Against Drugs: Deleuze & Guattari and Hari Krishna

[TheScuSpeaks]

I wrote this as an email originally to my brother.


I know we have so much to talk about, (thesis, grad school, teaching, granny, etc) but I'm going to ignore all that.
So, I remember a while back thinking 'hari krishnas are okay with ecstacy and bliss, but not okay with intoxication. I get that on an emotional level, if not a mental level."
But today I was reading Deleuze and Guttari's (D&G's) A Thousand Pleateus because, well, that's what I do, and I got to one of the sections where they talk about drug use. For some reason I hadn't remembered it.
The short of it is that whereas many people feel that drugs are useful ways to "destratify" (ie, get rid of all the ways that the State, capitalism, repression, paranoia, etc. stratify you) yourself (this destratification can also be called producing the plane of consistency [which makes sense if you think visually], which is also producing your Body without Organs [Bwo]). D&G agree that maybe drugs can destratify you somewhat, it's a bad idea. Most people who use drugs end up in the very places they are trying to escape from. "Drug addicts continually fall back into what they wanted to escape: a segmentarity all the more rigid for being marginal, a territorialization all the more artifical for being based on chemical substances, hallucinatory forms, and phantasy subjectifications. [...They] join the legion of false heros who follow the conformist path of a little death and a long fatigue" (p. 285. And I would make little of the use of the term addict, it is clear in context that D&G are drawing little if any distinction between an addict and an user).
The reason drug use fails is that the drug users get it all backwards. "Drugs are too unwieldy to grasp the impreceptible and becoming-imprecitable; drug users believed that drugs would grant them the plane [of consistency], when in fact the plane must distill its own drugs, remaining master of speeds and proximities" (p. 286). And I got it, drug users expect that chemicals will grant them destratification from all the petty fascisms of life. But this botches it, and they end up where they began if not worse off. Rather, one must learn to destratify, and that produces its own drugs. Which brings us back to Hari Krishna (so I hope you're still reading).
The chanting, the dancing, the feasting, etc. are all about processes of destratification. You've found that chanting the holy names of the Lord you are able to draw out this plane of consistancy. The dancing is a double movement; on the one hand you are destratifing yourselves, and on the other hand you are then producing ecstacy from that destratification. Why is it your deities are both dressed and undressed? (Okay, so I am sure there is some good religious reasons for it, but for the sake of theoritical cleverness) You are all both undressing (destratifying) and dressing (producing ecstacy and joy). Of course this isn't just when you feast, or chant, or dance. Everything is spiritual, it's just a question of it you can reach that level. A process of learning to get "drunk off of pure water" (Henry Miller. Or as Michaux also said, "I am a drinker of water"). Krishna Consciousness is this plane of consistency.It must be reached, must be produced.
And of course it would be a mistake to ever confuse the ecstacy of a Devotee of the Lord with the ecstacy of the drug user, they are fundamentally different. "Instead of making a body without organs sufficiently rich or full for the passage of intensities, drug addicts erect a vitrified or emptied body, or a cancerous one: the causal line, creative line, or line of flight immediately turns into a line of death and abolition" (p.285).

[Lazzarone]

i made the following response to stroube's citation of that deleuze and guattari passage here, http://www.ndtceda.com/archives/200405/0042.html.

_

thesis : drugs are tools.

drugs are no more 'temporary stepping stones' to some ideal state of consciousness than any other event in one's life, but drugs are not necessarily 'transgressions of the body' either.

i neither romanticize nor demonize any ingested chemical substance - sometimes they amplify certain intesities, sometimes they quiet them, sometimes they rejuvenate, sometimes they destroy.

yet make no mistake : there's no 'non-chemical' method of expanding consciousness - we are all composed of chemicals. the yogi who accomplishes with breathing exercises what a raver accomplishes with m.d.m.a. is manipulating chemicals just as readily (albeit with more self-discipline).

_

the cult of precious bodily fluids that you're subscribing to, jack, is found nowhere in the literature you've cited. burroughs writes in the prologue to his book, junky :

"i have never regretted my experience with drugs. i think i am in better health now as a result of using junk at intervals than i would be if i had never been an addict. when you stop growing you start dying. an addict never stops growing." ... and that's a quote from a man who lived 83 years.

obviously burroughs never intended to depict drug use through rose-colored glasses. but then again, he never depicted anything through rose-colored glasses. nevertheless, i sincerely doubt he'd equate his various experiments with the 'turning of [his] brain cells into martyrs' or the 'frying of [his] brain', or all the other d.a.r.e. propagandas you mindlessly repeat, jack.

throughout burroughs' writings, his literary explorations are intimately tied to his drug explorations, and he credits drug use for a lot of what he was able to accomplish. quoting from the book you quoted from, the job :

"q: have you written much under the influence of drugs? what results did you
get?

a: to put writing done under the influence of drugs into a special category is absurd. writing is writing, good, bad, successful, unsuccessful. i have written a good deal under the influence of cannabis; many sections of naked lunch were so written. ... i have attempted to write after taking mescaline, but was deterred by nausea and lack of physical coordination. on the other hand, after the drug had worn off i was able to describe the psychic areas revealed to me by the drug. ... i have never been able to write a line under the influence of alcohol." (p159.) ... whereas james joyce probably never wrote a line sober of alcohol.

in fact, you deliberately edit out all of the portions of the text in question that don't fall in line with your one-dimensional condemnation - two examples : "you don't need drugs to get high but drugs do serve as a useful short cut at certain stages of the training. ... the student would be preapred for drug trips to reach areas difficult to explore by other means in the present state of our knowledge ... " (p 137-8).

you're making burroughs into some conservative libertarian who believes that drugs are sinister but the drug war is the wrong approach to deal with what everyone agrees is a societal ill. this leaves intact more subtle methods of social control, namely the ostracism of drug users and the call for forced rehabilitation. (some helpful reading: http://www.ndtceda.com/archives/200207/0039.html;
http://www.ndtceda.com/archives/200207/0042.html)

and you're certainly reinscribing the repressive hypothesis more than i, as you march in lockstep the dominant assumption that drugs contaminate bodily purity - 'stay pure, kids. you don't need drugs to have a good time. instead of a joint, have a glass of water! be high on life!'

_

again, this isn't found in any of the literature you've cited (with the possible exception of deleuze & gauttari, and i'll get to them momentarily), but while we're on the subject of one michel foucault ...

in his discussion with french high skoolers (republished in 'language, counter-memory, practice', click here for full on-line text: http://www.ndtceda.com/archives/200206/0260.html), foucault writes that if one wishes to attack cultural normalization (or 'humanism', as he defines it), one should resist by 'loosening inhibitions with regard to drugs' and 'breaking all the prohibitions that form and guide the developement of the normal individual' (ibid, p222).

you demonstrate that foucault's most avid readers are notably timid to heed this call. you'll echo his outspoken position against the 'war on drugs' ('The campaign against drugs is a pretext for the reinforcement of social repression; *not only through police raids*, but also through *the indirect exaltation of the normal, rational, conscientious, and well-adjusted individual*.' - ibid, p226.), but you'll also downplay the significance of drug experiences upon many of foucault's writings.

let's review some citations: foucault wrote about l.s.d., opium, and drugs generally in one of his major essays entitled 'theatrum philosophicum' - take this rather trippy quotation, for example:

"one can easily see how lsd inverts relations between ill humour, stupidity and thought; no sooner has it short-circuited the suzeranity of categories than it tears away the ground from its indifference and reduces to nothing the glum mimicry of stupidity; not only does it reveal this whole univocal and a-categorical mass to be rainbow-colored, mobile, asymmetrical, decentred, spiraloid and resonating; it makes it swarm constantly with event-fantasies; sliding across this surface, which is at once punctiform and immensely vibaratory, thought, freed from its catatonic chrysalis, has always contemplated the infinite equivalence which has become an acute event and sumptuously adorned repetition.' (critique 282, nov 70, p895-6.)

foucault goes on to say that opium induces a 'weightless immobility', and that drugs generally break up the duality between truth and falsity through that 'rare flash' of 'continous phosphorescence'.

