Heroin Use, Gender, and Affect in Rock Subcultures

By Jason Middleton, Duke University
Echo Volume 1.1 (Fall 1999)

In
recent years the phenomenon referred to as “heroin chic” has gained
great visibility in mainstream culture with cover stories in the
major newsmagazines such as Newsweek‘s August 1996 feature
“Heroin Alert: Rockers, Models, and the New Drug Crisis” and Time‘s
May 1997 “How We Get Addicted—and How We Might Get Cured.”
The drug has also received publicity in invectives by politicians
like Bill Clinton’s 1997 speech to the US Conference of Mayors
in which he decried images in fashion photography representing
the “heroin chic” aesthetic. Heroin use among Americans has risen
significantly in the 1990s. The DEA estimated in 1994 that 20
tons of heroin were shipped into the US yearly, up from 4 to 6
tons in the early 80s,¹
and that the number of Americans who had tried heroin had also
risen from between 400 and 750 thousand to roughly 1.5 million.²

But
statistics alone clearly do not account for the investment of
collective social anxiety in this particular drug. Crack use is
still widespread but we stopped hearing much about it after the
anxieties cathected to the demonized figures of crack users in
the 1980s were gradually dissipated through the enactment of policy
such as “mandatory minimum” drug sentences and welfare “reform”
(policies which were influenced by racist representations of “social
problems”). Heroin provoked a different kind of anxiety as it
was represented by middle class, white-oriented magazines such
as Time and Newsweek. These magazines promoted the
idea to their target audience that it was their own children who
were using this drug and their own children’s rock’n’roll and
movie icons who were promoting it. Films like Pulp Fiction,
Drugstore Cowboy, and Trainspotting, and singers
like Perry Farrell of Jane’s Addiction and Scott Weiland of Stone
Temple Pilots were blamed for “glamorizing” heroin and “making
it look cool.” But the articles never tried to explain what is
at stake in these images of glamour or cool, what exactly is being
appealed to through the use of heroin, or the fashion and bodily
aesthetics with which it is associated.

It
is my intention in this paper to uncover some of the stakes in
certain highly visible cultural formations surrounding heroin
use, and the representations of these formations. Many explanations
of heroin use pathologize its users for an ostensibly irrational
and self-destructive behavior. While I do not intend to glorify
heroin use or to downplay its destructive effects upon many people’s
lives, I will seek to uncover the sources of its dangerous attraction
and to complexify such reductive explanations. I will argue that
heroin use has represented within particular cultural formations
a means of transforming the body and its affects, in a process
which disengages from normative social imperatives. These imperatives
include work, as organized by prevailing capitalist interests,
and sexuality as based in norms of heterosexuality, binary genders,
and bourgeois family life. The body on heroin is rendered unfit
for normative modes of production and sexuality, and directed,
potentially, toward new ones. It is disconnected from certain
affective investments, and can be the site for the production
of different and possibly transgressive ones. Here I will be focusing
primarily on the transgressions and affective reconfigurations
effected within heroin subcultures in the domains of gender and
sexuality, but these arguments should be suggestive as to how
the body on heroin points toward different modes of work as well.

I
will be examining three moments which contribute to an ongoing
cultural mythology surrounding heroin use, all of which involve
rock music subcultures. The first is the early New York punk scene,
particularly the music of the Velvet Underground, and its imbrication
with Andy Warhol’s Factory; the second, Slava Tsukerman’s 1983
underground film Liquid Sky (pictured) which promotes heroin use as a last possible
means of transcending the tyrannies of the human body; and the
third, Seattle grunge and the figure of Kurt Cobain, whose 1994
suicide capped off a series of deaths among musicians from this
scene whose heroin use was notorious. All three of these moments
involve deviant or underground forms of rock music: the influential
proto-punk of the Velvet Underground; new wave, with the sex and
gender transgressions of its performers and the aural transgressions
of its frequent privileging of synthesizers over guitars; and
grunge, which has come to represent a turning point in the mainstream
visibility of previously underground forms of music and culture.

