Jason Pine

Meth alchemists all over the United States tap the occulted potencies of industrial chemical and big pharma products to try to cure the ills of precarious living: underemployment, insecurity, and the feeling of idleness. Meth fires up your attention and makes repetitive tasks pleasurable, whether it’s factory work or tinkering at home. Users are awake for days and feel exuberant and invincible. In one person’s words, they “get more life.”

The Alchemy of Meth is a nonfiction storybook about St. Jude County, Missouri, a place in decomposition, where the toxic inheritance of deindustrialization meets the violent hope of this drug-making cottage industry. The book is based on fieldwork among meth cooks, recovery professionals, pastors, public defenders, narcotics agents, and pharmaceutical executives. Here, St. Jude is not reduced to its meth problem but Pine looks at meth through materials, landscapes, and institutions: the sprawling context that makes methlabs possible. The Alchemy of Meth connects DIY methlabs to big pharma’s superlabs, illicit speed to the legalized speed sold as ADHD medication, uniquely implicating the author’s own story in the narrative.

By the end of the book, the backdrop of St. Jude becomes the foreground. It could be a story about life and work anywhere in the United States, where it seems no one is truly clean and all are complicit in the exploitation of their precious resources in exchange for a livable present—or even the hope of a future.

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-alchemy-of-meth

Un libro che racconta in presa diretta quel mondo di confine dove la tradizionale arte di arrangiarsi finisce nelle fitte trame della malavita. Dal 1998 al 2011 Jason Pine, newyorkese, ha condotto la sua indagine sul campo, vivendo fianco a fianco con i maggiori protagonisti della scena neomelodica campana (cantanti, compositori, giornalisti, impresari) e condividendo la loro quotidianità tra case discografiche, emittenti pirata e feste private (matrimoni, battesimi, comunioni). Per penetrare la facciata folklorica che i protagonisti spesso volutamente offrono a questo «forestiero», l’autore diventa «uno di loro», in veste di regista di videoclip musicali e di pubblicità per le reti locali, associandosi a un boss-impresario. È così che, imparando a decifrare l’universo linguistico, gestuale e valoriale dell’ambiente, Pine ricostruisce il groviglio di legami e interessi che innerva quella zona di contatto tra marginalità sociale e criminalità organizzata, in cui centinaia di giovani sono disposti a scendere a compromessi con la camorra per inseguire un’opportunità di successo, convinti che non esistano alternative e attratti dall’assenza dei vincoli di un lavoro subordinato. In quella zona grigia, in cui Pine stesso gioca una parte ambigua, come i personaggi che osserva, le cosiddette economie formali, informali e illecite si ingarbugliano e l’arte di arrangiarsi, travalicando il semplice «tirare a campare», diventa una strategia di autodeterminazione per sfuggire, attraverso la creatività, alle prospettive di una vita precaria offerte dall’economia politica dominante.

“In Naples, there are more singers than there are unemployed people.” These words echo through the neomelodica music scene, a vast undocumented economy animated by wedding singers, pirate TV, and tens of thousands of fans throughout southern Italy and beyond. In a city with chronic unemployment, this setting has attracted hundreds of aspiring singers trying to make a living—or even a fortune. In the process, they brush up against affiliates of the region’s violent organized crime networks, the camorra. In The Art of Making Do in Naples, Jason Pine explores the murky neomelodica music scene and finds himself on uncertain ground.

The “art of making do” refers to the informal and sometimes illicit entrepreneurial tactics of some Neapolitans who are pursuing a better life for themselves and their families. In the neomelodica music scene, the art of making do involves operating do-it-yourself recording studios and performing at the private parties of crime bosses. It can also require associating with crime boss-impresarios who guarantee their success by underwriting it with extortion, drug trafficking, and territorial influence. Pine, likewise “making do,” gradually realized that the completion of his ethnographic work also depended on the aid of forbidding figures.

