Culture on drugs Narco cultural studies of high modernity
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Culture on drugs
Narco-cultural studies of high modernity
Dave Boothroyd
Manchester University Press
Manchester and New York
distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave
Copyright © Dave Boothroyd 2006
The right of Dave Boothroyd to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
Published by Manchester University Press
Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK
and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA
www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk
Distributed exclusively in the USA by
Palgrave, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York,
NY 10010, USA
Distributed exclusively in Canada by
UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall,
Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for
ISBN 0 7190 5598 9 hardback
EAN 978 0 7190 5598 0
ISBN 0 7190 5599 7 paperback
EAN 978 0 7190 5599 7
EISBN 978 1 8477 9163 4
First published 2006
15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Typeset in Minion and Rotis display
by Koinonia, Manchester
Printed in Great Britain
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For my mother and in memory of my father
Wisdom: that seems to the rabble to be a kind of flight, an artifice and
means for getting oneself out of a dangerous game; but the genuine
philosopher – as he seems to us, my friends? – lives ‘unphilosophically’
and ‘unwisely’, above all imprudently… he risks himself constantly, he
plays the dangerous game. (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil)
Contents
Acknowledgements page x
1 Deposition: drugs in theory
Experimenting with drugs: or, how to take this book 1
Narcoanalysis, pharmacography and cultural studies 3
Narco-literary studies 8
Rethinking ‘drugs’: towards a post-anthropological
perspective 10
The nature/culture dyad and drugs as ‘cultural substances’ 14
Drugs expertise and narco-power 17
The oblivion of drugs 19
Drugs and monstrosity 21
High modernity and high theory 23
Testing drugs in theory 25
2 Medusa’s blood: Derrida’s recreational pharmacology
and the rhetoric of drugs
The decision on drugs 29
In Plato’s pharmacy 30
Addiction and the decision of existence 33
Intoxication and dosage: doing drugs well 38
Sacrifice and bad conscience 39
Applying drug(ged) theory to the everyday drug(ged)
world 41
3 Deconstruction and drugs – all mixed up
Culture and interdiction 47
Saying ‘yes to drugs’ and ‘yes to deconstruction’ 51
Rejecting transcendence 58
Taking drugs, for example… 61
Rewriting the drugs text and taking drugs otherwise 64
Living on the margins of the unforgettable 65
viii Contents
4 Freud’s medicine: from the ‘cocaine papers’ to ‘Irma’s
Injection’
Mixing psychoanalysis and psychopharmacology 69
Refiguring the ‘cocaine episode’ 72
The cocaine research 75
Experiments with cocaine 76
From Fliess’s nasal reflexology to the nose as the hinge 81
From Emma Eckstein’s nose to ‘Psychology for
Neurologists’ 84
Freud on the neurochemical/psychological divide 86
The interface between inside and outside – the
neurochemical mechanism of the unconscious 88
Solutions and resolution: Freud’s drug dream – ‘Irma’s
Injection’ 91
Derrida on ‘Irma’s Injection’ 94
Freud’s resistance to cocaine 96
5 Benjamin’s ‘curious dialectics of intoxication’
A thinking which is eminently narcotic 100
Benjamin’s narco-analysis of the culture of modernity 101
Baudelaire and the high flâneur 105
Surrealism: dreaming the revolution 111
Benjamin on hashish and the love of things 119
6 Hallucinating Sartre
Philosophy and/or intoxication 127
The value of intoxication 129
The evidence of consciousness 132
Hallucination as a ‘stumbling block’ for the theory of
consciousness 136
Sartre and Lewin 138
Sartre’s mescaline trip 142
Merleau-Ponty: ambiguity and hallucination 148
Hallucination as a literary sort of high 152
7 Foucault and Deleuze on acid
Drugs and the orbit of madness 155
LSD in the Theatrum Philosophicum: ‘What will people
think of us?’ 158
Deleuze and Alice/D(odgson) 163
Contents ix
Deleuze’s mathematisation of the series and the function
‘LSD’ 164
Zabriske Point 166
From the self as a function of discourse to self-stylisation 167
Artaud and the artistry of depth 171
The LSD function and the surface–depth gradient 174
Deleuze, drugs and the ‘folding of thought’ 177
Deleuze and Guattari on the limits, uses and abuses of
psychotropic drugs 179
Foucault, Deleuze and the power of drugs 183
8 Cinematic heroin and narcotic modernity
From the heroin scene to the heroin screen 186
Deleuze and the cinema of heroin 192
Heroinised bodies 196
The cinematic fix 197
Heroin’s signature-autograph 198
Heroin close-up 200
Heroin as icon 202
Heroin’s redeeming feature (film) 203
References 206
Index 213
Acknowledgements
Many people have contributed to the thinking that I have given expres-
sion to in this book. Their encouragement, comments and suggestions
have always been welcome, as have their objections and criticisms. Some
have helped directly, by reading draft chapters and making suggestions
for improvement, or by responding to conference papers which were
early explorations of the themes addressed here. Others have helped indi-
rectly, as they will be aware – or not, as the case may be.
