Blood Sugar - content
In 2000 I lived and worked in part of a converted
paint factory on the bleeding-edge of a working class residential
district in a part of east Oakland (California) known as “Fruitvale”. My
home was in the border zone that runs along the narrow corridor between
the elevated train line and the interstate freeway. The loft complex
was a kind of bunker in the midst of a post-industrial wasteland. I had
moved from an apartment in San Francisco to this relatively raw space
but I didn’t actually need a studio with high ceilings and industrial
surfaces. At that time I was engaged in the development of systems for
collaborative and collective authoring online. I thought of the Internet
as a public space and saw my work as ‘public art,’ but I was troubled
by the delimitation of who and what could be considered ‘Public’ in this
context. Every definition of “Public” I have found includes the phrase
“the people”. In modern European languages the phrase “the people”
always connotes the poor, the underprivileged, and the excluded. It is a
curious contradiction that this phrase simultaneously identifies the
citizen or political subject (big “P” people), and the class that is
excluded from politics - the marginalized and technologically
disenfranchised. The cluster of renovated factory buildings I shared
with a population of other well-educated, middle-class artists, was
enclosed by a concrete wall — outside the street was strewn with
shopping carts, plastic bags and discarded syringes. Gazing over that
wall, while I worked in the security of my second-floor studio, I began
to wonder how, or if, information technologies and public art practices
could effectively create a more inclusive public sphere – one that would
engage both the big “P” public and the little “p” people just outside.
There was an HIV prevention program down the street that ran an
open needle exchange three nights a week. I first heard about it on
local radio where the non-profit’s director told of a city councilman’s
attempt to force the exchange out of the neighborhood in an effort
towards future gentrification. I believed in the efficacy of needle
exchange, (albeit in an intellectual and somewhat detached way). I was
intrigued by the paradoxical, outsider-subject of addiction, the
borderline between dependence on licit and illicit drugs, the mystery
and violence of the needle. I had reason to want to escape the
privileged isolation of my own sphere – to cross over that concrete wall
and into another world. This desire was sincere but also driven by
curiosity, even voyeurism, and naiveté. Unlike prior artists and
intellectuals who have pursued research in the arena of drugs (Freud,
Benjamin, Burroughs, and De Quincy), I was interested in the social and
biological construction of addiction — not the experience of the drug as
such. I would cross over through the point of view of the addicted
subject. My desire would be satisfied by listening and observing – and
the responsibility I thus assumed would be left unresolved in my
unsuccessful attempts to help one of my interlocutors.
I volunteered at the exchange. Eventually I started to interview
people who came to the tent site to swap needles. Most of them lived on
the street, had no official identification (either because they had a
criminal record or no fixed address) and therefore had no access to
basic civic or social services. Their absence in the data-space of the
Public sphere had serious implications for them in the physical world.
They were in a sense invisible - a kind of secret public.
I got to know one of the women rather well – the woman that I call A____ in BLOOD SUGAR.
The needle exchange was the last frayed layer of the social safety net
for someone like A____. I learned a lot from her about the third world
inside the first. I learned that the realities of poverty, racism,
social isolation, trauma, sexual abuse, and sex-based discrimination
could make a person, even an extraordinarily intelligent person,
vulnerable to addiction and psychosis. I learned a lot from A_____ about
desperation and about resilience. I learned that the complex struggle
over civil liberties and social rights in electronically mediated
information space is materially different from the one on the street.
There is another public outside – a secret public that is simultaneously
visible and invisible, and to most, illegible and incomprehensible. The
men and women who spoke with me at the needle exchange, and allowed me
to record our conversations, are part of this secret public. They
deserve to be heard and understood. The accounts they give are not
natural, objective descriptions of an unambiguous reality. No one I met
at the exchange described him or herself as a righteous dopefiend. On
the contrary, each self-narrative began with a kind of confession or
characterization of addiction as a weakness or disease. The messy
details of each life history then unfolded according to the syntax and
grammar of the disease-and-recovery discourse learned in the kind of
therapeutic setting where we met. But the fact that the telling is
inflected by its context and social construction does not mean that the
lived experience so related is any less real, or powerful, or deserving
of attention.
BLOOD SUGAR presents a public record of this secret public.
It provides evidence and testimony through an interface to the many
hours of conversation I recorded at the needle exchange. In the
interface each individual interlocutor is represented as a waveform or
“audio body” – these audio bodies are linked together through
“parasitic” connections revealed in their stories of pain, violence,
abuse, and despair. Overall, the space these bodies inhabit and the way
they are encountered by the viewer is structured in terms of the social
and biological construction of addiction – at the boundary of the skin.
The recorded interviews are framed by a series of texts that I have
written in response to a set of somewhat rhetorical questions posed from
the perspective of the Public such as “what do we hold against the drug
addict?” The texts incorporate my research into the neuroscience of
addiction with my experience while interacting with the clients of the
needle exchange.
In this work I have been more of an immigrant than an artist or
ethnographer — crossing over from the objective to the subjective, from
expertise or authority to unauthorized alien. As an academic I was once
reluctant to include my own story in my work. But my position is not
neutral; in theory or in practice, that would be an impossible place. So
I have crossed over into what theorists such as Jane Gallop and Michael
Taussig call “the anecdotal,” where theorizing and storytelling,
together, constitute an intervention and a refusal to accept reality as
it is.
It is my hope that the testimony gathered here, will challenge you,
as it has summoned me, to refuse and resist the paradoxes of social
exclusion and othering that attend the lives of those who suffer from
poverty, alienation, and addiction.
