21Feb07

SOCIALLY SIGNIFICANT DRUGS
FELIX GUATIARI
Translated by Mark S. Roberts

The most important thing is to subvert the simplistic attitudes taken toward the phenomenon of drugs whether in terms of a medicalized view or in terms of psychological, sociological, or criminological ones. These simplistic attitudes are deeply rooted in all of these “specializations.”

One cannot separate the mechanisms of delinquency and criminalization from the mechanism of the drug in itself. The drugs are so costly; they involve such a lifestyle, that they imprison the addict in a sort of ghetto. There is an infernal economic machine at work here, that no one can escape unless a free distribution of drugs were to come about. Perhaps this could take place under medical supervision. But the question is inconceivable unless a new nonrepressive approach, and therefore a new relation of power between the people involved and political power, were to be established. By and large, the results would certainly be far less disastrous than the present situation, which drives addicts to live in a state of constant panic and anguish. A situation, moreover, that imbues drug use with a highly developed mythological-proselytizing-atmosphere that enables the pushers to come out on top. That is the problem. It is not the alleged escalation from soft to hard drugs that is at issue. Rather, it is a question of defusing the systems that lead to the proselytizing of drugs. Could one possibly imagine a syphilitic being forced to spread syphilis in order to survive? It seems essential to me that hard drugs have to be freely distributed for there to be a possibility of offering the addict a choice among a range of alternative products. The ways of organizing this kind of therapeutically motivated distribution would be defined by the addicts themselves, with the help of social workers, physicians, and others. But the first principle would be to proscribe any repressive intrusion into this area by the police or the judiciary.

The “scientific” methodology that defines the mechanism of hard drugs as stemming from biochemical processes, which are said to be radically different from other drugs, parallels the mythology conveyed by the addicts themselves. Alcohol is an extremely dangerous drug, and it is not because it is freely sold that there are many chronic alcoholics or cirrhosis of the liver. The same kind of regulation should apply to hard drugs. A regime of free distribution would doubtless lead to a decrease in the volume of drug use, due to the fact that it would lessen the intensity of the drug mythology, and lead to the disappearance of its principal advocates.

Before considering such an orientation, it would be helpful to closely examine an experiment in England(see Vancouver’s current heroin harm reduction program) based on these principles. It is true that a great number of addicts refused to be registered in the program, and many just equated the use of legally distributed drugs with illicit ones; but the resulting analyses must be given priority over the institutional context of this experiment, which, doubtless, was unable to discount the economic dependence and the criminalization associated with drug use. To repeat myself, the fundamental prerequisite is an unequivocal decriminalization of drugs. If this cannot be obtained from the political authorities-at the level of personal consumption and petty dealing it may be necessary for a number of militant groups and associations to take responsibility and organize alternative forms of distribution. This has been tried in France (at V) under difficult conditions, and it at least succeeded in allowing some kind of collective control over the quality of the drug product.

In my opinion, the most general form of the problem stems from the fact that the old modes of subjective territorialization have collapsed. There now exist phenomena of the type I call “echoes of the black hole,” which compel people to grab hold of territorialities, objects, rituals, altered behaviors, at any cost, rendering them ridiculous or disastrous. In this respect, one can place the love of a teenager for his motorcycle or for rock music, or the love of a child for her dolls in the same series-much less, the reterritorialization of the gang of four on its emblems, that of a household on goods consumed, or that of a ranking system used for promotions. The question of drugs, then, moves along the passages between the different social, material, and psychological drugs. Why is there a reterritorialization focused on one drug rather than on another, on one “socialized” route, or on something that will be disastrous for the individual or his or her group?

The common characteristic of hard drugs that leads us to place them on levels as disparate as the faked “suicides” of bikers at the Rungis wholesale market, and a generalized audiovisual intoxication appears to me to be the existence of a kind of subjective “black hole,” which I would characterize as microfascist. These black holes continue to multiply, proliferating in the social field. It is a question of knowing if subjectivity echoes them in such a way that the entire life of an individual, all his modes of semiotization, depend upon a central point of anguish and guilt. I propose this image of a black hole to illustrate the phenomenon of the complete inhibition of the semiotic constituents of an individual or group, which then finds itself cut off from any possibility of an exterior life. By the expression “echo of the black hole,” I wish to resonate several systems of blockage. (Example: You have a stomach cramp and you can no longer think about it; you “embody” it; you invest an erogenous zone on your pain, you torment your wife, your children, and all these domains at once resonate.)

