CHAPTER EIGHT

NARRATIVE, SUBSTANCE, AND FICTION

KIRSTINE K. HOEGSBRO AND MORTEN NISSEN

Introduction
The purpose of this chapter is to contribute to an understanding of how
fiction/art concerning addiction can be relevant to counsellors working to
help young drug users. Our context is a research project called User-driven
standards in social work,1 where we work with youth workers, counsellors
and their clients to articulate the narrative practices that, in turn, form an
articulation of standards of youth life, with or without drugs. This work of
articulating is at the same time a creation and modification of standards of
social work. One important feature of that work–which completely defies
any hope of standardised and standardising measurement of effect–is the
creation of “aesthetic documentation”, that is, clients’ narratives presented
in works of art for a public (Nissen, 2014). In this context, works of fiction
become relevant as an “extreme case” of created and creating standards,
because they can be neither fixed as universals, nor reduced to individual
subjects’ preferences. For this reason, we zoom out from the counselling
room and discuss narrativity and fiction more broadly. The radicalism of
the narrative approach to counselling that engages with aesthetic
documentation does not lie in the ideas of how that, as a technique, may or
may not affect clients involved directly. Rather, it is in the boldness of
moving beyond the confines of immediate therapeutic manipulation, in the
embracing of wider cultures, and in the recruitment of clients as
participants. Still, we aim to push toward the discussion of the possible
effects of that participation. In particular, we want to look at the moments
when fiction or art get to us–those moments when (reading a book,
watching a movie, attending a theatre show) we feel touched and moved,
as when we laugh or cry. We suspect that those moments can be relevant
to counselling because they have a certain quality of being (experienced
as) authentic. This may sound straightforward, but in fact it is a rather
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strong claim. This is because authenticity, in common sense as well as for

most social theorists today, connotes surrender to essentialism and a
romantic appeal to private emotion. Especially in the field of addiction,
this would be obviously problematic, since drug use is itself, as we hope to
show, an ongoing play of artificiality and naturalism. Drawing on, among
others, Derrida‘s discussion of how not even drug use, but already texts,
are alienated signs that produce a dream of purity in the same moment that
they corrupt, we attempt to outline a concept of authenticity that is
compatible with a dynamic and participatory, narrative understanding of
subjectivity. Finally, we attempt to show how such an approach can be
used in a discussion of a television show as potentially relevant to our
dialogue with social workers who work with young drug users.

Narratives–as approach and resource in social theory

and counselling
We start out from what is sometimes called the “narrative turn” in the
social sciences, the humanities, and in psychology. In counselling, this is,
roughly, a turn away from the idea that there is a more or less traumatic
truth to be found inside people that they must expose in order to be healed,
towards an interest in how people make sense of themselves and the world
they inhabit through narratives. And how people through the use of
narratives imagine possible futures, and even create those futures. But the
concept of narrative, as we use it, is not limited to personal narratives,
spoken in therapeutic or self-help groups, or the like. It is a more general
characterisation of the processing and meaningful ordering of events in
human life. As such, they are expressed in fiction as well as in counselling,
self-help etc., as both tap into, and cross-fertilise through, our narrative
cultures.
One of our favourite references is Mattingly’s discussion of dramatic
and emergent narratives (Mattingly, 1998, 2010). In this approach,
narratives do not only exist as spoken, written, or otherwise articulated;
nor are they floating in an immaterial sphere of meaning. They are
immanent to our lives and practices, part of who we are. But this does not
mean that they are hardwired in our genes like Jungian myths. This is
firstly because all kinds of culture, or meaning, keep moving and
transforming between forms of activity, embodiment, and artefact–
between objectification and subjectification. In this, Mattingly represents a
long tradition that, in psychology, has been alive since Vygotsky gave
birth to a cultural-historical activity theory (Vygotsky, 1962). Second, it is
because they are precisely emergent, always in the process of becoming,
 Narrative, Substance, and Fiction 153

always reconstructing past events as meaningful and projecting future

activities and hopes. And third, because they are basically collective,
social constructs. Emergent narratives are constructed collectively, and
they are at the same time ways to create community. There is a constant
process of co-creation between narratives and subjects going on, at
collective and individual levels that are deeply interdependent, because
people live their lives as participants. This process never starts from
scratch–it always takes off from the great cultural bank of existing
narratives.
One of the immensely important narratives, or canonical narratives,
that exist in the cultures we have in common, is the great self-help and
therapy narrative. We all know it from countless works of fiction (novels
such as Doris Lessing’s Golden notebook, or films like Good Will
Hunting, Ordinary people etc), and Oprah Winfrey and many other kinds
of reality TV. In this narrative, the hero’s natural desires are disturbed by
certain events, and then go on to rest inside her as an inner secret and
traumatic truth, until she meets a person who helps her talk about it; from
then on, she struggles to turn her problems into opportunities for learning
about her true self. It all began with Freud. Psychoanalysis, in a sense, is a
great popular narrative that has aligned self-help with professional healing,
with science and with fiction. But the same basic narrative has developed
into many different shapes and forms since Freud. It is now part of the
culture we take for granted (cf. Illouz, 2003, 2007, 2008). The great self-
help and therapy narrative has one way of connecting itself with the real
experience and lives of addicts and the rest of us: since this story is the
authentic Truth about you, all you have to do is dig it up, stick to it, and
follow through to the happy end. Stop lying to yourself. Instead of
distorting your true emotions into a craving for drugs–or whatever else is
your symptom–put them into words. It’s your call to do it; and the
toughest monster you’ll face will be yourself. But if you do, you’ll be
rewarded, since the spoken truth, by definition, is healing (Carr, 2011). In
this idea of Catharsis, truth and effect, and even the proof of effect, merge.
“It works if you work it”, as they say in Narcotics Anonymous. As simple
as that!
We shall return to Narcotics Anonymous below: in fact, a far from
simple story. In a narrative approach, the point is just to question such
simplicities. There are many true ways we can–and do–make sense of and
create our lives. Some are rich, deep, and fruitful; others may be banal,
shallow and destructive. The authenticity and power of a narrative is not
just, nor even primarily, a question of whether it mimics and reveals some
pure reality of our lives. Rather, it is a question of how it picks it up,
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reshapes it, cultivates it–and recreates us in the process. Thus, as Parker

