s purpose is not really to tell a story of difference but rather to create the quintessential narrative of the War on Drugs, a feat which the fi lm effectively achieves, but not without invoking its own set of problematics. The failure of the drug war, the fi lm’s main discursive objective, is mapped primarily through the exposure of how this war is being fought, who is caught up within it, and why. The war’s main strategical centers are spread out across border zones – local, state, federal, military, and international law enforcement jurisdictions – their success dependent upon a complicated information exchange system built upon informants, secrets, and betrayal. Information is deeply dangerous – in its absence of sharedness and its false manipulation – and constitutes a key device in the management and exploitation of discursive gaps. During an early scene in the fi lm, one DEA agent is shot and an entire undercover operation compromised when local San Diego police arrive in the midst of a complicated, tense DEA bust, with neither side aware of the other’s plan for mobilization. In another narrative strand, the man being prepped by the USA for Mexico’s drug czar position, General Arturo Salazar (Tomas Milian) of the National Drug Force, is exposed as deeply corrupt, the political front man for a Mexican drug cartel lord, assumed dead – and the USA, specifi cally through the platitudes and policies of the new drug czar, has simply facilitated one cartel (Juarez-based) over another (in Tijuana). Most relentless of all is Soderbergh’s insistence upon the structural tautology of militaristic or political means to achieve any headway – as the Juarez cartel is eventually dismantled after the exposure of corruption, the Obregon brothers in Tijuana are brought back into business, and General Salazar found in his own seat of torture at the end of the fi lm. Offi cial, economic, and underground forces converge in individual actions and social practices which effectively reproduce the structures supporting both the war on drugs and the drug trade. Ultimately told from the point of view of individual actors, the fi lm’s effectiveness relies a good deal on its ability to build a structural narrative through empathetic, individualized characters. These actors bear the conventional markers of a classic heroism: the lonely stoicism of Tijuana police offi cer Javier Rodriguez (Benicio Del Toro); the mobile; idealistic Judge Wakefi eld (Michael Douglas); the relentlessly perseverant DEA Agent Montel Gordon (Don Cheadle). Among the fi lm’s fi ner points, these qualities are distributed fairly evenly across characters, including those whose morality is less admirable, but at times, clearly BROWN MAPPING DISCURSIVE CLOSINGS 21 understandable: Francisco Flores (Clifton Collins, Jr.) and Eduardo Ruiz (Miguel Ferrer) – the tortured assassin and the duped dealer/informant; Helena Ayala (Catherine Zeta- Jones), who, in order to protect her family and way of life, quickly becomes a self-made entrepreneur in the trade herself; and the elite child of privilege, Seth Abrahams (Topher Grace), responsible for introducing Wakefi eld’s daughter to drugs, who demonstrates an intense acuity of the drug war’s role in the maintenance of social order and political economies. Among such blurred moral and geopolitical boundaries, within the framework of war, everyone becomes a casualty and yet, as the fi lm’s tagline insists, ‘no one gets away clean’. The lines between victim and perpetrator are perpetually problematized and this, from Traffi c’s perspective, is why the drug war cannot be won. It is also why the fi lm is a more effective engagement of agency-centered approaches to structural contradictions than its predecessor, AC&PD, precisely because it foregrounds the manner in which discursive gaps are constant tensions, always in play. Most interestingly, this knowledge of failure is held by all who participate in the war, a sense of defeatism they must perpetually deny or resist and a sense of futility which accompanies the recursive character of social action in late modernity. This complex sense of noble action in the midst of futility is indicative of a tight structural relationship where individual actors fi nd their actions compromised daily through a very real cultural ambivalence in the USA where drugs are widely used and produced, prohibited and celebrated. In this respect, it is not surprising that Soderbergh concedes his narrative to a recuperative framework that ultimately is consistent with the cautious manner in which American cinema has treated issues of social justice, particularly since the 1970s, a general tendency in representation toward what Austin Sarat (2001: 243) calls a criminologically ‘conservative cultural politics’. In the end, Soderbergh cannot resist the temptation to situate the drug war within a structure of recovery (medically and politically) and responsibility. Drugs may ultimately be a public health problem in Traffi c, but all drug war actors are understandable and redeemable, especially if misdirectedly engaging in a lost battle. In this manner, Soderbergh mobilizes the war metaphor himself to an extent by invoking its frames to save his heroes. And he does this through the same cultural iconography of state crisis as AC&PD – an exposure of deligitimacy which nonetheless is resurrected on individual terms. In such a framework, reintegration and rehabilitation are easily mobilized as essential theoretical companions to war discourse, emerging as elements of vindication, counterpoint, and individualized justice. Soderbergh permits his favorite characters to achieve this kind of self-justifi cation in the fi nal scenes of the fi lm: DEA Agent Montel Gordon plants his surveillance device in Carl Ayala’s study in a dramatic performance of masculine confrontation and walks away smiling, his partner’s death in some sense avenged; Judge Wakefi eld risks the ‘savage’ spaces of the black inner city to rescue his daughter, resigns his position, and, no longer the absent father, accepts his patriarchal role in the appropriate domestic space of the family; and the Mexican cop-turned- informant Javier Rodriguez succeeds in bringing prevention and vision to his troubled community in the form of baseball, all in an anonymous, lonely silence. In Rodriguez, a rather ‘Americanized’ hero emerges again, across borders, through the re-enactment of various kinds of metaphoric captivities and rescues, fi nding a provisional peace through fl eeting incorporations and resistances to cultural understandings of masculinity, race, and 22 CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 3(1)

