This could be strange. The blog format makes the first into the last, as the posts layer in time, reversing the actual order. But what the hell. We’ll see how it goes. Here’s the abstract. The sign at the trailhead. Where we’re going, but no notes on the roughness of the terrain, the length of the trail, the steepness of the climb–or descent.
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Communicating the Unspeakable: Linguistic Phenomena in the Psychedelic Sphere
Psychedelics can enable a broad and paradoxical spectrum of linguistic phenomena from the unspeakability of mystical experience to the eloquence of the songs of the shaman or curandera. Interior dialogues with the Other, whether framed as the voice of the Logos, an alien download, or communion with ancestors and spirits, are relatively common. Sentient visual languages are encountered, their forms unrelated to the representation of speech in natural language writing systems. This thesis constructs a theoretical model of linguistic phenomena encountered in the psychedelic sphere for the field of altered states of consciousness research (ASCR). The model is developed from a neurophenomenological perspective, especially Michael Winkelman’s work in shamanistic ASC, which in turn builds on the biogenetic structuralism of Charles Laughlin, John McManus, and Eugene d’Aquili. Neurophenomenology relates the physical and functional organization of the brain to the subjective reports of lived experience in altered states as mutually informative, without reducing consciousness to one or the other. Consciousness is seen as a dynamic process of the recursive interaction of biology and culture, thereby navigating the traditional dichotomies of objective/subjective, body/mind, and inner/outer realities that problematically characterize much of the discourse in consciousness studies. The theoretical work of Renaissance scholar Steven Farmer on the evolution of syncretic and correlative systems and their relation to neurobiological structures provides a further framework for the exegesis of the first-person texts of long-term psychedelic self-exploration. Since the classification of most psychedelics as Schedule I drugs, legal research came to a halt; self-experimentation as research did not. Scientists such as Timothy Leary and John Lilly became outlaw scientists, a social aspect of the “unspeakability” of these experiences. Academic ASCR has largely side-stepped examination of the extensive literature of psychedelic self-exploration. This thesis examines aspects of both form and content of a selection of these works, focusing on those that treat linguistic phenomena, and asking what these linguistic experiences can tell us about how the psychedelic landscape can be navigated, interpreted, and communicated within its own experiential field, and communicated about to make the data accessible to inter-subjective comparison and validation. The methodological core of this practice-based research is a technoetic practice as defined by artist and theoretician Roy Ascott: the exploration of consciousness through interactive, artistic, and psychoactive technologies. The iterative process of psychedelic self-exploration and creation of multi-vocal and multimodal texts, is framed as technoetic practice.
dear voyager, godspeed on your worthy, timely and apposite travails! am truly looking forward to your posts and curious about the turn your dissertation will make – many dead-ends beckon; so far, it all looks promising and reflects a deep maturing of the mind/soul. on another note, am glad to see you’ve come accross richard doyle’s work:
http://biotelemetrica.pbworks.com/DecodingBateson
wishing you furhter happy trails,
bestos!
(hope you manage to venture beyond the “antipodes of the mind” and inner paths/outer space dualities found in current reference work)
care to elaborate on your last comment?
in its original, a. huxleyan usage, “antipodes of the mind” referred to areas of consciousness normally engulfed by darkness, a general not knowing and lack of awareness;
in current parlance, to those aspects of the mind that have not been accessed (yet). what was needed, poetically said, was an “opening, or cleansing, of the doors of perception” (w. blake, h. smith).
and then, some western brave conquerors of this little known realm made attempts to sketch out various cartographies in order to describe it and thus lay
claim to and entice other followers into its exploitation and inhabitation (j. lilly, t. leary, s. grof). in the interim, an inspired and fearless bard (the immortal terence mckenna, may he r.i.p.), inspired by the indefatigable mandarin-like r.e. schultes, and the victorian botanists before him, has travelled there extensively, bringing back many wondrous tales from those exotic liminal shores. more recently, boistered by “advances” in the cognitive sciences and attendant technological instrumentarium,
a whole horde of engineers of the human soul have laid claims to huge swaths of this hitherto hostile territory, and similar to sundry and infamous renaissance conquerors before them, in the process often exaggerated their exploits. generally, it has been an altogether familiar and greedy story of wanting one’s cake, and eating it too.
for, what “linguistic phenomena” (in the psychedelic sphere) are we talking about ? within the sessions themselves, in certain environments, there are the ritualistic or spontaneous speech acts guiding the communal experience, to various degrees of traditional or contemporary cultural embeddedness. these are the utterances, songs and other tools deployed by the shamans, healers, priests, and therapists. on the other side of the divide, there are the usually unskilled, naive or magical realist reports coming from the more or less conversant participants of these rituals and experiences. there are present thus the performative (during rituals, sessions), and the after-the-fact linguistic behaviours.
these are distributed among various communities of users (indigenous, mestizo/caboclo, religious/spiritual, free-form psychonautical, recreational, academic, and medical researchers), and can be readily summoned and documented. in addition, and of crucial importance in the psychedelic experience, is the role and use of music. how are these global relationships to be conceptualized in this “linguistic turn” (to psychedelic study)?
