new publication
“Ordinary Doses: New Research On Psychedelics Is Constrained By Technological Solutionism.” At Real Life Mag https://reallifemag.com/ordinary-doses/
Category Archives: Critical Theory
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Hi from Germany. Frankfurt is unseasonably warm, hotter than New York right now. It feels like Southern Virginia at the time I left. I was in Berlin and Poland (Sczcecin) last weekend. It was not much colder in either city. Trying not to think about climate change feels like trying not to be human. Even […]
incoming
Yesterday: five hours slicing through apocalyptic gales with my car, listening to Tom Zé and Bill Hicks comedy, around 8PM landed in Baltimore for the Students for Sensible Drug Policy Conference. Coming up: The 22nd-25th of March: Doing Interdisciplinarity, the 2018 ASPECT Conference at Virginia Tech. I will be giving a talk titled “Psychedelic Research and Data Positivism.” […]
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I want to tell people why they should read Peli Grietzer, but instead of doing that, I’m going to post this image from Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts In High School which was used to accompany his recent article. Theories of vibe, Blood and Guts, read and then get off the internet.
opaque, fragile and performative selfhoods
Recently I’ve discovered some overlaps between various works of contemporary psychedelic scholarship. Over the summer I started reading Nicolas Langlitz’s book Neuropsychedelia and came across the work of Chris Letheby not long after (when he himself reached out to me after an introduction I made on a grad student listserv… +1 for email networking). Letheby co-authored a philosophical paper […]
not digging political art
Re-reading Walter Benjamin’s “The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction” — good to remember this, from the epilogue, as fascist tendencies are (again) emergent: “The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses […]
entertaining the fantasy of complete psychological self-sufficiency
“I conceived of a rather odd project: not the evolution of sexual behavior but the projection of a history of the link between the obligation to tell the truth and the prohibitions against sexuality. I asked: How had the subject been compelled to decipher himself in regard to what was forbidden? It is a question […]
after life
…the invention of the Morse alphabet in 1837 was promptly followed by the tapping specters of spiritistic seances sending their messages from the realm of the dead. Promptly as well, photographic plates-even and especially those taken with the camera shutter closed-furnished reproductions of ghosts or specters, whose black-andwhite fuzziness only served to underscore the promise […]
Vita Obscura: Reclaiming Your Life Through Lies, Surgery and Performance
Here’s a little video I made. It’s a coda to a paper I’m working on titled Vita Obscura: Obfuscating Biopower. In the paper I talk about how obfuscation as an anti-surveillance strategy can be used to resist biopower (Michel Foucault’s formula for how command and control works in modern societies). The video has some imaginative examples of how this could […]
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“I’ve invented nothing; I’ve simply been the secretary of my sensations” — Emil Cioran
