Interesting that shamanism is coming up a lot lately. I’ve been reading about it in connection with schizophrenia, Michael mentioned it today, a few others recently, and I was given book on Psychomagic, too. If there is a reason why so many of us are looking at psychopathology- if we’re right to suspect that ‘generalised lunacy’ is here- then it seems like we’re also looking to the shamanic as a way out. Yes, a way out. I’ve been considering the left recently and it seem to come all too often to a game of hope and moral blackmail. The dream floats free of the dreamer and comes to dominate him. To escape the limits of reality.
I’m wondering if the best we can hope for is in fact the very evasion of control that has so often been cast as the ultimate irresponsibility. To every answer comes the question of how you feed 10billion people. The answer is you don’t because you can’t because to the unconscious the demand is that you- yes you Mr Hickman- get out there and distribute the loaves and the fishes. More leftist melancholy ensues, rhapsodising itself into the ultimate agonies of masochism, “radical victimology”. First task of control evasion is to evade the snares and traps of perpetual moralism.
Ballard said that he couldn’t get Burroughs; sexuality, drugs, and paranoia separated them. Ballard said Burroughs was an authentic paranoid. It’s trite but you got to ask it any, don’t you? The meaning of this paranoia. Clinically paranoids are marked by a cognitive deficits involving poor information gathering in relation to decision making, exacerbated by an over-active agential attribution system. It’s not wrong but it’s not enough. In Hegelese:
“The isolated person is thus, like the structureless mass of people,
object and not subject of the process of history. The heteronomous, the
controlled, the persecuted, the delusional paranoid is handed over
defenselessly to the objectively murderous relations of production of in
the hegemonic social “order.” Thus paranoia is a realistic expression of
reality.”Burroughs was all about this paranoia and it must be placed with his escapological aspects. Paranoia finds power everywhere and couples things up in an infinite and “bizarre” spiral of connectionism and interactionism such that the fear that you’ve irradiated my meal bespeaks Fukushima and the realities of everyday poison and the noxiousness of an irradiated psychosphere and the distrust of “the powerful” and it keeps connecting like an unending sentence that can’t and won’t ever abbreviate itself until a network or a spider’s web of conspiratorial energy is dispersed through the entire social fabric and and but it gets overinterpreted so that the psychiatric profession has been able to reabsorb the key insight and neutralise it.
Except that in tracing the capillary web of power it also comes to the startling conclusion that Baudrillard would make about Foucault’s theorisation of power: it is visible insofar as it disappears. It’s gone. It’s vanished. The paranoid has his nonspecific floating “They”- the conspiratorial plural- in order to reflect this still strange and probably still offensive news. Seeing that there is nothing to see and seeing it everywhere the paranoid is capable of following a path of disappearance. He is on the look out for shadowy corners in which to hide.
On the ‘immanent materiality of the ideal order itself’ I doubt there is anyone quite as up for it as Stirner, who as you might know is connected to Lacan through post-anarchism. Whatever. The materiality of the ideal can be spoken about but is it in terms of its effects or what? Lacan’s claims on the origin of knowledge in the paranoiac knowledge of objects: the idea that knowledge itself is persecutory. Isn’t it true? Isn’t it the case that consciousness itself is the very urgrund of all our persecutions?
To know thyself is to be lacerated by self-hate and to wrap it all up in self-love. That is why the phobia of negative thinking. The negative chatter in one’s own mind- I’m lazy, I’m a liar, I’m a hypocrite, I’m thick, my mind is arid, I have nothing important to say, I’m a bad lover, a bad father, a bad worker, a bad colleague, a bad communist, a bad whateverthefuckandIcan’tevendecideanything- is always treated as a persecutory enemy and identified as something to be dissolved, to be dissipated, to get some cognitive distance and disidentification from. Well it’s actually the opposite: this is the intimate paranoia that detects the defects in carrying this hallucination that you are a self at all. It’s not going away by wishing it away. You’ve got to get right in there. Disidentification, sure…but mind how you go. Why reject the dissatisfaction? Accelerate it to the point that it collapses the system of the semiology of negative self-attribution.
Simone Weil starved herself to death in solidarity with others. She might not be everyone’s favourite person to talk to about it, but for what it’s worth she had this much to say: “Turn all disgust into disgust with the self”.
