A proper theory of psychedelic utopianism requires a reassessment of past and present theories of psychology. In particular, it requires a critique of contemporary cognitive-behavioral approaches (not unlike the Frankfurt School’s critique of positivism), and a revalorization of certain elements of the “humanistic psychology” movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Jessica Grogan’s Encountering America provides an entry-point into the history of the latter movement. I’m thinking here of figures like R.D. Laing and Abraham Maslow, but also encounter groups, Esalen, and the so-called “human potential movement” more broadly. Finally, this reassessment would also have to engage with humanistic psychology’s successor, the field of “positive psychology.” Among contemporary scholars operating in this field, I’m particularly interested in the work of Berkeley psychology professor Dacher Keltner and the UC system’s Greater Good Science Center. On the other end of the political spectrum, however, we have figures like Martin Seligman and American Enterprise Institute president Arthur C. Brooks. (This latter figure, by the way, also serves on the advisory board of Charles Koch’s Well-Being Initiative.) For more on positive psychology, check out Daniel Horowitz’s book Happier?: The History of a Cultural Movement That Aspired to Transform America.
Tag: Utopianism
Friday May 11, 2018
Were I to lack the opportunity to escape a pseudo-totality, were I hemmed in by a false world-picture, I would nonetheless devote myself to peering beyond it. I would gaze out a small rectangular window near the ceiling of my cell. I would perform under the expectation that my performance could be rewound and fastforwarded at some later date. And everywhere around me, I would imagine signs left for me by a benign deity. I would suddenly find myself super high at a party in a basement among friends. I might worry for a moment about my heartbeat, an anomalous rapid fluttering in my chest. “At what point should I start to feel concerned,” I might wonder as the owner of the basement DJs for the group, lays the mood with some Junior Murvin.
Friends and I agree: “Drink or Treat” ought to be a new local holiday. Street parties. Radical hospitality. This is where one would situate a utopian novel. Here we come wassailing the neighbors; friends perform the role of hallelujah choir. Bring horns, bring dope, bring whatever. In our communist utopia, we’ll build trolleys running us house to house. In summer, we’ll pitch tents. Sometimes we’ll dance in windows. I’ll share with others the story of a time from my past when the Real intervened and posed for me a situation analogous to the Prisoner’s Dilemma. I appear to myself as a drunken flâneur, wandering among the wires the city has strung among its towers, dedicated to something dangerous. In the event, I tell the others, the potential for tragedy subdued the Faust in me and caused me to flee. “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” suggests a friend. “Magda Szabo’s The Door,” suggests another. Alas, I am too narrow an instrument to gauge much of reality. But I welcome and appreciate the help of friends. It is one of the ways the world responds, leaves signs, invites study. In this case, it tells me I am but an individual with my own distinct subjective response to particular chemicals. Even if I could wake tomorrow morning to a “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need” kind of universe, I would still be too ordinary and too weird in my particulars to represent for others some “new communist subject” of the future. Representatives of that sort need not exist in such a universe.
Wednesday May 2, 2018
Days blaze like a road in morning sunlight out in front of me. Car culture limits our ability to merge into larger communist groupings. Yet we’re forced to participate, both because we need to commute to work, and because we need experiences with which to refurnish our supply of concepts. To satisfy this latter need, Sarah and I attend “You Are Here: Light, Color, and Sound Experiences,” an exhibition currently up at the NC Museum of Art. The show features a number of works of a psychedelic bent, including Yayoi Kusama’s wonderful infinity room, “Light of Life.” Heads peer through portholes into a shadowy antechamber as galaxies of lightbulbs flash in kaleidoscopic profusion across the room’s mirror-box multiverse. Afterwards I attempt to meditate using a mindfulness app on my phone. My “Best Possible Future Self,” to use the name of the thing the app asks me to visualize, is itchy minimal. No, scratch that. Har har, some “uncle” humor. Crash landing. #kneetoface “Come on, Subject — liberate yourself!” coaxes the voice of the revolution. “Come one, come all,” it says. Space Invaders. Critters. Mind at play. During my first pass through the exercise, the antinomian in me imagines the worst. I’m hiding somewhere. It’s chaos. Will they allow me to work (flow, thrive, persist, whatever they call it) if I challenge reason? If, in other words, I question the enterprise of our knowing? How about if I show up to work in a trashcan? My “Best Possible Future Self,” I think to myself as I begin again. What a sad, peculiar exercise! Would live intentionally, in a self-designed home, with nods to Dwell and Nowness and the Whole Earth Catalog. Sarah and I would read, write, cook delicious healthy meals together, raise a brilliant happy child. All of the above, certainly. But what, pray tell, does this Self wish of the world beyond its household? After all, it must wish something, no? Just as it takes a village to raise a child, so too it takes the oikos of an entire planet, a whole integrated system of economy and ecology, to reproduce the oikos of the family. Let us, then, in dreaming our “Best Possible Future Selves,” also imagine our Utopia.
Tuesday May 1, 2018
Up next: live textual re-enactment for the blogosphere of the “Dr. Edward Jessup” role from Ken Russell’s psychedelic thriller Altered States. A tongue-in-cheek model of sorts for one of my personae here at Trance-Scripts — minus, of course, the primatological regression, the obligatory serpent in the garden, the film’s return to propriety after its initial prodigality, its surrender to disciplinary mechanisms, its obedience to traditional morality in its final half. Neoliberalism does everything in its power to provoke this turn historically, and to emphasize it in the accounts it allows the culture to tell of what we thenceforth come to think of as the “failed revolutions” of the late 1960s. “Disarm the utopian potentials of psychedelic communism,” read the instructions for this ideology. “Stage elaborate spectacles of punishment and retribution. Contain the figure of the acid freak within narratives that end unhappily.” The wonderful documentary The Cockettes, for instance, bows to the weight of this narrative arc — as does Wild Wild Country.
