the Female Body GOVERNING

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lori reed
imbricated in this technologically aided crisis surrounding issues of
“presence.” Derrida’s (1993) and Sedgwick’s (1992) perspectives about
the cultural formation of addiction converge around questions regarding
issues of “presence,” of how technological practices—chemical or otherwise—challenge
accepted notions of the natural body (in Cole, 1998).
As such, the deployment of the addiction apparatus as a classifi catory
scheme functions to organize and govern related crises and disruptions
of modern logic surrounding the body (Cole, 1998). For Sedgwick,
the postmodern condition of the body is emblematized in the notion
of steroid man. Like the cyborg, steroid man “destabilizes binaries
along multiple axes: body machine; human/animal; healthy/unhealthy
body . . . natural/prosthetic” (in Cole, 1998, p. 272). For Derrida, the
emblematic technosocial fi gure is the drug addict—body and experience
as chemically-technologically reconfi gured, and for Stone it is the
technosocial nontraumatic multiple.
Derrida (1993) asserts that “addiction appears to be governed by
a subject-object relation in which a diseased-self relies or becomes
dependent upon an object inscribed with mystical qualities” (Cole, 1998,
p. 270). As Glenda’s daughter states, the computer is “like a drug,” and
life online is a life of fantasy—it is “not real.” Historically, what may
lend computer technologies to the relatively ready and intelligible link
to addiction is the historical association of the technology with the
1960s drug counterculture, a powerful aura surrounding computers
as mysterious (even mystical; see Sconce, 2000, for a discussion of
the history of media and its connections to “mysticism”), as linked to
alternate realities, and the contemporaneous formation of computer
technologies and the formation of the “culture of addiction” or the
“culture of recovery” (Rapping, 1996). Gibson’s famous description
of cyberspace as a collective consensual hallucination both draws on
and connects the computer “elsewhere” to the alternate reality of a
drug trip. Derrida (1993) describes the drug addict as one who “cuts
himself off from the world, in exile from reality, far from objective
reality and the real life of the city and the community; that he escapes
into a world of simulacrum and fi ction. We disapprove of his taste for
something like hallucinations.” He suggests that the escape to fantasy,
to an alternate reality, is at the root of any prohibition of drugs (or
the Internet; p. 7). This description is also appropriate to the Internet
“addict,” and likewise, the drug/Internet users’”trip” takes place in the
“in between,” in a “place” that does not fi t neatly into usual oppositions
of natural/artifi cial. Thus, Derrida argues that in the case of drugs
(and to extend to cyberspace), it is in the name of an organized and
originary “naturalness” of the body that the “war on drugs” is waged