The modern social paradigm has this very particular view of the work alcohol does in interactions where it’s present. It makes previously boring, work-coded interactions into fun, social, and somehow transgressive ones. I call this “alcohol culture.” I’m working now on a Foucauldian interpretation of alcohol culture. Basically I think—and I think this is more true of attitudes toward alcohol than to most other substances that we consider “mind-altering”—our received concept that alcohol changes settings itself helps make it the case that it does so.

One side of this is obvious: When people go to dry parties they just expect to have a horrible time. And, of course, when people anticipate being miserable and bored at something, they’ll experience confirmation bias, and also their being conspicuously miserable will infect the space. This is a major obstacle I’ve confronted in setting up dry events!

But what I find to be particularly interesting is the apparent coexistence of alcohol-based incentives to do things/go to things with the fact that people in general (i.e. nonaddicts) don’t attend those events with the desire to use alcohol to change their subjectivity. This strikes me as not the same as the relationship between the incentive structure for other substances’ being present in spaces and nonaddicts’ intentions to use them. With alcohol, people don’t want to be perceptibly affected (e.g. tipsy/drunk). And yet alcohol does produce a dramatic incentive cashed out in functional terms. Explanations of the centrality of alcohol in social contexts often openly say that the presence—not the use—of alcohol changes attitudes toward a space. I’ve heard it said often that having a drink in your hands gives you something to do with your hands.

So anyway, yeah. With alcohol, more so than with other substances, the justification for its presence in spaces is often explicitly symbolic. I’ll update soon.