As a grad student in anthropology it was made very clear to me that Carlos Castaneda was undoubtedly a fraud as an ethnographer (see here), as Hickman alludes to, but his works are still suggestive of particular kinds of alt-potential in shamanistic modes of practice and experience. A certain range of post-nihilist praxis might welcome and deploy similar cognitive augmentation techniques as a means to disrupt habitual thought and open new waves of apprehension.
Hickman’s post here reminds us that synthetic experience as interface is still important. In the trendy rush to embrace the machinic Blur human existenz screams, recoils, and shifts eagerly to gain back our ethical attention. The possibility of agency remains open even if we would sell it to our future A.I overloads for a single moment of predictive truth.
One of the things of profound interest in Castaneda’s books, under the influence of drugs, or other things, and of a change of atmosphere, is precisely that they show how the Indian manages to combat the mechanisms of interpretation and instill in the disciple a presignifying semiotic, or even an asignifying diagram: Stop! You’re making […]
synthetic zerØ 
It is difficult for me to see that a consciousness not on drugs sees anything more true than when it is. How are D and G able to make any statements about the use of drugs, let alone ‘the indian’ if they 1)haven’t done drugs, and 2) are involved in a consciousness that would be disrupted if they did so drugs ?
I think it’s kind of funny how when you really read what D and G are saying in their books it’s kind of a difficult not to come to the conclusion that their agents of the particular ideology that is imposing itself and rationalizing itself into existence over and above every other kind of biology that might exist. You get the feeling that somehow D and G become like profits of our western religion justifying itself through its self aware presence of its own manifestation, as if we are actually as white people the end result in the future progress of humanity, as it in we to also are the ones that are saying all sorts of things that is about AI. And technology and stuff, as of technology and the thoughts and ideas around it manifest reality any differently than any other technology and ideas that were circulating around that. Or moment in history.
I enjoy reading DNG, but it’s not because they’re saying anything that isn’t totally obvious to me as a white man who’s done drugs. That’s I have to really take to heart what they’re saying and see that they are really white man talking about A drug experience that they presume to know just from the experience itself. If I didn’t know any better I would say that they are exactly protestants using different terms to describe what’s happening in their communion with some divine source.
I have suggested elsewhere that I believe that D and G and probably Derrida we’re too close to the event and so everything they say everyone loves to grab a hold of it and go yeah brother that’s so true right on man take another bong hit, and then say oh no drugs don’t have anything to do with what they’re saying and were the most sober minded theorists that can possibly be.
OK I’m sorry I apologize I’m done
This is what D&G said of drugs in A Thousand Plateaus:
Deleuze and Guattari on Drugs . . .
“It is our belief that the issue of drugs can be understood only at the level where desire directly invests perception, and perception becomes molecular at the same time as the imperceptible is perceived.”
“Drug addicts continually fall back into what they wanted to escape: a segmentarity all the more rigid for being marginal, a territorialization all the more artificial for being based on chemical substances, hallucinatory forms, and phantasy subjectifications. Drug addicts may be considered as precursors or experimenters who tirelessly blaze new paths of life, but their cautiousness lacks the foundation for caution. So they either join the legions of false heroes . . . . Or, what is worse, all they will have done is make an attempt only nonusers or former users can resume and benefit from . . . discovering through drugs what drugs lack. . . . Is the mistake drug users make always to start over again from ground zero, either going on the drug again or quitting, when what they should do is make it a stopover, to start from the ‘middle,’ bifurcate from the middle?”
“To reach the point where ‘to get high or not to get high’ is no longer the question, but rather whether drugs have sufficiently changed the general conditions of space and time perception so that nonusers can succeed in passing through the holes in the world and following the lines of flight at the very place where means other than drugs become necessary. Drugs do not guarantee immanence; rather, the immanence of drugs allows one to forgo them.”
“Drugs are too unwieldy to grasp the imperceptible and the becomings-imperceptible; drug users believed that drugs would grant them the plane, when in fact the plane must distill its own drugs, remaining master . . . .”
Guattari in his practice would use various hallucinogens as therapy, and he himself participated only in the sense that those like Albert Hofmann and Stanislav Groff the originators of Acid, etc., who used it in the 1950’s as therapeutic. Various military-industrial complexes would misuse it within black ops programs, etc. And those like Timothy Leary and others would release it into acceptable pop-cultural paths in the 60’s.
In his final book, LSD and the Divine Scientist The Final Thoughts and Reflections of Albert Hofmann, Hofmann would say,
Stanislav Groff in his research project at the Spring Grove Hospital was recognized for its outstanding scientific methodology. They established that the physical and psychic state of the terminally ill patient facing death is in many cases improved by psychotherapeutic treatment aided by the use of psychedelics. This justifies the hope that the actual transition to the other land, a land from which no traveler returns, can also be eased and spiritualized. But there is no protocol for this and many unanswered questions remain.
