Desiring Assemblages: A Case for Desire over Pleasure in Critical Drug Studies by P. Malins (2017)

Desiring assemblages: 

A case for desire over pleasure in critical drug studies

By P. Malins

International Journal of Drug Policy (2017)

While critical drug researchers have long pushed for an acknowledgement of pleasure in discourses of drug use, few have explored the alternative possibilities offered by Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of desire. In this paper I map out some of the conceptual differences between pleasure and desire and explore the opportunities opened up by attending more closely to desire in critical drug studies. I suggest that while discourses of pleasure do make an important intervention into and against dominant narratives of risk, harm, and addiction, they may inadvertently be working to keep in place the very binaries and forms of neoliberal western subjectivity that support those narratives. I argue that a Deleuzo–Guattarian ontology of desire is a better tool with which to make sense of the complex relations that form between drugs and bodies, challenge medical and criminal responses to drug use, and bring forth assemblages that enhance, rather than diminish, bodily capacities.

Introduction

In the early 1990s, Richard Klein explored – in poetic detail – the

many joys of smoking, showing how acknowledgement of these

joys was necessary in order to fully understand and deal with the

grief associated with quitting (Klein, 1993). Still one of my favourite

cultural texts on drug use, Klein’s Cigarettes are Sublime, is certainly

about pleasure, and the importance of incorporating an appreci-

ation of pleasure into any serious attempts at public health or harm

reduction. But what it also shows is that the joys of smoking

involve something bigger, or deeper, than pleasure: experiences

that cannot be fully encapsulated by that concept. The aesthetic

beauty of smoke curling upwards; the new relations forged with

the lungs and breath; the shifting sensations of the body and its

postures; the thrill of altered temporalities, spatialities and social

connections; the visceral intensity of life and death so acutely

inter-twined. One may indeed feel a certain pleasure associated

with these things, but they also enact a range of corporealities that

have little to do with pleasure. What Klein does then, is render

palpable not just the pleasures of smoking, but the complex

desiring-assemblages (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, 1987) that they

bring into being, and which we will need to make sense of if we are

to think seriously about harm reduction.

Critical drug researchers have long pushed for an acknowl-

edgement of pleasure in discourses of drug use (see for example:

Bunton & Coveney, 2011; Coveney & Bunton, 2003; Duff, 2008; Holt

& Treloar, 2008; Moore, 2008; Race, 2008; Valentine & Fraser,

2008). Many others have noted the value of Deleuze and Guattari’s

concept of the assemblage for making sense of the spatiality and

sociality of drug use events (see for example: Bøhling, 2014; Duff,

2014, 2007; Fraser, 2006; Malins, 2004a; Malins, Fitzgerald, &

Threadgold, 2006). Far less attention, however, has been paid to the

possibilities opened up by Deleuze’s related concept of desire (for

exceptions see: Fitzgerald, 1998, 2007, 2010; Leahy & Malins, 2015;

Malins, 2004b, 2011). This is somewhat surprising given the close

connection that exists between pleasure and desire, and given that

assemblages are, for Deleuze and Guattari, rst and foremost

‘desiring machines’: networks of bodies (people, things, dis-

courses) that operate to machine (join, cut, channel, free, block)

ows of desire. It is also surprising given the frustratingly little

impact that attempts to include pleasure in harm reduction have

made outside the academic realm. Despite enriching under-

standings of drug use, and posing an undeniable challenge to

dominant accounts of addiction, acknowledgement of drug-related

pleasures continues to be avoided and feared by policy makers, and

has had little lasting in uence on drug policy, education or

practices of harm reduction.

In this paper, therefore, I bring Deleuze and Guattari’s unique

conception of desire into focus, showing rst how it connects to

and differs from pleasure, and then exploring its potentials fo

critical drug studies and harm reduction. I argue that a Deleuzo–

Guattarian ontology of desire offers a more useful tool than

pleasure for making sense of the complex relations that form

between drugs and bodies, and accounting for the diversity of drug

use experiences, practices and motivations. I also suggest that it

may have a wider strategic and political value. For while attending

to pleasure does make an important intervention into and against

pathologising narratives of addiction, it does little to challenge

discourses of criminality, and may be inadvertently working to

keep in place the very binaries and neoliberal western subjectiv-

ities that underpin both these dominant approaches. By bringing

desire to the fore – in a way that repositions rather than erases

pleasure – I suggest we have a greater chance at challenging both

medical and criminal justice responses to drug use, enriching

understandings of harm reduction, and enacting assemblages that

enhance, rather than diminish, bodily capacities.

but are performative enactments involving both discourse and

material practice. As Race (2008) so cogently argues, the work of

Foucault is particularly useful in mapping these collective practices

and enactments of drug-related pleasure, particularly as Foucault

enables us to see in the concept of pleasure an immanent potential

for developing an ethical relation with oneself and the world.

