Presented at ‘Intoxication 2013’, the University of London Institute in
Paris Postgraduate conference (28
June 2013
Academia.edu version for download
Aversion to information. Rudiments of a state of
rapture. Great sensitivity to open doors, loud talk, music.
Walter Benjamin, first experiment in taking
hashish, 18 December 1927[1]
In his
interview ‘The Rhetoric of Drugs’ (1989), Jacques Derrida remarks on how the
drug user is condemned for their escapism from community: ‘he cuts himself off
from the world’ and ‘escapes into a world of simulacrum and fiction’.[2]
The drug user is similarly condemned on the grounds of a politics of
productivity, as they ‘produce […] nothing’ (236). In line with his tracing of
the instabilities and equivocations of this ‘rhetoric of drugs’, Derrida also
notes how drugs constantly cross the line of production. The supposedly
escapist and unproductive can turn productive. In the case of sports drugs can
become, Derrida suggests, the ‘artificially natural’ mode of augmentation that
could produce the superior ‘being’ (249). Drugs, as Derrida notes, are a pharmakon (234). In this case the pharmakon lies in the unstable
oscillation between escape into the transcendent and immersion in the immanent.[3]
Here, I want to trace intoxication
(and more particularly drug intoxication) as a site of the desire for
immanence, production, and the possibility of a new ‘being’. This is
intoxication not as unproductive detachment from or dissolution of the social
bond, but intoxication as attachment, immersion, and (hyper) productivity.
Intoxication is taken not some transcendent experience, some escape from the
social or from the body, but a radicalized experience of immanence, of
insertion within the social bond to its maximum extent, and of radical
intensification. Of course this form of intoxication aims at breaking the
social bond, or ‘desocializing’ as Derrida puts it (250), but through a
traversal or line of flight into immanence. The ‘social disconnection’ (Derrida
251) that drugs cause works, in this case, by an absolute connection.
If drugs, and other experiences of
intoxication, are taken as paths to an experiential immanence then this
immanence can only be achieved through acceleration.
In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and
Guattari state: ‘All drugs fundamentally concern speeds, and modifications of
speed.’[4]
We accelerate from beyond the stasis of our existent social position into an
intensified experience of immanence that tracks lines of flight. These lines do
not lead into a transcendent world, but reconstruct and rearrange the actual
world.
To be clear my aim is not to
validate this coupling of intoxication, acceleration, and immanence. Instead I
wish to critically explore what I regard as a particular fantasy of immersive
immanence and its correlation with acceleration and production. This is not
intended as yet another moralist discourse on drugs. In fact, as we will see,
actual drugs are not always at stake. Drugs take on the role of being a
simulacra or fiction. What is at stake is a desire. This is a desire for a real
production. Contrary to the simulacral discourse of drugs, the simulacrum is
put at the service of a collapsing of fantasy in intensification and immanence.
Giving them Drugs, taking their Lives Away
In his
review essay on the work of Gilles Deleuze ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’, published
in 1970, Michel Foucault suggested LSD and opium might counter stupidity. He
concluded:
Drugs
– if we can speak of them generally – have nothing at all to do with truth and
falsity; only to fortune-tellers do they reveal a world ‘more truthful than the
real.’ In fact, they displace the relative positions of stupidity and thought
by eliminating the old necessity of a theatre of immobility. But perhaps, if it
is given to thought to confront stupidity, drugs, which mobilize it, which
color, agitate, furrow, and dissipate it, which populate it with differences
and substitute for the rare flash a continuous phosphorescence, are the source
of a partial thought – perhaps.
Deleuze
remarked in a footnote ‘What will people think of us?’
Foucault’s remark suggests that in
part the effect of drugs is to eliminate a ‘theatre of immobility’. They
provide the intensification, mobilization, and acceleration, which offer an
experience of ‘continuous phosphorescence’. It is the work of Deleuze and
Guattari that takes-up this experience in a mode that links drugs and
acceleration. Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus
(1972) is relatively silent on drugs, with only a few mentions, in regards to
R.D. Laing and American literature. The book is rather more explicit about
acceleration, with its suggestion that ‘We can never go too far in the
direction of deterritorialization.’[5]
The generally ‘trippy’ (to use an appropriately kitsch term) atmosphere of some
parts of the book, the selective manner of its adoption, and the milieu to
which it appealed, meant that despite its often marked tone of sobriety Anti-Oedipus was taken by some as a
license for drug and other forms of ‘accelerative’ experimentation.