The
connection between rock musicians and excessive drug use is by
now commonplace, but it is important to remember that drugs have
played a significant role in the cultures and subcultures surrounding
other musical forms as well—notably the use and valuation
of heroin and other drugs by be-bop jazz musicians. Among musicians
themselves and among critics and commentators, drug use is often
linked with creativity, and performers’ work following their “cleaning
up” is often viewed as disappointing. But it is not simply the
idea that drug use somehow promotes “better” music that provokes
fascination in Miles Davis or Lou Reed; it is more importantly
the way in which, even as such figures transgress musical limits,
they transgress socially prescribed norms of the body, affect,
and identity. Social and bodily transgression is valorized through
its articulation to aesthetic innovation, and this articulation
brings out utopian impulses in audiences for whom such transgressions
seem to suggest new possibilities for the experience of everyday
life.

What
does the body on heroin do? Perhaps we first need to think about
what the body on heroin does not do. Heroin provokes a
loss of appetite for and disinterest in food; indeed, the hunger
for the drug displaces the hunger for food to the extent that
food takes on an abject status. It is no longer what the body
needs, but rather precisely what the body does not need and expels
in the vomiting which often accompanies taking the drug. Authors
such as William Burroughs, Jim Carroll (pictured) and Irvine
Welsh have all documented the disdain for food and its consumption
which becomes something of a mark of status in junkie subcultures:
renouncing food indicates real commitment. ³
The body of the junkie
thus acquires the painfully thin, withering appearance embodied
by icons such as Sid Vicious and Keith Richards. Another common
understanding of what the body on heroin does not do is have sex.
This perception genders the body of the heroin user as male, however.
Although heroin has been shown to reduce sex drive in both men
and women, the impotence produced in men by heroin use (humorously
depicted in Drugstore Cowboy) marks a dramatic transformation
of bodily functions and capacities which plays a significant role
in many accounts of heroin cultures. It is notable that most junkie
icons in popular culture have been male, suggesting that the transgressions
upon normative conceptions of masculinity effected by heroin use
register more powerfully upon the public imaginary.

How
do we picture, how can we conceive of this body? A starting point
might be to consider the grotesque body as theorized by Mikhail
Bakhtin and re-imagined by Mary Russo from a feminist perspective.
This body is “the open, protruding, extended, secreting body,
the body of becoming, process, and change.” It is opposed to the
“Classical body which is monumental, static, closed and sleek,
corresponding to the aspirations of bourgeois individualism.”⁴ For Bakhtin, Carnival, and the grotesque
bodies which populate it, serve as figures for different social
possibilities, perhaps ultimately for the Socialist state to come.
By contrast to the grotesque body, the body of the junkie might
initially seem as if it would be an inappropriate figure on which
to attach such collective social aspirations. Unlike the grotesque
body, whose excess figures possibility, the body of the
junkie seems characterized by lack, and incapacity for
effectivity of any kind. But the junkie’s body is certainly opposed
to the Bakhtin’s “Classical body” as well. And the junkie’s body
and the grotesque body share certain characteristics. Like the
grotesque body, it is a body in process, a body under reconstruction.

Another
body which is important to consider here is the cyborg body, as
theorized by Donna Haraway in her ground-breaking essay “A Cyborg
Manifesto.” Like the grotesque body, which has been theorized
to potentially have either fundamentally conservative or radically
disruptive effects upon dominant social structures, the cyborg
body can have very different social consequences. The cyborg,
the figure of new communications and biological technologies,
marks the undoing of older ideological dichotomies between organism
and machine, nature and culture, and male and female; but the
new systems emerging are described by Haraway in terms of “the
integration/exploitation [of women] into a world system of production/reproduction
and communication called the informatics of domination.”⁵ Thus, a situation in which “no objects,
spaces or bodies are sacred in themselves,” but can be interfaced
with each other if “the proper code. . .can be constructed for
processing signals in a common language,”⁶ reveals many possibilities for feminist
and progressive political alliances, practices, and formations.
But the work of finding or formulating the right codes is crucial
so as to keep the interfaces from being made according to the
demands of exploitative and oppressive social forces.