Everyone dies alone, and no one reports back to our earthly world about whether dying is better under the effects of psychedelics. Thus the decision to take the moksha medicine remains a gamble. Every individual must make this decision for themselves, depending on their personal worldview, their intuition and desires, and their beliefs.
… that being said, Carlos Castenada was a wait anthropologist lol. But I don’t think that Castenada denied that he was going against his anthropological training. I think towards the end of his series of books are about the middle maybe when you start getting preachy he was pretty much like this anthropology academic is kind of BS and I’m going to be a New Age spiritual preacher.
But it does bring up questions about reality itself and I think what I’m saying in my previous little comment is that if the use of drugs and perception bring up the question of reality in itself then what does it really say about D and G and their comments about reality in other states of consciousness. Kind of an ironic redundancy I think is what I’m kind of getting at.
I think DNG so far as what they say it might up apply to reality or some projections of reality are pretty wrong. And I say this because when you really read with her saying you see how they’re really not talking Beyond their own very immediate experience. OK I’ll shut up now. 😁
D&G would have been the first to say that drugs were a shock therapy, that the same thing could be encountered by other means: in other words, shamanic trance, yogini meditative practices, Voudoun dance trance, various apophatic and ascetic praxis of Christian, Sufi, and Jewish monotheistic or gnosis praxis, or any number of indigenous praxis of tribal societies from South America, Africa, India, Malaysia, China, etc. Even out own magico-religious occulture throughout the Western periods of Christian rule that remained within peasant-pagan cultural complexes would comply with such praxis. Developing various techniques of perceptual mutations… most of this is all well documented as if the whole enthenogenic complex itself. Christian Rätsch is probably the foremost scholar of entheogens and their historical use in socio-cultural complexes: https://www.amazon.com/Christian-R%C3%A4tsch/e/B001JP2LN4/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1
At some point I’m going to put a book out about philosophy and intoxicants. You know way I feel that everyone has an opinion on intoxicants just like everyone has an opinion on life. Or rather, everyone is supposed to have access to work being human is, and terms are proposed to convey upon a unilateral Stratham the potential for communication to every corner of the human being.
I’m not convinced that this is the case. And so I tend to see just as in philosophy, the discourse and topics of drug use really only covers about 90% because there’s only about say 1% of the population that might take the using of intoxicants that last 10%. Some people, granted, will go right up to the 89.9% tile of using drugs but then they turn back in and they use that 89.9 as if it was indeed 100% of the way and they speak about it in such a manner that the people who may have only gone 30% or 50% or even 70% of the way see those 89 percent people as having great insignificant things to say about the totality of the situation.
But I think due to this fact that those who have gone the last 10% are in an arena that the other 90% cannot really understand, yeah because it is indeed 90%, the full weight and backing of the commonality that is the 90% supposing into the hundred percent, denies the fact that that last 10% is even possible.
In the way of speaking, I called is inherent division the point of contention. It is the problem of someone who is Hindu attempting to communicate to a devout Christian, say, or fundamentalist Muslim, say. But indeed it is the issue involved in communicating and essential experience, would people tend to call subjective experience,, and we all know how difficult it is to convey a subjective experience.
But it is also this type of experience through which philosophy moves. Such that when one grabs hold of this movement a subjective experience has no more meaning. And this in a significant way is really the situation of that 10% that everyone did nice it’s possible.
It sounds arrogant, but it’s such a type of arrogance really only arises from the 90% who are unable to understand that remaining 10%.
And this is really the issue at hand: lyotard: how does one make a case to a court that is unable to hear it?
You’re going in circles… obviously no one has ever said they could describe experience which is closed off to discourse, since language is collective and public – the very enterprise of the socio-cultural world we share. But since this is as it should be then is or has there ever been anything private? Is experience after all private? From the get go a child is thrown into family and culture, learning the rules of the game for navigating the communications systems of our collective shared realities. So maybe the truth is that all supposed private experience is in itself a myth, a nice one at that – but, a myth after all. We’ve all been so prone to accept our own cultural blinkers of democratic liberal subjectivity as Universal that we assume it is just that: universally true for all. So we continue to think we can impose our democratic socio-cultural matrix on other cultures and find out that when it doesn’t take that it must be them not us.
Every time I read you I want to croak. You state things adamantly as if your supposed facts were the universal case. Where is the stats (statistics) for your surmises? You make up stats to suit your arguments. Assuming drugs are bad you just castigate the whole thing into a universal dump and happily walk away as if you’d just been handed a brownie button for your efforts. I have to admit you rub me the wrong way, always have. You present assertions rather than reasoned argument. When people present you with facts and experts you just go with subjective impressionistic fantasy to bolster your own stance rather than backing it up with any data.
i’m simply saying that D and G are not talking about any reality that I come across, and so their analysis is necessarily stunted incomplete and actually merely identifies them to particular way of viewing what reality is.
