Altered States
Eugene Brennan & Russell Williams eds., Literature and Intoxication: Writing, Politics and the Experience of Excess
Palgrave Macmillan, 224pp, £58.00, ISBN 9781137487650
reviewed by Stuart Walton
Intoxication has progressed over the most recent generation from being the great unmentionable in mainstream cultural discourse to being as present and urgent a theme as sex once was. Formerly no more than biographical ephemera in the lives of the pressing crowds of drug-fiends and pissheads with which the Western creative pantheon is stuffed, it has become at last a philosophical theme all its own. In the process, the focus on its psycho-physical potentialities has been enlarged from the always pitiful attempt to install it as an engine of the creative sublime to considerations of the role it might play in constructing the postmodern self in the era of global capital and its often infirmities.
Jacques Derrida's wandering ruminations in the interview he gave on the subject in 1989, 'The Rhetoric of Drugs,’ might be seen as having inaugurated the present interest in altered states. To be sure, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari had theorised them in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), but with the counter-intuitive aim of replacing actual intoxication with the fanciful project of 'getting drunk, but on pure water … getting high, but by abstention', an improbable late paroxysm of Victorian Temperance à la française. Nick Land and Sadie Plant's speculation in the Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit that intoxicants might provoke an immersive re-engagement with the limitless possibilities of the actual, thereby constructing a projective future from the voiding of the critical ego, was an assimilationist cultural and ideological project of the 1990s, a now hopelessly outmoded wager on the dog-eared myth that surfing the internet might be a bit like tripping. Becoming immanently inveigled in chemically altered states in hope of subjective destitution, the precise mechanism of consumer capitalism, once thrilled Land with visions of a post-human future, at least until his démarche to Shanghai, where capitalism is very much the mood of the moment but they aren't noticeably forgiving of illegal drug-taking.
In 2013, Jean-Luc Nancy delivered a panegyric on drunkenness in a French vineyard (to be published in English as Intoxication in December 2015), a few fragments shored against the ruins of a full-blown conceptual investigation. Something like the latter project is available here in the publication of a set of papers given at a colloquium in Paris in 2013, which approached the topic of intoxication not just via its adducements in French literature, as the title suggests, but also as a structural feature of contemporary biopolitics.
Those who haven't yet caught up with the repeat offenders in the literary drunk-tank – the crapulent novelists, poètes maudits and stoned theoreticians – can take a crash-course in Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Michaux, Bataille, Nerval, Gautier and Jacques-Joseph Moreau, but to those already familiar with them, the explorations here don't amount to much more than toujours la même chose. Joe Kennedy offers a thought-provoking contribution on the semi-drunken lassitude of the postwar British novel, which described an entropic collapse from the febrility of interwar modernism, its last hurrah the degraded sublime of Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano (1947), into the fuzzy-headed ennui of daytime tippling, a clapped-out nihilism personified by the bourgeois drifters in Henry Green, William Sansom and the recklessly overrated Patrick Hamilton.
In the book's final four essays, grouped under the rubric of 'Political and Theoretical Critiques of Intoxication', the theme gains forceful philosophical traction. There is some overlap among the contributions – there are two items on the Situationist International, and rather more about Beatriz Preciado's self-experimentation with synthetic testosterone than we really needed – but a welcome incisiveness is brought by the writers to the dialectics of intoxication and reality, of which the 19th century suspected nearly nothing.
Benjamin Noys' reflections on intoxication and the politics of immanence has sharply perspicuous things to say about the recovery of altered states from the clutches of accelerationism. If drinking and drugging were never in themselves truly oppositional behaviours – not least since they lie at the foundations of religion and aesthetics in antique ritual, but even less in that everybody else does them too, to greater or lesser extents – neither should they be co-opted, as was attempted twenty years ago by a cultural theory simultaneously blinded by cybernetic science and given to ravey dancing, into the service of an affirmationist politics of capitalist excess.
As though in support of the latter point, Alastair Hemmens traces the careers of two of Situationism's leading lights, the titanically self-deluding poet and professional heroin-addict Alexander Trocchi, and the movement's one shining intellect, the chronically alcoholic Guy Debord. One might raise more than an eyebrow at the contention that Situationism was 'the most important revolutionary organisation of the twentieth century' (did Lenin never live?), but Hemmens is properly sceptical about the claims of its convocations of rat-arsed penseurs that staggering around Paris three sheets to the wind represented 'the development of a critical discourse.’