sovereignty. Actors who have all chosen to act alone against institutions fi nd themselves through small decisions both revising and reproducing social practices that add up to a perpetuation of a seemingly endless war. I point to these twists and turns not to condemn or complicate Traffi c’s political and cinematic contribution (which I feel is important), but rather to direct attention to how discursive gaps in understandings of agency and structure underpin and often facilitate drug war representations. The fi lm’s critical and commercial success can be read as indicative of its successful invocation of deeply-held American values and moral systems against a sophisticated engagement of the very contradictions contained within these frameworks. The familiar, essential markers of American individualism – masculinity, race, and heroism – are reinvented in the fi lm’s complicated deconstruction and recuperation of drug war metaphors. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Soderbergh’s decision to play the war back to us from the perspective of the individual – the most effective narrative device in American discourse – and then contextualize that individualism in the aggregate, collective ‘we’ of an increasingly apparent global community, bound together structurally through the illicit traffi cking of drugs. Beyond this, Traffi c’s images are tied to a complex, growing material structural reality – an unprecedented expansion of the US penal system, widespread apparentness of unequal sentencing structures, staggering racial disproportionality – all primarily patterned through the enforcement of a war on drugs and its accompanying punitiveness (Beckett, 1997; Duster, 1997; Mauer, 1999; Garland, 2001). The fi lm’s very production is possible only through such a stark sociological actuality. In the end, Soderbergh’s networks are so encompassing and so vast that the audience sees its own fatigue and resignation in the familiar lifeless rhetoric of drug war policy as Judge Wakefi eld haltingly recites,

The war on drugs is a war that we have to win and a war that we can win. [Pause] We have to win this war to save our country’s most precious resource, our children. [Longer pause] Protecting these children must be priority number one. [Pause] There has been progress and there has been failure. But where we have fallen short, I see not a problem. [Pause] I see an opportunity. [Longer pause] … An opportunity to correct the mistakes of the past, while laying a foundation for the future. This takes not only new ideas, but perseverance. [Pause] This takes not only resources, but courage. [Pause] This takes not only government, but families. [Pause] I’ve laid out at … [voice breaks] … I’ve laid out a 10-point plan that … [very long pause)] I can’t do this. If there is a war on drugs, then many of our family members are the enemy. And I don’t know how you wage war on your own family … [left hanging]