(this leads deleuze to ask in a footnote: 'what will people think of us?' ... remember this for later.)

in conversation with clause mauriac, in mauriac et fils (p328, 1986), foucault describes in some detail his drug experimentations. cannabis was certainly his favorite, and readily available in paris, morocco, and berkeley. rumor has it, in fact, that foucault was pleasantly stoned on amsterdam-grade hashish during his debate with noam chomsky.

foucault also spoke to mauriac of 'an unforgettable evening on l.s.d., in carefully prepared doses, in the desert night, with delicious music, nice people, and some chartreuse'. (ibid, p222.) acid was clearly a life-changing experience for him.

he also considered cocaine and poppers helpful in producing a gay culture that isn't centered on the genitals, but diffuses sexuality throughout one's entire body. (see pages 371-3 in david macey's 'the lives of michel foucault' for further documentation.)

i think the examples of burroughs and foucault conclusively show that drugs can be very instructive, beneficial, and useful. it's too bad that ecstasy wasn't around in their drug days (http://www.ndtceda.com/archives/200208/0075.html), and i'm sure they both would've enjoyed the recent innovations in pharmological hallucinogenes (many from dr. alexander shulgin's cook-books).

_

what's fundamental is that every being follows their own path. some sleep 13 hours a day, like einstein. others dance in a crowd with music blaring and strobe lights all around. some get drunk and write alone. others get stoned and write alone. others get drunk and stoned and write in public places. some meditate, others medicate. no method can be called superior because the proof is always in the pudding of what is produced. the acid-test of creativity is in what's created, nothing more or less, and certainly not the mental state of the creator.

this means that if debate fails to live up to its creative potential, as you've consistently argued that it has jack, then don't blame drugs. that's an idiotic cop out. if burroughs and foucault could do it, then drug use is no excuse.

what you're calling for jack is self-discipline, intellectual responsibility, consistency, dedication to social struggle, etc., not abstinence ... though that might be *a* path it certainly isn't *the* path.

and in the process of criticism, you like to include over-the-top references to your opponents' drug use. this has moved away from pointing out hypocrisy (that is, many teachers who use drugs also defend the punishment of students who use drugs). it has become a way to slander your opposition, to use a tory rhetoric against predominately leftist targets. and this is definately where you begin to distort the literature from which you draw so much inspiration and ammunition. e.g :

earlier in the job, burroughs criticizes as shameful the practice of discrediting people for using drugs; can we not see the 'mccarthy principle of guilt by association' (ibid, p68-9) in your broad accusations against participants in college debate? .... wouldn't burroughs say, 'shame on you, jack'?

_

now delueze and guattari. why would deleuze write, 'what will people think
of us?' as a footnote to foucault's descriptions of various drug experiences?

sure, it's a humorous quip, but it's also telling. he's worried that people
will use exactly the discourse that you have, jack, to automatically ignore
and discard important lines of thinking. how did a funny question in the 70s
turn into a definitive statement against drugs in 80s?

to answer that, notice the change in tone between 'anti-oedipus' and 'a
thousand plateaus'. it's as if the first swings too far one way so the
second was altered to swing too far the other way. 'anti-oedipus' is angry
and destructive - like 'give me liberty or give me death' - while 'a
thousand plateaus' cautions that 'staying stratified is not the worst that
can happen'.

{after reading the chapter entitled 'how do you make yourself a body without
organs?' (in 'a thousand plateaus'), i wrote the following notes : if the
BwO is larger than any individual self, then suicide cannot be 'demented',
because death is both inevitable and non-existent. what if 'staying
stratified' is, in fact, the worst that can happen (because stagnation is
the only real death)? as burroughs wrote even 'failure is mystery'. what if
there's no possible way to 'botch' the BwO? "hence always rid yourself of
desire in order to observe its secrets; but always allow yourself to have
desire in order to observe its manifestations", tao te ching. (take that for
what it's worth.)}

i think deleuze reacted negatively to all those who had read 'anti-oedipus'.
in a phrase, he was very worried about what people thought. he thought
they'd taken destruction too literally, that they'd taken way too many
drugs, and that they'd burnt out too quickly because of it. as jack writes,
"a whole generation of youth coopted by drug addiction". 'a thousand
plateaus' was meant to augment this 'mistake' by emphasizing what had
perhaps been over-looked - patience, rigor, caution.

i find this overly simplistic. there's a sack full of reasons why the struggles of the 70s failed to become a utopia in the 80s, and much of it had to do with pie-in-the-sky rhetoric and hyperbolic expectations. i don't think that if a hippie keeps using drugs they turn into a yuppie, but regardless...

one must view this passage within that historical context. to reach a higher
sythesis, one must recognize the limitations of both anti-oedipus and a
thousand plateaus, one must read one against the other, and in their
confrontation find a third way that authenically engages the past, present,
and future.

what's crucial to me is unleashing intensity - if drugs work for you, then use them, if they don't, then don't. this is where burroughs and foucault both seem to end up.

so in this passage one would expect a thinker like deleuze to make distinctions, to resist the catch-all that is 'drugs', but no. he won't lift a finger that could perhaps be seen as aiding drug users. he's seen too many of his friends over-dose. he won't be put in that untenable position ... not unlike the position a utnif staffer is put in who smells weed coming from room 203. deleuze would rather the problem just went away : 'drug users have not chosen the right molecule or the right horse' - end of story.

thus deleuze and guattari typify drugs in general with typical voodoo-pharmacologies : they're 'too unwieldly', just think of 'abominable vitrifiction of the veins, or the purulence of the nose - the glassy body of the addict', and trust us, 'you will lose control'. this is absolute bullshit.

p282 : "What allows us to describe an overall Drug assemblage in spite of the differences between drugs is a line of perceptive causality that makes it so that (1) the imperceptible is perceived; (2) perception is molecular; (3) desire directly invests the perception and the percieved."

what on earth? ... the same could be said of any eye-opening life-experience. and not all drug experiences meet these three conditions, or if they do, then everything might be appropraitely considered a drug, from accelerating in a car with the windows rolled down to taking cough medicine. (they can't even argue that they were stoned when they wrote this!)

this passage conflates drug use and drug abuse, making the concept of addiction vacuous. i remember reading about a lady who compulsively drank water - she over-hydrated herself and drank herself to death. ... are we all to forgo water-drinking now? are we to consider all water 'a line of death'? are hydrogen and oxygen 'the wrong molecules' because of one individual's addiction? what changes if one million individuals are addicted? (did you write your post sloushed on water, jack? ... you 'zombie'!)

of course, there are dangers. everything is fucking dangerous! there are dangers in writing major works of philosophy as well, dangers in working in the university system, dangers in walking outside or even thinking inside. what's at issue is the mastery of danger, the acquired skill of accounting for, dealing with, and seizing the opportunities presented by risk. a few are able to do this. and most, as nietzsche constantly reminds us, are not.

'legions of false heroes' and 'herds' of drugged idiots though there may be, their existence never justifies criticizing useful tools with which it is still possible to explore; it only justifies criticizing their stupidity. in short, i find this passage shallow, ill-informed, prejudiced, and, to apply their own words to their own work, they fell right back into what they wanted to escape.

_

finally, let me point to an individual who has a lot to say to us today. aldous huxley. one of my favorite books of his was the last one he wrote before he died entitled 'island'. it is a practical description of a small-scale utopia to counter the example of the horrific disutopia 'brave new world'. in huxley's island community, almost everyone uses drugs (called moksha-medicine) on a regular basis. one of the characters, a cranky, young religious fundamentalist, decries this practice, claiming that the enlightenment it reveals isn't real. there's a lot of jack in this character. read the book.

_

conclusion : until we become beings composed of pure energy, we'll have to make do with pumping blood, with digesting and excreting, with inhaling and exhaling, and to make these processes go as smoothly as possible, mentally, physically, and spiritually, we will probably need some tools called drugs. don't panic, and safe trips.


.k


p.s. burroughs makes some interesting comments on another of jack's questionable advocacies - non-violence (http://www.ndtceda.com/archives/200404/0929.html) :

(1) "it probably is necessary to resort to physical violence, which is happening everywhere. there doesn't seem to be any alternative, since the establishments won't change their basic premises."(the job, p49.)

