Introduction: Among the Psychonauts with DreamWorks?

Imagining
Technoscience after the Transhuman Prohibition
Richard Doyle

Configurations, Volume 16, Number 2, Spring 2008, pp. 139-144 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/con/summary/v016/16.2.doyle.html

Access Provided by Universiteit van Amsterdam at 02/07/11 11:20AM GMT

 Introduction: Among the

Psychonauts with DreamWorks?

Imagining Technoscience after the

Transhuman Prohibition

Richard Doyle
Penn State University

Psychonaut: “One who navigates the psyche.”1

The seemingly infinite colors form swirling arabesques, fractalled

Persian rugs of bliss. The 2000 DreamWorks animation, The Road to
Eldorado, reminds me that we continue to be entranced by the call
of a mythological elsewhere composed entirely of value. Eldorado is
no doubt the ur-myth of colonializing and globalizing capitalism,
whose dream work constantly posits a space utterly outside of the
constraints of supply and demand, a metropolis of treasure toward
which imaginations can be tuned. Immigrants famously expected to
behold streets of gold upon their arrival in New York City.2 Dream-
Works’ City of Gold is populated by animated, costumed simulacra
of the Maya, and our blond (Miguel) and Brunette (Tulio) homoso-
cial dyad grapples over a girl (that’s J.Lo with all that animated ass!),
as well as the gold in an eternal return of Butch Cassidy and the
Sundance Kid meets an English grokking, but not talking, horse. So,
of course, the genre has been spliced and remixed as the Dream is
(re)Worked. An uncannily rhetorical horse, Activo—think 1950s
black-and-white-sitcom talking horse Mister Ed as an escapee from

1. A term proposed by Ernst Junger, a German writer-researcher on psychoactive chem-

icals and colleague and friend of Albert Hofmann, who discovered LSD.
2. In its somewhat updated form on The Simpsons, the world itself becomes consumable
when our epic hero’s place of employment—a nuclear power plant—is purchased by
some Germans: “You know Homer, we come from the land of chocolate.”

Configurations, 2008, 16:139–144 © 2009 by The Johns Hopkins

University Press and the Society for Literature and Science.

139
140 Configurations

evil Conquistador Cortez and you begin to compose what William

Burroughs called an “Identi-kit” for this character—finds himself re-
mixed into a scheme to find Eldorado and taps together gold horse-
shoes by film’s end. There’s no place like home. But over this rain-
bow—the opening credits feature a cosmological narrative wherein
the divine city emerges, yes, from the diffraction of light—Dream-
Works talks a good story about globalizing capitalism and an imag-
ined metropolis that was first and foremost psychedelic.
Even breathing the word seems to make the font swell in every
direction and summons a peculiar mix of guitar and sitar. Suddenly,
upon uttering or otherwise inscribing “psychedelic,” an enormous
certainty overtakes the context. The certainty script goes something
like this: everyone knows that psychedelics were a regrettable, tragic
episode of excess, a disgusting little narcissistic outburst by “Timo-
thy Leary and his ilk.” Everyone knows that the 1960s were a “fail-
ure,” a tragicomic set up for Reagan, with Leary playing the smiling
excessive doppelgänger to Reagan’s counter-revolution. Everyone
knows that was a mistake.
Yet historically and in the emerging present, even a casual glance
at the archive or the infosphere suggests an altogether different
story. For researchers Humphry Osmond and Aldous Huxley—from
whose correspondence the term psychedelic emerged—“psyche-
delics” signified not an outburst, but an act of intense focus. As
“mind-manifesting” chemicals and plants, psychedelics above all
summoned a sense of focused attention on the self. The mind itself,
in this view, became available to scientific investigation, and obser-
vant scientists such as Lynn Sagan (later known as Lynn Margulis)
would write of this scientific excitation and enthusiasm: “The ex-
citement here arises from our present position: we are probably on
the threshold of a physical basis of consciousness. Perhaps our times
are analogous to those at the beginning of the century, which cul-
minated in today’s clear concept of the physical basis of heredity.”3
For Sagan, psychedelics seemed to offer researchers the capacity
to model the mind with the same clarity and resolution as the Men-
delian investigations of living systems. Perhaps our own historical
context of biomedicine would model the effect this way: as a visual-
ization technology akin to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), psy-
chedelics increased the resolution of introspection through which
the mind was manifested, made available to observation. Psychedel-
ics (for Osmond and Huxley as well as for Leary) allowed looping