Wakefi eld’s speech mimics a prodigious popular and critical literature that dominates the debate concerning the historicizing of the war on cocaine at this time, one whose fundamental theme is a similar futility, framed by the offi cial absence of either social justice (Duke and Gross, 1993; Baum, 1996; Gray, 1998) or, oppositionally, a clear national commitment to a full-scale war for moral character (Kelling, 1996; Bennett et al., 1999). In the wake of this popular discourse, Traffi c appears, at fi rst glance, to effectively complete the cycle of representation that has followed the war on cocaine. It emphasizes the dense moral BROWN MAPPING DISCURSIVE CLOSINGS 23 ambiguity, deepening public mistrust, and attendant discursive gaps in the understanding of social relations that undergird war rhetoric. It mobilizes individual actors across multiple story-lines which all converge in a metanarrative of structure to effect this ambiguity. Then, after a critique of the battle itself, it makes a recursive compromise by saving all who are caught up in the war effort through a complex set of identity politics built upon the seduction of recuperation and reproduction.

THE WIRE

The Wire is

about what’s been left behind in America. It’s not about good guys and bad guys. We wanted to be subversive to the extent that you think you’re watching a show about whether they’re going to get the bad guy or not but by the time you get to the end of the show the idea of a good guy has less meaning than you thought it did and whether or not they catch him is not the point. The point is the system is dysfunctional. (Simon and Pelecanos, 2004)

In the study of the political economics of media ownership, debates have focused upon the manner in which forces of integration, conglomeration, and concentration of ownership have served to homogenize media outlets and limit production opportunities through extensive corporate structures, thus reducing diversity and alternative or inde- pendent approaches in representation. In such a context, fears circulate concerning the growing inability of a corporatized media to serve as an effective democratic institution (McChesney, 1999; Chomsky, 2002). From this perspective, the media are often conceived of as a singular institution and one that is distinctly overdetermined; yet, it would also appear that the current economics of production have resulted in a variety of foreseeable and unforeseeable practices, with complex social outcomes. These complexities include a recycling of cultural performances through massive syndication and increasingly available technology (DVD/VHS purchases and rentals; cable/satellite; TIVO) and the possibility in some instances of a carefully regulated and channeled diversifi cation of media programing, whose modes and content are refl ective of a carefully researched niche audience. The proliferation and diversifi cation of the mass media permit, in some instances somewhat ironically, and certainly not without compromise, the creation of niche markets which can risk divergent narrative lines and experimental programming. In this instance, television is envisioned not as a passive space, but a provocative one. It is also a space characterized in many ways precisely by its recursiveness. Films like Traffi c and AC&PD can be seen routinely, in cycles, due to the advent of cable/satellite television, envisioned as an alternative to the big three networks, and now constituting well over 300 networks, many of whom have created authentic innovations in programming content. In such media worlds, directed toward niche audiences and streamed through repetition and syndication, movies, television series, and individual episodes circulate and recur across visual culture prolifi cally. The Wire emerges out of 24 CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 3(1)

