Consuming drugs, books, tele

Posted on | October 13, 2009 | No Comments

I’ve just uploaded our co-authored article, “Underbelly, true crime and the cultural economy of infamy” on the Other Writing page. We would welcome any feedback while it’s under peer review, especially since there will likely be more to this project than just one paper. Thanks to Tim Laurie for so much help with the background coverage.

Finishing the piece the other week, I had the great fortune to read Kane Race’s Pleasure Consuming Medicine, which will definitely be adding to our revised version. Kane’s fascinating and inspiring book is full of ideas, and I want to share just a couple of them here.

The clear resonance with the story of Underbelly, in its scripted and real life forms, is the centrality of drugs. In each case, to borrow Kane’s words, “drugs are fit for incorporation within an amoral consumer logic, as commodities par excellence” (11).

Kane suggests that “one way to grasp the responsibility of drugs” is to “consider them as necessarily re-creational. When all drugs are cast on the plane of re-creation, the agonistic nature of pharmaceutical production and consumption becomes explicit: we expose what is specific, partial, and consequential about our biochemical techniques of the self” (9).

Among Kane’s wider arguments is the claim that: “At the moment that consumption becomes the normative mode of social participation and citizenship, medical authority becomes available in these discourses to fulfil the role of the moral curb on the self-administering consumer. As a result, these discourses become especially prone to political and authoritarian investment—precisely because they produce the self as the moral locus of consumption” (15).

The book provides a series of case studies to show how this plays out, whether at the local level in Sydney or through transnational media texts and health disciplines.

Kane also highlights the experiences of queer communities touched by HIV/AIDS, and how this context continues to affect drug consumption in the present. One point of this is to trouble the legal distinctions and moralising judgements that adhere to some kinds of drug consumption, and therefore some populations, more than others. But an even more forceful dimension of this project is the way that it reveals drug consumption to be symptomatic of a culture that fails to recognise or advance enough models to express desire, intimacy, care and community (see especially the final chapter, “Exceptional Sex: How drugs have come to mediate sex in gay discourse”).

Of the many poetic and powerful passages, the section describing ‘the auratic value of queer dance parties’ is among my favourite. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Kane shows how ecstasy use and the mass dance party event, set against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis, produced a set of singular experiences that lost their poignant “aura” with the commercialisation of queer lifestyles, and – as our Underbelly paper describes – the mainstreaming of club culture and ecstasy consumption. Linking this to the fortunes of Sydney’s Mardi Gras, Kane notes that: “If the large-scale queer dance party is a form in decline, this is not simply because it bcame more commercial, but because one of the primary conditions within which it came to accrue meaning and value has altered – and thankfully so” (29).

This is the bit that stuck:

What if we were to understand the dance party not as the transparent radiation of community, but as a mediated event through which a sense of community was hallucinated? The massed bodies, decorations, lights, drugs, costumes, and music combined to produce a powerful and widely accessed perception of presence, belonging, shared circumstance, and vitality at a time when the image of the gay man, dying alone, ostracized from family, was the publicly proffered alternative. To describe this experince as hallucination is not to say that it was false or untrue, for this would be to imply, incorrectly, that there is some pure, unmediated reality which it is possible to access transparently. I want to take seriously the importance of pleasure, imagination, and fantasy in the construction of new materialities. This sense of community that was animated at dance parties was real with real effects. It was realized in the affirmative apprehension of thousands of bodies presumed affected in similar ways by the accidents of history and the exclusions of heterosexual society. It was worked out in the minutiae of caring practices, the forging of dependable relations outside the family form, the inventive expression of memory and grief, the commitment to a safe-sex ethic. It was tapped into by agencies seeking to advance the public rights of gay men, lesbians, and people with HIV/AIDS, as well as to deliver health programming and to conduct research. It helped sustain a collective sense of predicament, power, care, and commitment – a shared ethos enabling wide-ranging cooperation and transformative activity. (22)

The true power of any great work of queer theory is that its insights advance our understanding of the culture at large, not merely the agendas of those seeking respite from the categories of gender or sexual identity currently favoured. Kane’s work sits among that precious group of writers and thinkers who translate experience in such a way that our ideas and hopes for another world are energised to take shape sooner. I hope a lot of people read this book!