Karen L. Kopelson

Department of English
University of Louisville
karen.kopelson@louisville.edu

 

What exactly is morally objectionable about excess?

 

–Stuart Walton, Out of It

 

By Way of (an Excessive) Introduction

 

In the introduction to The Female Grotesque, Mary Russo writes that feminism has often “stood for and with the normal”; that in efforts not to alienate men (or other women) made uneasy by departures from “proper” femininity, feminists have made sure we do not make “spectacles” of ourselves, consistently offering “reassurances that feminists are ‘normal women’ and that our political aspirations are mainstream”–efforts that have resulted, in Russo’s view, in a “cultural and political disarticulation of feminism from the strange, the risky, the minoritarian, the excessive, the outlawed, and the alien” (12). Yet in the midst of these efforts, and sometimes as corrective responses to them, feminism has also undeniably linked itself with the alien and excessive. Indeed, the notion of “excess” has for some years now served as a productively disruptive trope for a variety of postmodern feminist theories working to counter and subvert dominant, masculinist logics. Both psychoanalytic and sexual-difference theories, for example, have made use of ideas of excess to release feminine desire from its supposed basis in “lack” and refigure it as fluid, abundant, overflowing, and diffuse. Alternatively, but to similar ends, these and other theories have reclaimed the prevalent cultural associations of female desire with excess–with a “formlessness that engulfs all form, a disorder that threatens all order” (Grosz 203)–to capitalize on the potent force of these longstanding associations. In other contexts, French feminist writers have posited excess as an insurgent characteristic of feminine language/writing, one that can derail phallogocentric, disciplinary expectations for discursive linearity and closure. Feminist discussions of body image as well, academic and activist alike, have for over two decades attempted to recuperate excess, in the forms of voluptuousness and largeness, as modes of what Susan Bordo and others have repeatedly called “embodied protest” against cultural demands that women at once contain their appetites and remain diminutively un-threatening to men. More recently, queer feminist theorists have appealed to excess, at least implicitly, in conversations that have sought to extricate sex from gender, sex and gender from sexuality, and to multiply all of the above beyond any notions of correspondence or of binary construction. In short, excess has become a postmodern feminist rescue-trope, if you will, with some of us even suggesting that excess can rescue feminism from itself–and not only in the sense that Russo describes, but from dualistic models of generational conflict, or, conversely, from demands for transgenerational “paradigmatic coherence,” both of which would prohibit non-identical feminist practices, and diverse theoretical assumptions (see Weigman).

 

Yet a particular, and particularly derided, notion of excess that has not been as thoroughly redeployed to postmodern feminist ends is the excess of addiction and/or intoxication.¹ I must note immediately that in making such a claim I hardly mean to suggest that the concept of “addiction” has not been thoroughly interrogated and problematized. Culturally dominant understandings of alcoholism, addiction, and drug use have been contradicted, and convincingly up-ended, from historical, sociological, anthropological, literary-critical, philosophical/ theoretical, and medical/scientific perspectives alike, and, as I show in this essay, feminist theorizing has played no small role in advancing this broadly interdisciplinary critique. However, while feminist critics have performed many counterintuitive, deconstructive readings of addiction–Melissa Pearl Friedling’s 2000 book, Recovering Women: Feminisms and the Representation of Addiction is exemplary here–these critiques usually stop just short of actually rehabilitating addiction, fearing, as Friedling puts it, that such a strategy potentially “insists on female suffering as the prerequisite for feminist agency” (3), or, at the least, risks re-establishing associations of femininity with passive receptivity and dependence. In short, feminist critics (and others) who have theorized the subject of addiction have often been wary, and justifiably so, of arguing for, or being perceived as arguing for, the “emancipatory possibilities in compulsive drug use” (Friedling 31; see also Keane, Ronell, and Derrida).

 

Another boundary that feminist critiques of addiction have tended not to cross separates the figurative from the “real,” lived experiences of “excessive” drinking and drugging, and I mean this in two crucial senses. In one sense, and perhaps because of a reluctance to disregard the sometimes catastrophic results of drug use, we have tended to privilege analyses of media representations of the addicted subject, rather than analyses of the ontology of addiction (being on drugs). Friedling is careful to make this very distinction, saying in the introduction to her book: “Often the addict that I discuss only looks or acts like an addict.” Friedling is most often reading the “stylized acts of addiction” (the “heroin chic” look in fashion journalism, for example, as well as performances of addiction in music, film, and television), and says that “mistaking performance for ontology is an error” (13). However, in a second sense, we have retreated from the “real” of being addicted to or being on drugs not by studying addiction’s media representations, but by making addiction/drug use representative of something else–a pattern, we might note, that far precedes postmodern feminist examinations. At least since Heidegger, perhaps since Schelling (according to Heidegger), and even perhaps as far back as Plato, addiction–framed variously, depending on the cultural parlance of the day, as pharmakon, narcotica, toxicomania, intoxication, being-on-drugs–has served as what David L. Clark calls a “figure par excellence” (25); it has been made an allegory for (among other phenomena) myriad forms of consumption, for writing and literature, for cultural anxieties about the invasion and contagion of the “foreign” across permeable borders, for our relationship to time, for the fundamental structure of all desire, and even for the structure and experience of being itself.² True to its own definitive traits, then, addiction seems to have produced and sustained in us the desire to figure it repetitively, compulsively, to the point that Clark suggests figurations of addiction are “complexly symptomatic” of our addiction to figurative language itself: “philosophical narratives about addiction,” Clark writes, “have a habit of becoming evocatively pharmaceutical,” of obeying–and remaining fixed within–the “logic of the supplement” (26, 10).