But what are the limitations of these concepts of pleasure? And

how well do they shape up when used within a more post-

humanist ontological frame, such as that offered by Deleuze and

Guattari, which is increasingly being mobilised to make sense of

the complex relations between bodies and drugs?

Desire vs. pleasure

Pleasure in critical drug studies

The absence of pleasure in dominant accounts of drug use has

been a longstanding frustration for critical drug researchers (Holt &

Treloar, 2008). While drug-related pleasures feature abundantly in

art and popular culture, they have been sorely neglected in more

of cial accounts of drugs. This neglect has not only been apparent

in drug policy and education, where any mention of pleasure

seems to be positioned as a danger to the goals of deterrence and

prevention, but also in sociological drug research, where the risk-

attuned disciplinary lenses of public health and criminology, along

with risk-averse government funding priorities, have led to a

dearth of engagements with pleasure (Bunton & Coveney, 2011;

Moore, 2008). Even in practices and discourses of harm reduction,

where drug-related pleasures are certainly not judged or feared,

pleasure nonetheless tends to be eschewed in favour of a more

neutral, evidence-based, rational pragmatism (Holt & Treloar,

2008). There is in harm reduction, as the name itself makes clear, a

decisive focus on reducing risk and harm rather than, for example,

maximising pleasure or joy.

As critical drug researchers have shown, the neglect of pleasure

in these realms not only reduces the richness of our under-

standings and engagements, it is also likely to be increasing

experiences of drug-related harm (Bunton & Coveney, 2011; Holt &

Treloar, 2008; Race, 2008). For when everyday embodied

experiences of drugs (as positive, pleasurable, life-af rming) fail

to resonate in of cial discourses about them (as harmful,

dangerous, unhealthy), stigma and shame are likely to increase

while trust in practical, health-af rming drug messages and

services is sure to diminish. Acknowledgement of pleasure, then, is

crucial to understanding and adequately responding to issues

related to drug use. But what kind of pleasure are we talking

about? And does the concept of pleasure go far enough in terms of

thinking through that which is missing from dominant under-

standings of drug use?

Eschewing bio-psychological and neuro-physiological rendi-

tions of drug-related pleasure – which bind it to internal mental

states, universal biological drives and the chemical actions of

substances – critical drug researchers have shown how drug

pleasures need to be understood as dynamic, relational, contextual

and embodied (Duff, 2008; Keane, 2008; Race, 2008; Valentine &

Fraser, 2008). The pleasures associated with drugs are historically

and culturally mediated: tied to the speci c socio-spatial and

spatio-temporal discourses and relations. They can be libidinal,

chaotic and sensual (what Bunton & Coveney, 2011 refer to as

‘carnal’ pleasure), but they can also emerge through practices of

moderation (‘disciplined pleasure’), denial (‘ascetic pleasure’), and

collective spirituality (‘ecstatic pleasure’) (Bunton & Coveney,

2011). Drug pleasures are not simply that which we seek or receive,

Despite having great af nity with the work of Foucault,

Deleuze (1997, 2001) was notoriously critical of his reliance on

the concept of pleasure, and is known for having disagreed

publically with him on its philosophical utility. Where Foucault

(1986, 1990) positions pleasure, its uses and moderations, as one

of the key sites for an ethics of living, Deleuze can “hardly bear the

word pleasure” (Deleuze, 1997, np) for it represents to him a

limited and constrained mode of desiring, something that sti es,

rather than opens up the more primal desiring processes that

facilitate an ethics of transformation, connection and vitality. “I

cannot give any positive value to pleasure,” he writes, “because

pleasure seems to me to interrupt the immanent process of

desire; pleasure seems to me to be on the side of strata and

organisation” (Deleuze, 1997, np).

In some ways this disagreement is surprising, as Foucault’s

concept of pleasure and Deleuze’s desire have many similarities.

Both are attempts to articulate a materiality of the body and its joys

unencumbered by dominant medical and psychoanalytic frames.

Where Foucault chooses pleasure as the best concept though

which to de ne “a more dynamic and af rmative perspective on

the social pragmatics of bodies” (Race, 2008, p. 418), Deleuze goes

with desire, albeit a thoroughly reformulated version. Where

Foucault feels that desire is already too bound up with the

subjectifying discourses of sex and sexuality to be of any real use

(Race, 2008, p. 418), Deleuze feels that pleasure is too limiting a

concept through which to map the complexities of bodily

engagements, transformations and power relations. But while

the two philosophers clearly had analogous aims and motivations,

and the concepts they articulate do have some ontological

connections, they do nonetheless differ. It is worth exploring,

then, what Deleuze means by desire, and what this reformulation

might offer critical drug studies that the concept of pleasure

cannot.

