Tendencies and trajectories: The production of subjectivity in an event of drug consumption

Abstract

Posthumanist ontologies have been employed in theoretical and empirical research in human geography to explore the production of subjectivity in processes, events and relations. Similar approaches have been adopted in critical drug research to emphasise the production of subjectivity in events of drug consumption. Within each body of work questions remain regarding the durations and becomings of subjectivity. Responding to these questions, we introduce the notions of tendencies and trajectories as a way of theorising the emergent and enduring aspects of subjectivity. We ground this discussion in a select review of posthumanist geographies, geographies of habit and post-phenomenological approaches, along with vignettes drawn from an ethnographic study of young people’s recreational drug use conducted in Melbourne, Australia. We use these sources to indicate how the notions of tendencies and trajectories may help to account for the emergent and enduring aspects of processes of subjectivation in events of drug consumption.

Keywords

Subjectivity tendencies trajectories event drug use posthumanism

Introduction

Liam steps out of a bar into the darkness of an alley, chatting with a few friends. They each lick a finger and dip it into a small package of off-white powder, swallowing what they can. An acrid taste, a laugh, a few drops of rain, and they return to the bar to dilute the bitterness on the tongue with a sip of beer.

This snapshot introduces an event of drug consumption that we will unfold over the course of our paper. This event involves the movement of MDMA (3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine or ‘ecstasy’) powder from packet to the tongue, dissolving into bodies gathered in a Melbourne alley. This brief encounter may yet alter the capacities of these bodies to affect and be affected by one another. And yet the brevity of this account obscures how this moment of consumption came about, and its effects on the assembled bodies remain to be seen. Foregrounding these effects, our aim in this paper is to explore the emergence and endurance of one particular body in this event – the one entering as and becoming Liam – in order to reassess processes of subjectivation in events of drug consumption involving myriad bodies and forces. Through a sympathetic critique of broadly posthumanist accounts of subjectivation, we focus on a wider temporality of event relations to explore, firstly, how an emergent subjectivity can endure; and secondly, how subjectivities are involved in making, but not determining, events to come.

Events and encounters have become key points of interest for researchers adopting posthumanist and new materialist approaches in human geography, critical drug studies, and across the social sciences more broadly (see Anderson and Harrison, 2010; Duff, 2014b; Coole and Frost, 2010; Wilson, 2016). Within these fields, a focus on events and encounters has helped drive analytical interest in the nonhuman (or more-than-human) actors and forces involved in the collective generation of situations and ‘social’ phenomena (Duff, 2013; Latour, 2005). While posthumanist approaches aim to decentre the human by working against any arbitrary division between the subject and the nonhuman object, there has also been increasing acknowledgement of the need to return to the problem of subjectivity in order to realise the posthumanist project of accounting for human and nonhuman forces within the same ontological frameworks (Krarup and Blok, 2011: 44–48). If the challenge inaugurated in posthumanism is, as Hynes (2016: 24) puts it, to ‘[refigure] classically humanist problems in other than human terms’, the question remains of how the problem of subjectivity may itself be refigured in this way.

This question grows out of broader attempts across human geography to account for processes of subjectivation by way of emergent and relational ontologies (Anderson and Harrison, 2010; Bissell, 2011; Dewsbury, 2012; Hynes and Sharpe, 2015; Lapworth, 2015; Roberts, 2012; Wylie, 2010). Human geographers have long been interested in rethinking subjectivity, sociality, structure and context by working with and developing nonrepresentational (Thrift, 2007), posthuman (Castree and Nash, 2006) and new materialist (Whatmore, 2006) approaches. Despite the diversity of these approaches, they share an interest in departing from humanist modes of thought in favour of a ‘re-materialisation’ of human geography aimed at ‘theorising and apprehending ecologies of life that are, and have always been, more-than-human’ (McCormack, 2007: 371). The major achievement of this work has been a decentring of the human subject, troubling the ontological primacy it is accorded in humanist paradigms, weaving the human and its characteristic modes of re/composition back into assemblages, networks or ecologies comprised of heterogeneous materials and forces (Castree and Nash, 2006).

Similar developments have also emerged within critical alcohol and other drug research in response to dominant medical, neuroscience and social science paradigms that cast ‘problematic’ drug use as a function of a damaged, disordered or deviant subject, a diseased bodily state, impaired rationality and choice, a loss of self-control, or a failure of the subject to self-regulate (Fraser et al., 2014; Gomart, 2002; Keane, 2002; Weinberg, 2013). Assuming that consumption or compulsion is the result of a diseased or disordered subject often reflects a commitment to humanist and neo-liberal conceptions of the ideal subject as autonomous, independent and rational (Gomart, 2002; Moore, 2010; Moore and Fraser, 2006). Conceiving of subjectivity in this way has significant effects on how the ‘problem’ of drug use is framed and responded to in law, policy and practice. It also has significant effects on those individuals and groups who are stigmatised, marginalised and criminalised as a result of their drug consumption (Fraser et al., 2014; Fraser and valentine, 2008; Gomart, 2002; Keane, 2002; Moore, 2010; Shaw, 2010). In response, a significant body of research has turned to posthumanist and new materialist approaches, including assemblage theories and Science and Technology Studies, to critique decontextualised and individualising accounts of drug use by attending more closely to the vast array of bodies and forces at work in the consumption of alcohol and other drugs, and its effects (Duff, 2013; Fitzgerald, 2015; Fraser et al., 2014; Jayne et al., 2016; Weinberg, 2013). This work endorses an explicitly ethical and political effort to reimagine the possibilities for remaking drug-using subjectivities along less pathologising lines (Bøhling, 2015; Duff, 2014a; Fraser et al., 2014; Malins, 2004).