A
Thousand Plateaus (1980) reconsiders and recalibrates the discourse on
drugs. Deleuze and Guattari still insist that ‘Drug assemblage’ is one of
molecular revolution, allowing us to perceive the imperceptible, have a
molecular perception, and invest that perception with desire:[6]
‘Drugs give the unconscious the immanence and plane that psychoanalysis
has consistently botched (perhaps the famous cocaine episode marked a turning
point that forced Freud to renounce a direct approach to the unconscious).’
(284) Drugs don’t turn to the fantasy production that marks the psychoanalytic
unconscious as ‘a dualism machine’ (284). Rather than the ‘gross molarities’ of
Oedipus, drugs can embark on imperceptible becomings that are constructive and
immanent.
While Deleuze and Guattari insist,
in Spinozist style, that drugs must be granted their own causality and can’t be
reduced to ‘generalities on pleasure and misfortune’ (283), they also sound a
more cautionary note. Drugs may be a matter of speed, but this speed is
variable: the time of drugs is at once one of ‘mad speed’ and ‘posthigh
slownesses’ (283). That is, what William Burroughs calls ‘junk time.’ Deleuze
and Guattari now suggest that acceleration, ‘mad speed’, is not to simply be
endorsed, as deterritorialization can run out-of-control. A delinking line,
which is only speed, means ‘the lines of flight coil and start to swirl in
black holes’ (285). In such cases the drug user does not connect with
immanence, but reterritorializes. They reterritorialize on the identity of the user
or addict: ‘The causal line, or the line of flight, of drugs is constantly
being segmentarized under the most rigid of forms, that of dependency, the hit
and the dose, the dealer.’ (ATP: 284) We are no longer, as Deleuze and
Guattari say, ‘master of speeds’
(285).
Of course we could and probably
should note that this discourse risks returning to the extrinsic moralism
Deleuze and Guattari has claimed to avoid. Accusing drug users or addicts of
being locked-in anti-social identities and chains of dependency is not so far
from the discourse of the police. Of course Deleuze and Guattari would insist
that their aim is to suggest the drug addict returns themselves to social
orders of control, rather than pursuing a true or real construction that might
rupture with the normative forms of territorialisation. This is part of their
rejection of fantasy, and their insistence that the collapse of the drug user
is one that results in falling into ‘hallucinations, delusions, false
perceptions, phantasies, or paranoid outbursts’ (285). What is wrong with these
experiences is that they are not ‘rich or full’, they are not ‘passages of
intensities’, but result in ‘a vitrified or emptied body’ (285). The problem
with this use of drugs is that it is not immanent enough – ‘Drug addicts
continually fall back on what they wanted to escape: a segmentarity all the
more rigid for being marginal, a territorialisation all the more artificial for
being based on chemical substances, hallucinatory forms, and phantasy
subjectifications.’ (285)
Rather than disappearance or
immersion, the emphasis now falls on construction. This is an ‘art of dosages,
since overdose is a danger’ (160). It is not a matter of blazing a path.
Instead it is even a matter of absence of abstinence: getting drunk, but on
pure water’, or ‘getting high, but by abstention’. This is a critique of drug
use based upon a discourse of immanence: ‘Drugs do not guarantee immanence;
rather the immanence of drugs allows one to forgo them.’ (286) While I think
this is not particularly satisfactory as a mode of critique, it indicates the
priority Deleuze and Guattari give to a ‘molecular’ becoming that folds-in to
immanence. Constantly warding off any trace of the negative results in its
occulted return, which tries to specify and delimit what molecules we can
connect with. This selection, unsurprisingly, in the name of a ‘vital
assemblage’ (286). To use the ironic sample of Emperion’s classic track
‘Narcotic Influence’: ‘Giving them drugs, taking their lives away’… Deleuze and
Guattari conclude, in seeming contradiction, that drugs don’t lead to the plane
of immanence, but ‘in fact the plane must distill its own drugs, remaining
master of speeds and proximities.’ (286)
In response,
the discourse of Nick Land and the Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit (CCRU),
articulated at Warwick in the 1990s, insists on a return to full-blown
immanence. Rejecting any holding back, and working in the wake of the mass
pharmacological experiment of rave culture, they strip-out the cautionary
moralism of Deleuze and Guattari’s discourse. Their motto could have been
William Burroughs statement, from The
Naked Lunch (1959): ‘The addict regards his body impersonally as an
instrument to absorb the medium in which he lives, evaluates his tissue with
the cold hands of a horse trader.’[7]
Here acceleration abandons
selection. In Land’s words ‘Logistically accelerating techno-economic
interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway.’ The only option is to immerse in the backwash of this runaway process, which in
Land’s metaphysics infiltrates the present from its realized future. What
Deleuze and Guattari tended to regard as fleeting and asymptotic converges on
absolute deterritorialization that has happened, but not now or here: ‘Neo-China
arrives from the future.’ Immanence, in this discourse, is perfectly aligned
with the trendlines of contemporary capitalism taken as site of absolute deterritorialization
momentarily deferred. What we had now, or then (in the ’90s), were traces of
that future which we should seize as paths to full future immanence.
