Abstract
Trouble seems to be characteristic of contemporary politics and life. From the environment to the pandemic, crises of political credibility around the world, conflict on social media and the drama of so-called “cancel culture”, avoiding or settling trouble seems more unimaginable than ever. Yet, as the theme of this conference makes clear, trouble is not always negative, especially when posed in verb form. To trouble preconceptions, orthodoxies or alienating norms can be productive, exciting and transformative. This is as much the case in research as in any other area of life. Troubling our founding assumptions, our research questions, our theories and methods is the way we move forward, even if it is not always easy or immediately rewarding. In this keynote presentation I will reflect on my own engagements with forms of scholarly trouble, drawing on the work of Donna Haraway in her book Staying with the trouble (2018) to identify key ways in which we as researchers may “embrace trouble” in useful and productive ways. Thinking through some central propositions articulated by Haraway in her engagement with other scholars, such as the importance of storytelling, the value of grieving, and the uses of response-ability, I will offer a range of examples drawn from my own work in critical drug studies and ontopolitical research to highlight the promises and pitfalls of trouble. In doing so, I aim to acknowledge the opportunities I have enjoyed over the years to be part of the innovative and courageous field of critical drug studies, of which the Contemporary Drug Problems conference is also an important part.
Introduction
I would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the lands on which the research discussed in this presentation was conducted, and pay my respects to elders past and present. I would also like to acknowledge the many co-investigators, research partners and participants who made the research described in this talk possible.
Trouble seems to be a significant theme of contemporary politics and life. From the climate to the pandemic, crises of political credibility around the world, conflict on social media and what has been termed “cancel culture,” avoiding or settling trouble seems harder to achieve than it ever was. Yet, as the theme of this conference has highlighted, trouble isn’t always negative, especially when posed as a verb. To trouble pre-conceptions, orthodoxies or alienating norms can be productive, exciting and transformative, indeed it's our job as researchers to do so. Troubling our founding assumptions, our research questions, our theories and methods in careful engagement with the literature that has gone before is the way we move forward, even if it's not always easy or immediately rewarding. In today's presentation I’m going to draw on the work of Donna Haraway in her book Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene (2016), to identify some ways we as researchers may “embrace trouble” in productive ways. I’ll begin by saying a bit about the key elements of Haraway's approach, I’ll then link it to methodological issues previously canvassed as ontopolitically-oriented research and lastly I’ll use the insights from Haraway and these method issues to identify a few current areas that might benefit from troubling in the ways Haraway suggests.
Haraway and Staying with the Trouble
The reference to the work of Donna Haraway in this year's conference theme was very welcome for me because her thought has animated my whole academic career. From my undergraduate days when I read her enormously influential piece “A cyborg manifesto” (1991) and some of her trenchant and funny observations about gender politics in her early book Primate Visions (1989), I’ve always aspired to respond to her thoroughly searching analysis and capacity to introduce novel concepts. Staying with the trouble (2016) continues her unique and peerless approach, even if, or perhaps partly because of what Kenney calls the book's “shagginess” (2017). Her appeal to us to “stay with the trouble” is of course most explicitly related to the climate crisis, but it, can enrich almost any area of research. Two of her earlier interventions have stuck with me most over the years: the first is a question she asked in her book Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_Oncomouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (1997). Canvassing the politics of nature, she asked, “‘What counts as nature, for whom and at what cost?” This question shaped my PhD research on gender, the body and the self (see Fraser, 2003), and was immediately useful when I began work on social aspects of illicit drugs. The second was the deeply affecting and highly economical aphorism Haraway took from Susan Leigh Star (1991), “Power is about whose metaphor brings worlds together” (also in Haraway, 1997). Nature, metaphor, technology, gender—these themes run through Haraway's work. In this presentation I want to say a bit about Haraway's thinking in Staying with the trouble (2016) and elsewhere to identify some of these themes and other resources that have guided and inspired my work over the years as I’ve tried to trouble the assumptions behind research, policy and public perceptions of drug use and related issues.
