Category: Acid Communism

Sunday October 15, 2017

Let’s put the revolution back in crazy talk. Grab people by the collar, get up in each one’s face and shout, “The revolution begins now, motherfucker!” Or (to remove any suggestion of aggression): “The revolution, an event of super-humanization affecting the one and the many, begins now, with chemically-assisted transfiguration of consciousness.” Mass exodus from participation in the social sacrifice of life via labor. “Capitalism ain’t getting shit from me,” smirks the narrator as he starts his break. Marx was at his most Marxist in his hatred of work. “Fuck wage labor,” he’d say, “I’m gonna go hang out all day in the British Museum Reading Room!” The anti-capitalist martyr remains an important latency in my political identity. An impossible self I’ve at times admired, a fatal temptation to which I may yet succumb. Weed is very much for me an example of “appropriate technology.” A tool for creative self-experimentation with consciousness. Peter Mortensen investigates a similar such view in his essay “Tripping Back to Nature: Aldous Huxley, Psychedelics, and Pro-Technology Environmentalism.” Earl Hooker’s “Lucky You” scored yesterday’s venture into the psychedelic unknown.

Stoned at a local outdoor music festival. Relaxing sunlit on a grassy hill, while bands perform below. Could this event have served as a turning point? And if a turning point, away and toward what? The vibe was surprisingly negative at first, as if festival-going were the performance in an evacuated church of a belief-less ritual. I still believe in these gestures, however, says the participant, my vomit reserved only for poor execution of ceremony. Beautiful out here under the night sky. The universe arranged for me. And on the date of my parents’ anniversary, no less: my locale, assembling itself in celebration. Spider Bags speak to me, testifying, “I found inner peace by ignoring things.” Is that what I want on my tombstone? Shit started to feel exactly that existential as I stood there afraid of slipping down a hill. “That’s a long, long way to roll,” sang the band. I could see stars above as they chanted, “Who will I be next?” The self must avoid destroying itself for those it loves. Particularly affecting was a song the band performed with NC blues singer extraordinaire Reese McHenry.

The night melted into super chill vibes, though, with level-up conversation and synesthetic animation, once headliner Washed Out took the stage.

Paranoia subsides, and the crowd sways like wind-blown grass. This is how it begins, the participant thinks to himself. This is how you educate desire. This is how heads are turned.

Friday October 13, 2017

I tumble out of the workday to the sound of Bastian Void’s Three Sides of Consideration.

Music rotates through space like a holographic projection. I race on account of low memory capacity. Catch the mind’s formulations before time dissolves their presence. Mind at play is both fast and flighty, while words assume form and assemble ’round one another only haltingly, as if the creator-self has to pause every few steps to consult unsayable rules and unreadable guidebooks. What is “language” again? Refresh my memory. Remind me how it works. Bastian Void, by the way, is Massachusetts-based Moss Archive label founder Joe Bastardo. We are of the tribe raised as much by TV as by parents. The Nintendo generation. My allies among this generation are those who have begun to flirt again with consciousness expansion, therapeutic madness, and the creation of alternative realities. We operate experimentally and pragmatically, but could benefit from engagement with precursor theorists like Theodore Roszak. An Acid Marxist avant la lettre. I close my eyes and a clear gelatin tablet splits open in my hands, spilling forth its insides: tiny multicolored micro-plastic spheroids. The 1960s and 1970s countercultures were somehow neglected, an absent thing remembered wistfully, but as an unambiguously unrepeatable past, during the years of my schooling. Roszak, however, speaks directly to my concerns of late with a rousing defense of visionary experience in a chapter from The Making of a Counterculture called “Eyes of Flesh, Eyes of Fire.” (These trance-scripts, by the way, are written for “Eyes Turned Backwards, Belonging to Heads of the Future.” Picture them sitting there with their Whole Earth Catalogs, in their nomad-architectured, “full communism now” communes, all watched over by machines of loving grace. Why can’t others view this as beautiful with me — that way we could go out and do it?) How hard it would be, though, what obstacles we would need to overcome, in order to assemble a national, international, global economy of networked communes, encampments, all servicing each other’s productive needs in a non-profit, price-set, steady-state system of systems. Could we network them, perhaps, and thus establish dual power, under the guise of a religion?

