Nicole Vitellone
The narratives of drug discourse do not proceed as simple discussions of ‘fact’, but instead assess the moral and symbolic value of particular paths and patterns of risk and blame. These stories must achieve the rhetorical effect of realism – ‘facts’ must overshadow the values and images they inflect (Nancy Campbell, 2000:38).
Introduction
Much has been written about Pierre Bourdieu’s The Weight of the World (1999).
Presented as a collection of interviews, the stories in this volume are understood to mark a shift in concern for Bourdieu, from a predicament with the taste prac- tices of the respectable classes to the predicament of the socially marginalized.
As Roy Boyne (2002:121) has suggested The Weight of the World marks a shift from concerns with social inclusion to exclusion. What characterizes the accounts of social suffering documented in The Weight of the World is the length of interview material presented and under-theorised interview data. Boyne sug- gests Bourdieu’s tendency towards a descriptive account of the social lives of the inhabitants of French housing projects and his reluctance to theorise these spaces is strategic: ‘He did not want to fix the meanings of these spaces in advance, since he knew they are places of kaleidoscopic experience, and so he did not always clearly say they are places of exclusion . . .’ (2002:125).
Much of the impetus behind this methodological approach would appear to stem from Bourdieu and Waquant’s critique of the use and misuse of the exclu- sionary and universalising concept ‘underclass’ in the US and Europe:
. . . a fictional group, produced on paper by the classifying practices of those schol- ars, journalists and related experts in the management of the (black urban) poor who share in the belief in its existence because it is well-suited to give renewed scientific legitimacy to some and a politically and commercially profitable theme to mine for the others. . . . Inept and unsuited in the American case, the imported concept adds nothing to the knowledge of European societies (Bourdieu and Waquant, 1999:49).
But whilst the stories in The Weight of the World are understood to provide a more nuanced account of social suffering, avoid the trappings of cultural
imperialism, and especially the ‘imposition of a vision of a world’ (Bourdieu and Waquant, 1999:50), Angela McRobbie argues in The Weight Of The World
‘we are presented with the confident assumption of knowledge of the other’
(2002:132). McRobbie suggests this is the case since Bourdieu does not analyse the social and cultural contexts in which the interviews take place, and as a con- sequence ‘these testimonies exist merely as the stated truths of personal experi- ence’ (2002:131). With the exception of the chapters by Bourgois and Waquant on US crack using cultures, (which McRobbie considers to be ‘more rounded and persuasive’ as they ‘are able to demonstrate their familiarity with existing scholarship on race and poverty’ (2002:135)), McRobbie argues that for the remainder of the chapters ‘on occasion the respondents appear to be exploited for their own grief’ (2002:135). McRobbie sees the problem with The Weight of the Worldas resulting from Bourdieu’s ‘antipathy to cultural studies’ (2002:136).
In their different ways, both Boyne and McRobbie suggest that to avoid the positioning of the socially excluded as other, as outside of the social, what is required is that these voices be heard alongsidecomplex levels of theorising. In this chapter, I want to pursue this line of inquiry further and, in particular, address McRobbie’s claim that such a critical balance is achieved in sections of The Weight of the World, specifically in Philippe Bourgois’ groundbreaking ethnography on Puerto Rican crack dealers in East Harlem. By engaging with this much cited and award-winning ethnography,In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio(1995), I address Bourgois’ socio-structural analysis of crack and social suffering. I show how within his account of crack addiction, Bourgois produces an explicit form of empirical knowledge of illicit drug use as involving changing gender relations. However, in so doing, I argue Bourgois imposes a gendered vision of the social world onto his empirical data. Whilst Bourgois’ theoretical intervention is called into question by Lisa Maher in her ethnographic observations of women drug users in Harlem, it is also, I will argue destabilized by recent feminist analyses of contemporary drug experiences as figured by medical discourses, drug policy and the media. What these discursive and textual analyses of addiction offer for understandings of the experience of drug use and social suffering is not so much knowledge of the other in the world but rather the cultural conditions and political and social effects of this othering.