Monday April 30, 2018
What are the main differences in terms of form or orientation that distinguish the psychedelic from the weird? Both refer to anomalous modes of experience—but the psychedelic is the more utopian of the two sensibilities, is it not? Let us pursue this as our working hypothesis. Where the weird ruptures the circular selfsameness of consensus reality in a way that generates, as Erik Davis says, “a highly ambivalent blend of wonder and horror,” the psychedelic skews instead toward a more fully joyous cosmology, one that allows for ecstatic realization in the unconcealed immediacy of the here and now of what others might call the utopian, the eudaimonic, and the sacred. Speaking of which: The universe tosses me multiple 23s as Sarah and I drive with a friend of ours to visit an iris farm. So many varieties: Shaman, Catalyst, Closed Circuit, Lime Fizz, Desert Thistle. Petals hang in the sun, fluttering gently in the breeze. Before leaving, I’m drawn to a final flower. “Hidden Message,” reads the placard on the ground beside it. “How appropriate a name,” I think to myself, despite a certain skepticism, a reluctance to trust the world’s signage, not least because of a painful self-consciousness regarding the partiality, the incompleteness, and thus the potential incorrectness, of my conceptual inheritance. “By what means might we seek to inquire? And if hidden, by whom?”
Saturday March 24, 2018
I busy myself with psychedelic reassembly of cultural memory. Reshuffle the game-pieces and remember differently. The Rajneesh community, occluded for so long, re-enters political consciousness. Our society, drenched in capitalist realism, has no way to conceive utopian aspirations these days beyond “getting from day job to dream job,” as reads the text on a billboard in my neighborhood. This is the great virtue of the Netflix series Wild Wild Country: it reminds us not just to dream big again, but to demand everything.
Friday March 23, 2018
Imagine reality evolving into the unthinkable of existing sets and disciplines. Call the results of this dream-work The Ones Who Follow: A Modern Mythology. The Jonestown Massacre lies on the outskirts of all ventures of this sort, utopian communities of joy derailed everywhere, cursed, denounced, undone. How might we again induce a change in people? How might we together achieve self-actualization, group-realization? As opposed to just repeating over and over again history’s pattern of conquest, domination through separation of people from their lands. The “altered state” is what we’re after. That phrase, in its various senses, is what we mean by our Utopia. Lovers as hemispheres, fused at the mouth, as in John Donne’s “The Good Morrow.” We’re trying to raise consciousness, awaken the sleepwalkers from their deadly slumber — beginning with ourselves if necessary.
Thursday March 22, 2018
A singsong routine occurs, a beckoning. Guided by voices, I advance, dreaming up games to be played, video-streaming services stocked with programs. Netflix takes the chill out of my basement with its new series Wild Wild Country, about the Rajneesh movement and its leader, the Indian mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, later known as Osho. With crowns come guillotines, says a woman onscreen. Seek instead gentle, meditative gardens, oases amid seas of people. Unless those people are white christian practitioners of settler colonialism, who “settle” with bombs and guns and then defend their stolen land with same, heaven forbid others achieve ecstatic union with other deities. The conservative christians are the life-haters, the pleasure-deniers of history. The ultimate invasive species — over the planet they lay their rule.
Wednesday February 28, 2018
Receive and digest — or when that fails, depart the avatar and swim through virtual space. Respond initially as if bewitched, befuddled, inventing before one’s eyes tales of men on poles dragged off by crows. With appropriate adjustment, though, attention can relax its concerns and wander. Unlock the ideal athletic state of “relaxed concentration.” Get high snuffing twists of eucalyptus. “Not by one avenue alone,” wrote ancient statesman Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, “can we arrive at so tremendous a secret.” Truths that languages of conquest have rendered unutterable.
Souls hover amid the frequencies of Leo Noble’s Ashenden and Isaac Willow’s Treamplasturin’, while courts grant the State the right to indefinitely detain immigrants. How do those of us who have glimpsed utopia free the prisoners, the cavedwellers, those still ensnared in the Construct, the Collective Choice Architecture known as the “Prisoner’s Dilemma”? Perhaps we should teach them the story of Coeden Brith, “a 220-acre parcel owned by Alison Harlow on the 5600-acre Hippie homesteading community called Greenfield Ranch near Ukiah, CA.” Of special note is this countercultural, neo-pagan community’s ties to ecotopian fantasy and sci-fi writers Ernest Callenbach and Ursula K. LeGuin. As youth rise up, we can begin to think again about sustainable futures, the lives we want.
Thursday January 11, 2018
The bullies are in charge. That is the principle fact of my world. The semester began on a somber note yesterday in an upper-floor classroom looking out on a gray sky. Through an epigraph by Günther Anders, I led students into a conversation about the war on the utopian imagination. We discussed cynicism as a defensive shell that subjects of capitalist realism raise around themselves, an emotional armor borne of disappointment. Staring at an image of myself on my computer screen in the moments before the start of a WebX interview, I uttered words of encouragement, imagining my attempt to improve my life as a tribute of sorts to Daphne. She would have wanted me to do this, I told myself. Remembering an image of the dog’s pained final hours, though, made me wince. Let us ascend by discarding our bearings. Tell stories of dolphins leaping from crystal seas. Monkeys arrive, as if their being were a plot device introduced to startle the narrative. One tries to re-imagine primate consciousness. Body as rage machine, apprehending the world through a fish-eyed lens. Mind not yet bound by words. Whereas now, we cower, listening as choppers cut lines through space.
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