3. Lynn Sagan, “Communications: An Open Letter to Mr. Joe K. Adams,” Psychedelic

Review 1:3 (1964): 354.
Doyle / Imagining Technoscience 141

involutionary topologies of human subjectivity to behold them-

selves’ looping. In rediscovering what Ohio State psychologist Ro-
land Fischer dubbed “the perception-hallucination continuum,”
early psychonauts learned that by focusing the awareness on itself,
the aspect of human consciousness beyond the doors of percep-
tion—the infinite—would emerge as an experiential rather than
conceptual phenomenon.4 Out of this manifestation of self, a per-
ceivable though not verifiable “non-Euclidean” (Fischer) aspect of
human subjectivity could come into relief.5
Early researchers such as Francis Crick and Albert Hofmann
learned that they were spoiled for choice when it came to the seem-
ingly infinite domains that were often thus synesthetically perceived
when tuning consciousness toward itself. And as mathematician
and semiotician Brian Rotman has demonstrated, talk and writing
of “infinity” often stealths the material, energetic, and informa-
tional contexts necessary to its conceptualization, inducing a veri-
table amnesia of the psychologically and ecologically sustainable
body as talk of the infinite “ghosts” the radical diversity of ecosys-
temic corporeal specificities of living systems.6 And so, early re-
searchers learned that their inquiries into the experientially infinite
nature of mind required a practiced and always finite capacity to
abide and tune altered states of consciousness, let alone learn from
them. If psychedelics induced a sense of “tripping,” they also in-
duced a need for a navigator as well as navigational aids.
In becoming “psychedelic” science, this science of mind broke
with its precursor discourse, “psychotomimetics,” which had treated
these plants and chemicals as models; the delirium tremens of alco-
holic withdrawal as well as more general simulacra of psychoses
were the very modus operandi of these scientific tools. In short, they
were tools for inducing a pathology that was only infrequently ex-
perimentally observed. Yet when mescaline, LSD, and psilocybin be-
came “psychedelic,” they ceased to be referential and became in-
stead algorithmic, programs for actualizing and hence modeling,
inhabiting, the mind. This “turning about in the deepest seat of

4. Roland Fischer, “The Perception-Hallucination Continuum (a Re-Examination),”

Diseases of the Nervous System 30:3 (1969): 161.
5. This “non-Euclidean” aspect of the self came to be characterized by Stanislav Grof
and others as the “transpersonal” self; see Grof, Realms of the Human Unconscious: Ob-
servations from LSD Research (New York: Viking, 1975).
6. Brian Rotman, Ad Infinitum . . . the Ghost in Turing’s Machine: Taking God out of Math-
ematics and Putting the Body Back In: An Essay in Corporeal Semiotics (Stanford, CA: Stan-
ford University Press, 1993).
142 Configurations

consciousness”7 acted on and acted out phenomenology’s program

to investigate states of consciousness not available to ordinary
awareness.
Huxley’s original coinage to name the adjunct was “phanero-
thyme,” by which he hoped to transmit something of the sacred
aspect of these experiences: “To make this trivial world sublime, take
half a gram of phanerothyme.” Rhyming with rhyme, the “thyme”
of phanerothyme names not a spice, but the soul. But Osmond, call-
ing phanerothyme “too beautiful,” rendered “psychedelic” in re-
sponse, as in this couplet: “To fathom Hell or soar angelic / take a
pinch of psychedelic.” Birthed in a poem, psychedelic thus ceased to
be referential insofar as these tools of investigation required the use
of subjectivity itself as a scientific tool; manifested, psyche was also
transformed and involved in an unmistakably sacred space. Just as
quantum mechanics had earlier induced various and multiple fla-
vors of cognitive dissonance with its revelations of uncertainties
that appear to be epistemologically and ontologically fundamental,
psychedelic and hence psychonautic science induced a disturbance
in the very category of the observer, that “modest witness” who
would somehow describe a world in which they did not dwell or
dose. Perhaps less observed in this “crisis” of the observer is the
equally dissonant demand that the description must not affect the
world it maps, articulates, models, or declares. But early psychonau-
tic science, with its continual discovery that it was precisely the de-
scriptions of the experiences—including the very name of the adjunct—
that recursively affected subsequent and prior experiences, violates
this ontological taboo in ways we have perhaps barely noticed, and
these strange new ontologies were persistently characterized as a
space of the sacred.
Leary called this rhetorically cybernetic aspect of psychedelic sci-
ence “set and setting,” an extraordinary sensitivity to initial rhetori-
cal conditions that perhaps best summarizes psychedelic drug ac-
tion: “set” refers to the set of all psychological vectors composing
any given subject’s identity, vectors that included densely interac-
tive intertwinglings between DNA and mind, nature and culture—
what Leary dubbed “the neurogenetic threshold”; “setting” names
the polyvalent contexts of sound, image, tactility, gesture, scent,
breath, and word in which any given entheogenic experience might
unfold.
Because such contexts were so mutable, early researchers in psy-