Much of this critical drug research works in dialogue with similar developments in human geography, moving away from a central focus on the subject of consumption through the deployment of emergent and relational ontologies. One particularly significant line of research has focused on events of drug consumption to investigate how assemblages generate consumption patterns, subjectivities and drug effects (Dilkes-Frayne, 2014; Duff, 2014b; Dennis, 2016; Farrugia, 2015; Hart, 2015; Malins, 2004; Poulsen, 2015; Race, 2014). This work has been crucial for widening the cast of actors made evident in accounts of events of consumption, and for attending to the dynamism of their shifting configurations, and the contingency of their effects. However, in its eagerness to eschew the problematic notions of self and subjectivity espoused in conventional accounts of drug consumption, we argue that this literature risks disavowing the importance of some aspects of the production of subjectivities in events of consumption. Across this critical scholarship, efforts to decentre the subject often emphasise the role of nonhuman forces in consumption, casting the human as an effect of this collective action, and missing an opportunity to reconceive the ontological status of the human within these events. As we will argue throughout our analysis, this critical work often fails to attend to the subject’s extended temporalities beyond the moment of its emergence in events, and the endurance of processes of subjectivation within and beyond such events. These omissions have important implications for how we conceptualise and investigate drug consumption and the processes of subjectivation that unfold in and through it.

Alternatives to this critical approach may be found in discussions of the impact and significance of posthumanist, new materialist and post-phenomenological interventions within human geography (Ash and Simpson, 2016; Bissell, 2011; Braun, 2004; Castree and Nash, 2006; Dawney, 2013; Harrison, 2007; McCormack, 2010; Panelli, 2010; Simpson, 2013; Wylie, 2010). For our purposes, these discussions are notable for their interest in recasting subjectivity, and the reflexive human agent, in posthuman terms, disavowing the foundational subject of experience and emphasising instead the role of affects, events, relations, practices and materialities in the flows of subjectivation (Callus and Herbrechter, 2012). Reflecting on the encounter between human geography and poststructuralism, Wylie (2010: 103–105) identifies two broad responses to the problem of a posthuman subjectivity: one proposing a post-phenomenological subject of being, language, ethics and perception (Ash and Simpson, 2016), and the other working within the relational-materialism of Actor-Network Theory and Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘anti-humanist’ notions of ‘non-personal, pre-personal and trans-personal relations of becoming’ (Wylie, 2010: 105).

While there are significant overlaps between these two bodies of work, our own concerns accord mainly with the latter Deleuzian strand, even as we are drawn to the post-phenomenological troubling of a fully ‘emergent’ subject (Ash and Simpson, 2016). In this sense, we share Wylie’s interest in tracing lines of convergence between the diverse re-thinkings of subjectivity offered in human geography. Our aim is to articulate an account of subjectivity alert to both its emergence in events and relations, and its durations in habit and presence. This requires careful attention to what Massumi (2014: 96) has termed ‘subjectivity-without-a-subject’, in which the production of the human may be accounted for without necessarily invoking the centrality of a subject and its experience. Yet, we also argue that recent interest in a post-phenomenological subject, in problems of presence, responsibility and sensibility (Rose, 2010; Wylie, 2009), helps to temper the habit of exaggerating the emergent aspects of subjectivity we, and others, have observed in Deleuzian accounts (McCormack, 2010).

We develop this argument by way of a critical assessment of recent discussions of processes of subjectivation in events of drug consumption which, as we have noted, tend to treat subjectivity as an emergent effect of these events, rather than their cause (Duff, 2014b). Echoing Wylie’s (2010: 106) broader remarks about the Deleuzian subject, this research has often emphasised the emergent, rather than durational, aspects of subjectivity. As we see it, there is a need for greater attention to the processes by which subjectivities are continually produced, such that the more enduring aspects of subject formation may be understood alongside the roles these aspects play in how events arise and unfold. To this end, we introduce the notions of tendencies and trajectories as conceptual tools for elaborating the enduring and emergent aspects of subjectivity in events of subjectivation. We draw on the work of Bennett (2010), Massumi (2009), DeLanda (2013) and Deleuze (1995) to develop these concepts, and then indicate how they may be used to generate new insights into the ways prior events shape, without determining, the subjectivities that may emerge in consumption events.

We advance this discussion through a series of vignettes generated as part of an ethnographic study of young people’s recreational drug consumption completed in Melbourne, Australia (see Dilkes-Frayne, 2014). Following Jackson and Mazzei (2013), these vignettes are the product of thinking in the threshold between memories and data derived from transcripts of two in-depth interviews with Liam (pseudonym) undertaken by the first author; a diary he wrote of this night out; our reading of posthumanist theories of relational processes and research literature on drug consumption; and our concerns about processes of subjectivation. Reflecting our commitment to the performativity of research and writing as they enact realities (Law, 2004), these vignettes act not as complete or objective representations of this event, but as performative enactments that invite us into the night (Dewsbury et al., 2002). They gradually unfold throughout the paper, exposing the tendrils of this event as they stretch into and create different temporalities, spatialities and subjectivities. The vignettes provide a departure point for articulating some of the problems encountered in the conceptualisation and empirical study of events of consumption, and our working towards a response through the notions of tendencies and trajectories.