They are Terry Andrews, Steffi Boothroyd, Roy Boyne, Paul
Brightwell, José Cunha, Tracy Davis, Mary Evans, Gary Hall, Ben Knights,
Naomi Landau, Aideen Lucey, Ian MacLachlan, Diane Morgan, Margue-
rite Nolan, André Noor, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Nicholas Royle, Janet
Sayers, Sean Sayers, Miri Song, Michael Syrotinski, Mick Ward and Joanna
Zylinska.
I would also like to thank: the Arts and Humanities Research
Board for granting me a Research Leave Scheme sabbatical semester (a
long time ago!) during which I was able to complete or draft several of
chapters included here, as well as all of my former departmental colleagues
at University of Teesside, who assisted me by covering for my absence
during a second semester of leave funded by the University, the Centre for
Contemporary French Thought at the University of Sussex for affording
me a useful opportunity to present the ideas contained in Chapter 7, the
British Academy for supporting my participation in conferences in the
USA, and the editorial team at Manchester University Press for their dedi-
cation and extraordinary patience.
To Gary Hall I owe a special debt of gratitude. His support for
this project from its inception to completion has been invaluable to me,
as has his advice and his friendship over the years.
Earlier versions of two of the chapters included here appeared
as follows: ‘Medusa’s blood: Derrida’s recreational pharmacology and the
rhetoric of drugs’, Imprimatur, vol.1, 1996; ‘Deconstruction and drugs’, in
Nicholas Royle (ed.), Deconstructions: A User’s Guide (Palgrave, 2000).
1 Deposition: drugs in theory
Drugs cannot be placed securely within the frontiers of traditional disci-
plines: anthropology, biology, chemistry, politics, medicine, or law, could
not solely on the strength of their respective epistemologies, claim to
contain or counteract them. While everywhere dealt with, drugs act as
a radically nomadic parasite let loose from the will of language… Drugs
make us ask what it means to consume anything at all. (Ronell, 1992: 52)
Experimenting with drugs: or, how to take this book
Culture on Drugs comprises a series of experimental readings of a number
of texts by writers whose own diverse inquiries into the condition of
modernity have found prominence in the annals of twentieth-century
philosophy and cultural theory. This resulting cocktail of chapters I
pass on to the reader to take as they wish. Together they offer a series of
oblique and partial entries principally to the work of Freud, Benjamin,
Sartre, Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze, in each case from the perspective
of their encounters with drugs or on the basis of where the theme of
‘drugs’ touches upon their writings.
This book addresses the question of the difference of drugs – for
instance, the difference drugs make to ‘the user’. But it does so without
assuming in advance either that the difference they make – namely, to
the ‘drug taker’ – is exhaustively accounted for in the normal sense of
‘drugs’ and ‘drug use’ or that the identity of ‘the user’ ought to be exclu-
sively identified in this way either. It is, as the title suggests, ‘culture’ which
is considered to be on drugs. The specific sense of what I mean by this
will emerge in due course. Just to provide one quick example in advance:
drugs are ‘in use’ in the very writing of this book. Without them it would
not have been called for or have happened. Its existence, too, is therefore
owed to them.
Culture on Drugs thus regards cultural theory on drugs as being
inseparable from the cultural theorising of drugs. And, like the texts it
presents readings of, this book itself belongs to a wider ‘drug culture’. In
so far as ‘drugs’ figure in the production of texts – either as their direct
object of consideration, or as a theme, or, let it be said, as an imbibed
2 Culture on drugs
spur to thinking and theorising on the part of any author (as indeed is
the case in relation to several of the central texts examined here) – then all
involved, including the reader, are drawn into a relationship of proximity
to drugs, in one form or another and are subject variously to their effects.
These ‘drug effects’ are manifest in many forms and are discernible across
the body of culture in general, in the subjective movements of expressed
thought, and in the objective consequences of culture’s being on drugs
in the first place – something reflected in all the cultural products and
events, and the social and political practices engendered or orchestrated
by them. The principal focus here, however, will be on the place of drugs
in the form of culture we call ‘cultural theorising’.
The strategy I have adopted in this book involves tracing the
effects of drugs across a range of theoretical writings. One of the side
effects of this is that it can be read as providing something of an alterna-
tive introduction to cultural theory to the more orthodox synopsising
discussions of great oeuvres and ‘big ideas’ that are available. At the very
least I would want to challenge the very notion that bodies of thought
are the kind of systematic totalities they are often represented as, as well
as the idea that they can be agreeably reduced to palatable mouthfuls.
My preference is to make a meal of the minor detail and to pursue a
singular theme. What does this mean? In sympathy with what William
Burroughs says of his title Naked Lunch: ‘It means exactly what the words
say: NAKED lunch – a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the
end of every fork’ (1993: 7). What I offer here is indeed a ‘naked lunch’
at the table of recent philosophical and cultural theory, and it is drugs
which are on the menu. In fact this book’s entire menu is made up of
a collection of critical hors d’oeuvres: the ‘drugs’ theme is what enables
me to focus in detail on a wide range of titbits of modern theory at a
single sitting without succumbing to the reductionist imperative of other
kinds of ‘introduction to theory’ books. It might fairly be said that each
of these chapters wilfully reduces its scope to the exorbitant, some would
say perverse, detail – the point where drugs come into the picture. But, I
contend, it is by paying attention to the largely unremarked details of the
‘drugs’ embedded in the bigger theory pictures painted by those modern
theorists whose work is approached here that some of their most general
features can be seen to pivot decisively around encounters with drugs
– either substantively or as a theme.
