International Journal of Drug Policy 22 (2011) 404–406
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Editorial
Reassembling (social) contexts: New directions for a sociology of drugs
The sociological ‘imagination’ has long sustained theoretical and empirical interest in the consumption of alcohol and other drugs (AOD). Extending across the social sciences and into the arts and humanities, this impulse has inspired diverse accounts of the social, cultural, economic and political dimensions of AOD use in a range of disparate settings (Agar, 2003; Duff, 2007; Durrant & Thakker, 2003). In documenting the social and cultural ‘contexts’ of AOD use, sociological research has also offered something of a corrective to ‘egocentric’ models, which typically explain AOD use as a function of individual biological, psychological and/or physiological factors (Nutt et al., 2006). This reflects an enduring division of labour in AOD research between disciplines which emphasise the social and structural dimensions of such behaviours, and those which prioritise the endogenous, biological or ‘agentic’ aspects of AOD use. Despite intermittent and sometimes heroic attempts to finally reconcile the study of structure and agency in social science inquiry (see Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; De Landa, 2006; Giddens, 1986), the analysis of AOD consumption is nonetheless riven by the unrelenting antinomies of ‘context’ and ‘person’, the ‘social’ and the ‘individual’, ‘history’ and ‘will’. This is true of sociological inquiry no less than any other social science discipline, with sociologists almost always emphasising the cultural and contextual dimensions of AOD use, even as they attempt to discern the personal and symbolic meaning of such behaviours. Retracing these familiar historical and epistemological cleavages serves as a reminder of the foundational commitments of a sociology of drugs, whilst providing an opportunity to reflect on the progress sociologists have made in their attempts to account for the contexts of AOD use, and the directions such inquiry might yet take. Without wishing to reduce all sociological accounts of AOD consumption to the simple nostrum of ‘context’, this gesture provides a useful dramatisation of what is at stake in much recent analysis of AOD use (Weinberg, 2011, p. 304–306). Absent the idea of context, this analysis loses much of its rationale, and its intellectual or scientific impetus. Yet if context is what is at stake in contemporary sociological accounts of AOD use, then it is reasonable to consider how stable or reliable this epistemological axiom really is. Just as philosophers of science have recently begun questioning the status of the ‘social’ in social science inquiry (see Joyce, 2002, p. 12–15; Latour, 2005, p. 1–5; Law, 2004, p. 12–13), perhaps it is timely to question the role of context in AOD research and policy development too. This commentary poses this question in an attempt to sketch the contours of a sociology of AOD use ‘after’ context.
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Defining context Context is typically defined within social science research as setting, milieu or background; as a distinctive structural or cultural ‘environment’ that frames and situates human behaviour and the diverse cultural practises that sustain it (Agar, 2003; Durrant & Thakker, 2003). Context describes a nexus of “beliefs and practises (culture, forms of life, language game or tradition) that is never at once and completely capable of articulation” (Schwandt, 2001, p. 36). Despite this ineffable quality, sociologists and anthropologists in particular have invested considerable energy teasing out the constituent features of context, routinely highlighting the importance of power, values and beliefs, cultural norms and traditions, capitalism and consumerism, gender, sexuality and race in the organisation of human conduct. A critical feature of this work is the contention that social contexts exert a structural force that exceeds individual settings or locales, such that class or capitalism for example, are said to generate social and contextual effects in multiple local settings at once (Duff, 2007). The ‘macro’, in this sense, always exceeds the ‘micro’ (see Thrift, 1996, p. 2–4). This is also the reason why contextual factors are described as ‘structurating’, given the ordering effects of power, class, race, economics and so on. These same contextual factors are routinely cited in contemporary AOD research, with each regarded as an important determinant of the specific patterns of AOD use discernible in discrete sites (Weinberg, 2011). Inspired by Zinberg’s (1984) seminal account of drug use “settings”, considerable research now exists highlighting the manner in which drug use and related harms are influenced by contextual and structural factors such as economic and class distinctions (Weinberg, 2011); gender (Measham, 2002); sexuality (Slavin, 2004); ethnicity and race (Maher, 2004). Given the significance of this kind of research and the epistemological (or at least methodological) standing of ‘context’ in much contemporary analysis of AOD use, it might seem perverse to consider such a project without the ordering presence of context. Yet I want to argue here that the idea of context – at least in the ways it has been mobilised in recent sociological analyses of AOD use – is increasingly unable to account for the array of actors, objects, spaces and technologies ‘at work’ in the event of AOD consumption. Just as the notion of the ‘social’ has been progressively dismantled in contemporary sociological inquiry, ‘context’ too may be interrogated for the reifications it promotes. Certainly, the common association of ‘social’ and ‘context’ in social science inquiry invites this kind of speculation, whilst the ruminations of