precisely such a context, programming that is considered ‘groundbreaking’, experimental, and can be seen repetitively by a subscribing niche audience or a purchasing audience through DVD box sets of entire seasons. Because of its episodic structure, its subscription audience, and its repetitive play, The Wire is able to do very different things than either Traffi c or AC&PD. David Simon, the show’s executive producer, fought to create a program that would both exceed and violate conventional parameters of the police procedural through a complex series of plot lines, developed carefully across a full season with a clear institutional focus and a complex and extensive cast of characters. This sort of understanding is central to The Wire itself, a show about ‘people and institutions – and the ways in which our identities, our relationships to institutions inevitably compromise us’ (Simon and Pelecanos, 2004). In fact, the possibility of any narrative at all depends upon an understanding of the relational. For these reasons, The Wire is a program directed nearly entirely at the analysis of social networks mapped across institutional contradictions. It is specifi cally ‘about the nature of institutions in modern culture and how individuals are affected by modern institutions they serve or are supposed to serve them’ with a side argument ‘about the effi cacy of the drug war’ (Simon and Pelecanos, 2004). This institutional focus is apparent across the various core narratives of each season: Season 1 focuses upon the institutional contradictions and bureaucratic constraints of both law enforcement and the drug trade; Season 2 takes as its subject the ‘death of work’ in the Baltimore ports and shipping yards; the third and most recent season uses the city again as a vortex through which to examine the nature of reform through primarily political lenses, including ‘what would happen if one commander in one precinct in one American city decided to surrender in the drug war’ (Simon and Pelecanos, 2004); Season 4 examines the issue of urban educational reform through the lives of a group of street youths; the fi fth and fi nal upcoming season will examine the role of the mass media in the Baltimore drug war. The kinds of questions which the program raises result in the necessary violation of a number of key narrative conventions. First, a narrative which gives attention to institutional contradictions requires both breadth and depth: The Wire’s key cast members exceed 60 actors. Its concluding episodes are fundamentally open-ended and unresolved. Primary characters are commonly killed off. And the show is intentionally overloaded with information. Like the detectives themselves, the audience is forced to sift through an onslaught of information ‘garbage’ in order to make sense of things. Discursive gaps frequent the plot structure: murders go unresolved, good, compassionate characters are destroyed, and justice is always secondary. The narrative itself has such a complex quality to its representations that it is virtually impossible to employ a single clip or episode to depict a key concept or practice. It requires an entire season, and this precisely for distinctly sociological reasons. Each character comes with a history and biography whose accumulation creates meaning during a particular dramatic plot event and also adds a perpetually recursive character to the plot itself, whose development builds from precisely these kinds of intersections. The show is particularly successful at rendering the binary constructions (which are ultimately sustained in fi lms like AC&PD) as profoundly and irrevocably blurred – the world of the war on drugs is a gray one. The show does this through a sophisticated parallel BROWN MAPPING DISCURSIVE CLOSINGS 25 editing structure which runs a story of the street and a story of low-level law enforcement simultaneously and against one another. In the fi rst season, we are introduced to the main characters through this kind of juxtaposition where key characters are depicted side by side as they face similar institutional dilemmas from opposing perspectives and sides of the drug war. The series commences with the formation of a low-level narcotics unit through political design (as opposed to real law enforcement concerns on the part of administrators). The unit quickly expands to include several key characters, all pulled from various levels of law enforcement (homicide, major case unit, narcotics, district attorney’s offi ce, etc.) for different kinds of reasons, each with their own biography and concerns for promotion, mobility, and, as the show routinely puts it, the capacity to do ‘the job’ of ‘good’ policing. The political and institutional factors which feed into administrative chain- of-command decision making (best seen in the characters of the Police Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner of Operations) are juxtaposed against the realities of police work in a manner which makes clear that ‘good’ police work is institutionally impossible. In these kinds of contexts, individual actors who have clear social justice orientations fi nd themselves running up against absent resources, bureaucratic limits, politics and the law. This is highlighted at the conclusion of the fi rst season where the hardly obtained wire tap is dismantled for bureaucratic and political reasons just as the case is about to break wide open. In Season 3, we witness the growth within police management of actuarial technology against the perspective of a single precinct chief who decides to use his discretion to regulate the underground drug economy through a harm reduction model. He clears an entire block in the city for open drug sales, dramatically reducing the violence associated with turf trade, but also ushering in his own demotion. The street narrative, similar to the narcotics unit, primarily focuses upon one organization, a crew of drug dealers headed by Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris) and his partner, Stringer Bell (Idris Elba). The crew faces similar hierarchical problems in its attempt to create an effi cient, productive niche in the drug trade. Here, The Wire taps into one of the defi nitive shifts in the organization of contemporary drug trade economies against the backdrop of globalization. Unlike the centralized, hierarchical mafi a structures of the past, drug traffi cking organizations are made up of actors who are more likely to be mapped into global capital, organized by wealthy upper-level regulators with close proximity to key political offi cials and diversifi ed holdings which cover for drug markets. These actors, having bought legitimacy and social acceptance, represent fi nancial circuits and distribution channels that span the globe specifi cally through drug exchange (Naim, 2005; Van Schendel and Abraham, 2005). This has specifi c implications for the functional capacities of local politics, which The Wire adeptly depicts, where ‘good police work’ is restricted precisely because of the manner in which the political urban machine is now caught in complex webs of bribery and corruption largely through money fl ows undergirded by drug traffi cking. This is best exemplifi ed by the character of Stringer Bell who deals drugs through a variety of fronts (a night club, funeral home, copy shop), attends business school at night, and systematically begins to invest in commercial properties across the city and network with politicians and offi cials, a carefully thought-out strategy directed at the accumulation of social and cultural capital. 26 CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 3(1)