What
might the body of the cyborg look like, feel like? One general
impression we get, enforced by Haraway’s comment in an interview
with Andrew Ross and Constance Penley—”I would rather go
to bed with a cyborg than a sensitive man”⁷—is that it could look and feel great,
an improvement upon the flesh body and all its problems. Many
descriptions and images of the cyborg body in theory, literature,
film, and art have expressed this view of the cyborg as better
than the human, as transcending the human flesh. This idea of
transcending the flesh body returns us to the drug user’s body.
As Ann Weinstone has argued in a recent Diacritics special
issue on addiction, drug use and transcendence have, in Western
thought, a long history of rhetorical linkage which is presently
being articulated in descriptions of the experience of virtual
reality.⁸ This articulation between virtual reality
and drug use through the idea of transcendence is elaborated upon
by Margaret Morse in a fascinating essay titled “What do Cyborgs
Eat? Oral Logic in an Information Society.”

Acknowledging
that a “growing desire to disengage from the human condition”
characterizes many domains of contemporary technoculture, Morse
asks how organically embodied beings facing all the limitations
this body entails can enter the electronic future they so desire.⁹ Morse demonstrates the ways in which a
repudiation of the body is linked to a desire in technocultures
to become the electronic body. This repudiation is manifested
in the privileging of “nonfoods” such as smart drinks and drugs,
vitamins, and products such as artificial fat over food as means
of purification from the organic, of feeding the mind—metonymically
the virtual body—rather than the flesh body.¹⁰ This devaluing of the body and desire
for its transcendence through the ingestion of nonfood substances
such as drugs is certainly a primary feature of much of the techno-fetishistic
art, film, and literature which has been described as cyberpunk.
One need think only of William Gibson’s paradigmatic cyberpunk
hero Case and the constant drug use with which he maintains himself
when he is not able to jack in to the net and enter cyberspace.
Indeed, it could be said that drugs and their effects upon the
body serve as the interface between the cyber and the punk of
cyberpunk.¹¹

Thus
far, we have considered the junkie’s body in relation to the grotesque
body and the cyborg body. Like these bodies, the junkie’s body
represents a body in process, a potential becoming. In the case
of the grotesque body, we often have a reconfiguration of gender
norms expressed through cross dressing, and a reconfiguration
of power hierarchies that accompanies such role reversals. The
cyborg body dissolves dichotomies constructed as natural and rooted
in biological essentialism such as male and female, and human
and machine. It allows for other modes of identity and collectivity
that operate according to different logics. I have gone through
the theorizations of these two types of body not so much because
I think that the heroin user’s body is necessarily grotesque or
cyborg, but that it might have some similar effects as
these bodies, and, as we will see in my examples, they often share
the same representational spaces. Like the grotesque and cyborg
bodies, the heroin user’s body disrupts gender norms, ideals of
health and bodily propriety connected to social expectations concerning
the body’s ability to work (produce) and reproduce. The allure
of the drug itself and of the popular icons who use it, I will
suggest, has to do with the way these social norms are brought
forth and flouted in the appearances and practices of heroin users
and their bodies. I will now seek to explore these issues in more
detail in my examination of three cultural moments in the recent
history of heroin subcultures.

