Darin Weinberg

On the Embodiment of Addiction

In an effort to promote more theoretically incisive research regarding the specifically sociological aspects of addiction, this article critically discusses three prominent theoretical paradigms for the study of addiction - neurology, learning theory and symbolic interaction. Neurological theories and learning theories are found to inadequately provide for the role of culturally transmitted meanings in the addiction process. While symbolic interactionist theories have been centrally concerned with meaning, they have failed to theorize how issues of meaning might figure in the addicts inevitable subjective estrangement from his or her drug-related activities. This stems from their failure to appreciate the reality of non-symbolic meaning, or meaningful experience that manifests pre-reflectively, at the level of our immediate bodily encounter with reality. The article concludes by suggesting that sociological students of addiction adopt a more thoroughly praxiological orientation to meaningful experience, so as to overcome the analytic limitations inherent in the antinomy between biological reductionism and disembodied cognitivism.

Concepts of social justice in community psychology: toward a social ecological epistemology.

In this paper we address the pervasive tendency in community psychology to treat values like social justice only as general objectives rather than contested theoretical concepts possessing identifiable empirical content. First we discuss how distinctive concepts of social justice have figured in three major intellectual traditions within community psychology: (1) the prevention and health promotion tradition, (2) the empowerment tradition, and most recently, (3) the critical tradition. We point out the epistemological gains and limitations of these respective concepts and argue for greater sensitivity to the context dependency of normative concepts like social justice. More specifically, we point to a pressing need in community psychology for an epistemology that: (1) subsumes both descriptive and evaluative concepts, and (2) acknowledges its own embeddedness in history and culture without thereby reducing all knowledge claims to the status of ideology. Finally, we describe and demonstrate the promise of what we are calling a social ecological epistemology for fulfilling this need.

“Out There”: The Ecology of Addiction in Drug Abuse Treatment Discourse

A growing trend in social research concerning illicit drug use has entailed suspending regard for conventional questions such as the etiology of drug problems and the outcomes achieved by assorted interventions in favor of focusing analytic attention on how drug problems are socially constructed in and through human praxis. In this paper, I use a constructionist approach to demonstrate and explain endogenous accounts of what I am calling the ecology of addiction in drug abuse treatment discourse. These accounts posit a space “out there” marked by its degradation, dirtiness, solitude, and savagery which commonly tempts those who must live there to also behave amorally, licentiously, and/or savagely. I explain these accounts by showing their fundamental utility in light of specific conceptual puzzles that participants in drug abuse treatment discourse must inevitably solve. Namely, speaking in terms of this ecology of addiction provides participants with a compelling narrative means for reconciling the following two claims: 1) they are chronically prone to enslavement by their addictions, and 2) their addictions can be controlled through ongoing participation in a communal project of mutual help.

Post-humanism, addiction and the loss of self-control: Reflections on the missing core in addiction science

The core criterion of addiction is the loss of self control. Ironically enough, however, neither the social nor the biomedical sciences of addiction have so far made any measurable headway in linking drug use to a loss of self control. In this essay I begin by demonstrating the limitations in this regard suffered by the social and bio-medical sciences. Whereas the social sciences have variously reduced addicted drug use to deviant, but nonetheless self-governed, behaviour or discourses thereof, the bio-medical sciences have completely failed to adequately specify, let alone empirically analyse, how we might distinguish addicted from self-governed behaviour. I then show how these limitations can be very easily overcome by the adoption of a post-humanist perspective on self control and the various afflictions, including addiction, to which it is regarded heir. This argument provides occasion to acquaint readers with post-humanist scholarship concerning a spectrum of relevant topics including the human body, disease, drug use and therapeutic intervention and to show how these lines of investigation can be combined to provide an innovative, theoretically robust and practically valuable method for advancing the scientific study of addiction specifically as the loss of self control. The essay concludes with a discussion of some of the more important ramifications that follow from the adoption of this post-humanist approach for drug policy studies.

Lindesmith on addiction: a critical history of a classic theory

The evolution of Alfred Lindesmiths classic theory of addiction is analyzed as a product of the particular intellectual currents and controversies in and for which it was developed. These include the conflicts that pitted qualitative against quantitative sociology; the fledgling discipline of sociology against medicine, psychiatry, and psychology; and advocates of therapy for addicts against those who would simply punish them. By casting the meaningful experience of drug effects exclusively in terms of symbolically mediated mental representations of brute physiological sensations, Lindesmiths theory posits an epistemologically untenable dualism between mental and bodily perception that unnecessarily limits the explanatory scope of sociological research. As an alternative to this dualism, a praxiological approach to the meaning of drug-induced behavior and experience is proposed.

