Rudge CJ Thesis
Rudge CJ Thesis
2015
ii
Declaration of Originality
This thesis contains no material that has been accepted for the award of any
other degree or diploma in any university or institute of higher learning.
I affirm that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my
own work, and I certify and warrant to the best of my knowledge that all
sources of reference have been duly and fully acknowledged.
25 August 2015
_____________________________ _____________________________
Chris Rudge Date
The body of this thesis has been typeset in Arnhem, a typeface designed by
Fred Smeijers in 1999 and comercially released in 2002. Headings of various
sizes have been set in LL Circular, which was designed by Laurenz Brunner
in 2013.
iii
iv
More than this, however, the second part offers a range of detailed and
original readings of these authorss psychobiographies; it argues that even
individual authors such as Huxley and Dick can be seen as psychotropic. It
offers, that is, a series of broad-ranging and speculative explanations for the
ideas and themes that appear in their worksexplanations rooted in the
theoretical work of the first part.
Finally, this thesis concludes by reaffirming the importance of these
authorss narcoliteraturesboth for present-day and future literary studies,
and beyond. For while Huxley and Dick allow us to countenance afresh the
range of failures in the history and philosophy of science, they also prom-
ise to instruct usand instruct scienceabout the ways in which we might
move beyond our received mimetic models of the human.
Psychotropes
vi
Contents
Abstract iii
Acknowledgments viii
Abbreviations x
List of Figures xii
introduction
chapter one
Molecular Correspondences:
Writing With, On, and About Drugs 2
chapter two
chapter three
(De)automatising Subjects:
Scrivening in Modern Literary History 108
chapter four
chapter five
chapter six
chapter seven
conclusion
Bibliography 384
Acknowledgments
I should also like to acknowledge and thank the University for its sup-
port, which come to me in an array of forms. Thank you to Georgia Holmes
and Eileen Corrigan. To turn ever so briefly to matters economic, I thank the
University for its extension to me of the Australian Postgraduate Award, for
the travel monies it awarded, and for the casual tutoring that it allowed me
to so regularly enjoy and undertake.
To my very many thoughtful and inspiring colleagues and friends with-
in the University of Sydneys postgraduate community, thank you for your
friendship, advice, and inspiration. To my very good friend and companion
Tahlia, thank you for everything that you have done and said throughout
these years. To Alice, thank you for your calm companionship, and your ever
surprising and wholly unnecessary humility. To my good friends Liz and
Mark, thank you; and to my world-adventuring pal, Dan, thanks for all the
fantastic experiences. To my close and talented friend, Anna Breckon, I look
forward to continuing our never-ending repartee.
C.J.R.
Abbreviations
tt Michiel Heyns, The Typewriters Tale: A Novel (Johannesburg:
Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2005).
Aldous Huxley
x
xi
Philip K. Dick
List of Figures
N.B. As appropriate, further bibliographic details about each figure are provided on
the page on which the figure appears.
Introduction
F ranois de La Rochefoucauld1
on the morning of the day of his death, Aldous Huxley, weak and passive on
a creaky hospital bed, scrawled a barely legible note on a small square sheet
of paper. This was Huxleys last-ditch effort, perhaps, to relieve his pain. As
Huxleys bony hand passed the note to his wife, Laura, the words Try LSD
100 mm intramuscular must have caused her some concern; Huxley longed,
it seemed, for one final experience of that moksha-medicine in which he
believed: LSD (or d-lysergic acid diethylamide).2 Laura granted Huxleys
request and, at around lunchtime, several hours after she had injected the
first 100 micrograms (g), she injected her husband with another shot of
roughly the same quantity. Some three or four hours after that, a peaceful
Huxley would pass away; he would fade into his death, as Laura observed,
like a piece of music, concluding his life so gently in sempre pi piano,
dolcemente.3
If this dialogical and chemical exchange between Huxley and his wife
constitutes more than simply a private act of tender love and care, it also, as
Laura herself puts it, strikes us as a last gesture of continuing importance.
While it might, Laura continues, be ignorantly misinterpreted by some,
Huxleys dying ode to LSD seems to demand our attentionnot least be-
cause of the respectable and even grandiose familial and historical tradition
after which it arises: the history, as Laura remarks, in which Huxleys stop
ignorance before ignorance stops Huxleys.4
xiii
Introduction xiv
Yet, no matter how profoundly the gesture struck those who knew Hux-
ley, it would not be very long after the mans death that history and ignorance
seemed to escape the control and influence of such staunchly scientific fam-
ilies as his. And, in a way, Huxleys death marks a break from the period in
which the family name, as such, would mean anything at all. That is, after
Huxleys death, history seems to take a sharp turn towards something alto-
gether less peaceful and benevolent than this Huxley death scene. It would
enter into a time in which the constancy, uprightness, and objectivity that
had been signalled by his family name, ever since his grandfathers monu-
mentalisation in the early decades of twentieth century, would all but disap-
pear. By 1968, for instanceby which time Philip K. Dick had already been
practising his daily regimen of ingesting 45mg of methamphetamine for
some 36 monthsa score of news reports, all of them vicious counterpoint
to Huxleys gesture of continuing importance, had appeared in the United
States press about drugs and the human mind.
One report, published in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1967, just four
years following Huxleys death, describes how a group of four male users of
LSD had each, as a consequence of using the drug, suffered a severe eye in-
jury that would later be named solar retinopathy.5 But the report was also
concerned with how the drug could cause other injuries: LSD could bring
on deep spiritual delusion, it observed, and, among other things, it offered
details of how one man among the four had felt he had been holding a
religious conversation with the sun.6 The article made the damage of such
rituals abundantly clear: What this has left the students with, it posited, is
not total blindness but a blind spot in the center of their vision.
Rich in metaphorical potential (not to mention its ironic reverberation
of the story in which Huxley came to bear his own blind spota story this
thesis will tell), the reports literary and even Ovidian mythological allu-
sions appear only slightly less remarkable than the dismaying accident it
describes. But the report was also suspect: those who were interviewed for
the report appeared to know very little about the incident. One represen-
5 On Philip K. Dicks methamphetamine use, see chapter 7 of this thesis. Also see Phil-
ip K. Dick to Terry and Carol Carr, October, 1964, quoted in Lawrence Sutin, Divine
Invasions (Carrol & Graf Publishers, 1989), 119; A Blinding LSD Vision, San Francisco
Chronicle, May 18, 1967, 3. On cases of solar retinopathy, see H. Schatz and F. Mendel-
blatt, Solar Retinopathy from Sun-gazing Under the Influence of LSD, British Journal
of Ophthalmology 57 (1973): 270-3.
6 Four LSD Users Suffer Serious Eye Damage, Los Angeles Times, May 19, 1967, 1-2. The
story was also reported elsewhere: see Four Students Under LSD Hurt Eye by Sun-Gaz-
ing, New York Times, May 19, 1967.
Introduction xv
tative of the Santa Barbara Opthalmological Society could convey only his
impression that each of the sun-staring incidents occurred separately.
Unsure of the details, however, he could name neither a specific student
nor doctor who had been involved.7 Nonetheless, since the story came at a
time when a number of other reports had warned of LSDs dangers, the facts
of the story were accepted uncritically, easily digested by a public already
worried about the idea of a countercultural revolution. Such events as these,
scant in detail though they were, served merely to confirm the pestilence and
danger of those novel substances that the wider population had already been
persuaded to condemnsubstances such as LSD.