The Art of Making Do in Naples offers a riveting ethnography of the lives of men who seek personal sovereignty in a shadow economy dominated, in incalculable ways, by the camorra. Pine navigates situations suffused with secrecy, moral ambiguity, and fears of ruin that undermine the anthropologist’s sense of autonomy. Making his way through Naples’s spectacular historic center and outer slums, on the trail of charmingly evasive neomelodici singers and unsettlingly elusive camorristi, Pine becomes a music video director and falls into the orbit of a shadowy music promoter who may or may not be a camorra affiliate.

Pine’s trenchant observations and his own improvised attempts at “making do” provide a fascinating look into the lives of people in the gray zones where organized crime blends into ordinary life.

Recent works by Steven Soderbergh present a symptomatology of contemporary economic culture in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. These films follow the peculiarities of the present crisis and what it feels like to inhabit a fraught economic culture. More specifically, Soderbergh pays close attention to the overinvestment of the self in vocation—what we are calling vocational embodiment—for the production of value that is never quite materialized and never quite paid out. In these films, the main protagonists embody future states of their own imagining, promises of self-realization that lead them to unwittingly enact their own subjectivization.

There are no real ends, not on gravel roads that somewhere become something else like rocks and pond-size puddles and brooks, nor on mountain ascents where there is always another ascent that appears just when you make your way to a place of rest, nor in valleys where the distances dilate as you labor over grassy hummocks or green-daubed lava rock, never have you imagined so much moss and rock.

Popular cynicism toward formal late liberal economies and a paradoxical will to believe in the incredible ignites discontent and turns it into possibilist fervor. This fusion of hope and hopelessness is a joint performance between, on the one hand, the fantastically wealthy and powerful, such as organized crime affiliates, business elites and politicians, and on the other hand, workaday people who decide to believe in the possibilities embodied by the former. The widespread circulation of empty signifiers, fraudulent narratives, doubly fictitious financial instruments, and innumerable fake goods has accreted in a counterfeit aesthetics, a popular sense of one’s personal access to the operations that make possible and legitimate any social distinction and therefore to the political economic reality those distinctions are meant to signify.

As a transformational object (Bollas 1979), “the mafia” bears people’s projected desires for something in the future that will transform the present. “The mafia,” is evocative and alluring because it holds for people who come into contact with affiliates the possibility for success and wealth. “It” embodies, here and now, the realization of future dreams. In Campania, crime clan affiliates are particularly ostentatious, performing prepotency and supremacy through overt violence, conspicuous consumption and grand gestures of celebrity. These figures enact a hyperbole. They make the hyperbole plausible, and even make it feel possible, for people who are in their thrall.

This is like hope, but hope exasperated: the feeling of a better life to come, despite everything, the same feeling that keeps the production and consumption of meth on schedule. This industry of hope is an earlier form of industry turned inside out.

The worst was when the alarm went off, which was often, at first, because his body wanted to reject the foreign object. Information repeatedly leaked out. Although it had become a familiar presence in the house, the device had a knack for announcing itself again and again, and at the most infelicitous moments.

Allegories are alluring because they promise to light up inchoate objects, trace unimagined connections, and resolve ambiguities and paradoxes of human—and more-than-human and abiotic—life. At the same time, allegories reveal their own failure to cohere, disintegrating in the excessive polysemia of their heterogeneous fragments. Meth cooking similarly throws into relief the unstable composition of a life. Meth cooking is an aporia: it leads the way out of workaday failures while lapsing back into them.

A sacred art and a country-kitchen tradition. This is a perverse way of describing home meth-manufacture, but really it isn’t. For one, “ordinary” working-class country living and cooking in the so-called American heartland rarely resembles the pastoral
that more cosmopolitan types might imagine it to be—just as urban cosmopolitanism is a phantom a half-hour north, in Ferguson. The country kitchen is laced with leaching heavy metals and industrial chemicals that are pervasive in “Middle American” consumer products that populate country, suburb, and city alike, from foods to cooking tools, to countertop, table, and floor.