(2) "the people in power will not disappear voluntarily, giving flowers to
cops just isn't going to work. this thinking is fostered by the establishment; they like nothing better than love and nonviolence. the only way i like to see cops given flowers is in a flower pot from a high window." (ibid, p74.)

(3) "'q: what is your stand on student rioting and violence?' a: there should be more rioting and violence."

p.p.s. burroughs again responding to jack's attacks : "overcommitment to political objectives definately does limit one's creative capacity; you tend to become a polemicist rather than a writer." (ibid, p56.)

p.p.p.s. foucault in 'the minimalist self' :

"some drugs are really important for me because they are the mediation to those incredibly intense joys that i am looking for and that i am not able to experience, to afford by myself ... a pleasure must be something incredibly intense."

[retired]

Let me start by saying this has already been an interesting read. James and Kevin always do a knockup job. Secondly, id also like to issue a small disclaimer- any advocacy of drug use is not unconditional. Maturity, understanding, care, etc. are all necessary to any line of flight not to fall victim to the four dangers. I consider drug addiction (to heroin or other drugs that lock themselves as necessary to the metabolic functions at a cellular level), be it legal or narcotic, to be 'suicidal'- requiem for a dream captures this beautifully. Third, Id like to point to a set of terminology that holds some neutrality- 'Medicine' is power, 'drugs' are taboo. Lets remove those coordinates, because, lets face it, at both a theoretical level (FDA and other arms of the State as sites of repression, also subordinate to and subordinates capitalism) and an empirical level (oh shit, the FDA does pander to certain corporate interests but blocks others, the DEA do raid marijuana stores in the Bay Area, etc) they are pretty much useless to our discussion. Rather, drugs will be the neutral term. The next question would seem to be 'what is, then, a drug?' Obviously, we can talk about the addition of chemicals not already present in the body- but we find for most drugs, that just isnt the case, as either trace or significant amounts of active chemicals are found in the body. D+G's famous Miller line about drugs has water being drug, to get drunk on water alone. So it seems that drugs are defined less by what they are (their essence, their chemical compositions) than by their machinic qualities- how they function, what assemblages do they form, what flows can they produce, what affects are they capable of, and, perhaps most importantly, what lines of flight are made possible by their use?

What struck most about Nomadology is its relation to a 'form of thought'. From the discussion on nomad science, there seems to be a nonrepresentational grounding for thought itself (that makes such a science possible) that is outside anything the State enforces (representation, a geometric ordering, a telos, etc.) When we begin to think in a nomadically, there is endless possibilities, even dangerous and destructive or radically productive. The unique aspect of (certain) drugs is the function, the assemblages, the flows, the affects, and the lines of flight made possible by their use have a certain relation to this plane, to the nomadological (non)form of thought. A small toke, a hit of acid- a whirlwind of thought, the old ways of seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking that have all been conditioned by both stratifying and destratifying experiences, make new connections. Not Jon Stewarts 'have you ever seen the back of a twenty dollar bill on weed', but have you ever experienced a festival in the city when every one is working or going about their business, except you and a friend, in the middle of it all, experience the worst of the spectacle and the best of the celebration- its all there infront of you, possible without drugs, of course, but what a difference it makes!

Im not arguing for or against the use of drugs- which is precisely my point. Scu, your advocacy seems to be playing the mans game, closing of possibilities of flight before they begin. What chemicals are in your milieu?

[Antonucci23]

Drugs are bad because they make you write 5000 word posts.

[Lazzarone]

actually i was completely sober when i wrote that. so i guess i have no excuse. =)

[TheScuSpeaks]

One of the single most destratifying experiences of my life was getting the shit kicked out of me on a somewhat regular basis for about a year by my then girlfriend when I was 14 and 15.
Getting the shit kicked out of you can be a wonderful way to destratify yourself. Now, I am not here to either demonize or glorify being beaten up, but I don't see what people have against it. How dare anyone essentialize a tool that be used to destratify yourself. Look at Fight Club, the fighting and getting beaten up is what makes the Narrator see clearly. Also, there is fundamentally no difference between being beaten up and other, common activities. Being hit is simply impact upon skin, isn't walking that? or fucking? Don't tell me Bukowski would have ever been such a good poet if he hadn't gotten into regular bar fights, or Ernest Hemingway without experiencing violence. Don't think that everyone that gets beaten up ends up like Faulkner's Joe Christmas.
I mean, have you ever thought about what the state of the arts would be without genocide and war?
So go get your nose broken, go get your ribs smashed, your knee caps shattered; just so long as you destratify in the end. And anyone that tells you anything else has either sold out or mouthing phrases of The (molar) Man.


Please people. Deleuze and Guattari don't tell you that you can never destratify with drugs, but rather that you most likely won't. That you will just in up damaging yourself even more.
The Hari Krishnas are the same. The four regulatory principles are just that, principles for regulation to achieve Krishna Consciousness. They teach that if you obey all four principles but do not achieve Krishna Consciousness, you have gained nothing. If you break all four principles but gain Krishna Consciousness, you have gained everything. There is zero essentializations, but rather a careful eye to experimentation. A warning that drugs/intoxicants are not the best way to go about destratifying yourself, anymore than I would really suggest getting the shit beat out of you. If you are plowing a field with a two edged sword, you might succeed, but maybe you should be using another tool.

Love
TheScuStillBelievesDrugsAreUnwieldly

[vikingwizardsrule]

all I gotta say is that when i ate mushrooms after reading Anti-Oedipus i could literally see all the flows beneath the surface of everything, stretching out, grappling with eachother, not always attaching themselves to the partial objects that they touch but attempting to conjugate nonetheless.

I also find myself able to read deleuze with more ease after smoking a joint. (While reading Zizek stoned gives me a headache--something to do with their writing styles I suppose)


take that tidbit as you would like, about two drugs that most likely will not end up 'damaging the body' in any significant way.

[TheFunkMachine]

...I would just like to comment that I find it odd that you are able to discuss Deleuze and Guattari with your brother. I can hardly talk television with my brother.

I guess the "Scu" family home was a temporary autonomous zone... Yeah, I realize, it was a terrible joke.

[vikingwizardsrule]

Also, more to the point

The series of books by Carlos Casteneda, starting with The Teachings of Don Juan, demonstrate one effective use of drugs to literally rip the author, Carlos, from his incredibly stubborn psychological investment within western rationality, to begin his transformation to 'a man of knowledge.'

When working with an apprentice, a nagual must use various forms of trickery in order to get the apprentice to become immersed within the world of seeing (what 'seeing' entails, amusingly, seems very similar to the types of imagery that D&G write about--one sees humans as eggs of energy with strands that connect to eachother--the image of the egg is also invoked in anti-oedipus though the body without organs has no shape, of course.).

Many methods of the sorcerer are used to initiate apprentices, while some apprentices give in by their own accord.

But carlos, a westerner, all too sure that the reality that we all see everyday, combined with various cartesian metaphysical dualisms are in fact all that exist--he exists on a conceptual plane that cannot see any of the other things going on under within and throughout things, he sticks to rational argumentation, attempting to fit even his first mescalito experiences into his rational grid.

His benefactor Don Juan, introduces Carlos to three 'drugs' (more accurately: two allies and mescalito), because carlos is curious about peyote. Each of these 'drugs' contain some form of guidance, or so Don Juan tells Carlos.


In fact, one does not need these drugs to 'see' (in fact 'seeing' can be consciously triggered by a trained nagual, except for of course the real and guiding experience with the entity called Mescalito) -- drugs, in this case, were a form of trickery--a way to rip Carlos from his grid of cartesian rationality, a way to show him experiences that cannot but shatter his conceptual plane.
A way of cultivating a more open attitude towards what is and exists in the world. Perhaps, for carlos at least, these 'drugs' were a very effective tool for bringing him into the sorcerer's world, they were by no means an endpoint, but a condition of possibility (with the careful guiding hand of Don Juan of course). Perhaps, drugs are unwieldy when held incorrectly, used for the wrong purposes (like a sword for plowing...).