Social model treatment and individuals with dual diagnoses: An ethnographic analysis of therapeutic practice

Concurrent substance and psychiatric problems have been shown to significantly reduce the probability of successful treatment outcomes while increasing vulnerability to a range of troubles including homelessness, incarceration, physical health problems, and criminal victimization. This article presents an ethnographic analysis of treatment processes in a residential social model treatment program specifically designed for individuals with dual diagnoses in an effort to inform current debates with empirically grounded knowledge regarding therapeutic practice itself. The article focuses on four fundamental themes bearing on therapeutic practice in this residential program: social model treatment; the formulation of clinical identities; recovery, personal responsibility, and authority; and the measurement of therapeutic success. In conclusion, the article suggests that the central role played by program residents in the therapeutic process deserves particular attention and makes recommendations regarding mental health services delivery that, if followed, might invigorate treatment efficacy.

In Defense of Radical Constructionism

With his essay “The Limits of the Discursive,” Wing-Chung Ho has provided us an occasion to reflect on the state of the art in social constructionist social science. He has done so by taking issue with what he considers some ubiquitous tendencies in what he calls radical constructionism. According to Ho, radical constructionism understands “social realities as constructed and reproduced through situated, articulatory practices rather than objective structures” (p. 321). It claims “that social reality is constituted more by the actor’s usage of discourse than shaped by the social structure which is said to be fixed and static” (p. 322). Following von Glasersfeld (1984), Ho characterizes radical constructionism as a theoretical approach that insists “knowledge does not reflect an ‘objective’ ontological reality, but is exclusively an ordering and organization of a world constituted by our experience” (p. 322). As a result of these theoretical commitments, discursive practice “becomes an essential concept inherent in the creation of knowledge” (p. 322). He also makes a series of subsidiary claims regarding radical constructionism that I will take up in the body of this essay. While Ho is concerned to critique a much broader collection of authors, his focus is primarily trained on the collaborative work of Jaber Gubrium and James Holstein, two leading figures in the constructionist canon. In this commentary, I endorse Ho’s insistence that discursive practice cannot be adequately understood in isolation from what he calls the “pre-predicative structure of the lifeworld” (p. 323), but also point out several problems in his argument, including his mistaken claim that Gubrium and Holstein do so isolate discursive practice.

Starting the Conversation

Substances that alter the mental and physiological state of the person – here termed intoxicants – are a modern obsession. Debates over licensing and ‘binge drinking’; the categorization and policing of ‘addictive’ substances; the rights and wrongs of smoking in ‘public’ places; the relationship between intoxicants and notions of the self; the aesthetic and symbolic signifi cance of intoxicants: all testify to the central place of intoxicants in contemporary society. They also demonstrate that the problem of intoxication transcends the boundaries of any single academic discipline. It is trans-historical and trans-cultural and also traverses the divide between the natural and social sciences since the physical characteristics and effects of intoxicants only take on signifi cance within particular social contexts. For example, modern concepts of ‘addiction’ depend as much on medical and legal discourses as on a substance’s molecular structure; ‘taste’ is something learnt, practised and displayed as well as biologically embedded; and the meaning and signifi cance of substances are always representational as well as innate. Likewise, the peculiar relationship between intoxicants and medicine clearly illustrates how the history of medicine is integral to the history of societies (and vice versa). New intoxicants commonly derive their initial legitimacy from medical theory and practice. This was true for tobacco in the sixteenth century and cocaine in the nineteenth century. This book canvasses these various dimensions of intoxication in a single volume and provides readers with a more panoramic understanding of the dynamic relationship between intoxicants and society than is normally available in studies rooted in a particular disciplinary framework. It is our hope that by bringing together multiple perspectives on the study of intoxication we might begin to foster a richer and more inclusive dialogue regarding the causes, characteristics and consequences of intoxicant use in modern 1 Starting the Conversation

The Body in Question: A Socio-Cultural ApproachThe Body in Question: A Socio-Cultural Approach, by PetersenAlan. London, UK: Routledge, 2007. 169 pp.

book inaccessible to most undergraduates. I would have appreciated more detail about the author’s interview methods, such as an appendix listing her interview questions and greater clarity about the number and type of interviews conducted (some respondents were partners interviewed together, but it is not clear how many were joint interviews or what impact this methodological choice had on findings). Finally, some effort to place the U.S. case in international context would have been valuable. In many European countries, statutes or guidelines bar lesbians from using assisted reproductive technologies (Jones et al. 2007, Table 4.1). While it is interesting to ask how medicalization of alternative insemination has curtailed agency and access for U.S. lesbians, it also seems important to ask why lesbians’ access to these technologies and services has not been more constrained by social-conservative political opposition in the U.S. case.

35.95 paper. 9780415321624.

Sociologists have in recent years grown increasingly attentive to questions concerning the objectivity of the diverse accounts of social phenomena that hail from within and beyond the confines of our discipline. This has stemmed in part from longstanding intra-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary conflicts amongst proponents of competing academic research methods and theoretical models for describing and explaining social phenomena. It has stemmed in part from the advent of feminist, queer and other forms of ‘critical’ theorizing which implicate professional sociology, and the social sciences more generally, in legitimating oppressive ideas and institutions. More generally, it has stemmed from the opposition to social scientific accounts that we increasingly encounter from self-conscious and articulate spokespeople for the institutions and social movements that we study. Finally, it has stemmed from the salutary renaissance in regard for the public role of the social sciences in the wider societies in which we work.