Crime Media Culture, 2007

Crime, Media, Culture
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Mapping discursive closings in the war on drugs

Michelle Brown
Crime Media Culture 2007; 3; 11
DOI: 10.1177/1741659007074443
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ARTICLES
BROWN MAPPING DISCURSIVE CLOSINGS
Mapping discursive closings in the war on drugs

MICHELLE BROWN, Ohio University, USA
Abstract
This article maps the discursive closing of the most recent war on drugs through a series
of case studies drawn from popular culture. This kind of work is performed in an effort to
theorize the reflexive role of structure and agency in criminological representation. Each
of the three selected cases demonstrates important shifts in conventions of representation
that are historically contingent and recursively embedded in developing understandings
of the relationship between drugs, individual actors and larger structural forces of
sovereignty, inequality, and criminality. Each highlights the nature of a protracted crisis of
representation in popular narratives of the war on drugs, where individual actors, even in
their most mainstream manifestations, are depicted as caught within complex institutional
contradictions which often paradoxically affirm and subvert drug war contexts.
Key words
discursive gap/closing; reflexivity; representation; structure and agency; war on drugs
INTRODUCTION: A DRUG WAR MONTAGE

Narcotics have been systematically scapegoated and demonized. The idea that anyone
can use drugs and escape a horrible fate is anathema to these idiots. I predict in
the near future that right wingers will use drug hysteria as a pretext to set up an
international police apparatus. (William Burroughss cameo appearance in Drugstore
Cowboy (1989))
I promised the American people I would do something about the drugs pouring into
this country. What do these drug dealers think? That were powerless? That they
can keep doing this kind of thing and theres no response ever? The course of action
Id suggest is a course of action I cant suggest. The drug cartels represent a clear and
present danger to the national security of the United States. (President Bennett (Donald
Moffat) in A Clear and Present Danger (1994))
CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 2007 SAGE Publications, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore,
www.sagepublications.com, ISSN 1741-6590, Vol 3(1): 1129 [DOI: 10.1177/1741659007074443]
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CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 3(1)
If you start in with the war metaphors, Im going to drive this car into a fucking
telephone pole. (Barbara Wakefield (Amy Irving) to her husband, drug czar Robert
Wakefield (Michael Douglas) in Traffic (2000))
Fighting a war on drugs one brutality case at a time
Girl, you cant even call this shit a war.
Why not?
Wars end.
(Conversation between narcotics detectives Greggs (Sonja Sohn) and Carver (Seth
Gilliam) on HBOs The Wire (2003))
In the aftermath of 9/11 one emergent current of political drug discourse explicitly coupled terrorism with the drug trade. The National Youth Anti-drug Media Campaign (www.
theantidrug.com), a preventive initiative launched by the White House Office of National
Drug Control Policy (ODCP) in 1998 to target adolescent youth, served as the primary
conduit for this controversial campaign, itself a bipartisan partnership between civic
groups, anti-drug lobbyists, faith-based programs, private corporations, and the federal
government. Its ads aired heavily in the aftermath of September 11th across television,
print journalism, and cyberspace. The campaign disseminated its message through images
of everyday individuals (largely adolescent, middle-class, next-door-neighborly types of
various races and both genders) expressing stark statements about the impact of their
own drug use. One television commercial ran the following text, each line coupled with a
seemingly innocuous face:
I helped murder families in Colombia.
It was just innocent fun.
I helped kidnap peoples dads.
Hey, some harmless fun.
I helped kids learn how to kill.
I was just having some fun, you know.
I helped kill policemen.
I was just having fun.
I helped a bomber get a fake passport.
All the kids do it.
I helped kill a judge.
I helped blow up buildings.
My life, my body.
Its not like I was hurting anyone else.
This kind of paternalistic official discourse overtly couples a deresponsibilized individualized
image of recreational drug use (just having fun, all the kids do it) with the violent imagery
of a structural form of violence, terrorism (and a politicized, gendered sub-text my life, my
body). In many ways, this kind of campaign alludes to the major conventional parameters
for dominant drug discourse in the USA techniques focused upon a responsibilization of
the individual, the privileging of a narrow conception of free will, a solely and completely
rational actor, alongside stark binary oppositions of good and evil. These constellations
create easy linkages by which, semiotically, to chain individuals to the structural concerns
of criminality, violence, and terror. These ads, however, were quickly parodied through a
counter campaign launched by Lindesmiths Drug Policy Alliance, eventually resulting in
the ODCPs cancellation of the ad campaign.1 Part of the Drug Policy Alliances strategy
in condemning the anti-drug ads included criticizing the jump in logic made when linking
non-violent drug using Americans to acts of terror.
These leaps are not unusual in the cultural vocabularies surrounding drug use in the
United States, but rather constitute the classical mode of representation a superficial and
asociological approach to explanation, albeit one that is routinely widespread and available
in the cultural discourses surrounding drugs. In the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, as
images of human desperation and violence achieved widespread coverage, local and state
political officials closed up discursive gaps founded upon structural inequality and poverty,
race and class, by resorting to individualized frames of blame, labeling looters and those
engaged in violence as drug addicts.2 Significantly, these discursive closings depend upon a
privileging of individualism with its emphasis upon a culpable free will and simultaneously
a distinct form of sociological denial, characterized by a common cultural inability to
articulate the relationship between individuals and social structure. Consequently, these
kinds of performances, as cultural contradictions, constitute compelling settings for
criminological analysis. Strategically, they permit us the opportunity to explore how drugs
are invested with meaning and how drug wars are made or unmade culturally, primarily
through invocations and explorations of the relationship shared between the state and
its drug-using or drug-dealing citizens. We are also permitted by way of such analysis to
engage in a larger theoretical enterprise that defines the terms of social scientific study a
continuing conjugation of the relationship between individual agency and social structure
and our ability or inability to articulate/represent that relationship.
