Handling complexity

Abstract

Intoxication and its effects are a central feature of alcohol and other drug policy, with intoxication generally presented as a universal and singular state. Crucially, it is constituted as a threat to health and social order, both a harm in itself and a source of other harms. The exclusion of the multiplicity of intoxication in policy – multiple contexts, multiple practices, multiple meanings and multiple effects – enables networks of harm to be identified and linked, and strategies to reduce this harm to be recommended and justified. However, the style of explanation and rationales found in alcohol policy documents do not exhaust the forms taken in policy discourse. In this chapter, we examine the accounts generated during in-depth interviews with Australian alcohol policy stakeholders, in particular their reflections on the relationship between intoxication and violence. As key actors in the policy process, they mobilise a range of assumptions and concepts in policy development and implementation. We find that the stakeholder accounts provide an instructive contrast with the certainties evident in policy documents. Drawing on Mol and Law's discussion of the handling of complexity in knowledge practices, we identify various modes of explanation in these accounts, which include engaging with multiplicity as well as returns to simplification. In offering this analysis, our aim is not to argue that alcohol should not be the focus of government policies and discourse but to call attention to the simplifications evident in them and to their effects. As an authoritative discourse that plays a key performative role in the constitution of realities, the allocation of government resources and the governance of health, alcohol policy deserves close scrutiny for what it can tell us about the contemporary problematisation of intoxication.