… I guess I’m really saying that I don’t Grant what D and G are saying as much significance as you seem to Craig. And so when you write a post I kind of feel obliged to give the dissenting opinion about that situation
This has nothing to do with dissenting opinion, this has to do with integrity of thought. You have none.
… your last few sentences is really what I’m saying about D andG. : their analysis is a subjective fantasy. But a fantasy that is distinctly there is and doesn’t really overlap into my world. Or I should say that it is totally an entirely overlaps and represents my world such that their analysis has no or very little significance anymore.
The only fantasy is yours, Landek.
Can you point out something specific you had difficulty with in my book?
No.
What’s amazing is that you insult me, you insult Deleuze and Guattari, and then you have the gall to seek some egoistic aggrandizement from me for you pathetic work. Go away, Landzek. I am done with this conversation.
I’m not assuming that drugs are bad; I making the statement that people do a little bit of drugs and then project out to wehat the possibility of using them is. And as it is represented in one of the quotes that you put there. Innoway I’m saying that people who make statements upon situations that they only know partially, in the example of say I’ve smoked pot a few times and so I know everything there is about smoking pot, and what it might do or not do for consciousness, just heading example, is a categorical error. And so where I see the error am I not obligated to point out that error? But it seems that when I point out the air the people that are involved and invested in that a Roni us manner of coming to understanding or the erroneous understanding itself, they are not able to understand their error, but indeed defend it to the end even as their defence is already accounted for in the revealing of the error.
There’s a great difference in the private use of drugs, and the use of them in psychiatric therapy. Guattari was the head of a psychiatric institution for 40 or more years outside Paris. Do a little research. Boy you take the cake.
That’s is a good point. Come to think of it, did you happen to read my recent post on Zack and Lacan?
I guess that what I’m saying is is how is it possible that DNG can make these grand statements about reality and then talk about like how someone’s reality might be messed up if they take drugs? They obviously must be talking about a specific instance or specific occasion of reality, and in this case a specific type of reality that’s making statements about “drug states” or “cultural appropriated states of consciousness and intoxication” that really have no clue what the states are about except in the reflection of that particular type of narrow reality that somehow is being taken to include the Omni present situation of the whole state of being.
I’m simply saying that DNG does show their small mindedness and narrow approach to philosophy, indeed reflected in those quotes that you just put there. The only access they have to those states reality are analogies it’s like saying I know what it is to swim when I’ve never swim but I’ve only watched people people and what they do when they’re swimming. D and G make grande statements about what it is to be wet when they’ve never even taking a drink of water, or perhaps better put, they’ve only drinking some water would’ve never taken a bath, or they’ve taken many baths and so the extrapolate out what it could be to be swimming in the ocean tide.
Well they may be making statements about some specific reality, and I’m not denying that this reality may exist, I’m saying that there is a perspective that is able to see what DNG are talking about is actually confined within a particular sphere that is now identifiable and therefore really is not talking about anything really that significant, which is to say, except that now we can identify it for what it is.
Telling me that D&G are “small minded”? That they don’t speak of any reality that you know of? Landzek the only one being small minded around here is you. Period. D&G work within a whole tradition of thought that I doubt you have ever even delved into much less understand, so telling me that it is they who are small minded and out there is almost hilarious. I’m sorry but your site and your book are both narrow and are obviously outside the focus of most of modern and postmodern thought. Plus there is great difference between the concept of reality (phenomenon) and the Real (noumenon). They speak to both and work within an anti-humanist and anti-philosophical mode because they know in detail and historical reflection the full gamut of both philosophical thought and psychoanalytical literature. So if anyone is small minded and ill-read it is you my friend, not Deleuze and Guattari. Capish? Do you understand? Shall I be more plain? Your insulting D&G will get you nowhere but silenced in my book.
. I said that they are not involved in a reality that I know of,OR they are entirely involved.
Maybe you should read what I had to say in a bit closer…
But I know we have our differences and it’s OK.
I’m sure there will come a time when new voices arise from whom I will not be able to comprehend. And actually I can’t wait for that to happen.
Unfortunately I know all too well these authors that you think I am not educated or be able to speak intelligently about.
You, know Landzek, D&G have thousands of scholars who have poured over their work, written books, monographs, journals, depositions, speeches, academic lessons… and you think they don’t speak to you about reality. What reality do you live in?
Sometimes I over speak even myself. It’s like the devil in me. To
Provoke people so They might break the spell that is upon me.
… oh hey! Did you read my book or try and read it? That is so rad if you read it and have a negative opinion on it because that means at least someone read it and has a negative opinion on it! Most of the people that I’ve read it have pretty good opinions about it and I actually think that I do a pretty good job of describing the situation, theoretically as well as narratively. So I’m kind of stoked if you read it and have a negative opinion on it because usually people are kind of afraid to give a negative opinion about any creative work.
Significant, not insignificant. (2nd paragraph)