(1997) suggests, if the great Freudian narrative is “true”, it is because it
has become a building-block to our self-hood. We have learned to relate to
ourselves with it, not just from academic psychology, but from countless
magazines, self-help books, TV-shows, novels, songs, and movies. As
Žižek puts it in “The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema” (Fiennes and Žižek,
2006), it is “more real than reality”. Here, truth and effect seem to be
related in the opposite direction, more like Althusserian ideological “truth-
effects”: subjects will accept as truth anything that constitutes them as
subjects. This constructivist understanding is the starting point of narrative
therapy–or, since the idea of “therapy” is itself a narrative construction
with many dubious implications, narrative practice is a better term (White,
2007). Narrative practice starts from a critique of the stigmatising
implications in the concepts of disease and healing. From there, it recruits
clients in the collaborative work of creating “preferred narratives” that
build up clients’ positive identities and help them find ways to manage
their lives. But how do we know when and how they work? Whereas the
idea of an ideological “truth-effect” could be suggested as broadly relevant
as part of our “therapeutic culture”, in this narrative practice, it must be
carefully and precariously constructed in particular situations, for the
benefit of each client. Despite any deconstruction of “therapy” most
counsellors are accountable for achieving effect in just that form. This
paradox is at the core of the relevance of these considerations in practice.
As mentioned, this chapter is written in the context of a dialogue with
social youth workers who use narrative approaches in their search for
ways to help young drug users–ways that do not presuppose the
stigmatising narrative frame of “addiction counselling”, yet still can be
claimed as effective in that frame.
In this predicament, a pragmatic version of narrative counselling
suggests itself as the art of taking up the standards and preferences of the
client. In “solution-focused therapy”, as described by Steve de Shazer,
Scott Miller and others (de Shazer, 1991; Miller and de Shazer 1998; de
Shazer and Berg, 1997), the client is the expert, and the hero of therapy–
and she likes it when she is cast as such. If counsellors build on her own
language, explanations, and preferred narratives–at “face value”–it will
work. The truth is already there on the surface, to be had with no
resistance. We can ask the clients to test the sessions on simple numeric
scales (the “Outcome / Session Rating Scales”) to make sure we stay on
track. In areas where most cases of failure are cases of drop-out, this is
evidence-based practice, rephrased as “practice-based evidence” (Duncan,
Miller and Sparks, 2007).
 Narrative, Substance, and Fiction 155

This idea is opposite to that of denial and catharsis in the therapeutic

narrative. Or is it the mirror image? Again, we have the treacherous
attraction of simplicity. Again it works if the client works it. And again,
there must be something missing–which is what we are looking for.
Although in both cases, there is an emphasis on truth and effect, we seem
to achieve them too easily. In the psycho-dynamic form, we always knew
the truth because any contradictions could be explained away as denial–
including those many cases where the “customers left the shop” (Gomart,
2004; Stengers, 1997, 1999). In the solution-focused form, the customer
is–simply–always right, and if she still hangs around at the shop, that
counts as proof. In the former tradition, there is one great narrative
template with which it appears we can understand–granting certain
variations–the suffering of all humans (as Oprah’s global success testifies).
In the latter, the narratives are customised individually to the point where
we don’t even need to understand at all, so long as the client thinks she
does. Our purpose here is to search for ways in which we can think of the
potentials of fiction to help people. This may seem a bit off the mark, even
in relation to narrative practice, where the narratives generally remain
closely bound to clients’ stories and images, even when they are created or
performed in artistic forms (Nissen, 2013). But we propose that fiction
becomes relevant as soon as we leave behind the commercialised
parameters of success that dominate counselling today and have shaped
the rhetoric of solution-focused therapy. If narratives can “work” and help
people, it is not simply because they reveal a universal truth which so far
has been repressed; but nor is it solely because they are tailored to match
each person’s preferred self-image. What we are interested in exploring is
a much more demanding kind of effect. This explains the relevance of
fiction, since fiction is neither predefined as a universal, objective truth, to
which each person must be matched, nor is it doomed to remain an
unquestioned, since purely subjective, idiosyncratic imagination. But in
order to harness the rich potentials of fiction, we must overcome the deep
epistemological separation between objectivity and subjectivity which is
implied in the choice between a standard narrative and the individual
client’s preferred narrative. This means we must give up ambitions to any
easy way of measuring effect, since measurement requires fixed standards
or unquestioned subjective preferences (or, as in much psychology, one
dressed up as the other). Instead, the focus is on the creation of new kinds
of effect. For this, we must take up the dynamic tradition in theorising
subjectivity which starts from Spinoza via Hegel and carries on with his
critical followers. In this tradition, subjectivity is not an isolated
epiphenomenal domain of contemplative experience that must be either
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corrected in favour of a frozen set of universal ideas, or left alone. It is,

rather, to be viewed as moments of the ongoing creation and recreation of
human lives mediated by ever new cultural forms, ever new standards. If
we want to do what is sometimes referred to as “reception analysis “ (see
e.g. Zittoun, 2007b)–to understand how fiction works; the ways that
people receive, understand, and use fiction; their embodiments, their
effects, their realities–then we should take up this tradition, since it
provides resources for bridging the gap between subjectivity and
objectivity.

Narrative and subjectivity

Thus, our outline of the subjectivity of narratives will build on a quite
broad and radical approach to subjectivity, which has been developed in
some cultural-historical, pragmatist, and poststructuralist branches of the
tradition. We can unfold it in four dimensions: agency, reflexivity,
subjection, and creative participation.