With
the 1967 release of The Velvet Underground and Nico, and
their early live performance art pieces, the Velvet Underground
effected profound innovations and transgressions upon the field
of rock’n’roll. Their sound was distinctive even within the American
punk style, fusing instruments like viola with more standard rock
guitar, vocals, and drumkit, all played from an anti-virtuosic
“do-it-yourself” stance [ed.]. [Listen to an excerpt from VU’s
“Heroin”] Though some expressions had certainly been made
in rock music of affinity for drugs, the Velvets’ first two albums
explored the body and consciousness of the user of harder drugs—heroin,
cocaine, methamphetamine—with an unprecedented explicitness
and a new affective style of distance and disengagement from the
audience. Dressed all in black and concealed behind dark sunglasses,
with both Reed and icily beautiful, inscrutable German chanteuse
Nico delivering the lyrics in flat, deadpan fashion, the Velvet
Underground (pictured without Nico) challenged previous
modes of expressivity in rock music. They could be said to be
characterized by a sort of depthlessness not unlike that of Andy
Warhol’s artworks, which challenge older surface/depth models
of artistic expression and its interpretation. This depthlessness
also suggests, as Fredric Jameson argues in Postmodernism,
or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, the emergence
of a new form of understanding subjectivity different from the
older bourgeois model of the subject based upon surface/depth
metaphors in which deep-seeded alienations and neuroses find expression
in everyday acts of communication. Jameson proposes that in postmodernism
a new sort of subjectivity emerges in which interiority and the
psychopathologies of the bourgeois ego are replaced by a more
impersonal, free-floating set of “intensities,” a process he terms
the “waning of affect.”¹² A new affective configuration along these
lines can also be seen in the deadpan style of the actors in Warhol-produced
Paul Morrissey films such as Trash, a film which depicts
a day in the life of a junkie and in which the delivery of the
lines indicates little to no interiority for the characters.

The
Velvets’ articulation of transgressive practices in their lyrics
linked drug use with other forms of deviancy such as cross-dressing,
S/M, and gay and bi-sexuality. These linkages have a significant
history in American subcultural formations. Sociologists such
as Mara Keire have explained the ways in which the construction
of the figure of “the addict” in turn of the century America and
Europe was imbricated with constructions of the homosexual, or
“invert.”¹³ Keire focuses on how the drug use by
marginal social groups, including prostitutes, pimps, and gay
men—known as “fairies”—shaped public perception of
drug use as being effeminate. This perception allowed some men
to “incorporate drug use into their rejection of conventional
male gender roles,”¹⁴ making it a primary subcultural signifier
among gay men and drag queens in this period. These men adopted
much of the style and slang of the female prostitutes who moved
in the same circles as them, but reinterpreted the prostitute’s
model of femininity to suit their own purposes. Like drag, drug
use was associated with forms of bodily play and transgression
which did not conform to the expectations of masculine identity.
Drug use modifies the appearance of the body as well as its drives
in a way which places the natural body temporarily under erasure,
a process also effected by drag.

The
New York subcultural milieu of Andy Warhol’s Factory from which
the Velvet Underground emerged celebrated such transgressive practices
as drag and drug use. The articulation between these practices
is expressed in the lyrics of many Velvet Underground songs, such
as “Sister Ray,” about a cross-dressing heroin dealer who, along
with a group of other drag queens, seduces and shoots up a group
of sailors, leaving one dead. The shifting position of Reed’s
narrator in this song, as Jeff Schwartz has pointed out, in which
Reed sings first “Oh no man she hasn’t got the time-time/too busy
sucking on my ding-dong” but later sings “Oh no man I haven’t
got the time-time/Too busy sucking on a ding-dong,” allows for
considerable ambiguity as to the narrator’s gender and the form
of his or her desires.¹⁵ In the sociocultural context of Warhol’s
factory, populated by queers, junkies, and other deviants, and
influenced by Warhol’s challenges to older surface/depth models
of affective investment, The Velvet Underground created music
which transgressed boundaries of musical and lyrical narrative
structures and promoted the disruption of limits imposed by social
constructions of gender and the natural body.