So Haraway begins the book by tracing the origins of the word trouble, reminding us that it means “‘to stir up’, ‘to make cloudy’, ‘to disturb’.” (2016, p. 1). Her most immediate concern is of course the climate crisis, and the need to somehow press on with efforts to arrest climate change and to protect species and habitats via collaborations between people, animals and settings. As she puts it, “The task is to become capable, with each other in all our bumptious kinds, of response.” (2016, p.1) Here Haraway is referring to the notion of “response-ability,” elaborated by Barad, which she raises in contrast to the conventional liberal humanist notion of responsibility that she identifies as too beholden to the fantasy of the bounded autonomous humanist subject. We are all, she says, made in “sympoiesis,” a process of mutual becoming that makes clear just how dependent we all are on the thriving of each other, each species, each environment and habitat. Looking at the climate crisis and indeed existence in general in these terms, she tells us that, The task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present. Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places. (2016, p.1)
This indispensable present she identifies as the Chthulucene: “a kind of timeplace for learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying in response-ability on a damaged earth” (2016, p. 2). The term Chthulucene is coined from older terms, positing its living entities as “beings of the earth, both ancient and up-to-the-minute…replete with tentacles, feelers, digits, cords, whiptails, spider legs and very unruly hair…monsters in the best sense” (2016, p. 2). These interconnected, messy monsters—all of us and other creatures—can be said to exist in the Chthulucene as opposed to the now commonly accepted Anthropocene, a term she critiques not because she doesn’t acknowledge the decisive role humans have played in the development of planetary crisis, but because she sees it as short-circuiting a sense of the agency of non-humans, and the importance of seeing the world not simply and impoverishingly as the product of human action. The task, and the thinking, she shows us, is more challenging than simply deciding humans have destroyed the planet via their decisive agency and their devotion to capital.
Having identified tentacular monsters, and complex multilevel agencies and events, Haraway needs to help us rethink how to draw these elements together in new, more useful ways. In doing so, she turns to the notion of kin, arguing that, making kin as oddkin rather than, or at least in addition to, godkin and genealogical and biogenetic family troubles important matters, like to whom one is actually responsible. Who lives and who dies, and how, in this kinship rather than that one. (2016, p. 2)
What does Haraway believe is possible from here? As she puts it, I am not interested in reconciliation or restoration, but I am deeply committed to the more modest possibilities of partial recuperation and getting on together. Call that staying with the trouble. (2016, p. 10)
Via string figures of ideas, stories, places, people, animals, and other living beings, we tell stories and pass these along in a game of ever-changing patternmaking. As Haraway says, It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; […] what stories we tell to tell other stories with; […] what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories. (2016, p. 12)
Of course, as we can see from this account, string figures are contingent and emergent. They arise from the passage from hand to hand in complex, unpredictable, but not wholly unbounded ways, conferring limits as well as options. In this, they neatly articulate the Feminist Science Studies and Science and Technology Studies preoccupations with ontological contingency and emergence.
There is an enormous amount in Haraway's book, not to mention her previous work, to illuminate and inspire the work we do on drug issues and related topics, and I am going to have to be a bit selective here as I look at some tools for our ongoing work. Some of the concepts I think relate most to my own work over time are her take on nature, her way of framing response-ability, her related notion of kin, her emphasis on storytelling and her discussion of sympoiesis.
Her mobilization of mourning is also extremely relevant and affecting. She cites van Dooren (2014), who argues that mourning is key to cultivating response-abililty: Mourning is about dwelling with a loss and so coming to appreciate what it means, how the world has changed, and how we must ourselves change and renew our relationships if we are to move forward from here […] The reality, however, is that there is no avoiding the necessity of the difficult cultural work of reflection and mourning. This work is not opposed to practical action, rather it is the foundation of any sustainable and informed response. (2016, p. 38–9)
Haraway also cites Tsing (2015) in making her point. Tsing insists on the importance of refusing to look away. She “looks for the eruptions of unexpected liveliness and the contaminated and nondeterministic, unfinished, ongoing practices of living in the ruins” (2016, p. 37). This “living in the ruins” feels intensely relevant to our discussions here, living as we are in the ruins of the war on drugs and the overdose crisis. In pressing on with what still remains while not forgetting what has been lost, we must tell new stories in new ways, with new questions and new metaphors. For Haraway, there are no easy answers. We need to stay with complexity—to stay with the trouble.
So these are just some of Haraway's many productive and inspiring ideas and terms. For some, she is rather an abstract commentator, presenting us with odd and bizarre words and ideas. I’ve heard her dismissed as a tree-hugger, and I doubt she would take exception to this epithet. At the same time, she has also mobilized empirical material of many different kinds to demonstrate her ideas, and in Staying with the trouble (2016) she takes a different tack in the final chapter offering a fictional story to render more vivid and comprehensible her arguments. These methods are by turns familiar and daring, and point to the centrality of method to any research process, especially the importance of looking at method differently to move thought and practice forward. Shortly I’ll say a little about a couple of projects that, in line with Haraway's injunction to stay with the trouble, I’ve conducted in recent years, but first I want to say a bit more about method by drawing out the connection between Haraway's ideas and what I’ve called ontopolitically-oriented research (2020).
