In this work, Valverde investigates how people and institutions have conceptualized the consumption of alcohol in the West. Specifically, she inquired about why the medical profession has not asserted ownership over the regulation of alcohol as it has with sexuality, and madness. Medicalizing the alcoholic, or the inebriate identity, was complicated by the popular and professional recognition of a link between habit and the one’s consumption of alcohol. Instead of confidently asserting that one’s drinking was due to a trait lodged within one’s constitution and thus within their purview, doctors did not represent a divided front with respect to drinking; they were divided about whether and to what extent one’s disposition to drink was (also?) a question of subjects’ routines and choices. Into the twentieth century, regulators and alcohologists of alcohol consumption have not resolved what it is that makes drinking problematic (even if their continued interest in it suggests that they consider it to have this potential), employing a number of different strategies that vary considerably by jurisdiction. A common element, she argues, seems to be that regulation black boxes how drinking alcohol leads to disorder and incivility; as if to tacitly affirm its ignorance of what it is about unruly drinkers that causes them to act disturbingly, governments impose regulations indirectly—limiting potential drinkers’ choices by dictating what shall [not] occur in certain spaces, but not criminalizing particular individuals’ actual consumption of alcohol.
Especially interesting was Valverde’s discussion of Alcoholics Anonymous, and how the ontology propounded by Bill W. and co. has become so salient. It reminded me vaguely of some of Agamben’s ideas. AA (et al.) would have it that everyone is the sovereign of their own kingdom, the hero of their own epic, the master of their own destiny. A.A. does recognize that an individual coexists with a higher power as well. This power does not really govern the individual, even if personal contentment and freedom require one to reconcile one’s purposes with this benevolent force (which can be done with a little work, with a little submission). At the same time, however, AA would have it that the “alcoholics” who it says should hold themselves accountable and responsible for their actions, who can remake their lives every day, will drown when influenced by the irresistible force of drink. It would seem that they are not so sovereign at all, but that the exceptional power exerted by alcohol makes it their ruler, compelling them to rearrange their lives so that they become out of synch. with their higher power or have to live their life “step by step”... thus, regardless of the salience of the aa argument, it is nevertheless confounded by the structure/agency problem.
Valverde notes the dominance of this model of the will, how it has been uncritically adopted by the recovery movement, and how at a cultural level its logic has become commonsense. While I was reading I was reminded of an example of a counter-discourse (from one of the few episodes I have watched of) Will and Grace.
Here Karen Walker characterizes A.A. mantras as “hate speech,” that the organization “goes against everything I believe to be good and pure in this world,” and that it is obliterating her support network. Here this outspoken non-alcoholic identifies people like her as a class that should be considered apart from A.A. but who are nevertheless minorities in danger of being assimilated by it. She, and people who are deemed like her by other characters of the show, might be worthy of study as an example of alternatives to the addict identity.
I have little to add to this summary right now, except maybe that I was impressed by the sensitivity that she wrote about AA. Valverde was very clear that her account was an exploratory one. She introduced the reader to this group, and in so doing highlighted the tremendous amount of comfort and support that it provided rather than rake it across the coals for the epistemological problems with its concept of free will. It was refreshing to read something like that, which instead of belittling things for being logically incoherent, acknowledged that recovery groups provide a function for which our current systems of thinking are not analytically developed enough to account.
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