[this text is from the "Preface" section of Blood Sugar]
paint factory on the bleeding-edge of a working class residential
district in a part of east Oakland (California) known as “Fruitvale”. My
home was in the border zone that runs along the narrow corridor between
the elevated train line and the interstate freeway. The loft complex
was a kind of bunker in the midst of a post-industrial wasteland. I had
moved from an apartment in San Francisco to this relatively raw space
but I didn’t actually need a studio with high ceilings and industrial
surfaces. At that time I was engaged in the development of systems for
collaborative and collective authoring online. I thought of the Internet
as a public space and saw my work as ‘public art,’ but I was troubled
by the delimitation of who and what could be considered ‘Public’ in this
context. Every definition of “Public” I have found includes the phrase
“the people”. In modern European languages the phrase “the people”
always connotes the poor, the underprivileged, and the excluded. It is a
curious contradiction that this phrase simultaneously identifies the
citizen or political subject (big “P” people), and the class that is
excluded from politics - the marginalized and technologically
disenfranchised. The cluster of renovated factory buildings I shared
with a population of other well-educated, middle-class artists, was
enclosed by a concrete wall — outside the street was strewn with
shopping carts, plastic bags and discarded syringes. Gazing over that
wall, while I worked in the security of my second-floor studio, I began
to wonder how, or if, information technologies and public art practices
could effectively create a more inclusive public sphere – one that would
engage both the big “P” public and the little “p” people just outside.
There was an HIV prevention program down the street that ran an
open needle exchange three nights a week. I first heard about it on
local radio where the non-profit’s director told of a city councilman’s
attempt to force the exchange out of the neighborhood in an effort
towards future gentrification. I believed in the efficacy of needle
exchange, (albeit in an intellectual and somewhat detached way). I was
intrigued by the paradoxical, outsider-subject of addiction, the
borderline between dependence on licit and illicit drugs, the mystery
and violence of the needle. I had reason to want to escape the
privileged isolation of my own sphere – to cross over that concrete wall
and into another world. This desire was sincere but also driven by
curiosity, even voyeurism, and naiveté. Unlike prior artists and
intellectuals who have pursued research in the arena of drugs (Freud,
Benjamin, Burroughs, and De Quincy), I was interested in the social and
biological construction of addiction — not the experience of the drug as
such. I would cross over through the point of view of the addicted
subject. My desire would be satisfied by listening and observing – and
the responsibility I thus assumed would be left unresolved in my
unsuccessful attempts to help one of my interlocutors.
I volunteered at the exchange. Eventually I started to interview
people who came to the tent site to swap needles. Most of them lived on
the street, had no official identification (either because they had a
criminal record or no fixed address) and therefore had no access to
basic civic or social services. Their absence in the data-space of the
Public sphere had serious implications for them in the physical world.
They were in a sense invisible - a kind of secret public.
I got to know one of the women rather well – the woman that I call A____ in BLOOD SUGAR.
The needle exchange was the last frayed layer of the social safety net
for someone like A____. I learned a lot from her about the third world
inside the first. I learned that the realities of poverty, racism,
social isolation, trauma, sexual abuse, and sex-based discrimination
could make a person, even an extraordinarily intelligent person,
vulnerable to addiction and psychosis. I learned a lot from A_____ about
desperation and about resilience. I learned that the complex struggle
over civil liberties and social rights in electronically mediated
information space is materially different from the one on the street.
There is another public outside – a secret public that is simultaneously
visible and invisible, and to most, illegible and incomprehensible. The
men and women who spoke with me at the needle exchange, and allowed me
to record our conversations, are part of this secret public. They
deserve to be heard and understood. The accounts they give are not
natural, objective descriptions of an unambiguous reality. No one I met
at the exchange described him or herself as a righteous dopefiend. On
the contrary, each self-narrative began with a kind of confession or
characterization of addiction as a weakness or disease. The messy
details of each life history then unfolded according to the syntax and
grammar of the disease-and-recovery discourse learned in the kind of
therapeutic setting where we met. But the fact that the telling is
inflected by its context and social construction does not mean that the
lived experience so related is any less real, or powerful, or deserving
of attention.
BLOOD SUGAR presents a public record of this secret public.
It provides evidence and testimony through an interface to the many
hours of conversation I recorded at the needle exchange. In the
interface each individual interlocutor is represented as a waveform or
“audio body” – these audio bodies are linked together through
“parasitic” connections revealed in their stories of pain, violence,
abuse, and despair. Overall, the space these bodies inhabit and the way
they are encountered by the viewer is structured in terms of the social
and biological construction of addiction – at the boundary of the skin.
The recorded interviews are framed by a series of texts that I have
written in response to a set of somewhat rhetorical questions posed from
the perspective of the Public such as “what do we hold against the drug
addict?” The texts incorporate my research into the neuroscience of
addiction with my experience while interacting with the clients of the
needle exchange.
In this work I have been more of an immigrant than an artist or
ethnographer — crossing over from the objective to the subjective, from
expertise or authority to unauthorized alien. As an academic I was once
reluctant to include my own story in my work. But my position is not
neutral; in theory or in practice, that would be an impossible place. So
I have crossed over into what theorists such as Jane Gallop and Michael
Taussig call “the anecdotal,” where theorizing and storytelling,
together, constitute an intervention and a refusal to accept reality as
it is.
It is my hope that the testimony gathered here, will challenge you,
as it has summoned me, to refuse and resist the paradoxes of social
exclusion and othering that attend the lives of those who suffer from
poverty, alienation, and addiction.
[this text is from the "Preface" section of Blood Sugar]
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