Deposition 3
Narcoanalysis, pharmacography and cultural studies
In what way can cultural theory be considered an experiment, or, specifi-
cally, an experiment with drugs? Each chapter of this book provides a
possible answer to this question articulated in the context of a different
set of theoretical concerns and interests – after which it will be clear that
there could be countless others, too. I call the performance of this experi-
mental approach to the conjunction of drugs and theory narcoanalysis.1
Narcoanalysis – the critical approach to culture from the perspective of
its articulation with and by drugs – I want to suggest, has no obvious
limitations to its zone of application. I hope this work will render the field
wide open. I have adopted the term having first come across it in Avital
Ronell’s Crack Wars (1992), during the course of which she presents medi-
tations on the relationship between philosophy, literature and addiction
in the context of a reading of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. I have adapted
and deployed the strategy of ‘narcotics-centred’ critique here to my own
ends, in order to reveal how decisive elements of modern cultural theory
and philosophy can be illuminated on the basis of the theme and the
effects of drugs. Of course, various species of what could be called ‘narco-
cultural studies’ have been around for some time, if one understands the
term to refer to all investigations of culture from the point of view of its
articulations with drugs, that is. The precise character of the contribution
made here to the field narco-cultural studies as I understand this, and its
difference from all other forms of writing on drugs, is thus ultimately a
matter of the readings undertaken. There are, however, various attendant
complexities and definitional contestations relating to the terms ‘culture’
and ‘cultural study’ which must be addressed at the outset in view of the
many other ‘pharmacographies’ in circulation.
Anyone embarking on an investigation of the ‘drugs and culture’
conjunction is faced with a wide range of pharmacographies, to give a
collective name to the whole spectrum of genres and styles of writing about
drugs. (The term ‘pharmacographies’ was coined by David Lenson in his
own contribution to the field, On Drugs (1995).) To get the full measure
of this diversity it would perhaps be necessary to calculate the product of
all the senses of the two terms ‘drugs’ and ‘culture’, and lay out the result
encyclopaedic form. No doubt the rich history of pharmacography itself
warrants a dedicated study, too – a work which would simultaneously
constitute an extension to the very series it would be delineating. This is
not the place to embark on such a supplementary task. Nevertheless, in
4 Culture on drugs
order to indicate the scope and novelty of my project, it is perhaps useful
to reflect briefly on the extraordinarily diverse range of cultural phar-
macographies (as distinct from scientific and medical pharmacographies,
which, though belonging ultimately to ‘culture’, are not of direct concern
here) which comprise the field of narco-cultural studies, and to identify
the specific nature of each of their respective interests in drugs.
If, for the sake of simplicity, one thinks of cultural studies as
being concerned with ‘culture’ in terms of the three analytical dimensions
of culture as ‘way of life’, as ‘process’ (historical, political, social, economic
and so on) and as ‘creativity’ (usually understood in terms of artistic and
conceptual creativity typical of the arts and philosophy), then the articu-
lations of culture with drugs can at least provisionally be mapped in rela-
tion to three specific styles of cultural pharmacography.
Pharmacographies which are concerned with connections
between drugs and ‘ways of life’ are ostensibly anthropological in character.
Amongst them I would count classics such as Louis Lewin’s Phantastica,
Narcotic and Stimulating Drugs, first published in 1924 (Lewin 1964),
Thomas Szasz’s Ceremonial Chemistry (1974) and more recent works
of traditional pharmacoanthropology such as Richard Rudgley’s The
Alchemy of Culture: Intoxicants in Society (1993) and Goodman, Lovejoy
and Sherratt’s collection Consuming Habits (1995). These are works
which address the drugs–culture relation in ancient and modern soci-
eties, describing how tribal practices and religious belief, as well as trade,
customs and cultural production, form the cultural contexts of the mate-
rial and symbolic consumption of drugs. Modern social, political and
economic histories of drugs which adopt essentially comparable socio-
anthropological approaches to drugs and culture include, for example,
Richard Davenport-Hines’sThe Pursuit of Oblivion (2001) and Martin
Booth’s Opium: A History (1996). Even though these latter two studies are
notably also concerned with the political economy of drugs as well as with
their literary, critical and aesthetic articulations within modern culture,
and hence with human artistic creativity, they too are conceived firmly
within the anthropological paradigm. They do not in any sense attempt
to ‘use drugs’ (in the sense of move outward from ‘drugs’ as a subject
matter) to develop a critique of that epistemic paradigm, nor do they
attempt to identify the role drugs may have played in securing (or for that
matter loosening) its modern historical and conceptual normativity.
Some of the seminal texts of British cultural studies, written
from a predominantly sociological perspective, such as Jock Young’s The
