@article{THESIS,
      recid = {2745},
      author = {Boulette, Matthew},
      title = {Appetite for Ecstasy: Chronic Dispossession and  Biochemical Governance in America, 1870-1920},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2020-12},
      number = {THESIS},
      pages = {164},
      abstract = {“Appetite for Ecstasy: Chronic Dispossession and  Biochemical Governance in America, 1870-1920” is a study of  how appetitive bodies could verge on and converge around  the ecstasies of biochemical alteration amidst the  dispossessive conditions that restricted, fractured, and  normalized life under industrial settler capitalism. Its  archives set those ecstasies off against urban and  borderland locales imagined to belong only precariously to  the jurisdictional frame of the United States—the transient  atmospheres of New York or San Francisco’s subterranean  opium joints (chapter one, “On the Inertia of Appetite:  Transient Relations from the Chinatown Opium Scene”), the  autonomous movements of indigenous peyote meetings across  the expropriative frontiers of federal territorial rule  (chapter two, “Moved by Another Life: Allotted Time and  Historical Poiesis in the Peyote Craze”), the nullified  time of sensoria consumed by cocaine or drowned in chloral  hydrate (chapter three, “Appetite for Nothingness:  Pharmaconormativity and the Abandon of Reified Time”).  Appetites for these sorts of altered experience were  reconceived between the late nineteenth century and the  early twentieth as the byproducts of and catalysts for  scenes of somatic disorder.   

More than just excavating  the phenomenological feel of such experiences, this  dissertation zeros in on aesthetic relays between the  orectic and the ecstatic in order to lay out the regulatory  protocols that the human sciences, public health  authorities, and colonial bureaucracies developed to  apprehend those who went out of their senses. In question  throughout is how the settler capitalist imperatives to  secure national borders, privatize landownership, and  standardize time drove the formation of a split regime of  biochemical governance. Or, put differently, how the forces  of chronic dispossession came to invest a dispersed  infrastructure of clinical knowledge and state power that  divided illicit drugs from therapeutic medicines so as to  constrict the molecular flux of human bodies along  interlocking strata of race, class, sex, and citizenship.  

Yet, as a critique of biochemical governance, this  dissertation also queries how the dispossessed people and  populations it administered could bypass state and  extrastate projects of somatic, fantasmatic, and  spatiotemporal enclosure. No matter how totalizing the  drive to secure the apparent coherence of day-to-day  existence amidst the endogenous crises of settler  capitalist social reproduction, I argue, the calculated  volatility of these projects nonetheless left openings for  ecstatic amplifications of experience to warp, decenter, or  run out of sync with the common sense of collective and  political life. Altered states, far from simply escaping or  smoothing out the world as it is, carry the potential to  assemble scenes of alternate worldmaking at the seams of  what should feel seamless.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/2745},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.2745},
}