The fourth Situationist Congress, held in London in 1960, announced drugs to be of no importance, a stance that, in seeming to say nothing, effectively pronounced the end of intoxication's status as a radical practice. In later life, Debord himself mounted a critique of drug use as one of the ways of reconciling oneself to the prevailing state of affairs. Other writers here, notably Christopher Collier and Joanna Figiel, note that intoxication can be conceived as fitting perfectly within the biopolitical framework of capital accumulation. It mostly harmlessly comes and goes, leaving no particular radical consciousness in its wake, but rather reconstructing and recombining the colonised self into configurations quite amenable to global capitalism.
Derrida's inaccurate model of the drug experience as one of 'social disconnection' was misconceived for the same reason that all such models are misconceived – there is not just one drug experience. To a disappointing extent, writers on the subject still tend to opt for one model of intoxication, one subject-position under its influence, and stick to it, whether it be hypnotic entrancement, hallucinatory possession, hyper-stimulation, or narcotised demi-oblivion. The true dialectical approach would not only acknowledge the multiplicity of possible such states, but also reframe the relation of altered consciousness to reality as one of mediation, rather than setting the one over against the other in mutual autonomy.
The volume's introduction concludes by quoting the reflections of Walter Benjamin after his celebrated experiment with swallowing hashish in Marseille in the 1920s. What was fascinating about the experience was not that it removed him entirely from the unintoxicated world, but the displaced continuities it created in relation to it. 'Maybe any kind of ecstasy in one world is shameful sobriety in the complementary world,' Benjamin suggested. Where Bataille would theorise altered states as a secularised mysticism under the concept of 'inner experience', as though there were ever any other kind, Benjamin attended to their dialectically curious relation to the reality they allegedly subvert or reinterpret.
If all that drugs do is to make you look at the capitalist racket as though it were a funfair, the merry-go-rounds will carry on turning uninterrupted, perhaps more enjoyably indeed. Altered states are, however, primarily constitutive and reconstitutive of the human beings to whom they occur, not of the reality to which they find themselves subject, the objectivity of which is realised over their heads anyway, whether they are off them or not. Intoxication neither wholly reconciles people to the way things are by giving them a holiday from it, nor does it wholly enable critical resistance to it by dint of altering perceptual protocols, an effect that would be much less troubling to society anyway than the more concrete resistance of defying the drug laws. It is in itself neither inevitably solipsistic nor automatically subversive, but rather nothing more nor less than one of the components of active subjectivity. At its most dynamic, it can be a means by which subjectivity is liberated from the delusion of its constitutive role in relation to the exterior world, which happily permits it that delusion while carrying on its work of obliterating subjectivity through a power much stronger than drugs.
Jacques Derrida's wandering ruminations in the interview he gave on the subject in 1989, 'The Rhetoric of Drugs,’ might be seen as having inaugurated the present interest in altered states. To be sure, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari had theorised them in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), but with the counter-intuitive aim of replacing actual intoxication with the fanciful project of 'getting drunk, but on pure water … getting high, but by abstention', an improbable late paroxysm of Victorian Temperance à la française. Nick Land and Sadie Plant's speculation in the Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit that intoxicants might provoke an immersive re-engagement with the limitless possibilities of the actual, thereby constructing a projective future from the voiding of the critical ego, was an assimilationist cultural and ideological project of the 1990s, a now hopelessly outmoded wager on the dog-eared myth that surfing the internet might be a bit like tripping. Becoming immanently inveigled in chemically altered states in hope of subjective destitution, the precise mechanism of consumer capitalism, once thrilled Land with visions of a post-human future, at least until his démarche to Shanghai, where capitalism is very much the mood of the moment but they aren't noticeably forgiving of illegal drug-taking.
In 2013, Jean-Luc Nancy delivered a panegyric on drunkenness in a French vineyard (to be published in English as Intoxication in December 2015), a few fragments shored against the ruins of a full-blown conceptual investigation. Something like the latter project is available here in the publication of a set of papers given at a colloquium in Paris in 2013, which approached the topic of intoxication not just via its adducements in French literature, as the title suggests, but also as a structural feature of contemporary biopolitics.
Those who haven't yet caught up with the repeat offenders in the literary drunk-tank – the crapulent novelists, poètes maudits and stoned theoreticians – can take a crash-course in Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Michaux, Bataille, Nerval, Gautier and Jacques-Joseph Moreau, but to those already familiar with them, the explorations here don't amount to much more than toujours la même chose. Joe Kennedy offers a thought-provoking contribution on the semi-drunken lassitude of the postwar British novel, which described an entropic collapse from the febrility of interwar modernism, its last hurrah the degraded sublime of Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano (1947), into the fuzzy-headed ennui of daytime tippling, a clapped-out nihilism personified by the bourgeois drifters in Henry Green, William Sansom and the recklessly overrated Patrick Hamilton.