 

I am not sure whether to read Clark’s statement as a true indictment of philosophical discourses on addiction, or as playful philosophizing, though I tend toward the latter as he announces in his essay’s introduction that his own analysis will “risk the hermeneutical equivalent of ‘narcoticizing,'” “planting drugs,” of “looking for contraband and finding it everywhere” (10). However, for the sake of my own argument, I take Clark literally, and posit as a flaw, or at least as a timid retreat-response, the tendency of discussions of addiction to get stuck in the figurative, to construct and deconstruct addiction as representative of something other than/supplemental to itself, or, alternatively, to examine performances of addicted subjectivity in film, literature, television, music, and a variety of other cultural texts. In this essay, therefore, I risk the hermeneutical counter-stance of analyzing the ontology of addiction itself (as it is embodied by the female subject), rather than making the ontology of addiction/intoxication metaphorical, and of interpreting the state of “being on drugs,” rather than “looking” or “acting” like one is on drugs.³ Specifically, I take the risk of rehabilitating addiction and/or “excessive” drinking/drug use as another form of women’s lived, embodied protest against patriarchal structures of containment. While I offer my own concessions that drug and alcohol use wreaks havoc in the lives of many, it is perhaps precisely because these lived, embodied practices are among the most derided, dangerous, and (often literally) “outlawed” manifestations of excessive female desire that their interpretation can be productively, seditiously mobilized to postmodern feminist ends. To argue for the emancipatory properties of addiction and drug use may indeed seem unreasonable, even impossible. “Reason,” however, is a hegemonic, masculinist logic par excellence, and the circumscription of possibility is what feminist deployments of excess have always aimed to transgress.⁴

 

What Do We Hold Against The Drug Addict?

 

What are the antecedents of this infuriated, unforgiving attitude to intoxication in others?

 

–Stuart Walton

 

As Alcoholics Anonymous and its many offspring make clear, any act of rehabilitation must start at the proverbial “rock bottom,” and so in order to rehabilitate addiction from a postmodern feminist perspective, we must begin by reviewing some of the primary bases for the addict’s abjection more generally. In his interview, “The Rhetoric of Drugs,” Jacques Derrida answers his own, now famous question, “What do we hold against the drug addict?” by arguing that our discomfort arises because “his is a pleasure taken in an experience without truth.” The search for pleasure is not itself always socially condemned, Derrida clarifies, but we condemn the drug addict’s pleasure because it is obtained by escapist, artificial, inauthentic means removed from “objective reality.” The question of drugs, Derrida says, is thereby one and the same with “the grand question–of truth. Neither more nor less” (7-8). But the question of drugs is related to another grand question, which Derrida also acknowledges: the question of citizenship and social responsibility. And here we condemn the drug addict, Derrida continues, because he “cuts himself off from the world,” because we perceive his pleasure as “solitary and desocializing” (7, 19). Jeffrey Nealon, in “‘Junk’ and the Other: Burroughs and Levinas on Drugs,” similarly concludes that we hate the drug addict because of his “attempt to withdraw from contact with and responsibility for the other,” because he “is inexorably and completely for himself” (56, 62): “junkies want to be inside,” Nealon writes; “they want the pure, interior subjectivity of the drug stupor” (54). Or, as Levinas himself dramatically put it, “the relaxation in intoxication is a semblance of distance and irresponsibility. It is a suppression of fraternity, or a murder of the brother” (qtd in Nealon 56).

 

Many of the critics who have disrupted dominant views of addiction would remind us, however, that intoxication is not inherently desocializing, or inherently “stupefying.” Far from it, many intoxicants facilitate social connection, and lend considerable conviviality to social engagement, while others actually accelerate productivity. As Stuart Walton writes in his cultural history of intoxication, Out of It, a “working mother of the 1960’s, zipping through the ironing on prescription speed,” or the “superstar chef on cocaine,” immediately reveal the inadequacy of the “hazed out trance” to serve as the “paradigm state of ‘being on drugs,'” and so Walton asks “what sort of agenda is served by such a malevolent act of synthesis” (11). Answering his own question, Walton asserts that “to posit the existence of a single, compendious substance called ‘drugs,'” and to construct “drugs” as always “inimical to social functioning,” is to “get away with the fiction that taking them is an eccentric pursuit found only in a deviant, dysfunctional subculture” (11). In other words, the paradigm serves, as paradigms will, to squelch any differences that would disrupt the order of exclusion which produces and constrains normative, “authentic” subjects.

 

Like Walton, I seek to call attention to these differences within the master-category of “being on drugs” primarily to call attention to the paradigm itself, and it is within and against this hegemonic, socially constructed (because necessary) paradigm that I perform my analysis. I do this not to squelch differences myself, but in order to reveal, from a feminist perspective, what sort of agenda is served by ignoring the zippy ironer (or today, the female superstar chef), by rendering the female drug user, in particular, a socially dysfunctional deviant.

 

In Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, Bordo firmly established that the cultural need to control woman’s appetite for food is a symbolic crystallization of the need to police her appetites and desires more generally, in order to ensure that she “develop a totally other-oriented emotional economy.” “The rules for the construction of femininity,” Bordo writes, “require that women learn to feed others, not the self, and to construe any desires for self-nurturance and self-feeding as greedy and excessive” (171). Though Bordo never makes the connection between eating and drug use, the overlap is obvious: women’s drug use is a self-indulgence–verboten because it may take her away from her social and, especially, familial duties. In What’s Wrong with Addiction?, Helen Keane similarly reminds us that “normative femininity includes sociability and caring for others. Women who are obsessed with a solitary activity which they find more rewarding than family life are much more disturbing than men who neglect family and friends for the sake of a solitary pursuit, whatever those pursuits might be” (118). For women, it is hardly just clandestine drug use, but, as Keane says, any “desire for uninterrupted time alone” that is considered “pathological” (118), while for the male subject–as long as he is ultimately productive in the fraternal order–the withdrawal from family life is not only accepted as his rightful reward, but is even rewarded as his correct investment in the home. Clearly, as provider, the ideal family man must spend much time removed from the domestic space.

