Abstract
The Introduction presents the central thrust of the book and details how it will animate each chapter, exploring the concepts of intoxication and sobriety in relation to the aesthetic strategies and ethical implications of representing the violence of drug traffic and interdiction. Along the way, it is demonstrated that a broad consideration of the relationship between intoxication and culture is vital for placing these narratives in the most illuminating context possible, moving beyond the focus on sobriety established by Hermann Herlinghaus, and that the body of narco-narratives is not a monolithic entity that can be rejected wholesale according to one narrow criterion, as attempted by Oswaldo Zavala.
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Notes
- 1.
I define “intoxication” very broadly, in order to include both substances and cultural practices that demonstrably change the way beings think, feel, or perceive. I use “psychotropy,” a term introduced by Daniel Smail, as a synonym of intoxication. Paralleling the ambivalence of the pharmakon as both poison and cure, intoxication can refer both to dynamics of narcossism and to the disorienting effect of childlike perspectives or similar aesthetic experiences. This last usage is in line with the etymology of “toxic”: from Greek, toxikon , a poisoned arrow that penetrates the self to introduce something other. See also Mel Chen’s theorization of toxicity and the erasure of ontological boundaries, of “an intimacy that does not differentiate” (203). Toxicity, like queerness, “truck[s] with negativity, marginality, and subject-object confusions” (207). I discuss further my use of it for a wide range of psychotropic phenomena in Chap. 2.
- 2.
Avital Ronell takes up Derrida’s comments, exploring their relevance especially for the case of reading as a “feminine” addiction, in the context of Madame Bovary (Crack Wars 102–104).
- 3.
I use the term “cultural psychotropy” to emphasize that psychotropy is a broad phenomenon embedded in cultures, that transcends and includes drug consumption.
- 4.
For a definition of narco-narratives, a term that seems to have been introduced by Herlinghaus, I defer to Zavala’s concise formulation: “a dispersed but interrelated corpus of texts, films, music, and conceptual art focusing on the drug trade” (“Imagining” 341).
- 5.
In The Gay Science , Nietzsche exclaims, “The strongest thoughts and passions are there [in the theater] presented before those who are capable not of thought and passion—but of intoxication! And the former as a means to the latter! And theatre and music as the hashish-smoking and betel-chewing of the European! Oh, who will tell us the entire history of narcotics?—It is nearly the history of ‘culture’, our so-called higher culture!” (86–87). Benjamin’s work on intoxication will be discussed at length later in this Introduction and in Chap. 2.
- 6.
In this study I focus on the case of Mexico, because of the urgency of drug violence there and because of the energetic proliferation there of cultural products that deal with lo narco. The major exception to this focus is the discussion of William Burroughs’s Yage Letters , which deals with the narrator’s travels in South America. The inclusion of this text serves my analysis of global countercultural approaches to intoxication, including an attitude toward Latin American otherness that was problematic precisely because it had more to do with the traveler’s own psychic processes than with the specificity of their individual and cultural hosts.
- 7.
A prominent example of this is business culture’s appropriation, starting in the 1960s, of countercultural anti-conformism and desire for “difference”—this would be channeled into a steady stream of new products that created an addiction to novelty; in fact, Thomas Frank calls “difference,” as conceived by advertising maverick Bill Bernbach, “the magic cultural formula by which the life of consumerism could be extended indefinitely, running forever on the discontent it itself had produced” (68). For a consideration of psychedelics in the service of constructing the sense of a superior self, see Saldanha.
- 8.
On a related note, I agree with Julio Ramos that “El debate sobre neurociencia y psicoanálisis resulta fundamental en las discusiones actuales sobre la adicción, a pesar del riesgo determinista que supone la historia de algunas de esas mismas discusiones” (“Afectos colaterales” 6).
- 9.
Lemus’s critique will be discussed further in Chap. 5, where it bears on the work of Élmer Mendoza.
- 10.
For a cautious evaluation of this question, see Correa-Cabrera (211–38). Also see more polemical formulations of this critique in Watt and Zepeda and Paley.
- 11.
Regarding these two recent events, see David Brooks, Torrens, and Castillo García. While these incidents occurred under the AMLO administration, which presents itself as a rupture with failed policies of the past, I would argue it has so far been unable to fundamentally change the relation of the narco to the state.
- 12.
