ABSTRACT
Critically interrogating the historical associations between pathology and place in the urban context, this examination traced how the spatial characteristics, environmental conditions of and potential for epidemic contagion in the city were each attributed to a host of specifically urban ills. From this analysis, the work argued that popular forms of representation and opposition concerning the use of substance and the figure of the addict are based on the notion of disorder. Pointing to the irreducibility of the phenomenon of drug dependence to moral, criminological, or bio-medical explanations, p/re/in-scription denotes multiple simultaneous trajectories, emphasizing the inherently political stakes involved in the question of addiction research and treatment. Shadowing the semiotic migration of intoxication from the tactility of art and literature to the ephemerality of media infrastructure, invocations of body as city as machine can be read as metaphorical representations of the experience of narcotic modernity.