The accelerative beats-per-minute of
rave into Jungle and drum n’ bass offered a new passage into lived affective
intensity and immanence – ‘text at sample velocity’. This was combined with the
drug culture of rave and post-rave, which ranged across the spectrum of
pharmaceutical options in the pursuit of catching-up with that speed of the
music. Walter Benjamin, writing of his experience on hashish in the 1920s,
noted: ‘The music, which meanwhile kept rising and falling, I called the “rush
switches of jazz.”’[8]
He continues, hilariously, ‘I have forgotten on what grounds I permitted myself
to mark the beat with my foot. This is against my education, and it did not
happen without inner disputation.’[9]
Rave and post-rave dance music cultivated these ‘rush switches’ to an extreme
degree. Drug use + Jungle = CCRU, we could say. True abandonment requires the
breaking of all bonds, and drugs and Jungle would be two means.
This also had a deliberately
anti-political element, derived as from Lyotard’s delirial accelerationist
rupture with ‘left moralism’ in Libidinal
Economy (1974). In Mark Fisher’s retrospective: ‘The Ccru defined itself against the sclerotic stranglehold that a certain moralizing
Old Left had on the Humanities academy. There was a kind of exuberant
anti-politics, a ‘technihilo’ celebration of the irrelevance of human agency’.
The political and cultural fate of this discourse was not unpredictable.
Embrace of the trendlines welcomed self-dissolution, which gained an
appropriate accompanying mythology. The retooling of accelerationism in the
present moment owes much to repetition of this moment, which indicates the
strangely nostalgic form of such a Futurist discourse.
While more admirably
rigorous than Deleuze and Guattari, and less beholden to the minor or molecular
‘good hippy’ (as Lyotard sarcastically put it vis-à-vis Baudrillard), the
discourse of Land and the CCRU was deliberately terminal. Immanence achieved,
but deferred until its retroactive arrival, could easily generate the same
moralisms of adjustment and conformity to acceleration and immanence that we
found with Deleuze and Guattari. In this case adjustment and immersion come
from the future and the traces of this ‘future’ are prefigurative markers to
which we have to conform. This is an inverse moralism of conformity to
anti-moralism traced through a delireal sci-fi future that draws its elements
from the retro-kitsch of the present.
I’m the Platform
For one
recent instance of this form of immersive, immanent and intoxicated
‘acceleration’ I want to consider Beatriz Preciado’s description of
being-on-testosterone as a ‘transgendered’ body.
I’m not so much interested in the politics of this particular experience in
terms of gender, so much as the language and descriptive terms used to analyse
this state. Her description is one distinguished from other drugs – coke, speed
– to indicate ‘the feeling of being in perfect harmony with the rhythm of the
city’. This already suggests the resonant immersion in the forms and forces of
contemporary global capital, figured in the ‘rhythm’ of the city.
This is an experience intimately and
explicitly connected with contemporary neoliberal capitalism, which Preciado
characterizes as ‘a new type of hot, psychotropic punk capitalism.’ Here
capitalism converges and incites ‘molecular’ biopolitical transformation
through ‘micro-prosthetic mechanisms’ and new ‘multimedia technical protocols’.
What interests me is that, in common with the CCRU, the strategy Preciado
pursues is one of identification and immersion with these new forms of power.
The ‘drug’ experience, this molecular intoxication, is not a device of
transcendence or escape per se, but rather insertion with and within the
‘chains’ of signifiers and ‘materialities’ of the present.
The result is the common gesture of
the immanent and networked litany:
I
inject a crystalline, oil-soluble steroid carbon chain of molecules, and with
it a fragment of the history of modernity. I administer to myself a series of
economic transactions, a collection of pharmaceutical decisions, clinical
tests, focus groups, and business management techniques. I connect to a baroque
network of exchange and to economic and political flow-chains for the patenting
of the living. I am linked by T to electricity, to genetic research projects,
to mega-urbanization, to the destruction of forests and the biosphere, to
pharmaceutical exploitation of living species, to Dolly the cloned sheep, to
the advance of the Ebola virus, to HIV mutation, to antipersonnel mines and the
broadband transmission of information. In this way, I become one of the somatic
connectives that make possible the circulation of power, desire, release,
submission, capital, rubbish, and rebellion.
The
conclusion: ‘I’m the platform that makes possible the materialization of
political imagination.’