In the book's final four essays, grouped under the rubric of 'Political and Theoretical Critiques of Intoxication', the theme gains forceful philosophical traction. There is some overlap among the contributions – there are two items on the Situationist International, and rather more about Beatriz Preciado's self-experimentation with synthetic testosterone than we really needed – but a welcome incisiveness is brought by the writers to the dialectics of intoxication and reality, of which the 19th century suspected nearly nothing.
Benjamin Noys' reflections on intoxication and the politics of immanence has sharply perspicuous things to say about the recovery of altered states from the clutches of accelerationism. If drinking and drugging were never in themselves truly oppositional behaviours – not least since they lie at the foundations of religion and aesthetics in antique ritual, but even less in that everybody else does them too, to greater or lesser extents – neither should they be co-opted, as was attempted twenty years ago by a cultural theory simultaneously blinded by cybernetic science and given to ravey dancing, into the service of an affirmationist politics of capitalist excess.
As though in support of the latter point, Alastair Hemmens traces the careers of two of Situationism's leading lights, the titanically self-deluding poet and professional heroin-addict Alexander Trocchi, and the movement's one shining intellect, the chronically alcoholic Guy Debord. One might raise more than an eyebrow at the contention that Situationism was 'the most important revolutionary organisation of the twentieth century' (did Lenin never live?), but Hemmens is properly sceptical about the claims of its convocations of rat-arsed penseurs that staggering around Paris three sheets to the wind represented 'the development of a critical discourse.’
The fourth Situationist Congress, held in London in 1960, announced drugs to be of no importance, a stance that, in seeming to say nothing, effectively pronounced the end of intoxication's status as a radical practice. In later life, Debord himself mounted a critique of drug use as one of the ways of reconciling oneself to the prevailing state of affairs. Other writers here, notably Christopher Collier and Joanna Figiel, note that intoxication can be conceived as fitting perfectly within the biopolitical framework of capital accumulation. It mostly harmlessly comes and goes, leaving no particular radical consciousness in its wake, but rather reconstructing and recombining the colonised self into configurations quite amenable to global capitalism.
Derrida's inaccurate model of the drug experience as one of 'social disconnection' was misconceived for the same reason that all such models are misconceived – there is not just one drug experience. To a disappointing extent, writers on the subject still tend to opt for one model of intoxication, one subject-position under its influence, and stick to it, whether it be hypnotic entrancement, hallucinatory possession, hyper-stimulation, or narcotised demi-oblivion. The true dialectical approach would not only acknowledge the multiplicity of possible such states, but also reframe the relation of altered consciousness to reality as one of mediation, rather than setting the one over against the other in mutual autonomy.
The volume's introduction concludes by quoting the reflections of Walter Benjamin after his celebrated experiment with swallowing hashish in Marseille in the 1920s. What was fascinating about the experience was not that it removed him entirely from the unintoxicated world, but the displaced continuities it created in relation to it. 'Maybe any kind of ecstasy in one world is shameful sobriety in the complementary world,' Benjamin suggested. Where Bataille would theorise altered states as a secularised mysticism under the concept of 'inner experience', as though there were ever any other kind, Benjamin attended to their dialectically curious relation to the reality they allegedly subvert or reinterpret.
If all that drugs do is to make you look at the capitalist racket as though it were a funfair, the merry-go-rounds will carry on turning uninterrupted, perhaps more enjoyably indeed. Altered states are, however, primarily constitutive and reconstitutive of the human beings to whom they occur, not of the reality to which they find themselves subject, the objectivity of which is realised over their heads anyway, whether they are off them or not. Intoxication neither wholly reconciles people to the way things are by giving them a holiday from it, nor does it wholly enable critical resistance to it by dint of altering perceptual protocols, an effect that would be much less troubling to society anyway than the more concrete resistance of defying the drug laws. It is in itself neither inevitably solipsistic nor automatically subversive, but rather nothing more nor less than one of the components of active subjectivity. At its most dynamic, it can be a means by which subjectivity is liberated from the delusion of its constitutive role in relation to the exterior world, which happily permits it that delusion while carrying on its work of obliterating subjectivity through a power much stronger than drugs.