Sacred Hearts

Mark k-punk, for once, is dead wrong: Substance D is not speed.

It is rather the Drug.

The eternal model of everything drugs already are, and would like to become. Like the bloated brain of Einstein dissected into tiny pieces, the bloated corpse of Jimi Hendrix gently leaking benzedrine and wine. There can be no empirical approach to these objects since the divine spark they incarnate - the divine social spark - smartly evades objective analysis.

It is true that speed carries with it this spark. The socio-historical fact of the speed cult clearly attests to this fact. But it goes too far to conceptually privilege speed - even in such circumstances where speed really is privileged, since to make this move means forgetting inexorably the motor at the heart of addiction.

Radically, this motor amounts to an essential motor; a real drive towards the essential itself. The addict remains addicted to the extent that he has still not succumbed to the abyss completely, to the extent that he still insists on the presence of a manifest screen discretely seperating him from the void. In fact, this imperative is not even wrong: some kind of minimal formal reification - some kind of minimal transcendental model - is finally required by every subject, in order to ward off psychosis. But the addict subject goes further: he believes in the empiracle existence of some particular physical object magically willing and able embody it.

It is thus that he delivers himself up to the revenge of the model, and hence too why the apparently cold external perspective of the scanner is really a false perspective. The theatrical compulsion to transfer truth wholesale into an instrumental object means nothing insofar as it is not observed, since this operation is finally semantic, and accordingly extimate.

Burroughs made this point succintly: junkies may not like each other, but they need each other to score. There is a sting in the tail here: in fact, junkies do not only need each other simply to score, but more radically, they need each other in order to validate the basic foundational fantasy that forms the sacred heart of addiction itself: that scoring really is possible.

In other words, junkies need each other in order to materially maintain, in themselves, the evidence for the collective hallucination that is the Big Other. It is a desperate question of saving society, one hit at a time.

The addict, with his performance - by virtue of it, in respect to it - dreams of plugging directly into the real of an organic socio-historical wound, and becoming accordingly a kind of modern saint. In an attempt such as this, the exterior gaze is always-already caught-up in the terms of the more or less scandalized gallery sincerely performed for. It does not really matter if this gaze is unfriendly, just so long as it records every detail, and furthermore learns from these details. It is a kind of fetishist pedagogy.



The addictive aspect of drugs resides in this figure: the idea that there could really be something so attentive. This point seems to elude k-punk when he writes:

Both the novel and the film [of A Scanner Darkly] are remarkable, in fact, for their unstinting desublimation of drugs. The most censorious anti-drug campaigner could not have portrayed them more negatively... Dick and Linklater’s unblinking scanners (as unforgiving as a reality TV camera) record the vices of the habitual drug-user - unreliability, tedious self-involvement, a seemingly infinite capacity to squander time and resources - from outside.

What is missing here is the point that this supposed outside is really already the inside. It is the very fact that the scanners are unforgiving - and therefore supposedly truthful - which works to drive addicts into their blank, cozy, unremitting embrace. It is not that addicts - the contemporary avatars of fetishistic disavowal par excellance - somehow do not realize the utter abjection that radical addiction ultimately involves: the point is rather that they know this perfectly well - and this is precisely why they are doing it!



The rhetoric of pure negativity is therefore not a desublimation at all, but rather the most sublime lure of drugs. The failure to realize this point is most clearly expressed in supposedly harrowing ciné réaliste anti-drug heroin pictures such as Christiane F. The basic falsity in films such as these turns on a loaded axis of smug patronization, in which the wise and noble director simply fails to realize the fact that his heroic, forensic demystification of addiction really does not constitute a subversion of addiction at all, but rather precisely represents the subjective truth-procedure of the addict themselves - in other words, amounts to exactly the reason why the addict, when they grew up, became an addict in the first place.

Tom of BadZero notes:

Christiane speaks from beyond the grave, over an image of the countryside in winter. At the end of Christiane F we see her in a toilet cubicle injecting herself for the last time before her head slides down the tiles and out of frame. The scene fades and reopens over snow-covered fields. The recovery is moving because it comes out of nowhere and is in no sense already implicit in the events we have seen or the psychology of the characters. It's a sort of millennial redemption fantasy, moving because we know in real life, as presented on screen, it could never have happened. What is more moving than a beautiful untruth?

This is no redemption: this is addiction itself. Tom records the howlings, with the truth beneath the breath: "I survived. Mum took me to my Gran and Auntie in a village near Hamburg." Christiane did not survive. "I've been clean for 18 months." Christiane has been taking for 18 months. "It frightens me to think of Detlev. I often think of him. I'd like to give him some of my strength, and help him. But first I need the strength myself." It excites Christiane to think of Detlev. She seldom thinks of him. She would like to share some of her drugs with him, and fuck him up. But first she needs the drugs to fuck up herself. All of this in the spirit of ecstasy, and love without mercy.

Christiane speaks from the beyond the grave: in other words, she speaks as death-drive, which is how addicts talk. "There is a complete break between the film and its coda, " notes Tom acutely, but this break really is already inside the film, between the transcendent model and the squalid tedious series - and furthermore, really already inside the model itself. The religious parallel remains stunningly apt: Christ, this filthy idiot, who happens also to be God.

Substance D ex cathedro - the same substance exactly as Can-D, Chew-Z, Ubik and the anochi mushroom, this entire panopoly of active agents strewn throughout the work of Dick, each distinctly testifying in their different ways to the concrete universal of intoxication. Expression caught in the throat of technology, the last splash of the sacred in our narcotic modernity.

It is really the point initially made by Marx, and later taken up by Lacan: les non-dupes errent. It is not that the commodity is really just a commodity, which only the mystified believe to be magical. It is rather that the commodity really is magical, at least in appearance, and to fail to account for this fact means to fatally misunderstand it. In the tracks of this insight, it is clear that the drug - which explicitly claims to connect mind to reality, and thus asks for debunking most insistently of all - finally must be said to represent the supreme commodity, divinely shimmering transcendent light, seemingly criminally cast amongst mere dimensional things. It represents the essential ideological model of our consumerist post-society, much more so than money, and in another way too, really is like a contemporary Christ - this absolute object banally crucified between thieves, again and again, and moreover for identical reasons: to execute the Big Other - at any price.