MAPPING ADDICTED SUBJECTION

Abstract

Conceptions of the subject have been a critical site of intervention for cultural studies, especially where such studies concern those processes by which meanings, practices, and institutions and relations of power are articulated in the constitution and control of social life. This article considers the analytic potential of re-thinking the subject, as Deleuze suggests, not in terms of ‘a subject’ but as a force-field of intensities. Following the work of Deleuze and Guattari, this article develops a cartographic approach to the study of such force-fields and applies this approach to one uniquely potent mode of modern subjection: that associated with addiction. In addition to intervening in those discourses and practices which produce contemporary addictions, this article offers a potentially useful approach to the study of such cultural epidemics, as well as further exploration of Deleuze and Guattari's significance for cultural studies.

Keywords:

• subjectivity
• addiction
• epidemiology
• Deleuze
• Guattari

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Jennifer Slack, Patty Sotirin, Dale Sullivan, Charles Stivale, Mehdi Semati, and Christa Albrecht-Crane; Phil Teigen of the National Library of Medicine; and the anonymous reviewers and editors of Cultural Studies for their assistance and support in completing this research. I also wish to acknowledge the support of Bob Johnson, Chair of the Humanities Department and Max Seal, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Michigan Technological University for grants to conduct the archival research for this project.

Notes

1. In his Presidential address regarding the impending war against Iraq on 7 September 2002, George W. Bush announced that Sadam Hussein was ‘addicted to weapons of mass destruction’.

2. The ‘X-files fan fiction addiction’ website offers a diagnostic questionnaire and a 12-step recovery plan. There are a number of fan sites by and for ‘X-addicts’ [online] Available at: http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Keep/2355/ (accessed 6 October 2001).

3. This figure appears frequently in writings on the drug problem throughout the 1920s to 1930s, but it has proven to be a gross exaggeration. A more likely figure is 100,000 (see Courtwright 1982).

4. I wish to thank the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., for permission to reprint J.B. Whitehead's diagram of force fields.

5. Becker defines addiction ‘simply as a strong habit’ (1992, p. 329), a conflation of addiction and habit which is strongly resisted in medical writing on the subject (see Anderson et al. 1998).

6. The ARC understanding of addiction borrows selectively from a loosely Freudian model. The position of ARC, as embodied in the many publications of its members, blamed poor mother–son relationships and improper psychosexual development for the ‘deviant’ personality and illicit dispositions of the addict (see Isbell 1951, Hill 1962, Felix 1939).

7. In the WHO system of classification, ‘habit’ was characterized by strong desire, not compulsion, did not imply intoxication, and produced neither dependence, tolerance, withdrawal syndromes, nor ‘harm’. Thus, addiction was largely reserved for barbiturates and opiates, and later alcohol, while habit was used to characterize alcohol and nicotine use that had become excessive.

8. Peele offers statistics from several surveys that demonstrate the proliferation of the AA model as populations show increasingly that their beliefs about addiction follow the basic AA principles outlined here.

9. My recitation of this history has been aided by Musto (1987) and by the copious review of primary sources in Terry and Pellens (1928).

10. This claim was made by Samuel Hopkins Adams, a muckraking journalist who published a series of five influential exposés on the patent medicine industry. These originally appeared under the title of The Great American Fraud in Collier's between October, 1905 and January, 1906. The five essays were subsequently collected and published by P.F. Collier and Sons in 1906.