Yet when a similar news story emerged some eight months later in Janu-
ary 1968, it did seem to be even more serious than the others. While it gener-
ated some hysteria, it also attracted the suspicion and attention of a range of
commentators well placed to invigilate its credibility. These were the doctors
who, calling on their experience, began to question whether what had been
reported about LSD represented a likely or possible physiognomic response
to the intrusion of UV rays into the eye. For it was this group of tutored read-
ers who possessed, it seemed, the higher wisdom of what Huxley had called
the psycho-physical instrument (EOA, 12). They had wisdom enough, at
least, to see these reports for what they were: fraudulent fabrications. On
this occasion, Newsweek, among other sources, reported that no less than
six student LSD users had been rendered permanently blind by engaging in a
round of LSD-induced sungazing.8 (Some commentators have since suggest-
ed that this story represents no more than a concocted mutation of the first
report, a psychopolitical elaboration driven by an anti-LSD agenda.) But what
7 My analysis of these news reports profits greatly from the research of Jan Harold Brun-
vand and his colleagues at snopes.com. See Blinded By The Light, at http://www.
snopes.com/horrors/drugs/lsdsun.asp, accessed July 14, December 2014. Also see
Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World (London: Random House, 2004),
188; Joel Fort, The Pleasure Seekers: The Drug Crisis, Youth, and Society (New York: The
Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1969), 139-140.
8 Darkness at Noon, Newsweek, 22 January 1968. It is notable that this articles title
makes reference to Arthur Koestlers novel of the same name. In 1967, Koestler had
written an article for the Sunday Telegraph (London) titled A Return Trip to Nirvana
(it is also sometimes recorded as having been published in 12 March, 1961). Address-
ing the value of hallucinogens, the article formulated a response to Huxleys Doors of
Perception. On Huxley and Koestler, also see James Sexton, ed. Introduction to the
Toronto Luncheon Colloquy 1961, Aldous Huxley Annual 10/11 (2010-11): 153-221, esp.
189; cf. Jeff Aronson, The Magic Phrase, British Medical Journal 320, no. 7226 (2000):
50. Other sources of the story include the following: 6 College men Take LSD, Blind-
ed by Sun, Los Angeles Times, January 13, 1968, 1; and Medicine: More Bad Trips on
LSD, Time, May 26, 1967, 64.
Introduction xvi
was distinctive about this second story was that, this time, a source for the
information had been named.9
This source was Dr. Norman Yoder, a man who had been rendered blind
by an injury at an early age, and who had become the commissioner of the
office of the Blind in the Pennsylvania State Welfare Department. Yoder, it
was revealed, had filed an informal report to Washington, and had given
a press conference in which he presented this story as established fact.10
But many ophthalmologists who heard the story were doubtful; as one Time
reporter remarked, having heard some of the skeptical responses, it was un-
likely that even LSD could wipe out the eye-closing reflexes so completely.11
Before long, Yoders story was revealed to have been completely fabricated
the result of his personal wish to drive home the dangers of LSD.12 Having
falsified the records of six college students, all of whom had been blinded
for reasons completely unrelated to LSD, Yoder was suspended from his
post and, now distraught and sick, immediately had himself admitted to
the Philadelphia Psychiatric Center.13
A readers letter to Newsweek scolded the magazine for printing what
had been not just a false story, but a disturbing illustration of a grotesque
situationone that expressed the fabricators wrong-minded fear of the
unknown.14 However, within weeks of this story, the US Federal Drug Ad-
ministration (FDA) persuaded its Commissioner, Dr. James Goddard, to en-
dorse the Johnson LSD bill, persuading him against his own instincts, and
thus making possession of the drug a federal offense for the first time.15
These staring at the sun narratives are not simply disturbing and ex-
emplary proofs of the processes of psychopolitical fabrication; they are also
fascinating works of fiction. This is because they convey much more than
simply their authorss desire to convey the dangers of LSD. When we read
that the students didnt realize they were staring at the sun until they came
out of the trance, for instance, we are warned not only of the dangers of
drugs or sunswe are also directed to ignore what the writer more surrep-
titiously conveys: their knowledge of the power of trances. Thus, even while
we are directed to disregard it, what remains visible here is a psychotrope: a
tropism that represents a certain thought-image of the mindand in this
case a particularly dismaying image, one in which the mind, having reached
the potential to overpower the body, renders its owner sightless and helpless.
The story, as one Time reporter suggests, was Another LSD Hallucina-
tion; but this storys egregiousness followed from the fact that it trafficked
in one untruthful distortion (that of the overwhelming trance) precisely
to erase or obscure the possibility of another (that of the self-experiment,
emblematised by Huxleys last gesture).16 The moment recalled the one
in which the Egyptian king Thamus, as Plato suggests in his Phaedrus, had
rejected the truthfulness of letters and writing; to deploy an object or a tech-
nic (tekhne) without knowledge of its power, Thamus suggested, would mean
becoming subject to it, succumbing to its poisonous, hypnotic, delirious, or
toxic potential while know[ing] nothing.17
Despite what Thamus expressed about language, the danger of subject-
ing oneself to such a poison is a notion that this thesis will courtembrac-
ing a risk, to be sure. But this thesis will also carefully examine the range of
precarities entailed by these procedures: by the ingestion of new technics
and by staring at such suns. By offering a detailed elaboration on the freight-
ed conjugation of writing and drugs, this thesis attempts to demonstrate the
importance of this long-vexed conjugation for literary history, and particu-
larly for literary practices of the twentieth century. That drugs compel the
creation of texts in many ways, for instance, should already be evidentit
will be clear, at least, to anyone who tracks the emergence of the sungazing
news reports. For it is in these reports that we see how fear, ignorance, and
political pressure can conspire to concoct a new fictioneven if to dismiss
fantasies of another kind. But what is less clear about these news reports
and about the texts this thesis will examineis how every detail of these
stories also constitutes a biopolitical or psychopolitical enunciation. That is,
how every of Yoders utterances, for instance, also develops a progressively
18 See, for instance, Flix Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies, tr. Andrew Goffey (New
York: Bloomsbury, 2013); Flix Guattari, Chaosmosis, tr. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis
(Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995). Both originally published in French as
Cartographies Schizoanalytiques (Paris: ditions Galile, 1989), and Chaosmose (Paris:
ditions Galile, 1992).
19 Jacques Derrida, Cogito and the History of Madness, in Writing and Difference, tr.
Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2002 [1978]), 36.
Introduction xx
the other until they are separated only by what James Joyce calls a transpar-
ent sheet.20 It is this imbrication that will prompt both of them to undergo
a process of redefinitionone that I argue renders each category gradually
more interchangeable with the other.21 The chapter will then consider the
role of drugs in this transition, suggesting that, when one reflects on the
changes of the twentieth century, drugs and other related kinds of adjuncts
may be seen to increasingly begin to substitute for what had previously taken
the form of the injunction to write, articulated by a sovereign to a scrivener.
Observing the ways in which writing or scrivening has always elicited acedia
and melancholy, the chapter concludes by proposing that drugs should be
understood not as products of the advent of the chemical sciences, but rath-
er as simply another means of overcoming what the Greeks had previously
described as the noncaring state.
Comprising three chapters, part 2 constitutes what I call a series of Psy-
chobiographic Speculations. Here, much of what part 1 has already articu-
lated in a theoretical manner is interwoven with the close study of specific
texts and events in literary history, so that the conceptual apparatus of part
1 is now applied to specific literary works and ideas. Chapters 4, 5, and 6
undertake to examine a range of Huxleys fiction and essays in what are this
thesiss most detailed and extensive textual interlocutions. Proposing that
the geometrical and ontological figure of the chiasmus serves to model,
explicate, and reflect Huxleys thought, chapter 4 examines Huxleys strained
relationship with a range of emergent ideas in the physical, mathematical,
and mental sciences. In many cases, I propose, Huxley problematises and
rebuts the emergent ideas in science by privileging metaphysical experience;
this mode, which recalls Bergsons resistance to Einsteinian theoretical
physics, remains as persuasive today as ever, for reasons I will elucidate. The
chapter will then examine the historical evidence of Huxleys polyamory to
analyse the impact of Huxleys apparently open marriage on his ideas about
women, Victorianism, and gender and sexual politics.
Of course, to engage with the question of Huxleys sexuality is to return
to one of Freuds wider concerns: that of fatherhood or paternity. It is to
meditate on the way in which fathers condition the adolescences of their
sons and daughters. Developing an analysis of Huxley through his father and
grandfather, chapter 5 thus focuses on the filial or genealogical origin of
Huxleys masculinity and sexual identity. The chapter will consider various
22 See Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (London: Routledge, and Kegan Paul,
2007), 66.