Attending to emergence and endurance

Liam returns to the bar, buys another beer and chats with friends, waiting to see whether and how the MDMA will affect him, whether his body, his ability to affect and be affected by the bar, his friends, the beer, will be changed by his becoming-with MDMA. The Liam to emerge is, as yet, unknown.

Returning to this event at the point of Liam’s waiting-to-be-affected, we are drawn to consider where this event might go; to wonder what might emerge from Liam’s encounter with MDMA. Our focus here differs somewhat from recent accounts in critical posthumanist drug studies, including our own, which tend to focus on the immediacy of material and spatial relations in the co-constitution of consumption (Bøhling, 2015; Demant, 2009; Dilkes-Frayne, 2014; Duff, 2013; Poulsen, 2015; Race, 2014). This work typically follows Gomart and Hennion’s (1999) injunction to concentrate on what occurs in the event’s unfolding, rather than who acts. Taken from this perspective, an exploration of Liam’s case would likely emphasise the mediating associations linking various actants – such as the bar, alley, beer or MDMA – and their diverse effects on how this event unfolds. Such a focus, however, suggests that Liam is merely an effect of, rather than an active force within, this event’s unfolding. The logic of recent critical drugs studies would suggest that, were it of any interest at all, Liam’s subjectivity, agency or choices, and the transformations effected through each, would likely be accounted for by reference to how they were afforded in encounters among the collective that formed at this time in this particular encounter (Jayne et al., 2016).

Work undertaken in this critical vein appears to disavow the notion of a pre-existing subject, and focuses instead on a subject’s co-constitution in an assemblage, or ecology, of immediately present spatial and affective relations. In this way, the subject is positioned as a product rather than the source of its relations, insofar as the agencies afforded to a given subject are always contingent upon its relations as they are configured in a given situation or event (see Race, 2014; Weinberg, 2013). This gesture represents a crucial departure from humanist conceptions of subjectivity, and notions of stable, pre-existing agencies that still inform most empirical studies of social problems, such as drug use, across the social sciences (see Duff, 2014a). Without ignoring the significance of this work, we wish to argue that beginning with the encounter and presupposing the subject’s emergence from it has limitations for conceiving processes of subjectivation as ongoing, and subjectivity as potentially enduring, even as we remain broadly committed to an emergent ontology. To imply that subjects are emergent effects only under-emphasises their continuity and endurance, while failing to adequately account for both the material role humans play in an event, and how subjectivity may connect this event to others through its enduring temporality. A primary focus on emergence belies the ways in which the event’s constituents enter events, and what impact prior events have had on its unfolding. To return to Liam’s case, a focus on its immediacy makes it more difficult to ascertain how this consumption came about in the first place. How did Liam arrive in this place, with these people, and what impact did these circumstances have on his subsequent MDMA consumption and its effects?

We argue that we may only account for the push and pull of relations, and Liam’s relative durability from one event to another, by advancing beyond the notion that a subject is co-constituted entirely in the immediacy of material and affective events and relations. The force of the subject’s endurance beyond its emergent iterations is occasionally hinted at, but rarely explored, within recent geographies of alcohol and other drugs, where it is now common to read accounts of bodies, capacities and subjectivities being reproduced, transformed, modified, recomposed or altered in events. Each of these terms gestures towards something that pre-exists these events, prior to being re-produced, acted on or affected somehow by them. This ‘something’, which pre-exists and endures to enter subsequent events, is arguably sidelined in accounts that retain a primary focus on events of emergence, as Dewsbury and Bissell (2015), Lapworth (2015), Roberts (2014) and Wilson (2016) have also noted. Even though we accept that all events differ according to the ecologies at play within them, altering the ways agencies, capacities and orientations accumulate and settle into bodies, we need not deny that something akin to subjectivity enters into these events all the same, providing a body through which these capacities may circulate.

Returning to Liam’s case, attending only to the immediate affective, spatial and relational constituents of this event misses the range of relations in which Liam is already embedded, and the extent to which these relations feed into and through this event, shaping it in important ways. Focus on the immediacy of this event also makes it difficult to assess how the enduring aspects of Liam’s bodily form, skills, plans, preferences and memories have come to shape this event. Ignoring these aspects arguably obscures the role of pre-existing (albeit pliable) affects, features and forms in conditioning how things may unfold, and the connections between a given event and those that have come before it, or will be instigated as a result of it. For are these qualities simply a function of a particular network of associations unfolding, or is there not something relatively stable, relatively durable in the agencies that Liam expresses in this event, even as one concedes that these agencies are forever in formation? Our point is that in order to account for these aspects of subjectivity we need to revisit the question of how people and things remain (or are made to remain) relatively durable and stable across events, while also remaining (potentially) open to transformation.