Drugs, however, can be sharpened. No, taking a bunch of LSD and sitting around tripping balls probably isn't going to help much with liberating oneself (though it may be a start). But, perhaps, if one were to do drugs carefully, with patience, self-discipline---a process of getting high off water, only instead of water, you eat mushrooms (or whatever else)--the result is the same as Hari Krishnas and other modes of destratification.

[Antonucci23]

Originally Posted by thornthehairykrishna

Drugs, however, can be sharpened. No, taking a bunch of LSD and sitting around tripping balls probably isn't going to help much with liberating oneself (though it may be a start). But, perhaps, if one were to do drugs carefully, with patience, self-discipline---a process of getting high off water, only instead of water, you eat mushrooms (or whatever else)--the result is the same as Hari Krishnas and other modes of destratification.

1. Drugs are bad because they make you into a Hairy Krishna. Thorn said so.

2. Getting high off water is different than getting high off mushrooms. I think the difference, generally, is the part about mushrooms.

It just seems that the most fundamental insight drug hippies offer is that "cartesian dualisms are flawed and our picture of the world is influenced by perception."

Well, der. That's no longer a revelation. Even a Newtonian physicist will spot you that much. Can some hallucinogenic poster person come up with something better?

I've never known people who refrain from drugs to lack access to any particular philosophical insights as a result.

Originally Posted by harekrishna2

actually i was completely sober when i wrote that. so i guess i have no excuse. =) .

Flashbacks.

Seriously, this is all dumb. Reading critical texts and doing a bunch of drugs just aren't really related. Lots of people read critical texts (and understand them) without doing any drugs. Alternately, lots of people do drugs to see cool things when they play on popular video game consoles.

The only relationship that these two activities (drugs and crit-tasticalism) really have is that they're common recreational activities for people in and around tertiary education. Just because both activities are hott topics in the coffeehouse doesn't mean that they're really connected in any meaningful way.

[Lazzarone]

you're a machine. what we call 'the conscious mind' has very limited control over the patterns your machine is capable of fabricating. this is why 'cogito ergo sum' didn't speak the last word.

=====

now, it's very easy to repeat that 'philosophical insight'. it's much harder to explore the intensities opened up by that insight. the latter isn't an academic matter of 'reading critical texts', but of the task of self-revelation.

every body-machine's potential outstrips its production. so the question : how do we confront this honestly and learn to push through?

a drug-user pursues a specific line of this banal question : imagine you could open the lid of your skull and double-click on the tissues of your brain like the computer interface you're using now.

by clicking here, you alter your motor functions, clicking here, your visual functions, clicking here, you can float in zero gravity, clicking here, you hear colors and taste sounds, here, time slows to a crawl, and so on.

you'd discover a near infinite number of spots to press. whatever else you'd do, you'd be directly experimenting with your neurophysiology.

this is what drugs do. and sometimes it's EXTREMELY DIFFICULT without them. i meditated for years and never came close to a summer filled with l.s.d.

those who blithely say 'just do it without the drugs' usually don't know what they're talking about. a zen buddhist taking m.d.m.a. for the first time said, 'it took me 20 years to get here'. he'd been a buddhist for 40 years.

want to hear something that won't surprise you? ... i don't want to be a zen buddhist for 40 fucking years. nor do i want to be krishna (who i know are entirely different from the buddhists). call me a western busy-body, call me impure, call me a dirty rotten cheat - but i don't like permanently altering my hardware if a software program will work just fine.

=====

airplanes are faster than trains; drugs are faster than meditative exercises. you might say, 'trains keep you grounded' or 'trains give you a better view'. maybe so. i'm still gonna fly. .k


p.s. for scu: your analogy of 'getting beaten up' inserts a concept that's foreign to this discussion - consent. rape doesn't negate the beauties of fucking; assault doesn't negate the beauties of fighting. 'fight club' is the tale of a line of flight becoming a line of annihilation; the moral (if it has one) is NOT 'don't fly'. the moral is 'don't kill the pilot'. the pilot avoids storms, adjusts altitude, knows when and where to land. addiction, suicide, damage - drugs run these risks. drugs ran these risks for the shaman before the tripper before the raver. my advice: know the dangers, and be careful.

[TheScuSpeaks]

Buddhism and Hari Krishna have very little to do with each other except they both aren't from the west and new agers like to flatten them out. There is a reason that D&G included Krishna Consciousness in their description of the BwO and nothing (ha!) for the buddhists.

[vikingwizardsrule]

Originally Posted by Antonucci23

1. Drugs are bad because they make you into a Hairy Krishna. Thorn said so.

2. Getting high off water is different than getting high off mushrooms. I think the difference, generally, is the part about mushrooms.

I'm just sayin that if you wished to transform yourself into a crow on mushrooms (as opposed to just tripping balls), you need to train yourself in a way that is similar to training yourself to get high off water.

It just seems that the most fundamental insight drug hippies offer is that "cartesian dualisms are flawed and our picture of the world is influenced by perception."

Well, der. That's no longer a revelation. Even a Newtonian physicist will spot you that much. Can some hallucinogenic poster person come up with something better?

I've never known people who refrain from drugs to lack access to any particular philosophical insights as a result.

True, I knew that cartesian dualism was bad before I started doing drugs.

I also knew that our access to reality 'out there' was limited at best, if that reality existed at all


But I didn't know how things could be different, I didn't know that there was energy and strands of shit beneath the walls, the trees, the river (mushrooms)

I didn't know that reality was in fact one big cosmic joke, and in fact I was a couch for all eternity (salvia)

Most importantly i knew but i couldnt FEEL the 'truth' of the opinions on these issues.

Certainly insights, useful? I dunno, i think so.

[quote[
Seriously, this is all dumb. Reading critical texts and doing a bunch of drugs just aren't really related. Lots of people read critical texts (and understand them) without doing any drugs. Alternately, lots of people do drugs to see cool things when they play on popular video game consoles.

The only relationship that these two activities (drugs and crit-tasticalism) really have is that they're common recreational activities for people in and around tertiary education. Just because both activities are hott topics in the coffeehouse doesn't mean that they're really connected in any meaningful way.[/quote]

What about a coffeehouse, ON MUSHROOMS.
Seriously, mushrooms are better than coffee as a catalyst for having intellectual conversations and ranting about shit that concerns me.

I remember convincing someone that capitalism was in fact bad on a mushroom trip this summer, something that COULD have gone on elsewhere under a different mind-state but what is a better 'coffeehouse' than walking around the woods, tripping, and ranting about capitalism?

[Antonucci23]

Originally Posted by thorntheharekrishna

Most importantly i knew but i couldnt FEEL the 'truth' of the opinions on these issues.

I honestly chalk that up to a failure of imagination. Did you even try?

Originally Posted by thorntheharekrishna

What about a coffeehouse, ON MUSHROOMS.
Seriously, mushrooms are better than coffee as a catalyst for having intellectual conversations and ranting about shit that concerns me.

I remember convincing someone that capitalism was in fact bad on a mushroom trip this summer, something that COULD have gone on elsewhere under a different mind-state but what is a better 'coffeehouse' than walking around the woods, tripping, and ranting about capitalism?

People on drugs are notoriously bad at organizing to defeat capitalism, for a few reasons. First, they're on drugs. Secondly, treating politics as an aspect of your recreation makes it easy - nearly inevitable - to abandon politics once your schedule no longer leaves you with 6-12 hour slots free.

I think Samuel Gompers struck more effective blows against "capitalism" than Tim Leary. Hallucinating is not a revolutionary act when psychedelic overstimulation is already an advertising norm.

Originally Posted by somehippie

a drug-user pursues a specific line of this banal question : imagine you could open the lid of your skull and double-click on the tissues of your brain like the computer interface you're using now.

by clicking here, you alter your motor functions, clicking here, your visual functions, clicking here, you can float in zero gravity, clicking here, you hear colors and taste sounds, here, time slows to a crawl, and so on.

you'd discover a near infinite number of spots to press. whatever else you'd do, you'd be directly experimenting with your neurophysiology.

this is what drugs do. and sometimes it's EXTREMELY DIFFICULT without them. i meditated for years and never came close to a summer filled with l.s.d.