23 See chapter 7; and Gervas Huxley, quoted in Sybille Bedford, Aldous Huxley: A Biogra-
phy, 2 vols. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973), 1: 14.
Introduction xxii
Molecular Correspondences:
Writing With, On, and About Drugs
in our human world of letters, the question of what or who exactly may be
said to write has long been a subject of scholarly speculation.2 And while
this work may have seemed often arbitrary, circular, and even unproductive,
the fruit of the labour has been, and remains, for most literary scholars, as
tantalising as it is essential. Who writes? is a question that is worth taking
seriously too, since the prospect of discovering a vital new answer to the
questionhowever moderate its improvement on previous explanations
implies nothing less than a new literary and intellectual enlightenment.
If we can better discover precisely how and why it is that we humans
produce such language as we do, then we shall perhaps have answered a
number of other vital questions along the way, and have accumulated new
knowledge in disciplines as diverse as biochemistry, theology, and politics.
1 Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
tr. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 282.
2 Among many others, the following studies of the last half-century take up this ques-
tion: Michel Foucault, What Is An Author? in Paul Rabinow, ed. The Foucault Reader
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 101-20; Roland Barthes, The Death of The Author,
in Image Music Text, tr. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142-8; Ju-
dith Butler, Giving An Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005);
Jorge J.E. Gracia, Texts: Ontological Status, Identity, Author, Audience (New York: Uni-
versity of New York Press, 1996); Alexander Nehamas, What An Author Is, Journal of
Philosophy 83 (1986): 685-91; and Jos Medina, Speaking From Elsewhere: A New Contex-
tualist Perspective on Meaning, Identity and Discursive Agency (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 2006).
2
Molecular Correspondences 3
conditions, even if much is known about them, are by and large to be con-
sidered immaterial. But if it is true that individuals exist, can we not also
accept that there may be certain parts of these individuals that are not, in
fact, parts of them at all?
Exploring a range of ideas that may be understood to reside at the limits
of the scientific method, part 1 of this thesis seeks to develop a pathway
along which an answer to this question of biological authorship might be
faced. Proposing a fresh appraisal of this question through a molecular
or biochemical optic, the chapter aims less to discover a panaceaa perma-
nent and singular answerthan to enhance the many prophesies and prior
proposals about the epistemology of authorship.3
After all, it may already be apparent that the question I pose closely re-
sembles Roland Barthess 1967 invocation: Who is speaking? As such, this
thesis embarks on a quest, or a request, to solve a problem that Barthes
ultimately came to understand as insoluble; for him, the very being of writ-
ing militates against its explanation at the level of intention or individuali-
tyits essence keeps it from ever being answered.4 To encounter Barthess
proposition at this basic level, howeverand even to accept his conclusion
that writings very being makes the question of the nature of authorship
unanswerableis to intuit the chimerical, defeatist, and fatalistic character
of literary studiess myriad encounters with authorship.
When Jacques Derrida disavows the violent hierarchy of the Hegelian
dialectic, for instancethe binary dualism that, were it not already apparent,
he reveals to be detectable at every stage of philosophys historyDerrida
also prevents us from speaking of a singular, static, and originary author. As
with so many conceptions, the author cannot be understood as a homogenous
agent; but neither are they to be seen as fixed, static sites of production, nor as
series of orthodox processes that, when put in train, simply produce writing.
An author fits none of these descriptions because, as Derrida suggests,
each of them engenders a dichotomised asymmetry, and one that is essen-
tially too violent or blunt to be acceptedfor each reinscribes the same,
problematic distinction between the singular author and their others (the
world).5 And in any event, to imagine an author as such a unitary agent
3 I will afford a range of examples attesting to the limits of science at a later stage of this
chapter, including Kurt Gdels incompleteness theorems, and Alfred Whiteheads
theorisations on processuality.
4 I will address Barthess work in much great detail at the beginning of chapter 2. Ro-
land Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, tr. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 140.
5 Jacques Derrida,Interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta, in Posi-
Molecular Correspondences 5
tions, tr. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 39-41, esp. 42. Also see
Derrida, Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, in Writing
and Difference, tr. Alan Bass (New York: Routledge), 351-69.
6 Flix Guattari, Chaosmosis, tr. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 1995), 12. Originally published in French as Chaosmose (Paris: di-
tions Galile, 1992).
7 An instructive work that problematises sobriety in a productive manner is David Len-
sons On Drugs (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 3. Lensons discus-
sion of the oppositional dynamic between intoxication and sobriety is one of the most
valuable of its kind in the critical literature of psychography.
8 Matthew Ratcliffe develops a comprehensive argument for rejecting the binary oppo-
sition that undergirds Thomas Szaszs political theory of psychiatry, which draws an
opposition between mental and bodily illness. See Ratcliffe, Binary Opposition
in Psychiatry: For or Against?, Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 17, no. 3 (2010):
233-39, 234; cf. Pat Bracken and Phil Thomas, From Szasz to Foucault: On the role of
critical psychiatry, Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 17, no. 3 (2010): 219-28.
Molecular Correspondences 6
9 See Gayatri Spivak, The Trajectory of the Subaltern in My Work (lecture, University of
California ,Voices series, September, 2004), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZH-
H4ALRFHw/, accessed 27 April 2014; Jean de La Fontaine, The Arbiter, The Almoner,
and The Hermit, in The Fables of La Fontaine, tr. Robert Thompson (London: J.C. Nim-
mo and Bain, 1884), Book XII, Fable xxvii; Julian Huxley in fact deploys this idiom in
the closing paragraph of his book on human individuality in the context of evolution-
ary theory: The Individual in the Animal Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1912), 154.
10 See Isabelle Stengers, Thinking With Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts, tr.
Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), chapter 3, 58-73.
Molecular Correspondences 7
What, know ye not that your body is the Temple of the holy Ghost
which is in you, which yee haue of God, and ye are not your owne?
1 Corinthians11
recent claims in microbiological science affirm that our bodies are constituted
by no less than 90 percent bacteria.13 While we may imagine that our hu-
man microbiomes are our own possessions, scientists increasingly under-
stand our bodies as the shared province of so many other, nonhuman forms of
life. Predominantly, in fact, our bodies are the property of nonhuman organ-
ismsmany of which have gone long unacknowledged, previously not known,
and have certainly never been understood to form part of the human being.
And, perhaps needless to say, such microorganismsat least in studies
of the body and its relation to authorial subjectivityhave been almost in-
variably ignored in literary scholarship, or else only very seldom recognised
to be living properties that may constitute, in any material way, our human-
ness. Occupied by a virtual zoo of non-human genes that are represented
by human microbiota, the human body is home to huge numbers of nonhu-
man genes, numbered at about 1,000,000, as compared to the 25,000-30,000
genes in [the] human genome.14
Much more than simply the symbolic sites of competition and parasit-
ism, though, our human bodies have each been colonized by a vast number
11 The Holy Bible, Conteyning the Old Testament, and the New (The King James Bible)
(London: Robert Baker, 1611), 1 Corinthians, chapter 6, verse 19, see http://www.king-
jamesbibleonline.org/.
12 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology [Corrected edi-
tion] (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 81.
13 On the claims, see We are 90% bacteria says researcher for Hospital Microbiome
Project, Chicago Tribune, 2 January, 2013, accessed 22 April 2014, available at http://
articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-01-02/news/ct-met-microbiome-20130102_1_hu-
man-microbiome-bacteria-human-life/. On microorganisms, bioscience, and literary
culture, see Craig A. Gordon, Literary Modernism, Bioscience, and Community in Early
20th Century Britain (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 66-75.
14 Rup Lal, Human Body: A Virtual Zoo of Bacteria, Indian Journal of Microbiology 51,
no. 1 (2011): 1.
