Just Numb
More countercultures than the 1960s tried to undo man’s humanistic framing in structures of life, labour and language by reducing them to life and love, busting up man in the process. Let us not assume that we already know what life and love means (for instance who’s to say that life cannot end up being just a bad habit?). What matters is the dissolution, u n be coming.—
Language was one of the stakes in the hippie revaluation of straight society, inspiring communication through puns, slang, code. Some see this as the very opposite of a linguistic turn—a turn away from language. Negri and Hardt agree that the counterculture created powerful transformations in behavior and productivity, but that its evaluation of these revolutions with slang terms such as “dropping out” as they exemplify—italicizing their disgust—displayed “a poor conception” of the “profound political and economic effects” of the era’s social contestation and experimentation [Empire]. It is no doubt true that programmatic affirmations of a ‘festival of life’ weren’t helpful in forging an understanding of the ambiguous states it in fact produced. Thankfully Lee Lozano makes no bones about it in conclusion of her 1969 Grass Piece. “Not high anymore, just numb. Finished grass twigs & seeds,”
Or as Bernward Vesper observes (observes!) at one point in his unfinished fragment-novel Die Reise [1977, never to my knowledge published in English, and if they do they had better steer clear of the direct translation of The Trip]: “Here my forces left me and everything collapsed in itself, and I ‘sat once more in my pot of piss’.” (My translation from the German, then).
Mighty real, that pot of piss. More than half a century after the summer of love, in the midst of our winter of capital, the gringo shamans are still out there in tie-dye suits, our era’s anti-intellectualism grist for their post-psychedelic mill, messianic egos hardening for every new trip. Choke on a crop circle, you retro-imperialist. You make Timothy Leary’s cryogenic brain look like a fucking diamond. Europe is land of the feeble, home of the faded, I know, but why do Americans have to go to church?
Psychedelia has been realized. It is the labour market now. Prof. Vogl, writing in The Specter of Capital (a title that could have been any modern time, but it’s from 2010), “Having once been instructed to grasp their journey through life as a process of self-becoming, [those who try to succeed in the job market] are now urged to cultivate the art of becoming other.” Rampant market conformability related to the totality of individual practices and movements: Google execs are on the ayawaska trip, Wall Street brokers microdose. LSD is the latest in staying functional and in (meta)control.
If psychedelia can do anything for us, it must be as a radical imaginary. The first thing to dispatch is the experience. We can’t have it. It must be seen as divided against itself. It is an event that crosses boundaries—physical, social, conceptual—an experience between two experiences. In this passage, restrictive discourses with their burden of metaphysics are deconstituted, while conditions for experience-as-experiment can be set up. Make no mistake: the experience does not support imagination, it even undoes it or works against it. At the limit of life, where we can only go with love, we meet the ghost, the privileged non-subject which has experienced too much, which can experience no more, which doesn’t exist, which can only be imagined.
Respect for the ghosts. We are only into serious mutations.
