Placing the Blame
In her account of French portrayals of drunkenness (1991), Véronique Nahoum-Grappe recounts a 13th-century moral tale from Provence: In a fit of anger, a monk tells his superior that he wishes him dead. As punishment, the superior tells the monk that he must either drink alcohol, fornicate with a woman, or murder a man; the monk is free to choose from amongst these three wrongs. Thinking he is choosing the least of the three, the monk gets drunk. Crazed by drink, he flirts with a woman, eventually ravishing her, at which time the woman’s husband discovers them. Confronted by the man, the monk kills him, thus inadvertently committing all three evils after having willingly indulged in only the one. The moral, it seems, is clear: regardless of one’s intentions, the decision to get drunk pushes one onto a slippery slope towards evil. The question, though, is whether the monk is responsible, in the eyes of the law and his God, for his wrongdoing. Is he less so because of his lack of intention, his compromised reason, and the irrationality of his violence? Or does the fact of his sobriety at the time he chose to drink, the fact of its having been a decision made when he was of clear mind, make him responsible for all of his actions? Finally, a question that seems to sit slightly to the side of the first two, or beyond them: Does the fact that he was told to drink, that his drinking, while intentional, was a choice made of three awful options, reduce his culpability? Is his superior not as much or more to blame?
The work you are reading is an attempt to outline some of the ways in which these questions have been answered by a group of former drinkers in France called Vie Libre, “Free Life,” a support group with a very specific conception of alcoholism and its relation to society. Their focus is the illness (I follow the group’s doctrine in using this term), its origins, its causes, the forces responsible for its perpetuation and the ways in which individuals can fight against it. Though their concern is chronic drinking, rather than the sort of binge undertaken by the ill-fated monk, the issues at stake are the same: who is ultimately responsible for the drinker’s condition, actions and recovery?
The answer to this question is complicated by the practical difficulties of accessing and modeling the beliefs and organizing principles of a heterogeneous group of people, unified partly by adherence to a formalized group doctrine but also drawn apart by idiosyncratic interpretations of this doctrine and the numerous ways it can be put into practice. With that in mind, this paper will focus on the doctrine itself, the comparatively formalized way in which it has been interpreted, integrated and contested by its adherents (as explored and theorized by French anthropologist Sylvie Fainzang, the foremost ethnographic authority on the group), and the various continuities and discontinuities this doctrine has with the broader social context, both historical and contemporary. For the moment, then, constrained by my present reliance on literature rather than fieldwork, I will have to bracket certain questions, the most interesting (to me) being: how do group members balance competing or alternative models of alcoholism, holding them simultaneously or sequentially “in their heads” while tactically employing one or the other, situation by situation? It is my hope that this restraint in focus will allow for a more thorough exploration of the central question that I shall address here: for Vie Libre and its members, who is responsible for an individual’s alcohol dependence?
Some Epistemological Caveats
Michael Lambek, through his range of ethnographic studies and as summed up in his article How To Make Up One’s Mind (2010), points to the ways in which the unified coherence and boundedness of the individual – that is, the unity of reason and its direct and determining relationship with action – that is presumed in Western discourse is fractured, particularly through spirit possession. He notes the importance of decisiveness, consistency and constancy to Western conceptions of mind and ethical accountability. Webb Keane (2010) ties this view to the creedal and evangelistic moral universe, which followed the northern Reformation and had its apex in the Enlightenment, in which one’s moral agency depends upon the ability to reason and deliberate, to give explanations for one’s actions; in short, to be able to “objectify” one’s reasons or justifications in propositional form, and so to make them available for ethical evaluation. Yet human experience, in Western society as in all others, regularly falls short of this ideal, whether through the hidden machinery of the individual subconscious, the penetrating or structuring effects of social structure, or whatever relation might hold between them.[1] As a result, coherent accounts or explanations of one’s actions (“objectifications” of experience) are often constructive in that they contribute to the sense of there being an enduring and deliberate agent at their root, which in turn enters into later objectifications; as noted by Keane, “People are shaped as publicly known moral characters over the course of their interactions with others – this becomes part of the frame through which subsequent actions are interpreted” (2010: 75). This framing is an important part of social life, but this shouldn’t block our sensitivity to that which lies out of frame: the irrational, the inexplicable, that which is beyond the reach of post hoc explanation and doesn’t fit into these constructive accounts.
In an earlier examination of Alcoholics Anonymous (Pettit 2011), I found a tendency in the sociological literature about the movement to overemphasize the “drunkalogue” (Rudy 1986), each individual’s highly structured and moralizing account of their chronic drinking trajectory. Often, studies of members’ conversion to the tenets of the group took for granted that individuals adopted the A. A. model of alcoholism as a piece, that this adoption was profound and wholly altered their understanding of their drinking past, and that the members’ ritualized public story-telling serves as proof of this deep change (e.g. Cain 1991; Rudy 1986; Yeung 2007). Yet the tension between such moral accounts and the simultaneously held belief that alcoholism is an organic illness (which mitigates one’s responsibility and so strips one’s biography of its incriminating moral dimension) suggests an obscured ambivalence between what is said and what is, at least at times, deeply felt. Similarly, Valverde (1998) notes that, while the movement’s doctrine and the public “drunkalogue” emphasize a change of identity and a shift in consciously-held self-perceptions, the mottos, posters and conversational advice that permeate one’s experience in the program are largely based on the tradition of American pragmatism, which focuses on habit as opposed to identity, and the importance of repeated and quotidian efforts as opposed to single, dramatic moments of deep conversion. It is my belief that a focus on ethical objectifications, in particular the “drunkalogue,” has excluded issues of great importance, particularly the deep ambivalence and doubts of members, as well as the enormously important (though less spectacular) daily practice in which group members involve themselves. In the introduction to Illness and Irony, Lambek writes:
This is the caveat I want to stress here: that a study of Vie Libre’s doctrinal model, while useful, mustn’t be taken as exhaustively or authoritatively representative of the wealth of the individual members’ experience of alcohol dependence, their understanding of its etiology or treatment, nor the balance of values and considerations that enter into individual treatment pathways. It is my hope that this present work will help measure the span between doctrinal model and individual interpretation, without appearing to close it. I note this not as an effort to hedge my bets, but because I believe it is vital to the study of this subject; taking for granted either the bounded, rational unity of members-as-agents or the immediate proximity of doctrinal and individual conceptions of alcoholism will prevent a proper understanding of the dynamics of blame and responsibility within Vie Libre.
