Cultural Critique

Paul Gootenberg
Talking About the Flow: Drugs, Borders, and the Discourse of Drug Control
Cultural Critique - 71, Winter 2009, pp. 13-46

University of Minnesota Press

Project MUSE - Cultural Critique - Talking About the Flow: Drugs, Borders, and the Discourse of Drug Control Project MUSE Journals Cultural Critique 71, Winter 2009 Talking About the Flow: Drugs, Borders, and the Discourse of Drug Control Cultural Critique 71, Winter 2009 E-ISSN: 1534-5203 Print ISSN: 0882-4371 DOI: 10.1353/cul.0.0023 Talking About the Flow:Drugs, Borders, and the Discourse of Drug Control Paul Gootenberg This essay explores the relationships between illicit drug flows (my current area of historical research) and state borders. The larger theme, for objects-in-motion, is how statist languages of "control" underlie their construction and maintenance as illicit and criminalized flows. Students of drug trafficking can make public discourses about drugs a usefully explicit object of study. But in doing so they should also beware of the possible intellectual and political pitfalls of "talking like a state"--that is, of adopting the categories or characterizations of the illicit deployed by policing and regulatory agencies -- for thinking well about such flows. Among other problems, it is hard for territorial states to supersede their stationary view of shifting, furtive, borderless activities, a dilemma of note in the recent "war on terrorism" as well. The essay winds its way to these ideas by addressing three topics: first, the relation of drugs to commodity studies writ large (how drugs were differentiated from other goods during the...