 

However, when we remember that drug use is often not a solitary pursuit, that it is as often a communal activity as it is a withdrawal from community, we glimpse another way in which women’s drug use becomes an expression of female desire presented as inauthentic because dangerous to the social and familial order. While the hazed out, interiorized subjectivity of a drug stupor certainly constitutes woman’s improper removal from a domestic sphere that requires other-orientation, the other-orientation of much drug use itself becomes an improper sociality that similarly threatens to, and often literally does, take women away from familial space, and which must therefore be curtailed. A bit of transcontinental history here can serve to make the surveillance and punishment visited upon women for partaking in intoxicated public life most apparent: As both Walton and criminologist Mariana Valverde have documented, the Habitual Drunkards/Inebriates Acts instituted in Great Britain in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries were subject to much “gender specific enforcement,” and while many of the women put away under the acts (usually into Inebriates Asylums) were prostitutes, most were mothers charged with child neglect–charged, essentially, with the act of “enjoying themselves in pubs” and thereby causing “domestic chaos” (Valverde 52-53; also Walton 262). Several years later, and across the pond in Post-Repeal Massachusetts, women were officially barred from taverns altogether, and were forced to remain seated while drinking in other types of establishments where they were permitted entry (Valverde 157). In sum, women were punished by such legislation not for partaking of a desocializing, solitary pleasure, but for attempting to enjoy the male prerogatives of inhabiting public space, and for prioritizing sociality over domesticity. Through the threat of literal commitment (in the case of the Inebriates Acts), and through other more subtle but still effective forms of control, women’s commitment to, and confinement within, the private sphere was thus publicly enforced.

 

U.S. society today has not overcome such expectations of women’s other-orientation in the domestic sphere, nor has it given up related denunciations of their inappropriate, because other-oriented, participation in the public sphere. Thus, if we think back to Walton once more, and revisit from a feminist perspective the question why the “hazed out trance” has become misrepresentatively representative of all drug use, it is possible to conclude that we must characterize the woman drug user as a deviant (non)subject removed from the reality of public life precisely because she is not sufficiently removed from it; we must present her search for pleasure as inauthentic and inimical to social functioning in order to keep her functioning properly. But the hazed out trance is not only non-paradigmatic of women’s (or anyone’s) drug use, it is the least of the woman drug user’s offenses. Society may claim–for the ideological reasons just mentioned–to hate the female drug addict for her self-containment and interiorized absorption, or for her determination to put her own desires first, whether that be socially or in private, but it hates her all the more for her resolute lack of self-containment in other, more obvious senses and incarnations of that term. Society has left the Inebriates Acts behind, but it is not beyond gender-specific discipline of public inebriation. Women must still be seated while drinking.

 

Unruly Women

 

“What the fuck am I doing here?” I mumble as the center of our attention, a big loud drunk woman, hops onto her dining room table with a Japanese Kitana sword, strips off her blouse and begins to gyrate to an old Van Halen tune . . . . “Nothing, I repeat, nothing, is worse than a woman who can’t handle her booze.”

 

–Jim Marquez, “Girl Crazy”

 

There is a phrase that still resonates from my childhood. Who says it? . . . “She is making a spectacle out of herself.”

 

–Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque

 

As Russo explains, “making a spectacle out of oneself” seems a “specifically feminine danger” (53); the phrase is almost singularly associated with women’s public transgressions of the rules surrounding femininity. While men may occasionally get bounced from the bar for bad behavior, the “big loud drunk woman” inevitably becomes an object of derision and disgust, and not only because she is associated with largeness, with taking up too much space, or, as Russo puts it, “step[ping] into the limelight out of turn” (53), but because she is (again significantly) associated with an inappropriate, because excessive, sexuality. When a drunk woman steps into the limelight, she clambers onto tables and rips off her clothes. She stumbles onto center-stage and acts like a slut.

 

Though this essay hopes to move beyond analyses of stylized performances of addiction, I would like to take a particularly illustrative detour into an analysis of one such performance: that of rock star turned general icon of inappropriateness Courtney Love. In her Bad Subjects article, “Staging the Slut,” Kim Nicolini asks the Derridean question, “Why does the world love to hate Courtney?” and answers, “because she is a slut; because she’s totally fucked up; . . . because she’s totally out of control.” Nicolini remembers that audiences at typical (and still legendary) Hole performances of the 1990s were often seduced by Love’s apparent drunken/drugged accessibility and voracious sexuality, and yet repulsed by her sloppy, pornographic qualities, and repelled as well by the interplay of Love’s staged-slut persona with the band’s music: “equipped with electric guitar,” Nicolini writes, Love “denies her audience the satisfaction of a pure pornographic/erotic moment by disrupting its sexual pleasure with a bunch of ugly noise.” Nicolini sees this “slut/audience relationship” as a productive and positive dynamic, claiming that it unsettles audience members into confronting their expectations of a quiet and constrained female sexuality, and goes so far as to suggest that we may read Love, and other female performers like her, as “taking control of their bodies by losing control of their bodies.”

 

This may seem like a generous, or at least a very optimistic reading. Performances are only actualized in their reception, after all, and Nicolini does acknowledge that her radicalizing interpretation of the Love-spectacle might not be shared by those “less conscious”–those who are more likely to ridicule and trivialize Love before she can even become (because she is about to become) unsettling. But the very need to ridicule and trivialize guitar-or-sword-brandishing women who make spectacles of themselves is a testament to their power, to what Kathleen Rowe calls their “vaguely demonic” threat to “the social and symbolic systems that would keep women in their place” (3). (Love has a lyric in which she calls herself “a walking study in demonology.”) What may be especially threatening about Love, moreover, is that she is not just performative spectacle; she does not just look or act like an addict, does not just look or act like a slut for that matter. Before she was a star, Love worked in the sex industry across the globe, and has for over a decade now had a very public, very troubled relationship with drugs and alcohol. With Love, though she is a cultural icon delivered to us via the media, we are nonetheless in the realm of the real and the lived, and she forces us to reckon with the unwelcome image/reality of a woman on drugs, a woman on, and often way past, the verge. Whether Love and other women who step into the limelight as drunken/drugged-out sluts are taking control by losing control, or are wholly beyond the horizon of intention, is not important. Rather the drunk/drugged, “addicted” female body, because it is equated with a confusing sexual excess at once inviting and repellant, and because it enacts the male prerogatives of occupying–or, we might say, spilling into–public space in forceful ways, disturbs several normative ideals of what is befitting gendered, sexual conduct for a woman. The drunken/drugged woman’s way of living and being in the world, intentional or not, read as radical or repulsive, becomes an embodied refusal of gender-specific enforcements around inebriated and other “indecorous” acts.