The relationship between individuals and society, albeit the central project of social
scientific thought, remains highly contentious in cultural vocabularies. Those private
troubles of C. Wright Millss sociological imagination and their relationship to historically
contingent public issues and increasingly complex social institutions remain among
the most difficult of relationships to articulate. A focus upon the individual, of course,
privileges particular notions of agency, free will, and rational choice. The social, on the
other hand, demands a sophisticated language which privileges not simply relationships
and interaction but complex accounts of fields of interaction and the reasons why practices
achieve durability and institutional status, amidst expansive networks of social actors and
engagements. More significantly, it demands as well an account of the ways in which
these configurations are contextualized through conditions and choices into convergent
social forces, such as poverty, inequality, and criminality. A vocabulary which privileges
the individual will depend in its social reactions upon accountability, responsibility, blame,
and punishment. Perhaps, moreover, this vocabulary will perceive any discussion of the
social conditions of individualism as denial or worse, an excuse. Pathways, trajectories,
and explanations of social problems, then, will depend fundamentally in these contexts
upon a denial of the social. One of the arguments in this article, however, revolves around
the idea that such denial is not easily maintained in cultural practice that these gaps
between individualistic orientations and the structural relations that define modern life
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are difficult to leave open and thus constitute perpetual sites of anxiety and negotiation
in the construction of meaning.
Negotiating these kinds of discursive gaps culminates in a fundamental tension
between private and public where the linkages and networks which make up social life
are experienced in a field of uncertainty, one in which ambiguity serves as a central social
axis. For Anthony Giddens, this phenomenon is imagined as a form of structuration
a complex of processes that permit simultaneous reproduction and innovation, where
action is constrained and enabled. Giddenss notion of the duality of structure highlights
the recursive maneuver at the heart of structuration where action shapes and is shaped
by overarching structures that are continuously reproduced and revised. This reflexive
aspect of modern life, so central to the work of most contemporary social theorists
(Bourdieu, 1977; Giddens, 1990; Beck, 1992; Bauman, 1998), gives careful attention to
the institutional structuring of knowledge and the contests that ultimately feed into the
distinctive features of particular logics in social practice. Here social practice is continually
revised in light of new knowledge and more information, a process which is seen as
constituting the driving force of modernity. For Giddens (1990), sociological knowledge
spirals in and out of the universe of social life, reconstructing both itself and that universe
as an integral part of that process (p. 16). Reflexivity is introduced into the very basis of
system reproduction, such that thought and action are constantly refracted back upon one
another The reflexivity of modern social life consists in the fact that social practices are
constantly examined and reformed in the light of incoming information about those very
practices, thus constitutively altering their character and providing for the possibility of
social transformation (p. 38). The highly reflexive and recursive character of late modernity
is further argued to fuel new insecurities and uncertainties as science and knowledge
accumulate in malleable and often contradictory ways. Such a tendency in society possibly
indicates less about risk and danger and more about particular sites of uncertainty,
discursive gaps in cultural understandings, that are not yet named or understood. Drug
discourse constitutes precisely such a site.
Drugs are peculiar things in cultural representation, often directing us to sites of
fear, trauma, and indeterminacy in public discourse, consequently subject to dramatic
exaggeration, revision, and reinterpretation (Rogin, 1987; Lenson, 1995). Because drug
representations are fundamentally caught up in processes of structuration, always at
the core of drug representation is a problem of signification. Questions surrounding the
primary cultural frames of drug representation reveal this problematic: why were (and
still are) crack /cocaine and individuals associated with its use and distribution so easily
demonized in public rhetoric? More generally, why have chemical substances historically
been so susceptible to the framing of political crises and moral panics in the United States?
Why is the essential image of drug use and the user an excessive one, subject to a total
loss of control, essential to the politicization of crime? What is to be made of the fact that
this use is historically and publicly attached to groups of ethnic and political minorities,
whose persistent demonization forces them into the categories of other and the
dangerous class? Why are contemporary drug representations almost always bound up
with notions of sovereignty national defense, security, and the frames of war? And,
finally, what is really at stake in the visual enactment of social reaction against drugs
what is the specific relationship envisioned between the individual and the social, between
the agent and structure? These questions are the starting points for a fuller theorization
of drug discourse, which begins from the assumption that the war on drugs is not really
about drugs, but about key sites of cultural indeterminacy and the anxieties that surround
them.
Consequently, in matters of representation, drug war imagery provides a complex
site from which to work through key discursive gaps in knowledge reproduced through
sociological, criminological, and media frames. Moral panic approaches are perhaps the
most central example of this recurrence. The mode of media production and analysis
most essential to drug imagery, moral panic approaches have been widespread in their
application in criminology. As the predominant theoretical legacy in the study of crime and
culture, social constructionist perspectives dominate theoretical perspectives as evidenced
through the classic and frequent invocation of Jock Youngs The Drug Takers (1971),
Stanley Cohens seminal work in Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972) and Hall et al.s classic
Policing the Crisis (1978).
These studies and their contemporaries are centered inevitably upon the misrepresentation of crime and the manufacturing of ideologically dominant perspectives. Each is
centered upon myth busting where dominant discourse about crime is consistently exposed
as inconsistent with particular crime realities and this incompatibility as a source which
often exacerbates the social problems underscoring criminality within political and public
forums. This trajectory is largely directed toward the articulation of misrepresentation
where evidence persistently points to a lack of congruity between crime realities and their
mass-mediated image. Moral panic approaches consistently demonstrate this obsession
with the real vs. the mediated. But, as Simon Watney (1987) argues, the real is always
and inherently mediated:
Moral panic theory is always obliged in the final instance to refer and contrast
representation to the arbitration of the real, and is hence unable to develop a full
theory concerning the operations of ideology within all representational systems. Moral
panics seem to appear and disappear, as if representation were not the site of permanent
struggle of the meaning of signs. (cited in McRobbie and Thornton, 1995: 564)
I propose an alternative starting point for a dialogue about what the work of media and
representational analysis means in criminology. This kind of approach hinges upon the
acknowledgment of a key assumption:
The media is no longer something separable from society. Social reality is experienced
through language, communication and imagery. Social meanings and social differences
are inextricably tied up with representation. Thus when sociologists call for an account
which tells how life actually is, and which deals with the real issues rather than the
spectacular and exaggerated ones, the point is that these accounts of reality are already
representations and sets of meanings about what they perceive the real issues to be.