Subjectivity as agency
As epitomised in Descartes’ cogito, subjectivity is often seen as an
inner contemplative scene of feelings and thoughts. But if we think of
subjectivity as agency, we can identify how people make use of
narratives–and thus art or fiction–as what Tania Zittoun has called
symbolic resources (Zittoun, 2007; 2012). If we want to understand why
and how people “work” narratives, we must look for the activities and
projects to which they are resources: what people are engaged in, what
they are trying to accomplish. There is always a “work of imagination”
(Appadurai, 1996) that is part of people’s various ongoing projects and
activities in the world. Zittoun reports the example of a young person who
learns from the film Remember the Titans to imagine certain ways to
develop his football-team’s manner of dealing with inter-ethnic issues. It
was not until the boy saw the movie, in which one of the characters deals
with problems he himself was trying to solve, that he could envision how
to deal with these problems. In that way the movie became a resource, as it
helped him to imagine solutions–possible ways of acting on the problem–
which he wasn’t able to see before.
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Subjectivity as reflexivity
Zittoun (2012) further identifies how people use these symbolic
resources, not only in the frameworks of already given projects, but also in
the meta-project of reflecting possible projects and their ethics. Films and
other forms of fiction can help people achieve a distance to the narratives
that currently structure how they live their lives and imagine their futures–
and they can add new narratives. Subjectivity as reflexivity is about
questioning one’s imagination–it’s about the footballer from before not
only imagining how to create an ethnically harmonious team, but also
reflecting on those images, perhaps to imagine and reflect other kinds of
projects and identities besides or instead of being a footballer, even on an
ever so ethnically harmonious team.

Subjectivity as subjection
But, as the etymological root of “subjectivity” testifies, it can also be
about subjection. People do not only “use” fiction for their given purposes.
They can also identify with it, subject to it, as it were, letting it shape their
motives, perception and agency. As Gomart and Hennion describe in their
comparative study of music amateurs and drug users, in both cases,
subjecting to effects is a crucial part of enjoying and using (Gomart and
Hennion, 1999; see also Gomart, 2004). But of course, subjection is not
necessarily, nor typically, something that is chosen and controlled. We
cannot grasp how narratives really matter, how they go under the skin the
way they do, if we remain addicted to the liberal image of the free and
autonomous subject, who uses fiction to imagine and reflect, and who at
most decides to let herself be affected in a controlled way. We must go
beyond this notion of the user and address issues of power and
identification, suffering and passion. Freudian psychologies have done
this, but, given their fundamentally medical framework, they have never
been able to integrate the story of subjection with the story of agency.
Instead, we suggest that one way to achieve this integration is through the
concept of participation. So, we propose to add:

Subjectivity as creative participation and hope

This aspect highlights the key point that when people use, reflect on,
identify with, and subject themselves to narratives, they do so creatively,
constructively, and as participants. This implies a wider and deeper
concept of agency as more than simply instrumental or functional–it is
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creative, externalising, cultivating. In philosophy, this idea of agency as

creation goes all the way back to Spinoza’s ethics (either through Marx or
Nietzsche), and it has been plausibly theorised how it lies at the heart of
our criteria and motives as humans–at the core of what brings joy
(Osterkamp, 1976).
Recently, Greco and Stenner proposed the
concept of joy as the feeling of an increase in one’s power to affect things,
coupled with an increase in one’s power to be affected. When power is
understood in this Spinozist way, joy is inseparable from the actualisation
of power. It is the feeling of becoming more active in the world or, to put it
differently, of becoming part of a bigger world which one participates in
organising, and creating (Greco and Stenner, 2013, p.5).

A key point is that this joy itself is basically participatory–what we enjoy

is to create together and thereby create our relations and ourselves as
collectives and participants. In this, there is always an aspect of
identification, of becoming-participant–of letting oneself be shaped by the
narratives that define the collective that we are co-creating. In short,
although it may appear paradoxical, there is always a moment of
subjection, even in the most agentic, creative and joyful participation (see
also Nissen, 2012). Even the most radical innovations for the most part
honour tradition; and even the most powerful despot is prisoner of his
system of rule. All in all, the subjectivity of narratives is all about using
narratives from fiction to act, to reflect, to be affected–and, finally, the
crucial point is to create narratives that go under the skin and transform
who we are.

The paradox of authenticity

Obviously, not all narratives can be used–not all narratives have
something to tell us, something that will make us act, reflect, be affected.
Only those that have a quality of being authentic will. At least that is our
assumption. But to understand this, let us consider the concept of
authenticity a bit closer. In general terms, our approach to authenticity is
similar to that of Taylor (1991), who insists on an immanent critique of the
modern, romantic notion of authenticity as dialogical and historical, rather
than a kind of post-modern deconstruction that, in effect, rejects the whole
issue. Yet we suggest that a more reflexive kind of deconstruction can help
us on the way to reconstructing it more closely. One place to begin is from
Derrida, who discussed the problem of how we can understand our hopes
for authenticity, using poetry or text as a metaphor for drugs, and vice
 Narrative, Substance, and Fiction 159