 

Finally, and perhaps much more counterintuitively, the spectacle of women’s intoxication is potentially subversive not only of a femininity that would keep women in their place, but of a hegemonic masculinity as well. While men are permitted their public rowdiness in certain contexts, and while they are generally permitted more than women the indulgence of appetites of all kinds, they are also required in other contexts, particularly the civic or professional, to display cool self-discipline. For these reasons Bordo has suggested that anorexia (or thinness more generally) can be read not, or not only, as the absolute non-spectacle of women’s diminution and fragility, but, because of the intense self-discipline that anorexia entails, as an embodied cooptation of professionalizing “male virtues,” and that fatness, conversely, can be read as a “lack of discipline, unwillingness to conform, and absence of all those ‘managerial’ abilities that . . . confer upward mobility” (171-72, 195). I am arguing by extension, then, that women’s intoxication/addiction, even if it does take a more interiorized form, can be interpreted as–can enact–a similar unwillingness to be disciplined into the fraternal order.

 

In The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Volume 2, Michel Foucault describes in great detail the supreme “virility” that was associated with moderation and self-restraint in ancient Greece, and hence the centrality of these qualities to the constitution of the proper male subject. To properly “rule,” man had first to be ruler of his own passions, and to take his pleasures only in ways that were considered “right use.” When a man was immoderate, he was considered to be feminine: in a state of weakness, passivity, non-resistance, and submission. These mandates of masculinity, however, did not mean that women were not also expected to be moderate and self-restrained; rather, the ideal female subject–that is, the woman befitting of her self-mastering husband’s company–was expected to transcend her feminine nature and achieve a “domination over herself that was virile by definition.” Yet, even when a woman did attain this idealized because masculinized state, her virtues of self-mastery, according to Foucault, were not considered “ruling virtues,” as were the man’s; they were considered “serving virtues,” precisely because they made her a worthy wife (82-84). It is in the context of this simultaneous demand for virility in women and the denial of virility to women that we might discern what I see as the triple-threat wrought by the woman-on-drugs. One, she rejects what Bordo and Foucault both see as definitive male traits of self-control that have long served to confer masculine (and upper-middle-class) power and privilege. Two, in this refusal to master herself, the drugged/addicted woman refuses to be the servile, docile counterpart to the ruling, virtuous male; and three, to invoke my earlier discussion, in her (self)indulgence she casts off demands for masculine self-discipline and for feminine appetitive restraints that help ensure her other-orientation. Addiction is simply “wrong use.” It is only an “irrational being,” says Foucault of Plato’s views on moderation and excess, who would pursue the desire for pleasure beyond satiation (87).

 

Irrational Desire, or, Women Who Love Too Much

 

In the introduction to her memoir, Drinking: A Love Story, Caroline Knapp waxes eloquent about her past relationship with alcohol:

 

A love story. Yes: this is a love story . . . . It’s about passion, sensual pleasure, deep pulls, lust, fear, yearning hungers . . . I loved the way drink made me feel . . . I loved the sounds of drink: the slide of a cork as it eased out of a wine bottle, the distinct glug-glug of booze pouring into a glass, the clatter of ice cubes in a tumbler. I loved the rituals, the camaraderie of drinking with others, the warming, melting feelings of ease and courage it gave me. (5-6)

 

Such nostalgic descriptions are a common enough feature of addiction narratives: authors recount what was, and what now can never be, much as one remembers a romantic relationship before its ruin. But these descriptions are usually trumped by Reason. They are rewritten–or at least written over (as on a palimpsest) and thus obscured–by the addiction memoir’s inevitable turn to tales of despair, and while Knapp, too, ultimately hits her “rock bottom” and enters an equally glorious relationship with recovery, what distinguishes her story is that she lets this portion of her narrative stand, and even dominate; that even in the end she frames her “addiction,” as her book’s title suggests, as love and desire. If the question of drugs is one and the same with the grand question of Truth, as Derrida says, here we have a truth impermissible, and thus no truth at all. “In the modern definition of alcoholism,” George Levine writes in “The Discovery of Addiction,” “the problem is not that alcoholics love to get drunk, but that they cannot help it–they cannot control themselves. They may actually hate getting drunk, wishing only to drink moderately or socially.” Levine notes that in older views, however, that is, before the emergence in the mid-nineteenth century of the medicalized model of “addiction” as “disease,” and that model’s attendant understanding of the disease as marked by destructive compulsion, “drunkards” were perceived as driven not by a tormenting force they “truly” wanted to reject, or at least to control, but by the love for drink that Knapp expresses so well; by a “great affection”–a too great affection perhaps, but affection nonetheless–for the state of intoxication. The drunkard’s pursuit of intoxication was seen as the simple pursuit of happiness, the choice to pursue the object of his deepest desire, even if that choice was considered by some to be a bad one (Levine 4-5 of 16; see also Sedgwick).

 

Today, however, the excessive drinker or drugger isnot only making bad object choices, she is also in a state of bad faith (Keane 79). The addict does not “really” want what she wants, and it is not just her desires and pleasures that are inauthentic but her whole way of being that is void of truth. She is an ontological error. Such a conception becomes most pragmatically apparent when we think of that most pivotal of moments in the addict’s life: the Intervention, the moment when the drug user is corralled by friends and family members, reasoned with, told in no uncertain terms that she is in “denial,” and then shipped off to treatment which will return her to reality and “recover” her authentic self. As Keane says of this process, “the addict and truth are being constructed in such a way that they cannot coincide. The discourse and structure of intervention produce the addict as a subject excluded from the truth, because the truth resides in the story of disease and loss of control.” Any other story, like the speech of Foucault’s madman, is considered “null and void, mere noise” (81-82).

 

There have been theoretical accounts of the displacement of earlier understandings of drinking and drugging by a current model that inserts pathology into the place of pleasure, and dishonesty into the space of desire. For my purposes, the question is to what effects this newer model is mobilized against the female subject, and to what counter-effects one might revisit older, or simply different, conceptions of drug and alcohol use to rewrite the validity of women’s desire, and to continue to upset dominant structures that work to contain it. In response to these questions I will suggest that the woman who loves her drugs too much disturbs society–and does it so productively–because in this love she lays claim to a virility not hers for the taking, and because she needs nothing of man’s virility at all.