These versions of reality would also be impregnated with the mark of media imagery
rather than somehow pure and untouched by the all-pervasive traces of contemporary
communications. (McRobbie and Thornton, 1995: 571)
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Consquently, in this piece, I engage in a specific employment of media analysis. Although

I am interested in analysis as a means through which to examine the cultural life of the
institutional practices surrounding crime and punishment, including the cultural politics
of criminology how popular culture communicates specific kinds of knowledge (Sarat,
2001: 211) and upholds particular ideologies (Surette, 1992; Pfohl, 1994; Young, 1996;
Rafter, 2000), ultimately I feel these are strategies which are largely preliminary and carry
with them monolithic notions of society and consensus. My approach assumes that
in order to theorize how those representations are fundamentally bound up with social
practice, one must interrogate how images are recursively caught in the reproduction
and reinvention of social knowledge and ideology, sites of permanent struggle (Hall,
1980; McRobbie and Thornton, 1995; Manning, 1998). I do this through an application
which examines several popular yet complex efforts at the discursive closing of the war on
cocaine. By discursive closing, I do not intend to imply that cocaine no longer constitutes
a key social problem in particular settings, nor that social reaction has ceased to conceive
of the substance as a key social problem. Rather, it is my contention that other kinds of
wars and drugs have taken on greater precedence in political and public agendas. More
significantly, discursive closing implies that the popular configuration of the most recent
war on drugs is defined by efforts to close off unsettling absences that are inevitably
exposed in any depiction of the relationship between individual actors (drug dealers,
users, and enforcers) and social structure (race, class, gender, crime, and poverty), albeit in
very distinct ways. This closing is marked by a constellation of cultural performances which
gradually cycle into distinct strategies and trajectories of representation, each addressing
differently, while building upon the conventions of the other, the chronic contradictions
that leave Americans suspended in a war on drugs that seemingly never ends. Three
performances which map the complexity of this tendency are the Hollywood productions
of A Clear and Present Danger (AC&PD) and Traffic, followed by HBOs original series,
The Wire. What this article provides is an examination of how, through select cultural
performances such as these, we see knowledge being built, knowledge that, in its most
mediated forms, is ill-conceived as an emptying of meaning from social lives (or a break
between the real and the image) but rather, like all modes of knowledge, typically imports
dense but inadequate meanings into those lives (Wynne, 1996: 60).
A CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER

Based on the popular Tom Clancy (1990) novel, A Clear and Present Danger (AC&PD),
begins with the discovery of the murder of a wealthy banker/personal friend of the President
and his family in the South Carribean. The film, from the start, is framed fundamentally in
terms of the individual agent. Clancys hero, Jack Ryan (Harrison Ford), is called in by CIA
Director Admiral James Greer (James Earl Jones) to solve the murder. Ryan quickly links
the murder to the structural contexts of international drug trafficking, money laundering,
developing narco-states, and the Cali Cartel. The President, personally enraged by his
friends death, tells National Security Advisor James Cutter (Harris Yulin) that, although
he cannot publicly declare this, the drug cartels represent a clear and present danger to
the national security of the United States, marking the drug traffickers as national threats
and enemies, accentuating the peculiar collusiveness between drugs, national security,
and war.
The film is useful in depicting formally the manner in which different kinds of knowledge are accumulated and the complex stakes which sit center stage when these often
oppositional kinds of knowledge converge. For instance, after Ryans conversation with the
President, Cutter enlists the aid of CIA Director, Robert Ritter (Henry Czerny), who covertly
hires a renegade ex-patriot commando, Clark (Willem Dafoe), to conduct paramilitary
operations against the Cali Cartel in Colombia. This secret policy is classified Operation
Reciprocity, a euphemism which contains the retributive undertones and individualistic
framework of blame underlying the wounded personal and national identity expressed in
the Presidents initial anger. The President is portrayed throughout the film as conflating
personal sentiments with national concerns, combining these factors in one package as
a direct threat to the sovereign power of the USA. However, AC&PD poses this military
reorientation as problematic through the juxtaposition of knowledge. For this reason, it
marks a fundamental shift in popular mainstream drug war imagery of the period as it
launches not only an internal critique of US drug policy, but refers to the recursive character
of social practice where US international relations and foreign policy have contributed to
key configurations of the drug war.
This film creates this meaning through one main editing device: crosscutting. This
strategy creates a heterogenous space, depicting separate spatial events which are
occurring in time simultaneously. Although a foundational feature of classical continuity
editing, crosscutting nevertheless expresses the potential to push mainstream narrative
conventions: creating tension and suspense, building different kinds of knowledge. A
particularly powerful rhetorical device, crosscutting provides the viewer with information
that diegetically is not fully accessible to all characters. In such a manner, it mimics the
complex way in which various kinds of knowledge circulate in daily social practice among
various kinds of actors. In AC&PD, this editing strategy is instrumental to the creation of
narratives that counter the official version of events. When the newly promoted Ryan,
now acting CIA Deputy Director (in place of the ailing Greer), goes before the Senate to
request anti-drug funds to help the Colombians fight the drug war, this scene is intercut
with American troops being dropped into the Colombian countryside. As the unknowing
Ryan gives the Senate his word that this funding will take the form of supply and advice
only with no covert military action, one senator reminds him of a similar situation and its
escalation two decades ago with a little known country in Southeast Asia, a reference to
Vietnam. These scenes are framed in opposition and followed by the renegade Carter
sending Cutter a congratulatory email, saying, Youve got your own little war. This
brief series of scenes establishes the convention through which the film problematizes
military involvement in the war on drugs, a problematization that depends upon audience
awareness of a discursive gap, an ironic tension deriving from the different kinds of
knowledge that are given expression in different contexts.
