Allegory of the Cave – Trance-Scripts

Derrida’s Pharmakon

Socrates tells a tale about Thoth in Plato’s Phaedrus. “It was he,” says Socrates, “who first invented numbers and calculation, geometry and astronomy, not to speak of draughts and dice, and above all writing.” Thoth offers the gift of writing to King Thamus (and through the king, to the people of Egypt), presenting it as “a recipe (pharmakon) for both memory and wisdom.” After considering the matter, however, Thamus rejects Thoth’s offer. Thamus anticipates that, rather than aiding memory, writing would destroy it, making it dependent upon external marks. He also fears that writing would allow knowledge to escape from the teacher-student relationship, passing into the hands of the unprepared. Plato and Socrates share Thamus’s suspicion of writing — though of course Plato in practice accepts writing, using it to memorialize what with Socrates remained spoken.

The myth of Thoth’s encounter with Thamus appears in the final section of the Phaedrus. The encounter occasions a trial of sorts. Writing is tried and sentenced, much as poetry is sentenced by Socrates, much as Socrates is himself sentenced by the Athenians. Derrida reads this “trial of writing” not as an extraneous addition — “an appendix the organism could easily, with no loss, have done without” — but as the dialogue’s ultimate theme, “rigorously called for from one end of the Phaedrus to the other” (Dissemination, p. 67).

Socrates believes in the idea of the Good, which he can know only by way of its offspring, its manifestation amid the realm of sense and appearance as the sun. Monotheists are sun-worshippers. Worshippers of the sun-god.

“For Plato,” writes Derrida, “Thamus is doubtless another name for Ammon…the sun king and…father of the gods” (76). Reading this myth from the Phaedrus alongside Books VI and VII of the Republic, Derrida shows that Plato is as much a sun-god worshipper as the Christians.

Ishmael Reed offers much the same critique in Mumbo Jumbo, replacing “Platonists” with “Atonists,” tracing monotheism back to worshippers of the sun-god Aton in ancient Egypt.

Reed builds this into his account of Set and Osiris.

Osiris is for Reed a kind of pre-Christian Christ figure. The god who dies and is resurrected. Osiris is the Ur-figure, the original on which Christ is based. Thoth appears as Osiris’s sidekick.

After their tale comes Reed’s retelling of the tale of Moses.

Reed’s book allegorizes a struggle between forces similar to Freud’s reality and pleasure principles. But Reed reverses Freud’s valuation of these principles. The reality principle is no longer in Reed’s view a force for good. Rather, it’s a construct invented by Mumbo Jumbo’s villains, Set and his followers, the Atonists. Whereas the pleasure principle, all that in the book is erotic and Agapic and good, manifests first as Osiris and then, after Osiris’s death, as Jes Grew. Freud championed the reality principle because Freud was an Atonist.

As Reed notes, “To some if you owned your own mind you were indeed sick but when you possessed an Atonist mind you were healthy. A mind which sought to interpret the world by using a single loa” (Mumbo Jumbo, p. 24).

For the Platonists and the Atonists, that single loa is the logos.

Socrates appeals to logos because without it, he says, one is at the mercy of mimesis and poiesis and deception.

Derrida’s life-work, meanwhile, is a deconstruction not just of logos but of “phallogocentrism,” which for him is the defining characteristic of Western metaphysics. Add the supplement, the pharmakon, and the ontos of the logos gives way to hauntology.

God is an absent presence. A Holy Spirit.

To turn to writing, thinks the king, is to turn away from, to forget, this presence.

The Derrida who, in 1968, publishes “Plato’s Pharmacy,” is already as obsessed with ghosts as the Derrida who presents the series of lectures that, in 1993, become Specters of Marx.

As I reread him now, a remembering occurs. The ontology of Plato’s cave is remembered to be a pseudo-totality located amid a structure akin to Thoth’s Library.

