Our Narcotic Modernity

Devin Garofalo, Vanessa Lauber, Laura Perry, and Peter Ribic,
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Enculturation: http://enculturation.net/our-narcotic-modernity
(Published: September 27, 2012)

The following project, designed in the spring of 2011 as an exhibit proposal for an envisioned Museum of the Humanities, addresses both visually and textually the addictive undercurrents in cultural history. The proposal begins with an introduction to Avital Ronell's Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania, then moves to a sketch of a museum exhibit based on her text. The exhibit is intended to implicitly evoke the experience of grappling with such an experimental text as Crack Wars as well as explicitly respond to the theoretical and juridical challenges raised by Ronell.

The accompanying video attempts to translate the experience of the proposed museum installation into the visual and aural. The video’s arrangement imitates the fluid structure of Ronell's book, wherein an alternative history of drug innovation and criminalization emerges with references to the criminalization of Madame Bovary and pivotal events in the history of narcotics. Viewers should come to realize that literature itself is a drug that induces various kinds of addiction, some forms of which are culturally accepted and others that are especially dangerous to normative social agendas and thus monitored and controlled.

"Our Narcotic Modernity," a description of a proposed museum exhibit space [PDF]