As Ryan slowly unravels the depth of corruption and involvement of the Presidents
administration in this foreign war, he visits Greer in the hospital and relates his disgust
at this insidious aspect of his new political knowledge. As the former deputy director
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lies on his deathbed, he tells Ryan, You took an oath, if you recall, when you first came
to work for me, and I dont mean to the National Security Advisor of the United States,
and I dont mean to the President. You gave your word to his boss. You gave your word
to the people of the United States and your word is who you are. Ryan is clearly marked
here by the film as the bearer of national identity as the torch is passed from Greer to
Ryan in a manner that will prove essential to the closing of the gap. In perhaps the most
crucial symbolic series of scenes in terms of national identity, the covert operations troops
are sacrificed to the cartel and decimated in the jungle in segments which are crosscut
with the funeral of James Greer. The President delivers Greers eulogy, describing how
he devoted his life to his country and family, a man of knowledge, honesty, integrity,
and courage. He adds, never at all was he deluded in thinking one man could solve the
ills of the world. Greer was part of a unit, dedicated to the preservation of the ideals
of his nation, all of which is narrated over the ambush of American troops while Ryan
silently grieves at Greers graveside. The sequence evokes a powerful double image of the
symbolic death of America through the corruption of its ideals and principles at home
in the highest political offices, while simultaneously marking Ryan, individually, as the
remaining body of the state.
It is here that the official and hidden plots of the film begin to intersect through a
convergence of different kinds of knowledge. In a tense confrontation, Ryan presents
Ritter with evidence of his corrupt behavior, to which Ritter replies that the world is not
black and white, but gray the gap exposed. Ryan responds with disinterest in this
distinction, as he is more concerned with the difference between right and wrong. At
this point, his ineptitude and idealistic oversight are reclaimed as the lost moral aspects of
American national identity. Ryan is made potent again, as he returns to Colombia, enlists
Clarks help, buys a helicopter, and rescues the remaining American soldiers imprisoned by
the Cali cartel. Ryan makes a successful return home and confronts the President with his
own involvement in the undercover operations. The film concludes with Ryan beginning
his testimony of the truth at Senate hearings a maneuver which is indicative of the
closing of a discursive gap that is again also reflexive, both reintroducing and reaffirming
legitimacy in state power.
It is through AC&PDs use of crosscutting for ironic purposes that the film challenges,
albeit in an inevitably compromised manner, the dominant discourse of drug demonization.
In its juxtaposition of official and covert stories of the war on drugs, conventional lines
between heroes and villains are blurred as it becomes evident that members of the
Presidents administration are manipulating the war to suit their own ends. Appearing
at the essential conclusion of the Bush administrations declared War on Drugs, the film
represents the ways in which, culturally, drug discourse was already being revised through
reflexive strategies surrounding the gaps that perpetually occur in the conjugation of
structure and agency. However, because these frames assume an official versus a real
covert narrative, larger issues concerning the relationship between structure and agency
are conveniently redirected. Part of this alteration occurs through one of Clancys favorite
plot devices: the crisis of credibility experienced by the post-Cold War American state.
Amidst a late modern, increasingly global context, drugs become useful benchmarks
for exploring (and exploiting) the pervasive feelings of anxiety, trauma, and insecurity
which attend discussions of state borders and sovereignty (Giddens, 1990; Beck, 1992;
Bauman, 1998; Girling et al., 1999; Garland, 2001). As the film illustrates, the states
punitive and militant faces appear in their most extreme invocations when the state is
most vulnerable (in President Moffatts words, What do these drug dealers think? That
were powerless?) and, more significantly, are likely in social contexts where individualism
is privileged in the negotiation of discursive gaps.
In such a society, we approach a fundamental aporia an absence in the cultural vocabulary which in its most troubling moments exposes the states increasing deligitimacy
while simultaneously facilitating its expanding authority through a culturally produced
nostalgia that demands, in the face of failure, more direct, responsive, immediate, individualized action (Garland, 2001). In such a conflicted and contradictory setting, discursive
gaps are closed through the preservation of the nation/state often through the heroics of
a single individual. Consequently, in AC&PD, exposure, disruption, and the alteration of
drug war discourse are at best tentative. The film is never thoroughly able to question the
legitimacy of drug demonization, as it resorts to this same drug imagery to motivate plot
conflicts, pitting the singularly good against the singularly evil. And in keeping with this,
the film can never fully abandon the military metaphors which have so restricted the public debate about drugs. Rather, in the storys conclusion, as Ryan rescues American hostages, the film provides a space for the military re-enactment of classic American frames
of captivity and rescue, facilitating the reclaiming of a lost individualized masculinity and
national identity in the war on drugs.
TRAFFIC
Traffic is a film that emerges from the ironies and ambiguities of previous drug war
representations. Fraught with fundamental contradictions, it is a narrative which, like its
predecessors, is caught within the constraints of structure and a stubborn insistence upon
individual agency, but effectively utilizes these contradictions to expose the social impacts
of these very limits. This critique is situated within the formal structure of the film itself
(similarly to AC&PD) as it maps the invisible holistics of a war on drugs, its networks of
ever-expanding inter-relationships, through a tight mingling of multiple plot lines. Traffic
invokes and popularizes a narrative strategy (now apparent in films like Crash, Syriana,
and Babel) built around a large complex cast of characters all of whom are presented as
human and thus flawed rather than solely good or evil. Soderberghs filtered, often overexposed viewpoints cue us to the complex lives of his characters amidst intersections in
the global dimensions of the circulation of labor, law, power, and capital implicit in the
drug trade, where geographic location (and narrative exigesis) is mapped through color
the arid, pale yellows of Mexico; the cold, sickly grey-blues of Washington and Cincinnati;
the effusive, tropical schemes of San Diego. This complex configuration is, surprisingly,
easily transferred from Alistair Reids 1989 British mini-series (Traffik broadcast in the
USA on Masterpiece Theatre) which mapped the migration of heroin from Turkey to
Europe, a transplantation which emphasizes drug trafficking as a useful metanarrative in
a contemplation of boundaries.
