Sociology Research Seminar
The Consequences of Realism: Drugs, the Visual and Affect
Thursday 9 April 2009, 5-7pm, Monash Conference Centre (Level 7, 30 Collins Street)
Contesting Compassion
Dr Nicole Vitellone
School of Sociology and Social Policy
University of Liverpool
This paper examines the social affect of compassion. Focusing on
representations of drugs, I address the impact of suffering's
incorporation into cultural production. My aim is to consider the social
experience of suffering for the distant spectator. Drawing on the
examples of the US 'crack baby' crisis and the UK 'heroin baby'
advertisements the paper investigates the ways in which photographs of
crack and heroin move us. What is the effect of such images? Do we
feel empathy or simply numb? Is the distant sufferer compelled to act
or turn a blind eye? Do these actions change the present suffering of
drug users? In answering these questions the paper draws attention to
the role of public health and non-government organizations in
constructing and regulating compassion. In highlighting the culture and
politics of compassion in a neo-liberal context I show how knowledge
of substance use—via the spectacle of suffering—has diminished the
workings of the welfare state, reconstructed national citizenship and
undermined social justice.
The Image of Desire
Associate Professor John Fitzgerald
Associate Dean, Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry & Health Sciences
University of Melbourne
Scene 1: In March 1998 a television advertisement for the Salvation Army, entitled Addicted To Life, was withdrawn due to how realistic it was. The extreme close up, copied from Pulp Fiction, of a plume of blood coursing through a syringe was too much for some. It aroused their passion for drugs. Scene 2: At a Philadelphia hospital during 2007, 22 cocaine users were exposed to subliminal visual images of cocaine paraphernalia. The unseen images produced functional magnetic resonance imaging showing an unmistakable desire for drugs. The neuroscientists note: the brain can strike up a prelude to passion in an instant, outside awareness. How can the citation of a cinematic drug icon be so realistic as to inflame an unbearable desire, and further, how can unseen images of drug paraphernalia also inflame the same desire for drugs? What can these scenes tell us of images, and the desire for drugs? In this paper I will outline an alternative rendering of drug desire by focusing on the mobility of affect in realist visual accounts of drug desire.
Please RSVP: Steven.Angelides@arts.monash.edu.au