Recent work in geographies of habit (Bissell, 2011; Dewsbury and Bissell, 2015) and post-phenomenological geography (Ash and Simpson, 2016) offer important insights into this question, echoing investigations of habit and repetition in critical drug studies (Fraser et al., 2014; Fraser and valentine, 2008). For our purposes, one of the most attractive features of each body of work is an explicit interest in rethinking subjectivity in terms of the materiality of bodies and their relations (see Ash and Simpson, 2016; Dewsbury and Bissell, 2015 for reviews). For example, recent geographies of habit reject negative conceptions of habit that have grown out of the thinking of Descartes and Kant, in which habit is treated as a mechanistic, automatic and routine repetition characterised by an absence of reflexive thought or rational judgement (Dewsbury and Bissell, 2015; Lapworth, 2015). Working through the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Ravaisson in particular, numerous geographers are now adopting a more productive, creative and expressive understanding of habit in order to explore the possibilities for emergence and change that arise in all processes of repetition (Bissell, 2011, 2015; Dewsbury, 2012, 2015; Hynes and Sharpe, 2015; Lapworth, 2015). While drawing upon different intellectual resources, efforts to articulate a post-phenomenological geography also emphasise the plasticity of the human, and its openness to both gradual and sudden transformations in processes of subjective becoming (Harrison, 2007; Rose, 2006; Wylie, 2010). Here, the body becomes open to novelty through, rather than in spite of, repetition. This view of presence, habit and experience is grounded in a conceptual logic of becoming, difference and embodiment, and as a result emphasises processes of habituation and emergence. Taken from this vantage, subjectivation may be regarded as an accretion of practices, experiences and habits that render the subject coherent to itself, giving it the impression of continuous existence, or selfhood, in the on-flow of experience. As Lapworth (2015: 89) writes, ‘subjects are thus no longer seen to be individuated by essences, but rather by the assemblage and articulation, both spatial and temporal, of their patterns or regularities of gestures, practices and encounters’. Subjects are necessarily susceptible to the difference in repetition that follows from the imperfect iterations of practice with their recurrent possibilities of destabilisation and change.

Recent habit and post-phenomenological geographies help to counter approaches that render subjectivity solely in terms of difference and change, with insufficient regard for the force of repetition and endurance. In this respect, Dewsbury and Bissell (2015: 23) argue that habit provides ‘the suture through which we can consider how singular, situated encounters draw something from the history of previous encounters and tend towards future encounters’. Thinking in terms of habit ought to help draw out the temporality of the encounter to reveal the processes by which it connects with other events, other encounters, in other times. Yet we would argue that additional conceptual resources are needed to refine understandings of the situational disruptions and continuities of subjectivity; hence our focus on tendencies and trajectories.

Bennett’s (2010) account of the vitality of matter and ‘things’ provides a useful point of departure for our introduction of tendencies and trajectories. Bennett (2010: viii) conceives of nonhuman ‘vitality’ as ‘the capacity of things […] to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own’. Bennett (2010: 56) goes on to argue that vitality is directly associated with things owning particular trajectories, propensities or tendencies, even where agency is said to be ‘variably enacted depending on the other forces, affects or bodies with which they come into close contact’. Though Bennett does not provide a detailed conceptualisation of tendencies or trajectories, we wish to develop these notions further to elucidate the contours of the production of subjectivity in events. As we show in the next two sections, these two notions provide insights into the human forces at work in events of drug consumption by revealing the changes and the continuities immanent to processes of subjectivation. Tendencies and trajectories emphasise histories, materialities, affects and relations by which subjectivities are differentiated, made relatively stable, and gain and lose capacities to affect and be affected in encounters.

Tendencies

Partially it is habit that leads Liam to this particular bar, with these particular friends, on this particular night. One is the habit of taking public transport. Outside his home is a local tramline that takes him, in one direction, from his house to the university he attends, and in the other, towards the city along a street lined with bars, restaurants and shops. He often frequents these suburban bars with friends who live nearby, talking, playing pool and drinking beer. On occasion, he ventures further along the tramline to meet friends at nightclubs in the city, to go dancing and take MDMA. In the right circumstances – with good friends, electronic music, free time and good quality MDMA – this drug affects him in ways he finds agreeable. Through these movements, consumptions, relations and affectations, a Liam is expressed with a particular form that enters into this event.

In moving backwards we begin to get a picture of how the event of consumption we opened this paper with may have come about. Liam’s consumption of MDMA is a product of many relations already in place, just as it relies on more spontaneous encounters on this particular night. These existing relations have partially led Liam into this event with a particular form and presence, open to the encounter with this bag of MDMA, the street, his friends, the bar and much else besides. These could be regarded as habits: habits of consumption, style, gesture, relation and affect. However, while this orientation helps us to attend to what has taken place, and what has already been expressed or actualised, what we are most interested in is how these practices pass into tendencies to affect and be affected in particular ways in future encounters. Approaching Liam’s night out from this angle ought to shed light on how Liam’s existing form, expressed through past encounters, re-emerges and is implicated in bringing about this particular event, without falling back on the idea of an essential self-hood.

Tendencies, following Manuel DeLanda (2013: vii), may be ‘real without being actual, if they are not currently manifested or exercised’. DeLanda provides the example of water’s tendencies to either boil or freeze depending on its actual relations at a given point in time. The fact that a given volume of water may not currently be boiling or freezing does not make its tendencies towards these states any less real (DeLanda, 2013: vii–viii). Following Deleuze, DeLanda refers to these unrealised states as virtual capacities. Tendencies are actualised in the presence or the absence of bodies and their relations, just as they remain always at least partially virtual as capacities go unexercised (or un-actualised) in a given state of affairs. Insofar as tendencies are not always actualised, they can be regarded in terms of the likelihood of their being realised, depending on the character of particular events, encounters and conditions. Tendencies, in this way, mirror the slow accruals of subjectivity as preferences, habits, reactions, responses and practices slowly settle into the body as they are actualised in successive encounters. Materialised in the repetitions of practice, gesture and routine, tendencies may become stable over time if they are actualised in similar ways in subsequent events, or dissipate if they are not. As such, tendencies shed light on the ways habits actually accrue in bodies, such that they can affect the body’s entry into encounters and their ensuing iterations and disruptions.