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In its American incarnation, a film where main characters pass each other at busy
intersections in Tijuana, Mexico City, San Diego, Cincinnati, Washington, DC, and the
USA/Mexico border, crossings become the central gesture in the films most ambitious
project, the incorporation of the trajectories of numerous individual lives and deaths into
one larger social narrative that transcends geopolitical boundaries. This use of borders
as the films essential framing device is a crucial theoretical maneuver in that whereas
the frontier implies a state center and a unidirectional movement of power, borders are
permeable, perpetually being traversed, and thus tend to have a decentering effect. Here,
in the transition between different times and space, identity becomes suddenly more
fluid a transformation which affords strategical analytical possibilities, a means through
which to situate notions of difference and agency within larger structures of power and
knowledge. Akin to AC&PDs crosscutting strategies, these border crossings permit the
accumulation of different kinds of knowledge and experience in connection with the War
on Drugs. However, Soderberghs purpose is not really to tell a story of difference but
rather to create the quintessential narrative of the War on Drugs, a feat which the film
effectively achieves, but not without invoking its own set of problematics.
The failure of the drug war, the films main discursive objective, is mapped primarily
through the exposure of how this war is being fought, who is caught up within it, and
why. The wars main strategical centers are spread out across border zones local, state,
federal, military, and international law enforcement jurisdictions their success dependent
upon a complicated information exchange system built upon informants, secrets, and
betrayal. Information is deeply dangerous in its absence of sharedness and its false
manipulation and constitutes a key device in the management and exploitation of
discursive gaps. During an early scene in the film, one DEA agent is shot and an entire
undercover operation compromised when local San Diego police arrive in the midst of a
complicated, tense DEA bust, with neither side aware of the others plan for mobilization.
In another narrative strand, the man being prepped by the USA for Mexicos drug czar
position, General Arturo Salazar (Tomas Milian) of the National Drug Force, is exposed as
deeply corrupt, the political front man for a Mexican drug cartel lord, assumed dead
and the USA, specifically through the platitudes and policies of the new drug czar, has
simply facilitated one cartel (Juarez-based) over another (in Tijuana). Most relentless of all
is Soderberghs insistence upon the structural tautology of militaristic or political means to
achieve any headway as the Juarez cartel is eventually dismantled after the exposure of
corruption, the Obregon brothers in Tijuana are brought back into business, and General
Salazar found in his own seat of torture at the end of the film. Official, economic, and
underground forces converge in individual actions and social practices which effectively
reproduce the structures supporting both the war on drugs and the drug trade.
Ultimately told from the point of view of individual actors, the films effectiveness relies
a good deal on its ability to build a structural narrative through empathetic, individualized
characters. These actors bear the conventional markers of a classic heroism: the lonely
stoicism of Tijuana police officer Javier Rodriguez (Benicio Del Toro); the mobile; idealistic
Judge Wakefield (Michael Douglas); the relentlessly perseverant DEA Agent Montel Gordon
(Don Cheadle). Among the films finer points, these qualities are distributed fairly evenly
across characters, including those whose morality is less admirable, but at times, clearly
understandable: Francisco Flores (Clifton Collins, Jr.) and Eduardo Ruiz (Miguel Ferrer)
the tortured assassin and the duped dealer/informant; Helena Ayala (Catherine ZetaJones), who, in order to protect her family and way of life, quickly becomes a self-made
entrepreneur in the trade herself; and the elite child of privilege, Seth Abrahams (Topher
Grace), responsible for introducing Wakefields daughter to drugs, who demonstrates
an intense acuity of the drug wars role in the maintenance of social order and political
economies. Among such blurred moral and geopolitical boundaries, within the framework
of war, everyone becomes a casualty and yet, as the films tagline insists, no one gets
away clean. The lines between victim and perpetrator are perpetually problematized
and this, from Traffics perspective, is why the drug war cannot be won. It is also why
the film is a more effective engagement of agency-centered approaches to structural
contradictions than its predecessor, AC&PD, precisely because it foregrounds the manner
in which discursive gaps are constant tensions, always in play. Most interestingly, this
knowledge of failure is held by all who participate in the war, a sense of defeatism they
must perpetually deny or resist and a sense of futility which accompanies the recursive
character of social action in late modernity. This complex sense of noble action in the
midst of futility is indicative of a tight structural relationship where individual actors find
their actions compromised daily through a very real cultural ambivalence in the USA where
drugs are widely used and produced, prohibited and celebrated.
In this respect, it is not surprising that Soderbergh concedes his narrative to a
recuperative framework that ultimately is consistent with the cautious manner in which
American cinema has treated issues of social justice, particularly since the 1970s, a general
tendency in representation toward what Austin Sarat (2001: 243) calls a criminologically
conservative cultural politics. In the end, Soderbergh cannot resist the temptation to situate
the drug war within a structure of recovery (medically and politically) and responsibility.
Drugs may ultimately be a public health problem in Traffic, but all drug war actors are
understandable and redeemable, especially if misdirectedly engaging in a lost battle. In
this manner, Soderbergh mobilizes the war metaphor himself to an extent by invoking
its frames to save his heroes. And he does this through the same cultural iconography of
state crisis as AC&PD an exposure of deligitimacy which nonetheless is resurrected on
individual terms. In such a framework, reintegration and rehabilitation are easily mobilized
as essential theoretical companions to war discourse, emerging as elements of vindication,
counterpoint, and individualized justice. Soderbergh permits his favorite characters to
achieve this kind of self-justification in the final scenes of the film: DEA Agent Montel
Gordon plants his surveillance device in Carl Ayalas study in a dramatic performance
of masculine confrontation and walks away smiling, his partners death in some sense
avenged; Judge Wakefield risks the savage spaces of the black inner city to rescue his
daughter, resigns his position, and, no longer the absent father, accepts his patriarchal
role in the appropriate domestic space of the family; and the Mexican cop-turnedinformant Javier Rodriguez succeeds in bringing prevention and vision to his troubled
community in the form of baseball, all in an anonymous, lonely silence. In Rodriguez, a
rather Americanized hero emerges again, across borders, through the re-enactment of
various kinds of metaphoric captivities and rescues, finding a provisional peace through
fleeting incorporations and resistances to cultural understandings of masculinity, race, and
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sovereignty. Actors who have all chosen to act alone against institutions find themselves
through small decisions both revising and reproducing social practices that add up to a
perpetuation of a seemingly endless war.