versa. In The rhetoric of drugs (2003) Derrida claims that if we criticise

drug use, it is often in the name of authenticity. The experience or pleasure
of the drug user is false, artificial. Experience should be conceived in truth
and labour–not in irresponsible fiction, pure imagination, or through some
technical device. This ideal is also deeply engraved in the great therapeutic
and self-help narratives in terms of disposing the sense of false selves and
digging out to find our true inner selves. On the other hand–says Derrida–
our culture is a culture of artificial experience. This is evident, of course,
in the expanding psycho-pharmacological practices that define ever new
states of mood or feeling that can and should be modified. As Rabinow
(1996) phrases it, we are moving from socio-biology to bio-sociality, to
cultural shaping of our biology, and medical drugs are one of the most
important techniques in that movement. To paraphrase one well-known
addiction book and movie, we are a Prozac nation. But artificiality is not
only pharmacological; other examples might be the engineering of social
networks in self-help communities, or of gender in drag shows.
Derrida‘s point is that drug discourses seem to oscillate between, or
endlessly combine, the two seemingly opposite points. The pharmaco-
technical practice of drug use can be motivated by the desire for a more
authentic experience. The naturalistic rejection of drugs can be put in the
service of some artificial regulation that continues an arbitrary culture, e.g.
of accepting alcohol, but banning cannabis. One metaphor for this curious
play with opposites in drug use or drug regulation is immortalised by the
rock legend: The Doors of perception. What is a door? An absence,
completely transparent, an opening through which one can perceive the
world outside, or the world inside, as it really is. But on reflection, it is
also a designed contraption, in a visibly constructed framework, directing
our view. But, returning to Derrida, the issue of authenticity and
artificiality goes much deeper than contemporary drug discourses. In
Plato’s pharmacy (Derrida, 1981), Derrida demonstrates how Plato, in
some of his texts, reveres Socrates for rejecting the artificiality of text
itself. Socrates preferred “the living word of knowledge which has a soul,
and of which written word is properly no more than an image.” (Plato,
2009, p. 109) Plato’s metaphor for this textual artificiality is the
Pharmakon, the remedy, the drug. Or: the poison that transforms the living
soul into a dead image that can be mass-produced and repeated, but never
comes back to life. Text sets a standard that may be senselessly applied out
of context, alienated, a set of signs that wander like orphans from their
meaning of origin and never return. Rather than living dialogue and
reason, the text relies on and institutes convention; and like some dubious
potion it reshapes our perceptions so that we forget real experience.
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But–all this only appears to us in the text itself! It is in Plato’s text that
Socrates’ complaint is expressed. We get only a dead repetition, the same
Socrates, who was already long put to death, sacrificed as Pharmakos, the
City’s scapegoat, for corrupting the youth. Derrida recounts this paradox
in Plato because although, as contemporary drug discourses testify, our
modern technical condition is currently called to attention, it is also very
old. When he insists, so famously, that “there is nothing outside the text”
(Derrida, 1997, p.158), it is to say that the human condition is the
perpetual construction and reconstruction of culture and ourselves. In other
words, narratives are external as standards, mass-produced, dead images,
yet soon to be immanent to our lives, corrupting any innocence which
could be projected as the image of a virgin soil they plough. The dream of
the natural, the “living word of knowledge”, uncorrupted by text, is made
in the same process as the text is written, and carried by that text.
Authenticity seems to be constituted by the very creation that perverts it. It
lies in that creation itself, even though we tend to displace it as lying
where creation began, as the Paradise from which it took off, the Paradise
that it thwarted. An ancient paradox, but one that appears to be
accentuated in recent modernity.

Performing authenticity
We find this ancient and modern paradox in many shapes. One of
them is in addiction studies, most pointedly, perhaps, in the numerous
attempts to reduce addiction to a brain process. Alexander (1981) and his
colleagues revealed the artificiality of the purest image of the physiology
of addiction: we all recognise the image of the rat that pushes a lever to
receive heroin injections until it dies of starvation. But rats are social
animals. In their famous “Rat Park” experiment, Alexander and his
colleagues demonstrated that if you do not cage them individually, but
grant them even a rather poor version of a more authentic rat life, in a rat
park, and still provide them with the means to inject the drug, then most of
them will abstain (Alexander et al., 1981). Alexander’s art is to make us
aware of the radically artificial nature of the practice of psycho-
physiology: how it is structured by the oppressive architecture of
individualised cages; and how the grand narrative of the Demon Drug
invokes the pure nature of a brain process to veil the harmful engineering
that goes into that same purification. Nearly two decades later, Alexander
is quite explicit about his utopia of a “psycho-social integration” in
communities that are somehow not contaminated by Modernity and its
dislocations–which, to him, explains the “globalisation of addiction”
 Narrative, Substance, and Fiction 161

