Aesthetic mediation and lateral agency: Rethinking trauma and drug consumption in ‘crisis ordinariness’

Int J Drug Policy. 2026 Aug 21;156:105471. doi: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2026.105471. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Trauma has a become a dominant causal explanation in psychological and public health accounts of drug use, with drug consumption typically framed as a coping response or form of self-medication. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s work (2008, 2011), particularly their concepts of genre, crisis ordinariness and lateral agency, we examine the affective and political conventions of trauma as a genre for understanding problematic or heavy drug use. This article analyses three consumers’ life story narratives drawn from a large-scale, Australian qualitative study on experiences of trauma and drug consumption. First, participant Helena recounts a lifetime of poverty, welfare surveillance and exposure to family violence, in which drinking affords lateral agency in conditions of ongoing attrition (rather than scenes of traumatic exception). Second, Amanda describes the significant aesthetic value of methamphetamine and MDMA consumption in habituating feeling and expression after overlapping experiences of sexual assault, community victimization and labour precarity. Finally, Clayton describes how drug consumption produces unpredictable effects over time but mediates distance from systemic processes of neuroableism and exclusion. All three accounts demonstrate an aesthetic engagement with drug consumption in what Berlant understands as the environment of crisis ordinariness that characterises contemporary neoliberalism. Read together, these accounts challenge the overdetermined trauma-drug use axiom. We argue that attention to crisis ordinariness offers a way to keep open the ‘problem of the forms heightened threat can take’ (Berlant, 2011, p. 101) in neoliberalism and resituate the aesthetic value of drugs in contemporary environments of attrition and overwhelm.

PMID:42628311 | DOI:10.1016/j.drugpo.2026.105471