Unlike the prevailing psychoanalytic models of desire, which

tend to permeate everyday usage, the desire Deleuze refers to –

and which is mapped out most clearly in his collaborative writings

with Guattari (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, 1987) – is not that which a

pre-existing subject has for something, nor is it motivated by

individual lack or the pursuit of pleasure. It is instead best

understood as a pre-subjective, pre-conscious life force or energy

that ows between bodies, connecting, animating and trans-

forming them, enabling the ongoing differentiation essential to life

itself. In place of the autonomous agentic subject and its verb: ‘I

desire’

, we thus have a eld of pre-personal currents: a kind of

primordial soup or “plane of immanence” (Deleuze & Guattari,

1987) from which bodies and subjects emerge, and through which

they become-other. Desire, Deleuze writes,

is but one with an assemblage of heterogenous elements . . . it

is process, in contrast with structure or genesis; it is affect, as

opposed to feeling; it is “haecceity” (individuality of a day, a

season, a life) as opposed to subjectivity; it is event, as opposed

to thing or person. And above all it implies the constitution of a

field of immanence . . . which is only defined by zones of

intensity, thresholds, gradients, ux. (1997 np)

Desire in this sense is no longer something we can control or

satiate, but rather a force that can only ever be mediated or

modulated: “One borrows a ow, one absorbs a ow” (Deleuze,

2001, p. 97–98). There is, therefore, still an element of agency: our

bodies seek ows, plug into ows and mediate ows. Yet the ows

are, for Deleuze (1997), ontologically primary: they exist before us,

generate us, and come to be machined – channelled, directed,

blocked and freed – in and through the assemblages we form with

the world around us.

These desire- ows are in fact the key ingredient of assemb-

lages; it is desire that makes assemblages function. Far from being

sterile networks of inter-connecting players and parts, assemb-

lages, as Deleuze and Guattari write:

are passional, they are compositions of desire . . . The

rationality, the ef ciency, of an assemblage does not exist

without the passions the assemblage brings into play, without

the desires that constitute it as much as it constitutes them . . .

Passions are effectuations of desire that differ according to the

assemblage (1987: 399).

If desire is the primal force that both enables and is enabled by

assemblages, passions can perhaps be understood as the visceral

ways our bodies gravitate toward, or move away from, desire, as

well as the ways they come to experience it. What we commonly

think of as desire, then, as a yearning or craving for, or an attraction

to, becomes simply one of the many different passions or emotions

that is brought into play, or effected, in and through desiring

assemblages. Passions shape assemblages by machining desire in

various ways – blocking it, redirecting it, freeing it – shaping the

kinds of bodies and relations and passions that can emerge.

Visceral experiences of disgust or abjection, excitement and

pleasure, for example, are all passions that can be set in motion

as we connect to various assemblages.

Pleasure, for Deleuze and Guattari, is therefore just one of the

many ways that desire comes to be felt by the body; giving texture

to how we experience, differentiate or consciously register the

ows of desire that move through us as we connect to the world.

This awareness of desire necessitates the emergence, or re-

emergence of a subject. “Pleasure”

, Deleuze and Guattari write, “is

an affection of a person or a subject”

, a way for people to “‘ nd

themselves’ in the process of desire that exceeds them” (1987:

156). Pleasure brings back an experiential, sensing, autonomous

and agentic subject: a strati ed emotionally aware self who is able

to extract something familiar – a recognisable emotion or identity

– from desire. This ‘ nding oneself’ is not, for Deleuze and Guattari,

so much a positive or life-af rming affair, but rather a process

through which the self or subject comes to be further subjecti ed,

solidi ed, and re-strati ed, and through which desire necessarily

loses its revolutionary force. “Pleasure”

, Deleuze observes, “comes

to interrupt the positivity of desire and the constitution of its eld

of immanence” (1997 np). It constitutes the frustration or

suspension of desire, rather than its emancipation. Or in other

words:

one de nes a pure eld of immanence of desire, in relation to

which pleasure, orgasm, jouissance are de ned as veritable

suspensions or interruptions . . . not as the satisfaction of

desire, but as the contrary: an exasperation of the process that

makes desire come out of its own immanence . . . its own

productivity. (Deleuze, 2001, p. 97–98)

Flows of desire can indeed manifest as pleasure, but they can

also be expressed and experienced in many other ways: ways that

may be more liberating, transformative, or revolutionary, chal-

lenging who we are and how we engage with the world.

Shifting focus from pleasure to desire, therefore, helps make

sense of the diverse passions that might generate assemblages, as

well as those which are engendered by them, both positive and

negative. For some assemblages are more likely to machine or

invest desire in ways that stratify bodies, categorising, organising

and delineating them, while others tend toward destrati cation,

destabilising bodies and breaking apart the categories and labels

that bind them. “Assemblages”

, Deleuze and Guattari suggest,

“swing between a territorial closure that tends to restratify them

and a deterritorialising movement that on the contrary connects

them with the Cosmos” (1987: 337). Each direction has its bene ts

and dangers. While the forces of strati cation bring comfort in

their predictability and familiarity, they carry with them the

dangers of fascism, and the risk of complete inertia and death. And

while the disorder, destabilisation and chaos that forces of

destrati cation enable are essential to life, they too have their

dangers, bringing with them the risk of complete dissolution of the

body or self.