Editorial / International Journal of Drug Policy 22 (2011) 404–406
actor-network-theory almost demand it (Demant, 2009; Duff, in press; Weinberg, 2011). The wide-ranging critique of ‘society’ and the ‘social’ presented in the actor-network-theory (ANT) of Latour (2005), Law (2004) and Mol (2010), hinges on analysis of the distinctive ontological and epistemological status of each such category. Far from describing some ‘aggregate’ feature of social organisation, Latour (2005, p. 4–10) stresses that the ‘social’ and ‘society’ are what is produced in contemporary accounts of this organisation. Hence, the ‘social’ should not be regarded as one discrete element of society arranged alongside its other constituent parts such as “economics, geography, biology, psychology, law, science and politics” (Latour, 2005, p. 3). Rather, the social is “what is glued together by many other types of connectors” (Latour, 2005, p. 5). These arguments proceed from Latour’s difficulty identifying a unique social domain of contemporary life which differs in any meaningful way from other established structural actors like the law and politics. Whilst acknowledging the enduring appeal of the social, Latour (2005, p. 2) insists that it’s “no longer clear whether there exists relations that are specific enough to be called ‘social’ and that could be grouped together in making up a special domain that could function as a ‘society”’. He illustrates this point by way of a discussion of the challenges associated with generating ‘social’ accounts of ‘non-social’ phenomena, which Latour regards as the raison d’etre of contemporary sociological inquiry. Latour (2005, p. 1–5) argues that such accounts inevitably founder on a conceptual slippage between two different understandings of ‘social’. First, the social is taken to describe “a stabilised state of affairs, a bundle of ties” that somehow accounts for the ‘social’ aspects of ostensibly ‘non-social’ activities. Yet, the social is also understood to comprise “a type of material” that differs in ontologically and epistemologically significant ways from other entities thought to comprise society like ‘biology’, ‘markets’ or ‘institutions’. Social accounts continually oscillate between these two domains, on the one hand describing a “movement during a process of assembling”, and on the other, specifying a “material that is supposed to differ from other materials” (Latour, 2005, p. 1). As such, social explanations of contemporary life are caught between a description of process and the protection of a discrete social domain which serves as the very authorising foundation for all social inquiry. This however, leaves the social seemingly everywhere and nowhere; everywhere involved in the organisation of associations and interactions, and yet nowhere leaving a material trace, a domain that might be amenable to empirical inquiry. The social has in these ways become reified in social science inquiry; an epistemological maxim devoid of any ontological content (see also Law, 2004, p. 2–5). It is arguable that the idea of ‘context’ functions in much the same way in contemporary social science inquiry, including the analysis of AOD consumption. Like the ‘social’, contexts are understood to exert a material force on practises like AOD use, such that one might identify the contextual determinants of consumption behaviours. According to this logic, social contexts ‘frame’ AOD use in various ways, shaping the distribution and availability of individual substances and the tenor of cultural attitudes regarding their use, limiting certain choices whilst facilitating others. However, the extant literature emphasises the ways settings and contexts restrict or frame consumption behaviours, without ever quite specifying how they achieve this mediation (Demant, 2009; Duff, 2007). At issue is the task of identifying the specific mechanisms by which non-human entities – like the structures, practises, beliefs, objects and spaces thought to constitute social contexts – mediate consumption behaviours in the event of transforming them. The point is to determine how, why and under what circumstances these nonhuman (or contextual) actors actually make a difference in AOD use. Rather than posit context as some short hand for the mechanisms
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of structural mediation, social science accounts of AOD use need to return to the laborious empirical task of documenting the array of actors at work in any instance of consumption. Clearly, there are diverse agencies present in this consumption; bundling all of the non-human agencies together in the artifice of context merely obscures rather than explains the character of these forces, actants and processes. The relational logic set out in ANT provides a means of tracing these processes, and the various actors active therein. Reassembling contexts The work of Latour and Law provides a highly original basis for exploring the production and reproduction of context in relation to the consumption of alcohol and other drugs, and an equally novel means of accounting for the impact of contexts, spaces and settings in mediating this consumption (Demant, 2009; Weinberg, 2011). This innovation derives from Latour’s reassessment of the role of actants, spaces and objects