-Raymond, L. & Walls, H.C. (2006). “Pharmacology of Cannabinoids” in M. ElSohly (ed) Marijuana and the Cannabinoids. Totowa, NJ: Humana Press.

Animals after the administration of cannabis by the mouth show symptoms in from three quarters of an hour to an hour and a half. In the preliminary stage cats appear uneasy, they exhibit a liking for the dark, and occasionally utter high pitched cries. Dogs are less easily influenced and the preliminary condition here is one of excitement, the animal rushing wildly about and barking vigorously. This stage passes insidiously to the second, that of intoxication. […] In cats the disposition is generally changed showing itself by the animals no longer demonstrating their antipathy to dogs as in the normal condition, but by rubbing up against them while constantly purring; similarly a dog which was inclined to be evil-tempered and savage in its normal condition, when under the influence of hemp became docile and affectionate. […] When standing they hold their legs widely apart and show a particular to and fro swaying movement quite characteristic of the condition. The gait is exceedingly awkward, the animal rolling from side to side, lifting its legs unnecessarily high in its attempts to walk, and occasionally falling. […] Animals generally become more and more listless and drowsy, losing the particular startlings so characteristic in the earlier stage, and eventually sleep three or four hours, after which they may be in quite a normal condition.

 -Dixon, W.E. (1899). “The Pharmacology of Cannabis Indica” in The British Medical Journal, Volume 2, Number 2028, pp. 1354-1357.

– Michel Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum” (1977)

The pain, the cut in his scalp, so unexpected and undeserved, had for some reason cleared away the cobwebs.  It flashed on him instantly that he didn’t hate the kitchen cabinet: he hated his wife, his two daughters, his whole house, the back yard with its power mower, the garage, the radiant heating system, the front yard, the fence, the whole fucking place and everyone in it…But in this dark world where he now dwelt, ugly things and surprising things and once in a long while a tiny wondrous thing spilled out at him constantly; he could count on nothing.

– Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly (1977/1991)

How can ethnography achieve “the effect of the real” (Barthes 1989; Gallagher & Greenblatt 2000)?  Is it enough simply to expand our definition of the field, to allow (post)modernity to redefine our object of study as one that is not limited to particular temporal and geographic sites?  Or is something more required?  If “realism” need not rely on representation, then what might a non-representational realism look like?

For Deleuze, the alternative to the logic of representation is the “logic of sense” (Deleuze 1990).  The logic of representation is what we typically refer to when we speak of Platonism, and is the ontological distinction between bodies and ideas, substance and form, copy and model.  This is the order of the “limited.”  It is the order of that which stays still, of the present, of adjectives and nouns, and of the fixed relationship between what gives shape and what takes shape.

The logic of sense, however, exceeds and defines the logic of representation.  It is the distinction between what falls within the logic of representation and that which does not, between the real and the simulacrum.  This is the order of the unlimited: not without end but without limitation.  It is the disorder of that which resists staying still, of the past and the future, of verbs and the infinitive.  The logic of sense puts static categories and states of being in opposition to possibilities and “rebel becomings” (2).

Deleuze finds within Platonism the key to subverting it—the logic of sense destabilizes and brings into focus the logic of representation by placing it in irreducible contrast with that which exceeds it.  In Stoic terminology, the distinction between what falls within the logic of representation and what falls outside it is the difference between “things” and “events.”  In Deleuze’s reading, everything contained within the logic of representation are “things,” while everything that exceeds that logic are “events.”  Forms, ideas, models, and categories are granted the same ontological status as substances, states, objects, and bodies—they are all things, static and defined.  Events, on the other hand, resist definition and do not belong to the logic of representation.  They are the effects of things coming together and moving apart, and have either already happened or are yet to happen.  They are “becoming[s] whose characteristic is to elude the present” (1).