Although Deleuze and Guattari (1987) do draw attention to the

dangers of destrati cation, particularly if it happens too fast or

with too little caution, they nonetheless make clear that the real

danger lies in the direction of fascism, with the forces that seek to

block desire and prevent connection and transformation. These

sti ing forces, however, are not in fact ontologically separate to

those which free desire. “Why does desire desire its own

repression, how can it desire its own repression?” Deleuze and

Guattari ask, before answering:

Desire is never separable from complex assemblages that

necessarily tie into molecular levels, from microformations

already shaping postures, attitudes, perceptions, expectations,

semiotic systems . . . a whole supple segmentarity that

processes molecular energies and potentially gives desire a

fascist determination.” (1987: 215)

The ows of desire that enable transformation may be

experienced as joy or pleasure, but may also translate to an

unease or fear that can trigger passionate attempts at averting,

preventing, controlling and blocking the ows. A certain joy or

pleasure may similarly be extracted from fascist assemblages, just

as much as it may be obtained from revolutionary ones. The more

ontologically primary concept of desire allows us, therefore, to

grasp how the same force or energy that mobilises freedom and

life, can also be machined into forms of oppression and control,

depending on the investments that are assembled and the passions

that emerge. By thinking through drug assemblages in terms of the

ways that desire circulates, we might better understand the kinds

of power relations and passions that not only drive or emerge from

them, but also those that operate to stratify, categorise, police and

control them. Conceptualising our affective connections to ows of

desire – including those circulating in and through drugs and forms

of drug control – can therefore reveal to us a wide array of life-

af rming, as well as life-threatening, experiences and becomings.

Drug use and desire

It is no secret that Deleuze and Guattari were fairly negative

about the kinds of desiring-machines or assemblages that

psychoactive drugs tend to establish (Malins, 2004b). As both an

activist and a philosophy lecturer at the Sorbonne, Deleuze was

despairing at the way he saw drug use impacting on some of his

students’ academic capacities, and no doubt considered it likely to

be impacting negatively on their revolutionary potentials too.

When describing the dangers associated with desiring-machines,

Deleuze and Guattari (1987) use the drugged body, along with the

schizophrenic and the masochist, to illustrate what happens if the

self or the body destratify too quickly or too extremely, without

retaining enough connection to the strata to on becoming. They

see drugs as too easily catapulting the body toward full

disarticulation, toward a fully destrati ed self, a Body without

Organs (BwO) through which can only circulate “black holes and

lines of death” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 285). And they also

point to the risk of dependence, where desire can become

segmented or “vitri ed”

, and a drug user can experience “the

most abject reterritorialisations” (1987: 284).

But Deleuze and Guattari are not entirely disparaging of drugs.

They do, elsewhere, also acknowledge their more positive

potentials: their ability to open up new perceptions, sensations,

and forms of corporeal embodiment; to bring forth potentially

revolutionary lines of ight or productive ‘planes of consistency’

.

They note, for example, how writers and artists have long shown

that

drugs, under necessary conditions of caution and experimen-

tation, are inseparable from the deployment of a plane. And on

this plane not only are becomings-woman, becomings-animal,

becomings-molecular, becomings-imperceptible conjugated,

but the imperceptible itself becomes necessarily molecular:

arrive at holes, microintervals between matters, colors and

sounds engul ng lines of ight, world lines, lines of transpar-

ency and intersection.” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 285)

In other words, drugs can be used to compile desiring machines

– or assemblages – that ‘molecularise’ perception, shifting it away

from whole or ‘molar’ forms (discrete subjects, static categories

and identities) and toward a ‘molecularity’ of part objects or

haecceities (fragments, colours, sounds, smells and textures,

movements and ows). In this

molecular perception to which drugs give us access . . . we

attain a visual and sonorous microperception revealing spaces

and voids, like holes in the molar structure. That is precisely

what clarity is: the distinctions that appear in what used to

seem full, the holes in what used to be compact; and conversely,

where just before we saw end points of clear-cut segments, now

there are indistinct fringes, encroachments, overlappings,

migrations, acts of segmentation that no longer coincide with

the rigid segmentarity (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 227–228)

Drug assemblages have the capacity, therefore, to dissolve the

self, and the stable ontological world of xed subjects and

identities and roles with which we normally interact. They also

have the capacity to alter temporal perception, or more

accurately lived temporalities. When Deleuze and Guattari say

that, “all drugs fundamentally concern speeds, and modi cations

of speed” (1987: 282), they are not simply referring to the speed of

the body and its movement, but to the speed of sensation and

perception, and to our capacity to perceive the passage of time

itself. This shift in perception, they argue, also necessitates a

dissolution of the rational autonomous self, a merging the body

with the ow of space and time:

The problem is well formulated if we say that drugs eliminate

forms and persons . . . Nothing left but the world of speeds and

slowness . . . A whole rhizomatic labor of perception, the

moment when desire and perception meld (Deleuze & Guattari,

1987, p. 283)