To elaborate this point, Massumi (2009: 2) describes the body’s differing from itself in events as a kind of ‘activation’ whereby an event ‘governs a transition, where a body passes from one state of capacitation’ to another. This move extends the temporality of an event beyond the moment of actualisation, as ‘the capacitation of the body as it’s gearing up for a passage towards a diminished or augmented state is completely bound up with the lived past of the body’ (Massumi, 2009: 2). This lived past includes the repetition of skills and inclinations, which are carried forward as an orientation. This means that any event expresses a ‘reactivation of the past in passage towards a changed future’, insofar as that which has already become is actualised anew, enduring in a modified form into future encounters (Massumi, 2009: 2). Tendencies ‘take up the past differently’, creating new potentials according to their actualisations, inevitably dragging something of the past with them (Massumi, 2009: 2–3). Subjectivity, then, emerges and reemerges ‘from a field of conditions which are not that subject yet, where it is just coming into itself’ (Massumi, 2009: 4).

According to this analysis, subjectivity can be conceived of in terms of change and continuity, where continuity is an effect of an accrual of tendencies in bodies, and where change is introduced precisely at the moment at which tendencies are actualised differently. Partially, the change that events introduce is a function of an excess of potentiality in tendencies, as Massumi (2009: 5) notes:

[T]he tendencies and capacities activated do not necessarily bear fruit. Some will be summoned to the verge of unfolding, only to be left behind, unactualized. But even these will have left their trace. In that moment of interruptive commotion, there’s a productive indecision. There’s a constructive suspense. Potentials resonate and interfere, and this modulates what actually eventuates.

Tendencies thus describe habitual inclinations to affect and be affected in certain distinctive ways from one event to another, without suggesting that these affective responses should be regarded as predictable, routine or determined. As we see it, the key advantage of the notion of tendency is its sensitivity to the ever-present prospect of tendencies being actualised anew in novel circumstances. Understood in these ways, tendencies provide a useful conceptual means of thinking through the conditions of Liam’s endurance in and through events, without ascribing this continuity to the expression of an essence.

With these arguments in mind, we can revisit the tendencies that carried Liam into the laneway on this particular night to lick his finger and dip it into a bag of what he was told was MDMA. Nothing in the tendencies that may be said to characterise Liam at this point – a tendency to drink beer with his friends in quiet bars within walking distance of the tram that runs past his home; a tendency to consume moderate quantities of MDMA with friends in particular circumstances – actually determine the outcome of this event. Nevertheless, in order to engage with what is happening here something of Liam’s durable subjective inclinations needs to be taken into account. These are the tendencies that carried Liam out into the laneway with his friends as the prospect of MDMA beckoned. On another night, these tendencies may well have been actualised differently, with Liam declining the offer of MDMA. The empirical problem, as we see it then, is to examine how tendencies that have formed in other times and spaces act virtually within an event as they are actualised, or not. The notion of tendencies alone does not quite achieve this aim, and so we introduce the notion of trajectories to attend to how bodies carry tendencies into the event of their material and affective expression.

Trajectories

Enjoying the respite of mid-semester break, Liam has a quiet day at home before heading to the bar to meet with friends after dinner. Feeling a bit unwell, he plans to drink only a beer or two before returning home early. For this reason, Liam arranges for his girlfriend to give him a lift home later that night after the concert she is attending finishes in the city. After arriving at the bar, Liam drinks a few beers, plays pool, and chats with his friends.

Moving back to before Liam’s arrival at the bar we find the resonances of a particular (subjective) trajectory, along with some indication of how this trajectory affected and was affected by the tendencies explored in the previous section. Let’s consider this trajectory and the actualisation and counter-actualisation of tendencies that it describes. Feeling a bit unwell, Liam plans to take the tram a few stops to meet his friends, play some pool, have a few beers and then accept a lift home with his girlfriend with time to read before bed. Taken together, these plans describe a trajectory that maps the direction or line of futurity of the tendencies that express Liam’s preferences. These include a tendency to prefer the quieter vibe of suburban bars to noisy clubs in the city; a taste for craft beers; enjoyment of the game of pool, and so on. Liam’s trajectory on this night traces the lines of futurity set out by these tendencies as they pull him away into the night. The notion of lines here provides a way of clarifying how trajectories function in processes of subjectivation in and through events. Deleuze’s (1995: 33) invocation of cartographic lines is instructive in this respect, insofar as he regards lines as the ‘basic components of things and events’. Lines carry affects and materialities from the past as they project, uncertainly, into the future (McCormack, 2003: 501–502). While lines ‘map out pathways and moves’, we cannot know ‘in advance how things will go’ (Deleuze, 1995: 33–34). We may well identify and follow particular trajectories and their movements or directions, but we cannot determine their outcome or their terminus. While the trajectories that carried Liam into this bar on this particular night partially framed the course of events that followed, they were also open to being disrupted in the event’s unfolding. Unexpectedly, one of Liam’s friends arrives carrying a package in her handbag. Another possible trajectory opens up.

After some time, Liam’s friends inform him that another friend will be arriving shortly, and Liam figures it polite to stay for another drink to say hello. When this friend arrives, she informs the others, to their surprise, that she has MDMA powder with her, and offers it to the group to share. They have each taken MDMA before, even together as a group, and have found it to be enjoyable. It doesn’t take long for them to agree to share the MDMA, and so they head outside into the laneway.