Molecular Correspondences 8
of microbes.15 This produces a ratio in which, for every single human gene
that has been sequenced in the human genome, thirty-three nonhuman
genes exist.16 Recent metagenomic research attests to the same discovery:
Within the body of a healthy adult, microbial cells are estimated to out-
number human cells ten to one.17 In this very material and mathematical
sense, humans are constituted less by any one received notion of our hu-
mannessand less by any traditional understanding of the human as im-
bued with an agent or a spiritthan defined by this material occupation:
this progressively more elaborated and elucidated reality of the vast physical
otherness that lies within us.
Of course, this is not exactly what had been meant by the Other when,
to name only two proponents of the notion, Jacques Lacan and Emmanuel
Lvinas employed variations of the term. Yet Lacan and Lvinas both gen-
erally mark a site of presence that is radically different to and from a sin-
gular self, one that we cannot say ever absolutely excludes such an idea as
this: that the other might be a range of microbial agents.18 Having had the
opportunity to witness these developments in microbiological science, how-
ever, more recent philosophers, such as Dorian Sagan, have emphasised the
changing definition of the human. Sagan notes that we are now more than
humanand that our knowledges of such embodied interspecies commu-
nities represents nothing less than a development of the New Facts of Life.
And likewise, Stefan Helmreich notes that we are so threaded through
with so many kinds of microscopic companion species and stranger
15 See the opening bylines of Natures Human Microbiota Special (14 June 2012): www.
nature.com/nature/focus/humanmicrobiota/index.html, accessed 12 June 2013, em-
phasis mine.
16 For an excellent summary of the modern history and current state of genomic and
metagenomic analysis, see Pieter De Maayer, et al., The Current State of Metagenom-
ic Analysis, in Maria S. Poptsova, ed. Genome Analysis: Current Procedures and Appli-
cations (Norfolk: Caister Academic Press, 2014), 183-220.
17 The Human Microbiome Project, Overview: http://commonfund.nih.gov/hmp/over-
view.aspx, quoted in Stefan Helmreich, Homo Microbis: The Human Microbiome,
Figural, Literal, Political, in Thresholds 42 (2014): 52.
18 In 1955, during his annual seminars, Lacan draws a distinction between the little
other and the big Other. Following this, Lacan refers to the little other as a, for
the French autre, and the big Other as A, for Autre. See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of
Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses, 1955-1956, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, tr. Russell
Grigg (London: Routledge, 1993), 41-2. Also see Emmanuel Lvinass conception of the
other as a besieging neighbour in Dieu, le mort et le temps (Paris: Editions Grasset &
Fasquelle, 1993), published in English as God, Death, and Time, tr. Bettina Bergo (Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 138-39. Lvinas also contemplates the other as
a face that resists possession in Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, tr.
Alphonso Lingis (London: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 50-1, 194, 197, 297.
Molecular Correspondences 9
19 See Dorion Sagan, Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science (Minneap-
olis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press, 2013), chapter 1 (passim); and Helmreich,
Homo Microbis, 52.
20 For a succinct contemporaneous summary of the work of each of these scholarss
studies, see Ann Rosalind Jones, Writing The Body: Toward an Understanding of
LEcriture Feminine, Feminist Studies 7, no. 2 (1981): 247-63. I will deal with Irigarays
description of the chiasmus in chapter 4.
21 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On The Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge,
1993), xi.
Molecular Correspondences 10
22 Ibid. Also see Judith [Jack] Halberstam and Ira Livingstone, eds. Posthuman Bodies
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).
23 Butler, Bodies That Matter, vi.
24 Ibid., xii, 23.
25 See Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-femi-
nism in the Late Twentieth Century, in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinven-
tion of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), chapter 8; originally published in Socialist
Review 15, no. 2 (1985): 65-107.
26 See Derrida, Dissemination, tr. Barbara Johnson (London: Continuum, 2008), 39n39;
98-118, 100-1; originally published in Paris in 1972 by ditions du Seuil. Also see my
discussion of phallogocentrism and Huxley in chapter 4.
27 N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was A Computer: Digital Subject and Literary Texts (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 79.
28 Ibid., 183.
Molecular Correspondences 11
Although one might accept the proposition that the body is only knowable
through language, that the body is given throughout language, it is never ful-
ly given, when it is given, in partsit is, as it were, given and withheld at the
same time, and language might be said to perform both of these operations.34
If language seeks to deny its own implication in the body and, in the
process, begins to refute the bodys material constitution, remnants of the
corpus, we find, still begin to reappear in spectral and partial form within
the very language that seeks to perform their denial.35 Ghostly emergences,
emanating from the body itself in a multimodal production, engender a car-
nival spectacle of which language forms but one working part.
When one reads Aldous Huxleys early writing, one encounters multiple
occasions on which to examine precisely such a spectral projectionand
often, it is humorous. Huxleys fiction and essays routinely figure the body as
an unstable site of emergence; the body can, for instance, articulate itself
can speak even when its owners are unaware of its presence. The body can
also become a locus of chaos and disordera crucible that resists foreclosure
even when it is ignored by its owner, or positively disavowed in words.36
In Philip K. Dicks fiction, as I argue in chapter 7, embodied experience
summons different kinds of corporeal and linguistic effects. With the aid of
33 Ren Descartes, Meditations, quoted in Judith Butler, How Can I Deny That These
Hands and This Body Are Mine? Qui Parle 11, no. 1 (1997): 1-20.
34 Butler, How Can I Deny, 4.
35 Ibid., 5.
36 See my detailed discussion of Huxleys deployment of body humour and semantic
gravitation in chapters 4, 5, and 6.
Molecular Correspondences 13
Butler deploys the figure of the chiasm throughout her essay to configure
the relation of the self and the body; and such a figure, notably, will also
become an important heuristic for Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Luce Irigaray
in their philosophies of perception and embodiment.
Taking up this figure as one of the most crucially determinative psy-
chotropes for Aldous Huxleys thought, my analysis of Huxley in chapters
4, 5 and 6 attends to the chiastic relations of Huxleys linguistic and on-
tological worlds. These are the relations that I argue are modulated, first of
all, by a range of biographical traumasincluding the deaths of his broth-
37 For a thoroughgoing examination of OBEs and their precipitation, both by the exoge-
nous administration of the psychedelic N, N-Dimethltriptamine (DMT), or the endog-
enous stimulation of the pineal gland (a speculation similar to the one once posited
by Descartes himself), see Rick Straussman, DMT: The Spirit Molecule (Vermont: Park
Street Press, 2001), 31, 43, 222. Cf. Ren Descartes, Discourse on Method, Optics, Geome-
try, and Meteorology, tr. Paul J. Olscamp (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1965), 100.
38 While this thesis shall not directly address the appearance of these cartoonish ani-
mals in Dicks fiction, they appear in a variety of his novels, such as in A Scanner Dark-
ly, where Charles Freck will compare his friend Barris, a methamphetamine user, to
Donald Duck, cautioning him not to do too much methamphetamine (ASD, 129), in
Dicks recurrent depiction of rats and glucks in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
(TSPE, 96), or even in his continued references to his cat Pinky, which Dick compares
to Tony The Tiger (and then to his friend Tony Boucher) in his Exegesis (Ex, 127).
Notably, John Ashbery, another postmodern, calls on similar images in his 1975 poem
Daffy Duck in Hollywood, in Houseboat Days (New York: Penguin, 1977).
39 Butler, How Can I Deny, 4-5.
Molecular Correspondences 14
40 On this history see Richard DeGrandpre, The Cult of Pharmacology: How America Be-
came The Worlds Most Trouble Drug Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006),
146-8.
41 See my discussion of Dicks methamphetamine use in chapter 7.
42 See, for instance, Humphry Osmond, A Review of the Clinical Effects of Psychotomi-
metic Agents, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 66 (1957): 418-34; David Nich-
ols, Potential Psychotomimetics: Bromomethoxyamphetamines and Structural Con-
geners of Lysergic Acid, PhD diss., University of Iowa, 1973, ProQuest: AAT 7330961,
esp. 6-8.
43 On the history of the serotonin hypothesis, see Erika Dyck, Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD
From Clinic to Campus (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2008), 32-51.
Also see my chapters 2 and 4.
