Notes from Critical Friends Meeting - READING ROOM

a problem of sick self.

It is becoming difficult to imagine a world where work does not spill over into the rest of life, emails landing 24/7, increased pressures to achieve more than you are paid for that demonstrate your commitment, creativity and potential to your employer. In London we have the added pressure of trying to find a home to rent that you can afford and secure 'useful' employment to pay for it. What is the alternative to a world where you desire what you can not have, borrow to afford it and consume to gratify the desires that orchestrate your own entrapment. The pressures, anxieties we experience appear as a realism within contemporary capitalism, a space from which we cannot imagine a different society.

Being an addict is frustratingly hard work, finding substances, food, shelter, care, treatment are complicated formations that require knowledge situated in the actions and reactions of being addicted yet this knowledge never enters into the machinery of governance that purportedly cares for drug users in the UK. This situated knowledge has much to tell us about forms of reticulated discipline that governs addicts and workers in the UK care system.