They used to talk about getting out of your head. Jodorowsky has a psychomagical ritual for that. There are drugs for that. There are psychopathologies and ecstatic dancing and religious and mystical experiences to seek out for that. Oh dear. The postmodern shaman comes back around. I almost said temporary autonomous zone but I stopped myself. How do you feed 10billion people? You don’t just walk off, that’s for sure.
Our politics are serious. They are singularly serious. They come together with techne and rationalism. Out at the fringes we’re talking about re-engineering the whole thing. Fuck nature- nature’s just waiting to be mutated. Can we even start with ourselves? The neurostimulatory experiments in authentic desubjectivation. Fuck, can we even just begin with survival today and tomorrow and the soft warmth of our fragile shit smeared bodies. I’m not against xenofeminism; I’m not against anything xeno.
The return of the weightiness of rationalism raises a fear for those who see psychopathology not as all breakdown but also as breakthrough, as Laing put it. Paranoia, to be beside one’s own mind. Is this the first reactive wave against the new rationalism? It isn’t a rejection but a warping and side-ways looking everywhere at once. The return of reason breeds new and wonderful monsters. A new irrationalism.
I am an escapologist: for my first trick I will disappear from my own head.
Consequently since my arrival five hundred thousand years ago I’ve had one thought on my mind: the escape plan…
– William Burroughs
Rereading Burroughs is like falling through the abyss on glass wings, one is never sure if the shattered reflections on the black seas below are of one’s own paranoia or just the truth of nature revealed as alien topology. The cartography of annihilation is always a smile hiding in the dark. Burroughs is that smile.
Naked Lunch still packs the stiletto poetry of the street, a free flow impressionism that sinks deep. Burroughs voice is brisk and driven, speed is the game:
The Rube flips in the end, running through empty automats and subway stations, screaming: `Come back, kid!! Come back!!’ and follows his boy right into the East River, down through condoms and orange peels, mosaic of floating newspapers, down into the silent black ooze with gangsters…
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synthetic zerØ 
Yea, I have to admit that my travels in the altered-states during the sixties and seventies is what awakened me out of my slipshod dream of life. Mushrooms, peyote, and acid: the triumvirate at that time opened as Huxley said after Blake – the “doors of perception”. And what a world it revealed! I knew that it was all connected to our brain even then, knew that we’d been like Blake said in his poetry and critical proems closed off in our little cubical of a mind through a long history of Reason. Reason is a Control device: a prison that locks us up in our small manageable worlds so we can cope with this technological wonderland of a hell we’ve all created together.
The Shamans of the world were technologists of the spirit rather than of engineered bridges. They engineered bridges between our everyday lives in sociality and the dreamtime of the universe itself. The invent maps to help us negotiate these in-between states while traveling among them so that we’d not get lost in the cosmos. Paranoia as Guattari and Deleuze would testify too is what capitalism does to a Shaman: it brutalizes them and forces them into perverse relations with their natural born being.
We know in ancient cultures that both women and men were sorcerers of various types: it was part healer, part alternate voyager. I spent years studying this history and lived it. Drums are a key as Mickey Hart of The Dead would discover in his Drumming at the Edge of Magic: A Journey into the Spirit of Percussion. So much about sound and rhythm in the magic that most never learn about. It’s not just drugs, or meditation, etc. Its knowing the beat of the heart, the earth, the universe: a beat and rhythm that puts one into what we used to call the “groove” – remember oh that’s groovy… silly now, but back then one knew what it meant.
That’s always been at the back of my own world while still engaging with this other world of academic philosophy etc. Yet, when I read these men and women its as if all the things we learned back in the sixties and early seventies have fallen away, a whole generations knowledge lost. Of course most of it is because the propaganda machine worked overtime to provide disinformation about that culture, showing it as evil druggies who commit suicide, et. al. Junk academia … oh well want beat the bush on that score.
Stanislof Grof who never quit experimenting with LSD and its derivatives wrote extensively about this area from a science perspective and toward a psychotherapeutic path. We’ve lost so much from earlier tribal knowledge on this score that we may never find our way back. Most of our religious experiences come out of this one way or another. I still affirm with William Blake that all the gods resided in the human breast: not out there… and it was through vision we awakened these realms while awake. The Gnostics and especially of the Ismaili Dervishes etc. keep this alive. India in Shivaites and others… it’s all there scattered like the fragments of a lost civilization. Yet, its our only hope as you suggest. If we don’t learn to touch that region of our being we’re doomed. I truly believe that. Keep it to myself most of the time. But it’s there.
apart from the sheer aesthetic/literary qualities and pleasures I think that Burroughs gets much of the mood right but I worry (in terms of taking his work as more than art) that in some sense it is an escape in so much as it doesn’t capture the real alienation of the everyday, mundane, world that most of us dwell, and suffer, in.