Cool, well, now that you have superpowers, I hope you use them for awesome, especially when you progress from the zero gravity to shooting lasers out of your eyes. Drop me a line when the superpowers kick enough ass to let me destroy enemy base!

[vikingwizardsrule]

Originally Posted by Antonucci23

People on drugs are notoriously bad at organizing to defeat capitalism, for a few reasons. First, they're on drugs. Secondly, treating politics as an aspect of your recreation makes it easy - nearly inevitable - to abandon politics once your schedule no longer leaves you with 6-12 hour slots free.

I think Samuel Gompers struck more effective blows against "capitalism" than Tim Leary. Hallucinating is not a revolutionary act when psychedelic overstimulation is already an advertising norm.

Personal transformation is a prerequisite for any other form of revolutionary action.

[Lazzarone]

1. fucking SAM fucking GOMPERS was a fucking DRUG fucking DEALER!

{oh but i guess folks like you don't consider nicotine a real drug, even though it's more addictive than alcohol and cocaine and kills 1 out of the 3 of its regular users... still, it's aesthetically pleasing and helps you focus.}

2. what does 'defeating capitalism' even mean?

{gompers never aimed at 'defeating capitalism', but organizing labor in order to improve capitalism, to make it more responsive to its workers' needs. ... today's ilicit dealers also pose a threat, if not to capitalism, at least to corporate control over drug consumption - does this count?}

3. to categorize drugs as mere recreation denies the personal as political.

{no one does salvia divinorum for recreation - it makes you sweaty, it's anti-addictive, you travel to disquieting worlds and sometimes you see wicked creatures. nevertheless, i'd recommend it while it's still legal.}

[kritikingforlife]

Originally Posted by Lazzarone

{no one does salvia divinorum for recreation - it makes you sweaty, it's anti-addictive, you travel to disquieting worlds and sometimes you see wicked creatures. nevertheless, i'd recommend it while it's still legal.}

word...10x extract is crazy shit.

[Antonucci23]

Originally Posted by lazzarone

1. fucking SAM fucking GOMPERS was a fucking DRUG fucking DEALER!

{oh but i guess folks like you don't consider nicotine a real drug, even though it's more addictive than alcohol and cocaine and kills 1 out of the 3 of its regular users... still, it's aesthetically pleasing and helps you focus.}

Folks like me? I don't know what that's supposed to mean. I don't have anything in particular against your recreational activities, and legalization would likely be a good idea from most any rational social planning perspective.

I don't really care how many psychedelic drugs you take - but trying to sell drug consumption as a precursor to revolution flies in the face of both logic and empirical evidence.

Yes, you can link everyone to drugs. That's especially easy to do if you're on them.

That's irrelevant to my point. Labor organizing accomplished more than so-called revolutions in consciousness that serve to justify pretty vacuous faux-revolutionary crap.

It appears, by the way, that you have successfully mastered the art of saying "fucking." Was it just natural, or did you learn those skills from a machine elf?

Originally Posted by Lazzarone

2. what does 'defeating capitalism' even mean?

{gompers never aimed at 'defeating capitalism', but organizing labor in order to improve capitalism, to make it more responsive to its workers' needs. ... today's ilicit dealers also pose a threat, if not to capitalism, at least to corporate control over drug consumption - does this count?}

How should I know? Thorn's the one who claimed that he had accomplished a fantastic revolution by getting a stoned Dartmouth student to agree that capitalism was bad (most likely to shut him up so they could go back to PlayStation, I'd imagine.)

I view measures that regulate capitalism and defend the interests of workers as a good thing. I view such measures as substantially more impressive than movements that focus all their energies on defending the recreational choices of middle to upper class college students and their affiliates. You can call it "defeating capitalism" or "amending capitalism." I don't care - I call it "better for most people than the rhetoric of stoned Learyites."

None of this matters. I was just refuting Thorn's implication that somehow taking drugs makes it easier to rant about capitalism. Bullshit. Taking drugs makes it easier to rant, period. He could just as plausibly be ranting about how awesome capitalism is, or how a new popular fascism would really stick it to the man.

Originally Posted by Lazzarone

3. to categorize drugs as mere recreation denies the personal as political.

{no one does salvia divinorum for recreation - it makes you sweaty, it's anti-addictive, you travel to disquieting worlds and sometimes you see wicked creatures. nevertheless, i'd recommend it while it's still legal.}

Yeah, people do salvia divinorum because it brings down The Man!

In my experience, people usually do salvia because someone told them that it was legal pot. Sometimes, they do it when they can't find anything better.

I'm sure you can give me a detailed history of the awesome consciousness expansion from the side of the packet or whatever, and it will be really enlightening.

Maybe "the personal is political." So? That doesn't make every personal choice into some revolutionary act of awesome. Drug choices are not inherently political in any particularly progressive or revolutionary way. Anyone can get away with doing a mess of psychedelics in a sufficently privileged institution or set of circumstances.

Originally Posted by someotherhippie

Personal transformation is a prerequisite for any other form of revolutionary action.

Great bumper sticker!

It's also meaningless at best, counterproductive at worst.

It's meaningless because people constantly undergo transformations. That's a product of most any continued existence. Therefore, you can point at any "revolutionary action" and say - it was a product of transformed consciousness.

It's also meaningless for your argument because you equivocate "personal transformation" and "taking a shitload of psychedelics and seeing things." The types of "personal transformation" achieved by effecting a partial ego dissolution are, both logically and empirically, not conducive to revolutionary organization and action.

It's counterproductive because of the implied order of operations. By calling personal transformation a "prerequisite" you justify total apathy until you've "worked out this revolution in your head." By the time you have, of course, your personal circumstances will have changed in such a way that they'll dictate against any particularly revolutionary action on your part.

You should find people who are working on meaningful social projects and tell them that their "revolutionary action" is meaningless because they haven't taken the right drugs yet. Woo hoo.

Bottom line: none of the people claiming drug wisdom have produced one drug insight worth reading. "The brain is a computer - I can double click it!" "Cartesian logic might be flawed." Seriously - 12 hours of intense dissociative experience fraught with real risks, and that's the best you can do?

[Lazzarone]

sam gompers made cigars. that's what the man did. he set about labor organizing because he wanted to defend his trade. i suppose one could say, 'what's so revolutionary about smoking tobacco?', but he didn't look at it like that. thank goodness he didn't, because i agree, we're all better off for his dedication.

as for me, i'm so sick of hearing about the revolution that it's enough to make me turn republican.

i play poker (an aristocratic pastime if ever there was one). i read novels (a complete waste of time). i write papers (mostly about literature, and with little relation to 'revolutionary struggle', whatever that means). i like listening to and making music (again, totally useless). i also try to help people out where i can.

i've found that drugs have opened certain things up for me. that's all. i never meant to romanticize them, and if you hear me doing so, then feel free to stop me. they're tools, period, end of sentence.

'naked lunch' was written while burroughs was stoned. it doesn't make the novel any more or less revolutionary, if that's even the right word, but maybe it helped him pour his imagination out on the page. he also did heroin, and said it made him a healthier person. doesn't mean you have to do it, but he's entitled to his opinion.

everything joyce wrote he wrote while drunk off his ass. ditto for him. you can say he might've written well without the booze, but you're not him. when you spend two decades of your life writing the most complex novel ever written, then you can say that. until then, i don't believe you.

thoreau did some ether. so did william james. they said it helped them out too. but ether wasn't enough for leary, and he propagated l.s.d.