Molecular Correspondences 15
44 On the effect of hallucinogens on these receptor subtypes, see David Nicholss detailed
overview of the pharmacokinetics and psychopharmacology of these compounds in
his Hallucinogens, Pharmacology and Therapeutics 101 (204): 131-81, esp. 139-48. On
stimulant psychosis, see Catherine Curran, et al., Stimulant Psychosis: Systematic
Review, The British Journal of Psychiatry 185 (2004): 196-204.
45 I discuss Dicks drugs use in detail in chapter 7. Also see Nichols, Hallucinogens,
Pharmacology and Therapeutics 101 (204): 138-9.
46 On the disavowal by biochemists and others in psychiatric medicine of the opinion
that hallucinogens can produce a model psychosis, see Alessandra Paparelli, et al.,
Drug Induced Psychosis: How To Avoid Star Gazing in Schizophrenia Researches
by Looking at More Obvious Sources of Light, Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience 5
(2011): 1-9.
47 See Laura Archer Huxley, This Timeless Moment: A Personal View of Aldous Huxley (Lon-
don: Chatto & Windus, 1969), 302-7.
48 For a recent summary of the psychotherapeutic and other studies of LSD in history
before this prohibition in the US, and afterward in other countries, see Peter Gas-
ser, et al., Safety and Efficacy of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide-Assisted Psychotherapy
for Anxiety Associated With Life-Threatening Diseases, The Journal of Nervous and
Mental Disease (3 March 2014, ePub ahead of print at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
pubmed/24594678/): 1-8.
Molecular Correspondences 16
will begin, Dicks fame and writing career will be established around this
very same moment. By contrast, Butlers relationship with Descartes is char-
acterised by no such temporal overlap; and yet their interaction, it might also
be said, forms a far more intricate and intimate dialogue.
Butlers response to Cartesianism entails far more than merely her elab-
oration on those originary arguments about the bodys linguistic construc-
tion that she had previously advanced in Bodies That Matter. Too often veiled
by reductive descriptions that focus on dualism and extrication, Descartess
work expresses an unusual and at times mystical theory of the mind-body
relation that, as Butler seems to apprehend, is founded on a far more con-
tentious strain of materialism. As Karen Jacobs notes, Descartess work is
nothing if not resistant to a resolution; it generates, she says, a bedrock
ambiguity at the level of this most fundamental of relationships.49
An instructive example of Descartess vision of the body, however, is ex-
pressed in his La Dioptrique (1637); here he proposes that all those things
that are seen by the human subject, the entirety of those products of the
eye, may also be transubstantiatedare ingested somehowinto the hu-
man body itself. Sometimes, when they are seen, these envisionings begin
to grow or emerge within the corpus itself, reappearing as lesions. Here they
are made flesh biologicallythat is, by the operation of the pineal gland.50
Descartes explains the process in this way:
I could go even still further, to show how sometimes the picture can pass from
there through the arteries of a pregnant woman, right to some specific mem-
ber of the infant which she carries in her womb, and there forms these birth-
marks which cause learned men to marvel so.51
For Descartes, what has been seen may also be embodied; vision is incorporat-
ed or introjected materiallyand not only into consciousness, but into biology.
Thus, the visions of a mother may pass through her eye and body to the
child, who, presumably, may be only a foetus. Then these visions are, like
tumours, reinscribed on the childs skin. The skin is thus less a reflection
of the childs experience than a reverberation of these progenic visions.
And for Descartes, this is a proof of the process in which mimesis becomes
49 Karen Jacobs, The Eyes Mind: Literary Modernism and Visual Culture (Ithaca, New York:
Cornell University Press), 10-11.
50 Descartes, Discourse on Method, 100. Also see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigra-
tion of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993), 76.
51 Ibid. Also see Jay, Downcast Eyes, 77n178.
Molecular Correspondences 17
incorporation. But this is only one among the myriad ways in which Des-
cartes suggests the body is at least partly nonhuman. In general, his incor-
porational model makes the body a res extensa: it is a living trace of so many
perceived exteriorities, now mutated into organs. Of course, Descartess view
is not as formal as those propositions advanced by the evolutionary theorists
that succeeded himby Jean-Baptiste Lamarck or Charles Darwinand nor
are they as detailed.
Rather, such studies of Descartess, including his Meditations, are specu-
lative observations about the unpredictable emergence of the human body;
and, at the time, they designed a new, profound intersection in which the
material and metaphysical can be conjoined. The profundity of these studies
follows from the privilege they accord to what Butler describes as our mad
visions:
Descartes not only reports that others perform... hallucinations, the report
[also] constitutes the textualization of the hallucination: his writing perform
them for us, through an alienation of perspective that is and is not exclu-
sively his own. Thus, he conjures such possibilities precisely at the moment
in which he also renounces such possibilities as mad, raising the question
whether there is a difference between the kind of conjuring that is a constitu-
tive part of the meditative method and those hallucinations that the method
is supposed to refute.52
merely for effect, the rhetorical questionat least as that form may be said
to appear in Descartess meditative vernacularoperates or textualises
itself in way that more freely invites paradoxical interpretations. In fact, this
utterance insists on its own paradoxicality. The result is that, as Butler ar-
gues, Descartess question hallucinates its own answers, generating a kind
of mad presentiment or presentimentation that may never be known other
than as what it is: an idiopathic Cartesian hallucinosis.56
But if little can be known of Descartess affective composition, recent work
on rhetorical questions at least confirms Butlers description of the effect she
describes. Apprehending Descartess crucial question, it becomes possible to
assert, for instance, thatwhile one study seems to call this kind of question
a new type of rhetorical questionit is also arguably not of a new type at
all. To be sure, it could be one of these wrong-opinion questions, as one
study claims, which have arisen only recently. These involve the speakers
expression of an obviously wrong opinion only for the purpose of demon-
strating that same opinions absurdity.57 Indeed, as with the wrong-opinion
question, Descartess question may be seen to say something about the body
that is obviously wrong, and it may be understood, equally, to advance such
a notion precisely to refute itand in an economic utterance withal.
And yet, as Butler suggests, Descartes also presupposes the enunciation
of a voice that imagines this wrong opinions actual possibility.58 Taking this
voice seriously, Descartess question accords to the wrong opinion the possi-
bility of its own autonomous invention. As Descartes writes,
Linguistics Papers 2 (2006): 134-68, cf. Todd Oakley, Afterword: From Cognitive Gram-
mar to Systems Rhetoric, in Cognitive Grammar in Literature, eds. Chloe Harrison, et
al. (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co.), 234-5.
56 Butler, How Can I Deny, 11-12.
57 See Russell Lee-Goldman, Rhetorical Questions and Scales: Just what do you think
constructions are for? Presentation at the International Conference on Construction
Grammar, University of Tokyo, Japan, 2006, see www1.icsi.berkely.edu/~rleegolfd/
ling/iccg4-presentation.pdf, slides 17-36.
58 Butler, How Can I Deny, 12.
59 This translation is Butlers: see Butler, How Can I Deny, 12 and 12n6.
60 These ideas are, of course, elaborated in Descartess Meditations and elsewhere: see
Molecular Correspondences 19
What happens when the signifier in question, the organizing center, the point
of significant convergence that it constitutes, is evoked but fails to appear
[ fair default]?63
Resonant not only with Descartess meditation, but also with the question
that opens this chapter, Lacans enquiry apprehends the subject as the
centre of a discursive system that, in its obfuscation within that system,
is made occult and equivocal, failing to appear, and failing to be seen, as a
final object in itself.
In his lectures concluding paragraphs, Lacan offers an oblique answer
to the enquiry by returning to the figure of the symbolic father (the Law
of symbolization) that his seminar had earlier introduced.64 In his final
remarks, Lacan identifies this other who speaks as in fact no more than a
symbolic father. But in this case, the specific other appears to Daniel Paul
Schreber, the German judge who was Freuds famous analysand,65 And the
The Philosophy of Descartes, vols. 1, 2 and 3, tr. John Cottingham, et al. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985, 1984, and 1991). However, whether Descartes was
interactionist (as was Aldous Huxley) who believed that the body and mind interact-
ed so that the mental events have physical effects, or an ocassionalist who believed
that physical and mental events occurred as one, and under the will of God, is un-
clear. On this, see Cecilia Wee and Michael Pelczar, Descartess Dualism and Con-
temporary Dualism, The Southern Journal of Philosophy 46, no. 1 (2008): 145-60, esp.