in the production of social contexts, and the distribution of the agencies necessary to initiate practises like AOD use (Duff, in press). Rather than treat social contexts as expressions of broader and more complex structural processes, Latour and Law seek to account for the production of social contexts in discrete networks, practises and associations. These networks assemble objects, actants and bodies in the active task of producing and transforming context. In a critical innovation, Latour (2005) and Law (2004) do not presuppose an active subject who serves as the author of this contextual production, and instead highlight the agentic force of spaces, objects, bodies and actants. Whilst recognition of the agency of actants, objects and spaces presents significant challenges for existing accounts of the role of social contexts in mediating AOD use, it has the considerable advantage of offering a robust and testable explanation of how contexts actually exert this force. This analysis turns on ANT’s idiosyncratic understanding of ‘social’. The ‘social’ does not, for Latour (2005, p. 1–5), comprise a discrete substance or domain. It should not be construed as a material infrastructure that guides or frames the myriad individual interactions that characterise everyday life. Rather, the social ought to be understood as “a trail of associations between heterogeneous elements” (Latour, 2005, p. 5). The social is a “type of connection” (Latour, 2005, p. 5), involving the creation and maintenance of associations between actors, objects and processes and not a fixed contextual domain. The social is always relational and never the sum total of the elements so assembled. Sociality thus describes the various processes and relations that facilitate the creation of novel associations and the distribution of diverse agencies. To study social relations according to the logic proposed by ANT, requires the identification of the specific moments of connection and association by which social effects are produced; an explanation of how these associations come to comprise discrete networks; and a tallying of the various efforts by which these networks are maintained or extended (Latour, 2005, p. 7–9). This logic presents a equally compelling basis for studying social contexts and the ways contexts are materially, socially and affectively produced and reproduced in individual sites or networks (Duff, in press; Weinberg, 2011). More directly, Latour’s reassembling of the social provides a means of determining how specific contextual objects, actants, processes and spaces mediate, transform or otherwise organise discrete cultural practises like AOD use. In charting such a course, ANT gestures towards a revitalized sociology of AOD use more sensitive to the ‘event’ of this consumption. A sociology of drugs ‘after’ context The goal of such a sociology ought to be the generation of ever richer accounts of the event or situation of AOD use, alert
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to the great diversity of ‘actors’ at work in this event. It is often claimed that the primary political aim of a fuller accounting of the social contexts of AOD use is the basis such reckonings provide for the design of more effective harm reduction and prevention strategies (Duff, 2007). However as I have argued throughout this commentary, the problem with this argument is the challenge of documenting clear causal links between specific contextual and/or structural processes and the mediation of AOD use in particular instances, such that effective ‘structural’ interventions might be devised. This problem recalls older debates regarding the relationship between structure and agency, the macro and the micro, yet it also introduces new challenges for applied social research. The task is to identify the mechanisms, relations or processes by which social contexts actually transform AOD use in specific settings. Starting with the social, affective and material relations that compose, organise or construct contexts, ANT establishes a means of tracing the divergent articulations of context within the everyday experience of AOD consumption. This includes the emergence of discrete ‘structural’ actants and their subsequent ‘translation’ within local AOD consumption networks; the association of bodies, relations, affects and events in the production of ‘social’ effects; and the collocations of spatial and corporeal relations typical of ‘local’ interactions. ANT in this way provides a basis for describing how the ‘macro’ comes to infiltrate and reorder the ‘micro’, just as the ‘micro’ articulates itself within the order of the ‘macro’. A number of scholars have recently begun tracing these associations between the macro and the micro, context and practice, in the event of AOD consumption (Chen, 2011; Demant, 2009; Duff, in press; Keane, 2011; Law, 2004; Moore, 2004; Weinberg, 2011). Rather than posit fixed ontological categories – like ‘context’ and ‘subject’ – that subsequently meet or interact in the course of AOD use, scholars interested in the work of Latour, Mol and Law have sought to demonstrate how subjects, agencies, networks and spaces are produced in and through the activity of this consumption. This emerging literature points to the development of a sociology of AOD use ‘after’ context; after the reifications of structure and more sensitive to the local and contingent operations of networks, events and assemblages (Marcus and Saka, 2006, p. 105–106). In a wideranging review of this literature, Weinberg (2011, p. 304–306) notes the