... now, were these guys 'revolutionary'? - who knows. i dig them either way.

see, here's the issue. people tend to fall into ruts. we have a tendency to get stuck. we go about our daily routines and pretty soon we can't see anything but what we're prepared to see. so we have to put ourselves in uncomfortable positions, we have to disturb our mental habits.

and drugs can do that sometimes, speaking abstractly [1]. sometimes, on the other hand, they become the routine. then they suck.

if you wanna dance or sing or chant or feast or drink water, that's fine too. strictly speaking though, it's not about 'consciousness' [2]. it's about experiences and experiments. so do whatever floats your boat.

the 'fucking' was for emphasis - because the point about gompers is fucking important. you missed it in your attempt to reduce all drugs to mere 'recreation'. please don't do it again. .k


[1] this word 'drugs' is either way too abstract or not abstract enough. it includes organic and pharmaceutical, addictive and non-addictive, illicit and prescribed, etc. it's almost impossible to say anything educated about such a large category of substances, except to say don't generalize.

it reminds me of the overused concept 'addiction' - either you restrict it to chemical addiction (e.g. nicotine) or you expand it to include everything (e.g. water), but if you half-ass it, then you start calling things like gambling, shopping, and t.v. watching 'addictive', which is meaningless.

as for drugs, there's disassociatives, there's psychedelics, there's stimulants; there's drugs to relax and there's drugs to freak you out; there's specific dangers, specific benefits, and each drug affects each person individually at different times in their lives and in different environments.

[2] however implicitly, the word consciousness tends to isolate your mind from your body (and being from doing), as if certain activities don't affect material reality. once you start down that road, then you start separating work from leisure, among other dumb distinctions.

[Lazzarone]

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

#1 : When Sam was a grown-up of ten his father took him out of the free school for Jewish boys, and apprenticed him to a shoemaker. His father himself was by trade a cigarmaker. Often after supper he rose from the table saying he was off to a meeting of the Cigarmakers' Society.

"I would rather be a cigarmaker," remarked Sam, the shoemaker of eight weeks standing.

"And why?" asked father Gompers.

"Because shoemakers have no society," replied Sam.

With that the Society of Cigarmakers enrobed a new apprentice boy. Sam took his place at a long worktable. In the daily company of men HIS RAW, OPEN MIND WAS MOLDED AS TIGHTLY AS THE RICH BROWN VELVETY LEAVES OF TOBACCO MOLDED BETWEEN HIS FINGERS. {j. cottler. the grand old man of labor. http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~maggieoh/Ld/h1index.html.}
___

question : do you think the fact that cigar-smoking was a social activity (folks sitting around, the nicotine going to their heads, talking politics) helped foster the rise of labor unions as a political activity? (answer : yes.)

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

#2 : The types of "personal transformation" achieved by effecting a partial ego dissolution are, both logically and empirically, not conducive to revolutionary organization and action. {m. antonucci. see above.}

___

The theory of the subject (in the double sense of the word) is at the heart of humanism and this is why our culture has tenaciously rejected anything that could weaken its hold upon us. But it can be attacked in two ways: either by a "desubjectification" of the will to power (that is, through political struggle in the context of class warfare) or by the destruction of the subject as a pseudosovereign (that is, through an attack on "culture": the suppression of taboos and the limitations and division imposed upon the sexes; the setting up of communes; THE LOOSENING OF INHIBITIONS WITH REGARD TO DRUGS; the breaking of all the prohibitions that form and guide the development of a normal individual). I am referring to all those experiences which have been rejected by our civilization or which it accepts only within literature. {m. foucault. http://www.ndtceda.com/archives/200206/0260.html}

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

#3 : In the period of crisis, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the expansion of welfare and the universalization of discipline in both the dominant and the subordinate countries created a new margin of freedom for the laboring multitude. ... The disciplinary regime clearly no longer succeeded in containing the needs and desires of young people. The prospect of getting a job that guarantees regular and stable work for eight hours a day, fifty weeks a year, for an entire working life, the prospect of entering the normalized regime of the social factory, which had been a dream for many of their parents, now appeared as a kind of death. The mass refusal of the disciplinary regime, which took a variety of forms, was not only a negative expression but also a moment of creation, what Nietzsche calls a transvaluation of values. ... From the standpoint of the traditional "political" segments of the U.S. movements of the 1960s, the various forms of cultural experimentation that blossomed with a vengeance during that period all appeared as a kind of distraction from the "real" political and economic struggles, but what they failed to see was that the "merely cultural" experimentation had very profound political and economic effects. "Dropping out" was really a poor conception of what was going on in Haight-Ashbury and across the United States in the 1960s. The two essential operations were the refusal of the disciplinary regime and the experimentation with new forms of productivity. The refusal appeared in a wide variety of guises and proliferated in thousands of daily practices. IT WAS THE COLLEGE STUDENT WHO EXPERIMENTED WITH LSD INSTEAD OF LOOKING FOR A JOB; it was the young woman who refused to get married and make a family; it was the "shiftless" African-American worker who moved on "CP" (colored people's) time, refusing work in every way possible. The youth who refused the deadening repetition of the factory-society invented new forms of mobility and flexibility, new styles of living. {m. hardt & a. negri. empire. p272-4.}

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

[Antonucci23]

Obviously, I used the term "drugs" without any precision. I think that's fine - when university-associated young people start quoting Castenada and claiming that the mushrooms let them see the strands and shit, I don't think there's any doubt left about the range of stuff we're discussing: various shades of hallucinogens, possibly including marijuana, LSD, DMT, psilocybin, peyote, mescaline, MDA, MDMA, your mailorder salvia crap...and stuff like that.

Originally Posted by Lazzarone

sam gompers made cigars. that's what the man did. he set about labor organizing because he wanted to defend his trade. i suppose one could say, 'what's so revolutionary about smoking tobacco?', but he didn't look at it like that. thank goodness he didn't, because i agree, we're all better off for his dedication.

There's a clear distinction between defending the rights of laborers and defending the rights of consumers. I find it difficult to believe that most debate-affiliated Learyites give a shit about the conditions or organization that *produce* their recreational substances. Is your advocacy here really just for British Columbian farmers or something? The benighted entrepreneurial successors to Sandoz?

Come on, put down the bong and get serious - this is a bunk analogy and you know it. Sophistry's just exhausting in a written format.

Originally Posted by Lazzarone

as for me, i'm so sick of hearing about the revolution that it's enough to make me turn republican.

Well, why the heck did you feel compelled to double post your mandatory quotes from Foucault, Hardt and Negri, two hours later? Did your alternate personality do that - does he come out when you're peaking?

Originally Posted by Lazzarone

i play poker (an aristocratic pastime if ever there was one). i read novels (a complete waste of time). i write papers (mostly about literature, and with little relation to 'revolutionary struggle', whatever that means). i like listening to and making music (again, totally useless). i also try to help people out where i can.

K. Again, I have no particular objections to your lifestyle, nor do I wish to insist that you devote EVERY WAKING MINUTE to IMMEDIATE ACHIEVEMENT OF A WORKERS' PARADISE.

Your claims are grandiose, though. In fact, a vastly inflated sense of cosmic significance is often associated with artificial forebrain stimulation. That's why drugs make you shamelessly write novella length posts.

That's my objection. The continued association of particular chemicals with revolutionary changes in consciousness is misleading at best. At worst, you know, you're acting as a very irresponsible promoter on a bulletin board populated by people substantially less experienced than you are.

Originally Posted by Lazzarone

i've found that drugs have opened certain things up for me. that's all. i never meant to romanticize them, and if you hear me doing so, then feel free to stop me. they're tools, period, end of sentence.

Uh...can I talk to Sybil now? You immediately double post to romanticize drugs. Stop! Stop! Stop!

I'm responding to the mythology that drugs are especially useful tools for a mystical journey of self-discovery, which will lead the way out of oppressive material conditions. Are you propagating that mythology? I'm not sure. All I know is that when someone starts rattling off about Carlos Castefuckingnada, I'm pretty sure I can predict what comes next. The inevitable 2-3 quotes from criterrific authors, then continued recycling of the same 5-10 author "drug canon." Can y'all throw something in from Hunter S. Thompson, too, or is that the wrong kind of hippie?

Originally Posted by Lazzarone

he also did heroin, and said it made him a healthier person.

I have some affection for William S. Burroughs, and we both know that's a ridiculous claim on his part. I strongly suspect that if your friend were to start banging smack, you'd advise them to stop instead of ruminating over Burroughs' wisdom as a medical practitioner.

Originally Posted by Lazzarone

but ether wasn't enough for leary, and he propagated l.s.d.

Are you going to tell me that Leary was a particularly good writer or speaker?
If so, I'm deeply skeptical that you read things he wrote, or listened to him speak.