(Alexander, 2008). This prompts us to ask: is this already another form of

naturalisation? And if so, does it prove that any deconstruction
presupposes an implied claim to authenticity, which only awaits the next
turn of the wheel of critical deconstruction?
In any case, with Derrida (2003, p.30) we can wonder whether this
paradox is performed, at least in some cases, by people who take drugs in
order to reclaim an authentic pleasure or perception of themselves or of the
world–to be stoned immaculate. This latter phrase is the title of a song by
The Doors–who, in some lyrics, perform just the artificial naturalism that
their name, as mentioned, invokes. Jim Morrison’s words on An American
prayer, spoken across his death through a tape recording of his drunken
ravings, provoke us with the idea that there is no difference or no
boundary between the intoxicated and the pure, between the artificial and
the natural–once we find ourselves in “heartache and the loss of God”, out
here in the perimeter, wandering in hopeless night, under no stars… And
we wonder: the prototype of a distorted mind, a living mind thwarted by
the agency of the ultimately inanimate, the verb form of stone … is the
immaculate? Counter-intuitive, perhaps; but also a creative intuition that
spurs a radical rethinking of authenticity. And of course, many works of
art do the same thing, more or less unknowingly–cherish Nature or
Paradise, call forth authentic impressions or expressions, with ever new
forms of artfulness that shape our gazes so that, although we experience
how “life imitates art”, as Oscar Wilde would say (Melmoth, 1911), what
we will report, and what the artist is likely to confirm, is the opposite.
What art and intoxication have in common is that they are both powerful
ways of creating a kind of bracket, a pocket of space and time that is
cleared of the messy heterogeneity of concerns and preoccupations of
everyday life. In this way, authenticity is distilled and amplified, so that
we experience intensely the ways the drugs or the works of art touch and
move us, often at the price of pushing the awareness of their artificiality to
the background. Their ideological truth-effect is no smaller than that of
scientific experiments. Pharmaceutical and artistic metaphysics alike have
asserted their status as providing access to Nature or God to the extent that
they, even as “exceptional” and “spiritual” experience, have also
confirmed certain relations of power and certain forms of participation, of
common sense, more or less defensively. If this holds, a further
implication is that works of art that depict addiction may at the same time
describe and perform this paradox of artificial naturalisation. Some of the
best addiction movies show us first how drugs match what we and the
protagonists perceive as real desires and needs, or open to an otherworldly
experience etc, and then deny that statement with descriptions of the ways
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in which drug use is after all artificial, and alienating, and how the misery
of addiction is the truth of that alienation. At the same time, they make that
point by invoking authenticity as the real or natural sort of experience that
was not, after all, to be found with the drugs–and that invocation of
authenticity is precisely at the core of the artistic creation.
In Trainspotting (Boyle, 1996), we are persuaded that we get the
shocking truth two times over: first, the surprisingly convincing rendering
of the young peoples’ experience that drugs make them happy; that they
seem to be, after all, knowledgeable and intelligent, and have found a new
kind of culture, defined in part by the drug’s intense and immediate
physical pleasure–it’s “better than a 1000 orgasms” as Alison, one of the
addict characters, says. Soon after follows the fall to the authentic reality
of misery, with the death of Alison’s infant daughter. This Hubris-Nemesis
sequence is precisely authentic because it twice exposes an underlying
truth, criticises a prejudice. But those points of truth are where it is most
artful. Even the scenes that claim to lay bare the extremes of drug pleasure
and of addict misery are authentic precisely as aesthetic constructions of a
certain grunge style–a style that, like so many other youth subcultures,
presents what appears to be anti-aesthetic, and only later, after the fact, can
be identified as a style at all. Trainspotting is richer than many addiction
films because it brings to the surface how drug use is structured as hopes
that we, as audience, share. Many others, such as Christiane F. (Edel,
1981) or Candy (Armfield, 2006), simply refer to drug use as a pathology
based in the given desires of body or mind, and in the deficits of culture or
society. They make use of our identification to manipulate us, to scare us
and reassure us how lucky we are that, although we can almost sense the
craving, the pleasure and the despair, this story is basically not about us.
The upshot is that, just as our desires are natural, so are the events and
traits that make some people, unlike the rest of us, into addicts. In
Christiane F., for example, our identification with the protagonist may be
carried authentically by the music and the appearance of David Bowie. In
the final scene, showing her on the train looking out into the rural
landscape, we project the hope that she, like Bowie, is breaking away from
her addiction to become once again like us–and unlike many of the other
characters we have met in the freak show of the movie. Addiction movies,
like addiction studies, can at once describe and perform the paradox of
artificial naturalisation. As works of art, they are authentic, not because
they faithfully represent a given reality, and provide access to Nature or
God, but to the extent that they invite their audiences into the community,
the perception, the narrative–and thus the “joy”–precisely of their art, their
creation, as a recreation of ourselves, too. And this is the case even if they
 Narrative, Substance, and Fiction 163

seem to “claim” something to be natural through the ways they create a

bracket of experience that is experienced as immaculately authentic.

Being touched and moved

If we accept that authenticity is constituted by the inauthentic, this
threatens to break down the distinction. We seem to approach a situation
where anything, or nothing, can be authentic. Our suggestion, however, is
that we interrogate deeper into our differential experience of the authentic–
not because the “intuitive” is some kind of proof, but because there is
more insight to be had. What is it that makes us point at something as
authentic and something else as inauthentic? In Derrida, it is all about
power. The claim to authenticity is at the same time the invocation of
some paternal figure, a King of Gods or a genius philosopher who, in the
end, authorises what counts as authentic, as against the “orphanage of the
wandering sign” (Derrida, 1981, p.142). To repeat Derrida’s play with
words: authority claims authorship of authenticity; appropriates propriety
as its property. No doubt, it is impossible to get rid of this aspect. To make
claims about authenticity–what counts as authentic–is to define your
world, your community, yourself in a certain way. Inevitably, to create is
to also create relations of power, and this implies that creations assume the
form of ideology. Any ideology seems to legitimise relations of power
with transcendent references to God, or Nature etc (cf. Billig, 1997;
Hänninen et.al., 1983; Žižek, 2004). And, obviously, the more creation
needs to legitimise itself to a given community, with its given power
relations and subjectivities, the more it must project an abstract, idealised
or naturalised, celestial image of that transcendence, an image of an
eternal innocence; the more it must pretend to claim its authenticity as
derived from some metaphysical entity that cannot be questioned. In the
old days, this was often God. More recently, as we saw, it has typically
been some version of Nature–and in most canonical narratives around
addiction, it is some image of an inner psychological nature.
However, if the distinction between the authentic and the inauthentic
should be regarded only in light of its function in terms of power,
authenticity could be simply defined as a suspension of critical awareness.
If authenticity is valued at all, then, we could end up suggesting, like
Cypher, the traitor who preferred the illusion of The matrix (Wachowsky
and Wachowsky, 1999) to the grim reality of underground “Zion”, that
“ignorance is bliss”. But we do not need to embrace this dystopian
cynicism, if we keep in mind the way we reconstructed the concept of joy
above. It is only if we accept the premise that authenticity must be defined
164 Chapter Eight

