Abstract
Drugs – few topics in the humanities and social sciences inspire so much scholarly commentary. Whether in the form of anodynes, palliatives, curatives, enhancers, recreationals, illicits, placebos, or all of the above, drugs are the stuffs of cultural and political imaginaries. They give rise to Gilgameshian hopes. They are imbued with our collective fears. We regulate our bodies with them, even while inscribing their use by others in moralizing rhetoric. For some, drugs lull us into ‘a false sense of happiness’ that ‘imprisons our minds’; for others, drugs promise the alluring ‘power to console and compensate’, bring ‘visions of another, better world’, and strengthen faith in the Divine (p. 4). Drugs may have rendered our mind ever more material and secular, but, ironically, they have not immunized us against the mystical, spiritual, and enchanted. Indeed, as Nicolas Langlitz observes in Neuropsychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research Since the Decade of the Brain, drug experiences are an offering to scientists and scholars of a strange postmodern assemblage combining molecularization, animalization, classical monism, and an enduring profoundly human quest to discover the Divine.
At once provocative and wry in its analysis of hallucinogenic drugs, Langlitz frames Neuropsychedelia as ‘fieldwork in philosophy’ and as a critical history of biomysticism, contained in an ethnography of contemporary psychedelic laboratories. He argues that a perennial mystical materialism haunts drug research in Western science, a mysticism prompted by past spiritual and religious yearning for self-understandings and resulting in a revitalized investigation of hallucinogenic compounds. According to Langlitz, the re-emergence of psychedelic research in the past two decades, although now configured in the languages of neuropharmacology, can be construed as an ongoing story of the West’s historical endeavor to resolve and reconcile subjectivity with rationality, spirituality with materialism, dualisms with monisms, and the ‘modern subject’ with ‘truth’ (p. 245). Methodologically and empirically rich in its historical and anthropological approach, theoretically contemplative, and thoroughly interdisciplinary, Neuropsychedelia promises great ambition from its opening pages. And it delivers.
Like so much that has been written about neuroscience since the 1990s, Neuropsychedelia focuses on the ways in which neuroscience qua psychedelic research transforms and reaffirms human self-conception and self-understanding. His approach in this book is thus as much self-exploratory as it is interpretive of biomedical culture. Early on, Langlitz describes his first existential sojourn into the LSD landscape at age 18 as a temporary ‘loss of self’ (pp. 13–14). Later, he describes his ‘field trips’ in Swiss laboratories as permitting his entrance into an ethnography of the psychedelic laboratory and his ‘scientific curiosity with respect to drugs’ (p. 85) as bringing him enduring friendships and collegial associations. At the same time, it is impossible when reading this book to ignore the fact that since the 1980s, the number of citizens of the United States who have been incarcerated for petty drug use has tripled. It is consequently somewhat jarring to discover that for some, it is easy enough to study and literally experience drugs in the name of ‘academic research’, while for so many others, exactly similar conduct leads invariably to the criminal justice system. Langlitz, of course, is not responsible for the failures and inequalities perpetrated by misguided drug policies in the contemporary United States and elsewhere.
Elements of this story will be familiar to many. Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann discovered and investigated lysergic acid diethylamide, known also as LSD or even just ‘Acid’, in 1938. By the time Hofmann began this work, hallucinogenic compounds had been studied for almost a century, and in this sense, a spiritual and scientific foundation had already been prepared by the time LSD ‘found’ Hofmann. The substance moved from Switzerland to North America, and by the 1950s, psychedelic psychiatrists in politically left-leaning Saskatchewan were pioneering research into its therapeutic value and its potential capacity as a model for psychosis and schizophrenia. As word spread about its hallucinogenic virtues, LSD moved quickly out of biomedical research communities into a more common culture of peyotism and ended up popularized in the ‘neurotheology’ of such counterculture icons as Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley. Acid, which might well have treated alcoholics and aided progress in the investigation of mental illness in the real world, became a mediating device for access into a ‘real’ spiritual dimension and escape into an alternative political reality. Cultural panic ensued, and by the 1980s, LSD had been so demonized in popular culture that scientific research into its biological activity and functions came to an abrupt halt. How could psychedelic research be revived? Langlitz’s answers to that question are thoroughly original.
Langlitz’s book recounts the rehabilitation of psychedelic research in Switzerland and the United States. The strategy was novel. Contemporary psychedelic researchers sought to secularize their work from alternative spiritual pasts. Swiss researchers, working in a politically more forgiving environment than their American counterparts, turned away from LSD and began investigating psilocybin and ketamine, thereby lowering the charged, emotional tenor and religious fervor historically attached to their work. The universalizability they claimed for the hallucinogenic response to psychedelics further normalized and grounded their research, while the putative ability of that response to model mental illness offered their research yet another secular end of legitimacy. Curiously, Langlitz observes that the researchers distancing themselves from countercultural pasts did not bring about an avid rejection of the spiritual questions invited by psychedelic drug use in the past. Yet rather than turning those questions into the foundations of a neurotheology, as past figures had done, contemporary researchers cast the spiritual experience as synonymous with psychosis. Religious ecstasy and hallucinogenic episodes were thus analogous problems of human mental pathology. Such a view reduced much of human experience to an essential materialism, but even as it did so, it reopened questions about the legitimacy of spiritual experiences qua psychosis. Such questions legitimate Langlitz’s conclusion that the result of such psychedelic research has been something akin to a ‘neurodicy’, a monist vindication of the divine, the animal, and the human, through a molecularizing culture of being (p. 241).
It may be surprising that so many scholars who contemplate the rise of neuro things do so through the utopian hopes neuroscience engenders in them that the mysteries of selfhood will soon, finally, be solved. As Langlitz makes abundantly clear, the revival of psychedelic research is certainly cast in such mystical terms. Meanwhile, such research visibly creates political dissonances and structural inequalities that few seem all that bothered with correcting or even recognizing. The upshot is that Neuropsychedelia is apparently going to liberate a few for trips of self-discovery, while others, no doubt seek similar self-indulgence, will find that they are on a trip to jail. This difference is not about selfhood. It is about politics.