Tuesday September 26, 2017

I admire the lyrical persona who sings raw and afloat amidst lonely journeys westward. That was a story some imagined community used to tell itself. The nation imagines itself through its heroes. When these heroes hail us, we become sutured, stitched up in selves until, with desire for change, the cycle begins anew. What would it take to make the imagination over again into a genuine threat to capitalist reproduction? Isn’t that what we’re getting at: selves who, like Melville’s Bartleby, would prefer not to? I’m so far gone, thinking up here. Reality refracting into inward-regressing, multi-dimensional nested sinkholes. It gets messy. A small giggling reverbed spazz-voice floating in the void of a recording studio soundboard. New aesthetics rupture into the realm of the known all the time: just look at Netflix Original Neo Yokio. Bored prep school anime existentialist tells his robot bodyguard / handler, “I’m simply too blue for lunch.” The future is an interminable pool of wackness, he says, thus provoking the wrath of bank fees and debt collectors. Poor Bartleby. No more than a ghostly riddle, an exception-state — a martyr whose death would surely have gone unmourned, were it not for the intervention of Melville’s narrator. Invisible forces tug at the edges of a branded, logo-covered object-world. May a great wind sweep down and lay waste to the Empire and its effects. Following up on a recent recommendation from a friend, I spent my commute yesterday to and from work listening to a special episode of The Discourse Collective podcast titled “Psychedelic Politics.”

As much as it pleases me to witness LSD’s rising fortunes again among certain folks on the Left, hippie-phobic, 60s-bashing podcasts like this one illustrate the persistence in our time of some profound misunderstandings about the past. On the whole, a disheartening experience. But also a reminder: it’s time to correct some of these misunderstandings. If I don’t write “Notes Toward a Theory of Psychedelic Utopianism,” who will?

Monday September 25, 2017

Check for blockages. Free oneself from what Christian theologian John Howard Yoder calls “the Powers.” Like Sartre’s “practico-inert,” the Powers name a given form of the world, a “mode of production” that produces individual subjects addicted to that mode’s reproduction. We must try to model for others another way: a life that, through psychedelic resistance to interpellation, sheds its determination by the Powers, thus allowing an improvised, moment-to-moment stepping forth of something new. (Yoder himself, by the way, failed terribly in this regard. He usefully reframed the story of Christianity in countercultural terms, with Christ serving as the preeminent example of how an individual’s refusal to be determined by the Powers can prompt “the creation of a distinct community with its own deviant set of values and its coherent way of articulating them.” But when Yoder himself attempted a similar refusal, positing “intimacy” as a means by which to challenge the world as given, it appears he did so without seeking the consent of others, his legacy thus marred by multiple charges of sexual abuse.) I stare at walls and wonder, what shall step forth today? What new mode of being shall cross through the cracks as we alter the constitution of the given? As Robert Masters and Jean Houston note in their book Mind Games: The Guide to Inner Space, “Man is still something to be realized” (5). From this point forward, I will attempt to assume my role as “guide.” I will bring back from each day’s trance something of value to enrich other heads (and through them, the General Intellect.) Becoming fully aware means becoming one with all that is. Should make you smile. What we’re trying to escape is a cultural trance where, as Masters and Houston note, “we all dream the same dream, more or less, and call it: reality” (13). I feel infinitely more well-provisioned after grilling myself a couple hot dogs. I care about consensus reality only inasmuch as it is there where I get to care for those I love. I care, too, though, for their entire life-body relation, their full organic and inorganic being. Where do we draw the line between that and the whole of nature? Perhaps these experiments need to be performed in groups, each member becoming for the others their Ezekiel.

Sunday September 24, 2017

I’m feeling super down at the moment. My hope, however, is that by writing, I can pull myself up. Evacuate the current narrative. Bleed out into another. Lemme just get myself adjusted, as with the ludicrous prog of Gong’s “Master Builder.”