These
transgressions sometimes have a terrifying quality, however, and
are expressive of a nihilism which implies the negation of all
affect and even the body itself as a possible consequence of disengagement
from dominant social standards. This nihilism is expressed in
lyrics such as the refrain from “Heroin”
which offers as explanation for the use of the drug only the acknowledgment
that “I guess that I just don’t know” or the line from “Candy
Says,” about drag queen Candy Darling: “Candy says I’ve come to
hate my body and all that it requires in this world.” Such destructive
impulses are given compelling expression in Slava Tsukerman’s
Liquid Sky, the second moment I wish to examine in the
recent history of heroin subcultures. The film takes us into the
world of an urban new wave subcultural milieu involving fashion
modeling, impersonal and often brutal sex, and cocaine and heroin
use. The plot concerns the arrival on earth of aliens intent on
stealing a chemical released in the human brain at the moment
of orgasm and through heroin use. The film’s central characters
are Margaret, a bisexual fashion model, and Jimmy, a gay fashion
model and heroin addict. Both are androgynous in their own right,
and both are played by the same actress, Anne Carlisle.

The
new wave milieu that serves as the setting for Liquid Sky
can be historically situated as a music and fashion style of the
late 1970s and early 1980s. The androgyny and deconstruction of
sexuality effected by the Velvet Underground and its punk descendants
like the New York Dolls, as well as the flamboyant costuming of
glam or glitter rock artists like David Bowie (pictured)
and Marc Bolan, all contribute to the aesthetics of new wave. New wave lacks the aggression and
destructive impulses of much punk but continues in the practice
of transgression at a bodily and affective level. Unlike punk,
which has been appropriated by both the right and the left, new
wave has never really been articulated to a political ideology.
Also differing from the articulation in punk of “no future” (The
Sex Pistols), the new wave aesthetic contains a strongly futurist
impulse in which the blurring of genders is linked to the blurring
of boundaries between human and machine. This difference is signaled
aurally in the predominance of synthesizers in new wave music
as opposed to the guitars favored by punks. In the opening scene
of Liquid Sky, androgynously made-up clubgoers dance robotically
to a spoken word poem celebrating the union of human and machine
called “Me and My Rhythm Box,” performed over cold synthesizer
sounds.

As
Janet Bergstrom points out in her article “Androids and Androgyny,”
androgyny, a fashionable look in the 1980s (and, as we will see,
a facet of heroin chic), can indicate more sexuality, possessing
of both masculine and feminine appeal, but it can just as easily
signal “the eradication of sexuality. . .[and] a withdrawal of
affect.”¹⁶ In a brief discussion of Liquid Sky,
Bergstrom rightly points out that the film’s focus on androgyny
as a form of masquerade signals a radical change in sex role definitions
in society. She isn’t quite so specific about this radical change,
but the implication is that even as theories of femininity as
masquerade suggest that there is no essential “woman” beneath
the masquerade, here we have the masquerade of androgyny placing
masculinity and femininity even as categories of performance under
erasure.

The
change or historical break which the film narrates may in fact
be understood more broadly than being just about gender roles.
The film represents a strong contrast and opposition between its
youthful new wave protagonists and older characters identified
as baby boomers or aging hippies, an opposition which was also
important for many punks. In an early scene, Margaret, the female
protagonist, sits with her college acting teacher who rolls himself
a joint and paternalistically lectures her on how she is wasting
her talent by spending all her time at the clubs. As part of an
effort at seduction, he tells her that she is wasting her beauty
by wearing trashy clothes and makeup which make her look like
a whore and a freak. “I think you would look better in jeans and
a turtleneck,” he tells her. She responds by pointing out to him
how his preferred image of her would be just as much a masquerade,
just as much a construction of his own desire: “You want me to
be a happy housewife, slave to a husband’s desire. A hooker is
at least independent.” She then deconstructs his idea of himself
and his generation as more “natural” by arguing that his professors
in their three-piece suits must have thought blue jeans were outrageous;
and that these professors themselves didn’t know they were in
costume: “You thought your jeans stood for love and sexual equality,”
she mocks him, “We at least know we’re in costume.”

