Abstract
In his ethnography of the shooting gallery Phillipe Bourgois interprets the comment “I started shooting heroin at 14, now I'm 64” as an indication that his respondent's “oppression is fully internalised and, almost like a neo-liberal ideologue, he takes full responsibility for his poverty, illiteracy and homelessness” (1998 Theory, Culture and Society 15). In this paper I consider whether this interpretation adequately gets to grips with a lifetime of attachment to the syringe. Could there be another interpretation for the experience of the shooting gallery? What happens when heroin addiction is addressed not in terms of the political economy of suffering but the political economy of affect? Drawing on my empirical research on the syringe, I examine the affective dimension of the shooting gallery, paying particular attention to the sensation of the syringe. My focus concerns the policy of needle exchange, practices of syringe collection and disposal, and issues of space, waste, and affect. Bringing together poststructural analyses of space, I argue that the excess value of the used syringe unsettles the boundaries between subject and object, private and public, and space and place. This has implications for how we understand not just the space of the shooting gallery but the politics of harm reduction and the city.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.