That band’s Radio Gnome Invisible Trilogy belongs in a genre study of psychedelia. “Tea” is how you say it. (Ontological, with space whisper vocals.) It all comes down to whether or not one pronounces one’s Rs, these distinct identities out of which one’s community is made — though the word “community” these days seems a bit of a stretch. One can really mangle quite spectacularly one’s perception of reality. Crash symbols fill me with a sense of alarm. We cease to exist when lacking care and connection. The self mourns its disappearance from the minds of others. Sarah leaves today to deliver an invited lecture on an island in the Mediterranean. The world narrative, meanwhile, threatens to introduce “global nuclear” as a plot device. What would be the emotional response proportionate to such drama? I’d prefer to think about Marxism and the politics of psychedelic subjectivity. Patch up, repair, and in the process make new again. Sit back and let go. Imagine a narrative thread relating Hawkwind’s “Assault and Battery / The Golden Void” as precursor text to mid-90s big beat electronic artists like The Chemical Brothers.

Psychedelics pull Marxism toward seizure here-and-now of the means of pleasure-production: as in, fuck the bio-rhythms of capitalism, I’m gonna go listen to Augustus Pablo’s “Keep on Dubbing.” And after that, stretch out across Bardo Pond’s “Screens For a Catch (Fur Bearing Eyes).”

My goal is to devise protocols for drug-based rebellion against the twenty-first century work ethic. Slacker brutalism. Imagine a ‘Greil Marcus’-style secret history weaving a constellation out of Walter Benjamin’s On Hashish, the stories of Hawkwind, Penny Rimbaud of Crass, and related psychedelic anarcho-Marxist communes and art collectives. Throw the MC5 and John Sinclair’s White Panthers in the mix as well. Revise the contemporary meaning of religious-political-aesthetic radicalism. The radicalism of self-administered, medicinally-aided deconditioning therapies. Join up with your local psychic decolonization struggle today!

Saturday September 23, 2017

I came to adulthood possessed by a disposition toward being. A preliminary faith, a preliminary ontology. An intellectual argument entangled with an underlying affect. Prepare to meet my Marxist “ontopolitical assemblage,” to use a phrase favored by certain jokers out in Theoryland. The thing is, that disposition has changed in the last few years, a conversion process triggered through encounters with psychedelics. Hence my desire to rally ’round phrases like “Acid Communism” and “Psychedelic Marxism.” Along the way, though, I should probably read more Deleuze and Guattari, as well as William E. Connolly. In the meantime, I sit beside a road in town listening to locust symphonies and the wave-like comings and goings of my countrymen. Setting morphs into a monster-themed arcade bar. Friends unburden themselves of unhappy workplace narratives. Poorly executed send-off parties for retiring comrades. Anchor points for the evening include Youth Code’s “Keep Falling” and the late-70s American sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter, the latter cropping up repeatedly throughout the evening.

Friends assign each other nicknames. “Gentleman Nihilist.” “The Don King of Predagogy.” The consensus among everyone I know is that this week sucked. Don’t all of us suffer the abuse of some private, local dotard? We all still fear getting called down to the workplace equivalent of the vice principal’s office for referring to our fuzzy boar cocks or for wearing our “I Am The Pol Pot of Pussy” t-shirts. Fuzzy boar cock: yes, that’s a thing. Isolated musicians play to the accompaniment of looped and sampled backing bands. Eventually we call it a night.