The allure of drugs is evidently far more complicated than the

pleasures they bring; their true power lies in their capacity to

destratify the body and the self and its relations to space, time and

perception. And, as Deleuze and Guattari make clear, the yearning

for such destrati cations – whether pleasurable or not – is

perfectly normal: essential, in fact, to life. They ask rhetorically:

Is it really so sad and dangerous to be fed up with seeing with

your eyes, breathing with your lungs, swallowing with your

mouth, talking with your tongue, thinking with your brain,

having an anus and larynx, head and legs? Why not walk on

your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin,

breathe with your belly: the simple Thing, the Entity, the full

Body, the stationary Voyage, Anorexia, cutaneous Vision, Yoga,

Krishna, Love, Experimentation. Where psychoanalysis says,

“Stop, nd yourself again,” we should say instead, “Let’s go

further still, we haven’t found our BwO yet, we haven’t

suf ciently dismantled our self.” Find your body without

organs . . . It’s a question of life and death, youth and old age,

sadness and joy. It is where everything is played out (Deleuze &

Guattari, 1987, p. 150–151)

Drugs enable destrati cations of the body: differentiations and

transformations which are positive and life af rming even if not

necessarily or directly pleasurable. Desire then, is likely to be a far

more useful concept than pleasure when it comes to mapping

these destrati cations and accounting for the diverse array of

motivations, bene ts and dangers associated with drug assemb-

lages.

Beyond pleasure and pain (and other problematic binaries)

Motivation for the use of drugs that are commonly considered

to be dangerous, illicit or both, is most often put down to either the

need to escape pain or suffering (including suffering induced by

drug withdrawals), or the supposedly inverse longing to experi-

ence pleasure (most notably the chemical ‘high’ or euphoria a drug

is associated with). While the former is most often aligned with

pathologising – and sometimes sympathetic – narratives of

trauma, addiction and disease, the latter tends to be aligned with

more criminalising narratives of self-centred hedonism, through

which drug users are demonised for choosing arti cial, illegitimate

or illicit pleasures rather than the socially normalised, licit

pleasures of alcohol, exercise, sporting spectatorship, watching

TV, hard work or rampant consumerism. As Keane (2008) notes,

western medicine likes to forcibly construct and maintain that

separation, framing pharmaceutical treatment for pain as empiri-

cally distinct from the illegitimate pleasures of illicit drugs, while

in reality, many who use illicit substances are doing so for pain

relief, and many who use pharmaceuticals are using them for

pleasure. No doubt both are being used for both reasons at the

same time, for the two are certainly not mutually exclusive. By

bringing the concept of pleasure to the fore, and arguing that

pleasure can be had in medicines, and that pleasure-seeking and

pain-relief are not mutually exclusive, we can indeed begin to

problematise that neat separation, and challenge some of the

interventions and social relations sets in motion. But if we are to

avoid reinscribing the concept of pleasure and the negative

associations attached to the pleasure-seeking subject – if we are to

adequately dismantle the deeply entrenched social narratives

around both of those subjectivities and distinctions – we need a

new language, and a new concept.

Deleuze and Guattari show how desire can be mobilised to

challenge the assumption that it must either be pleasure or pain

that motivates risk-taking activities such as drug use, BDSM or

kink, or engaging in forms of criminal ‘edgework’

. 

They show, for

example, how masochism is not well understood if we think of it as

people who seek pleasure through pain, and argue instead that

pain is simply one aspect of an assemblage that – for some bodies –

best enables desire to ow. They write: “it is false to say that the

masochist is looking for pain but just as false to say that [they are]

looking for pleasure . . .

” (1987: 152);

the masochist uses suffering as a way of constituting a body

without organs and bringing forth a plane of consistency of

desire. That there are other procedures than masochism, and

certainly better ones, is beside the point; it is enough that some

nd this procedure suitable for them. (1987: 155)

The common need to nd ways of circulating desire, to nd

assemblages that work, is also a better way of conceptualising the

reasons we use psychoactive drugs. Humans (and other animals)

take a range of drugs for a range of different of reasons that cannot

be encapsulated by the alleviation of pain or the experience of

pleasure. Drugs are used to experiment with what the body can do,

or to make the body function better or differently. They are used to

slow down or speed up time, or to engage with new modes of

thinking and perceiving. They are used to connect differently to

one’s environment, to nd new ways of relating to friends or lovers,

to get in the right zone to write poetry or music, or to feel the body

become one with the music, lights and a dancing crowd. They are

used to generate novels forms of sociality, to dismantle the limits of

autonomy, identity and the individual self, to nd a liminal zone

where the self and its boundaries dissolve. They are used to pose a

challenge to fascism and its control over our bodies, our thoughts

and our modes of desiring. These things that unsettle us, that

provoke or transform us, may indeed bring pleasure, but to con ne

their affect to an emotion of pleasure – or similarly to an

experience of pain-relief – would be to limit them, and our

understanding of them. Shifting to desire, and desiring-machines,

we can more readily de-centre both the pleasure-seeking and pain-

relieving subject, and more readily challenge these binaries.

