Elsevier

International Journal of Drug Policy

Volume 49, November 2017, Pages 126-132
International Journal of Drug Policy

Desiring assemblages: A case for desire over pleasure in critical drug studies

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2017.07.018Get rights and content

Abstract

While critical drug researchers have long pushed for an acknowledgement of pleasure in discourses of drug use, few have explored the alternative possibilities offered by Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of desire. In this paper I map out some of the conceptual differences between pleasure and desire and explore the opportunities opened up by attending more closely to desire in critical drug studies. I suggest that while discourses of pleasure do make an important intervention into and against dominant narratives of risk, harm, and addiction, they may inadvertently be working to keep in place the very binaries and forms of neoliberal western subjectivity that support those narratives. I argue that a Deleuzo–Guattarian ontology of desire is a better tool with which to make sense of the complex relations that form between drugs and bodies, challenge medical and criminal responses to drug use, and bring forth assemblages that enhance, rather than diminish, bodily capacities.

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.

References (33)

  • R. Bunton et al.

    Drug’s pleasures

    Critical Public Health

    (2011)
  • J. Coveney et al.

    In pursuit of the study of pleasure: Implications for health research and practice

    Health (London)

    (2003)
  • G. Deleuze et al.

    Anti-oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. (trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem & H.R. Lane)

    (1983)
  • G. Deleuze et al.

    A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. (trans. B. Massumi)

    (1987)
  • G. Deleuze

    Negotiations: 1972–1990. (trans M. Joughin)

    (1995)
  • G. Deleuze

    Desire & pleasure (trans. M. McMahon), unpaginated

    (1997)
  • Cited by (39)

    • The potential of mind wandering in the recovery from addiction

      2022, International Journal of Drug Policy
      Citation Excerpt :

      It is precisely through the psychiatric narrative's imposition upon someone who recovers from addiction that they paradoxically learn to cope with their addictive behaviour. Today, no single academic discipline alone is able to understand the nature of addiction coherently (Fox, 2011; Oksanen, 2013; Coonfield, 2008; Malins, 2004, 2017). That is why it is time to advocate rethinking addiction as a mode of existence, an affective process in which artistic research is intercessing, starting in the middle of the addiction's liminality.

    • A geology of drug morals

      2021, International Journal of Drug Policy
    • Connections built and broken: The ontologies of relapse

      2020, International Journal of Drug Policy
      Citation Excerpt :

      Deleuzo-Guattarian methodologies and systems of thought have contributed to the unfolding of drug-related realities and practices as not fixed, but fluid and emergent (Bøhling, 2014; 2015; 2017; Dennis, 2016; Dilkes-Frayne, 2014; Dilkes-Frayne & Duff, 2017; Duff, 2014;, Duff, 2014b; Farrugia, 2015; Fitzgerald, 1998; 2010; Malins, 2004; 2017).

    • Enlightened hedonism? Independent drug checking amongst a group of ecstasy users.

      2020, International Journal of Drug Policy
      Citation Excerpt :

      Examining this group of drug users as consumers (Fitzgerald, Broad & Dare, 1999), we draw on the work of Slavoj Žižek to construct a framework that contextualises IDC in the wider landscape of neoliberal consumer capitalism and hedonic consumption. Heeding calls from critical drug studies, this framework acknowledges pleasure as a central component of subjecthood (Valentine & Fraser, 2008), but extends this analysis by looking beyond pleasure to an ontology of desire (see Malin, 2017). This is motivated by a belief that desire is integral to subjectivity and defining who we are (e.g. politics, culture).

    • Drugs as technologies of the self: Enhancement and transformation in LGBTQ cultures

      2020, International Journal of Drug Policy
      Citation Excerpt :

      Read together these accounts challenge the common narrative of drug use as driven by narcissistic hedonism. In addition to demonising the use of drugs, this dominant narrative reinforces a series of binary distinctions between medications/drugs, therapeutic/recreational use and pain/pleasure (Malins, 2017). But as our participants’ experiences amply demonstrate, these distinctions do not hold: as we know, illicit drugs can be used therapeutically, just as pharmaceutical drugs can be used for recreational and pleasure-seeking purposes.

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text