I point to these twists and turns not to condemn or complicate Traffics political and
cinematic contribution (which I feel is important), but rather to direct attention to how
discursive gaps in understandings of agency and structure underpin and often facilitate
drug war representations. The films critical and commercial success can be read as
indicative of its successful invocation of deeply-held American values and moral systems
against a sophisticated engagement of the very contradictions contained within these
frameworks. The familiar, essential markers of American individualism masculinity, race,
and heroism are reinvented in the films complicated deconstruction and recuperation of
drug war metaphors. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Soderberghs decision to play
the war back to us from the perspective of the individual the most effective narrative
device in American discourse and then contextualize that individualism in the aggregate,
collective we of an increasingly apparent global community, bound together structurally
through the illicit trafficking of drugs.
Beyond this, Traffics images are tied to a complex, growing material structural reality
an unprecedented expansion of the US penal system, widespread apparentness of unequal
sentencing structures, staggering racial disproportionality all primarily patterned through
the enforcement of a war on drugs and its accompanying punitiveness (Beckett, 1997;
Duster, 1997; Mauer, 1999; Garland, 2001). The films very production is possible only
through such a stark sociological actuality. In the end, Soderberghs networks are so
encompassing and so vast that the audience sees its own fatigue and resignation in the
familiar lifeless rhetoric of drug war policy as Judge Wakefield haltingly recites,
The war on drugs is a war that we have to win and a war that we can win. [Pause]
We have to win this war to save our countrys most precious resource, our children.
[Longer pause] Protecting these children must be priority number one. [Pause] There
has been progress and there has been failure. But where we have fallen short, I see not
a problem. [Pause] I see an opportunity. [Longer pause] An opportunity to correct the
mistakes of the past, while laying a foundation for the future. This takes not only new
ideas, but perseverance. [Pause] This takes not only resources, but courage. [Pause] This
takes not only government, but families. [Pause] Ive laid out at [voice breaks] Ive
laid out a 10-point plan that [very long pause)]
I cant do this.
If there is a war on drugs, then many of our family members are the enemy. And I
dont know how you wage war on your own family [left hanging]
Wakefields speech mimics a prodigious popular and critical literature that dominates
the debate concerning the historicizing of the war on cocaine at this time, one whose
fundamental theme is a similar futility, framed by the official absence of either social justice (Duke and Gross, 1993; Baum, 1996; Gray, 1998) or, oppositionally, a clear national
commitment to a full-scale war for moral character (Kelling, 1996; Bennett et al., 1999). In
the wake of this popular discourse, Traffic appears, at first glance, to effectively complete the
cycle of representation that has followed the war on cocaine. It emphasizes the dense moral
ambiguity, deepening public mistrust, and attendant discursive gaps in the understanding
of social relations that undergird war rhetoric. It mobilizes individual actors across multiple
story-lines which all converge in a metanarrative of structure to effect this ambiguity. Then,
after a critique of the battle itself, it makes a recursive compromise by saving all who are
caught up in the war effort through a complex set of identity politics built upon the seduction
of recuperation and reproduction.
THE WIRE
The Wire is
about whats been left behind in America. Its not about good guys and bad guys. We
wanted to be subversive to the extent that you think youre watching a show about
whether theyre going to get the bad guy or not but by the time you get to the end of
the show the idea of a good guy has less meaning than you thought it did and whether
or not they catch him is not the point. The point is the system is dysfunctional. (Simon
and Pelecanos, 2004)
In the study of the political economics of media ownership, debates have focused
upon the manner in which forces of integration, conglomeration, and concentration of
ownership have served to homogenize media outlets and limit production opportunities
through extensive corporate structures, thus reducing diversity and alternative or independent approaches in representation. In such a context, fears circulate concerning the
growing inability of a corporatized media to serve as an effective democratic institution
(McChesney, 1999; Chomsky, 2002). From this perspective, the media are often conceived
of as a singular institution and one that is distinctly overdetermined; yet, it would also
appear that the current economics of production have resulted in a variety of foreseeable
and unforeseeable practices, with complex social outcomes. These complexities include a
recycling of cultural performances through massive syndication and increasingly available
technology (DVD/VHS purchases and rentals; cable/satellite; TIVO) and the possibility in
some instances of a carefully regulated and channeled diversification of media programing,
whose modes and content are reflective of a carefully researched niche audience. The
proliferation and diversification of the mass media permit, in some instances somewhat
ironically, and certainly not without compromise, the creation of niche markets which can
risk divergent narrative lines and experimental programming. In this instance, television is
envisioned not as a passive space, but a provocative one. It is also a space characterized in
many ways precisely by its recursiveness.
Films like Traffic and AC&PD can be seen routinely, in cycles, due to the advent of
cable/satellite television, envisioned as an alternative to the big three networks, and now
constituting well over 300 networks, many of whom have created authentic innovations
in programming content. In such media worlds, directed toward niche audiences and
streamed through repetition and syndication, movies, television series, and individual
episodes circulate and recur across visual culture prolifically. The Wire emerges out of
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precisely such a context, programming that is considered groundbreaking, experimental,

and can be seen repetitively by a subscribing niche audience or a purchasing audience
through DVD box sets of entire seasons. Because of its episodic structure, its subscription
audience, and its repetitive play, The Wire is able to do very different things than either
Traffic or AC&PD. David Simon, the shows executive producer, fought to create a program that would both exceed and violate conventional parameters of the police procedural
through a complex series of plot lines, developed carefully across a full season with a
clear institutional focus and a complex and extensive cast of characters. This sort of
understanding is central to The Wire itself, a show about people and institutions and
the ways in which our identities, our relationships to institutions inevitably compromise us
(Simon and Pelecanos, 2004). In fact, the possibility of any narrative at all depends upon an
understanding of the relational. For these reasons, The Wire is a program directed nearly
entirely at the analysis of social networks mapped across institutional contradictions. It
is specifically about the nature of institutions in modern culture and how individuals
are affected by modern institutions they serve or are supposed to serve them with a
side argument about the efficacy of the drug war (Simon and Pelecanos, 2004). This
institutional focus is apparent across the various core narratives of each season: Season 1
focuses upon the institutional contradictions and bureaucratic constraints of both law
enforcement and the drug trade; Season 2 takes as its subject the death of work in the
Baltimore ports and shipping yards; the third and most recent season uses the city again as
a vortex through which to examine the nature of reform through primarily political lenses,
including what would happen if one commander in one precinct in one American city
decided to surrender in the drug war (Simon and Pelecanos, 2004); Season 4 examines
the issue of urban educational reform through the lives of a group of street youths; the
fifth and final upcoming season will examine the role of the mass media in the Baltimore
drug war.