Here we arrive at the point at which this paper began, having followed the lines leading Liam to this point. The trajectory that led him here, however, has been disrupted as the event of his friend’s arrival transforms his plans and expected movements. Liam’s decision to join his friends in the alley to consume MDMA throws the night’s trajectory off course, even as the tendencies that drew Liam into the bar with his friends continue to exert some force over this event’s unfolding. Not least of these is Liam’s existing agreement to travel home with his girlfriend, and his tendency to honour such agreements rather than break them. Nonetheless, something has changed. The unexpected arrival of the friend, and the appeal of her proposition of MDMA consumption, has introduced a new trajectory, which promises to carry Liam along a new line. As he wanders into the laneway, all manner of contrasting and competing tendencies are at work, actualising and counter-actualising this event according to the singularities at work within them (McCormack, 2003: 502). As the bag of MDMA is passed around from friend to friend, rival tendencies are expressed, for example, in the habits that shape how a bag of MDMA powder might most effectively be shared among friends quickly, furtively and without unwelcome interruptions. In this respect, we might say that the sudden appearance of MDMA transforms the night by introducing novel bodies, forces and encounters. However, much of the way these encounters are actualised reflects the force of existing tendencies being materialised in relatively consistent and coherent ways. This event has never happened before, but that does not make all its elements unprecedented.

After returning to the bar, the MDMA begins to take effect and the group begins to talk more animatedly, switching seats to facilitate conversation. Liam’s erstwhile tiredness gives way to wakefulness, and his desire to return home fades. He now feels happy to stay and is reluctant to leave his friends. However, the plans he’d earlier made with his girlfriend are still in place, pulling him in a different direction. Separate trajectories are now being enacted in different spaces, interactions and movements. On one trajectory Liam’s girlfriend will soon appear to take him home as planned; on another Liam will leave with his friends for a different venue to continue the party. Each trajectory remains partially actualised.

Moving forward now, we can see that the trajectory that carried Liam into this event is not singular or determined, but is open to novel and competing actualisations as it is shaped by forces immanent to this event, along with the effects of earlier actualisations (such as Liam’s commitment to travel home with his girlfriend). Despite the partial actualisation of this trajectory, it may quite easily be disrupted now that Liam has unexpectedly consumed MDMA. And yet the disruption of this trajectory is not infinitely malleable, for there are certain things his body cannot do without a change in circumstances, and each transformation of his trajectory will have some effect upon his future possibilities. What if he phones his girlfriend and attempts to change their travel plans? What if he continues on with his friends, likely drinking more alcohol, perhaps consuming more MDMA? Where might these new trajectories lead him and where will they leave him tomorrow when he next sees his girlfriend? In the midst of competing trajectories, the encouragement of friends and a desire to honour his agreement with his girlfriend, this event has thrown up an invitation to make a decision. Who (or what) will decide where these encounters lead? This is not a decision akin to the one normally framed in popular discussions of young people’s use of alcohol and other drugs, whereby the decision to consume or refrain from consumption is presented in the light of careful rational assessments of risk and utility (Duff, 2013: 168). It might be more sensible to think of this moment in terms of an emergent causality (Race, 2014) in which forces immanent to an event converge in the actualisation of a new trajectory.

Of all the possible iterations of this event, it ends, for Liam at least, in a rather mundane fashion. He farewells his friends, returns home with his girlfriend and watches television before going to bed, as originally planned. His friends proceed to another venue before going home together in the early hours of the morning. Despite the emergences that arose within it, Liam endures through this event only marginally changed from the way he entered it. The occasion has supported the (re)actualisation of several of Liam’s tendencies – as partner, friend, student, drinker, and occasional taker of MDMA – that bear a strong resemblance to those that came before, giving rise to a sense of continuous subjectivity. However, this continuity is as much an effect of this event as its cause. Had the event involved different actualisations, Liam’s continuity might have been disrupted. The realisation that the powder in the bag was not MDMA; unexpected effects following its consumption; intervention from the bar staff; further drug consumption; an altercation with other commuters on a tram ride into the city; a car accident on the way home – these are some of the potential counter-actualisations that may have altered how Liam emerged in this event, sending him on a new trajectory, a new line of becoming. This is to say that the trajectories that bodies travel along are transformed in events, sometimes subtly, sometimes profoundly, as they are drawn towards future encounters.

As an example of this transformation, Liam’s experience of MDMA use on this particular occasion created new sensations and memories that left him more inclined to accept offers of MDMA in similar circumstances in the future. This shift in inclinations may be regarded as a novel and emergent tendency that will lead Liam along a new trajectory in which future MDMA consumption is more likely. Indeed, Liam may even seek to actively shape events to come by attempting to choreograph the actions, practices or responses of the bodies he encounters in order to ensure that another encounter with MDMA is realised. The point here is that the notions of tendencies and trajectories offer new ways of understanding the role of human forces in events of drug consumption by offering an alternative to notions of subjective choice, appetite, desire or will. Tendencies and trajectories converge in the actualisation of events, but neither fully determines these actualisations. Tendencies and trajectories are quasi-causes of this consumption, as they are transmitted between bodies in the event of their subjectivation (Duff, 2014b). Many forces are at work in the consumption of alcohol and other drugs, only some of which are human, and only some of which may merit the attribution of subjectivity. Continuing to frame drug use in terms of rational (or irrational) choice misses these ‘more-than-human’ elements (see also Bøhling, 2015; Dilkes-Frayne, 2014; Duff, 2013; Demant, 2009; Fitzgerald, 2015; Poulsen, 2015; Race, 2014). The notions of tendencies and trajectories are an attempt to return these elements to the study of drug consumption without ignoring the (human) force of subjective becoming in this consumption.

