Death, Dread, Desire.

• Author: Carney, Phil

AT THE END OF DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH, FOUCAULT DISCERNS BEHIND the strategy, tactics, and mechanisms of modern power "the distant roar of battle" (Foucault 1977,308). If, in turning Clausewitz (1982) upside down, politics is for Foucault war by other means, then power in modernity multiplies in the service of defending society against a host of dangers (Foucault 1977,2003). Such confrontations also take place at the level of subjectivity in which a largely unconscious, though not uncontested, self-subjection takes place in new fields of control. We recall these insights when faced with those social practices recruited to combat the enemies of crime and drugs. Travis Linnemann's compelling and powerful book Meth Wars investigates the cultural productions and practices of the great US war on drugs through a well-conducted case study of the methamphetamine problem. We sense not so much the faint echoes of Foucault's "distant roar" but more a noisy and spectacular series of battles with a feared, hated, socially constructed adversary. Like Foucault, he suggests that the methamphetamine war also takes place at the level of subjectivity.

Linnemann takes us on a journey into the world of the "methamphetamine imaginary," a dark fantasy traversing US culture in its images, discourses, and narratives. Agencies of control, treatment, correction, punishment, and government follow in the imaginary's wake, all invested with a heavily moralized, righteous, and endless sense of war. However, his text reminds us that the fight is not about just one drug, one drive, or one battlefront; it is also embedded in wider practices of power and control. His framework of analysis creatively uses the methods and perspectives of cultural criminology, to which are added an explicit critique of capitalism leavened with Slavoj Zizek's psychoanalytic understanding of fetishistic disavowal and ideology. We not only encounter "Merton with energy and Katz with structure" (Young 2003) but also energy and structure understood through an analysis of unconscious desire. In this way, the question is raised: What if we need the drug war? This subtle but insistent refrain on desire and subjectivity regularly punctuates the text and in many ways orders its argument too.

Fizzing with wonderful cultural observations, the book takes in, for example, a penetrating critique of the popular TV series Breaking Bad, in which Walter White's death drive is revealed to be that of a wider...