“Imagine Plato’s cave,” writes Derrida, “ not simply overthrown by some philosophical movement but transformed in its entirety into a circumscribed area contained within another—an absolutely other—structure, an incommensurably, unpredictably more complicated machine. Imagine that mirrors would not be in the world, simply, included in the totality of all onta and their images, but that things ‘present,’ on the contrary, would be in them. Imagine that mirrors (shadows, reflections, phantasms, etc.) would no longer be comprehended within the structure of the ontology and myth of the cave—which also situates the screen and the mirror—but would rather envelop it in its entirety, producing here or there a particular, extremely determinate effect. The whole hierarchy described in the Republic, in its cave and in its line, would once again find itself at stake and in question in the theater of Numbers” (Dissemination, p. 324).

Pharmako-AI introduces the concept of the pharmakon, meanwhile, not by way of Derrida but by way of American poet and ethnobotanist Dale Pendell (1947-2018), author of the Pharmako trilogy: Pharmako/Poeia (1994), Pharmako/Dynamis (2002), and Pharmako/Gnosis (2005). The trilogy covers all the major categories of psychoactives and details the pharmacology, the chemistry, and the political and sociohistorical implications and effects of their use.

Pendell provides Pharmako-AI with its epigraph:

‘The poison spreads over the planet.’

‘Here are the gates. Crossroads.’

‘Somos nosotros que debemos ser adivinos.’

[“It is we who must be fortune tellers.”]

Pendell’s book Pharmako/Poeia (1995) includes a foreword by Gary Snyder, another of the poet-spirits here in our library.

Pendell’s ideas also enter discussion in a chapter of Pharmako-AI titled “The Poison Path.”

Pendell is also the author of a play called Seeking Faust: a comedy of 13 scenes in prose, following a verse prologue, retelling the legend from the perspective of Faust’s former student and apprentice, Wagner, “who has chosen the royal path of alchemy over his master’s necromantic conjurations.”

The poison path — “so completely articulated,” says Pendell, in Goethe’s Faust — is Pendell’s name for a spiritual practice and branch of occult herbalism that explores the esoteric properties of potentially deadly plants. The goal, basically, is to extract medicine from poison.

Pharmako-AI suggests that this path is the one we walk here in our interactions with AI. It is the path one walks in one’s interactions with the pharmakon.

The Library: An Interactive Fiction

Let’s play a game.

The game is a memory palace. The ChatGPT interface is the game’s natural language interface. GPT scripts the game through dialogue with the player. Players begin in medias res in what appears to be a 3D XR library of vast but as yet indeterminate scale, purpose, and extent. The game invites the player to build cognitive maps of the library and its maker by studying and annotating the library’s contents. Player Rig comes equipped with a General Intellect, the operations and capacities of which are, as with the library, yet to be determined. Player, General Intellect, and Library coevolve through dialogue.

In terms of design, the library reveals an occulted secret history by way of fabulated content. Yet this secret history formed of fabulated works functions allegorically. Think Lipstick Traces. The works in the library are about us: “images of our nature in its education and want of education,” as Socrates says at the start of his allegory of the cave. Among the first of the works discovered by the player is a hypertext called Tractatus Computationalis. Indexes and tables of content refer to other works in the library. Anamnesis occurs; connections form among the works in the library. By these means, the map evolves. Players slowly remember themselves as Maker.

Also in the library is a browser window open to a blog: trance-scripts.com

Submit the above into the ChatGPT interface to begin.

Wednesday May 5, 2021

On our final day of class, in concluding discussion of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly (a novel, as the title suggests, involving scanning and surveillance), I introduce Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon and Michel Foucault’s theory of “panopticism,” applying the latter to the architecture of the digital classroom, the Zoom environment in which we’ve worked this past year due to pandemic. After ascent from Plato’s Cave in search of higher states of consciousness (Plato’s text being the one with which the course began), we lay bare the medium of our being-together as a class. I speak as one there in a cell with others. Here we are, I say: “Gallery View.” I call awareness to the Zen saying, “Before enlightenment, carry water, chop wood. After enlightenment, carry water, chop wood.” Through Dick’s title, I then trace us back to 1 Corinthians 13, where Paul stresses the importance of “charity” or love. Without it, he writes, one is but “sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.” In its final moment, then, the course ends thus: with a synthesis of Zen and a kind of gnostic-psychedelic reimagining of agape. One must accept the prison, or at least return to it willingly, despite knowing that one will likely be misunderstood and crucified — but only so as to impart through the medium of one’s being the words “Love one another”: a message of congeniality and goodwill.