Throughout
the film Margaret remains the character who maintains the greatest
affective detachment. Other than a desire for drugs, she expresses
no active desire of her own, and instead is repeatedly made a
vehicle for the expression of other peoples’ desires, from the
professor who wants to marry her to other junkies (including her
own girlfriend) who rape her. Margaret expresses only disdain
and contempt even in the face of the most violent enactment of
others’ desires upon her. An important subtlety of the plot is
that although the aliens initially sought the chemical released
through heroin use and are hence attracted to this new wave subculture,
they then find that the chemical released during orgasm is far
superior for their purposes. Hence, no one in the film winds up
getting killed for their heroin use—only for sex. The characters
in the film’s new wave milieu represent the erasure of older constructions
of the natural body and its desires, but even these various deviants
succumb to sexual desire in one form or another and are killed.
Jimmy, Margaret’s ambiguously gay but mostly asexual doppelganger
falls prey to narcissism, the desire for his own flesh, and is
seduced by Margaret at a fashion shoot while gazing into his reflection
in a mirror.

Margaret
is consistently haunted by an idea of “the natural,” a haunting
represented when androgynous images of her being taken at the
same fashion shoot are presented in montage form with photographs
from her youth and childhood, in which, with long hair and ordinary
makeup, she is conventionally feminine and innocent in appearance.
In the climactic scene after Margaret’s girlfriend and Jimmy are
both killed by the aliens in the course of sex with her, she gives
a speech in which she voids the various myths of identity which
have been “taught” to her in her life, from the security of bourgeois
marriage to the glamour of being a beautiful, androgynous model
and actress. Margaret rejects and voids not only older naturalized
conceptions of identity but also the performativity of androgynous
costuming. Her speech suggests that there is always an encroachment
upon the destabilizations of the body and identity effected by
performance, an encroachment by the natural body and its desires,
expressed in the film through coarse and violent sexuality.

Margaret’s
only recourse is the destruction of her body, which has itself
become an agent of death to others. She shoots herself up with
heroin and leaves the building where she encounters the alien
ship, begging them to take her with them. This is the one moment
of the film which suggests a possible transcendence: rather than
being killed as the other characters have been, Margaret is “beamed
up,” her body disappearing into the night sky, leaving behind
no corpse as the other characters did—no corpse to remind
of the degraded condition of being locked in a body of flesh.
The film thus seems to represent a sort of allegory for the utopian
impulses within the interlocking set of discourses I have been
examining: the idea of transcendence through drug use articulated
by Ann Weinstone; Haraway’s cyborg, fusing the human and machine
and enabling an overcoming of limitations imposed through biological
essentialism; and the waning of affect in postmodernism which
rids us of the psychopathologies of the bourgeois monad. Only
Margaret, who meets these criteria, reaches this utopian moment
of transcendence. The other characters, locked into older modes
of the “human,” do not achieve this goal.

The
articulation of punk and new wave music, androgyny and gender-bending,
and heroin use in these two cultural moments emerged again as
a highly visible and controversial formation in the early 1990s
known as “heroin chic.” This was a period characterized by the
emergence into the public eye of a number of previously underground
cultural currents, with 1991 ironically dubbed “the year punk
broke” following the breakthrough success of Nirvana’s Nevermind.
At this moment, heroin served as the interface between a new skinny,
wasted aesthetic in fashion and body image exemplified by models
promoted by fashion photographers such as David Sorrenti, who
would himself die of a heroin overdose in 1997, and the postpunk
musical form known as grunge and situated primarily in the Pacific
Northwest. Initially a somewhat underground subcultural signifier,
the popularity of heroin in this music scene gained public notoriety
through the high profile overdose deaths of musicians such as
Stefanie Sargent of 7 Year Bitch and Kristen Pfaff of Hole as
well as countless other nameless kids in the scene. Finally, of
course, it was the suicide of Kurt Cobain, who was found to have
been using heroin up till the time of his death, that truly captured
the general public’s attention.