 

While it is “true” that in many historical contexts excess (because understood as a weak-willed, irrational submission to desire) has been gendered feminine, there have been other, intervening historical moments characterized by quite different–and differently gendered–truths. For example, Valverde claims that at the time of the Inebriate Acts in Great Britain, when women were incarcerated for public intoxication and neglect of domestic duties, male inebriates, at least male inebriates of the upper classes, were often viewed positively because in possession of a hyper-masculinity. Though their pursuit of intoxication was considered excessive, that excess was seen to arise from the fact that these “gentlemen” “simply possess[ed] too much desire, too much virility”; men’s excessive drinking (in the U.S. of this time period as well) was seen “as rooted in an excess of masculine animal spirits.” Valverde concludes that though the association of excess, alcoholism, and addiction with femininity has come down to us as a “timeless truth,” it was only in the early 1940s that men’s drinking began “to be regarded as a symptom of dependence, of feminized weakness,” and that male drunkards were reconstituted as “a bunch of weak willed daydreamers of questionable virility” (92, 109).

 

However, despite claims like Valverde’s that addiction is now thoroughly feminized, there is a sense in which, still today, the addict remains the masculine, too-virile subject associated with earlier epochs, for even though today’s addict is “diseased,” and thereby “powerless over alcohol,” the primary manifestation of this pathology is considered to be a focus on oneself bordering on egomania: a self-serving pursuit of what one wants (drugs/alcohol), without regard for others and at all costs–usually considered “masculine” traits (see Van Den Bergh). When we revisit the denial of virility to women described by Foucault, as well as the expectations for women’s other-orientation emphasized throughout this discussion, we can read women’s addiction as the forbidden cooptation of masculine attributes, and of masculine rights to self-privileging and self-indulgence. The female addict, rather than being redundantly feminized, is still in possession of too much selfish desire. She is too virile for her own–and certainly for the “greater”–good.

 

In addition to its potential incursive affront to masculinity, there is another, definitive characteristic of addictive desire that makes the woman who loves her drugs too much particularly threatening. As Knapp’s account of her entrancement with drinking attests, addiction is indeed an all-consuming love; it is fiercely self-sufficient. Though I have argued against viewing intoxication as only interiorized absorption, to a certain extent it always is: intoxication, whether achieved with others or alone, needs nothing but itself to be, and it is the bodily “being” of intoxication, rather than the being with others, that the addict often seeks. Knapp can continue to serve as our exemplar here, when she describes her typical drinking outing:

 

A drink or two at the Aku with work friends. Then dinner at a restaurant with someone else, three or four glasses of wine with a meal, perhaps a glass of brandy afterward. Then home, where the bottle of Cognac lurked beneath the counter, a bottle of white wine always stood in the refrigerator, cold and dewy and waiting. (25)

 

Knapp’s fellow drinkers in this scenario are little more than props, the jovial “camaraderie with others” that she earlier mentioned alcohol facilitates secondary to satisfying the hunger for alcohol itself, secondary to the sensuous pleasure of intoxication, which is ultimately experienced most luxuriously at home alone. Knapp claims later, in the recovery portion of her narrative, that this pattern is hardly unique; that she discovered at AA meetings that “recovering alcoholics often talk about drinking ‘the way they wanted to’ when they were alone, drinking without the feeling of social restraint they might have had at a party or in a restaurant” (106). Alcohol is the paramour here–waiting at home–alcohol the “best friend,” a relationship, Knapp points out, she and others experience “on the most visceral level”: “when you’re drinking,” Knapp explains, “liquor occupies the role of lover or constant companion. It sits there on its refrigerator shelves or on the counter or in the cabinet like a real person, always present and reliable.” Knapp continues to describe alcohol as “a multiple partner,” since drinkers will have their “true love”–the drink they are most often drawn to–as well as “secondary loves, past loves, acquaintances, even (but not often) an enemy or two” (104).

 

I focus on Knapp’s descriptions in such “excessive” detail to call attention to the lavish, loving, lust-filled nature of these descriptions and, by extension, to illustrate the danger of the female addict’s desire: Here we have a desire that is full and exclusive, a cathexis complete and non-transferable, a libidinal investment in an object for which there is no substitute. In fact, while addiction is often equated with and derided for its supposed narcissism, the “problem” here is quite the opposite. The social/sexual threat of addiction is not that it is an objectless investment, but that the certainty of the (bad) object choice obviates the need, even the possibility, for other (acceptable) choices. The female addict has what she needs, and in her fulfillment she threatens heteronormativity. Understood in this way, it is obvious why addiction cannot be what woman “really wants,” cannot be her authentic desire, and it is obvious what agenda might be served by rendering such modes of being void of truth. In the next section of this essay, I elaborate the female addict’s challenge to heteronormativity, and to the mandates for reproduction that heteronormativity entails. Addiction becomes productively disruptive in this case because, as I have begun to suggest, it reproduces nothing but itself.

 

Off the Biological Clock: Women with a Queer Sense of Time

 

I believe that children are our future.

 

–Whitney Houston

 

What . . . would it signify not to be “fighting for the children?”

