Drugs Done in Words

I've been giving some thought to the interface between language/rhetoric and drugs. There are a few well-known examples of thinkers closely comparing the two. Plato's dialogue, The Phaedrus, likens the written word (inferior, for Plato, to more organic speech) to a drug - the word is "pharmakon," which means both poison and medicine. This is all elaborated in a well-known essay by Jacques Derrida called "Plato's Pharmacy" - a whirlwind tour of inebriants, medicines, poisons, technologies, writing, speech, and the gods Thoth and Hermes. There are also the references to good rhetoric as an enrapturing drug in Gorgias' Encomium to Helen. Gorgias was a famous teacher of rhetoric in Greece and elsewhere (a real Mediterranean cosmopolitan).

"For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication."
-Fdriedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, "Expeditions of an Untimely Man"

If we expand our definition of rhetoric to envelop communication technology as a whole - speech, text, hypertext, moving and still images - we often find the conflagration of drugs and rhetoric in the idea that television is "addictive" or that art is a kind of drug designed to produce flights of fancy or is in itself a hallucination. We find this notion at work in the art-world of The Matrix, where Neo, the main character, is offered one pill to remain in the hallucination, and another to fall from it. (But there are different takes on this art-world as the series progresses; in my estimation, it goes I: Baudrillard, II: Foucault, III Hegel).

I think we find it much easier these days to see the relationship between rhetoric and drugs thanks to new French posty conceptions of power - that discourse and indeed all achitectures of living comprise "power" - both regulation and production of life. In fact, the growth of the self-help pharmaceutical business is only matched by the pace of change in the world of communication technology. If the little pill-boxes of Xtreme mints in the grocery store checkout aisle are any indication, we are a pill-popping culture. The Internet, moreover, aside from the charge that it is itself a drug, has facilitated the explosion of the free international trade of prescription drugs - anything from phentermine to oxycontin to psychedelic research chemicals. I'm not the only one who holds the incipient thesis that the twain will one day meet. But we also have what I call the "cubicle enhancing drugs" - Prozac, Zoloft, and the gang - that function to preserve the management hub of the global economy. That is, these drugs overcome the alienation of the post-industrial office in much the same way as the discourse of the protestant work ethic functioned to sustain industrialism - heaven is simply brought to earth.

But drugs aren't drugs. David Lenson, in his book On Drugs, suggests that there are some drugs that push one to consume more - i.e. alcohol, caffeine, cocaine, nicotine, heroin - and some drugs that are expressive rather than consumptive - psychedelics, mostly; the Native American peyote cults, for example, consider peyote to be the spiritual antithesis of alcohol, and can break addictions, reboot the addictive mechanism of the brain and/or help one fine spiritual connection beyond the addiction.

So what does this mean in terms of rhetoric, discourse, and language? Can we find an analogue and make simular distinctions? I don't know. I'll work on it.