Wednesday July 17, 2019

I find myself wondering about the relationship between psychedelics and the Situationist practice known as the dérive. A number of writers have hinted at one: maybe Sadie Plant? Alexander Trocchi? I also understand, however, upon arriving to campus, that my office could stand some redecorating. Time to occupy space with good vibes, positive energy. Time to fill the walls with doorways and windows. Ken Knabb, editor of the Situationist International Anthology, talks openly of turning on and taking psychedelics in his “Confessions of a Mild-Mannered Enemy of the State.” What I no longer like about Situationism, though, is the way it mired Surrealism’s “energies of intoxication” with ideological conspiracism and paranoia. They were a lot like the Discordians in that respect, suffering from what Timothy Melley calls “agency panic.” Situationism wasn’t loving enough or trusting enough of others in its manner of expression. The same is true of a Situationist-influenced anarchist group from the Bay Area, the Council for the Eruption of the Marvelous. What about Raoul Vaneigem’s famous book, The Revolution of Everyday Life? Does that, too, proceed from a paranoid, “gnostic” state of distrust? The other place to look would be British Situationist Christopher Gray’s book The Acid Diaries. Reality flickers and teases. Recognition coincides with forgetting. Best to hold true to a both-and worldview, exercising what the Romantic poet John Keats called “negative capability.” This is what allows us to be here amid life’s “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” This is our condition: let us explore it without undue vexation. Let us be flexible and open, granting the cosmos agency enough to be fun, weird, wild, delicious, and strange. Navigate by way of flashes of noetic insight, and an abiding faith in love as an unfolding process — a single mountain with many paths.