Very few people successfully leave the world of hard drugs unscathed, apart from some rock groups that make it a form of public expression, their license to “theatricalize” their condition. The others, if I might say so, are in deep shit. It would be a mystification to seek support from those few types who are able to articulate something of their drug experience just to sustain the mythology of hard drugs.
The distinction between hard and soft drugs is, in the final analysis, rather artificial. It appears poorly grounded on a clinical level. There is a hard use of soft drugs and a soft use of hard drugs. It is always the same nervous system that is afflicted by “what happened,” and there is a replacement of thought by what, in the end, involves the density, intensity, the forms of administration, the material, subjective, and social assemblage (agencement) of drugs. ‘

In other words, what counts are not only the physiochemical characteristics of drugs, but also the style of buying, the atmosphere, the context, and the myths. And the whole question is of knowing if such complex agencies (agencements) do or do not lead to a reinforced individuation of subjectivity, usually in the sense of an inescapable solitude (solitude en impasse), or of a social and addictive entrapment.
The social grid and control imprisons most individuals between extreme Situations:
* a solitude without recourse
* a, complete inability to accept any type of solitude, and thereby one is constantly draw to all modes of dependence, all the “hang-ups”: sports, television, married life, the pecking-order, and others.

Hard drugs seem to heighten the first situation and soft drugs the second, insofar as they sometimes lead to an overcoming.

Soft drugs are consumed by people who build a microeconomy of desire, that is, mare or less collective assemblages (agencements collectifs) at the center at which drugs intervene only as a lesser constituent.

A drug can be said to be soft from the moment it ceases to work in the sense of the above subjective individuation, of an entrapment, of a break with external realities. Those who use them effect collective assemblages of enunciation (agencements collectifs d’enonciation), allowing certain individuals to remove their inhibitions; to question their lifestyles, their moral and political preferences, their social and material environment.

One of the formative elements of the myth of hard drugs lies in the idea that they inspire a specific and novel kind of production. There would thus be a culture linked to drugs-a theme exploited particularly by the “Beat Generation.” This mystification appears to” me to run parallel to that established with regard to the art of the insane. Consider, for example, the two short films Henri Michaux has devoted to hallucinogenic drugs. In point of fact, they don’t have very much to do with the experience of drugs! Certain images are extremely beautiful, but’ what the film really illustrates is Henri Michaux’s literature, and not at all the modes of semiotization proper to drugs. It is aberrant to even imagine the existence of an art, specific to the insane, children, addicts,’ etc. That a child or madman produces these artworks only implies that its production is essentially infantile or mad! Certain drug environments develop Certain cultures, but one cannot infer from this that drugs create a specific mode of expression.

Perhaps anthropological and linguistic studies will one day demonstrate’ that far from belonging to a marginal world, drugs have played a foundational role in all societies, in all cultural and religious areaS. One might think that it was the use of drugs, beginning in the Paleolithic era, that contributed to producing the earliest “ascent” of human language (which I have called, in another connection, “paradigmatic perversion”). But the solitary drugs of capitalism very rarely function in the collective mode, which was, for example, the case with shamanism. It is our, entire society that is drugged, that “hardens” its drugs, and that connects them increasingly to a taste for disaster, to a drive for the end of the world.
There is no longer anything to say, nor anything to do. The only thing left is to follow the movement. Fascism and Stalinism, were collective hard drugs. Consumer society shortens the road to passivity and death. All the less need to build death camps; one can design one on one’s own.

In essence, the break between hard and soft drugs occurs between a new lifestyle-I prefer here to call it a “molecular revolution” rather, than a new culture-and the microfascist elements of industrial capitalist and bureaucratic socialist societies. I will always stand by, be in solidarity with, the addicts, such as they are, against their repression. But this doesn’t imply a defense for hard drugs:, which I consider to be essentially microfascist in nature. Not insofar as they are chemical molecules, but to the extent that they are molecular assemblages of desire (agencements moleculaires de desirs) crystallizing subjectivity in a vortex of abrogation.

The way in which drugs and psychosis are assimilated or, rather, subtly differentiated, appears to me “to be seductive, but dangerous. In the case of psychosis, one would experience an attempt to overcome the disabling semiotics of the body, whereas drugs present a micropolitics of the will,,)Jn urge “to perform this disabling by oneself. I do not believe this idea i~ tenable. I would always depart from the idea of an assemblage (agencement), of the importance of the, assemblage over its components. The design, I believe, is not the delusion, symptom, or the hallucination. Rather, it is something that implies much more and much less thad the particular; it includes parts of the socius, economic structures, organic functions, and an ecological environment. Addicts don’t have access to a great deal more initiative (Roberts translation probably doesn’t do justice to what Guattari said here, I would suggest the pair of words: agency and code) than psychotics. I am here pushing a process of responsibility and accountability that I myself often challenge. A psychotic is a psychotic. lt’s not his or her fault. But an addict is a filthy bum; he’ or she is just a goad con artist. Anything that even provides pseudoscientific support for this genre of collective fantasy should, it seems to me, should be examined under a magnifying glass and disassembled.

We must en with the idea of collective responsibility and accountability. There are SOme types who are situated in a field of micropolitical possibility, leaving a way out, and others who find themselves at a complete impasse. This depends both on objective and micropolihcal facto1!s at the level of the most intimate and immediate assemblage of enunciation (agencement d’enonciation). There are those who, in a flood, reach out and hang on to a plank, and those who are swept away. It is necessary to arrive at a kind logic, not dualistic, but triplistic, multiplistic, polyvocal, that gives both a full responsibility and a full irresponsibility to individuals, according to the micropolitical arrangement through which one considers them.

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