Originally Posted by Lazzarone

you missed it in your attempt to reduce all drugs to mere 'recreation'. please don't do it again.

The consumption of the psychedelic range does not aid political activity in any meaningful way that I can see, nor has it produced very many interesting philosophical insights. All I'm getting out of y'all are attempts to appropriate a range of authors as supporters as your cause, and then:

Western rationality - possibly not a complete description of the everything - film at 11!
My brain - it's like Windows, I can double click it!

I do not think your drugs are either a useful tool for either raising political consciousness or personal self-discovery in the vast majority of cases. At that point, recreation's pretty much what you've got.

[Antonucci23]

You told someone to stop you if you started to romanticize drugs...then hours later...

I'll stop after this post. This is a massive time suck - drug romanticism is obviously an important component of your belief structure, and I don't have time to deal with your delusions.

Originally Posted by Lazzarone

question : do you think the fact that cigar-smoking was a social activity (folks sitting around, the nicotine going to their heads, talking politics) helped foster the rise of labor unions as a political activity? (answer : yes.)

Question: are you auditioning for a basic textbook on logical fallacies?

By mixing three elements together inappropriately, you've attempted to hide a very weak argument.
Factors contributing to the formation and success of labor unions:
Folks sitting around? Yes.
Talking politics? No shit, sherlock.
THE NICOTINE GOING TO THEIR HEADS?! NO.

There's no warrant for that assertion. You're just making shit up. You took multiple 'graphs to try to sneak in the worst argument ever.

Originally Posted by Lazzarone

#2 : The types of "personal transformation" achieved by effecting a partial ego dissolution are, both logically and empirically, not conducive to revolutionary organization and action. {m. antonucci. see above.}
___

The theory of the subject (in the double sense of the word) is at the heart of humanism and this is why our culture has tenaciously rejected anything that could weaken its hold upon us. But it can be attacked in two ways: either by a "desubjectification" of the will to power (that is, through political struggle in the context of class warfare) or by the destruction of the subject as a pseudosovereign (that is, trhough an attack on "culture": the suppression of taboos and the limitations and division imposed upon the sexes; the setting up of communes; THE LOOSENING OF INHIBITIONS WITH REGARD TO DRUGS; the breaking of all the prohibitions that form and guide the development of a normal individual). I am referring to all those experiences which have been rejected by our civilization or which it accepts only within literature.

YES. I SEE WHAT YOU HAVE WRITTEN IN PERSUASIVE CAPITAL LETTERS. I BELIEVE THAT IN THIS PARTICULAR, FOUCAULT IS FLAT WRONG. WAY TO FIND RANDOM INTERVIEW SEGMENT AND INVEST IT WITH THE AUTHORITY OF FOUCAULT'S CAREFULLY RESEARCHED WORKS.

Temporary dissolution doesn't do anything if it isn't accompanied by a 'desubjectification of the will to power.' Postdating matters here - 30+ years of data after this 1971 article display precisely the extent to which existant social structures can absorb and redeploy those powerfully felt experiences of ego (subject?) dissolution. Psychedelic overstimulation was not an advertising norm yet; Foucault had never seen ravers embrace their own infantalization; the Haight experiment hadn't flopped.

Regardless, you're just misreading this. It's entirely possible to loosen or eliminate 'inhibitions' without embracing psychedelic pioneers. I mean, shit, by your logic, we should all huff gas to show that we're free.

What, are you inhibited about huffing gas? Fucking boojie.

Originally Posted by Lazzarone

The disciplinary regime clearly no longer succeeded in containing the needs and desires of young people. The prospect of getting a job that guarantees regular and stable work for eight hours a day, fifty weeks a year, for an entire working life, the prospect of entering the normalized regime of the social factory, which had been a dream for many of their parents, now appeared as a kind of death. It was the college student who experimented with LSD instead of looking for a job. The youth who refused the deadening repetition of the factory-society invented new forms of mobility and flexibility, new styles of living. {m. hardt & a. negri. empire. p272-4.}

Those college students did get jobs, unless they were already independently wealthy. Deferring the factory society isn't the same as refusing it, and, in many cases, the ability to defer is intimately bound up with class stratification. Fucking around on LSD for a few years was, and perhaps is, a privilege. Is Paris Hilton particularly revolutionary? Would Paris Hilton on acid be revolutionary, or just extremely annoying? I'll vote for the latter.

It's perfectly possible to be concerned with professional advancement and material gain while ingesting psychedelics on weekends. Plenty of middle-upper class Ecstasy eaters feel that their drugs help acclimate them to the factory.

[Lazzarone]

"Obviously, I used the term 'drugs' without any precision. ... I don't think there's any doubt left about the range of stuff we're discussing: various shades of hallucinogens, possibly including marijuana, LSD, DMT, psilocybin, peyote, mescaline, MDA, MDMA, your mailorder salvia crap."

and now you know what i meant by 'folks like you'.

... as for gompers, i think one can see (though i doubt you will) how the activity of cigar-smoking itself assisted in the development of his political thought - it was part of the social environment at the time, part of the reason cigar-makers had a society while shoemakers didn't, part of what must've aided the educated discussions that then led to organization.

most political/cultural movements (and i quoted hardt & negri to explain that slash between political and cultural) have their particular drugs: look at marijuana and beatniks, or hippies and l.s.d.

drugs help to create social networks - bars, humidors, coffee-shops, teapads, opium dens - and when people have a place to talk about what matters to them and share experiences, then sometimes cool things can happen, whether that manifests itself analytically, artistically, or politically. i don't feel i'm over-stating this case.

timothy leary was a beautiful person who helped an awful alot of people. he wrote 'the politics of esctasy' which i read long before taking acid, and i still consider it an eye-opening work. (alan watts' work is what convinced me to try l.s.d., however.) actually, a friend of mine's dad used l.s.d. as a thearpy tool with both neurotic and psychotic patients, and it was a very successful psychiatric program (before the government shut it down). you might also look at the study leary did with prisoners in connecticut - if memory serves, their recidivism rate was effectively zero.

sometimes, i would agree, drugs can aid reactionary forces as well. charles manson used that same drug to create a fascistic death squad of vicious murderers. the word 'assassin' originally comes from the word 'hashish', as al-hassan ibn-al-sabbah used that drug in training others to kill world leaders.

"you're acting as a very irresponsible promoter on a bulletin board populated by people substantially less experienced than you are."

how does one gain experience? by sitting alone 'reading critical texts'? ... i don't have so low an opinion of the people on this list as you seem to, and i think your comment reveals a certain prejudice against young people. it really equates to saying, don't learn to cook because you might burn yourself.

i've said repeatedly 'be careful', but i disagree that the only solution is abstaining from whatever drugs you arbitrarily categorize as mere recreations of the rich and infamous.

before using anything, from cough medicine to coffee to shrooms to anti-fungal toe cream, do some research and consult knowledgeable people. if you're considering using m.d.m.a. or the cornucopia of interesting pharmaceuticals out there, you might drop dr. shulgin a line - http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/shulgin/blg/index.html.

by the way, neither foucault nor hardt & negri were 'romanticizing' drugs, simply because they noted that sometimes they can work to explore new subjectivities. romanticizing something means giving it properties that it doesn't inherently possess, hyperbolizing its usefulness. i'm sure all of the above would agree that drugs can just as easily fail you. don't romanticize a tool; it either works for you or it doesn't. my guess is that nothing short of nancy reagan's 'just say no' will satisfy antonucci.

"I have some affection for William S. Burroughs, and we both know that's a ridiculous claim on his part."

the man lived till he was 83. he smoked weed until the day he died. he used an assortment of psycedelics throughout his life. and yes, he was also addicted to heroin for a couple decades. if he says drugs made him a healthier person, i believe him.

i also believe him when he says that addiction is one of the worst experiences a person can go through. sometimes putting your body through hard times makes you a stronger person, just as fighting infection improves your immunity to disease. that's not to say, 'go get addicted to heroin' - most people have enough problems without needing to add to them. but when you get to be 83 with your abstinence regiment, then maybe i'll respect your calling burroughs ridiculous.

until then, rethink your narrow-mindedness. because it's comments like yours which led people to discard his work as illegit ('he's a druggie, not a writer'), propagating one of the many pretexts for censoring 'naked lunch'.