Events happen “at the limit” or “on the surface” of things in that they are the effect of an impact or collision, something that happens when the order of representation is perturbed or rendered inadequate.  They are felt as surprising moments, as feelings of uncertainty, as affects that resist our attempts to categorize and delimit them.  Sense, then, is “the thin film at the limit of things and words” (31).  It is what happens. The logic of sense is the (dis)order produced by our attempts to make sense out of the contradiction between the dissonance of events and the order of things.

 This juxtaposition of sense and representation—or, more precisely, this subsumption of the logic of representation under or within the logic of sense—and the rethinking of language that it entails has potentially dramatic consequences for how we think about the writing of culture.  If moving away from representation involves collapsing the distinction between the material and the ideal, then what is the ethnos in ethnography?  If what matters is not the order we impose on the world but how we make sense out of it, what kinds of narrative tools will allow us to call attention to this process of sense-making?  Can language be used to explore its own nebulous boundaries?

Language attempts to impose static categories on things, but it is consistently unable to do so—the moment we attempt to describe something, to capture it in words, we find that it is no longer what it was before we attempted to name it.  The significance of language, and therefore of culture, does not reside in the stable relationship between what we say and what we are referring to; rather, it resides in the play between them.  “It is language which fixes the limits (the moment, for example, at which the excess begins), but it is language as well which transcends the limits and restores them to the infinite equivalence of an unlimited becoming.”  To consign language to the order of representation is to ignore its capacity to both fix and transcend limits.

When we speak of anthropology, who is this anthropos and what logoi does it inhabit?  Paul Rabinow sees us as living at the intersection of multiple and heterogeneous rationalities, each of which presents us with a unique set of problems and a unique way of engaging with ourselves and with the world.  “The act of thinking,” he writes, “is an act of modal transformation from the constative to the subjunctive.  From the singular to the multiple.  From the necessary to the contingent” (Rabinow 2003: 19).

Thought is the act of loosening the grasp of categories and rationalities.  It is a matter of identifying the assemblages of things and events that come together in particular times and in particular places, and which give form to the experience of the contemporary.  For Rabinow, ethnography is not about creating a faithful representation of the real, but rather about using language to hold it still for long enough to see what is happening.

As Foucault wrote in his 1970 review of Deleuze’s work, to speak in terms of sense and events is to see the real not as a static and predictable system of causes and effects but as something very different, something that resists our attempts to constrain it within a representational framework.  “Let us imagine a stitched causality: as bodies collide, mingle, and suffer, they create events on their surfaces, events that are without thickness, mixture, or passion; for this reason, they can no longer be causes” (Foucault 1977: 173).  Instead, the reality of the logic of sense is a space of shifting assemblages held together by “a more complex logic” than that of cause and effect, signified and sign, form and substance (173).

What is important for the philosopher—and, it would seem, for the ethnographer—is to be attentive to this uncertain excess of things and events in such a way that “the shock of difference,” when it happens, prompts us not to retreat into the darkness of the cave but to continue writing.

***

• Barthes, R. (1989). The rustle of language. Trans. R. Howard. Berkeley, University of California Press.

• Deleuze, G. (1990). The logic of sense. Ed. C. V. Boundas, Trans. M. Lester and C. Stivale. New York, Columbia University Press.

• Dick, P. K. (1991). A scanner darkly. New York, Vintage Books.

• Foucault, M. (1977). “Theatrum philosophicum.” Language, counter-memory, practice: Selected essays and interviews. Trans. D. F. Bouchard. Ithaca, Cornell University Press.

• Gallagher, C. & Greenblatt, S. (2000). Practicing new historicism. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

• Rabinow, P. (2003). Anthropos today: Reflections on modern equipment. Princeton, Princeton University Press.

Has anybody else noticed this?

Go to the Google homepage. Type a letter in the box. A list of suggestions or recommended searches pops up. This list is based on other people’s searches as well as your own personal history of searches.

Type “M”. I get the following list: Myspace, mapquest, msn, maps, mapquest driving directions, macys. So first of all, I never search for any of these things (with the exception of “maps,” which I search for with some regularity). And second of all, what is quite clear from this list is that there’s some money moving around somewhere. Unless you believe that people search for “Macy’s” more often than they search for “money.” Who knows.

