Addiction phobia: Foucault, abstract governance, and the fascination with materiality in contemporary critical studies of addiction

ABSTRACT

This article explores how the field of critical addiction studies – which can be traced back to the late twentieth century – has used Foucauldian social theory on governance to challenge dominant biomedical and moralistic models of addiction and to account for the ways in which addiction discourse and practice reproduce purifying, essentialist and singular assumptions about behaviour, bodies and desire. Starting from Foucault’s late critique of the neoliberalist phobia of the state, and Dean and Villadsen’s subsequent analysis of how this phobia ironically appears to haunt Foucauldian as well as other versions of poststructuralist social theory, the article asks whether a similar phobic tendency can be identified in Foucauldian accounts of addiction, although in this case directed towards addiction as a discursive centre. Analysing accounts of addiction provided by several critical addiction scholars, the article investigates how this more general tendency in relation to Foucauldian and poststructuralist theory is enacted in and structures a number of key points in contemporary critiques of addiction. Through detailed analyses of how critics have framed addiction as governmentality and an epidemics of the will, related addiction to habit, dealt with tensions within the discourse of addiction, raised issues of materiality, and aligned themselves with the heterogeneity of bodies, behaviours, and desires, the article claims that the field of critical addiction studies reduces addiction to abstract governance and avoids seriously engaging with the structure and dynamics of addiction from a decentred social theoretical perspective.

KEYWORDS:

• Addiction
• Foucault
• governmentality
• subjectivism
• materiality
• desire

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments to earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 It should be noted that this abstract knowledge is referred to using an array of terms like ‘essentialist’, ‘universal’, ‘metaphysical’, ‘territorial’, ‘molar’, and ‘totalizing’, all denoting the same reductionist logic.

2 Keane notes, ‘Unlike compulsions and addictions, which require insight into buried feelings and conflicts to be remedied, habits can be altered without any excavation or examination of the self. It is this very characteristic of habits, their location on the surface of the subject, which can disrupt the understanding of addiction as the expression of a fixed, unified and fundamentally pathological identity’ (2002, 187).

3 In comparison, Robin Room’s (2011) analysis of the discourse on moderate drinking as part of liberal consumerism, even if it links the temperance movement, state regulations, neoliberal morality and the discourse on moderation, also indicates crucial tensions between, for instance, regulations and capitalist interests. Unlike the insistence on a fundamental molar apparatus, his discussion points to a more complex history implying different powers, each with their own particular logics and problematic tendencies.

4 This reduction is symptomatic of the continuity thesis developed in critical studies of addiction, and clearly discernible in often-cited works like those of Levine (1978, 2015). Levine’s historical description of the addiction discourse and the American temperance movement as parts of a single modern governance through will is, for instance, conditioned by his systematic way of obscuring the specificity of AA’s disease notion.

5 Thus, ultimately, Valverde’s position is similar to Keane’s claim in relation to the recovery discourse’s claim that ‘the addict identity operates as a master identity which comes to explain everything about the subject’ (Keane 2002, 187).

6 In this respect, Valverde’s study prefigures Melissa Bull’s genealogy of international and national drug control systems in Governing the Heroin Trade.

7 This is very much in line with Bull’s (2008, 153) argument that current forms of governance of drugs represent a kind of authoritarian control paradoxically committed to liberty, and as such are related to the will of the individual to control his or her desire.

8 For instance, this focus can be contrasted with Room’s analysis of tensions between strong state-sanctioned control systems around drinking and commercial interests and neoliberal, free-market ideologies pushing for a more open alcohol market (2010, 2011).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fredrik Palm

Fredrik Palm is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the Department of Sociology, Uppsala University, Sweden. His research covers social theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and sexuality studies, and particularly concerns issues of subjectivity and desire in contemporary society. He is currently working on a project that explores different ways to develop contemporary frameworks on addiction through critical, social theory.