as precluding the productivity of its paradox, its movement between

opposites, that we are forced to choose between ignorance and
inauthenticity. We should not accept at face value the ideological
appearance of authenticity as natural; even if it does claim an authority by
such naturalisation, it is still productive. And production can be evaluated
as more or less joyful. Even if fiction is always created and creating, it is
not all fiction that can be used to act, reflect, be affected and, finally, to
create and be recreated in joyful ways. Not all the stories that we watch,
read or hear will make us act in new significant ways; they will not all
make us start to tell or live new and different stories about ourselves and
the world(s) we inhabit. We suggest that this distinction can be approached
in a broadly affective register, as a question of touching and moving:
recognising feeling is a way of recognising subjectivity. “From feeling we
discover our own viewpoint on the world” says Hochschild (1983, p.17).
Not that feeling makes the felt “true” in some universal sense, but it points
to the truth of one’s perspective (p.30). When a moment in fiction
suddenly has this capacity to make us feel, we are reminded that here is
something that is important to us–or to me (as participant). This feely-
quality is perhaps what has an authentic quality to it–it suggests that
something here is true (for me).
Hochschild’s approach matches that of Osterkamp (1976) who
reconstructed emotions to reflect relevance for one’s life, as striving
toward creative and participatory (joyful) agency–as we saw. Relevance,
in turn, implies qualities of readiness for action. To use again Hochschild’s
views, “feeling is a form of pre-action, a script or a moral stance”–and she
goes on: “it is one of culture’s most powerful tools for directing action”
(1983, p.56). Thus, feelings do not derive “from the inside”; even as
relevances for each singular “me”. Since they index relevances for our
actions as participant humans with agency, feelings can be formed and
move us as “culture’s tools”. And one venue of such cultural formation is
art. The (faction-) writer Knausgård (2012) quotes Henry James who
suggests that in art, the emotions are the meaning–echoed in Vygotsky’s
Psychology of art (Vygotsky, 1974)–and goes on to recount how his
reading of a certain passage in a book has this special quality of touching
and moving:
The loneliness of the sea, sun-bathed yet mixed with a premonition of
death–I never thought of the sea that way, but I must have felt it, because
when I read it, there is something in me that recognises it–vaguely, as if far
away. A recognition of something I didn’t know what was. And a
recognition of the alien, the powerful, the non-human, which is to do with
death (Knausgård, 2012, p.721).
 Narrative, Substance, and Fiction 165

For Knausgård, the recognition is emotional. It is not only about

understanding in a cognitive sense, it is about understanding through the
experience of being affected. Reading the passage puts him in a new
affective state of mind, which he recognises as such, and which moves him
to reflect on the at once universal and very personal condition of mortality.
Still, it is not only a question of individuals being formed. Touching and
moving are not processes of one individual, through the neutral medium of
a work of art, discovering another, who is identical in certain respects, in
an otherwise lonely existence. Hochschild, Knausgård, Osterkamp and
Vygotsky all stress the transformative, socio-cultural nature of emotions
and art. If we look closely at how emotions are shaped as feelings in social
interaction, we can appreciate this more fully.
In some recent discussions of education and counselling, the concept
of perezhivanie (re-living), which Vygotsky adapted from Stanislavki’s
method of acting, has received some attention (Baumer et al., 2005;
Hakkarainen, 2005). Stanislavski’s method was for the actor or actress to
re-live a personal experience that was similar to that of the character in the
play. Vygotsky generalised the concept to point to how such processes of
witnessing (as it would be called in narrative counselling), of retracting the
Other’s experience through one’s own, and vice versa, constitute how we
establish emotions as (reflexively) felt in the first place, from the first
interpersonal exchanges in a child’s life. Being touched is not about
resonance with an emotion that is already present; it forms that emotion as
a feeling, and is thus always already moving. Vygotsky’s point was that
this process, which is recognisable in art, is already present as an aspect of
any social interaction through which we learn to feel and to cultivate our
emotions. And that, further, the process is mediated, whether in the
nursery or in the theatre, by cultural forms more or less artfully created,
appropriated, and transformed. Osterkamp’s continuation of the
Vygotskian legacy stressed agency, as the joyfully enhanced capacity to
affect and be affected–not as “autonomous” individuals, but as participants
of collectives that continuously recreate ourselves as we cultivate our
conditions, means, forms and purposes of living. We could thus
reformulate touching and moving from the perspective of a collective:
when we create together, our creation must touch us; it must resonate with
our immediate lives as we live them together; it must represent a sense
common to us. Yet that very same creation will move us, it will take us
beyond that common sense, toward forms of meaning that can generalise
our situation and point towards new ways of recreating it–with the
implication that it will “wander off as orphan signs” in unknown
directions. This means that any such creation must claim a paradoxical
166 Chapter Eight

unity of common sense with transcendent meaning. It must, in a way, say:

This is what we really are, because, look what we have made, that is what
we could also be; in a word, these are always-already our potentials.

Productive and reflexive critique

Formulated thus, the problem of power reappears. The authentic
synthesis of (common) sense and meaning, of touching and moving, of
what we are and what we could become–is a production of social relations
that includes power. In the broader Foucauldian sense, as actions upon
actions, this is uncontroversial, although certainly worth noticing; but
when Derrida highlights the link between authenticity and authority, there
is something more at stake. This “something more” connects with the issue
of ideology, as the critical distinction between two aspects of authenticity,
two ways of being touched and moved: on the one hand, in those processes
that, even as relevant and productive, still work to reproduce certain
asymmetries, still generate certain delusions and separations to keep up
their promises and to dampen anxieties–and on the other hand those that
seem to overcome them, to joyfully realise potentials for expansion and
generalisation. The latter aspect, when regarded in its relation to the
former, is reflective and critical. At this point, we might take up an
inspiration from Brecht’s concept of “estrangement”, in German,
verfremdung (Brecht, 1982). Brecht sought to create performances that
made people wonder, or reflect critically. This is because audiences are
more than willing to identify, to be touched and moved, so long as this
stays within the confines of their everyday lives as they are. It is no great
trick to achieve an “authentic” performance if measured simply by the
immediate emotional effect that is stirred in the audience. Brecht’s critique
of the establishment and manipulation of identification and empathy in the
traditional “dramatic” theatre (and, we could add: in most contemporary
soap operas, reality TV etc) is not, in the first instance, a critique of its
inauthenticity. When it actually makes the audience “cry with the crying,
laugh with the laughing” (Brecht, 1982, p.82), this does testify to some
kind of authenticity. But it is one that, at least from the point of view of a
Brechtian critique, can be regarded as limited and narrowing; and then,
once this point of view has been assumed, it does appear “false”, and thus,
after all, inauthentic.
Yet the purpose of such a critique should not, in our view, be to
denounce or debunk the “false consciousness” and/or the “banality” of
certain kinds of art, tempting though this may be. Rather, we suggest
taking up Derrida‘s method of deconstruction: the point is not to denounce
 Narrative, Substance, and Fiction 167