Now type “e”. My list: mega millions, megan fox, and metro pcs. I don’t even know who Megan Fox is.

Now type “dica.” My list: medicann, medical dictionary, medical care. Fair enough.

Now type “l ma”. I get medical malpractice, medical malpractice lawyers, medical malpractice cases.

See where this is going? Type “r”. I get one suggestion: medical mart. What?

So what do we get when we type “medical mari”? Absolutely nothing. Google has no idea, no clue whatsoever, what I could possibly be trying to search for. Zero. Zip. Nada.

Yep: Google refuses to suggest that anybody search for medical marijuana.

Of course, you could also just hit enter.

From a recent article in the Oakland Tribune:

Oakland International Airport may be the nation’s only airport with a specific policy letting users of medical marijuana travel with the drug.

The policy is spelled out in a three-page document quietly enacted last year by the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office. It states that if deputies determine someone is a qualified patient or primary caregiver as defined by California law and has eight ounces or less of the drug, he or she can keep it and board the plane.

Deputies warn the pot-carrying passengers that they may be committing a felony upon arrival when they set foot in a jurisdiction where medical marijuana is not recognized. But they say they don’t call ahead to alert authorities on the other end.

“We never have. We’re certainly within our right to, but we never have,” said Sgt. J.D. Nelson, a spokesman for the sheriff’s office. “Our notification of the passengers is for their own safety and well-being.”

Isn’t it nice when our well-being depends on the goodwill of law enforcement officers? Aren’t these people supposed to be enforcers rather than arbiters of ethics and morals? Isn’t this the definition of a police state?

If this is what happens in the space between competing forms of legality–if in the absence of juridical clarity, life and limb depend on the choices of individual officers–then maybe we need to hurry up and get a new system in place.

NOTE (added 10/21/09 at 9:47 a.m. PST): If anyone knows the whereabouts of (or has access to) that three-page document specifying the specific policy of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, please let me know!

There seems to be a misunderstanding here.  Drugs are tools, technologies of the self, material objects that allow individuals to work on their bodies and minds in certain ways.  Of course, they haven’t always been seen in this way, and they certainly haven’t always been available to the degree or in the same way as they are today.  Today, drugs are everywhere and individuals are at the same time encouraged to use them and taught to fear them.

But to say that drugs are tools is not to claim that they’re just like hammers, ladders, crock pots, rakes, combine harvesters, toothbrushes, keyboards, paper, or ankle braces.  Drugs are not necessarily benign.  In fact, they are usually quite dangerous and many drugs just seem to demand that we use them irresponsibly.  Of course, hammers, ladders, crockpots, and toothbrushes have their own dangers, but for the purposes of most situations they are relatively harmless.

It will not do to think of drugs as tools in the sense of benign, stationary-until-picked-up, unproblematic devices for getting done what we want to get done.  When I say that drugs are tools, I do not always have in mind forks or ballpoint pens or barbecues, but rather something far more nefarious and uncertain.

To see drugs as tools is not to make them easier to deal with, not to somehow justify their (unexamined) use.  Bombs are tools, too.

A relatively young man hobbles, in good spirits, into a medical marijuana cooperative.  He’s proud of having made it to the co-op today, his new aluminum cane giving him the style, confidence, and stability to find new places to interrogate, explore, and (yes) even to obtain his medicine.  And mirrored windows notwithstanding, this place showed promise: a quiet waiting room, clear instructions for how to fill out the new patient form, and an elegant display of free stickers and fliers.  Maybe at one point these publications were to be found only in head shops and sex toy emporiums, but (today at least) they were just another glossy mound of magazines in just another doctor’s office.

The rest is pretty typical of cooperative practice these days.  The usual forms, the usual friendly-and-knowing eye contact with the man behind the desk, the usual minute of tense conversation while the patient is verified over the internet, the usual moment of unsurprised relief when the clearance is granted and the unmistakable scent of lovingly grown hydroponic cannabis oozes out the open door.

