Tendencies and trajectories: The production of subjectivity in an event of drug consumption

Abstract

Posthumanist ontologies have been employed in theoretical and empirical research in human geography to explore the production of subjectivity in processes, events and relations. Similar approaches have been adopted in critical drug research to emphasise the production of subjectivity in events of drug consumption. Within each body of work questions remain regarding the durations and becomings of subjectivity. Responding to these questions, we introduce the notions of tendencies and trajectories as a way of theorising the emergent and enduring aspects of subjectivity. We ground this discussion in a select review of posthumanist geographies, geographies of habit and post-phenomenological approaches, along with vignettes drawn from an ethnographic study of young people’s recreational drug use conducted in Melbourne, Australia. We use these sources to indicate how the notions of tendencies and trajectories may help to account for the emergent and enduring aspects of processes of subjectivation in events of drug consumption.

Online gambling venues as relational actors in addiction: Applying the actor-network approach to life stories of online gamblers

“…In the ANT-influenced applications the focus has typically been on current relations of addiction. How addiction endures and changes from one event to another has remained understudied ( Dilkes-Frayne & Duff, 2017 ). The study by Törrönen and Tigerstedt (2018) is an exception, making use of the ANT approach to analyse addiction-related attachments of alcohol consumption over time.…”

“…The study by Törrönen and Tigerstedt (2018) is an exception, making use of the ANT approach to analyse addiction-related attachments of alcohol consumption over time. Next, by taking influences from this study and by supplementing our ANT approach with the concepts of ‘tendency’ and ‘trajectory’ developed in post-humanist and post-phenomenological approaches ( Dilkes-Frayne & Duff, 2017 ), we address this lack of research and pay attention to how gambling-related addictive attachments endure, change or break off over a long period of time. ‘Tendencies’ consist of preferences, plans and practices that gradually accrue and settle into the actor, and develop into trajectories to gamble.…”

Resituating post‐phenomenological geographies: Deleuze, relations and the limits of objects

“…It is perhaps not surprising, then, that cultural geography's experiments with post‐phenomenological thinking have led it to engage with the kind of speculative realism engendered by contemporary object‐oriented philosophers, including Graham Harman (, , ), Levi Bryant (), Timothy Morton (, , ) and Ian Bogost (). This engagement pivots around cultural geography's longstanding concern for elucidating the “more‐than‐human” assemblage of social and cultural life (Spinney, , p. 234), in a move that seeks to decentre the human and displace the inherent anthropocentrism of subject‐centred approaches within the social sciences (Dilkes‐Frayne & Duff, ). The ontological status of objects thus plays a key role in post‐phenomenological debates, because the Husserlian alternative, Ash and Simpson explain, represents “a return to an idealism in which things in the world are granted existence, but only by the humans that perceive them and only through exclusively human structures of concern and familiarity” (, p. 62).…”

“…In place of “objects,” Deleuze speaks of impressions or perceptions as individual terms; in the case of the mind, these impressions generate ideas. These are the abstract materialities of the virtual: insipient tendencies that are only retrospectively embodied as actualised trajectories (Dilkes‐Frayne & Duff, ). But there is also an innovative concept of the subject in Deleuze, which, as I have argued, is always a provisional relation that takes hold – or actualises – within matter's intensive flux of impressions and ideas.…”

Materialising drugged pleasures: Practice, politics, care

“…Fraser, Moore & Keane, 2014), feminist technoscientist Karen Barad (e.g. Fraser & Moore, 2011;, as well as the French philosopher and psychanalyst team, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (Duff, 2014, Fitzgerald, 1998Keane, 2002;Malins, 2004), have sought to capture the changing qualities of not only alcohol and other drugs (Duff, 2013;Fraser et al 2010), but bodies (Malins, 2004;Dennis, 2016), subjectivities (Dilkes-Frayne & Duff, 2017;, space-times (Duff, 2008;Fraser, 2006), and highlight the implications of such approaches for policy (Lancaster et al 2015), education (Farrugia, 2017;Leahy & Malins, 2015) and intervention (Rhodes et al, 2016). In this collection we sought to continue these conversations by inviting contributors to respond and contribute to these debates by exploring what new materialist modes of inquiry offer the study of AOD pleasures.…”