Emergent and enduring subjectivities

We now return to the issues we raised in introducing this paper to reflect on how the notions of tendencies and trajectories may help to open up theoretical and empirical investigations of subjectivity in light of emergent and relational ontologies characteristic of posthumanist thinking. The question of subjectivity remains hotly debated within post-phenomenological and posthumanist geographies (Ash and Simpson, 2016). Recent critiques of this research have called for a return to the human (Krarup and Blok, 2011), with some even proposing a ‘new humanism’ that retains an interest in the experiential dimensions of human life (Simonsen, 2013). We agree that work in a posthumanist vein must continue to think through the refiguring of subjectivity in other-than-human terms (Hynes, 2016), and have proposed one way of doing so here with the notions of tendencies and trajectories. These notions, we suggest, provide significant benefits over recent attempts to reconceptualise subjectivity in terms of emergence alone, at the expense of due understandings of durability and endurance. We bring our intervention to a close by briefly reviewing these benefits for novel studies of subjectivity, with a focus on consumption events.

Firstly, greater attention to tendencies and trajectories could provide novel means of articulating both the emergent and enduring aspects of processes of subjectivation in such events. The tendencies that carry bodies along particular trajectories inform, at least in part, what enters, emerges and is enabled to endure through events. Tendencies and trajectories produce an emergent form that builds upon, disrupts, transforms or consolidates into an enduring affective and material complexion. What endures does not imply a human essence but a virtuality that subtends a body, awaiting its actualisation in similar or different iterations according to the singularities that frame events as they unfold. Subjectivation, then, involves the thickening of tendencies as they coalesce in habits, skills and bodily forms, and the irruption of trajectories in novel encounters. While we would agree that the subject is not ‘prior to and separate from the process of event formation’ (Massumi, 2009: 10), we contend that the temporality of all processes of subjectivation extends beyond the moment of encounters in events. By looking at how things enter events, and the trajectories they follow, or are made to follow, in and through these events, we can gain an appreciation of how events come to express both emergence or disruption, and continuity or stability, in the constitution of subjectivity and sociality.

Secondly, as we have elaborated them, the notions of tendencies and trajectories suggest that there are wider temporalities at play in consumption events than are commonly accounted for in empirical studies. As we have demonstrated, the actors, forces and relations that shape an event’s unfolding do not entirely arise within the moment of drug consumption, but rest in part on earlier encounters that have occurred in other places. These histories form the tendencies and trajectories that carry bodies, human and nonhuman, towards or away from one another in events, with implications for how each emerges. A partially emergent, partially durable body – with the balance of emergence and endurance always a question of an event’s actualisations – draws out of the past and into an uncertain future. For these reasons, we present the notions of tendencies and trajectories as a way forward for ongoing empirical studies of the spatial, affective, temporal and material contours of consumption events by including more of the force of continuity and durability, without falling back on accounts of structurally determined or inherent human agencies.

Thirdly, while it is not our aim here to explore lived experience in a phenomenological sense, we do aim to bring some particular tendencies into our analysis of consumption events that enable more refined insights into the actions of ostensibly human bodies within these events. Examples of these tendencies include memories, intentions, plans, habits and personal histories. Our notions of tendencies and trajectories enable us to clarify in greater detail how transformations wrought by past encounters manifest particular virtualities for particular bodies. Agency and affectivity, and something akin to a non-representational sense of experience (McCormack, 2010), arise through these encounters. Our goal is to remain sensitive to the individual, though entangled, histories that differentiate bodies in events, while retaining some sense of the distinct capacities and forms that human actors evince as they enter events if only to be transformed by them. In pursuing this goal our intention is not to recentre the subject, such that it is seen as the most consequential actor in an event, but simply to enable greater differentiation of the varied human and nonhuman bodies assembled in events, and more refined understandings of how their actions are both constituted by, and constitutive of, these events.

The significance, therefore, of our attempt to reconceptualise processes of subjectivation by way of the notions of tendencies and trajectories lies in its contribution to recent debates regarding posthumanism and post-phenomenology in human geographies, and in its contribution to ongoing efforts to develop more sophisticated methods for analysing consumption events, and better responses to the problems sometimes generated in them. As we noted in the introduction, the problem of subjectivity is a crucial one for critical drug researchers. Most scientific and public policy paradigms cast ‘problematic’ consumption as a product of flawed subjects, with this framing then used to justify a range of punitive and coercive measures that ostensibly ‘correct’ the problems of these flawed subjects (Moore and Fraser, 2006). We are concerned about this framing because of the ways it makes the subject of drug use the near exclusive locus of drug problems and their putative solutions. This framing all but ignores the myriad human and nonhuman forces active in any event of drug consumption, and thus has little to say about the social, affective and material aspects of drug use. It also has little to say about how social, affective and material forces might be enrolled in practice and policy initiatives to reduce the harms sometimes experienced in consumption events (see Duff, 2015).

