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City Tech Humanities Journal Complicates the Concept of Intoxication

June 22, 2016

The new issue of NANO: New American Notes Online, City Tech’s interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed, open-access journal, is now available online. Issue 9, “Intoxication,” is the result of a collaboration between guest editors Alexine Fleck and Ingrid Walker, the article authors, the interviewees, and NANO’s editorial team: Sean Scanlan, Ruth Garcia, and Rebecca Devers.

Intoxication has long held an uncomfortable position in US culture: An overwhelming number of people reach for this state of mind, and entire industries compete to support it. Most academic literature on intoxication references substance abuse, addiction, violence, incarceration, and death; however, Issue 9 explores intoxication as a particularly complex concept and condition.

For instance, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band played two sold-out shows at Barclays Center in 2016. It is probably safe to say, since this was a popular rock music concert, that some in attendance were sober, some were intoxicated, and many audience members were somewhere in between these two states of consciousness. From a conceptual standpoint, were those intoxicated people drunk on music or alcohol or something else? From a legal or psychological standpoint, were these intoxicated people harming themselves, were they addicts or worse?

Guest editors Fleck and Walker question common perceptions of intoxication in their introduction:

What is often lost in scholarly discussions of intoxication is a recognition of “user agency,” the rational ability to choose that state of being along with the reasons one might want to make that choice. In this sense, intoxication offers a tantalizing paradox: what looks like chaos, insanity, or simply a waste of time from the outside can feel like order, transcendence, or inspiration from the inside.

Intoxication can be euphoric and expansive. It can also be chaotic and incoherent. At times, intoxication is joyful or silly; at others, it is downright angry or greedy. The challenge of describing this transitory condition underscores its complexity. Even the etymological origins of the term reflect a blurred boundary between elixir and poison. As Joseph Gabriel points out in the Afterword to this issue, intoxication risks (and promises) an obliteration of the self—if only temporarily. It exceeds its own containment, as reflected in terms like getting “trashed” or “wasted.” Terms like these indicate a deeply ingrained assumption that intoxication is garbage to be thrown away. However, perhaps what is to be found in the unstable temporality of intoxication is neither disposable nor wasteful. The essays in this issue of NANO: New American Notes Online presume that there is treasure to be found if one just digs a bit through the trash of wasted time.

Table of Contents:

Editor's Introduction for NANO Special Issue 9: Intoxication Alexine Fleck and Ingrid Walker
Intoxication and US Culture: An Interview with Craig Reinarman Ingrid Walker
Coming to (the History of) Our Senses: A New Methodology and Category of Analysis for Drug Historians? Kyle Bridge
The Price of Eternal Vigilance: Women and Intoxication Michelle McClellan
Intoxication as Feminist Pleasure: Drinking, Dancing, and Un-Dressing with/for Jenni Rivera Yessica Garcia Hernandez
Sugar Highs and Lows: Is Sugar Really a Drug? Kima Cargill
"Fringes blown by the wind": High Hopes for Expanded Consciousness in Benjamin and Brecht Lauren Hawley
Afterword: Intoxication as Zone of Exception Joseph M. Gabriel