Kurt
Cobain and Courtney Love, grunge’s “first couple,” both made visible
to the public transgressions of normative ideals of gender, sexuality,
and adulthood. Certain ideals from punk scenes to which Kurt and
Courtney had ties gained national attention through figures such
as them, although perhaps not in a form many would consider authentic.
The musical, fashion and affective styles within punk known as
“kindercore” or “cuddlecore” represent a certain neoteny—a
retention, or reconstruction and celebration, of childlike qualities
within teenage and adult life.¹⁷ At this time Kate Moss was the most notorious
model in the public eye, representing an androgynous, prepubescent
look which could, as Bergstrom suggests, seem to signal an eradication
of sexuality along with sexual difference. I would suggest a further
inflection upon this reading, however: the gaunt faces and frail
bodies of female models situated within the heroin chic aesthetic
suggest the voiding of the construction of sexuality through associations
with fertility and other conventional signifiers of femininity.
For male models, this shifting of visual signifiers away from
gendered norms was also apparent, as thin bodies with little muscle
and androgynous facial features were prevalent. It is not so much
that sexuality is eradicated here, but rather that it is disarticulated
from prevailing social standards. Desire is more free-floating
and less cathected with the implied desire for the drug imbricated
with the desire for sex. Prepubescent appearance, in turn signals
a desire to escape from the adult responsibilities of the body
and the imperatives upon it to produce and reproduce.

The
breakthrough appeal of Nirvana can be understood in terms of a
number of cultural currents related to the aesthetic of heroin
chic discussed above. Nirvana was regarded as the antithesis of
the hyperbolic, sexist, and masculinist spectacles of the “hair
metal” bands popular through the late 80s. Cobain’s boyish, even
childlike appearance, with oversized sweaters and a sloppily cut
blond mane; his affirmation of gay
sex, and televised screen kiss with bassist Chris Novolesic; and
the sound of his music in which guitar solos were eschewed in
favor of amateurish intensity; all negated the values of aggressive
masculinist heterosexuality prevalent in much rock music in the
period preceding Nirvana’s emergence. The song which brought Nirvana
their success was “Smells like Teen Spirit,” the ambiguity of
which made it a cipher for different sorts of people to invest
with very different meanings. Much of the interpretation of and
response to Nirvana proved incredibly frustrating to Cobain, who
insisted he was being misunderstood, without ever seeming able
to really articulate what his ideas were. Perhaps the idea he
articulated most strongly was what he screamed out over and over
at the end of “Teen Spirit”: “A denial.” Punk’s ethics have
often involved forms of negation, and one of the initially utopian
possibilities Nirvana’s success presented was a broader cultural
application of this negation. Cobain’s heroin use was imbricated
with his acts of negation, as he responded to social expectations
of his role as hero rock star by the very denial of his embodiment
of such ideals, and magazine photographs documented the steady
withering of his physical being and finally his suicide. He seems
to have inherited the promise of certain earlier impulses within
punk (Sid Vicious, pictured) and expressed in Liquid Sky: everything
is a lie and the ultimate recourse is withdrawal, not only from
the world but from one’s own embodiment within that world.

The
three moments in the recent history of the cultural mythologies
and practices surrounding heroin use I have described point both
to possibilities of forging transgressive and potentially productive
modes of identity and sociality as well as to destructive and
self-defeating impulses. I want to emphasize in conclusion that
we should keep in mind these different possible products of heroin
cultures, rather than reducing heroin use to self-destructive
impulses based in some notion of a “death drive” as some psychological
accounts of drug use have done. Sociological research on women
heroin users has consistently shown that the motivations for the
use of the drug had to do with liberating themselves from oppressive
forms of identity imposed by patriarchal structures.¹⁸ A valuable text for thinking through
these issues is Deleuze and Guattari’s “How do you Make Yourself
a Body Without Organs?” in which they discuss the sort of remappings
of the affective geography of the body potentially enabled by
masochists and drug users.¹⁹ These forms of experimentation, in their
reading, allow for a disconnection of affects from meanings in
which they have been entrenched by discourses of psychoanalysis,
medicine, and so on. The crucial point perhaps is that the “lines
of flight” away from oppressive social structures which such practices
represent are never inherently productive or destructive,
but can have very different effects depending upon the care and
caution with which they are undertaken. The body of the heroin
user is a body in process, and can be a mode of passage, but only
when connected up with other forms of productivity and creativity.
If this is the case, as Deleuze and Guattari write: “The Body
Without Organs reveals itself for what it is: connection of desires,
conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities. You have constructed
your own little machine, ready to be plugged into other collective
machines.”²⁰ Without this sense of collective possibility,
the transgressive possibilities enabled by heroin cultures can,
as we have so often seen, lead to failure and death.

