In 2000 I lived in a former paint factory on the edges of a working class residential district in a part of east Oakland known as “Fruitvale”. The loft was a kind of bunker, populated largely by well-educated, middle class artists, set in the midst of a border zone, a kind of post-industrial wasteland that runs along the corridor of the elevated train line. Our cluster of converted factory buildings was enclosed by a concrete wall -- outside the street was strewn with shopping carts, plastic bags and discarded syringes.
At this time my art practice involved developing systems for collaborative and collective authoring online. I thought of the Internet as a public space and saw my work as ‘public art,’ but I was troubled by the delimitation of who and what could be considered ‘Public’ in this context. Every definition of “Public” I have found includes the phrase “the people”. In modern European languages the phrase “the people” always connotes the poor, the underprivileged, and the excluded. It is a curious contradiction that this phrase simultaneously identifies the citizen or political subject (big “P” people), and the class that is excluded from politics - the marginalized and technologically disenfranchised. I had started to wonder how, or if, public art practices or information technologies, could effectively create a more inclusive public sphere – one that would engage both the People and the people.
There was an HIV prevention program down the street that ran an open needle exchange three nights a week. I first heard about it on local radio where the director told of the city councilman’s attempts to force the exchange out of the neighborhood, which was slated for future gentrification. I believed in the efficacy of needle exchange, (albeit in an intellectual and somewhat detached way). I was intrigued by the paradoxical, outsider-subject of addiction, the borderline between dependence on licit and illicit drugs, the mystery and violence of the needle. I had reason to want to escape the privileged isolation of my own sphere – to cross over into another world. This desire was sincere but also driven by curiosity, even voyeurism, and naiveté. Unlike Freud, Benjamin, Burroughs, and De Quincy, I was interested in the social and biological construction of addiction not the experience of the drug as such and, in any case, my (very rational) fear would preclude direct experimentation with injection drugs. I would cross over through the point of view of the other. My desire would be satisfied by listening and observing, – and the responsibility I thus assumed would be left unresolved in my unsuccessful attempts to help one of my interlocutors.
I volunteered at the exchange. Eventually I started to interview people who came to the tent site to swap needles. Most of them lived on the street, had no official identification, either because they had a criminal record, or no fixed address, and therefore had no access to basic civic rights or social services. Their absence in the data-space of the Public sphere had serious implications for them in the physical world. They were in a sense invisible - a kind of secret public.
I got to know one of the women rather well – the woman that I call A____ in what follows. The needle exchange was the last frayed layer of the social safety net for someone like A____. I learned a lot from her about the third world inside the first. I learned that the realities of poverty, racism, social isolation, trauma, sexual abuse, and sex-based discrimination can make a person, even an extraordinarily intelligent person, vulnerable to addiction and psychosis. I learned a lot from A_____ about desperation and about resilience. I learned that the complex struggle over civil liberties and social rights in electronically mediated information space is materially different from the one on the street. There is another public outside – a secret public that is simultaneously visible and invisible, and to most, illegible and incomprehensible. The men and women who spoke with me at the needle exchange, and allowed me to record our conversations, are part of this secret public. They deserve to be heard and understood. The accounts they give are not natural, objective descriptions of an unambiguous reality. No one I met at the exchange described themselves as the righteous dope fiend. On the contrary, each self-narrative begins with an admission, a kind of confession of addiction as a weakness or disease, and the messy details of each life history then unfolds according to the syntax and grammar of the disease-and-recovery discourse learned in the kind of therapeutic setting where we met. But the fact that the telling is inflected by its context and social construction does not mean that the lived experience so related is any less real, or powerful, or deserving of attention. It is my hope that the testimony gathered here, will challenge you, as it has summoned me, to see and to challenge the paradoxes of social exclusion and othering that attend the lives of those who suffer from addiction.
Sharon Daniel
