2011
10. 17
On Control | The User 02 -- I'd like to ask just two questions. Clearly no one knows what to do with drugs, not even the users. But no one knows how to talk about them either... The first question would be: Do drugs have a specific causality and can we explore this direction? Specific does not mean a 'metaphysical' or an exclusively scientific (i.e. chemical) causality. It is not an infrastructure on which everything else would depend as on a cause. It implies mapping the territory or contours of a drug-set. Let me use a completely different domain as a example: psychoanalysis. Whatever we can say against psychoanalysis, the following fact remains: it attempted to establish the specific causality of a domain, not only neuroses, but all kinds of psychosocial formations and productions (dreams, myths, etc.). In short, it traced this specific causality by showing how desire invests a system of mnesic traces and affects. The question is not whether this specific causality was right. What matters is the search for this causality, through which psychoanalysis led us out of overly general considerations even if it was only to fall prey to other mystifications. But my question is: Can we conceive of a specific causality of drugs and in what direction? For example, with drugs, there is something very unique where desire directly invests the system of perception ...It seems to me that there was a time when research was headed in this direction: [viz.] how all drugs involve speeds, modifications of speeds, thresholds of perceptions, perception on a molecular level, superhuman or subhuman times, etc. Yes, how desire directly enters into perception, directly invests perception...
The second question would be: How do we account for a 'turning point' in drugs, how do we determine at what moment this turning point occurs? Does it necessarily happen very quickly, and is the material such that failure or disaster is necessarily part of the drug-plane? ...My two problems converge. It may be at the level of the specific causality of drugs that we can understand why drugs turn so bad and alter their own causality. Once again, desire directly investing perception is something very surprising, very beautiful, a sort of unknown land. But... the long list of dependencies -- they are all too familiar, even if replayed by the addicts, who take themselves to be the experimenters, the knights of the modern world, or the universal providers of bad conscience. What happens to get from one to the other? I have the impression that no progress is currently being made, that good research is not being done ...Those who know the problem, the addicts and the doctors, seem to have abandoned their research, for themselves and for others. (Deleuze, "Two Questions on Drugs")