This, the young man told himself, is what a cooperative should look like: a clean glass counter, a well-stocked fridge in the corner, and row after row of tall glass jars containing well-pruned flowers of every shape and shade.  And let’s not forget the genial capped fellow behind the counter.  It’s a good situation.

“What can I get for you?  You’re definitely one of my more legitimate patients–do you mind me asking what the problem is?” He smiled, a look of real compassion of the kind you’d expect in a place like this, and pointed with a single finger at the aluminum cane.

If the patient had had just one more moment to think, one more second to remember where he was and what he was doing in this place, his words would have come out very differently.  But the question was honest, and the genuine look of care on the pharmacist’s face pulled him out of whatever cleverly constructed rhetorical response might have emerged instead.  Instead, he responded thusly:

“Actually, it has nothing to do with this,” gesturing briskly with his free hand to the wavering prosthetic.  “Actually, I’m looking for something good for anxiety and sometimes depression: a hybrid certainly, but indica-dominant.”

But as his eyes and nose surveyed the selection, the fellow’s words continued to echo in the young man’s brain: “You’re definitely one of my more legitimate patients.”  Never before had a human being in this man’s position hailed him in this way.  Not once had a pharmacist, a bartender, a drug store cashier, a hospital administrative assistant, or a drug dealer ever asked what it was that ailed him.  That had always been, if not exactly beside the point, but certainly silent in transactions like this.  The uses to which drugs–or, for that matter, the cane on which our protagonist now leaned–would be put were always a powerfully present absence in such places.

In the politics of psychopharmacology, some of the bad guys are good and some of the good guys are bad.  All is up for grabs when personal technology changes hands in the high-stakes game of drug politics, a more heterogeneous field than we may think.  Articulating the stakes of a politics of psychopharmacology is as much for the benefit of those who resist dominant regimes as for those who refuse to hear what other voices have to say.

Compassion, too, is a fluctuating field.  Not all care is created equal.  A revolution can be done wrong.  These are the thoughts that the young man should have been thinking as he calculated the differences between Cotton Candy Headband, Green Crack, Hindu Kush, and Bubblegum Skunk.  But he was too placed, to certain of his surroundings, too confident that in this liminal space all words spoken would be spoken from the side of Truth.

And that’s when the jolly fellow behind the counter nodded his head and smiled.  “Anxiety, huh?  I know just what you mean: that’s what I use it for.”

“Habit” and “inhabit” have more than a passing affinity.  To remember that we live in a space is to remember that certain habits are encouraged and others are not.  Driving an automobile, we might say that we are “encouraged” to drive on a certain side of the road. We might even say that we are “in the habit” of driving on one side or the other.  But it is hard to imagine that one who was not in the habit of driving on the appropriate side of the road would be at it for very long.  When we live in a space, a space that we design in cooperation with others, there is a fine line between habit and compulsion, its evil twin.

An unfolding entanglement of reasons, immense and cloudlike in its scope and organization, is suddenly and without trepidation quietly brought together in a single point.  It dissolves into fragments whatever it touches, slicing things into bits and allowing them to fall gently into neatly arranged stacks.  This-is, this-is-not, this-could-be, this-will-be.  The groping feeling is gone, and it is no longer necessary to wonder if a thought will attach to its object or simply fall away.  Thoughts are sticky now, and what was once a hesitant touch is now (though only for a short time) a confident incision.  Things just get done; it just works.

There is a compatibility with boxes, inscriptions, categories, lines, points, things, and surfaces that was not there before.  It has the feeling of what-should-be.  It has the feeling of something I should have already been doing.  It has the feeling of being restored to a state that I was never in to begin with.  It has the feeling of being elegantly and invisibly persuaded that all is as it should be.  It has the feeling of truth.

Perhaps there are other options, other ways of negotiating this line between what-must-be-done and what-it-is-possible-to-do.  No solution is a solution for very long, and no problem is ever really fully solved.  We need to be strategic in our choices, and get comfortable moving between habits and opportunities.  Even though thought may, for a time, “just work,” it will not do so forever.

