Tag: Psychedelics

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?

Sunday August 13, 2017

Others vacation when and where they want. This, too, is a form of inequality. Worse still, my city is livable, but unmemorable and unattractive. Is my miserabilism the effect of my impoverished personhood or its cause? I am being asked to fail and fail again. And it’s okay: I’ll keep going. I know I somehow will. Please do not be frightened. It’s just that I’ve become deeply unhappy with myself. My writing is a testament to the failure of my ability today to enjoy. The thing is, it really felt like I was pulling out of the spiral there for a moment. What happened? I try not to tell myself that I suffer from depression, as I’m wary of the theoretical presumptions embedded in that label. (My thinking has been partly shaped on this score by Susan Sontag’s Under the Sign of Saturn. But see as well Eric G. Wilson’s Against Happiness.) But, look, let’s be honest: my moods are seasonal and affected by work. I go through patches of good and bad over varying durations. One consequence is that I drive people away just by being myself. My work, if it is truly to be mine, will have to attest to this. And so, without further ado, let’s return to the work itself. The construction of a Marxist theory of psychedelia will have to build upon the insights of critical geographers like David Harvey and Edward W. Soja (and before them, Henri Lefebvre). Psychedelics intervene in and directly modify socially produced space, by changing what we might call cognitive space or mental space. “The presentation of concrete spatiality,” as Soja notes, “is always wrapped in the complex and diverse re-presentations of human perception and cognition, without any necessity of direct and determined correspondence between the two. These representations, as semiotic imagery and cognitive mappings, as ideas and ideologies, play a powerful role in shaping the spatiality of social life” (Postmodern Geographies, p. 121). As we continue to think about the relationships between psychedelics and space, we’ll also have to consult Alastair Gordon’s book Spaced Out: Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties. Following Fisher, I see capitalist realism not just as an ideology and an aesthetic that situates subjects within a narrowed or foreshortened horizon of political possibility, where there can be no future utopian alternative to the present; it’s also a shaping and debasing of the way subjects experience space and time. Psychedelics thus possess a certain radical potential under such circumstances, as they provoke immediate (albeit temporary) modification of inner experience beyond the forms imposed by capitalism. When under the influence, one is no longer the Self as defined and designed by the current order. One can drift and linger, now that one has restored to oneself that which capitalism had drowned in what Marx called “the icy water of egotistical calculation.” Anxieties, begone! Pot allows us to see again reality constituted through veils and unveilings, everything both inwardly-lit and haloed. All of which is to re-invoke through transcendence upward from the profane a sense for the sacred, although I’m not sure I wish to do that, as emotional, perceptual, and symbolic spaces are all still immanent to the dialectic of nature. Picture, through perceptual refocusing, the circle-shape and the yin and yang struggle contained therein. No need to delve into those questions just yet. Think, after all, of how much of our lives is invested in staring at illusions of depth onscreen! Games of perception are the very magic by which the system operates. Business is, along with whatever else, a religion imposed on conquered subjects.