In its more compelling moments, the show depicts how mobility and escape, based upon individual agency, out of the world of the drug trade, are virtually impossible due to structural constraints. A particularly compelling example of this is the socialization of low-level drug runners into the upper-level violence of the drug trade. In one of the show’s more poignant moments in Season 1, a key character, a project runner named Wallace, attempts to relocate out of the ‘game’ by moving to the country with his grandparents after he is badly shaken by the brutal murder of a thief by his bosses. After a few weeks, he returns to the projects where he explains to his boss that the only life he knows is project life and the drug trade. In one of the show’s more famous lines, he concludes his pitch by opening his arms to the project buildings and insisting ‘yo, this is me’. At the conclusion of the season, he is murdered by his best friends who suspect he is not simply an informant but more signifi cantly has become too soft for the drug trade. They are forced to kill him by Bell and Barksdale who recognize that the youths must be ‘bloody’ in order to move up in the crew. In The Wire we routinely see the processes of internalized institutional violence, of the development of an oppositional street culture, of how structural marginalization relates to personal and psychological depression and self-worth (on both sides of the law), and the effects and outcomes of an absence of cultural and symbolic capital. Both law enforcement and the street are depicted as worlds in which those who are particularly sensitive, observant, and attentive to the complex ways in which this violence is reproduced, those who are informed by a sense of social justice, are precisely the individuals who will fail professionally (McNulty, the show’s lead character, is demoted at the end of Season 1 as are several other members of the narcotics unit) and personally (most of the characters on the show have either transient relationships or fi nd themselves divorced). Most are inevitably corrupted in some manner (implications of which hang over Major Daniels who is in charge of the wire tap and offi cers Carver and Hauk who consider taking a cut out of money retrieved during a drug bust). In the face of resistance to complicity, several are injured (detective Greggs) or murdered by their own (Wallace and D’Angelo Barksdale). Similar to Traffi c, small individual acts of institutional resistance on both sides of the law, grounded in compassion, are valorized, however futile, but, unlike in Traffi c, the futility now envelops all actors and an entire city and the show carefully insists that these acts are not the source of direct political change. Rather, such futility is precisely what happens to cities in a chronic war and is why, for Simon (2004), The Wire is really the story of a post-industrial city, Baltimore, being told through the lenses of the drug war. Through carefully drawn out cases, the show depicts the violence structurally and interpersonally that occurs in these kinds of social settings and the complex manner in which the institutional conjugates with the personal. The contradictions of social life persist, as do the discursive gaps, but the knowledge constructed through The Wire foregrounds the notion that these gaps are the structuring absences of late modernity.

DISCURSIVE GAP AS POSSIBILITY

Drug war representations thus constitute important sites from which to interrogate the cultural conjugation of agency and structure. In the ‘double movement’ of initial critique BROWN MAPPING DISCURSIVE CLOSINGS 27 and ultimate recuperation that Nicole Rafter (2006) presents as emblematic of Hollywood crime fi lms, we witness both the articulations, revisions, and reproductions of cultural discourse as well as those moments when that discourse fails. In the recuperative framework, drug demonization serves a very powerful ideological objective by providing a single point of explanation and blame for a vast variety of structural social problems, resulting in what Reinarman and Levine (1997) call ‘a form of sociological denial’ which leads, logically, to social control and imprisonment rather than alternative drug policy models. In this manner, ‘the most basic premise of social science – that individual choices are infl uenced by social circumstances – was rejected as left-wing ideology ( p. 37). Undoubtedly, the majority of cultural representations in mainstream, contemporary popular culture still do little more than reaffi rm and perpetuate this ideology through the very ubiquity of the drug user, addict, dealer, and traffi cker as easy villains in familiar cultural mythologies. As Judith Butler (2004) elaborates, these kinds of oppositional contexts insist upon an irreconcilability that is, at heart, artifi cial where ‘the framework for hearing presumes that the one view nullifi es the other’ ( p. 13). In such a context, explanation itself is suspect, ‘as if to explain these events would involve us in a sympathetic identifi cation with the oppressor, as if to understand these events would involve building a justifi catory framework for them’

