Author Archives: emma

8/18/22

I used to be interested in the construction of languages, in particular how syntax can promote terror or euphoria. 21 years old reading Noam Chomsky’s “Language and Politics,” thinking about HTML as a reification and export of Western grammar. These days I don’t impute to language the capacities of ideology, but I still treat it as material. Writing is a craft before it’s an art.

I assume that syntax reflects the numerics of thinking, and that language and mind seem endless to everyone (not just me). That’s why we don’t worry about running out of new thoughts to think. Reality is a wilderness of feral patterns. Maybe we forget it because the internet surrounds us with domesticated ones. I don’t know if the empirical world can compel us like it did Victorian scientists. Someone once said that technology is great because it reveals the limits of rational knowledge. But it’s bleak unless we have metaphysical faith.

Metaphysical faith. Language and thinking aren’t bigger than we are. Put differently, I hate spectacles. Not despite but because there’s an actual occult/Big Other, one that exceeds our limits. Modern epistemic conditions permit only one intractable mystery: ourselves. So this is writing about the past as future.

Still I’m a sucker for the glint of a brand-new idea, artifice be damned. The other day, driving from New York City to Philadelphia, I searched for music that wouldn’t make me think any thought I’ve ever had before. Which may be impossible amid so much mechanical augury. The black magic circle goes by lots of names: filter bubble, echo chamber, hermetic seal, dark scanner. I believe something lies outside it. Nothing runs deeper than that faith.

And it has to be faith because I don’t know if anything’s really out there. I’ve been writing and writing for years, dithering on… because I despair at the gaps between people. I know that absence makes the heart, but it teems with fantasies I can’t allow myself (but I love them for others).

This is writing about words adding up to nothing. And a human voice that keeps calling me on across the gaps. ‘Call’ in the sense of ‘vocation.’ So much thinking and writing is embarrassing, but I’m not the only one. Since there’s no real solitude anymore, von Kleist’s thesis proves true: speech starts with Thou. Nobody can shut up with so many other voices in our heads. That thing about mental real estate.

I was reading Chomskyan psycholinguistics at the same time as the French literature on writing and death. Nowadays, I know such combinations make no ideological sense; this was before higher education bullied me into a coherent intellectual identity. So much time pushing my brain through the latticework of Blanchot and Derrida, and I still admire their creative method. It’s a flux-movement, a flash in the dark or a rainbow. Nabokov described ‘a shimmering go-between’ that displaces ‘the wolf in the tall grass’ from ‘the wolf in the tall story.’ He said prismatism is the art of literature. It’s also one of philosophy’s sweeter faces, and it’s the only way to write death, since it can’t be denoted. My mom’s uncle promised her he’d tell her about the afterlife if he could; it hasn’t happened yet.

Death is the big signifying nothing. Also known as the fool on the hill. Its idiosyncrasies confound predictive capitalism: it can’t be calculated or predetermined. Just another sign that capital only exists as a flimsy talisman against thoughts of mortality. Death is stupid.

Towards its acceptance: I have this idea that reality defies theory. Lack of knowledge has to be the same for every unsolvable X, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing there.

Of course the seams between life and death are as discreet as those that run between words and their effects. Any sham of a distinction vanishes in time. Someone once said ‘let the tracks be lost in the darkest snow.’

8/19/22

Love me for not assigning a specific metaphysics to this. (My aunt in Scotland texts me to ask if I’m okay.)

For the restraint I show in not considering implications. (My husband in New York City texts me a video of my cat, who lives with him, to cheer me up.)

(What to say about a life of fractures and inconsistencies in time and space. Work has me living far away from all of my loved ones. Right now, it’s exceptionally cruel.)

I’m okay. 

The opposite of confusion isn’t understanding, it’s blessing the unsolved. Certainly not falling in love with it. Asking nothing from (X), saying nothing to it.

Still, unspoken words push the blood through my veins. I’m young and dumb enough to want to want to make people mean what they say. A child again, or a sadist. Early midlife crisis a thousand miles beneath a celestial grave. Meaning I’m very near others in my mind. In love with them, pathetically, not blessing them at all. 

I’m always dreaming about beloved friends won and lost in time. Wonder if a death in the family will rid me of these visions — as if I could know in advance.

I’ve been traveling. From the beginning of the month, in order: Philadelphia; Brooklyn; Lewes, DE; back to Brooklyn; Fairlawn, VA (where I was stranded for an extra 36 hours due to a flat tire;) Lafayette, IN; Chicago; Columbus, OH, where I am now for Psychedemia. I’ll be presenting this afternoon: “Acid Communism and Psychedelic Science in the Age of Digital Capitalism.”

As part of the speaker application process, we had to write a statement explaining our talk’s applicability to the field of Psychedelic Studies. Mine is below.

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“Acid Communism and Psychedelic Science in the Age of Digital Capitalism” indicates a connection between empirical psychedelic science and critical/theoretical approaches to contemporary culture and political economy. I’m not advancing knowledge on psychedelics qua psychedelics. Instead, I’m staking out a space for psychedelic science in the burgeoning literature on digital capitalism and digital culture.