By engaging with and moving beyond existing drug ethnographies of social suffering (and their critiques) this chapter draws attention to a further underly- ing assumption in Bourgois’ work. Specifically, I address the division put in place by Bourgois between the culture of crack, on the one hand, and the nature of substances on the other. In so doing, I will suggest this division between the
‘substance’ and the ‘social’ evades the matter of crack and especially its rela- tions with the materialisation of the social. Indeed, more generally, I will suggest that ethnography as a method evades the nature of substances, their embodied effects, and the relationship of substances to the social. The chapter therefore aims to show that the experience of social suffering cannot take for granted or indeed assume the matter of substances – particularly the use of crack and
heroin – are simply effects of social exclusion, which can be measured via ethno- graphic observation. Rather I aim to address how it is that substances them- selves have come to be inculcated in the social in ways that transform the nature of drugs, the experience of substances and the culture of addiction. Thus I will argue Bourdieu’s notion of the habitus – as the embodiment of the socio- cultural – should be extended to incorporate non-human matter such as crack and heroin. I will do so by examining British child poverty campaigns as well as recent British social realist films in which issues of heroin addiction are key.
In so doing, I aim to create a reformulated notion of the habitus, which does not close off the matter of drugs but recognizes various substances and the tech- niques of their consumption as part of the embodied dispositions which make up the habitus. In addition I aim to show how such substances play a key role in the cultural production of the fictional group the ‘underclass’.
The structure of crack
In his richly detailed ethnographic account of social suffering, Philippe Bourgois explains how crack use in the US inner city spaces concerns ‘extreme forms of structural violence’ (2003:32), with the highest proportion of crack addicts found amongst ‘the most exploited population groups suffering from the most intense forms of systematic racial discrimination and spatial segregation’
(2003:32). Bourgois’ political economy perspective stresses the need to under- stand crack addiction as involving a shift from industrial to post-industrial service based economies, a shift that concerns structural unemployment and the withdrawal of government from urban US settings. The crack epidemic among African Americans, Latinos (especially Puerto Ricans) and working-class Lumpen whites, Bourgois argues, ‘was the all-too-logical product of Ronald Regan’s neo-liberal policies that dismantled the social welfare safety net and replaced it with the carceral dragnet’ (Bourgois, 2003:36). Bourgois argues further that the infrastructural problems facing unemployed or drug addicted Puerto Rican men include a crisis in patriarchal social organization and control caused by rural urban migration, female empowerment and male economic feminisation. Moreover, this radically changing social structure is understood as having such a negative impact on masculine gender identities that a crisis of masculinity emerges in his ethnography dialogues ‘as a central research focus’
(1996:414). Thus it would appear that following Bourdieu, Bourgois finds ‘the idea of masculinity is one of the last refuges of the identity of the dominated classes’ (Bourdieu, 1993, in Fowler, 2003:469). As Fowler elaborates ‘one of the chief distinctions of Bourdieu’s theory of masculine domination is its capacity to grasp simultaneously both the purely subjective, symbolic stakeswhich pre- occupy men when they experience struggles between each other for reputation, and the economic/political interestsfuelling their actions’ (Fowler, 2003:472).
In Bourgois’ ethnography of crack use, structural transformations in eco- nomic relations are central to his account of the gendered experience of social
suffering. Moreover, he argues ‘the crisis of patriarchy in El Barrio expresses itself concretely in the polarization of domestic violence and sexual abuse’
(1995:215, my emphasis). What creates the conditions for such violence, par- ticularly violence against women both within and outside of the home is ‘the complicated process whereby women are carving out a new public space for themselves’ (Bourgois, 1996:424). In other words, according to Bourgois the mis- match between a masculine habitus and an increasing feminized public sphere produces a male crisis, one that takes expression in interpersonal physical vio- lence. This power shift is illustrated well in his account of Primo, who was sup- ported by a female crack dealer, Candy:
After several months of the patriarchal role reversal of being economically supported by a woman and forced to satisfy her sexual desires upon demand, however, he attempted to recoup his personal sense of male respect by the only means immedi- ately at his disposal: public physical violence. Years later, in crackhouse conversations, he emphasized his outrage over how his sense of masculinity was ‘dissed’ (disre- spected) by Candy’s violation of domestic roles (Bourgois, 1996:416).
Clearly, what stands out from Bourgois’ Bourdieusian understanding of gender are a series of assumptions about social suffering as concerning alienation from a masculine gender identity, and a patriarchal socio-economic structure in crisis.