 

–Lee Edelman, No Future

 

In my introduction, I noted that addiction has been made allegorical of many psychical and social phenomena, and perhaps none more so than our relationship to time and our anxieties about its appropriate management and control, its “right-use.” Addiction itself has often been characterized as a kind of “temporal disorder” (see Marder; Keane), a pathological inability or refusal to live in time: intoxication kills time, wastes time, seeks to escape the “objective reality” of time, and thereby leads to an apathetic failure to produce in time. Levine writes that as early as 1637 in the American colonies, “wealthy and powerful colonials complained about excessive drinking and drunkenness” as a “mispense of time,” and a “waste of the good creatures of God” (3 of 16). And Valverde observes that in the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand alike, and I would say also in the U.S, “the history of licensing [for alcohol-serving establishments] has been largely a debate focussing [sic] obsessively on pub opening hours” (146-47, original emphasis), a debate that persists today (as does the related concern over hours during which liquor may be sold in stores). Even the determination of what constitutes addiction itself is dependent upon time: according to the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, and to one of the “warning signs” that drug use is slipping into addiction is more frequent use of substances, while staying intoxicated for days in a row is considered symptomatic of the “final stages” of the disease (see Knapp; Keane). As Derrida summarily puts it, it is the “the possibility of repeating the act,” the “crossing of a quantitative threshold that allows us to speak of a modern phenomenon of drug addiction” (5). If we return to Derrida’s question, then, of what it is that we hold against the drug addict, another answer is, the “wrong use” of time.

 

What kinds of physical bodies does the social body need? I have used the word “productive” repeatedly, and therein lies the answer. Since the seventeenth century, Foucault reminds us, networks of power have depended on “obtaining productive service from individuals in their concrete lives,” have had to ensure the “accumulation of men,” who could in turn produce an accumulation of capital (Power 125). There is simply no time in such a labor-reliant society for its “mispense.” If addiction is as much an abuse of time as it is of drugs, what is so dangerous about women who have this “temporal disorder?” The answer should be clear. If historically we have needed male bodies that are industrious and productive, we have needed female bodies that are diligently reproductive. As Walton claims of the disproportionate punishment visited upon women during the Inebriates Acts, the cause of public outcry, at least implicitly, was not only that pub-dwelling women were being neglectful mothers, but that they were being neglectful “of their duty to bear children for the propagation of the empire” (262); they were refusing to devote all of their energies to the accumulation of men. In this refusal, however, the woman who mis-spends her time drinking or drugging not only shirks her heterosexual duty to reproduce male bodies, she rejects the even more encompassing heteronormative logic of what Lee Edelman calls “reproductive futurism.”

 

In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Edelman focuses on the sanctified figure of The Child as emblematic of our cultural commitment to reproduction above all else. The book is essentially an extended response to question in my epigraph–“what would it signify not to be fighting for the children’?” (3)–and Edelman’s dramatic answer is that it would signify, or at least provoke mass anxiety about, the “undoing of social organization, collective reality, and, inevitably, life itself” (13). Such provocations and undoings, Edelman argues, are exactly the types of disruptions queerness should entail and enact, while instead gays and lesbians fight doggedly for the right to marry and become parents, to “kneel at the shrine of the sacred Child,” as he puts it, shoulder to shoulder with their “comrades in reproductive futurism”: a zealous Right Wing that seeks to deny us exactly these mundane futures (16-17, 19). Edelman’s figure for the resistance to this social order based on reproductivity is the “sinthomosexual”–a complex neologism that connotes a “child-aversive, future negating” queerness devoted only to the excesses of jouissance (113). I would like to extrapolate from Edelman’s premise to offer up the addict as a similarly queer figure, and, again, move beyond the figural to demonstrate ways in which being on drugs enables women to dwell outside of a collective reality that demands that we genuflect at this shrine of tomorrow.

 

“Intoxication has no clock other than the body’s sheer physical capacity to withstand it,” Walton writes (180). But it is not permitted to be “off the clock” in a culture that requires the consistent production of goods and services, and being off the “biological clock” is certainly impermissible in a social order that demands reproduction of itself and of the life that ensures that ideological reproduction. For this reason Edelman takes the very queer position indeed of being “against” the future, for the future is always synonymous with reproduction of the same–a same that pathologizes in order to “other” all modes of being that deny its dominant values. As we have seen, the offenses of the woman on drugs are many: she abjures feminine (domestic) duties, appropriates masculine prerogatives and “virile” traits, makes a spectacle of herself, and loves too much, but not too well. Her cardinal sin may be that she lives primarily in the present moment, thereby rejecting not only her role as reproducer in, and of, what Edelman calls the “familial unit so cheerfully mom-ified as to distract us from ever noticing how destructively it’s been mummified,” but rejecting as well “the faith that properly fathers us all” (114): the various hegemonic religious doctrines that have always insisted we sacrifice and suffer in the present for an endlessly deferred hereafter.

 

A counterintuitive reading may be necessary here once again, for the addict is commonly understood not as living in the moment, but as making a desperate and eventually, “diseased” attempt to escape the present moment. Hers is the pathological inability to “authentically” be in “real” time. Moreover, since the addict is always chasing “more” of the buzz, addiction can be read as a future-focused pursuit. However, this pursuit can also be read as seeking to prolong the perpetual present of intoxication, and thus as an attempt not to escape time, but to be, and stay, in it. As Keane writes in What’s Wrong with Addiction?, we can (re)conceive the addict not as a person who avoids the moment, but “as an active and skilful [sic] producer of time and pleasure” in the present, and in this reconception come face to face with what she calls “some positive attributes of addiction itself” (105). Though catchy slogans conspire to convince us otherwise, living “in the now”–or, as AA would have it, “one day at a time”–is not a culturally sanctioned mode of being, at least not when it persists beyond those few moments allowed us by the capitalist order for worry-free enjoyment; moments allowed us, moreover, precisely so we may return, refreshed and renewed, to the business of preparing for and producing the future. In fact, privileging the present over the future in ways that may put that future “at risk” becomes an expression of one of the most inauthenticated, irrational forms of desire (in)conceivable in our social order: the desire not to desire a life that lasts as long as possible.