156. On Huxleys interactionism, see Aldous Huxley, A Psycho-physical Education,
in Wilfred Barlow, ed. More Talk of Alexander (London: Gollancz, 1978), 65-8; also see
Huxleys essay in the same volume titled End-Gaining and Means-Whereby, 149-53,
and my chapters 4-6.
61 Lacan, The Seminar, Book III, 274.
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid., 283.
64 Ibid., 83.
65 See Sigmund Freud, Psychoanalytic Comments on an Autobiographical Account of a
Molecular Correspondences 20
Paternity is not a causality, but the establishment of a unicity with which the
unicity of the father does and does not coincide. The non-coincidence con-
sists, concretely, in my position as brother; it implies other unicities at my
side. Thus my unicity qua I contains both self-sufficiency of being and my par-
tialness, my position before the other as a face.67
But if the other is no more than a face, its influence can be witnessed only
in moments of epiphany, where this face becomes perceptible as a nonhu-
man entityone that is separate and distinct from that which characterizes
sensible experience.68 Lvinass understanding of the other as materially vi-
sualand more specifically as facialserves not only to dovetail Descartess
Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides), in James Strachey, ed., The Standard Edition
of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1959 [1911]),
12: 9-82.
66 Lacan, The Seminar, Book III, 284.
67 Emmanuel Lvinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, tr. Alphonso Lingis
(London: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 214.
68 Ibid., 187.
Molecular Correspondences 21
69 See chapter 7.
70 In adopting this term I paraphrase, or reappropriate, the words of Peter Sedgwick;
Sedwick used this term as the title for his book Psycho Politics (New York: Harper &
Row, 1982).
Molecular Correspondences 22
In the 1960s, just such a view was championed by those who identified
with the so-called anti-psychiatry movement; this was a loose coterie ex-
emplarily represented by, for instance, Italys great social reformer, Franco
Basgalia, and the United Kingdoms most intellectualistic psychiatrist duo,
David Cooper and R. D. Laing.71 It is also from out of this political context that
Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattaris Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
(1972)and the work that followed it, A Thousand Plateaus (1980)would ap-
pear in the following two decades72
Adroitly observing this history in a succinct literary-cultural study of psy-
chiatry, Angela Woods underscores the extent to which Deleuze and Guat-
tari, in their critique of psychoanalysis, are indebted to other such critiques
of psychology of the time, including Michel Foucaults Madness and Civiliza-
tion (as it was so published in 1965).73 But Deleuze and Guattaris adoption
of the diagnostic term schizophreniaa term distinguished from Freuds
psychoanalytic categories, which are emblematised by his descriptions of
psychosis and neurosisindicates the authorss wish to speak back to the
institutionalised taxonomisation of mental phenomena as it has thus far,
largely with Freud, proceeded.
Their aim, in other words, is to become vociferous interlocutors in the
progressively more bureaucratised science of mental healthan area in-
creasingly buffeted by a scientific regime that is itself sustained by exclu-
sionary methodologies unlikely to be understood by those who are made
the subjects of its practices. In rejecting Freudian psychopathology, Deleuze
and Guattari also deprivilege Freuds authority within the regime of twen-
tieth-century psychopolitics; in this they at least tacitly agree with Sylvre
Lotringers claim that Freudianism survives in America not as a truthful
method, but merely as a transmogrification of communications theory.74
For Deleuze and Guattari, the persistence of Freudianism is not simply
dependent on late capitalism, though, but radically transcoded by it. Psy-
chopathology metastasises in the middle decades of the twentieth century;
from here it departs from the private couches and notebooks characteris-
If Guattaris remarks openly express his scorn both for voracious govern-
ments and self-interested social psychologists, Deleuze and Guattaris cri-
tique of psychoanalysis in Capitalism and Schizophrenia will even more dis-
dainfully repudiate psychopathologys formalisms, which are now practiced
in its invariably coercive and deceptive institutional therapaeutics.
In Woodss words, the authors convey a general irreverence towards the
psychiatric establishment78and this indicates their contempt for those
factions that threaten to rob something both from psychiatrys legitimate
practitioners and its involuntary patients. To be specific, psychiatry takes
from practitioners a range of intellectual and professional freedoms, and
from patients the fundamental belief and realisation that some heterogeneity
in human mental life is to be expected and appreciated. The aim of capitalist
75 Ibid.
76 Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought
(Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2007), 139-40.
77 Guattari, Transversality, in Molecular Revolutions: Psychiatry and Politics (New York:
Puffin, 1984), 11-23. Originally published in 1964 in the Revue de Psychothrapie Insti-
tutionelle, no. 1. On the shortlived history of this review, and the society that produced
itthe Socit de psychothrapie institutionelle (SPI)see Bourg, Revolution to Ethics,
137-43.
78 Woods, The Sublime Object of Psychiatry, 148.
Molecular Correspondences 24
colonialism, Guattari would later say, had been no less than to enforce and
facilitate a homogenisation of mental experience, achieved slowly but surely,
and by so many conservative reterritorialisations of subjectivity.79
Authoring a complex microanalysis of capitalisms procedures, Deleuze
and Guattaris lifework remediates and transcodes those ossified assemblag-
es of the socius that also function as its systemic constituents, chief among
them psychoanalysis and institutionalised psychiatry. This they do not only
to fortify a new epistemological resistance, but to nurture and recuperate
the political desires of others. The regulation and availability of drugs, for
instancecontrolled by governmental agencies as much as by psychiatric
organisationswill become an increasingly important subject for the au-
thors in A Thousand Plateaus.
Here, for instance, Carlos Castanedas escape from semiosis and his
concomitant entry into a visual and sonorous microperception, will lead
him into what the authors describe as a becomings-molecular. This is a body
transformation that is distinguishable from those others that, in the preced-
ing passages of the book, the authors have described in different terms. Before
now, the authors have conceived of the bodys morphologisation in terms of its
animality; when they have previously described changes in the body or mind,
the authors have, as if to accord with some law of the jungle, understood them
as instances of a becomings-animal.80 This becomings-molecular registers
a new re-encoding of the subjectone that has everything to do with the mo-
lecular revolution, which, beginning in the 1950s, stretches into the present.
My claim is that much of Deleuze and Guattaris work expresses an effec-
tive concern to see the liberalisation of drugs (and primarily illicit drugs)
even if the authors have intended to express no such concern. Just this con-
cern, for instance, is reflected in their recurrent valorisation of their tropaic
Body Without Organs (the BwO), whichtraceable to other alternative or
anormative bodies, such as, for one, the drugged body of Antonin Artaud
gives itself over to the intoxication of desire almost as readily as Artaud him-
self actually gave his body over to the intoxication of mescaline. The authors
commend Artaud, and similarly laud Henri Michaux, whose ability to discon-
nect hallucinatory experience from the question of causality with respect to
drugs, allows Deleuze and Guattari to fabricate a philosophy of wild creation,
apprehending the world less as structural system than mutating specter.81
79 Guattari, Chaosmosis, 3.
80 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 227, 248.
81 Ibid. On the drugged body see 165; on Michaux and Artaud, see 283-5.
Molecular Correspondences 25
82 Ibid., 286.
83 See Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report On Knowledge (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
Molecular Correspondences 26
87 See Isabelle Stengers, Gilles Deleuzes Last Message, accessed 10 May 2014, http://
www.recalcitrance.com/deleuzelast.htm/.
88 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 273-382.
89 Flix Guattari, Chaosmosis, tr. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 1995). Originally published in French as Chaosmose (Paris: ditions
Galile, 1992), 61.