Rausch , a word Benjamin uses to describe states of intoxication, is variously translated “ecstasy,” “frenzy,” and “intoxication.” According to John McCole, “‘Rausch’ is far more suggestive than the English equivalent ‘intoxication’: it quite naturally bears the connotations of such overwhelming feelings as exhilaration, ecstasy, euphoria, rapture, and passion; its onomatopoetic qualities have an equivalent in the slang term ‘rush.’ ‘Intoxication’ is the only real option for rendering ‘Rausch’ in English, but its strong associations with alcohol and toxicity can be misleading. Benjamin uses it to refer to various states of transport, providing a bridge to Klages’ theories of dream consciousness and ‘cosmogonic eros’” (225).
- 13.
For Ronell, “drugs are crucially related to the question of freedom” and “questions attending drugs disclose only a moment in the history of addiction” (Crack Wars 59). She writes that “the chemical prosthesis, the mushroom or plant, respond to a fundamental structure, and not the other way around” (103). True enough, except that in the case of (psilocybin) mushrooms, we may be talking about different structures. The subtitle of Crack Wars : Literature, Addiction, Mania tips us off as to her study’s approach to intoxication, but in discussing hallucination in the structure of addiction (101–106) and mentioning drugs like mushrooms, she does not highlight the radically different psychotropic experience presupposed by some of these substances. What of the hallucination that pries one’s eyes open, forcing unwanted visions—the drug experience you run from, not toward—or at least approach with consideration, even apprehension. Here there is no structure of addiction, but rather something like its opposite.
- 14.
The idea of drugs being used to buffer the nervous system from the shocks of modern life, which as far as I know comes from Buck-Morss (“Aesthetics”), informed by her reading of Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire (“On Some Motifs”), is certainly a valuable and productive one but, as I argue in the next chapter, there is more to the story.
- 15.
According to Susan Buck-Morss, “unlike with drugs, the phantasmagoria assumes the position of objective fact. Whereas drug addicts confront a society that challenges the reality of their altered perception, the intoxication of phantasmagoria itself becomes the social norm” (“Aesthetics” 23).
- 16.
A willful failure to understand on the part of characters who play the part of “the fool” also works as a literary device in the service of social criticism (Bakhtin, Dialogic 402–405). The techniques by which children’s perspectives are appropriated for defamiliarization at times overlap with this dynamic (see Chap. 6).
- 17.
I have chosen to respect the ambiguity or ambivalence of Benjamin’s original formulation, instead of attempting to funnel its meaning into my own conception. However, one possible point of connection may be worth noting: as Chap. 2 will argue, intoxication or “ecstasy” of a certain character may lead to an uncomfortable lucidity that challenges established habits of thought and perception. To suddenly come to realizations about mistaken beliefs, especially fundamental ones about the self, could certainly be construed as “humiliating sobriety”; in this connection, see also the “ego death” experience of Francine at the end of Se está haciendo tarde (final en laguna), as considered in Chap. 4.
- 18.
See Ronell’s discussion of Heidegger on Dasein and addiction (Crack Wars 33–46).
- 19.
The “ambivalent, indeterminate space of the pharmakon ” that Derrida identifies in his exploration of writing as pharmakon (Dissemination 115) gives way, within concrete historical moments, to a dialectical movement between the semantic poles of poison and cure.
- 20.
This approach could be understood to take one step further from Oswaldo Zavala’s demand that narco-trafficking and related criminal activities be seen as internal to state and society (“Imagining” 342).
- 21.
This concept will be discussed in detail in Chap. 2.
- 22.
According to Ronald Siegel, “Recent ethological and laboratory studies with colonies of rodents and islands of primates, and analyses of social and biological history, suggest that the pursuit of intoxication with drugs is a primary motivational force in the behavior of organisms. Our nervous systems, like those of rodents and primates, is arranged to respond to chemical intoxicants in much the same way it responds to rewards of food, drink, and sex. … Intoxication is the fourth drive” (10).
- 23.
See Ramos, “Afectos colaterales,” where he discusses literature and psychotropy in these terms, based on a reading of Derrida, Ronell, and Bernard Stiegler, albeit with caveats (12–13).
- 24.
See Stiegler on prosthesis as a constitutive characteristic of humanity.
- 25.
In “Afectos colaterales,” Ramos also questions the limits of the philosophical disruption of “la retórica de las drogas” as a tool for confronting the massive suffering that accompanies drug use, trafficking, and interdiction, a discussion we will return to in the following chapter.
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Patteson, J. (2021). Introduction. In: Drugs, Violence and Latin America . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68924-7_1
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