Similarly, by drawing attention to the commonality of desire –

to the shared corporeal need to plug into transformative ows –

the concept of desire could help to break down broader

distinctions that tend to be made between legitimate and

illegitimate types of edgework, distinctions through which illicit

drug use tends to emerges as one of the most demonised and

stigmatised kinds. We all need our desiring outlets, otherwise we

rigidify and die, and different assemblages work better for different

bodies. While the concept of pleasure does do some of this work in

activating commonalities across different assemblages, an ontolo-

gy of desire goes further still toward problematising both the

criminalising and the pathologising tendencies associated with

drug discourses, including those that work to create hierarchies of

pleasure: delineating those whose drug use is seen as ‘recreational’

from those for whom it is deemed ‘problematic’

. 

These distinc-

tions, as Valentine and Fraser (2008) have shown, tend to be

heavily classed, raced and gendered: some groups are allowed to

have their drug use understood as pleasurable, while others are

not. Simply elevating pleasure in harm reduction discourses is

unlikely to do much to challenge these power relations, stereo-

types and distinctions. A Deleuzo–Guattarian ontology of desire, by

contrast, would help draw attention to the desires circulating in all

our drug assemblages, helping to level the playing eld. It would

also assist in drawing attention to the power relations that

machine desire in various ways, such that some groups are more

likely to bear the brunt of the strati cations of law, stigma and

other forms of social control.

Evaluating and responding to drug assemblages

Critical drug researchers have already shown how an appre-

ciation of socio-political, spatio-temporal and embodied contexts

is necessary to understand, evaluate and respond to the complex

ways that bene ts and harms manifest in drug use events (see for

example Dilkes-Frayne, 2014). And as Fraser (2006) has shown,

drawing on the new materialist work of Karen Barad (2003), it is

better to think of these contexts and bodies as always already intra-

acting, rather than as separate, pre-existing inter-acting entities.

She shows, for example, how particular temporal, spatial and social

arrangements of bodies at a methadone dosing point, intra-acted

to enact particular kinds of bodies (lazy junkies) and social

relations (stigma and violence). These material realities did not

pre-exist the dosing point but emerged in and through the speci c

relations it was enacting. It is more useful and accurate, in other

words, to think of the drug using body not as pre-existing the

drug using assemblage but as emerging in and through it.

Drug discourses, representations and spatio-temporal milieus

likewise do simply press upon an assemblage, but are always

already intra-twined with it, shaping and being shaped by it. None

emerge exactly the same as before; all are transformed, even if

imperceptibly.

This concept of intra-action resonates ontologically with

Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of the assemblage as a

collection of pre-personal bodies in collective emergence. The

concept of desire then, so central to the working of assemblages,

might also enable us to better conceptualise these intra-acting

relations, trace the direction and tendency of those relations, and

map how harms emerge in and through different drug use events.

As Deleuze and Guattari have suggested, some drug assemblages

free up desire while others block it; some increase bodily

capacities, while others decrease them; some challenge, transform

or dismantle the subject, while others stratify it even further. There

are the dangers of a bad trip, psychosis or overdose; the dangers of

organ failure, infection, or blood borne viruses; the dangers of

becoming dependent, or being labelled an addict or junkie; the

dangers of no longer being able to connect to others, or to other

desiring assemblages. These harms cannot be isolated in the drugs

themselves, nor can they be neatly tied to, or separated from, drug-

related pleasure. They emerge instead in the assemblages that

form in and around drugs, in the materials and bodies and forces

that are part of those assemblages, and in the ways that drug-

related desires come to be machined or invested at both the micro

and macro social levels.

While giving the concept of pleasure more prominence in

discourses of harm reduction certainly enriches understandings of

harm and its mediation, it cannot suf ciently account for the

complex ways that intra-acting forces and bodies are being

transformed in and through drug assemblages. By mapping desire,

we can not only bring pleasure back into the discussion, as one

material, passionate aspect of the assemblage, we can also develop

a better understanding of the other forces and sensations present,

and the ways that they collectively intra-act. Desire forces us to

evaluate each assemblage in terms of what it enables a body to do:

an immanent ethics of bodily capacities that might help prevent

drug use itself being evaluated a-priori as an intrinsic harm.