Molecular Correspondences 28
concoction. One must remain a master of [ones own] speeds, that is.90
Schizoanalysis, in short, rejects any idea of [a] pretraced destiny; it creates
its own doors, and its own drugs, only in order to itself then become such a
drug. To put it more clearly, schizoanalysis is a discursive potionan anti-
dote both to the bodys and the subjects apparently inexorable reterritori-
alisation by desire.91
In Chaosmosis, Guattari diagrammatises his model of schizoanaly-
sis; but this model must be a metamodel, he says, if it is to incorporate
into its own system those antecedents from which it drawsthose in the
history of ontological formations. To be more precise, the model must
overcome the aporia, Guattari suggests, that is common to all those an-
tecedents, which is to say the problem of self-reference in language. Of
course, the term modeland even the idea of a modelharbors neg-
ative undertones for Guattari, for it suggests, as Janel Watson argues,
the schematic reductionism which for Guattari characterizes both struc-
turalism and the capitalist axiomatic. But metamodeling constitutes some-
thing different: a discipline of reading other systems of modeling, not as a
general model, but as an instrument for deciphering modeling systems in
various domains. Intent less on producing of a model for everything than
a unique and particular model for each thing it encounters, schizoanalytic
metamodelisation, much like schizoanalysis, creates a new door for each
rowa new heuristic for each and every application.92
In this way, Guattaris models offer entry points to the impassive and, as
he calls them, diverse existing systems (religious, metaphysical, scientific,
psychoanalytic, animistic, neurotic... ) of human fabrication, all of which
nearly always skirt around the problem of self-referential enunciation.93
These systems, Guattari argues, tend to reterritorialise the subject sooner
than they develop or crystallise in themselves. The result obtains not only in
these systemss inertianor in their theoretical redundancybut appears
as the egregious misapplication of these models.
One of Guattaris metamodels, the assemblage of the four ontological
functions (see figure 1.1, below), distinguishes between discursive Expres-
first, the embodied or machinic subject and its language, where that ac-
tual (discursive) expression in language is machinic and ordained only by
physical conditions such as energy, space, and time; and
ically prior to their own constitutions as human objects, and prior even to
their constitution even as prehumans.
While perhaps no scholar or philosopher has so rigorously attempted to
diagrammatise consciousness as Guattari, his models do not arise ex nihilo.
As Simon OSullivan asserts, this Guattarian schema
owes much to [Louis] Hjemslev, from whom the expression content frame-
work is taken (and which is Guattaris response to the Saussurean signifier/
signified framework in Lacanian modelisations).95
95 Simon OSullivan, Guattaris Aesthetic Paradigm: From the Folding of the Finite/In-
finite Relation to Schizoanalytic Metamodalisation, Deleuze Studies 4, no. 2 (2010):
269.
96 On transhumanism, see Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man (London: Im-
age Books, 204), 239; Julian Huxley, New Bottles For New Wine (London: Chatto & Win-
dus, 1957), 13-17.
97 I deal with the emergence of the doctrine of epiphenomenology, often erroneously
attributed to Aldous Huxleys grandfather, Thomas Henry (TH), in chapter 6.
98 See Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ: A Curse on Christianity, 3-4.
99 Guattari, Chaosmosis, 64-5.
Molecular Correspondences 31
10 (2000): 1-20.
102 I will return to the figure of the psychoticand to the diagnostic description of psy-
chosismany times throughout this thesis. I simply wish to note here Guattaris com-
pelling emphasis on writing and narrative in the context of his discussion of schizo-
phrenia. For him, the schizo reduction is a language cast in asignifying refrains
which give back to the narrative, which [is] recast in artifice, existential narrativity and
alterity, albeit delirious ones (Chaosmosis, 64).
103 See Derrida, Platos Pharmacy, 98-118, esp. 100-101.
Molecular Correspondences 33
the same way in which it had long before been characterised by Plato: as a
delirium-inducing poison? Writing, after all, is the very same instrumental
power that Freud will, in an almost virtualised infliction by inflection, use
to rot the minds of those men who, having returned from the First World
War, will be so shocked and distressed that they are diagnosed as war neu-
roticsand later, as Freud interviews them and writes them upbe there-
by transformed into psychotics.104
This transformation involved a process that, as Laurence Rickels
notes, Freud had fabricated out of his own apparently ahistorical myth-
ico-conceptual narrativea doxa borne out of the far from ahistorical
instantiation of the Great War. After 1918, Freud will chart a trajectory in
which what he originally named the peace-ego and war ego will, less
than a year later, be renamed the ego and the superegothose con-
cepts so well known to modern scholars of psychoanalysis. And it is at this
juncture too that Freuds period-specific theorisation at the borderline
zone between neurosis and psychosisa formulation engendered by the
profound trauma and mourning of total warwill become a normative
schemaone under whose aegis so much more than a war diagnosis
can and will henceforward be conferred.
Of course, if psychosis is a limit concept, it is only one among a series
of Freudian structures that resided at the pre-World-War-I limit of Freuds
psychoanalytic system. But all of these had been brought into focus, legiti-
mised and utilisable, by the end of Great War. Diseases, now, are less physical
than evental. That is, war neurosis, or war disease (as it was commonly
described), becomes exactly that: a disease occasioned by an event. As Rick-
els explains, the Great War precipitated these diseasess takeover of pre-
vious models of schizophrenia. It was in the wake of this event, that is, that
While it is only in the wake of war neurosis, then, that Freud can apprehend
the excess that constitutes the symptomatology of each and every psychopa-
104 See Freud, Introduction, in Sndor Ferenczi, Karl Abraham, Ernst Simmel and
Ernest Jones, Psycho-analysis and The War Neurosis (London: The International Psy-
cho-analytic Press, 1921), 1-4.
105 Laurence Rickels, Giving Up The Ghost of a Fetish: Between the Couples Theory of
Marxo-Freudianism and Nazi Psychoanalysis, The South Atlantic Quarterly 97, no. 2
(1998): 297-325.
Molecular Correspondences 34
thology, once these have arisen, they can not be dismissed: in other words,
that which has been already seen cannot now for Freud be unseen. For long
after the war, and generations after it in fact, psychologists everywhere acted
as if they had been compelled by some implicit Freudian dictate: that the
show of war disease, at least as psychosis, must go on. Hence the lesson
in the subtitle of Rickelss first volume of his Nazi Psychoanalysis three-part
seriesOnly Psychoanalysis Won the War.106 For if among the many trag-
edies engendered by the Great War there remained any clear victor, it was
psychoanalysisand, more to the point, psychosis.
If Freuds impact on twentieth-century thought is amplified by the Great
War, then, it is an amplification that Huxley laments in his 1925 essay Our
Contemporary Hocus-Pocus.107 Decades later, Dick will similarly take up in
various of his novels, such as in his 1959 Time Out of Joint, the aftermath of
the war and its implications for biopolitical control.108 But in both writerss
bodies of work, we discover that the effect of the twentieth-centurys World
Wars on psychological knowledge has been so effectively compossible with
the development of western thought that, even as knowledge of these wars
is everywhere refracted in their books, it also remains disguised, its sheer
scale too great to ever be totally visible. After these wars, so ingrained have
become the doxa of psychoanalysis in the populations epistemological con-
stitution, that Freudianism begins to constitute what Foucault calls, in The
Order of Things, an pistm.109
A serviceable analogy with which to further illuminate this point about
the development of Freudian psychoanalysis may be discovered in the post-
World War II impact of other discoveries, such as those in biochemical engi-
neeering. In the 1980s, for instance, the discovery or invention of polymerase
chain reaction (PCR) enabled forensic science and cloning to become a reality.
106 For a comprehensive historical analysis of psychoanalysiss post-war growth, see Rick-
els, Nazi Psychoanalysis: Only Psychoanalysis Won the War, vol. 1 (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minneapolis Press, 2002). For a more sympathetic account of psychoanalysiss
contribution to the neuroscience of subjectivity, see Franois Sauvagnat, et al., A His-
torical Perspective on the Collaboration Between Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience,
Journal of Physiology Paris 104, no. 6 (2010): 288-95.