Fired up and looking for somewhere to go, the tweaker plants his tweak in a task. Inspired and interested, she forages and burrows and hoards in rhythmic perpetuity. Stereotypy. When it’s aimed at the job—roofing, cement, assembly line, foundry—things can finally work out well. With your strong back and weak mind you can work longer. Finally, beyond what dulls, something good feels within reach.

In the 1980s, another popular Neapolitan vocal music scene emerged that today thrives in a position of ambiguous alterity to the once-dominant “traditional” music industry that thrived in the decades before and after the turn of the 20th century. La canzone neomelodica, or neo-melodic song, is produced, distributed, performed and consumed in an alternative political economic culture, where the so-called formal, informal and illicit economies overlap. The neomelodica music scene constitutes an alternative music industry that encompasses a range of affective-aesthetic sensibilities and economic practices that cause friction with dominant attitudes in Naples regarding “Neapolitan culture” and dominant aesthetic and economic norms performed by the mainstream Italian music industry and its publics.

As an anthropologist who has conducted several years of ethnographic research in Naples in the contact zone where organized crime and ordinary everyday life meet, I find Roberto Saviano’s book Gomorrah at once courageous, insightful and extremely problematic. It is an ethnographically rich document of one person’s struggle to speak the unspeakable. It is also an epic tale of perdition that risks ghetto branding the Italian ‘South’. Both of these dimensions of Gomorrah are perilously sustained by the book’s overwhelming mass-mediated commercial success.

“I thought I was getting more life,” writes a recovering methamphetamine addict on a blog dedicated to the drug. Ice, Glass, Tina, Crystal, Crank, Poor Man’s Crack, Black Beauties, Tweak, P, and the Diligence Drug — these are all names for speed. It is a relatively cheap yet cherished substance that, with the utmost efficiency, floods the brain with dopamine: one hit and for up to twelve hours you are overwhelmed with unprecedented euphoria and energy, alertness and alacrity, and sexual stamina. You get more life.

This paper tracks how difficult material conditions are lived on the level of affect among ordinary underemployed families engaged in the locally named practice “the art of making do” in the contact zone where the informal and illicit economies meet. This zone is where tens of thousands of ordinary underemployed Neapolitans and the camorra, Naples’ powerful and diffuse organized crime networks participate in a shared, albeit volatile, affective community. Affect is a pre-personal experience of intensity, the ability to affect or be affected. Affective community in Naples is less an identity or organization than it is a synergy, event or practice. It is experienced as a blend of fear, recognition and tolerance through the phenomena of contact, complicity and conspiracy.

I've been studying mosses in Iceland. Their nonvascular, aquatic ca­paciousness, their interstitial insistence, the wound-binding work they perform on a world while themselves hovering at the boundary layer between life and death.1 Mosses pioneer where there is only nonlife and death. Other life follows, some of it bound for disappearance.

The designs that narcotics agents found on Meth Mountain were, in fact, part of a scenography, a re-composition of late industrial ruins for staging another mode of existence.  A meth cook is a demiurge, a late industrial alchemist, who hastens the work of postnature, where human and chemical species take up shared non/living arrangements on uncertain ground.

There are no real ends, not on gravel roads that somewhere become something else like rocks and pond-size puddles and brooks, nor on mountain ascents where there is always another ascent that appears just when you make your way to a place of rest, nor in valleys where the distances dilate as you labor over grassy hummocks or green-daubed lava rock, never have you imagined so much moss and rock.

O’Connell’s paintings reframe a familiar aesthetic worlding, a distribution of the sensible that has made the desire for industrial chemicals a quotidian intoxication for shoppers as they amble about the new town square.

These late industrial consumer landscapes – what O’Connell calls one of the last public places – reorder the sense of the world, distracting shoppers from the ecological and bodily injury perpetrated by the chemical industrial apparatus that makes ordinary Walmart shopping possible.