Notes

1. “Heroin,” alt.culture (http://www.pathfinder.com/altculture/aentries/h/heroin.html).

2. “History of Heroin,” The Miscellany News (http://misc.vassar.edu/spring_96/mar29/features/hhist.html,
1996).

3. See William Burroughs, Junky and Naked Lunch,
Jim Carroll, The Basketball Diaries, and Irvine Welsh,
Trainspotting. Several other popular books concerned
with heroin addiction have appeared in the 1990s, including
Luke Davies’ Candy and M. Burgess’ Smack.

4. Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque (New York: Routledge,
1994) 62-63.

5. Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (New York:
Routledge, 1991) 163.

6. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women 163.

7. Constance Penley and Andrew Ross, “Cyborgs at Large: Interview
with Donna Haraway,” in Penley and Ross, eds., Technoculture
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1991) 18.

8. Ann Weinstone, “Welcome to the Pharmacy: Addiction, Transcendence,
and Virtual Reality,” Diacritics 27.3 (1997) 77-89.

9. Margaret Morse, “What Do Cyborgs Eat? Oral Logic in an Information
Society,” in Gretchen Bender and Timothy Druckry, eds., Culture
on the Brink: Ideologies of Technology (Seattle: Bay Press,
1994) 157.

10. Morse, “What Do Cyborgs Eat? Oral Logic in an Information
Society,” 161.

11. It is worth noting here that in the smash cyberpunk hit of
the summer of 1999, The Matrix, the hero Neo (Keanu Reeves)
must take pills to cross between the virtual and the real.

12. See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic
of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991)
14-16.

13. Mara Keire, “Dope Fiends and Degenerates: The Gendering of
Addiction in the Early Twentieth Century,” Journal of Social
History Summer 1998.

14. Keire, “Dope Fiends and Degenerates: The Gendering of Addiction
in the Early Twentieth Century.”

15. See Jeff Schwartz, “‘Sister Ray’: Some Pleasures of a Musical
Text,” in Albin Zak III, ed., The Velvet Underground Companion
(New York: Schirmer Books, 1997).

16. Janet Bergstrom, “Androids and Androgyny,” in Penley, Lyon,
Spigel, and Bergstrom, eds., Close Encounters: Film, Feminism,
and Science Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota,
1991) 36.

17. This aesthetic of neoteny was connected to certain political
ideals such as the notion that sexual maturation and adult socialization
brought about a number of ills including a devaluing of female
friendships and a pitting of women against each other. Kathleen
Hanna, in the zine Bikini Kill and in her band of the
same name, was a prominent proponent of these ideas. Kurt and
Courtney, however, who become internationally famous rock stars
and celebrities were far enough removed from such scenes and
their ideals that their expression of an aesthetic of neoteny
seemed to be operating on rather different levels from that
of a punk band like Huggybear (a mixed gender band whose childlike
appearance and affect mobilizes an aggressive punk sound to
the effect of disrupting gendered adult identities.)

18. See, for example, Jennifer Friedman and Marisa Alicea, “Women
and Heroin: The Path of Resistance and its Consequences,” Gender
and Society, 9:4, August 1995, 432-449.

19. In Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.

20. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 161.

The original article was be found at
http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/echo/Volume1-Issue1/middleton/middleton-article.html