[1] As theorized, for instance, by Avery Gordon (1997), who pointed to the ways in which repressed forces bear significant impact on social life, or Judith Butler’s (1997) reflections on the ways in which subjection always falls short of social roles and norms, causing gaps or slippage that language must gloss over.
Michael Lambek, through his range of ethnographic studies and as summed up in his article How To Make Up One’s Mind (2010), points to the ways in which the unified coherence and boundedness of the individual – that is, the unity of reason and its direct and determining relationship with action – that is presumed in Western discourse is fractured, particularly through spirit possession. He notes the importance of decisiveness, consistency and constancy to Western conceptions of mind and ethical accountability. Webb Keane (2010) ties this view to the creedal and evangelistic moral universe, which followed the northern Reformation and had its apex in the Enlightenment, in which one’s moral agency depends upon the ability to reason and deliberate, to give explanations for one’s actions; in short, to be able to “objectify” one’s reasons or justifications in propositional form, and so to make them available for ethical evaluation. Yet human experience, in Western society as in all others, regularly falls short of this ideal, whether through the hidden machinery of the individual subconscious, the penetrating or structuring effects of social structure, or whatever relation might hold between them.[1] As a result, coherent accounts or explanations of one’s actions (“objectifications” of experience) are often constructive in that they contribute to the sense of there being an enduring and deliberate agent at their root, which in turn enters into later objectifications; as noted by Keane, “People are shaped as publicly known moral characters over the course of their interactions with others – this becomes part of the frame through which subsequent actions are interpreted” (2010: 75). This framing is an important part of social life, but this shouldn’t block our sensitivity to that which lies out of frame: the irrational, the inexplicable, that which is beyond the reach of post hoc explanation and doesn’t fit into these constructive accounts.
In an earlier examination of Alcoholics Anonymous (Pettit 2011), I found a tendency in the sociological literature about the movement to overemphasize the “drunkalogue” (Rudy 1986), each individual’s highly structured and moralizing account of their chronic drinking trajectory. Often, studies of members’ conversion to the tenets of the group took for granted that individuals adopted the A. A. model of alcoholism as a piece, that this adoption was profound and wholly altered their understanding of their drinking past, and that the members’ ritualized public story-telling serves as proof of this deep change (e.g. Cain 1991; Rudy 1986; Yeung 2007). Yet the tension between such moral accounts and the simultaneously held belief that alcoholism is an organic illness (which mitigates one’s responsibility and so strips one’s biography of its incriminating moral dimension) suggests an obscured ambivalence between what is said and what is, at least at times, deeply felt. Similarly, Valverde (1998) notes that, while the movement’s doctrine and the public “drunkalogue” emphasize a change of identity and a shift in consciously-held self-perceptions, the mottos, posters and conversational advice that permeate one’s experience in the program are largely based on the tradition of American pragmatism, which focuses on habit as opposed to identity, and the importance of repeated and quotidian efforts as opposed to single, dramatic moments of deep conversion. It is my belief that a focus on ethical objectifications, in particular the “drunkalogue,” has excluded issues of great importance, particularly the deep ambivalence and doubts of members, as well as the enormously important (though less spectacular) daily practice in which group members involve themselves. In the introduction to Illness and Irony, Lambek writes:
Thought and agency run up against constraints, external ones of fate and circumstance and internal ones of ignorance, confusion, and contradiction. External and internal constraints on knowledge force us to speak with an assurance we do not have. (2003: 5)
This is the caveat I want to stress here: that a study of Vie Libre’s doctrinal model, while useful, mustn’t be taken as exhaustively or authoritatively representative of the wealth of the individual members’ experience of alcohol dependence, their understanding of its etiology or treatment, nor the balance of values and considerations that enter into individual treatment pathways. It is my hope that this present work will help measure the span between doctrinal model and individual interpretation, without appearing to close it. I note this not as an effort to hedge my bets, but because I believe it is vital to the study of this subject; taking for granted either the bounded, rational unity of members-as-agents or the immediate proximity of doctrinal and individual conceptions of alcoholism will prevent a proper understanding of the dynamics of blame and responsibility within Vie Libre.
[1] As theorized, for instance, by Avery Gordon (1997), who pointed to the ways in which repressed forces bear significant impact on social life, or Judith Butler’s (1997) reflections on the ways in which subjection always falls short of social roles and norms, causing gaps or slippage that language must gloss over.
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