I've been reading Helen Keane's excellent book What's Wrong with Addiction? (reviewed here) which is a critical look at the discourse of addiction and drugs. She uses a variety of thinkers from Derrida and Deleuze to Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler to perform a deconstruction of overdetermined, reified concepts of addiction. I'm especially interested in her reading of a study, outlined here, which used brain imaging to compare "normal" subjects with "addicted" ones:
The method was PET scan, an imaging procedure that shows which areas in the living human brain are activated by certain stimuli. There are two groups of subjects -- people who had never used cocaine, and people who had been cocaine abusers in the past but had not used any in recent months. Two kinds of cue were presented on video tape -- a neutral one (such as a pastoral scene), and a cocaine-related one (such as injection equipment). Subjects who had never used cocaine showed no unusual brain activity when exposed to either kind of cue. Subjects who had abused cocaine in the past were not affected at all by a neutral cue; but they responded very differently to a cocaine-related cue. Intense craving was provoked, and specific brain areas lit up on the PET scan -- areas in parts of the brain (frontal cortex and amygdala) that are known to be associated with emotional memories and craving.
This study is very interesting because it points to how the technologies of brain imaging are used to confirm pre-existing notions of addiction and disease. The subjects have already been divided into the two groups: normal and addicted, based on the model that addiction is a disease which causes an irreversible and essential change in the brain. Then differing brain reactions to the same stimuli are taken as positive proof of the altered nature of the addict's brain, when in fact the same changes could be read in a whole variety of different ways: as the emotional response engendered by a reaction to a powerful memory, for example.
The brain images are supposed to provide the key to unlock the secret of who is an addict and who is not, but the researchers have already decided this by looking at behavioral cues, self-report, and individual history. But these individuated factors are too fuzzy and too vague for the scientific understanding, which needs to reify itself into the certainty of an objective image. So instead of the infinite diversity of addictions, and the vast variety of stories one might tell about different people using different drugs in different cultures at different times, we have one story -- a metanarrative -- that perceives addiction as a single thing with a universal track.
That universality slights the individual history of addiction and the particular, quirky problem that it poses within a lived experience. Instead of world-unfolding Dasein, we have concrete captured Essence. The polarity of normal/addicted also gets mapped very conveniently onto good/evil and natural/artificial distinctions, making the addict into the "other" that constitutes the normal (this is Keane channeling Judith Butler, of course, but also Derrida's pharmakon).
More later on the parallel between the use of brain imaging to classify normal vs addicted brains, and the use of same to classify male vs female brains, and how that relates to yesterday's post on creativity and porn.