The Banana Peel Project

What forms of subjecthood and subjectivity are available to us?

The question should not be, what is the “modern” subject or what is “modern” subjectivity, but rather what forms of subjecthood and subjectivity—what ways of being and of being with—are made possible in particular practices and sets of practices?  We should be looking for multiple, contingent, and always-shifting subjects, and at finding ways of liberating those forms.  Freedom and liberation remain useful goals so long as we are careful that such concepts do not collapse under the weight of contradiction, ignorance, and disengagement.

How can we open up possibilities for criticism, strategy, and transformation without knowing who we are and what we are capable of?

So what forms of subjecthood and subjectivity—what forms of life, what modes of governmentality, what aesthetics of existence—appear in and around the practice of drug use?  The use of chemical technologies to alter our moods and perceptions in reliable ways entails a particular set of attitudes and orientations with respect to the experience of pleasure, the valuation of the self, notions of dependence and independence, the possibility of change, the role of the individual in society, and many others.

Consuming drugs is part of a broad and heterogeneous practical-discursive (material-semiotic) field, a field which has itself transformed over time.  Tracing the spatiotemporal contours of this field genealogically in order both to situate the subject of psychopharmacology and to make critically available an array of strategic options for responding to the demands of that subject, problematizing its existence, and forming a new one is the entire point of the politics of psychopharmacology.

“The title means exactly what the words say: naked lunch, a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.”  This is what’s on the menu:

• Attention to the heterogeneity of the pharmaceutical subject in different places and different times, with different drugs and different communities of use, each of which has its own heterogeneous genealogy.

• This includes not forgetting the complexity of actual drug use—the role of compliance, side-effects, prescriptions and availability, communities of use and abuse, drug testing, and the intertwined and proliferating discourses of cosmetic psychopharmacology and risk.

• Attention to the voices and actions of those who use drugs, as well as to the voices and actions of those who produce them.  This is in part a relationship between consumer and producer, but it is also much more than that—a relationship between those who generate drugs as technological possibilities and those who decide what works best.  The market is only one part of this—it is not a site of truth but a tool to be used (witness the decline of neoliberal forms of governmentality).

• Respect for the active, engaged, and self-critical orientation of those who use drugs, as well as for the discourses and practices that seek to limit that activity.  This includes incorporating ideas about the reciprocity of power and resistance.

Looking at psychopharmaceutical subjects simply through the lenses of psychiatry, disability, and law is not enough—though each of these is essential.  At different times and in different spaces, users can be criminals, leaders, addicts, patients, victims, victimizers, and so on.  Pharmaceutical subjects are multiply constituted across time and space.

Attention to the specificity of the sites of formation of these subjects and to the potential of those subjects to endure partially between sites is therefore absolutely crucial.