This essay is about desire, compulsion, and bodies. It is my attempt to re-evoke the experiences of methamphetamine users, producers, and user-producers living in the rural midwestern United States and to make them uncanny. When something is uncanny, it has the effect of being both strange and familiar. But what do rural, severely marginalized, intoxicated people have in common with "us;' the urban or suburban. the educated, adequately employed, and sufficiently sober, the "mainstream"? This essay argues that it is possible to trace the excesses and intensities lived by rural midwestern meth users and cooks to a broader field of forces felt in multiple worlds, affecting not only the "abject" rural poor but also enfranchised urbanites and many others.

Paying attention to the unique ways people in an underground music scene in Naples use video teaches the ethnographer to pay closer attention to his own use of video while in the field. Experiences in Naples demonstrate that the digital video camera, when it is used to document “reality,” ultimately misrecognizes it as footage, artifactualizing it (Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, 1998). In the Neapolitan contexts described here, video emerges as a far more effective ethnographic tool when it is used to mediate “live” social entanglements on both sides of the lens (Pink, 2006).

In this chapter, I use Adorno and Horkheimer's culture industry concept to examine potent dissenting cultural productions within culture industry. These 'alternative cultural productions ' usually only receive attention in mainstream public discourse when culture industry attempts to incorporate or criminalize them (Hebdige 1979). Moreover, the attention they receive is confined to the level of representation, where their political potential appears as 'legible.' But alternative cultural productions, like those of dominant culture industry, have potencies that remain unregistered in such accounts.

Below I focus not on aesthetic representations of neomelodica music and narcocorridos, but on the aesthetic contours of the social relations that are elaborated in neomelodica and narcocorrido
performance. My goal is not to determine whether these musics are tools of transnational organized crime (TOC), but to suggest a preliminary step towards making such determinations. Instead, I wish to trace some of the unregistered political potential of alternative cultural production that may be available to affiliates of TOC seeking to achieve cultural hegemony across transnational publics. In order to trace political phenomena that exceed static representations, I suggest as a framing device the notion of a dynamic 'alternative culture industry.'

Jason Pine (The Alchemy of Meth) joins Jessa to discuss the invisibility of America's drug crisis. Pine spent a year in Missouri to research his book on the overwhelming presence of meth, an extremely common and yet almost entirely invisible issue. But this is also a conversation about creativity under late capitalism, the health care crisis, and exploitation vs representation.

https://jessacrispin.libsyn.com/website/red-state-culture-with-jason-pine

The Alchemy of Meth, to me, is really about the second part of the title, A Decomposition. It is steeped in the materials of meth making, but it is also an alibi for talking about decomposition in the United States in its multiple forms, including the disintegration of the American Dream, which has had a very long toxic half-life.

America is currently experiencing an explosion of analysis and commentary, trying to make sense of the astonishing events since November 8. I suspect there is no skeleton key that unlocks the secret of the election’s outcome, no single factor to ground some grand unified theory for this act of political self-harm of a great nation.
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But having spent the past five years researching and writing on the shadowy and often surprising role that drugs play in human history, I was intrigued when psycho-active substances began to emerge as a factor in this election, too—an elusive counterpoint dancing around more prominent themes of nationalist status anxiety and racial animus. Social scientists pointed out unmistakable correlations. Counties most affected by the opiate epidemic (as measured by drug overdose rates, among other indicators) backed Donald Trump more enthusiastically than they had Mitt Romney four years earlier. And those counties with the highest number of clandestine meth lab busts, which describe a veritable Meth Belt, overwhelmingly chose Trump over Hillary Clinton.

The productivity is now just a sensation, rather than a reality. Maybe it always was. It puts into question the kind of frenzy that anybody would put into making a life. I have always read it like an allegory. If you can point a finger at it and say, ''Look at this person with no teeth who is living in a junkyard." We may not have the junk, or the marks on our body, but we are still anxious and overwrought beings who feel underproductive and want to extract more out of ourselves.

