Speaking of what I wrote in my last post, this theme of language, psychedelics, and a new technology: I’m interested here in what two, well four really, have to say about this. The medium is Deleuze and Guattari, and the two thinkers are Erik Davis and Benjamin Dueck.
Deleuze and Guattari, according to both Dueck and Davis, are resistant to ontological essences. The project that they undertake isn’t to outline a system of concepts and categories. They are using the text as linguistic machines. What are they trying to do though? Davis describes Guattari’s project quite well. Guattari worked as a psychiatrist with psychotic patients. His approach towards these patients and towards thinking in general was what he called an “ethico-aesthetic” paradigm.
Guattari attempted to remain open and tuned in to the experiential flux and the constructions that the patients were relying on to make sense of their world. This traced the creative and aesthetic processes that dissolve the traditional paths that the psyche takes and move it towards some novel, chaotic singularity as Davis would say. He’s trying to find ways to think about radical subjectivity in terms that aren’t harmful or boxed in, and instead are both creative and constructive. Guattari suggests that subjectivity is aesthetic because excessive experience can sometimes create genuinely new forms of being and relating, excessive being “psychotic” type experiences–psychedelic experiences could also fall under this category.
Creativity is inherently built on previous culture, knowledge, and experiences, what Guattari would call “semiotic segments” but creativity cannot be reduced to these segments alone. There is something genuinely new and novel that is emergent. These new developments that occur within the psyche Guattari calls “self-referential existential territories” or “universes of value and reference.” Just how are these newly self-referential territories created? Through enunciation.
Enunciation is a form of expression that releases the power of both signs and material forces. It uses language but also is expressing material that is not grounded in language or semiotics. These enunciations are a-signifying (non-semiotic) forces that are machine-like. They oscillate between the material and the linguistic, bouncing between them and incorporating both elements into a new thing. Still with me? Great. Now we’ll throw in another layer of complexity, but hold on to the communicative and oscillatory aspect of Guattari’s theory here. They will become relevant again in a moment.
(De)Territorialization
Guattari, now working with Deleuze, attempts to think through these machines again, this time incorporating both physical and mental processes. They are thinking through a two-fold process of territorialization and deterritorialization. Territorialization is the process where spatial boundaries between different parts of the material system are both sharpened and defined. The second step is deterritorialization. It is the boundary-dissolving semiotic process and an abstract descriptor of the behavior and organization of matter. Deterritorialization is referring to the way that material systems will lean towards a certain degree of internal homogeneity where the boundaries between the elements in the system are decreased–more fluid. You can think of this process as the way the monolith from Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D works.
The monolith, pictured above, changes from solid state to liquid state, and back to solid state every so often. *Minor spoilers ahead.* In the show, when the monolith is in its solid form, nothing much occurs. When solid, the monolith contains characters which function as a dissolving semiotic process. The characters can touch it and it will feel like a statue. It is territorialized. Then, in a moment, it deterritorializes. It turns liquid and the boundaries between the elements are decreased, things are more fluid. The boundaries between space and time are diminished. One of the monoliths, once turned liquid, will “grab” one of the characters, absorb it, and send her through space. Another monolith, liquifies, grabs some of the characters, and sends them through time. When liquid, the system (and reality) are more fluid.
Psychedelics as Monoliths
Psychedelics function in a similar manner to the monoliths. They are the liquified monoliths that grab you and send you to a new time or a new space. The creative aspect of the psychedelic experience is influenced by the culture that you are from and your life experiences. It takes those semiotic segments, which are structured and rigid, and builds on them, shatters them, and reforms them while bringing in something wholly new. This “new” reality of the psychedelic experience is the enunciation of your mind and the drug in harmony. Two become one. One becomes two.
In the psychedelic experience, subjective reality has completely shifted. This territory is a self-referential existential territory in which something new is birthed. This territory, this universe of value, is an “incorporeal domain of entities we detect at the same time that we produce them, and which appear to have been always there, from the moment we engender them” (Guattari quoted in Davis, 139). This is quite the description. It fits neatly onto the entities that people encounter in altered states of consciousness, without necessarily making any claims of their ontological reality outside of the present experience.
Davis questions that, if these entities do come from loops of the self (e.g. a mobius strip of the self producing the entity), should we think of these others as others? Or just manifestations of the self? William James suggests that “the simplest bits of immediate experience are their own others.” And Davis points out that things aren’t quite identical with themselves. There’s a weird gap between essence and appearance. Perhaps once they appear they take on a life of their own. And, even if they are simply “all in the head” contra Putnam’s view of meaning, we have no choice but to listen to them even if we don’t believe them. And, perhaps, these entities communicate to their ‘creator’ in a non-linguistic form, elucidating a language beyond linguistics whose possibility does exist, even if it is all in the head.
Stratification
One further concept needs to be explained here: stratification. Stratification occurs through an “abstract machine” that when diagrammed will illustrate just how deterritorialized matter and energy can become a territorialized structure–a sort of black box. Stratification occurs through two steps, two articulations that function to lock the elements into systems of organization.
In the first articulation the unstable particle flows are sorted into different categories or groups. Think, groups of sediment deposited at the end of the river in different locations or representations within the brain being sorted into categories. The second articulation is that of a form or a code that is imposed on the already sorted data which locks the elements in a stable structure. Think of the layers of sediment on a rock that you can see. The layers have been stabilized into one particular order and locked together. Think also of the different systems within a human (digestive, circulatory, etc.) that are locked together within the human system.
Dueck sees this stratification as apparent in the Entropic Brain Theory proposed by Robin Carhart-Harris and his colleagues. He also sees it as apparent in Manuel De Landa’s conceptualization of psychedelics. De Landa uses a metaphor of solid, liquid, and gas. If the system is solid then its dynamics are uninteresting just as they are if the system is gaseous. Liquids have more potential–they are not too rigid nor are they too loose. In these liquid states self-organizing structures and bifurcations can form–they can bring forth Guattari’s self-referential territories. De Landa and Dueck think that psychedelics essentially liquify the brain. You can think about concepts that you couldn’t before and information is rushing through your brain (like a river might). Your brain is self-organizing. In other words, psychedelics deterritorialize your brain, forcing a stratification to occur all over again.
De Landa thinks that if you take too high of a dose, you go gaseous–the self-organization diffuses into nothing and is useless. Ordinary consciousness is solid. We are seduced by things that are stratified he suggests. We are obsessed with permanence–permanent buildings, rock-solid relationships, stable job, etc. All of this is just constructions that have already been stratified. Language is stratified and stable (Arguably it isn’t stable because language evolves and flows—just very slowly. Language is a very viscous liquid) and machinic in nature. Combining the solidified language and the psychotic mind is an enunciation which brings new things into being. It is essentially creative.
Dueck identifies parallels in De Landa, and in Andrew Gallimore and Peter Sjostedt-H who both do work on psychedelics. Briefly, Gallimore argues that DMT primes the brain for contact with a sort of higher dimensional hyper grid. This grid displays aesthetic signatures and logical consistencies that can’t be explained by normal brain functioning. Sjostedt-H does psychedelic metaphysics. He defines the psychedelic experience as a vertical, lateral, and temporal integration of sentience. All three of these thinkers have a common denominator in communication. Dueck wants to argue that these theories find a common denominator of communication which means that we can think of psychedelics as communication technologies, a technology that deterritorializes flows of information within the brain. He uses this to talk about developing posthuman forms of communication which we will return to in a later post.