The un-canny is not other than the brutal simplifiers of ‘able’ bodied human-beings doing what we do exposed for us to attend to (like a post-modern building with see thru walls revealing the pipes and wires and all, or an injured hand with cut tendons now attached to wires to try and set and heal), the tragic banalities of evil as Germany has once again reminded us.
Click to access Caputo.Essay.pdf
Not sure what you mean… his work was nothing but the mundane seen through the lens of paranoia. Of course his world was my world during the mid-century, so in that sense his work is of another era. So if you mean the mundane of our political era, of course it couldn’t speak to you. He used cut-ups, fantasy, surrealism, pop-art of his time to connect to the undercurrents of the politics of desire of the 50’s and 60’s cultural frame. His wasn’t an “escape” from reality per se, only an escape from our “official” reality as presented by the cultural monarchs. His work captured every aspect of our alienated condition if you open your eyes and see what he is doing.
about the shamanism thing, there seems to be some suggestion by many of the proponents that someone who doesn’t already live in a world that they experience as being full of spirits and underworlds and all could just adopt such beliefs or somehow engineer them with drugs or such, this seems pretty dubious to me.
Shamanism isn’t about otherworldly spirits, etc. as you suggest… we’re talking a very materialist mapping of the mind and earth in a form that is not bound by the discursive rationality of philosophy. Yet, some presume it to be like religion which is a false analogy. It’s neither animism nor New Age mumbo jumbo…. no matter what you may have heard. It’s pragmatic knowledge of plants, healing, and the altered forms of perception that escape the reasoning filters of the mind that our sociality has imposed on us.
don’t know what believers/practitioners you’ve known or studied but the folks i know here in the US and Mexico (and those my old profs used to work with in tundra and rain-forest) wouldn’t recognize such a naturalistic/de-animated account as being of the same kind as theirs.
I guess I’ve worked with the others… who do.
That’s probably why I don’t speak of it on my blog more often because of the stupid association with New Age spirituality that some people confuse with shamanism as presented by new age gurus etc. These guys are con-men and women who seek fame and fortune not knowledge or self-experimentation. It’s like anything else one can describe it in discourse, yet what one describes is not the thing itself only its faded appropriation to the linguistic structures of social reason we’ve all come to share as this thing we call “human”.
well if yer going to insist on using a term in such contrary (to general/popular) use why not just give a working definition as well so folks know what you are referring too?
Why should I? You don’t get now… why would then? You think everything is reduced to “conceptuality” as if that is the ultimate prize… it’s not a conceptuality but a praxis… and, like shamanism for thousands of years it’s not something you can teach through words: it’s through the body… same way as my martial arts… through actual praxis: it’s a body practice connected to embodiment, not to our Western metaphysics since Plato… lol you want definitions rather than reality!
And, of course, you seem to think I’m in some alternate universe of thought that goes against you’re professors… not sure what universe you live in, either with this “folks”? Why are you always the one who is so contrarian? Always wanting to argue with people? What makes you some great expert? I never see any names … just generalizations…. not once do you ever post anything in detail, just blather full of hot air and steam… always throwing the ball back into my court to prove my side of the issue… I’m don’t need prove anything. That’s not what this is about… but you seem to make it into that every time.
I’ll try again… having become a martial arts expert from my early twenties on I learned early on that some things are never taught through conceptuality, but through actual bodily form itself in performance not reflection on the body. Buddhism and martial arts in certain traditions that grew out of that mixture of Taoist/Shaman world-views in Northern China mixed with Buddhism became fully pragmatic and praxis oriented over time to the point that what one learned was form not content. One enacted the forms through practice… the same applies to the mappings of shamanistic pathways. It’s not something one can teach through book knowledge ( obviously some have tried and failed miserably ) or conceptuality. It’s a physical relation between an expert Shaman and his pupil… and even in those traditions it’s not just any and all who can follow this path: the ancients knew that certain types of beings showed signs of vocation and could be taught, while others would never make the cut so to speak. So in that sense it’s not something just anyone can enter into and suddenly become a practitioner. I’m not going to sit here and give you some long rendition of this whole complex of knowledge since to me it’s a useless exercise in conceptuality. That’s one of those aspects I have problems with Western Philosophies: they think everything can be put into words… it can’t.