This is where we think greater focus on tendencies and trajectories, and the ways they frame consumption events, might be helpful. In order to counter the view of consumption as subjective flaw, and the decontextualised and individualised accounts of consumption this view relies on, greater attention to tendencies and trajectories should enable more refined understandings of the range of human and nonhuman forces active in consumption events, and how subjects enter, and are shaped by, these events. The key here is that due attention to tendencies and trajectories should act as a counter to simplistic understandings of drug use that emphasise subjective will, intention, desire and responsibility, without regard for the complexities of consumption events. Reframing subjectivity in the way we are calling for here aims to contribute to novel ways of making the ‘problem’ of drug consumption, and fresh grounds for the design of novel responses to this ‘problem’. Whereas the subjectivities of people who use drugs are often represented in prevention and harm reduction efforts in ways that directly contribute to harm (Farrugia, 2014) – due to a lack of recognition of the agencies that make events beyond an individual’s control (Dennis, 2016); where ‘consumers’ are defined in policy and public discourse in ways that contribute to their marginalisation (Lancaster et al., 2017; Moore and Fraser, 2006); and where people are subjected to coercive treatments and incarceration as a result of their consumption – we would emphasise the urgent necessity of recasting drug using subjectivities in more-than-human terms. Subjectivity is, after all, ‘a key terrain of political intervention’ in which ‘creative experiments’ may yet express ‘new potentials for life and living’ (Lapworth, 2015: 87). With respect to events of drug consumption, this course would seem to necessitate a reconceptualisation of the subject of drug use in favour of new understandings of the tendencies and trajectories that shape subjectivation in consumption events (Duff, 2014a).

To be more specific about the politics of this intervention, our approach may suggest means by which the tendencies and trajectories of bodies and events to come might be counter-actualised, shifted onto another line of becoming, through the modification of events (see also McCormack, 2003: 502–503). A potent example concerns the ways events of drug consumption may be modified or manipulated to make the expression of harms less likely. A focus on tendencies and trajectories calls attention to modes of intervening in these events without attributing the responsibility for risk or harm to an individual and their ‘flawed’ impulses and/or an innately dangerous substance, but to the ways in which events come together and unfold (Dilkes-Frayne, 2014; Duff, 2014b). One of the most effective ways of modifying events of drug consumption to reduce harm may well be to manipulate, displace or re-direct the tendencies and trajectories that carry bodies – human and nonhuman – into and out of events. The possibilities for harm reduction policy and practice informed by this kind of research are only beginning to take shape, with promise for conceiving of the ways in which event-based interventions work to reduce or temper the emergence or actualisation of harmful potentialities, with long-term positive effects (see for example, Gonçalves et al., 2016). Reconceiving how processes of subjectivation unfold in drug use events may be part of renewed efforts to foster an ‘ethics of care’ in the social and political governance of drugs and their consumption (Duff, 2015). This is not to suggest that it is either possible or desirable to stage particular normative subjectivities, but to emphasise, as Malins (2004) does, the importance of an ethico-aesthetics in any effort to open up, rather than foreclose, the possible becomings of drug using bodies. Rather than regarding people as responsible for their own self-governance in relation to ‘their’ drug use, requiring them to produce themselves as ‘healthy’ subjects by avoiding or ‘managing’ drugs (Pereira and Scott, 2017), we suggest the need for modes of governance that remake subjectivities and consumption by enabling alternative means for intervening in events, widening the responsibility for consumption beyond individuals. Our hope is that by finding ways to work subjectivity back into conceptions of consumption and harm, while maintaining the insights gained from recent critical scholarship, our work will contribute to the development of novel approaches to harm reduction.

Along these lines, this paper raises a number of new questions: how might new trajectories be chartered and brought forth in events of drug consumption such that certain trajectories might be realised in the interests of, for example, reducing harmful or unhealthy encounters with drugs? What tendencies would these require, and what relations might these tendencies lead into or away from? Each course will likely lead to further questions regarding how to ‘create and sustain’ particular becomings (Anderson and Harrison, 2010: 19; McCormack, 2003: 502). Attending to the counter-actualisation of subjectivities in particular situations, and the ways tendencies and trajectories may be made otherwise, provides conceptual impetus for studies of how social conditions may be altered to enable the transformation of agencies, affects and forms for humans and nonhumans alike. Such are the outlines of a posthuman harm reduction praxis.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to extend our thanks to Lenore Manderson, Thomas Roberts, and the three reviewers and editor of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space for their engaged and highly constructive comments on earlier versions of this article. We give special thanks to Liam for his extended involvement in the research.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by an Australian Postgraduate Award and the School of Psychological Sciences, Monash University.

Ella Dilkes-Frayne is a research fellow in the Neuroethics and Public Policy group at the Monash Institute of Cognitive and Clinical Neurosciences, School of Psychological Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Her recent research has explored young people’s party drug use in nightlife settings, personal accounts of alcohol and other drug addiction, and online drug counselling. Dilkes-Frayne has a particular interest in how posthumanist thinking can assist in articulating the emergence and effects of social contexts on drug consumption.

Cameron Duff is a vice chancellor’s senior research fellow at the Centre for People, Organisation and Work at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. Duff’s research explores the role of social innovation in responding to complex health and social problems in urban settings. Duff has explored these themes in qualitative studies of precarious urban lives, housing insecurity, addiction and mental illness in Australia and Canada. Duff’s first book, Assemblages of Health: Deleuze’s Empiricism and the Ethology of Life, was published in 2014 by Springer.

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