Gender in drug ethnographies
Following Bourgois commitment to ethnography ‘as a key to understanding extreme social suffering’ (Bourgois, 1999:62), Lisa Maher’s ethnographic field work on the lives of drug using women in New York City takes up and chal- lenges some of these assumptions regarding gender and social suffering. For instance, Maher’s (1997) account of gender for homeless – mostly ethnic minority – women crack cocaine users in three Brooklyn neighbourhoods poses a rather different explanation of social suffering from that of Bourgois’ in the sense that she does not assume a mismatch between habitus and field in her account of women’s lives. Instead of seeing women’s participation in an infor- mal street-based drug economy as producing autonomous self interested agents or as positioning women as dependant victims of drugs and abusive men, Maher’s observations of drug user’s everyday interactions and exchanges – both violent and non-violent – are considered to be survival strategies. These include the mutual sharing of drugs, needles, valuable information, clothing and food (Maher, 1997:36). But Maher also questions Bourgois’ depiction of the drug economy as male domain whereby economically marginal males ‘reconstruct their notions of masculine dignity around interpersonal violence, economic parasitism, and sexual domination’ (Bourgois, 1996:414). She argues:
This account suggests that the ‘backlash’ against feminism has filtered through to the street-level drug culture where it gains expression in violence against women. Implicit is a desire to comprehend the perceived threat to ‘hegemonic masculinity’ presented
by women crack users. The validity of this argument is ultimately contingent on the degree to which one accepts that women crack users have challenged traditional gender roles and that patriarchal gender relations have been undermined as a result.
While Bourgois’ (male) informants may perceive this to be the case,accepting such perceptions at face value may misrepresentnot only the position of women in the drug economy but the position of women more generally, and that of minority women in particular. A variant of the old ‘she asked for it’ theme, the notion of a male back- lash is neither unique to gender relations in the crack economy, nor does it provide an accurate representation of all such relations (Maher, 1997:14, my emphasis).
Even though over a third of her respondents had experienced physical violence whilst growing up, these women ‘perceive themselves neither as powerless victims nor as emancipated and independent, nor – as their own accounts demonstrate – are they without agency and recourse to innovative forms of resistance’ (Maher, 1997:19). By addressing the physical violence, economic hardship and social deprivation faced by women working in the street level drug economy as central to understandings of how power operates, particularly in terms of gender, race and class relations, Maher calls into question Bourgois’
insistence that for his male respondents their experience of the drug economy is structured by class relations and in particular poverty and social marginalization. Such an account of social suffering Maher argues falls short since ‘the privileging of class – or indeed race or gender – fails to provide an adequately nuanced explanation of the operations of systems of social stratifi- cation inthe drug economy’ (Maher, 1997:170, my emphasis). Maher therefore finds Bourgois’ hegemonic account of masculinity troubling since it ‘fails to elaborate the nature of women’s participation in the drug economy and the ways in which their gendered status structures this participation’ (Maher, 1997:13).
Bourgois’ account of the structural transformation of the social and social- ity as involving a feminization of the public sphere is complicated further by Lisa Adkins’ critical analysis of detraditionalized accounts of the economy. In Adkins’ analysis such readings of a feminised economic field are understood to involve not so much a ‘failure to analyze and incorporate gender’ (Maher, 1997:13) but a particular theoretical reading of Bourdieu’s work on habitus.
According to Adkins ‘Bourdieusian-influenced accounts of transformations in gender in late modernity fail to register that . . . [a lack of fit between habitus and field] does not concern a liberal freedom from gender, but may be tied to new arrangements of gender’ (Adkins, 2003:34). Interestingly this reconfigura- tion of gender emerges from Bourgois’ (1995:278) fleeting analysis of the crack epidemic in the media and popular culture. Here he finds that public represen- tations of crack users position women as not simply liberated from gender – through a patriarchal role reversal – but that the cultural narrative of crack in the mid 1990s becomes the very site for a re-traditionalized account of gender:
‘The distinctive feature of the crack epidemic of the late 1980s and early 1990s . . . was that instead of an ethnic group or a social class being demonized for their proclivity for substance abuse, women, the family, and motherhood itself were assaulted. Inner city women who smoked crack were accused of having
lost the “mother-nurture instinct” ’ (Bourgois, 1995:278). Maher also touches on this particular story of crack in the media and popular culture. Specifically, Maher (1997:56) draws attention to press reports whereby ‘women crack users have been held responsible for the creation of a “bio-underclass” of “crack babies”, said to be lacking “the central core of what it means to be human”
(New York Times, 17 September 1989)’. But Maher is quick to dismiss ‘such partial representations [which] have served to obscure critical aspects of drug use behaviour’ (1997:56). Indeed Maher is both critical of such media repre- sentations and firmly committed to the methodology of ethnography for telling the story of ‘those who live at the margins of our own society’ (1997:208). Con- sequently she argues against discursive and textual analyses, which ‘evade issues of power, politics and participation’ (1997:207–208), since ‘textual cleverness side-steps power relations’ (1997:207).
