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Opiate Subjectivity in Edinburgh and East Asia Professor Michael Gardiner Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of Warwick Global Cities in World Literature Seminar Series
This paper tracks the importance of an empiricist self-making in the expansion of British commercial empire through East Asia, specifically in a nineteenth-century weaponisation of Edinburgh thinking that tied historical development to the creation of property-owning subjects standing over the world as property. This developmentality, originally created to cement Scotland’s place in the new British union, made the logic of opiates irresistible: opiate addiction physically binds a mass of users into ‘rational self-interest’, but also morally spreads the progressive good of ‘empiricist’, owner-driven history. Used as a weapon to ‘open’ much of East Asia, or rid East Asia of its ‘stagnation’ relative to British commercial empire, opiates became a sign of historiographical addiction – the inevitable binding of mass dependency and individual empowerment. This story takes on a new significance, though, after the great neoliberal turn from the end of the 1970s saw a new appeal to this Smithian developmentality, turning the Thatcherite understanding of enlightened self-interest back to Edinburgh, and strangely, back to opiates. Although overtly condemned, the early 1980s heroin dealing that accompanied the ‘streamlining’ of the economy and mass unemployment was tacitly encouraged by, and even came to stand as a kind of exemplar of, the pared-down entrepreneurialism of the early Thatcherite era. Heroin dramas from the mid-1980s, especially when given their rightful place relative to the Smithian legacy, have much to tell us about how addiction remains an ontological and historiographical backbone of liberal developmentality in the twenty-first century, and how the drive back to empiricism’s individual viewer-owner always tends to produce dependency.
Biography: Michael Gardiner is Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. His books include The Cultural Roots of British Devolution, The Return of England in English Literature, Time and Action in the Scottish Independence Referendum, and The British Stake in Japanese Modernity. Registration for this event has closed. |