7. Lama Anarjarika Govinda, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism (San Francsico, CA:

Weiser), p. 77.
Doyle / Imagining Technoscience 143

chonautics—the human investigation of psyche through unavoid-

ably first-person science—characterized the composition and altera-
tion of such contexts as “programming” and “meta-programming,”
and the incalculable array of choices—“Should I eat mushrooms
near a fox? I would not eat them in a box!”—induced much talk of
the experiential “internal freedom” often provoked by the sheer re-
sponsibility of tuning human experience toward the psychonautical
investigation. With such infinite tuning potential, programming
and meta-programming psychedelic experiences became, by an of-
ten experiential analogy, an act of creation.8 Hence yet another ta-
boo is distressed by psychonautical science: science and the sacred
become joyfully intertwingled in psychonautical practice. And this
was not just an effect of 1960s spiritual and political transformation;
psychonautical scientist Rick Strassman’s early 1990s human-subject
studies repeatedly revealed the importance of creating a comfortable
and even sacred space for the nonetheless classically scientific stud-
ies, and, of course, all of the classic psychedelics have spawned
churches, some of them legal.9
For those involved, past or present, in the multidisciplinary fields
researching psychedelics and their effects on human subjects, this
infinitely programmable aspect of psychedelic experience suggests
tremendous scientific and therapeutic potential. Osmond’s own re-
search centered on the treatment of alcoholics, and Bill Wilson,
founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, was sufficiently impressed by
the effects of his own LSD experience that he argued, to no avail, for
its inclusion in the AA program.
But, of course, the program of psychonautical science that was
intensified by Hofmann’s 1943 synthesis of LSD-25 halted—or did
it? While a large-scale propaganda campaign that culminated in the
Controlled Substances Act and continues through the failed drug
war officially effected a prohibition on psychonautic science, the es-
says in this special issue make clear that psychonautical knowledge
production and research indeed manifested both before and after the
Controlled Substance Act. And the early twenty-first century appears
to be undergoing a psychonautical renaissance, as brain visualization

8. Robert Anton Wilson, a noted meta-programmer and author, asks simply, “Who is
the magician who makes all grass green?,” as a way of amplifying the active composi-
tional role of humans in their active perception of reality, a role archetypically occu-
pied by a deity. See the 1994 filmed/animated interview with Wilson, Who Is the Master
Who Makes the Grass Green? (directed by Edgar Pera). http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=yY5r_zox-a8.
9. Rick Strassman, DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor’s Revolutionary Research into the
Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences (Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 2000).
144 Configurations

technologies and long-standing critiques of the mind/body split con-

verge in studies throughout the globe—some of them legal too!
Of course, there is nothing new to these investigations. I watch
the screen go fractal psychedelic and moiré as Miguel, Tulio and,
yes, Activo drink an unnamed brew somewhere in the tropical
Americas while singing a song performatively announcing their di-
vinity. Animated, they are attracted by the gold, but enchanted by
what Carl Jung called the “numinous”—that aspect of human expe-
rience linked to the infinite. On top of the screen you can find my
copy of the Rigveda, our oldest sacred text, which describes the
drinking of soma, perhaps the oldest continuously used entheogen
on the planet. Yes, these are time-tested values indeed!