Addiction Becomes Normal: On the Late-Modern American Subject

Jaeyoon Park concludes his book Addiction Becomes Normal by saying: “Put another way, the late-modern body is one constituted without a coordinating center” (p. 174). Admittedly, I found this an unsettling conclusion, although it was clear how he reached it. The path that led him here was forged by his focus on understanding who “we” are in the present time sociologically. Park notes that a foundational tenet of this study of who “we” are is the distinction between the individual and the subject. In other words, the author does not see the individual as a significant factor, because “the subject and the person are not just conceptually distinct. They are formed through different processes” (p. 7). As a result, although Park defines individuals as people who grow and change through their actions, subjects (again, this is his focus) are defined generically or as components of the social frameworks. As a...