Trouble and Method: Ontopolitically-Oriented Research
In response to the legacy of Haraway, along with that of cognate thinkers Bruno Latour, Annemarie Mol, Isabelle Stengers, John Law, and Karen Barad, ontopolitically-oriented research (2020) attempts to map out elements of a methodological approach capable of responding to the ontological turn, troubling traditional accounts of the politics of research, and recognizing the contingency and emergence of realities and the role of methods in making those realities. While Haraway is extremely strong on new concepts and language, she can be relatively silent on the details of method, not surprisingly given her focus is on the philosophical. In an article bringing together key aspects of this approach, I outlined a range of features, all of which entail in different ways the troubling of methods, also noting that further features remain to be identified. Here I pick up some of the features I outlined to consider their relevance to the work we do.
(1) The methodological performativity of naming (2) The ontological politics of data generation (3) The liabilities and limits of representation (4) The contingency of units of study (5) Researching partial worlds
The first feature I noted, the methodological performativity of naming (2020, p. 6), is inspired both by the importance of telling new stories, and by the constitutive power of metaphor. It's very difficult to create new knowledge without troubling the names we use for things (and indeed this is what makes Haraway's style seem obtuse to some, but it's essential). Examples include the terminology of “addiction,” with its history in notions of enslavement, and its role in shaping research recruitment and analysis. Similarly, the language of “intoxication.” When we call something addiction or intoxication, we must realize its metaphorical tentacles and recognize that particular uses of the labels have particular political effects. We must ask ourselves ‘whose metaphors these are, and what kinds of worlds they bring together.’
The second feature I noted was the ontological politics of data generation (2020, p. 7), which focused on the ways in which specific approaches to collecting data in research shape the realities generally considered merely reflected in the data. For example, convenience recruitment has historically dominated drugs research, thereby foregrounding the experiences and circumstances of the most marginalized and disadvantaged. In turn, this approach materializes a reality of drug use as fundamentally about vulnerability and deprivation, connecting to certain legal, policy, and public discourse effects that have their own action. Such effects create certain stories that then cats-cradle certain public measures and outcomes in unhelpful metastasizing cycles. By taking a different, admittedly at times more onerous, approach to recruitment—staying with the trouble of how to engage research questions and subjects of research in a thick political present—we can tell wholly different stories of so-called addiction and intoxication (see Fraser et al., 2022a).
A third feature of this ontopolitically-oriented approach relates to the role of “representation” (2020, p. 7) in that the emergent account of reality tells us that the data collected for research can’t be treated as comprising a simple window onto true events. In attending to the accounts of drug effects (such as intoxication or euphoria and so on) evident in research interviews, it's necessary to recognize the discursive co-constitution of these experiences and terms, again asking “what stories we tell to tell other stories with,” and equally, to try to notice dynamics and effects that might be obscured or erased by discursive conventions. This focuses attention again on the performative role of research and questions about how to design research in light of this political performativity.
Also needing scrutiny are the units of study on which we base any analysis (2020, p. 7). Entities such as addiction or intoxication are a collective effect of a network, and therefore not stable effects of certain patterns of drug consumption, or of the “behavior” of individuals and their individual “agency.” This scrutiny necessarily shifts focus from the individual as origin and embodiment of action to the network, and therefore to dispersed and various actions and contributing agencies. Focusing on the network is of course more trouble. It is harder to map, harder to describe, harder to address. But in this way, the approach asks us to develop a new response-ability (a new way of being capable of response), to make new kin in thinking through how these entities emerge and operate, how the tentacles of the past, present, and future connect in familiar patterns, and how they might be redrawn if we think in terms of what Haraway calls “sympoiesis” (the mutual living intradependence of humans, nonhumans, and objects).
Lastly for my discussion today, Harway's focus on the Chthulucene, sympoiesis, and the emergent string figure reminds us that in research—as in all life—there are only partial, contingent worlds (2020, p. 8), only unstable emergent subjects and objects whose perspectives and priorities cannot be taken for granted. This is a further feature of ontopolitically-oriented research, one that again reminds us that the world is in the making, as Haraway might put it, through the game of cat's cradle we play in our research in co-constituting realities with human and nonhuman collaborators. This partiality creates multitudes of new openings, new possible methodological string figures, and fewer political dead ends.
So in these comments my aim is to point to some resources for future work, noting how these ideas can help raise questions about otherwise taken for granted yet highly consequential figures and objects such as addiction, intoxication, the drug, the putatively natural non-drugged body, and the bounded self, on which the supposed scandal of drug use depends.