 

Judith Halberstam, in A Queer Time and Place, writes that within the “middle class logic of reproductive temporality,” “we create longevity as the most desirable future, applaud the pursuit of long life (under any circumstances), and pathologize modes of living that show little or no concern for longevity” (4). Yes, there are exceptions to this rule. Athletes and soldiers, people who scale Mt. Everest or swim the English Channel, are cultural heroes, as is anyone who risks life and limb for a child. But much as the society condemns the drug addict’s search for pleasure for its “artificiality,” so it condemns her jeopardizing longevity (actions that are considered non-active) for its insignificant and “inauthentic” results. Unlike Edelman, Halberstam mentions drug addiction as among our most culturally disparaged, pathologized modes of living, “characterized as immature and even dangerous” for its seeming refusal to honor life itself (4). But as both she and Keane remind us, pursuing longevity at all costs, and living according to what Halberstam identifies as bourgeois, biological, “repro-time” (5), is one logic of living among many, or what Keane calls a matter of “taste, rather than truth” (109). While positioning oneself “against health” would seem more irrational still than taking a “child aversive” stance “against” the future, Keane takes this risk to argue that the “use of ‘health’ to encompass almost all that is worthwhile and valuable” is another manifestation of the reigning ideology of futurism, and that it “ignores the fact that the desire for a long and disease-free life can, and often does, conflict with practices which make us feel like we are doing more than merely existing” (109). According to alternative, queer logics such as Keane’s, Halberstam’s, and Edelman’s, intoxication/addiction is not a “mispense” of time, but simply a different form of its expenditure–an expenditure derided because it refuses the logics of cost and of indebtedness to the future. The addict’s sin is that she does not fear that one day, she will pay. According to such alternative logics, there may be nothing “wrong with addiction” at all, other than the fact that it is “wrong life”: Complete in itself, moving toward nothing (and no one) but the excesses of jouissance, addiction, or prolonged intoxication, refuses to beget an “other,” but is determined just to be. In so doing, it fails the future, and so becomes a very queer (mis)use of time indeed. A misuse, I have been arguing, most impermissible for women, whose time is never their own, and whose bodies are needed to ensure that tomorrow comes. In yet another improper act of self-indulgence, the female addict privileges her own body, or refuses to privilege her body, if we insist on holding to this dominant view. She refuses to save herself for the sacred child, and so sins not only against Father Time, but against the Father of Faith, and against the familial, mom-ified culture that is her inheritance and her task to reproduce.

 

Conclusion: Freedom’s Just another Word. . .

 

The intersecting cut between freedom, drugs and the addicted condition (what we are symptomatologizing as “Being on drugs”) deserves an interminable analysis whose heavily barred doors can be no more than cracked open by a solitary research.

 

–Avital Ronell, Crack Wars

 

There is not enough space (or time) here, nor, as Ronell suggests, the possibility even if there were, to perform a conclusive analysis of addiction’s relationship to freedom, but, as I believe questions of freedom have been lurking at the edges of what has come before in this essay, a brief discussion of the intersecting cut to which Ronell refers seems in order. I have proffered several ways in which the woman on drugs poses threatening challenges to a social order that has long served to constrain the excesses associated with, or, more often, forbidden to, female desire. There are to be sure several potential challenges to my interpretations of (women’s) drug use and/or addiction as a kind of embodied practice of freedom. (This portion of my discussion speaks in more general, rather than gendered, terms.) First is the objection, and the danger, voiced representatively by Friedling and acknowledged at the outset of this essay, that arguing for the “emancipatory possibilities in compulsive drug use” may move beyond counterintuitive possibility and slip into the realm of genuine peril. Even if we choose queer interpretive logics that refuse to consider drug use “wrong life”–even if and as it risks death–it is often a life that potentially neglects other-orientation in such a way that it can put those others at significant risk–for loss, pain, and suffering. It would seem that even the most sophisticated deconstruction cannot escape the objective reality of drug use’s potential for destruction, and this is perhaps a reason most theorists stop short of addiction’s full rehabilitation. Ronell’s own deconstructive reading of addiction seems to come closest to cracking the door of this conundrum, when she writes plainly, drawing on Heidegger’s Being and Time, that in a state of “true” freedom “one can decide for destruction,” that “true freedom involves the freedom to choose what is good and what is bad” (45-46). Yet even this reading cannot circumvent, nor does it address, the potential consequences to others of such “bad,” destructive decisions. It does not circumvent, or address, what happens, what becomes of freedom itself, when its destructive force impinges upon freedoms (or lives) not ours for the taking. In addressing this question myself, I can do no more than suggest, problematically perhaps, that there is no Being which is free from the consequences of being-in-relation-to-others, including destructive, addicted others; that to be is always already to be in a state of peril.

 

Ronell’s own follow-up questions to her reading of Heidegger (questions she believes Being and Time leaves unresolved) are these: iffreedom can, and does, decide for destruction, what then happens not to others, but to decision itself? Is it not also destroyed? And if freedom turns on decision, what have we left of freedom after decision is gone (46)? Put differently, in Friedling’s terms again, how can we argue for the emancipatory possibilities in compulsive drug use when emancipation and compulsion seem exclusive, or destructive, of one another? Compulsion is by definition an urge that trumps decision, an urge that constrains. But definition is the ultimate constraint, and this tidy dilemma actually becomes somewhat easier to outmaneuver than the one that cracks open into the ineluctability of others’ pain. The first maneuver side-steps the binary that insists on framing freedom and compulsion as exclusive in the first place, an insistence that is itself compelled by what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick points out is an anxious need to preserve “a receding but absolutized space of pure voluntarity” (134).⁵ Yet the (fictitious) boundaries around this “absolute” space crumble immediately in the face of many human endeavors (I am compelled by my freely chosen profession to write this article), and certainly in the face of all desire–“healthy,” “addictive” or otherwise. Desire, by definition, compels, and then sustains both itself and its subject only by continuous compulsion.