“Who’s watching your drink? Let your hair down, not your guard.” In bright pink with big black block lettering, of course.

“Enjoy your night.  Know your limits.  Zero tolerance towards violence.”

A textual exhibition of the physiology of alcohol (and its rapacious others).  A drug defines its own textuality, its own social limits, its own legal presence — but only partly.  There’s a flexibility in the materiality of a drug, a malleability in the uses to which it can be put.  But these words — materiality, physiology, even chemistry or biology — are nonspecific, perhaps even incapable of allowing an easy movement into a zone of activity within which it is possible to affect.

A profound boredom is at work here. “I don’t know what the weather might do” is perhaps a fitting phrase, one that relates the uncertainty of being (on) alcohol: an uncertain space, a language that is almost precise, a danger that is merely apparent and probably kind: “a tiger in a trance.”

Just as “to listen” is to let the words wash over us, to write is to allow words a space to play.  Writing is hardly an analytical exercise, hardly an exercise in circumscription and determination (and least of all logocentrism) — especially when we are writing on (on) reason.  Reason — logos — needs something to bounce off of, something against and for which to assert itself and, in doing so, govern the landscape of its own impossibility.

To translate writing (as logos) into action (as ethos) is not to somehow assimilate every word, to incorporate every every morpheme of what is written — it is to have faith, to surrender (without throwing in the towel) to the play of words.  Words (and worlds) have their own agency, their own desire to move thought and action, to render logos different from what it is.

To surrender to logos is to critique logos, and it requires a recognition of things not for what they may be or what they signify, but for what they appear to be on the surface — what they are now, here.  Ignore signification and textuality.  Let being (on-on) shape its own path.

All this, of course, is to render strange.  It is the experience of traveling while still at home.  Trip at weddings.  Get high everywhere.  Be (on).

A sign can be a sign, and nothing more –: who’s watching your drink?

But Halsted, together with his illustrious friends and colleagues at Johns Hopkins, was (at first) unaware of cocaine’s tendency to escape the contexts of use in which it appears.  Cocaine, like many narcotics, are extremely dangerous when not used carefully.  In the 1880s, the deadly (and sneaky) nature of cocaine addiction was not yet widely recognized.  And even worse, physicians like Halsted had easy access to all of the latest medical gadgetry, including one particularly fascinating piece of then-recent technological wizardry that was to play a considerable role in the later explosion of cocaine and opiate abuse: the hypodermic syringe.

Suffice it to say that Nunn’s article does a great job describing the surprising quickness with which Halsted and his friends found themselves beholden to the effects of cocaine:

Unaware of the insidious ease and rapidity of cocaine addiction and its disastrous effects, the group used the drug freely and sometimes indiscriminately, but often noticed that larger doses resulted in nausea and dizziness.  Those with a cold sniffed cocaine to clear nasal passages, whereas others sniffed during theater performances, as the drug seemed to “add color to the play.”

Soon after discovering that cocaine could be far more than a simple surgical tool, far more than a way of getting patients to hold still on the operating table, Halsted discovered an ingenious way of alleviating the side-effects of cocaine addiction.  He had found a new drug, one that did a great job eliminating the pain and sickness that he found accompanied his attempts to stop using cocaine.

Halsted’s love affair with morphine would ultimately land him in a psychiatric hospital, and might have ended his career if it had not been for his continued and somewhat surprising success in publishing medical journals.  In 1885, however, at the beginning of Halsted’s journey through cocaine addiction, he published an intelligent, widely read, but nearly incomprehensible article on the anesthetic properties of cocaine.  It began with this “sentence:”

Neither indifferent as to which of how many possibilities may best explain, nor yet at a loss to comprehend, why surgeons have, and that so many, quite without discredit, could have exhibited scarcely any interest in what, as a local anesthetic, had been supposed, if not declared, by most so very sure to prove, especially them, attractive…

You get the picture; the rest is too excruciating to reproduce here.  Cocaine, and his attempts to escape its grasp, had very nearly transformed Dr. Halsted from a brilliant physician into an aphasic charlatan.  But morphine, somehow, had saved him.