What counts as nature, for whom and at what cost? (Haraway, 1997). As is now well understood in our field, where we essentialize substances and their effects, the pure, natural body and the rational mind, and in turn demonize or pathologize subjects whose actions don’t fit the expectations of neoliberal modernity, the effects are devastating: we find ourselves turning to criminal sanctions or medical pathologization as answers, then, paradoxically, to asking ourselves how to “reduce” or “eradicate” the “stigma” of incarceration or diagnosis. What does it cost to produce the natural, non-drugged body? We know all too well it costs lives. While research of many different kinds has challenged aspects of the governing assumptions about drugs consistent challenges to foundational concepts are still relatively rare. This is in part because the tools are often used relatively selectively, and as such, are unable to wholly escape the essentializing tendencies that govern the field overall. Perhaps this is why Haraway's work is so filled with whimsical neologisms such as the Chthulucene, because every commonplace word risks reproducing unhelpful, regressive logics and undermining her point. While social science researchers seek to demonstrate the variability of drug effects, the fundamentally social nature of drug-taking practices and the political dimensions of issues such as “addiction,” we’re also sometimes drawn back to familiar treatment and harm reduction responses that have benefits but also implicitly problematize drug use and drug effects in conventional terms. At the same time, neuroscientists, psychologists, and others continue to invite us to picture the brain on drugs, to understand drugs and the self as biochemical entities, and to turn to science to provide what they see as objective evidence to shape drug policy. In short, research into illicit drug use is torn between challenging received wisdom and trying to make new kin across issues and themes and entities, and wishful thinking about a pure past in relation to which we might hope for having “our facts back” (Marres, 2018) even as we know the stable, pre-existing bounded world that can be mastered, destroyed or saved by human agency alone, by the very agency considered compromised by drugs, cannot save us.
Mobilizing Trouble and Ontopolitical Approaches
The key features of ontopolitically-oriented research and theoretical tools akin to Haraway's have been used in some of my past projects, for example, in a project producing new stories of so-called addiction for a website called Lives of Substance (www.livesofsubstance.org). Here our team made new recruitment methods, created new templates for interview questions and asked different questions, analyzed the data according to fresh assumptions, and produced stories of people who consider themselves to have an addiction, dependence or drug habit that in modest but striking and revealing ways made new string figures of lives with regular heavy drug use. For the first time as far as I know, such stories described people associated with regular heavy drug use as having, for example, hobbies. In another project we looked at the tentacular connections between drugs, viruses, subjects, and objects such as injecting equipment kits in a project on new fitpacks for couples, making kin in new ways along the way for people whose intimate relationships were often dismissed as insincere or dysfunctional. And more recently, our team highlighted the importance of what might be understood as sympoietic, ontologically emergent encounters in explaining hepatitis C treatment non-uptake via Lauren Berlant's notion of slow death in a piece published in 2022 (Fraser et al., 2022b). Of course there are many other issues open to treatment with Haraway's ideas and the related resources of ontopolitically-oriented research.
The first is the growing field of what's termed “alcohol's harm to others”—and what an enormous amount of work that possessive apostrophe does here! While this area addresses a legal substance, and does so with, I imagine, the intention of shedding light on a substance generally exempted from the stigmatization applied to illicit drugs, it raises very important questions about unifocal causal models, the need to address key issues such as gender, and the all-too-familiar weaponization of kin in condemning substance consumption and the people engaged in it. So, for example, in a piece first published in 2022 (Laslett et al., 2023), we read that over 21% of people surveyed described being harmed by the drinking of people they know (and 23% by the drinking of people they don’t know). In this piece harm ranges from littering to failing to share housework equitably to sexual assault, all of which are ascribed to alcohol, and while the method is detailed in many respects, it's entirely silent on how respondents actually establish the causal role of the drug in the problems they’ve encountered. It seems the general public's assumptions about alcohol form the only basis for determining that alcohol causes such problems as inequitable household labour burden and sexual assault (thinking onotopolitically we can see the politics of data generation at work here, and choices about the particular units of study posited). Following Haraway, we can see this free discourse of harm and causation makes certain types of kin, family and friends and the problems created for these others by someone's drinking, ignoring the broad, tentacular nature of the issues, declining to stay with the trouble of those issues as it were, instead narrowing down to make a comforting simplicity. My feeling is our field urgently needs more stories from family and friends of people who consume drugs, that is, stories that do not simply reproduce unifocal accounts of harm, that remind us to value the individuals apparently readily condemned and consigned to personal blame for the effects of criminalization, or else to question those select privileged groups