Desiring assemblages: A case for desire over pleasure in critical drug studies
Introduction
In the early 1990s, Richard Klein explored – in poetic detail – the many joys of smoking, showing how acknowledgement of these joys was necessary in order to fully understand and deal with the grief associated with quitting (Klein, 1993). Still one of my favourite cultural texts on drug use, Klein’s Cigarettes are Sublime, is certainly about pleasure, and the importance of incorporating an appreciation of pleasure into any serious attempts at public health or harm reduction. But what it also shows is that the joys of smoking involve something bigger, or deeper, than pleasure: experiences that cannot be fully encapsulated by that concept. The aesthetic beauty of smoke curling upwards; the new relations forged with the lungs and breath; the shifting sensations of the body and its postures; the thrill of altered temporalities, spatialities and social connections; the visceral intensity of life and death so acutely inter-twined. One may indeed feel a certain pleasure associated with these things, but they also enact a range of corporealities that have little to do with pleasure. What Klein does then, is render palpable not just the pleasures of smoking, but the complex desiring-assemblages (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) that they bring into being, and which we will need to make sense of if we are to think seriously about harm reduction.
Critical drug researchers have long pushed for an acknowledgement of pleasure in discourses of drug use (see for example: Bunton and Coveney, 2011, Coveney and Bunton, 2003, Duff, 2008, Holt and Treloar, 2008, Moore, 2008, Race, 2008, Valentine and Fraser, 2008). Many others have noted the value of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the assemblage for making sense of the spatiality and sociality of drug use events (see for example: Bøhling, 2014, Duff, 2014, Duff, 2007, Fraser, 2006, Malins, 2004a; Malins, Fitzgerald, & Threadgold, 2006). Far less attention, however, has been paid to the possibilities opened up by Deleuze’s related concept of desire (for exceptions see: Fitzgerald, 1998, Fitzgerald, 2007, Fitzgerald, 2010, Leahy and Malins, 2015, Malins, 2004b, Malins, 2011). This is somewhat surprising given the close connection that exists between pleasure and desire, and given that assemblages are, for Deleuze and Guattari, first and foremost ‘desiring machines’: networks of bodies (people, things, discourses) that operate to machine (join, cut, channel, free, block) flows of desire. It is also surprising given the frustratingly little impact that attempts to include pleasure in harm reduction have made outside the academic realm. Despite enriching understandings of drug use, and posing an undeniable challenge to dominant accounts of addiction, acknowledgement of drug-related pleasures continues to be avoided and feared by policy makers, and has had little lasting influence on drug policy, education or practices of harm reduction.
In this paper, therefore, I bring Deleuze and Guattari’s unique conception of desire into focus, showing first how it connects to and differs from pleasure, and then exploring its potentials for critical drug studies and harm reduction. I argue that a Deleuzo–Guattarian ontology of desire offers a more useful tool than pleasure for making sense of the complex relations that form between drugs and bodies, and accounting for the diversity of drug use experiences, practices and motivations. I also suggest that it may have a wider strategic and political value. For while attending to pleasure does make an important intervention into and against pathologising narratives of addiction, it does little to challenge discourses of criminality, and may be inadvertently working to keep in place the very binaries and neoliberal western subjectivities that underpin both these dominant approaches. By bringing desire to the fore – in a way that repositions rather than erases pleasure – I suggest we have a greater chance at challenging both medical and criminal justice responses to drug use, enriching understandings of harm reduction, and enacting assemblages that enhance, rather than diminish, bodily capacities.
Section snippets
Pleasure in critical drug studies
The absence of pleasure in dominant accounts of drug use has been a longstanding frustration for critical drug researchers (Holt & Treloar, 2008). While drug-related pleasures feature abundantly in art and popular culture, they have been sorely neglected in more official accounts of drugs. This neglect has not only been apparent in drug policy and education, where any mention of pleasure seems to be positioned as a danger to the goals of deterrence and prevention, but also in sociological drug
Desire vs. pleasure
Despite having great affinity with the work of Foucault, Deleuze, 1997, Deleuze, 2001 was notoriously critical of his reliance on the concept of pleasure, and is known for having disagreed publically with him on its philosophical utility. Where Foucault, 1986, Foucault, 1990 positions pleasure, its uses and moderations, as one of the key sites for an ethics of living, Deleuze can “hardly bear the word pleasure” (Deleuze, 1997, np) for it represents to him a limited and constrained mode of
Drug use and desire
It is no secret that Deleuze and Guattari were fairly negative about the kinds of desiring-machines or assemblages that psychoactive drugs tend to establish (Malins, 2004b). As both an activist and a philosophy lecturer at the Sorbonne, Deleuze was despairing at the way he saw drug use impacting on some of his students’ academic capacities, and no doubt considered it likely to be impacting negatively on their revolutionary potentials too. When describing the dangers associated with
Beyond pleasure and pain (and other problematic binaries)
Motivation for the use of drugs that are commonly considered to be dangerous, illicit or both, is most often put down to either the need to escape pain or suffering (including suffering induced by drug withdrawals), or the supposedly inverse longing to experience pleasure (most notably the chemical ‘high’ or euphoria a drug is associated with). While the former is most often aligned with pathologising – and sometimes sympathetic – narratives of trauma, addiction and disease, the latter tends to
Evaluating and responding to drug assemblages
Critical drug researchers have already shown how an appreciation of socio-political, spatio-temporal and embodied contexts is necessary to understand, evaluate and respond to the complex ways that benefits and harms manifest in drug use events (see for example Dilkes-Frayne, 2014). And as Fraser (2006) has shown, drawing on the new materialist work of Karen Barad (2003), it is better to think of these contexts and bodies as always already intra-acting, rather than as separate, pre-existing inter
Challenging the war on drugs
While the concept of pleasure can illuminate the limits of addiction discourses, it is less capable of mounting a challenge to those of prohibition and the war on drugs. Pleasure is, for example, more likely to exacerbate than challenge the notion of individual responsibility that underpins criminal justice responses. The pleasure-seeking subject is easily portrayed as being responsible for their own illicit drug-related demise, thereby rendering them accountable under law and deserving of
Conclusions
Properly accounting for the pleasures of drug use is essential if harm reduction research, policy and practices are to truly resonate with embodied experiences and mediations of risk. Yet the concept of pleasure alone does not adequately express the passions and transformative joys that motivate and arise from drug using assemblages. Nor does it sufficiently decentre the subject, to convey the complex ways that drug using bodies emerge in and through their intra-active relations with the world.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the editors, and two anonymous reviewers, for their insightful feedback and interesting ideas (as well as picking up on some typos), all of which have helped improve the paper.
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