jedicist.org Blog

The mighty signifier Drugs names a narrative that births a calculated and urgent economy of fear and desire subsumed into raw desperation and dilapidation, an economy sanctioned by a bumbling civil system that we all propagate and support, a system that seems not to know what to do with the population that it created in America to exploit, and so continues to mindlessly and automatically oppress.  That mighty signifier Drugs deemphasizes and confuses the substances that it claims to signify: chemicals which interact physiologically with a Human, creating distinct physical states that should be understood medically.  Along with that material signified, Drugs points to a narrative and archetype that has been re-created in the American psyche: the violent and violating minority who profits unfairly off despair (this discourse never bothers to probe that despair, lest it be traced back to the dominant economy), the menacing cancer that preys on youth.  The violence that is packed tightly within the word is supposed to be somehow ontologically connected to the substance itself, rather than the regime that has been created by fear of that very violence.  Whether or not I like it, the significance of the word Drugs is heavily laden by a regime of anti-produductive forces that war at once from within and without marginalized American communities—a regime enacted through the legal system and justified by its own narrative.

Cocaine, for example, ruins lives.  It does so because it contains the chemical power to destroy bodies.  However, it cannot be overlooked that the most common side-effect of cocaine—seen as a social force—is chronic prison sentences.  Prison is not the prescribed treatment for any physical ailment, including addiction or withdrawal therefrom, including also poverty, malnourishment, hopelessness, abuse, or trauma.  Indeed, in the absence of prison education and rehabilitation programs, it is hard to see just what prison is prescribed to treat, as a body or as a body politic.

More likely than any salubrious effect desired, the carceral regime that is enabled by this narrative is enacted upon bodies because those bodies are Criminal, were born Criminal.  The American system was created to be exclusive and continues to be: others have said it before me, so I will boil it down to the essence: the Other is essential for the Self to be.  This is true economically: America was blatantly built on slavery.  Perhaps our economy today has less dependence on bondage labor than it once did, perhaps not,

especially if the regime of low wages and high debt is recognized for the calculated malevolent beast that it is.  Those who seek a way to opt out of that system that keeps labor desperate and cheap must be dealt with somehow.  And yet, we must get our drugs from someone.

A  speculative response to V.S. Naipaul as a person

Born on the margins, he lives to marginalize, seeks to impose his isolation upon the world, upon the land of his ancestry, and his father was also a lonely man. What was once projected upon him—the inadequacy of the periphery and the scantiness of cultural life there—he will continue to project outward, mercilessly if he must. A man who rewrote his biography upon the skin of the world, where the ebb of colonialism had left nothing in its wake to replace it, where history had planted no seeds to blossom. Whose entire life’s-work is a product of a single primordial achievement: getting a scholarship to Oxford: leaving the island and becoming educated in the homeland of the empire: studying at the point of origin, which was a loftier summit than anywhere else in the colonized world or the post-thereafter, a history into which he interpolated himself, into which he poured himself, onto which he projected the history of his family, upon whom much injustice had been wrecked by a system built upon the assumption of their racial inferiority, producing a potent inferiority complex, which seems to have laid a firm foundation for a mighty misogyny. In his family, his mother was Power, she was the landed class, it was her family that bound him and that sought to bind his father from their literary independence, from their writerly images, the interference between the man and his material, between Bogart and the pen. He idealizes his father, idolizes his father, writes for his father, and blames his mother for not having enough material to write about. His mother as a mother lies flat against vague abstraction: as he gives her to us, she is not a person in herself, not a nurturing individual, but a Force, a manifestation of history, a representative party of her family, who, as the inheritors of a landed history, pulled him into isolation on a plantation estate from the city, where his father was as a participant in a more vibrant society, in a literary culture which he loves nostalgically for its provinciality, for its promise of anticolonialism, for its attempt to restore autonomy to a culture. Is this enough to build a lifelong misogyny, a grotesque indulgence in fantasies of sexual violence? He did not hate his mother. Perhaps he did not even hate motherhood. But, yes, perhaps she—psychologically, She—that bound him to his periphery, to his island, to the colonial past. And he escaped and achieved, strove to prove that the writerly force of his father as reproduced in him was stronger than she was, for all the power of her family, for all the weight of the past.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jed-bickman/sacred-art-exploring-the_b_531799.html

No, I did not put in the work necessary to make this good.  Yes, I want to share it with you.  Yes, it’s worth reading if you’re reading.