exonerated by accounts of the deterministic power of drugs (e.g., men and violence). And here the work of some families affected by overdose deaths, such as that of Australia's Tony Trimingham (of Family Drug Support), for example, comes to mind. We need, I think, to enact new realities of kin, of family and friends, by asking the right new questions, recruiting in new ways, analysing for new themes. At present the moral power of traditional kin is woven in to the most punishing and harmful and impoverished ways of looking at substances and their use. The second area is again to do with the role of storytelling, and also with our capacity to mourn who and what we’ve lost while remaining determined to save who and what we still have. In my own work this has been most vividly illustrated through our team's work on overdose prevention. Our research documented many incredible acts of care and bravery among people who consume drugs as they acted to literally save the lives of others. These acts are recorded on our website Overdoselifesavers.org, and also covered in publications, and they show extraordinary efforts, often made repeatedly, to save lives despite significant obstacles, risks, and stress. Tellingly, when seeking to publicize our findings through media outlets, the response was total indifference. This might have been dismissed as lack of skill in media engagement on our part, but we used exactly the same media team as colleagues aiming to publicize the caring work of another community, and while that work garnered widespread sympathetic media coverage (as it should and please don’t mistake me here), stories of people who consume drugs literally saving people's lives in difficult and sometimes dangerous conditions attracted no coverage at all. Telling positive new drug stories, including those of the sympoiesis of safety and care, continues to be desperately needed, and we need to find ways to reach the public that are not subject to the limitations of mainstream media. In all these areas, and many more of course, we are faced with the challenge of what Haraway calls ongoingness (2016, p. 132), that is, the work of pressing on and holding what is of value despite the seeming intractability of core issues—for her climate change, the loss of species and habitat and the irreversible harm to Indigenous communities—and for us issues such as criminalization and everything that clusters around it, supports it and flows from it. As Kohn (2018) explains, ongoingness is about ‘learning to be truly present’ in order to ‘become capable of response’ (p. 1), for example, we need to be able to dream well and remain fully awake. [… It] is a form of staying with what is, holding it with care in a way that might leave open a space for unexpected flourishing. (2018, p. 100).
These are all challenging issues. As with other heavily freighted biopolitical issues such as access to abortion or euthanasia, views on drug use may never become fully settled or unanimous, and the rights of those affected never finally and irreversibly secured. Of course, these issues are so woven into other issues such as gender, race, and colonial legacies that it's possible they’ll remain permanently contestable. Here I wanted to point briefly to the generative potential of a relatively newly elaborated fruitful area, narcofeminism, for bringing all these concerns into new matterings. A new edited collection (Dennis et al., 2023) is being launched at this very conference, and I can see it one day accompanied by a reader presenting the amazing past work done by wonderful scholars such as Susan Boyd, Nancy Campbell, and Elizabeth Ettore, as well as more work on how narcofeminism can further tackle masculinities along with the plights of women and gender diverse people, as in the issues of violence so palpable right now. Again this is a matter of ongoingness, and I suggest pressing on in the cautious but determined spirit of Haraway. As she says, there is no going back, and there is no final settling, no chance of restoration. As we know all too painfully, we can’t ever restore the lives lost to criminalization or fully reconcile the harm caused by stigma and discrimination. But we also know of course that so much remains to be saved, to celebrate and to transform into thriving, and that the obligation is there to do so because the past cannot be righted.
To give the last word to Haraway's fellow traveler Isabelle Stengers (2023), whose powerful new book seeks to rethink “common sense” for “times of collapse,” we can think about regeneration rather than restoration. As she puts it (2023, p. 179), …to regenerate is never a general matter, for it is about creating or reactivating, step by step, relationships that are always tentacular, always partial, always to be cultivated, to be resumed under the aegis of the absence of guarantee, and also under the aegis of sorrow when loss is irreparable.
Thank you
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The author sincerely thanks many people who generously gave their time to take part in the research discussed in this talk. All participants provided written informed consent to participate in the research discussed here. Also key to this piece are the investigators, collaborators and project staff involved in the projects discussed here: Elizabeth Birbilis, Joanne Bryant, Paul Dietze, Ella Dilkes-Frayne, Adrian Dunlop, Robyn Dwyer, Michael Edwards, Adrian Farrugia, Nyssa Ferguson, Renae Fomiatti, Renata Kokanovic, Emily Lenton, David Moore, Joanne Neale, Gemma Nourse, Kiran Pienaar, Jake Rance, John Strang, Carla Treloar, and others. Advisory panel members on these projects comprised peer advocates, policy makers and service providers across a range of services, government departments and advocacy organisations. All projects received ethics approvals from their host universities.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Australian Research Council and National Health and Medical Research Council.