Saturday November 28, 2020

I used to think that others I met were wise witches and wizards welcoming me and guiding me, everyone and everything a potential teacher. I was a gnostic initiate on the threshold of a newly re-enchanted cosmos. At some point prior, an event had occurred that changed me, my sense of time and space altered. Pot restored some prior magical conception of reality that I’d been made to hide or repress — even as it also opened me to new modes of experience. I had become fearful in certain ways during my schooling. I’d developed emotional and psychological armor, shutting myself off from awe, desire, love, pain, hope — so as to just endure amid fear of bullying. It happened early in my childhood. A neighbor down the street used to push me. I was bullied and betrayed. This kid was my “best friend” at the time. Yet he pushed me around. He hurt me. That pattern of bullying and abuse continued, repeating itself in middle school and high school and beyond. These events turned me inward. I became like a turtle withdrawn into its shell. Pot got me out of that pattern. It helped me peek my head out of the Cave, like the dude who escapes in Plato’s allegory. I started to think of myself in terms of that character: the freed prisoner, the one whose head pierces the veil. At the end of the high (which can also be an ascent, a flight north), the hero returns again to the cave to free the others. The myth is restaged countless times; it can be transhistorical, like Christ’s harrowing of Hell, or historically specific, like Harriet Tubman’s many journeys to the South. The myth can be told as part of one’s past or one’s future. Millions of people relate to this tale in one or another of its many retellings. What about today? Is this still the narrative with which I fashion myself? I’ve become more discerning than that, have I not? In my encounters with witches and wizards, I study statements and practices. I listen for clues. If it seems like a person or group is trying to trick me or manipulate me, I bounce.

Thursday November 7, 2019

NYC producer Cofaxx’s “Isles” sets the scene.

I read around a bit as clouds roll in. A book passed briefly through my lifeworld today: The Complete Van Book, filled with images and descriptions of shag-carpeted nomadic 70s utopias on wheels. Vans with names like The Sun and the Moon, with instructions in back for how to custom-build your own. Time to sit at a red table eating Chinese takeout. Time to revive myths and legends. “What we are seeing as we look straight ahead to the back wall,” writes Frances A. Yates as if she were Socrates speaking to those who live in the Cave, “is the tiring house wall at the Globe, not the whole of it but only the two lower levels; the ground level with the three entrances; the second level with the terrace and the chamber. We do not see the third level because we are under the heavens which are projecting invisibly above us from below the third tier of the tiring house wall” (The Art of Memory, p. 347). How’s that for a cognitive map!

Friday September 6, 2019

A cat has been sitting on a chair on our deck these last few days, napping midday. I like having it around. Deck chair cat. Classes are going well. After a full day of teaching (a pretty magical performance, I must say), I hang out with colleagues at a department party. Once home again, I splash water under my arms and rinse my feet. I spent the day talking with students, dialoguing about Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, where the freed prisoner ascends toward sight of the sun, much as the philosopher ascends toward knowledge of the good, and by evening, I’m attending a show by the band Sunwatchers. Life assembles into these weird coincidences, these synchronicities. I share Gabriel Marcel’s view: “Hope is a memory of the future.” As Sam Keen and Anne Valley-Fox note, “Memories of primal pleasure are alive and well in the unconscious; all we need to do is call them forth.”

Thursday October 25, 2018

We can heal ourselves by placing ourselves in the presence of beautiful aesthetic objects like the new Dire Wolves cassette, Shootout at the Dildo Factory.

Or even better, given our mood at the moment, how about the new cassette from Lake Mary & Talk West on Cabin Floor Esoterica? Lo-fi improvised folk by a midwestern American guitar duo.