Desire might also have more success at improving the ways that

drug education is conceptualised and taught in schools, as well as

in broader public health campaigns. Despite extensive research

showing the importance of acknowledging drug-related pleasure

in health promotion, little progress has been made, particularly in

school-based settings (see for example: Farrugia, 2014; Leahy &

Malins, 2015). There is widespread fear, generally morally infused,

that any mention of pleasure is tantamount to advertising drugs

(Moore, 2008). Pleasure, it seems, is just too politically sticky to use

in pedagogies of drug use, particularly when working with young

people. By shifting focus to discussions of desire, and the ways it is

mediated though all sorts of activities, including drugs, we might

be able to understand, and strategically avoid, the political and

moral controversies that discourses of pleasure seems to give rise

to. Given that popular conceptions of desire – particularly desire

for drugs – tend to position it as negative, as something that works

counter to rational liberal subjectivity (even though some desires –

or cravings – are clearly legitimised in capitalist culture more than

others), it is unlikely that discussing desire in drug education

classrooms will be seen as promoting drugs in the same way that

pleasure is. Students of desire are just as likely to critique their

drug use motivations, as much as celebrate them. Even though it

may be popularly misunderstood (or indeed perhaps because of

this misunderstanding), a Deleuzian concept of desire might

therefore help students, teachers and health promotion cam-

paigners to navigate the politics of critical drug education such that

they might better evaluate a diversity of consumer assemblages,

including those involving drugs, and explore the kinds of things

that would make each assemblage safer or more ethical (see for

example: Farrugia, 2014; Leahy & Malins, 2015).

Thinking with and through a Deleuzo–Guattarian concept of

desire might also open up new lines of ight in the eld of drug

treatment. The concept of pleasure already helps us to understand

the limitations of trying to stop drug use by simply stating how

dangerous it is, and the importance – as Klein (1993) illustrated –

of supporting a process of grieving, of consciously letting go of the

good as well as bad aspects drugs. By shifting from pleasure to an

ontology of desire, we might be able to go deeper, to re ect on the

aspects of drugs we miss even though they were not necessarily

pleasurable. In addition, we may be able to develop a better

appreciation of the ways that our different emotional and

corporeal responses to drugs may be connected to one another,

as well as how they might be tied to broader social, spatial,

economic, political and moral forces. More than pleasure,

therefore, the concept of desire helps us to connect drug

assemblages and forms of drug treatment to the broader power

relations in society that machine the ows in drug assemblages. It

might also help draw attention to the ways in which we ourselves –

in our attempts to control others’ drug use – might be

unintentionally investing desire in fascist ways in and through

treatment regimes: attempting to control some people’s assemb-

lages more than others. As Deleuze and Guattari suggest,

understanding broader forms of fascism requires that we rst

acknowledge and work on our own micro-fascisms.

Developing treatment approaches based on desire might also

shift the focus away from stopping people taking drugs, to instead

connecting them to new assemblages, such that they might

continue to plug into desire ows, albeit through assemblages that

might be healthier for them. Mapping and activating assemblages

of health is, as Duff (2014) suggests, a far more ethical and

productive way of approaching drug treatment. Deploying desire

in drug treatment could build upon the methods Guattari’s

deployed in his mental health clinic, where instead of diagnosing

and categorising people, or getting them to work on the problems

they were experiencing, he found new assemblages to connect

them up to: new work or social assemblages that shifted their

relations to ows of desire (Guattari, 1984). Rather than just

diagnosing or blocking up ows, this method – which he called

schizoanalysis – was about getting people to change their

assemblages, so that their capacities for acting were enhanced

rather than diminished. A similar schizoanalysis of drug use –

evaluating where desire investments are positive, and where they

are not, would help reframe problematic drug use away from being

a problem of the individual, to a problem of assemblages, allowing

us to mobilise new assemblages and facilitate new ows. And, by

positioning different assemblages – including drug assemblages –

as involving bodies attempting to nd the best ways to allow desire

to ow, we can more readily begin to dismantle the forms of

autonomous, rational neoliberal western subjectivity that domi-

nant discourses and practices of drug prohibition rely on.

Challenging the war on drugs

While the concept of pleasure can illuminate the limits of

addiction discourses, it is less capable of mounting a challenge to

those of prohibition and the war on drugs. Pleasure is, for example,

more likely to exacerbate than challenge the notion of individual

responsibility that underpins criminal justice responses. The

pleasure-seeking subject is easily portrayed as being responsible

for their own illicit drug-related demise, thereby rendering them

accountable under law and deserving of stigma. Pleasure will also

do little to undermine the problematic deterrence model that

underpins criminal justice frames. This model relies on the idea

that there are rational subjects weighing up costs and bene ts, and

generally assumes that as long as the pleasures of drugs are

minimised or hidden, and the dangers are maximised or

exaggerated, then those subjects will choose not to take drugs.

Rather than challenging this model, drawing more attention to the

pleasures of drugs is likely to result in increased efforts at

maximising or exaggerating the harms to re-stack the cost-bene t

ratio. Desire, by contrast, draws attention to the fact that there is no

autonomous rational subject capable of such neat cost-bene t

analysis. It shows that people will be drawn to drugs even if they

are not ‘pleasurable’

, even where, in fact, they are harmful. Desire

shows, moreover, that people will not be deterred by increased

risks and harms because these are not necessarily antithetical to

the kinds of bene ts that desiring assemblages can give rise to.