The prompt: to evoke economic anxiety

The animals still needed to be fed, and she had barely finished feeding herself. Not that she was hungry much anymore; her stint in the hospital had taken care of all that. But she dreamed about eating, still, imagined the metal curvature of the spoon against her tongue, the metallic clink of handwashed plates knocking together in the cabinet, a sound like one of the notes the bear hits as he gnaws against the lock on his enclosure, or maybe even coins hitting an empty register.

When the animals get too hungry, they can’t be so sociable as they need to be. Visitors get turned off by sulking chimps and vicious hissing marmots. Children go home in tears. And that was never the intention, that wasn’t why she had started the menagerie. It had been for the children. For Victor, really, though he hadn’t lived to see it. When the cages were new, before the animals had come, she had imagined his presence filling them—his spirit not little boy sized as most conventional ghosts are the size of people left behind, but expansive, like a gas, filling the empty but environmentally-appropriate habitats, filtering between the chickenwire and the locks. The locks, now rusted, almost rusted shut. She hadn’t opened most of them in years, didn’t think she ever would, now. They would die in there, she would finally give up on this place and flee across the border, try to get out of reach of her creditors. It would happen soon, at this rate, sooner than she had hoped.

Some of the animals were still in that fierce stage of hunger. The jackal cackled and flung his body against his walls. The sloths just sighed. Last week, the chimps had fought, fought so hard she thought they were resorting to cannibalism. Now they lay in a stupor, apparently passing in and out of consciousness, swallowing air to fill their bellies and then pungently deflating from both ends.

She sat in a faded upholstered chair in front of their enclosure and considered hunger, from a theoretical point of view. Considered the utensils and other infrastructure of culinary activity.

She would feed them if she could, she would, she would. She was not cruel. But she could not; the whole country was deflated, starving; the government had willed the economy out of existence, apparently—according to the bill collectors—with loans like the one she had gotten to build this place.

She thought about murdering them. What is it they say about misery in lesser beings? She thought of the long sound of a knife being released, wielded. She thought of Victor. He had wanted the monkeys so badly. It had all been his idea, the idea of a child turned into a business plan, a loan application, defaults and down payments. Now, his memorial.

She thought of the government doctors, still probably eating in cafeterias, despite it all. When they had released her, they had told her to start a business. Do something for the national economy, they had said. Part of her rehabilitation. Or reeducation. Both words were thrown around a lot. But now that their great experiment had failed, now that Victor was gone, now that her animals were hungery and her programming unraveling, they were unresponsive. She wondered if they still wore suits under their white coats.

Her own clothes were stained with feces that the chimps had thrown when there were still feces to be thrown. They hung off her narrowing arms. She could fit into some of Victor’s old clothes, now. She wouldn’t be able to make her next payment. If she missed one more, she would lose herself; even herself, only herself; they didn’t want the monkeys.

She didn’t eat much these days, and even if she could, she probably wouldn’t. It tasted like sawdust. The hospital had seen to that.

She still kept the menagerie open, and, once and a while, some tourist family would come by, glad to stretch their legs after being in the station wagon too long. She told them the animals were just sleeping, if they weren’t in a rage. If the kids were too young to understand suffering, she’d get away with it. The parents were sympathetic, it was the same everywhere in the country. They were escaping themselves, telling the kids they were just going on a little trip, then hiding their last valuables under the boot and leaving their house to the dogs.

She still had her plates and spoons, at least, her lumpy chair, worthless to her creditors, worthless to her starving animals. She had her cages that kept the animals away from her flesh. She still had her memorial. And, soon, she would flee.