The obvious problems with textual and discursive analyses of crack, high- lighted by Maher’s study, concern questions of re-stigmatisation via a lack of engagement with complex networks of power relations in people’s everyday lives.
But similar criticisms have also been made of the construction of reality and empirical truths in some drug ethnographies, particularly in relation to gender.
In UsingWomen: Gender,Drug Policy and Social Justice Nancy Campbell (2000) draws attention to what she sees as the problems of realism in many drug ethno- graphies. Campbell argues ethnographic studies run the risk of confirming stereotyped expectations of drug users as members of an underclass. In relation to gender, Campbell points out drug ethnographies often position drug use by men as normative, and part of male risk taking and a masculine identity, involv- ing the street, violence and crime, whilst simultaneously positioning drug use by women as compromising family, domestic and parenting roles, thus reaffirming the common place view that drug taking behaviour in women concerns gender deviance. In many ways, Campbell’s criticisms of drug ethnographies echo McRobbie’s critique ofThe Weight of the World, especially the concern that such visions of the world fall short of a broader understanding of the historical and cultural contexts of social suffering.
‘Crack’ and its discursive effects
Campbell’s project follows the discursive construction of drug use in US drug control policies and the political effects of such policies for women. And while Maher warns against the dangers of such a textual analysis, Campbell’s project indicates that textual and discursive analyses of addiction need not necessarily evade issues of power and understandings of everyday social suffering. For instance, Campbell argues historically the discourses on women and drug use, including the recent US controversies around “crack babies” and “crack moms”
‘exercise materialeffects that shape the experience and interpretation of addic- tion’ . . . (2000:6, my emphasis). In the case of “crack moms”, Campbell points out that the representation of crack as concerning the destruction of the mater-
nal instinct extended well beyond the media and popular culture and ‘was the commonly identified source of the [drug] policy problem’ (2000:170). Moreover, the effects of locating the social problem of crack cocaine with women them- selves not only involved the ‘the deflection of responsibility for social problems’
(2000:170) onto the figure of the ‘crack mom’, but also figured drug using women as ‘produc[ing] the structural effects of economic erosion and neigh- bourhood disintegration’ (2000:170). By making women appear to ‘cause the effects of social inequality’ (2000:171), Campbell shows how drug policy dis- course simultaneously ‘obscures social stratification’ (2000:187) and ‘displaced poverty as the chief cause of damage’ (2000:169). Thus, in deflecting blame onto women crack addicts, ‘policy-makers avoid addressing the larger structures, decisions, and policies that exacerbate our multiple drug problems’ (Campbell, 2000:6).
Campbell’s discussion of the social effects of US drug policy discourse clearly highlights the way in which official accounts of pharmacological addiction posi- tion women as responsible for the social reproduction of inequalities. Yet this particular narrative of poverty is not, as Campbell amongst others have pointed out, the case for all women. Rather it is African-American women who in the 1990s became positioned in US drug policy narratives as both biologically vul- nerable to crack, and responsible for the making of the ‘bio-underclass’. Whilst, according to Campbell, one outcome of the figuring of ‘crack moms’ as respon- sible for the biological reproduction of inequality was to conceal broader struc- tural inequalities, another material effect was the coercive governing of (black)
‘crack moms’ (2000:187). To highlight ‘the discursive pattern of causation at work’ (Campbell, 2000:171) in public policy, Campbell addresses the hearings of the national drug prevention policy debated in the hearings and reports of the 101st Congress between 1989 and 1990:
“Crack babies”, according to then Senator Pete Wilson (r-CA), were “abandoned because of the particularly insidious effects of crack, the destruction of the maternal instinct”. The “sickly, inattentive, and inconsolable ‘crack baby’ ” became a focal point for neurobehavioral research focused on identifying cognitive deficiencies and intel- lectual outcomes. Researchers studied the subtle behavioural effects of cocaine expo- sure to discover “what kinds of interventions will work best . . . to soften the ‘double whammy from nature and nurture’ that these children have received”. Responsibility for both “nature” and “nurture” fell to women. This position effectively absolved social policy from doing anything other than controlling women in order to break the
“intergenerational transmission of the disease of addiction . . .” (2000:174).
In the attribution of deficiencies associated with crack babies to ‘crack moms’, drug-using women become solely responsible for producing a generation of chil- dren who have a predisposition to addiction, a predisposition which concerns the pharmacological structure of crack. The intergenerational logic of crack addiction produced by drug policy discourse thus presumes that the contempo- rary US crack phenomenon involves a biological reproduction of social suffer- ing. Bourgois’ account of the production of social suffering in the US is not