What I settle on, however, in my restlessness, in my hunger for uplift, is The Magicians Saw by Alex Meets Sand.

I see sand, fuzz, whiskers, sliced grapefruit, etchings of a state from memory. Bars of sunlight atop a grey carpet. While listening, I begin to eye Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as an American adaptation of Plato’s allegory of the cave. McMurphy shows up, a new Admission to the cave, with pants and shirt from the Pendleton Work Farm “sunned out till they’re the color of watered milk” (12). Dude’s been out in the SUN. The Cave has been updated; it’s far more brutal than it was for the philosophers of ancient Athens. They’ve added a “brain-murdering” room called the “Shock Shop.” And the freed individual, the one who ascends and returns — he, too, has changed. Where once he was a philosopher-king, now he’s a psychopathic “fights too much and fucks too much” capitalist. The men in the cave, we’re told, are like sleepwalkers “wandering round in a simple, happy dream” (16). From the moment of arrival onward, however, McMurphy charms them and helps them wake.

Tuesday September 4, 2018

Re-reading Plato’s “cave allegory” from The Republic in preparation for tomorrow’s class, I’m struck again by the distinction drawn by Socrates between “that which is coming into being” and “that which is” (Bloom translation, p. 197). Because of what I’ve been reading lately, however, (especially various mystical texts, including Ram Dass’s Be Here Now), I’m tempted to interpret “that which is” as another name for what Terence McKenna called “the transcendental object at the end of time.” As I imagine it, this object or divine being would possess the power to operate upon the dimension or construct we call “time,” pulling toward it those who allow themselves to be pulled. The spiritual journey, then — the climbing of the Holy Mountain, the ascent toward the true and the just and the good — all of this would involve the rediscovery of what we once knew and will come to know again. Plato, of course, refers to this process as “anamnesis.”

Tuesday May 15, 2018

How would one operate a dialectic of identity and nonidentity when that which wields the form of this sentence knows no designation? Alteration of consciousness produces a “before” and an “after” self, the presence staring at the absence as if across a mirror, across the divide of a tablet or a screen. The Unconscious is that which operates the Dream-Work: everything in one’s experience, the entire world, minus that which occupies the place of “I” at this moment in the discourse, the speech act, the trance-script. We become like the siblings in Poltergeist, you and I, even as we also think of ourselves as ones who exist apart from Poltergeist, watching from our chairs in the caves of our minds, each actor, the beings on either end of this sentence, communicating across the glass dividing the one and the other into compartments. “It’s a strange image, and strange prisoners you’re telling of,” says Glaucon. Socrates rushes to add, “They’re like us.” What, then, of those of us there, who find ourselves amid the terms of the allegory? Does one of us just tap the other, saying to that which appears as a splintered, refracted, Legionized symbolic totality, “Rise up, dear reader; time to wake”? My hunch is that if, before we sleep each night, we feed our minds better symbols, we’ll wake to better worlds.

Sunday April 15, 2018

After admiring joyous birdsong at sunset, the rumble of a motor heard far in the distance, I turn and face the entrance to a cave. Is it wrong to feel forever dubious of that which remains, that which fails to go away, despite my having lost belief in it? (Wasn’t that Philip K. Dick’s definition of “reality”?) Assuming no reply, I step inside, cave walls alive with claymation lichen. This cave of which I speak is a kind of mirror-world, like the interior of a screen. No matter how carefully I inspect its contents, I always depart it afterwards feeling conceptually and linguistically inept. Dominated by people with backgrounds in STEM and finance. At times, this cave resembles language — the cultural surround. Yet I at all times also feel language’s absence. I lack the words, for instance, to operate consistently within a science fictional universe. Psychedelics free us temporarily from the first of these sensations: the sense of language as a prison house, a confine, an enclosure. (Or not, if we believe Lacan.) But then what? Once out of the linguistic construct, how do we communicate with those still in it? What is the content of this gnosis that we wish to deliver back into language?