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POWER AND ADDICTION: THE MAKING OF THE MODERN ADDICT
Author(s) -
Bull Melissa
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
australian journal of social issues
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.417
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1839-4655
pISSN - 0157-6321
DOI - 10.1002/j.1839-4655.1996.tb01049.x
Subject(s) - addiction , argument (complex analysis) , constitution , discipline , foundation (evidence) , confessional , phenomenon , power (physics) , population , opiate , politics , consumption (sociology) , sociology , political science , social science , psychiatry , law , psychology , medicine , epistemology , demography , receptor , quantum mechanics , philosophy , physics
This article provides a genealogical analysis of the ‘discovery’ of the modern phenomenon of addiction. It considers how the emergence of a bio‐politics of the population in the industrialising West facilitated the invention of addiction and supported an argument for the regulation of opiate use. As a result of regulation, particular patterns of opiate use became increasingly visible. In response the medical profession, in the late nineteenth century, through the use of power‐knowledge strategies transformed opiate use from a diverse set of social valuations to a unified pathology associated with madness, or unreason. This constitution of addiction as a negative category has been developed and appropriated by other discourses to provide the foundation for disciplinary interventions directed towards the regulation of undesirable patterns of consumption.