I’m also not arguing that psychedelic encounters are inherently political. Nor am I stating that they predispose individuals towards particular world-views, political or otherwise. As I apply the Fisherian “acid” to experiences actually induced by psychedelic substances, I suggest that there is use in politicizing such experiences post-facto. This explicit politicization gives traction to certain critiques of digital capitalism — i.e., those which claim that the mental effects of digital technology serve economic purposes. These critiques generally do not identify positive alternatives or confounds to the effects they consider. Thus my work may be considered a supplement to this particular body of scholarship and would indeed be appropriate in the context of Political Theory and Cultural Studies.

It contributes to Psychedelic Studies insofar as it establishes a link between the field’s “hard” dimensions and political issues that appear to be unrelated. Digital capitalism is not immediately connected with some of the most serious political problems of psychedelic research, e.g., those germane to decriminalization, the racist war on drugs, patenting, regulation/oversight of clinical use, indigenous appropriation, and so forth. Nevertheless, psychedelic science can be deployed towards a necessary intervention here.

My methods are not novel — they come from critical theory and critical STS — but the application may inspire further research from those interested in extrapolating from rather than inquiring into psychedelic phenomenology. I think that both approaches — which I might characterize as “looking out from” vs. “looking into” psychedelic experience — belong in Psychedelic Studies.

***

And here are some photos from an abandoned house in Virginia. (Wish I had a better camera — this is just from my iPhone 7).

the only time i’m not acting is when i’m writing.

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Capitalism has produced a class of people rich enough to avoid domestic commitments. I get it. To accept others as family is to shack up with death. The day I got engaged I fixated on one of us burying the other. That’s why today’s elite prefer the primordial monotony of Mars over familiar but perpetually decaying worldly paradises. Mars is the permanent second chance, a hack only dreamable by those who can afford to see its remedial effect on life and death. This vision may be better than sex and other Earthly delights, but I could never take it seriously enough to think it through.

My mom and dad are getting old, neither are in great health, and they’re raising my sister’s four year old son. Covid might hand them a really bad deal; I’ve lost sleep about it. My nephew was born three days after my mom finished chemo for breast cancer. Their hair came in at the same rate, and even though they’re best friends, they drive each other crazy. She insists he observe the same grammatical mandates trained into her by Catholic nuns half a century ago (e.g., the word “of” never follows “off” and it’s trashy to say “sure” when you actually mean “yes”). Growing up I thought that proper speech indicated proper character, which made my classmates hate me.

So I have a lot of these domestic ties. There was a romantic nihilism to getting married in the early days of the virus, like we mattered more than These Unprecedented Times. I put on a Johnny Cash record and made a makeshift nuptial boudoir of my bedroom. We shared a drink in the kitchen — I hid my gown and makeup beneath a floor-length coat and surgical mask.

Two days before the ceremony, my twin brother tested positive. He was relocated from the group home where he lives with other nonverbal autistic people to an “extremely comfortable” quarantine — my mom’s description, and she expressed gratitude to New York state taxes. I told my fiance that’s socialism working, my cruel attempt to give his pain political meaning, and it’s not the first time that sort of detachment’s been a comfort. Champagne-drunk I announced his diagnosis to my wedding guests and it struck me that it’s not political at all.

Like everyone I know, I’m more sensitive to Twitter’s sophistic brand of bullshit than universal inevitables. Year-end accomplishment lists, internally consistent and Borgesianly precise that sort of thing. They’re more conducive to sanity than the big nothing which lies where political discourse should have a beating heart. The timeline scaffolds the illusion that there’s a positive center to the world-pain rather than a void of meaning.

For years I’ve charged social media with advancing capitalist realism. It’s a staple of my writing career. It’s still easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, but honestly, I find the thought experiment less useful than ever. These days my working response is that even the most improbable fantasy has a price tag. Finance lays claim to anything intelligible. If you poke them enough, every weird amalgam of colors, faces, and desires turns into a commodity.

I started writing this on New Year’s eve. Four days later I learned that my friend Will died. They found his body on the side of a road in Macon, Georgia. It was a hit and run accident; now there’s a criminal investigation. He was 36.

Will was building his own idiosyncratic version of the reset, an unfucked / pro-social variation of the Musk-Bezos-Gates otherworld rendered in websites, novels, community projects, relationships. That’s not why I loved him, but it’s worth mentioning. The word visionary comes up in his eulogies. He loved public commons and hated private cars.

We dated for three years; for a while I thought we’d get married. I’ve thought of him as family for over a decade. So I’ve mourned him twice now. Of course I prefer this over any sterile extraterrestrial fantasy. Will was not a normal person, but to paraphrase one of his favorite authors, the only abnormality we should care about is the incapacity to feel. Maybe my hypothetical noncapitalist future is only reserved for those who are okay with death. That might be the political radicalism I’m chasing.

I have a lot of thoughts about acid communism and not a lot of time to write. Here’s something brief inspired by Ajay Singh Chaudhary’s essay “Left-Wing Hypomania,” a call for realism in light of the new post-Trump bloodless optimism: “From uncertain celebration to fluctuating fixation, it is our inner depressive realists, our exhaustive selves, speaking to our collective effervescence.”