role of ANT-inspired studies in drawing attention to the varied agencies and subjectivities that are mobilised in the event of AOD use. Developing these insights, Demant (2009) describes the agentic force of alcohol in assembling peer networks and mobilising discrete identities amongst cohorts of adolescents and young adults. Moore (2004) uncovers the various network relations by which substances come to acquire distinctive ‘personalities’, and the ways these personalities frame both the meanings associated with individual substances and attempts to regulate their consumption. In my own work, I have tried to identify the range of human and non-human actors present in the event of AOD use in order to trace the ways ‘structural’ or ‘contextual’ effects are produced, assembled and deployed in this use (Duff, 2007, 2010, in press). Each of these studies points to the ways contexts are made and remade in AOD use, in the activity of diverse bodies, actants and objects. The emergence of these kinds of studies demonstrates both the utility of ANT in reframing sociological investigation of AOD use, and the possibility of moving beyond fixed or ‘structural’ understandings of context to better describe the ways contexts are produced and reproduced in practice, space and culture (Duff, 2007). This move does not deny the force of ‘non-local’ actors in
shaping social practises like AOD use; it rather insists that such actors are always in the process of being assembled without ever settling into the familiar reifications of ‘structure’ or ‘context’. A number of the papers presented in this special issue provide further indications of the contours of a sociology of drug use ‘after’ context (Chen, 2011; Fraser and Moore, 2011; Keane, 2011). They also suggest a willingness to return to the patient labour of documenting the myriad associations by which ‘societies’ are created in everyday life (Latour, 2002, p. 119–121); including those ‘societies’ of drugs, bodies, spaces, objects and affects by which ‘contexts’ as such are ordered. References Agar, M. (2003). Toward a qualitative epidemiology. Qualitative Health Research, 13(7), 974–986. Bourdieu, P. & Wacquant, L. (1992). An invitation to reflexive sociology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press., 332pp. Chen, J.-s. (2011). Studying up harm reduction policy: The office as an assemblage. International Journal of Drug Policy, 22(6), 471–477. De Landa, M. (2006). A new philosophy of society: Assemblage theory and social complexity. London: Continuum. Demant, J. (2009). When alcohol acts: An actor-network approach to teenagers, alcohols and parties. Body and Society, 15(1), 25–46. Duff, C. (2007). Towards a theory of drug use contexts: Space embodiment and practice. Addiction Research and Theory, 15(5), 503–519. Duff, C. (2010). Enabling places and enabling resources: New directions for harm reduction research and practice. Drug and Alcohol Review, 29(3), 337–344. Duff, C. (2000). Accounting for context: Exploring the role of objects and spaces in the consumption of alcohol and other drugs. Social and Cultural Geography. Durrant, R. & Thakker, J. (2003). Substance use and abuse: Cultural and historical perspectives. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. Fraser, S. & Moore, D. (2011). Governing through problems: The formulation of policy on amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS) in Australia. International Journal of Drug Policy, 22(6), 498–506. Giddens, A. (1986). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Joyce, P. (Ed.). (2002). The social in question: New bearings in history and the social sciences. Routledge: London. Keane, H. (2011). The politics of visibility: Drug users and the spaces of drug use. International Journal of Drug Policy, 22(6), 407–409. Latour, B. (2002). Gabriel Tarde and the end of the social. In P. Joyce (Ed.), The social in question: New bearings in history and the social sciences. London: Routledge. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Law, J. (2004). After method: Mess in social science research. London: Routledge. Maher, L. (2004). Drugs, public health and policing in Indigenous communities. Drug and Alcohol Review, 23(3), 249–251. Marcus, G. & Saka, E. (2006). Assemblage. Theory, Culture & Society, 23(2–3), 101–106. Measham, F. (2002). ‘Doing gender, doing drugs’: Conceptualizing the gendering of drugs cultures. Contemporary Drug Problems, 29. Mol, A. (2010). Actor-network theory: Sensitive terms and enduring tensions. Kölner Zeitschrift Für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 50(2), 253–269. Moore, D. (2004). Drugalities: The generative capabilities of criminalized ‘drugs’. International Journal of Drug Policy, 15(5–6), 419–426. Nutt, D., Robbins, T., Stimson, G., Ince, M., & Jackson, A. (Eds.). (2006). Drugs and the future: Brain science, addiction and society. San Diego: Academic Press. Schwandt, T. (2001). Dictionary of qualitative inquiry. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Slavin, S. (2004). Crystal meth among gay men in Sydney. Contemporary Drug Problems, 31, 425–465. Fall. Thrift, N. (1996). Spatial formations. London: Sage. Weinberg, D. (2011). Sociological perspectives on addiction. Sociology Compass, 5(4), 298–310. Zinberg, N. (1984). Drug, set, setting: The basis for controlled intoxicant use. Yale: Yale University Press.
Cameron Duff ∗ Monash Fellow, Social Sciences and Health Research Unit, Monash University, PO Box 197, Caulfield East, Melbourne, 3145 Australia ∗ Tel.:
+61 3 9903 4506. E-mail address:
[email protected]
