Remembering to Forget: Blacking Out in Itchy Park

• Autores: Joshua Burraway
• Localización: Current anthropology: A world journal of the sciences of man, ISSN 0011-3204, Nº. 5, 2018, págs. 469-487
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This article draws on ethnographic research to examine the relationship between anaesthetic intoxicants, memory, forgetting, and subjectivity among homeless addicts in inner-city London. This article explores memory as a conduit to the ghostly forces that entrap the homeless, faced with losses that are at once intimate and structural, in a kind of existential crisis—a crisis that is solved through dissociative journeys into the drug-induced blackout. For the homeless of Itchy Park, the blackout is a time in which they become somebody else. The existential mechanics of the blackout—in which the vacuum left by the dissolution of memory is filled by the emergence of a new concealed presence—provide an alternative means of thinking through the complex entanglement between memory, loss, temporality, agency, and discipline in late liberalism. Operating through a temporal economy alternative to the one laid down by capitalism (where time is killed rather than spent), the blacked-out body is thus also a black-market body—one that forces us to confront our most taken-for-granted everyday conventions.