Sunday September 17, 2017

The Founder is the story of that monstrous St. Paul of the New American Church, McDonalds businessman Ray Kroc. A little guts, gumption, and elbow grease, says the face spied blurry in the mirror, and there’s gold to be had. Alas, nothing in this world can stop the scourge of that bloody word “persistence.” “Keep going,” mouths Harriet Tubman from the epigraph to Hillary Clinton’s new book What Happened — which, of course, I have no intention of reading. (Are you kidding me? “What happened”? What rubbish!) But Tubman’s words echo regardless, don’t they? Imbued with oracular import. Careful, though, I warn myself, not to appropriate for one’s personal, psychonautical meaning-system, words tossed up by the struggles of the enslaved and the oppressed. With that warning firmly in mind, I firmly place a tab of acid directly beneath my tongue and prepare for takeoff. Within (give or take) half an hour, I begin to feel jittery impulses, excess energy welling up inside me. I take a whack at describing the experience: not just the proverbial “butterflies in one’s stomach.” Indeed the “stomach” barely enters the affected sensorium! Let us focus instead on tension woven into our necks and upper backs. Our minds seek to be released out from under this weight. Before long, though, the restlessness spreads outward, becoming observant, firstly, of “mind-body dualism” and other related epiphenomenal derangements of experience via discourse. “Stop wedding awareness to locations and objects,” shouts the recurring intrusion of a car horn. Trees drop their leaves onto my deck. Should I sweep them or let them be? I throw myself into the experimental body practice known as “yard work”: a practice I associate with submission to the compulsions of my father (who, let’s face it, despite my great affection for him, is a bit of a clean freak). And yet, here I am, thinking to myself (and subsequently sharing with all of you): the act of sweeping can serve for us as a kind of “centering” practice, a reminder of our embodiment, and thus, at least briefly (one is grudgingly forced to admit), a source of pleasure. A scolding voice intrudes here, though, and commands me to regard dispassionately the many ways I attempt to correct myself. Let go of these, I say! Open fully to whatever may follow. Allow a wind to come and scatter thought far and wide. I do hereby declare: We shall compose ourselves tomorrow in full appreciation of sunlight, in all its aspects and guises.

Sunday September 10, 2017

Writing requires as its precondition grounds on which to relax and listen. Words appear — enter perception — in some domain ontologically different from, but nevertheless coextensive with, embodiment amidst being. This domain is what I’ve elsewhere called “consciousness.” Raymond Williams, by the way, neglected to include that term in his book Keywords. Do I need to review debates within Marxism regarding materialism and idealism? How else would one assemble a theory of consciousness? We who wish to advocate on behalf of acid communism need such a theory, for consciousness serves as the heavily trafficked bridge connecting the otherwise radically distinct discourses of Marxism and humanistic psychology. (Along with the latter, I should add, we also need to consider its successor, the field of “positive psychology.” About this more recent field, I remain conflicted, particularly given the current, ongoing appropriation of its concepts — “eudaimonia,” “human flourishing,” etc — by paid ideologues working on behalf of capital.) “So I sing these words,” sings Kevin Ayers. “Let them fly around like birds.”

Horn part on “When Your Parents Go To Sleep,” I salute thee. Soundtrack thus established, we return again to the task at hand. Remember, too, to consult the work of Lev Vygotsky — including, for instance, his book Mind in Society. My theory of consciousness views the mind as an embodied multi-sensory medium; dreams and fantasies are its purest productions, assembled through use of historically-derived forms, images, concepts, languages, sign systems — in other words, that vast edifice that Marx called the “General Intellect,” acquired by each of us through socialization (though only ever incompletely), and modified dialectically through lived experience. What happens to consciousness, however, when its experience-stream delivers to it the event known as ego death? To be honest, I’m not sure I’ve ever myself experienced anything akin to that. Except: no, wait: I take that back. Those jumps, remember? Screen glitching, consciousness tumbling rapidly down many levels. The Subject, through parallel realities, takes flight. The unity makes itself up, just like that — and we are one with that, remember? The path keeps changing scale, until my observing self turbo-powers itself free of the gravity and haecceity or “thisness” of all things. The bodies of the non-player characters, with their oversized plastic bobbleheads, rapture away one by one. The self acknowledges itself as the occulted Alpha and Omega, the one with all the free swag. Thus the Self invents as a gameworld for itself its own adulthood.