what appears to be lacking at present is a universal model, or meta-language which would subsume and include in its descriptive, explanatory and performative scope all of these different, modes, tropes and communities of usage, and veridically evoke, invoke, replicate and entice the experience of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. in a sense, autrement dit, there is a gaping lack among present generation of psy bards of one so inspired a homer of the unspeakable, who would hammer or craft out of the anvil of experience the consensually accepted alchemical logos, or lingua franca that would serve as the vehicle to take us to eleusis and back, and maintain alive the glow afterwards for all to see, hear, feel and taste. in this, a few came close to the
present day equivalent of j. joyce of FW (e. davis in ‘techgnosis’, m. taussig in his unevened ‘shamanism, colonialism and the wild man’, and r. doyle as per usual). j. narby paved the way in some ways, so did wade davis, as far as exploratory narratives go. deoxy.org, the vaults of erowid, MAPS, CSP, et al do provide a lively community for the circulation of stories, preparation for various journeys and safe heavens to return to. what are we waiting for?
for let us not get too giddy and self-delude ourselves
into restless, vain and kitschy artificial paradisiacal
states and status claims – there is much, and much too much serious work to be done, for chrissakes we have ventured upon interfaces within indra’s net!
as a consequence, there is thus also the karma of collective responsibility for these forays into the ecology of BIG MIND – every time we venture into the unnameable & unspeakable, we are knocking on heaven’s door. in other words, there is compound interest accruing from these temporal rewards from the pearly gates, i.e., such rainbow tainted “sentient visual languages” and sudden drunken bouts of “interior dialogues with the OTHER”, do have a price, they are a form of debt. we have to strip our conscience bare, individually to begin with, and admit that these ASCR’s, SSC’s, etc., are but immodest human constructs, heuristic at best, mostly just hubristic, and tooled out in a climate of exceptionalism. why at all pin down, relate and reduce “consciousness” to just (the) physical and functional organization of “the brain”? this bespeaks of an untold arrogance towards what has appropriatelly and poetically been termed the “more than human world”
(d. abrams in ‘the spell of the sensuous: perception and language in a more-than-human world’). it ignores the probable topology of mind-at-large (in g. bateson’s conception), and reflects a habitually incestuous infatuation with technological analogies and models coming from outer space exploration on the one hand, and fMRI scans of the inner domain, on the other. why should psychedelic modelling and theorizing self-limit, censor and colonize itself right at the outset? the stakes are too big for this kind of immature and spoiled posturing. how does the perception of consciousness
“as a dynamic process of the recursive interaction of biology and culture” enhance our important task at hand? more to the point, how does this construct help us to better navigate the by now well known rapids, slippery slopes and pitfalls of western-based psychonavigation? would it not be helpful to introduce notions such as iteration, emergence, open-endedness, performativity, speech acts,..?
in metatheoretical terms, this would amount to a paradigm shift analogous to that which occurred between the wittgenstein of the ‘tractatus’, and the more cautious and mature, but also more ludic one of the latter ‘philosophical investigations’. why not take a leaf out of francisco varela’s notebooks? his version of neuroscience, deeply informed by continental phenomenology and buddhist practice paved the way
for interesting and promising work (‘the view from within: first person approaches to the study of consciousness’). how about the corrective work of
d. lachapelle, e. sahtouris, j. macy, mae-wan ho,
v. shiva? of s. george, d. harraway and others?
matters of ideology and “the fringe” can and should
not be shoved under the carpet anymore (however, some outer limits should be established, i.e., lacan, derrida, žižek!)
if techno(po)etic practice is to faithfully reflect the liberational potential and promises of sustained and serious exploration of deep psyche, we – as its pioneers, practitioners, promotors and zealots (sic), would do appropriate justice to our enterprise if we came to it openly, humbly, lovingly, and full of respect, and adopted it as a form of ritualistic performance irrespective of the context in which it occurs (it could be in the desert or the laboratory): precisely such as innumerous parttakers and witnesses of soma, the kykeon and other
sacraments have done before us, in countless veladas.
let our practice be our theory, and vice versa.
for, let us not forget, it the source code that is
at stake here. so be it; truly.
Contact with an unknown intelligence is a real phenomena I have been researching since 1994. Al language of visual projections that transcends all barriers. Time capsules of communications etched in small stone artifacts I have labeled ‘petro photoglyphs’.
Contact with those who have been called GOD since the dawn of humanity.
A detailed report and many examples at my research website (absolutely no solicitations)
http://www.impactoptics.com
Absolutely real empirical scientific fact. Been looking for others who have found similar stone etched hologram projectors.
fine example of umwelt biomimicry,
relevant to psychedelics & language:
http://www.ultrafeel.tv/octopus-psychedelic-color-language/
http://discovermagazine.com/2006/apr/cephalopod-morphing
a note of caution, however, and a useful reminder:
http://www.matrixmasters.net/blogs/?p=289
((“I think that any models [of the psychedelic experience] that we can build, verbal, visual, or mathematical are really, really feeble compared to the experience itself.” Ralph Abraham))
another fine model for human cognitive processing,
as interface:
http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/
i have a deep love and fascination for the octopus and his brethern who can speak such subtle languages with their skin-displays
hahaha ! this is good shit
Really awesome! Yay i’m glad you’re doing work like this. I too am trying to combine linguistics and psychedelic research; you’ve done a nice job so far, can’t wait to read the rest.
A bit of styling, a lot of prep, and an awesome team = beautiful shoot. Thanks guys!