 

The second maneuver around the freedom/compulsion dichotomy points to the great irony that the “freedom” culturally sanctioned as “most true” turns out to be the least absolute. “True” freedom has most often been culturally constituted not as the ability to do and live as one wants, nor, in Heideggerian terms, as the existential state of being radically “given over to the world” (Ronell 46), but as a practiced condition achieved only by self-control. Foucault has illumined for us the centrality of this ideal to cultures of ancient Greece, and its still hegemonic position shows no signs of erosion despite an already-interminable analysis which has sought to chip away at its foundations. Among the theorists whose work I have engaged in my own analysis, Keane, Valverde, Levine, Sedgwick, Ronell, and Russo have all interrogated, at a general level, this paradoxical understanding of what true freedom is, and many have noted as well its constitutive relationship to what counts as, and to what is “wrong with,” addiction. Russo, for example, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of Franz Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy,” writes of “the ludicrousness of the humanistic ideal of freedom as ‘self controlled motion.'” Within such an inhibiting ideal, the freedom “which makes ‘us’ human,” Russo observes, “turns out to be another version of imprisonment” (51). Or, as Levine similarly observes of addiction specifically, the freeing act by which the addict is “released from his chains” turns out to be stringent self-control, or, in the disease model, the compelled submission to total self-denial/abstinence (13 of 16). Though freedom as self-control is understood as freedom because it resists the supposed enslavement of compulsion and/as desire, within this paradigm freedom is oxymoronically attained via a socially compelled indentured servitude to the supreme values of moderation and restraint, values without which addiction as such could not exist. The official diagnostic criteria for addiction are again illustrative here, for the primary determinant of whether or not one is “truly” addicted (over and above even frequency of use) is the crossing of another nebulous threshold into “loss of control.” If there is loss of control over consumption and/or intoxicated behavior, we are obviously in the presence of a “disease,” for what else could explain such an “irrational” lack of restraint?

 

The standard of self control as both a means and end of freedom traverses histories and cultures to such an extent that Valverde calls it “a common denominator for most of the history of the West” (18). Yet this consistency may attest more to the mutability of this idea(l) than to its immutability, for it attests to the great anxiety to maintain it, to the tremendous transcultural efforts, to which Sedgwick, to carve out spaces of absolute self-determination–efforts that keep subjects functioning properly precisely because they believe they are functioning voluntarily. In Foucauldian terms, this “great fantasy” of “a social body constituted by the universality of wills,” rather than by “the materiality of power operating on the very bodies of individuals,” serves to obscure awareness of those structures of power, and, most particularly, to obscure the awareness that these structures often render self-determinism an impossibility in the first place (Power 55). So the third and final maneuver around the freedom/compulsion binary, to put it plainly, is to burst the bubble of this fantasy, or, more elaborately, to recognize the ways, the means, and to what ideological ends we are compelled to believe we are autonomous and free. When we do so, we may discern that another one of the emancipatory possibilities in “compulsive” drug use lies in its embodied protest against the regulative ideal of freedom itself.

 

Bordo, whose term “embodied protest” I have used as a framework for this discussion, concludes her reading of women’s eating “disorders” by reverting to the language of pathology, and by capitulating to the ideals of freedom scrutinized above. “To feel autonomous and free while harnessing body and soul to an obsessive body-practice is to serve, not transform, a social order that limits female possibilities,” she writes. She indicts postmodern feminist theorists for their inattention to this “reality”–for “too exclusive a focus on the symbolic dimension” of these protests, and inattention to the practical life of the body (179, 181). In other words, Bordo ends where I begin, and where I here end as well: with our tendency to get stuck in the figurative, and with a corrective call for renewed interest in the lived. Bordo’s own response to this call is the typically cautious retreat that marks and curtails feminist and other deconstructive readings of addiction. While she works from the opposing premise–that remaining wedded to the symbolic is itself a risk, rather than the refusal of risk, as I have been arguing–the message, and the fear, is one and the same: Emancipation is at stake, and the real, lived body, the body meant for (consigned to) a long and disease-free life, must be handled with care. While I once again acknowledge that I do not seek to disregard suffering, I do seek to exceed the confines of this typical retreat narrative, and to examine the ways in which the particular excesses of intoxication, addiction, being on drugs may be interpreted not only as symbolic crystallizations of cultural anxieties, and not only as symbolic subversions of gendered and other regulative constraints, but as lived, ontological protestations against these constraints. Excess has served postmodern feminists well in their rehabilitation of feminine desire, and I have attempted here to offer us one more for the road.

 

Notes

 

1. Because “addiction” is the arbitrary, recently constructed categorical term I am problematizing, I am conflating it with other terms, such as intoxication or “being on drugs,” rather than distinguishing between these states of being.

 

2. For fine overviews and contextualizations of these discussions, see the spring 1993 special issue of differences on addiction, the 1997 Diacritics special issue on addiction (and especially Clark’s essay), Nealon’s “‘Junk’ and the Other: Burroughs and Levinas on Drugs,” from Alterity Politics, Ronell’s Crack Wars, and Sedgwick’s “Epidemics of the Will” from Tendencies.

 

3. To a certain extent, of course, the addict I am discussing here is also a “representation,” and she is certainly an interpretive construction, as I do not have access to “ontology” other than through my synthesis of the theoretical, historical, and autobiographical accounts on which I draw. However, I seek to make this distinction between interpretations of the potential subversions wrought by an embodied subject, even as I construct and construe her and interpretations of subversively “stylized” media performances, and especially between interpretations of the “being” of addiction itself and the use of addiction to interpret and metaphorize other phenomena.

 

4. In calling upon excess I am by no means suggesting that “reason” is the property of men, or that reason is somehow antithetical to feminist criticism, or that reason is always appealed to and deployed toward oppressive ends. As many theorists have reminded us, such an anti-reason stance is unreasonable for feminists to take, as it would potentially negate the possibility of setting evaluative criteria, of constructing (counter)narratives of legitimization, and would exclude women/feminists from the realm of rational argumentation more generally (see, for example, Waugh’s Feminine Fictions, Benhabib’s “Feminism and Postmodernism” in Feminist Contentions, Clément’s dialogue with Hélène Cixous, “A Woman Mistress,” in The Newly Born Woman, and Felski’s The Gender of Modernity). Indeed, it is precisely because reason has been equated with the masculine that feminists must reclaim and retain its powers, and it is only through reason that feminists can construct counternarratives that upset the idea of “Reason” as universal. In short, it is only through reason that we can expose what Felski describes as the “fundamental irrationaliy of modern [masculinist] reason” itself (5). This is the stance from which my essay proceeds, and the project within which my deployment of excess, and my counternarrativizing of addiction, seek to take their place.

 

5. Sedgwick, Valverde, and Keane all attempt to recoup the lost concept of “habit” as what Sedgwick calls “an otherwise” to addiction’s absolutes of compulsion and voluntarity.

 

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