Wednesday September 6, 2017

Moon recruits: board your cruisers, man your battle stations, rev your engines. But lose the metaphor, dig? Let the monkey self swim a bit. As René Daumal notes in Mount Analogue, a book he left unfinished at the time of his death, “the view one has from a high peak is not registered in the same perceptive range as a still life or an ordinary landscape.” Just so we’re clear: I equate the latter with non-turned-on beginner’s consciousness. The Demiurge plants throughout that realm demons disguised as humans. They want us to go out there and earn points, remember? These trance-scripts, meanwhile, serve as “souvenirs” of our daily ascents. Look around, up and down. Navigate around tables, militaries, game boards. For those of you interested in attempts to articulate a theory of Acid Communism, be sure to eyeball Jeremy Gilbert’s latest, a piece called “Psychedelic Socialism: The Politics of Consciousness, the Legacy of the Counterculture, and the Future of the Left.” While Gilbert’s stance here strikes me as being too timid in its discussion of psychedelics, and too fierce in its critique of selfhood, there’s still plenty in the piece that he gets right, particularly when he gets around to skewering the contemporary Left’s knee-jerk “hippie-phobia.” The Left’s lack of charity in its historical memory when it comes to the 60s counterculture pains me greatly. Of course, this is why the battle must be fought also at the level of form, as the latter serves as the linguistic-material anchor-bed of consciousness, while itself being the product of a practice. Hence the method I employ here: trance-scription keeps faith with the experimentalism of the 60s and 70s freak-left. It makes the practice of writing into an act of utopian prefiguration of psychic liberation. I mean, if Psychedelic Marxists are serious about wanting to raise consciousness, then for fuck’s sake: start here, start now. Getting high is one easy and reliable way to do so — especially when one does so with others and among an Internet public. Wasn’t it Funkadelic that sang, “Free Your Mind…and Your Ass Will Follow”?

Let’s turn WordPress into a meeting space for a first-of-its-kind, unity-of-theory-and-practice Psychedelic Marxist encounter group. Let’s make of ourselves a here-and-now virtual community of evolvable and expandable high-minded mind-altered radicals. Any takers?

Friday August 25, 2017

I listen in a reclined position to a train across town and the ocean-like repetition of cars headed to work on a distant parkway. Before long, a fire truck joins the fray. And beneath it all, creating a sense of tonal continuity, a chorus of crickets. What remains of consciousness as it passes intermittently between states? Is there an internal reckoner, a memorized self-same self? Picture this self as the Pugilist, whose nature (so I hear) is to lose and rise again. Borges bestowed on this figure the title “Funes the Memorious.” “Perhaps we all know deep down,” he wrote, “that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.” Perhaps, I murmur back, slipping in and out of consciousness of the many brown and yellow leaves lying dead upon my deck. Must I sweep them? What’s the point? Mosquitoes will continue to haunt these grounds regardless of my effort. Give it a little push at the start, though, and the whole thing begins to glide. We no longer need our sunglasses, for instance, do we? Nor do we need our helmets. Just tree-lined, solitary inner wanderings. We conduct our trance-scripts at a picnic table in a park. And if you don’t mind me saying, it feels magical: a beam of sunlight carves a face on a tree directly across from me. In its features, the face is sometimes ghost from Pac-Man or poor Yorick, sometimes ancient-wise-benevolent. There are occasionally people who walk past, and we tense a bit; but it’s all good, the locusts shift their motors up a gear and we’re staring down into a distant puddle or a sinkhole. Therein lies the psychic mortuary / compost heap. Do we want to take a look? Of course we do. We are in some sense seeking to establish a rapport between Marxism and psychedelic human-potentialists and positive psychologists. Ours will be a communism “articulated,” in Laclau and Mouffe’s sense, with projects of self-realization and personal well-being. I want to be able to camp out in empty fields, even after the revolution, apart at a safe distance from my fellow humans. “Family of man” mustn’t become a curse hung ’round the necks of particular, living-breathing humans. Can we respect that? Non-human Nature, I congratulate thee: that sunlit field looks fantastic. Well done. Lay back in the grass and gaze up at the sky. That ought to be part of the Left’s promise: high-quality, de-commodified (though psychedelically enhanced), authentic lives of leisure. A Marxism that robs individuals of the right to design their own paths toward understanding is an abomination. Nor is there anything in Marxism that demands such a robbery. Why, then, is today’s radical Left so square? If holding these views implicates me in natural theology, then so be it.