This is an intriguing, and revealing, episode that shows how intertwined the histories of addiction, drugs, medicine, and medical technology really are.  But to me, the most interesting part of Nunn’s article comes right at the end.

Halsted endured a life of controlled addiction in which he apparently cured himself of cocaine abuse by substituting morphine; no less a habit, but one that allowed him to live a “courageous 30 years of fruitful activity with the haunting enemy always at hand” but without deterioration of self, health, or mentality.

What, one might well ask, is “controlled addiction”?  If addiction is marked by a loss of control, by a kind of progressive giving-up of whatever techniques of self-control and self-knowledge are important to an individual, then what does it mean for that loss to be controlled?  I think Nunn is pointing to something important here, but I’m not quite sure what it means.

Halsted is a fascinating case, and probably deserves a lot more attention than he’s already gotten–especially if his experience can tell us something about current understandings of drugs and drug addiction.  And I think that it can, particularly given the current controversies around the complete lack of effectiveness of methadone (a patented, synthetic opioid) as a treatment for opiate addiction.  Yeah, I know, we should have seen it coming.

(Thanks for pointing me in the direction of Halsted, David!)

The question should not be, what is the “modern” subject or what is “modern” subjectivity, but rather what forms of subjecthood and subjectivity—what ways of being and of being with—are made possible in particular practices and sets of practices?  We should be looking for multiple, contingent, and always-shifting subjects, and at finding ways of liberating those forms.  Freedom and liberation remain useful goals so long as we are careful that such concepts do not collapse under the weight of contradiction, ignorance, and disengagement.

How can we open up possibilities for criticism, strategy, and transformation without knowing who we are and what we are capable of?

So what forms of subjecthood and subjectivity—what forms of life, what modes of governmentality, what aesthetics of existence—appear in and around the practice of drug use?  The use of chemical technologies to alter our moods and perceptions in reliable ways entails a particular set of attitudes and orientations with respect to the experience of pleasure, the valuation of the self, notions of dependence and independence, the possibility of change, the role of the individual in society, and many others.

Consuming drugs is part of a broad and heterogeneous practical-discursive (material-semiotic) field, a field which has itself transformed over time.  Tracing the spatiotemporal contours of this field genealogically in order both to situate the subject of psychopharmacology and to make critically available an array of strategic options for responding to the demands of that subject, problematizing its existence, and forming a new one is the entire point of the politics of psychopharmacology.

“The title means exactly what the words say: naked lunch, a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.”  This is what’s on the menu:

• Attention to the heterogeneity of the pharmaceutical subject in different places and different times, with different drugs and different communities of use, each of which has its own heterogeneous genealogy.

• This includes not forgetting the complexity of actual drug use—the role of compliance, side-effects, prescriptions and availability, communities of use and abuse, drug testing, and the intertwined and proliferating discourses of cosmetic psychopharmacology and risk.

• Attention to the voices and actions of those who use drugs, as well as to the voices and actions of those who produce them.  This is in part a relationship between consumer and producer, but it is also much more than that—a relationship between those who generate drugs as technological possibilities and those who decide what works best.  The market is only one part of this—it is not a site of truth but a tool to be used (witness the decline of neoliberal forms of governmentality).

• Respect for the active, engaged, and self-critical orientation of those who use drugs, as well as for the discourses and practices that seek to limit that activity.  This includes incorporating ideas about the reciprocity of power and resistance.

Looking at psychopharmaceutical subjects simply through the lenses of psychiatry, disability, and law is not enough—though each of these is essential.  At different times and in different spaces, users can be criminals, leaders, addicts, patients, victims, victimizers, and so on.  Pharmaceutical subjects are multiply constituted across time and space.

Attention to the specificity of the sites of formation of these subjects and to the potential of those subjects to endure partially between sites is therefore absolutely crucial.