The kinds of questions which the program raises result in the necessary violation
of a number of key narrative conventions. First, a narrative which gives attention to
institutional contradictions requires both breadth and depth: The Wires key cast members
exceed 60 actors. Its concluding episodes are fundamentally open-ended and unresolved.
Primary characters are commonly killed off. And the show is intentionally overloaded with
information. Like the detectives themselves, the audience is forced to sift through an
onslaught of information garbage in order to make sense of things. Discursive gaps
frequent the plot structure: murders go unresolved, good, compassionate characters
are destroyed, and justice is always secondary. The narrative itself has such a complex
quality to its representations that it is virtually impossible to employ a single clip or episode
to depict a key concept or practice. It requires an entire season, and this precisely for
distinctly sociological reasons. Each character comes with a history and biography whose
accumulation creates meaning during a particular dramatic plot event and also adds a
perpetually recursive character to the plot itself, whose development builds from precisely
these kinds of intersections.
The show is particularly successful at rendering the binary constructions (which are
ultimately sustained in films like AC&PD) as profoundly and irrevocably blurred the world
of the war on drugs is a gray one. The show does this through a sophisticated parallel
editing structure which runs a story of the street and a story of low-level law enforcement
simultaneously and against one another. In the first season, we are introduced to the
main characters through this kind of juxtaposition where key characters are depicted side
by side as they face similar institutional dilemmas from opposing perspectives and sides
of the drug war. The series commences with the formation of a low-level narcotics unit
through political design (as opposed to real law enforcement concerns on the part of
administrators). The unit quickly expands to include several key characters, all pulled from
various levels of law enforcement (homicide, major case unit, narcotics, district attorneys
office, etc.) for different kinds of reasons, each with their own biography and concerns
for promotion, mobility, and, as the show routinely puts it, the capacity to do the job of
good policing. The political and institutional factors which feed into administrative chainof-command decision making (best seen in the characters of the Police Commissioner and
Deputy Commissioner of Operations) are juxtaposed against the realities of police work
in a manner which makes clear that good police work is institutionally impossible. In
these kinds of contexts, individual actors who have clear social justice orientations find
themselves running up against absent resources, bureaucratic limits, politics and the law.
This is highlighted at the conclusion of the first season where the hardly obtained wire
tap is dismantled for bureaucratic and political reasons just as the case is about to break
wide open. In Season 3, we witness the growth within police management of actuarial
technology against the perspective of a single precinct chief who decides to use his
discretion to regulate the underground drug economy through a harm reduction model.
He clears an entire block in the city for open drug sales, dramatically reducing the violence
associated with turf trade, but also ushering in his own demotion.
The street narrative, similar to the narcotics unit, primarily focuses upon one
organization, a crew of drug dealers headed by Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris) and his
partner, Stringer Bell (Idris Elba). The crew faces similar hierarchical problems in its attempt
to create an efficient, productive niche in the drug trade. Here, The Wire taps into one of
the definitive shifts in the organization of contemporary drug trade economies against the
backdrop of globalization. Unlike the centralized, hierarchical mafia structures of the past,
drug trafficking organizations are made up of actors who are more likely to be mapped
into global capital, organized by wealthy upper-level regulators with close proximity to
key political officials and diversified holdings which cover for drug markets. These actors,
having bought legitimacy and social acceptance, represent financial circuits and distribution
channels that span the globe specifically through drug exchange (Naim, 2005; Van
Schendel and Abraham, 2005). This has specific implications for the functional capacities
of local politics, which The Wire adeptly depicts, where good police work is restricted
precisely because of the manner in which the political urban machine is now caught in
complex webs of bribery and corruption largely through money flows undergirded by
drug trafficking. This is best exemplified by the character of Stringer Bell who deals drugs
through a variety of fronts (a night club, funeral home, copy shop), attends business
school at night, and systematically begins to invest in commercial properties across the city
and network with politicians and officials, a carefully thought-out strategy directed at the
accumulation of social and cultural capital.
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26
In its more compelling moments, the show depicts how mobility and escape, based
upon individual agency, out of the world of the drug trade, are virtually impossible due
to structural constraints. A particularly compelling example of this is the socialization of
low-level drug runners into the upper-level violence of the drug trade. In one of the shows
more poignant moments in Season 1, a key character, a project runner named Wallace,
attempts to relocate out of the game by moving to the country with his grandparents
after he is badly shaken by the brutal murder of a thief by his bosses. After a few weeks, he
returns to the projects where he explains to his boss that the only life he knows is project
life and the drug trade. In one of the shows more famous lines, he concludes his pitch by
opening his arms to the project buildings and insisting yo, this is me. At the conclusion of
the season, he is murdered by his best friends who suspect he is not simply an informant
but more significantly has become too soft for the drug trade. They are forced to kill him by
Bell and Barksdale who recognize that the youths must be bloody in order to move up in
the crew. In The Wire we routinely see the processes of internalized institutional violence,
of the development of an oppositional street culture, of how structural marginalization
relates to personal and psychological depression and self-worth (on both sides of the law),
and the effects and outcomes of an absence of cultural and symbolic capital.