Desire, therefore, works more effectively to undermine the model

of deterrence itself.

As Manderson so effectively demonstrated in 1995, the war on

drugs that dominates global drug policy and practice is inherently

and deeply contradictory (Manderson, 1995). Although it relies on

a problematic neoliberal model of rational agentic autonomous

subjectivity, it nonetheless operates in ways that are not at all

rational, but rather express a morality that is teeming with all sorts

of chaotic and exaggerated emotions, fears and desires. Under-

standing those irrationalities – making sense of the ows of desire

that mobilise the fascist tendencies and extremes of the drug war –

is, as Manderson makes clear, essential if we are to mount a

successful challenge. Perhaps, as Guattari suggests, “there can’t be

any revolution that serves the interests of oppressed classes until

desire itself takes on a revolutionary orientation . . . Because

however you look at it, desire is part of the infrastructure” (cited in

Deleuze, 1995, p. 9). By showing how the same ows that move

through drug assemblages also move through assemblages of drug

control, the concept of desire might help us understand why we so

often perpetuate and invest in the discourses of addiction and

criminality that oppress us: why we plug ourselves in to them,

even as they harm and limit us.

While drug-related pleasures undoubtedly precipitate a great

deal of morally infused panic, drugs are ultimately demonised not

so much for being pleasurable – something that many socially

acceptable assemblages can lay claim to – but for their tendency to

render perceptible the visceral limits of the ideal, orderly, rational,

autonomous, subject of modernity (Fitzgerald, 2007; Malins,

2011). Attempts to purge those who use drugs, is less about

demonising pleasure, than it is about shoring up and securing the

boundaries of rational, autonomous self-hood. For despite the

thoroughly chaotic and desiring nature of contemporary neo-

liberalism, capitalism nonetheless relies on the stability – or rather,

an illusion of stability – of the autonomous subject – who is free to

make individual choices and be held accountable. By bringing

desire squarely into the frame we have the opportunity to make

visible the transformative forces that animate, challenge and excite

all of us, thereby divesting marginalised drug-using bodies of that

burden and, potentially, neutralising the threat drug use poses to

the modernist moral order.

Conclusions

Properly accounting for the pleasures of drug use is essential if

harm reduction research, policy and practices are to truly resonate

with embodied experiences and mediations of risk. Yet the concept

of pleasure alone does not adequately express the passions and

transformative joys that motivate and arise from drug using

assemblages. Nor does it suf ciently decentre the subject,

toconvey the complex ways that drug using bodies emerge in and

through their intra-active relations with the world. Narratives of

pleasure have the capacity to challenge some of the more

pathologising discourses surrounding drugs, which code drug use

as addiction and disease, yet they are less able to counter discourses

of prohibition, which criminalise those who seek out drugs.

Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of desire – as a pre-personal

energy which ows between bodies, enabling the connections and

transformations that are essential to life – offers critical drug

studies a more useful tool through which to understand drug using

events and enact more ethical assemblages. Desire can better

convey the diversity of reasons why people use drugs, and the

many bene ts they derive from them. It draws attention to the fact

that neither drug-using bodies nor drug-related harms pre-exist

their relations, but rather emerge in and through drug assemb-

lages. And it helps render perceptible the social, spatial and

temporal forces that are also involved, intra-actively: forces that

invest and machine desire, enabling and blocking its transforma-

tive capacities.

The desiring body is, undoubtedly, a threat to dominant forms

of modern neoliberal subjectivity, but when mobilised in critical

drug studies it might also be neutral enough to avoid some of the

morally-charged reactions that the association of pleasure with

drugs seems to precipitate. It offers new creative opportunities for

drug education and drug treatment, where the focus could, for

example, shift to the construction of diverse assemblages that

enhance bodily capacities. Compared to pleasure, it might even

offer a more viable means of accessing the politically-tenuous

government funds needed to do more critical drug research.

Perhaps most importantly though, the concept of desire offers

drug studies a greater chance of challenging the global war on

drugs, which continues to dominate drug policy and practice

despite overwhelming evidence of its incompetence and its harms.

By helping to destabilise the autonomous, rational subject that

criminal justice models of deterrence and punishment rely on,

highlighting the ontological relationship between fascist and

revolutionary forces, and exposing the commonality of our need to

nd ways to let desire ow, Deleuze and Guattari’s concept has a

the potential to more effectively and strategically counter the

dangerously obstinate policies and practices of prohibition.

Desire is not, in itself, liberatory; desire alone won’t save us. But

the concept of desire, in the sense that Deleuze and Guattari made

of it, might be of more use to critical drug studies and practices of

harm reduction than we have yet acknowledged.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editors, and two anonymous

reviewers, for their insightful feedback and interesting ideas (as

well as picking up on some typos), all of which have helped

improve the paper.

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Please cite this article in press as: P. Malins, Desiring assemblages: A case for desire over pleasure in critical drug studies, International Journal

of Drug Policy (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2017.07.018