or destroy authenticity because it is presented as a naturalisation. Rather, it

is to reinterpret it as art, to remind it of its artificiality, so to speak, and
thus to identify and move it in new ways. In narrative therapy, there is a
similar idea of “thickening” narratives that are thin–instead of simply
working against problematic and stigmatising depictions of persons, what
is attempted is to expand and enhance them, so that the thin story (e.g. of a
person who is simply an “addict”) is transformed into being a part of a
larger narrative of a person who has also reasons and resources to develop.
The idea can even be seen as a way to think of the dialectical notion of an
“immanent critique”–the authenticity of any work of art is always relative
to its reception. Authenticity, or inauthenticity, characterises the work of
art, objectively, but only as recreated in its reception. This “reception” is
itself a productive process, at once objectifying and subjectifying. We may
take our feelings of being touched as a standard, but we have to recognise
also the power of the work of art to reshape those feelings, to move us.
Returning to the dimensions of subjectivity, we can restate it this way: in
this process, (1) tools are provided for our activities and projects; (2) with
those tools, we perform new ways of seeing and reflecting possibilities;
and (3) our motives and perceptions are shaped–and all in the same
process because this work is (4) creative and participatory, it develops new
narratives from those given, and constitutes new communities in which we
participate in new ways. With this approach to how people can be affected
by fiction, we are not really talking about “reception-analysis” anymore. It
is more like what we could call a “creation analysis”. The only way to
work with the problem of what narrative, fiction, or art does to people is to
turn the question around and ask: in what ways do, or could, people
recreate it and recreate themselves in the process, as collectives and
participants?

The creativity of communal ethics–authenticity

in more or less real life
Let us see, finally, if we can demonstrate something like a productive
and reflexive critique, or a creation analysis, which could be relevant for
the narrative counselling of young people with drug problems. As
mentioned, “we”, in this connection, define ourselves by the emerging
research project User-driven standards in social work, where one of the
interesting general tensions is between professional standards and those
standards that users–and counsellors, too–derive from addiction narratives
through media such as TV shows. We cannot stipulate specific ways of
counselling with the help of fiction. Rather, we can illustrate the above
168 Chapter Eight

general considerations by discussing one work of fiction, as relevant to our

general intentions and approaches to the field. We propose to take a look
at one big narrative in our field, one that we are almost certain to
encounter, in one way or another–the narrative of the 12-step movement–
as this is depicted in a TV-show that has enjoyed a quite wide reception,
The wire (Simon, 2002-2008). What we will try to do is to thicken its
narratives, and to reinterpret its naturalisation as art; remind it that it’s a
work of art. The wire describes the drug scene in a US city–Baltimore–
from many different perspectives. In one episode, one of the main
protagonists, Bubs, a destitute but intelligent and sensitive addict, attends a
meeting of Narcotics Anonymous (NA) along with his young friend, who
is required to attend as a condition of his parole. We follow them coming
into the meeting, which follows a strict pseudo-religious ritual and
culminates in the “speak” of Walon, a man who later becomes “sponsor”
to Bubs. A “speak” is a self-presentation where the person admits to being
an addict, recounts his troublesome past and his self-deceit, and expresses
his hopes as found in NA (Rafalovich, 1999). Walon’s speak is humorous
and dead-serious all at once. As Walon speaks, we zoom in on Bubs who
is at first inattentive, but gradually begins to listen, with ironic smiles and
sad recognition. At the end, he joins the ceremony, receiving a medal as a
“most important member” with “one day of clean time or a sincere desire
to live”–to the surprise of his friend with whom he had a fix that morning.
For us, the authenticity of this work of art is evident. But how does it
create this feeling in us, and to what impact? First, we could note that it
seems to both depict and repeat an authenticity-effect that is part of NA
itself. In NA you meet people that tell you the simple truth: death is near,
but “it works if you work it” (as the NA tautology goes). The crap is cut
and we seem to be given the simple truth, as seen from the eyes of people
who have also been where you/the main characters are, through their own
mouths. One way to break open this tautology is to notice the art itself, as
technique–e.g. how the TV show is produced, to notice the camera angles,
the music, the editing. How the close-up on Bubs’ face makes us identify
with him, and his implied identification with Walon. But the technique
itself appears to be somehow beside the point. As in Derrida‘s Plato,
denouncing text as artificial subtracts nothing from the naturalising
invocation of authenticity performed by the same denouncing text. What
we can also see in the scene is how reflexive irony and immediate
emotional identification coexist smoothly in the NA. One does not rule out
the other. At this point, we could mention the case of Jacob H. Winsløw,
the Danish sociologist who wrote two brilliant books about drug treatment
before he came out as having been an addict all the time, confessing in the
 Narrative, Substance, and Fiction 169