Both law enforcement and the street are depicted as worlds in which those who are
particularly sensitive, observant, and attentive to the complex ways in which this violence
is reproduced, those who are informed by a sense of social justice, are precisely the individuals who will fail professionally (McNulty, the shows lead character, is demoted at
the end of Season 1 as are several other members of the narcotics unit) and personally
(most of the characters on the show have either transient relationships or find themselves
divorced). Most are inevitably corrupted in some manner (implications of which hang
over Major Daniels who is in charge of the wire tap and officers Carver and Hauk who
consider taking a cut out of money retrieved during a drug bust). In the face of resistance
to complicity, several are injured (detective Greggs) or murdered by their own (Wallace and
DAngelo Barksdale). Similar to Traffic, small individual acts of institutional resistance on
both sides of the law, grounded in compassion, are valorized, however futile, but, unlike
in Traffic, the futility now envelops all actors and an entire city and the show carefully
insists that these acts are not the source of direct political change. Rather, such futility is
precisely what happens to cities in a chronic war and is why, for Simon (2004), The Wire
is really the story of a post-industrial city, Baltimore, being told through the lenses of the
drug war. Through carefully drawn out cases, the show depicts the violence structurally
and interpersonally that occurs in these kinds of social settings and the complex manner in
which the institutional conjugates with the personal. The contradictions of social life persist,
as do the discursive gaps, but the knowledge constructed through The Wire foregrounds
the notion that these gaps are the structuring absences of late modernity.
DISCURSIVE GAP AS POSSIBILITY

Drug war representations thus constitute important sites from which to interrogate the
cultural conjugation of agency and structure. In the double movement of initial critique
and ultimate recuperation that Nicole Rafter (2006) presents as emblematic of Hollywood
crime films, we witness both the articulations, revisions, and reproductions of cultural
discourse as well as those moments when that discourse fails. In the recuperative framework, drug demonization serves a very powerful ideological objective by providing a single
point of explanation and blame for a vast variety of structural social problems, resulting in
what Reinarman and Levine (1997) call a form of sociological denial which leads, logically,
to social control and imprisonment rather than alternative drug policy models. In this
manner, the most basic premise of social science that individual choices are influenced
by social circumstances was rejected as left-wing ideology ( p. 37). Undoubtedly, the
majority of cultural representations in mainstream, contemporary popular culture still do
little more than reaffirm and perpetuate this ideology through the very ubiquity of the
drug user, addict, dealer, and trafficker as easy villains in familiar cultural mythologies.
As Judith Butler (2004) elaborates, these kinds of oppositional contexts insist upon an
irreconcilability that is, at heart, artificial where the framework for hearing presumes that
the one view nullifies the other ( p. 13). In such a context, explanation itself is suspect, as if
to explain these events would involve us in a sympathetic identification with the oppressor,
as if to understand these events would involve building a justificatory framework for them
(p. 8). Both kinds of frames limit discussions of the origins of violence and the cultural
conditions necessary to produce them. The problematic outcome of this type of imagery is
the denial of complex social and cultural contexts and the constriction of possibilities in the
realm of alternative US drug policies. Significantly, this denial reinforces a critical absence
in the American cultural vocabulary, a discursive gap in fundamental understandings of
the relationship between individuals and structure, at precisely the point where alternative
frameworks for understanding drugs might arise. But, I would argue, in locating the gap
within this massive social contradiction, a useful, albeit provisional, analytical window
appears in the tension between how we live and what our culture allows us to say, a site
from which we might begin to hope for the reappropriation of a common language in
which those dilemmas can be discussed (Bellah, 1986: vii).
From such a perspective, social denial and its cultural logics are not impermeable nor
invulnerable, as the complex ongoing contests which undergird culture always prove.
There is ample evidence in mainstream representation of complicating tendencies in
the presentation of drug discourse: largely (and surprisingly) because the presence of
discursive gaps is inherently troubling and demands attention, particularly as genres evolve,
conventions become subject to revision, and alternative narrative structures emerge.
As images approach ahistorical status, the very denial of their social context pushes
production into a confrontation with the complexity of reality, providing the possibility for
the emergence of a film like Traffic or a series like The Wire after a long cycle of easy cultural
demonization. Culturally, then, these images of drug wars, their warriors and enemies are
perpetually problematized by the very vocabularies and logics that sustain them. For these
reasons, discursive gaps serve as strategical research sites in cultural and criminological
analysis; sites where poverty, inequality, sovereignty, and criminality are continuously
conjugated across late modernity through representations which reveal how we work
through the troubled place of the social. In the case of drug discourse, it is through the lens
of individualism that A Clear and Present Danger and Traffic teach us wars futilities. It is
27
28
also through this lens that they always teach us of its possibility, its beckoning promise of
vindication and justice, but only on individual, never social terms. These representations find
themselves teetering precariously, on the verge of an awareness that radical individualism
as a language obscures the fact that we find ourselves not independently of other people
and institutions but through them (Bellah, 1986: 84). As complex and contradictory as
that path may be, it is one worth taking one which imposes a relentless confrontation
with the kinds of cultural ambiguity that, as in The Wire, introduce intractable narrative
tensions and open up discursive gaps that cannot be easily closed off. In this way, visions
of change and alternative possibilities as much as the politics of stasis and prohibition are
built into attempts at discursive closings, which are always caught in a double gesture,
reaffirming and denying, damning and redeeming.
Notes
I would like to thank Bruce Hoffman, Barbara Klinger, Steve Rubinstein, Lynn Chancer, and the CMC
editorial staff and reviewers, including Chris Greer and Yvonne Jewkes, for their insightful comments
on earlier drafts of this article. And a special note of thanks to CMC Editor, Jeff Ferrell, for his
intellectual mentorship and support.
1 Drug Czar Cancels Misleading Drugs and Terrorism Ad Campaign, 3 April 2003. Available
at the Drug Policy Alliance website: http://www.drugpolicy.org/news/pressroom/pressrelease/
pr040303.cfm.
2 Drug Users Demonized by Hurricane Coverage, 9 September 2005. Available at the Drug Policy
Alliance website: http://www.drugpolicy.org/news/090905hurricane.cfm.
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MICHELLE BROWN, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology,

Ohio University, Athens, USA. Email: brownm3@ohio.edu
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Mapping discursive closings in the war on drugs

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MICHELLE BROWN, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology,

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