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Etched in the Skin: Pain, Methamphetamine Violence and Affect

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Life in Pain

Abstract

Very powerful in constructing the image of drug user suffering is a genre of websites that “demonstrate” the impact of drug addiction through the physical transformation of drug user faces. Websites such as “Faces of Meth” and “Faces of Addiction”, emerging either from police or the drug rehabilitation industry, trace the changes in drug user faces over time, usually showing the pain of extreme degeneration. Whilst there is an obvious critique of these strategies in terms of mobilising fear and the construction of horror, there is a deeper question as to how do we read pain in people faces and what sort of pain do we recognise when we see the faces of drug users in these types of images. The technique of reading the pain in faces has an ancient history, however 20th century medicine, re-recognised the face of pain through the 1934 work of German physician and photographer Hans Killian. The title of his work “Facies Dolorosa” assumed a clinical meaning. In recent times, reading pain from faces has been applied to a wide range of applications. In the case of drug users, reading faces is a primary mechanism to culturally inscribe pain. There are now algorithms for reading facial musculature, to provide an “objective” account of this subjective state. In this chapter I explore the rendering of the pain of drug user faces on “face-of-drugs” websites and how the reading of pain and violence in drug user faces has material impacts on how we read the faces of methamphetamine users and construct methamphetamine epidemics. I will then explore how this transformation of pain into a corporeal state creates affects. This rendering has significant implications for the cultural pain neuromatrix and how we communicate the pain of drug use. There are material consequences from etching the pain of drugs into faces.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia

    John L. Fitzgerald

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Fitzgerald, J.L. (2020). Etched in the Skin: Pain, Methamphetamine Violence and Affect. In: Life in Pain. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5640-6_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5640-6_6

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