12-step language. His books are highly social constructionist in their

approach, so at a seminar at the University he was asked how he could
embrace the essentialism of the NA concept of disease. His answer was
simply: “OK, it’s essentialistic, but it works for me!” Again, knowing
about the technique is beside the point. Authenticity may still be
naturalised, if the right pressures apply, if the right constellations of power
are present.
We get to see how NA is more than text. The narrative structures given
in the signs of texts such as those on the NA website (2012), or the prayers
recited in the episode, are easily identifiable, globally standardised yet
modifiable into ever new orphan off-springs, such as Overeaters, Co-
Dependent, or Nicotine Anonymous. But there is a way in which the
practiced rituals of NA resurrect dead standard signs as meaning, and
returns them to the life and the authority of the community. There is a
claim to an immediate fusion of the artificial and the naturally given in
ritual (cf. Järvinen, 2003). This is perhaps what works to put an end to the
futile hyper-reflexivity of psychotherapy in which so many addicts have
gone wild. The authority, not of some academic training, but of the spoken
word, with death and hope breathing down its neck, works to reclaim the
authenticity of an otherwise external, standardised experience. If it is in
the speaking, in the investment of the body, in the live participation, that
the NA gospel is brought to life, and exerts its authority, this is also where
it creates the authentic experience of never being alone, of being
recognised transcendentally, that is: not as addict, not only as a member of
a community of self-labelled addicts, but as human being. We recreate this
experience through our identification with Bubs’ identification with
Walon. In the ritual, the body is invested collectively, becomes part of the
collective creation, only in the afterthought to be deliberately reflected–
“fake it till you make it”, as they say in NA. The crucial point is neither
about the text in itself, nor about the effects of adapting its narrative. The
magic lies in the collectivity of experience and support (Leighton, 2006)–
in the embodied creativity of participating in cultivating an ethics.
We could suggest yet another way to move that narrative–by asking
what is not there, what is kept outside the NA tautology and its particular
creation of authenticity, to find themes with which to go on developing,
co-constructing it. Actually, in The wire, great work of art that it is, we are
moved to see a lot of what is not included in the 12-step tautology. Even in
this very scene, we are confronted with the question of those who do not
choose to “work it”, in the shape of Bubs’s young friend Johnny, the
character who is not convinced, and who eventually dies. And when we
see it in the context of the whole series, we are helped to question the idea
170 Chapter Eight

of sending addicts to 12-step meetings, time and time again, of recruiting

them into the grand self-help narrative that all problems in life are really
opportunities to learn about yourself. In The wire, the whole socio-political
context is under scrutiny, including not just “the usual suspects” such as
drug traffic and corruption, but also such things as industrial recession,
New Public Management, and populist politics, which helps to explain
why NA meetings seem to be the only real intervention, even though it
falls so obviously short of engaging the problem in its real scope as a
social problem. In this way, The wire can remind us welfare state social
workers and academics that we should not try to fool ourselves with the
New Public Management idea that we are really, or ought to be, agents of
a more natural civil society of free citizens: let us not hide the authority of
our authorship behind the alleged authenticity of self-help. We should
rather accept and reflect how authenticity comes through the radical
artificialism of state social engineering. Welfare state social workers co-
create communities that are vital to their clients–for instance, in networks
of educational and health care institutions, families, and friends–and
although some sociologists are keen to repeat the NA self-conception that
the mutual help movement is worlds apart from professional treatment and
state agencies (Mäkela et al., 1996), even the NA cannot avoid being part
of just those networks. In the scene from The wire, this is made obvious,
as what presents itself as a freely chosen participation in a civil society
fellowship is ironically framed as a condition of parole. But even if we
only recommend NA to our addict clients, this sometimes amounts to a
kind of coercion (Carr, 2011; Peele, Bufe, and Brodsky, 2000).
Maybe an educated hope could be for that communal ethics to be able
some day to go beyond the confines of civil society and the perpetual
individualised choice of “working it”? Of course, this would turn all the
signs, the NA Basic Text, the 12-steps and the ritual forms, once again into
orphans. But one of the liberating things about the 12-step movement is
precisely that this is long since embraced. The movement is already an
orphanage of wandering signs, despite its alleged dogmatism, since every
week a new 12-step group is formed somewhere; and sometimes even one
that carries a new name. The crucial critique would have to set in at the
point of constitution. At the place and the time when such a group is
formed, when we do not yet know quite who we are. When we meet each
other “on neutral ground and in movement”, as we learned from one
Copenhagen grass-root mutual help community (Nissen, 2012). The
counsellors who work with drug users, co-creating “healing dramas and
clinical plots” (Mattingly, 1998), and corresponding communities of hope,
have the advantage of not being stuck in the landscape of absolutes
 Narrative, Substance, and Fiction 171

(Sedgwick, 1993, p.133) that organise 12-step fellowships as “spiritual

communities” of mutual help. As recreated through fiction such as The
wire, the “we” who confront drug issues in some Danish town are perhaps
better helped to see ourselves in the broader terms of social problems,
even as we recognise the power of mutual help.
Watching The wire, we are dealing with one of the great standard
narratives of our time. It is open for us to use as tools for our projects and
reflections, and we let ourselves be affected, we let it shape our hopes and
fears. But we also participate in recreating it. The wire is another
orphanage of wandering signs that mean different things to us in different
places and situations. To us who approach welfare state counsellors in
Scandinavia, one thing The wire seems to do is recreate NA as part of the
narrative of a society. We identify as participants of a collective practice,
of the audacious hope of a democratic and inclusive kind of social
engineering. Over there, in that Baltimore epic, NA is still only civil
society, plus a maybe a state coercion that is either irrelevant or
counterproductive. This makes us wonder if it could be more than that in
Denmark. Using that narrative is to build on it. This not only links us in
new ways with people who work with TV and films, theatre and literature,
but it also projects the hope of bringing together welfare state
professionals and self-help communities in more productive ways than the
traditional attempts to test the effects of 12-step fellowships as if they were
treatment. This could be one articulation of why watching The wire brings
joy. It is workable as a tool for our projects; it points to new possible
projects; as we identify directly with and are touched by its authenticity, it
forces us to surrender to the common sense of the community of
(potential) addiction sufferers, yet also moves us to see ourselves–with
another, more expanded kind of authenticity–as the larger and more
empowered community of a welfare state that grows through such
dialogue to engage with social problems.

Notes
1. As of December 2013, see http://substance.ku.dk/english/projects/user-
driven_standards/

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