"I strongly suspect that if your friend were to start banging smack, you'd advise them to stop..."

depends on the friend, frankly. some of my friends have proven very prone to addiction while others not. obviously, if they found themselves in a place they couldn't get out of, i'd intervene - that's what friends do.

"Come on, put down the bong and get serious."

you don't make me want to talk with you anymore. you're very dismissive of people's experiences. maybe you need to hit a bong before you feel tempted to hurl insults instead of constructing solid counter-arguments.

anyway, i promise i haven't written any of these posts under the influence of drugs. i'm sorry if i've gone on too long in writing to you. if you want, i won't let it happen again. .k

p.s. i don't think i've read anything by castenada. maybe i've looked up the part deleuze and guattari quote from him, but that's about it. that said, i'm very interested in drug use by indigenous peoples. the mazatecs, for example, have been using salvia (or what you referred to as 'mailorder crap') for centuries. still, their visions haven't led to a communistic utopia yet - i mean, where's the results mazatecs? quit jerking around and get with the revolution already!

p.p.s. william james, the varieties of religious experience, p387-89 :

"Some years ago I myself made some observations on this aspect of nitrous oxide intoxication, and reported them in print. One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requiste stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regarrd them is the question, - for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality. Looking back on my own experiences, they all converge towards a king of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance. The keynote of it is invariably a reconciliation. It is as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles, were melted into unity. Not only do they, as contrasted species, belong to one and the same genus, but one of the species, the nobler and better one, is itself the genus, and so soaks up and aborbs its opposite into itself. This is a dark saying, I know, when thus expressed in terms of common logic, but I cannot wholly escape from its authority. I feel as if it must mean something, something like what the hegelian philosophy means, if one could only lay hold of it more clearly. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear; to me the living sense of its reality only comes in the artificial mystic state of mind."

[Lazzarone]

i don't see where i'm 'romanticizing' drugs (see above); and if you're not demeaning drugs as mere recreation, then we agree: they're tools for intensifying certain neurophysiological experiences.

"Factors contributing to the formation and success of labor unions: Folks sitting around? Yes. Talking politics? No shit, sherlock. THE NICOTINE GOING TO THEIR HEADS?! NO. ... the worst argument ever."

well the reason lots of people were sitting around was because they were smoking cigars, and the manufacture of cigars was central to the trade they were unionizing - so drugs were not irrelevant to the revolutionary process here, the nicotine may've helped to spark it up... so to speak.

"YES. I SEE WHAT YOU HAVE WRITTEN IN PERSUASIVE CAPITAL LETTERS."

i was just to trying to highlight the relevent portion.

"I BELIEVE THAT IN THIS PARTICULAR, FOUCAULT IS FLAT WRONG. WAY TO FIND RANDOM INTERVIEW SEGMENT AND INVEST IT WITH THE AUTHORITY OF FOUCAULT'S CAREFULLY RESEARCHED WORKS."

foucault is someone whose opinion i respect, and he thought loosening inhibitions with regard to drugs would aid the reconceptualization of humanist subjectivities. he also used drugs with much benefit throughout his life (see original post, which you never responded to).

"Temporary dissolution doesn't do anything if it isn't accompanied by a 'desubjectification of the will to power.'"

i concur.

"Postdating matters here - 30+ years of data after this 1971 article display precisely the extent to which existant social structures can absorb and redeploy those powerfully felt experiences of ego (subject?) dissolution."

finally, a reasoned argument. jeez.

yes, foucault was writing for a particular place and time, and you have every right to say to me that that time has passed. but to me, simply because past political resistances have been reabsorbed by the dominant structure doesn't make them worthless, and it doesn't mean we can't both use some of the tools they used and learn from their mistakes.

you can chart this process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization in most drug communities too. the early raves of yester-year versus the mega-raves of today, for instance. you can chart this course in your own life too, as i think you can overdo all these drugs, even marijuana. that's why i said beware that the drug doesn't become the rountine, but maybe you missed that part in your attempt to burn straw arguments.

in my own experience, using drugs has been liberating. sometime it's been a terrifying too (namely, bad acid trips), but mostly it's been both fun and enlightening. i feel that i've been able to do certain things that i wouldn't have had i not taken drugs - write certain poems and short stories, drop certain neurosises, emotionally connect with certain people, see certain things in new ways. on balance, they've made me more confident, more creative, more open to listening to others' perspectives. and i will continue to use drugs to get at the hard to reach places of my psyche.

"Psychedelic overstimulation was not an advertising norm yet; Foucault had never seen ravers embrace their own infantalization; the Haight experiment hadn't flopped."

i think you're conflating a lot here. yes, advertisements use over-stimulation. does this mean being really dull somehow resists advertising's grip upon us? no. foucault (again) in 'the minimalist self' : "some drugs are really important for me because they are the mediation to those incredibly intense joys that i am looking for and that i am not able to experience, to afford by myself ... a pleasure must be something incredibly intense." ... i also like listening to music that's very loud - is that just what 'the man' wants me to do? i don't know. i just like to hear all the subtleties. similarly, lots of drugs turn the volume up on existence.

ravers and infantalization. don't really know where this one comes from. the suckers are to stop your jaws from clenching, which you probably won't notice while you're on the drug, but may be painful afterward, especially on higher doses. and yes, maybe mdma makes you feel a bit like a child again, or at least that's how many people describe it. seratonin controls your feelings of well-being, so i'd describe it as feeling completely free and at one with yourself and the world. i really felt like i got several glimpses of my ideal self using the drug, and it's an ideal that i still keep with me today, however much i may fail to live up to it. empathy has always been a struggle for me, so i need all the help i can get.

did the the haight experiment flop or just run its course? i honestly don't know enough about it to say. feel free to educate me.

"Regardless, you're just misreading this. It's entirely possible to loosen or eliminate 'inhibitions' without embracing psychedelic pioneers."

foucault embraced psychedelics elsewhere (see above).

"What, are you inhibited about huffing gas?"

which gas? what does it do? who uses it? are there side-effects? etc.

"Those college students did get jobs, unless they were already independently wealthy. Deferring the factory society isn't the same as refusing it, and, in many cases, the ability to defer is intimately bound up with class stratification. Fucking around on LSD for a few years was, and perhaps is, a privilege. Is Paris Hilton particularly revolutionary? Would Paris Hilton on acid be revolutionary, or just extremely annoying? I'll vote for the latter."

some of those drug-users, by the way, left lives of privilege and accepted living broke. maybe they married people or pursued lines of work that their parents didn't approve of, and they were cut off.

i don't think anyone should feel bad for where they're at. class consciousness is fine, but class guilt? everyone is trying to find their own way through life, regardless of their income level. if you can take a few years off, then maybe that's better than continuing to do something that doesn't fulfill you. i suppose you could say, 'i'll just work a job i hate because look at all those poor folks', but what kind of logic is that? if they were where you are, who's to say they wouldn't seize opportunities just like you?

"It's perfectly possible to be concerned with professional advancement and material gain while ingesting psychedelics on weekends."

concede.

[mstruth]

Originally Posted by Lazzarone

i don't see where i'm 'romanticizing' drugs (see above); and if you're not demeaning drugs as mere recreation, then we agree: they're tools for intensifying certain neurophysiological experiences.

How is a tool for intenifying certain neurophysiological experiences not recreation? Held to a simple answer, one that is not spun via 'sophistry,' I doubt you can identify any intensified experience that Antonucci would not view as romantisized. You two wil probably never agree there.

I think it would be helpful if you clarified what experiences will be intensified, how they will be, and perhaps why you view those aren't recreational experiences.

It'd be most clear if you stayed away from postmodern-esque references, and just told a story about how billy can use drugs for non-receational purposes, presumably in every day life.

I think alot of the discussion in this thread has been really thought-out, but it seems to be drifting. Perhaps this as a focus point would be useful - it would certainly put the thread somewhere I'd like to hear people talk about.