( p. 8). Both kinds of frames limit discussions of the origins of violence and the cultural conditions necessary to produce them. The problematic outcome of this type of imagery is the denial of complex social and cultural contexts and the constriction of possibilities in the realm of alternative US drug policies. Signifi cantly, this denial reinforces a critical absence in the American cultural vocabulary, a discursive gap in fundamental understandings of the relationship between individuals and structure, at precisely the point where alternative frameworks for understanding drugs might arise. But, I would argue, in locating the gap within this massive social contradiction, a useful, albeit provisional, analytical window appears ‘in the tension between how we live and what our culture allows us to say’, a site from which we might begin to ‘hope for the reappropriation of a common language in which those dilemmas can be discussed’ (Bellah, 1986: vii). From such a perspective, social denial and its cultural logics are not impermeable nor invulnerable, as the complex ongoing contests which undergird culture always prove. There is ample evidence in mainstream representation of complicating tendencies in the presentation of drug discourse: largely (and surprisingly) because the presence of discursive gaps is inherently troubling and demands attention, particularly as genres evolve, conventions become subject to revision, and alternative narrative structures emerge. As images approach ahistorical status, the very denial of their social context pushes production into a confrontation with the complexity of reality, providing the possibility for the emergence of a fi lm like Traffi c or a series like The Wire after a long cycle of easy cultural demonization. Culturally, then, these images of drug wars, their warriors and enemies are perpetually problematized by the very vocabularies and logics that sustain them. For these reasons, discursive gaps serve as strategical research sites in cultural and criminological analysis; sites where poverty, inequality, sovereignty, and criminality are continuously conjugated across late modernity through representations which reveal how we work through the troubled place of the social. In the case of drug discourse, it is through the lens of individualism that A Clear and Present Danger and Traffi c teach us war’s futilities. It is 28 CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 3(1)

also through this lens that they always teach us of its possibility, its beckoning promise of vindication and justice, but only on individual, never social terms. These representations fi nd themselves teetering precariously, on the verge of an awareness that ‘radical individualism as a language obscures the fact that we fi nd ourselves not independently of other people and institutions but through them’ (Bellah, 1986: 84). As complex and contradictory as that path may be, it is one worth taking – one which imposes a relentless confrontation with the kinds of cultural ambiguity that, as in The Wire, introduce intractable narrative tensions and open up discursive gaps that cannot be easily closed off. In this way, visions of change and alternative possibilities as much as the politics of stasis and prohibition are built into attempts at discursive closings, which are always caught in a double gesture, reaffi rming and denying, damning and redeeming.

Notes

I would like to thank Bruce Hoffman, Barbara Klinger, Steve Rubinstein, Lynn Chancer, and the CMC editorial staff and reviewers, including Chris Greer and Yvonne Jewkes, for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article. And a special note of thanks to CMC Editor, Jeff Ferrell, for his intellectual mentorship and support.

1 ‘Drug Czar Cancels Misleading “Drugs and Terrorism” Ad Campaign’, 3 April 2003. Available at the Drug Policy Alliance website: http://www.drugpolicy.org/news/pressroom/pressrelease/ pr040303.cfm. 2 ‘Drug Users Demonized by Hurricane Coverage’, 9 September 2005. Available at the Drug Policy Alliance website: http://www.drugpolicy.org/news/090905hurricane.cfm.

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MICHELLE BROWN, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ohio University, Athens, USA. Email: [email protected]