![Sample our Social Sciences journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110822/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Social-Sciences.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This article investigates the ways in which psychoactive substances, boredom, temporality, and biopolitical forces intersect to constitute the situation of homeless addiction in inner-city London. It argues that the temporal scales intrinsic to this situation can be conceptualised as an immanent field of sociopolitical, economic, and moral relations that are constituted above all by precarity. Inseparably bound up within these precarious fields are complex constellations of care and economy that place the homeless in a particular relation to each other and, simultaneously, the state. Further, it explores how homeless people use psychoactive substances to negotiate the unbearable ‘present-ness’ of their situation by displacing their subjectivities into alternative temporal states. In so doing, it interrogates the way that conflicting spatio-temporal scales fold into broader matrices of power, abjection, and governance, specifically exploring the ways in which the people most disadvantaged by this enfolding continue to navigate their way through the turbulence.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 I use the term situation in accordance with Jarrett Zigon’s theorising of the term. From his perspective, a situation can be conceived as ‘a non-totalizable singular multiple, which as such is an assembled intertwining that always has interstices, gaps, incompatibilities, and aspects of other assemblages’ (Citation2018: 83). If I am reading him correctly, a situation as Zigon understands it is the temporary and local manifestation of diffuse but interlocking social, political, moral, economic, institutional, and historical forces, creating the shared conditions of existence – the worlds – that people find themselves ‘caught up in’.
2 See also Burraway (Citation2018).
3 See Bourgois (Citation1995) for a more detailed account of the way in which hustling and drug-selling in Harlem intersects with extreme, racialised poverty to create an under-class workforce who embody the entrepreneurial autonomy of a soico-economic system that has otherwise cut them adrift.
4 To borrow a term from the work of the influential urban critic Jane Jacobs (Citation1961).
5 A commonly prescribed benzodiazepine but still a class C drug when acquired without a prescription, carrying a maximum sentence of 2 years imprisonment. Also, when taken with alcohol, the two drugs chemically interact in a way that mutually increase the ‘bioavailability’ of the other, meaning that the effects of both are amplified simultaneously. Both substances increase the efficiency of synaptic transmission of the neurotransmitter GABA by acting on its receptors, sparking a progressive reduction in inhibitory neurotransmission in the hippocampus, the brain structure that is responsible for memory. In short, their combined usage drastically increases the likelihood that the user will slip into a blackout state.
6 Anything over the 8% ABV mark can be classified as super-strength.
7 The Conservative government’s flagship policy to reform and streamline this process into a single welfare payment – known as Universal Credit – has proven itself a spectacular failure; massive implementation delays, design flaws, and administrative failures penalising the country’s most vulnerable citizens and pushing many – notably single mothers – deeper below the poverty line. See Cain (Citation2016).
8 Those who did receive housing benefit were typically already established in temporary accommodation, or else on the verge of finding privately rented accommodation. People in this position were typically women who had fallen into homelessness following violent breakdowns in former relationships. This kind a trajectory boosted them into the ‘priority need’ category, their vulnerability granting them the ‘statutory homeless’ status that pushed them to the front of the housing queue whilst their ‘intentionally’ homeless counterparts, all men in Itchy Park’s case, remained on the outside looking in.
9 Demographic statistics for the UK’s homeless populations makes it clear that the population is overwhelmingly male. Women typically find rehousing easier, be that through informal social networks or through state channels, especially if they are young, pregnant, or have children in tow.
10 Day centres around the capital were able to provide many of these items, often for free, or else at minimal cost. That said, certain items – such as clothes and sleeping bags – would typically be dispensed only on particular days of the month or week, which meant that it was easy to miss out.
11 People are typically more likely to give when it is cold outside, the shared experience of harsh temperatures seemingly lowering people’s empathic thresholds.
12 Rather than projecting Marxist theories onto Dave’s self-positioning, it should be noted that he was a self-proclaimed Marxist. He often joked that he was so far to the left that he wasn’t even on the political spectrum anymore: ‘I fell right off the side and into homelessness!’
13 Originally brought into existence under the 2014 Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act.
14 See also Throop (Citation2017) for a more detailed account of the way in which mood discloses possibilities for being, in particular during times of social and embodied suffering.
15 Local vernacular for being in the midst of heroin withdrawal.
16 See Desjarlais (Citation1997).