Die Droge Meth lässt sich im Do-it-yourself-Verfahren herstellen: aus pseudoephedrinhaltigen Erkältungsmedikamenten und gängigen Supermarkt- und Baumarktprodukten. Häusliche Methamphetamin-Produktion ist Teil einer Ökologie von Alltagspraktiken, die von der Droge selbst angetrieben werden. Der New Yorker Anthropologe Jason Pine hat diese Ökologie und Ökonomie in Missouri im südlichen Mittleren Westen der USA erforscht, als eine komplexe Assemblage von Menschen und Dingen, Praktiken und Diskursen, Materie und Institutionen. Meth ist für Pine ein emblematisches Objekt, in dem sich die Versprechen der Konsumkultur intensiviert artikulieren und die Existenzweisen im Spätindustrialismus manifestieren . Mit Daniel Eschkötter sprach Jason Pine über den Alchemismus des home cooking von Meth, über Walmart-Arkana und den Narko-Kapitalismus der Gegenwart.

Albums range in quality from bankrolled productions to DIY bedroom projects, but the earnest, sentimental music seems to confirm "a lot about very old prejudices against the South: that it's another Europe, another Italy, and all of the associations that are kind of attached to that label. It's regressive, pre-modern…uncivilized, unable to establish rule of law." The soundtrack of the 2008 Italian movie Gomorrah, which was based on an eye-opening account of the Neapolitan mafia, featured mostly neomelodici tunes.

I have found it useful to put aside the singular, and sometimes spectacular, qualities of meth cooking in order to consider it as just one practice within a repertoire of local material cultural practices. That is, rather than focusing primarily on an illicit economy, or drug addiction and the pathologies (physical, psychoaffective, moral) with which it is associated, or the violence (self-inflicted, interpersonal, ecological) that often accompanies it, I choose to look at the craft of meth manufacture as meaningful in its own right. The do-it-yourself quality of meth production is shared with more common regional practices, such as fixing one’s own vehicles (also known as shade-tree mechanics), DIY home improvement, homesteading, hunting and fishing, and dressing your catch. The material familiarity and manual dexterity entailed in this repertoire can contribute to the perception that it is reasonable to tinker with potentially harmful chemicals extracted from household products in order to produce a substance of great value. Moreover, the sense of accomplishment and personal sovereignty derived from these practices is felt with equal, if not greater, intensity among meth cooks.

Drawing on over ten years of ethnographic research on the neomelodica music scene in Campania, The Art of Making Do in Naples (University of Minnesota Press 2012) offers several empirical, theoretical and methodological points of interest for scholars working in a range of social science disciplines. For this reason, Meridiana hosted a forum on the book comprised of scholars from variety of backgrounds (history, sociology and anthropology). Pine’s work is the first to explore, through in depth long-term field research, the social spaces where formal, informal and illicit economic activities overlap. In their discussion, the participants of the forum engaged a number of issues relevant to readers of Meridiana, including: Pine’s concept of the “contact zone,” stereotypical representations of the neomelodica scene and of Neapolitan popular classes more generally, the power and form of camorra networks, the fraught relationship between researcher and the field, and the spaces of indeterminacy that comprise the topography of social research. Pine’s book and, in part, the forum discussion, argue for the need to question the interpretive and ethical certainties of “common sense” and/or theory, treat the field instead as a space of immanent knowledge to be considered situationally and concretely.

Il recente libro di Jason Pine The art of making do in Naples (Minneapolis 2012) presenta diversi elementi di interesse per le varie discipline sociali, sia dal punto di vista contenutistico che metodologico. Per questa ragione «Meridiana» ha promosso e organizzato un forum presso il Dipartimento di Scienze sociali dell’Università di Napoli Federico II. Al forum, che si è tenuto l’8 gennaio 2014 ed è stato coordinato da Luciano Brancaccio, hanno partecipato Nick Dines, Marcello Ravveduto e lo stesso autore.