This is an intoxicated and willed
extinction of the self, especially the gendered self, into the mere ‘platform’
for affects, materialities, and signifiers. Insertion is the aim. Yet, this is
figured not simply as immanent extinction and immersion at the expense of
agency. Instead a strange new form of ‘agency’ is born: ‘I’m both the terminal
of one of the apparatuses of neoliberal governmentality and the vanishing point
through which escapes the will to control of the system.’ What might be thought
to imply the surrender of the self to neoliberal capital is, it is claimed, a
‘vanishing point’ to immanent exit. This is registered in the usual discourse
of neoliberal availability: ‘I am a copyleft biopolitical agent that considers
sex hormones free and open biocodes, whose use shouldn’t be regulated by the
State commandeered by pharmaceutical companies.’
The aim is to ‘produce a new sexual
and affective platform’ in which ‘T is only a threshold, a molecular door, a
becoming between multiplicities.’ The reference to the ‘threshold’ and
‘molecular door’ echo the weird fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, or Lovecraft
channelled via Deleuze and Guattari in A
Thousand Plateaus. The choice is, however, of what I’d call the hippy
Lovecraft. This is the Dunsanian Lovecraft of transformation and metamorphosis,
of Through the Gates of the Silver Key,
happily consonant with Deleuze’s Jungian roots. What is displaced is the
Lovecraft of horror. The molecular door is affirmed and positivised as exit and
escape, traversing the platform-being of contemporary capitalism, rather than
the negative horror of loss and dispersion.
This is the strange logic of
holding-on at work, in which immersion is disappearance but one that pushes or
nudges immanence beyond the supposed limits of the capitalist form. True to
Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-oedipal formulations it traces agency and
possibility as modes of ‘hypertrophy’.[10]
The primary target is the State, as symbol of control of fluxes and flows,
which makes the usual correlation of power with planning, capture, and
transcendent control. Immanence flees beneath, in terms of riding, supposedly,
the lines of capitalist flight. The conformity of this strategy with neoliberal
capitalism’s own imaginary is not commented upon.
Closing the molecular door
The
problematic core around which these discourses turn is one of absorption into
actuality as the site of transformation. The stakes here turn on the right
choice of molecule to enter into molecular becomings. This is a metaphysics of
self as platform to insert the self into ‘real’ production. ‘Real’ here is not
the usual sense of ‘real production’ as manufacturing, etc., versus ‘financial
or fictional capital’. Obviously this distinction doesn’t hold up. Instead
‘real’ here has the Lacanian sense, vectored through Deleuze and Guattari, of
immersion into a machinic production that encompasses all the flows and fluxes,
simulacral and ‘real’, in one metaphysics of differentiated production. Of
course, I’d suggest, lurking within this metaphysics is a suspicion of the
fictional or simulacral, which is rapidly displaced by the productive virtual.
In the moment of capitalist crisis
this immersive acceleration refigures the triggering of production, of creative
destruction directed against the ‘bourgeois ego’, as we immanently inhabit our
own potential or actual obsolescence. Drugs or intoxication are not matters of
insulating or cushioning against this loss, but active choices to intensity and
inhabit this process. The ‘platform being’ of the present moment is the being
of creative destruction. What is welcomed here is not the accelerative force of
capital, which has dispersed into intractable crisis, but the future
possibility of restarting that acceleration through stripping out the
‘residues’ of humanism and the remnants of the welfare State.
This is the peculiar intoxicated
acceleration of our moment: a capitalist ostalgie that retools the search for
transcendence through drugs into immanence that selects only overload. The
inadequacy of this discourse should be self-evident. The fading of dreams of
jouissance in counter-culture is turned into a nihilistic inhabiting of the
superior force of the only actuality we have: capitalism in crisis. What is
lost is any negativity, any displacement or resistance, as that negativity is
hyperbolically reinscribed as the negation of the self. It’s enough to make you
want to take drugs.
[1] Walter Benjamin, On Hashish, intro. Marcus Boon, ed.
Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2006), p.20.
[2] Jacques Derrida, ‘The
Rhetoric of Drugs’, in Points:
interviews, 1974-1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1995), pp.228-254, pp.235-6.
[3] The exception to this
structure, in fact an exception at the origin, is Thomas De Quincey. His Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
(1821) not only insists that opium is not intoxicating, but that is also serves
a transcendental function. Opium increases the capacity of the intellect to
subsume content under form; in the language of Kant it augments the
transcendental schematism.
[4] Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus,
trans. Brian Massumi (London: The Athlone Press, 1988), p.282.
[5] Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus [1972], trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and
Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p.417.
[6] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p.282. Further page
references in text.
[7] William Burroughs, The Naked Lunch [1959] (London: Paladin,
1986), p.63.
[8] Benjamin, On Hashish, p.55.
[10] Alexander R. Galloway
and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory
of Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), p.98.
