Pharmaceutical interventions, prescribed or illicit, do much more than reorganize our somatic selves. Yes, they shuffle the sensorium and re-engineer the molecular body. But these effects are only part of the profound, and even violent, transformation of the somatic self made visible by the emergence of what Nikolas Rose has called the “neurochemical self.” Drugs …
Monthly Archives: July 2008
2. Drugs
Pharmacological interventions, drugs, neurochemical prostheses. For a cure or for fun, these are our most intimate technologies. They rearrange our spaces at the level of the senses, the body, and the flesh. The effect–the thought, the handshake, the message–becomes something different, something that moves differently across space and time, creating a new unique extension, a …
1. Spaces
A space is a set of relations, defined by its unique extension across space and time. A space between two trees can be a passageway for wind, a window, a place to hang a hammock, a distance invisibly traversed by underground roots, an arboreal interruption. Yes, it depends on what you want it to be, …