I know that collective effervescence seems to characterize acid communism as I and others have written about it. But there’s no singular affective mode of acid communism any more than there’s one paradigmatic type of psychedelic experience (although clichés of “the psychedelic experience” suggest otherwise). So acid communism might be a sort of radical realism that proceeds from a clear-eyed, unflinchingly honest acknowledgment of two links: first, the causal connection between capitalism and depression — Mark Fisher’s version. Second, the affinity between class consciousness and non-quotidian states of consciousness. That includes psychedelic inebriation, but also every other phenomenon that capital’s tools can’t tabulate and standardize for profit. These effects aren’t always bright and cheery. If anything, the work acid communism demands would be destabilizing and demoralizing. Just like any proper rite of passage — see Chaudhary:

Growing out of Melanie Klein’s “depressive position,” in which the individual finally faces up to the reality principle, depressive realism is the opposite of enforced optimism. (Melancholics against biopolitics).

Its principal incipient observation, inspired by Klein but carried out in experimental studies, was not so much that the depressed had some kind of intuitive understanding of the real world, but rather that “non-depressed people succumb to cognitive illusions that enable them to see both themselves and their environment with a rosy glow.” Pace the preachers of optimism from every corner, they found, much to their surprise, that depression did not inhibit action or perception of capability of action. Rather, it was the “cognitive illusions” and “rosy” outlook of the non-depressed that constantly impaired decision making.

At least one psychedelic scholar is sounding the alarm on inflated claims to the drugs’ anti-depressive efficacy. I can’t comment on that scientifically, but as the zeal for psychedelics grows, she probably has a point. She suggests that meditation and other “alternative” treatments are equally useful. At first glance they’d seem to imply more work than the nuclear option, but there’s no such thing as a painless route to illumination. Psychedelic experiences aren’t always fun.

Speaking of which… I can’t tell if this song is manic or depressive, but it reminds me that sadness is pellucid. It’s the feeling most devoted to the reality principle, but to reap those rewards, sad people have to drink a lot of it. Let it tone and fortify the spirit until its psychic contents dissolve in a stream of light. Political thought should have a similar clarifying purpose.

I don’t mean to make a fetish of melancholy (which Chaudhary warns against). To see things for what they are might be praxis or meditation; both terms work just fine.

I found this comment on the Bjork video after I finished writing this post:

Last week I was interviewed for a podcast. The first thing the host asked me: “what questions drive your research?” Like any good question, it was hard to answer, and I’m afraid I fumbled the response.

Right now I’m reading Florian Jaton’s new book The Constitution of Algorithms (available for free here). Chapter III accounts for the historical sedimentation of the brain-computer metaphor. In his words, it became reified through a “cascade of reductions” dating to the postwar era of technoscience:

As soon as one inquires sociohistorically into the process by which brains and computers have been put into equivalence, one sees that the foundations of the argument are shaky; a cascade of reductions, as well as their distribution, surreptitiously ended up presenting the computer as an image of the brain. Historically, it was first the reduction of the Turing machine as an expression of mental processes, then the reduction of neurons as on/off entities, then the reduction of the EDVAC as an input-output device controlled by a central organ, then the distribution of this view through academic networks and commercial arrangements that allowed computers to be considered as deriving from the brain. It is the collusion of all of these translations (Latour 2005), along with many others, that made computers appear as the consequences of the brain’s structure. (123)

And a bit further down the page:

In short, similarly to von Neumann’s view on the EDVAC but with far less engineering applications, the brain as conceived by the computational metaphor of the mind selects the appropriate mental program from the infinite library of all possible programs. (123, bolded font originally in italics)

Jaton’s identification of “selection” as the key function of “thinking machines” (biological brains or digital computers) reminds me of this section in Byung-Chul Han’s Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power:

Intelligence means choosing-between (inter-legere). It is not entirely free in so far as it is caught in a between, which depends on the system in operation. Intelligence has no access to outside, because it makes a choice between options in a system. Therefore, intelligence does not really exercise free choice: it can only select among the offerings the system affords. Intelligence follows the logic of a system. It is system-immanent. A given system defines a given intelligence. Accordingly, intelligence has no access to what is wholly Other. It inhabits a horizontal plane. (85)

So, what questions drive my research? These excerpts describe a sort of technological determinism which impacts not just the way we conceive mentality, but (as Han explicitly argues) the way we actually think, feel, cognize — what minds do. Here’s a question, then: how do we break from cybernetic control to communicate with the new? What are the political stakes of our bondage to selection-from or choosing-among as the only available modes of constituting worlds? You can trace this “intelligence” through Mark Fisher’s writings on hauntology and capitalist realism; critiques of remix/retro culture; anyone who grieves a lost future.

Han uses the word “idiot” to describe the one who outside of this hermetic epistemology. Continuing his quote:

“the idiot has contact with the vertical dimension inasmuch as he takes leave of the prevailing system — that is, abandons intelligence.” (85)

The idiot might be the artist, at least according to my ideal of artistic consciousness and practice. Not the scientist or the philosopher. Art blows my mind more than ideas.

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