107 Aldous Huxley, Our Contemporary Hocus-Pocus, Forum 73 (1925): 313-20; and repr.
in Adelphi, 2 (1925): 966-74.
108 On the inordinate number of explicit references to Freuds work in this 1959 nov-
el, see David Gill, Delusions of Grandeur: Paranoia in the Life and Work of Philip
K. Dick, masters thesis, San Francisco State University, 2006, chapter 1 (pages not
enumerated), https://www.academia.edu/1759119/Delusions_of_Grandeur_Paranoia_
in_the_Life_and_Work_of_Philip_K_Dick.
109 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Routledge, 2005 [1966]), xxiii, 33-4.
Molecular Correspondences 35
110 Werner Kunkel, Conquer Yourself: The Way to Self Confidence (New York: Ives Wasjburn,
1936), cited and quoted in Rickels, DSM3rd Reich, in Nazi Psychoanalysis, 1: 125.
Molecular Correspondences 36
discovered that the related symptom pictures once associated with classic
hysteria have all but disappeared, practitioners would not conclude that
hysteria itself had disappeared, however. They would deduce only this: that
the patientss methods of expressing the same disorder had changedand
that it had simply morphologised, no doubt, into more complex new disor-
ders. Where once sensational blindness, muteness and other paralysis had
been commonplace, for instance, in hysterics, now complicated intrigues,
insidious physical ailments, hatred, scorn and sullenness characterised the
group of symptoms to be henceforth identified in the diagnostic interview
with these patientsand much the same was true for the diagnosis of neu-
rotics and psychotics.111
As I will argue in chapters 4, 5, and 6, Huxley had himself responded to
the shock of war; he had suffered a kind of post-war trauma in the context
of a range of great personal losses. Having already mourned the death of his
mother in 1908 and the loss of his eyesight in 1911, the death of Huxleys
brother, Trevanen, in 1914, was an especially difficult tragedy for this young
man to bear. A mentor for Huxley at Oxford, Trevanen had committed sui-
cide following what he interpreted as his unsatisfactory results in his Civil
Service examinationsand after having ended two complicated relation-
ships with different women.112 In such novels as Antic Hay (1925), Huxley pa-
rodically depicts the disillusionment felt by many after the Great War, toying
with a theme that, two years later, he would more explicitly take up in his
venomous dismissal of Freudianism as hocus pocus.113
As with Guattaris critique of Christian Trinitarian symbolism in Chaos-
mosis, Huxley perceives Freudianism as just another form of encoding the
subject through a diversion of narration. For Huxley, the idea that
When, some decades later, Huxley in his Doors of Perception (1954) will bring
his sceptical, even-minded rationalism to bear on the question of drugs, he
will yet again encounter the question of the scientific value of symbolisa-
tion. But Huxleys own becomings-molecular now only confirms his belief
111 Kunkel, Conquer Yourself, 107, cited and quoted in Rickels, Nazi Psychoanalysis, 1: 126.
112 See Ronald W. Clark, The Huxleys (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 163-4.
113 Huxley, Our Contemporary Hocus Pocus.
Molecular Correspondences 37
114 See Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, tr. Nancy Paul, et al. (London: MacMillan,
1929 [1911]), 20; also see Creative Evolution, tr. Arthur Mitchell (London: MacMillan
and Co., 1922), where Bergson describes the brain as a switchboard (266). Also see
Paul Marshall, Mystical Encounters with the Natural World: Experiences and Explana-
tions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), ch. 8, Mind Beyond the Brain: Reducing
Valves and Metaphysics, esp. 237-9.
115 See Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, tr. Arthur Mitchell (London: MacMillan and
Co., 1922); Huxley, DOP, 11.
116 Ibid., 34, 50.
Molecular Correspondences 38
Gdel, and then turned into a numeric equation, for example, Gdel will
discover it to have been, at least mathematically, insurmountable or insol-
uble all along. But, inspired by the philosophy of mathematics as much as
its procedures of strict calculus, Gdel will attempt to calculate the problem
philosophically and theoretically, building on Alfred North Whitehead and
Bertrand Russells attempt at the axiomatization of mathematics in their
Principia Mathematica. It is there, in this latter work, that the authors had
produced valuable results in [various] regions, such as infinite number
theory, among other subjects that had been formerly regarded inaccessible
to human knowledge.117
By 1931, Gdels two formal mathematical theoremsknown as the in-
completeness theoremsdemonstrated the validity of the proposition that
no system is internally consistentat least, it could not be seen to be such
without having first committed some grave epistemological or empirical
error. Even mathematical systems, Gdel showed, could not overcome the
aporia of self-reference without defying itself or its own rules.118 Whitehead
had reached much the same conclusion at much the same time; he had ar-
gued, however, that for an organism to attain legitimate self-awareness was
a fanciful notionsomething empirically unimaginable, and akin to an ar-
gument from ignorance.
Whitehead would first express this view in his lectures on process and
philosophy at Edinburgh in 1927 and 1928, but would later revise the lec-
tures for publication for his Process and Reality of 1929. Unlike Descartes,
however, Whitehead proposes not that the body belongs to an individual,
but to the entire world, which is to say to nature more generally. However,
the process of being myself, Whitehead argues, is my origination from
my possession of the world.119 And so, while the claim that the body is a
possession of the world is a weaker one than the claim that the individual
possesses (as in apprehends) the world, neither of these statements is com-
pletely false, since in both cases, we seem always to accept the claim that an
individual possesses their body.
117 Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, Principia Mathematica , 3 vols. (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), 1: v. Also see notably Isabelle Stengerss
Thinking With Whitehead, 3, and ch. 18, Feeling Ones World, which deals with a
range of Whiteheads dicta from Process and Reality concerning the doctrine of [the
human] organism as it is interposed with subjectivity or the finality of the individu-
al. (296). Also see Whitehead, Process and Reality, 60.
118 Kurt Gdel, ber Formal Unentscheidbare Stze der Principia Mathematica und Ver-
wandter Systeme in Monatshefte fr Mathematik und Physik 38 (1938): 173-98.
119 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 81.
Molecular Correspondences 39
120 On the drug-user-subjects sensory experience of the world of the non-human, see
chapter 6, The World of the Non-Human in Robert Masters and Jean Houston, The
Varieties of Psychedelic Experience: The Classic Guide to the Effects of LSD on the Human
Psyche (Vermont: Park Street Press, 2000), 151-83.
Molecular Correspondences 40
121 On the myth generally see Barry Beyersteins chapter, titled Whence Cometh the
Myth that We Only Use 10% of our Brains? in Mind Myths: Exploring Popular Assump-
tions About the Brain and Mind, ed. Sergio Della Sala (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons,
1999), 3-24. Beyerstein traces the history of this expression or mythos, including its
misattribution to Einstein. He then comprehensively rejects the myth on a number
of grounds, including on the philosophical-fallacious ground that it is an argument
from ignorance. He then also points to the serious doubts raised about this idea in
the scientific studies of brain damage, evolution, and imaging, many of which involve
microstructural analyses of the organ. Also see Rachel Vreeman and Aaron Caroll,
Medical Myths, British Medical Journal 335, no. 7633 (2007): 1288-9.
122 Beyerstein, Whence Cometh the Myth, 13-4.
123 Huxley focused on the illustration that we only use 10% of our brains in his 1959
lecture at the University of California at Santa Barbara. An edited version of this lec-
ture was transcribed by Piero Ferrucci, and published under the title Latent Human
Potentialities in The Human Situation, ed. Ferrucci (London: Harper and Row, 1977),
263-73. Also see Human Potentialities: A Series of Talks on The Human Situation,
recorded live from the Lecture Hall, vol. 1, produced by Laura Archer Huxley, distribut-
ed by Giffard Associates. This recorded version is currently available from a merchant
at Big Sur Tapes, with code 01101. See http://www.bigsurtapes.com/merchant.mv82.
htm, last accessed 22 April 2014. Also see Bernfried Nugel, Aldous Huxleys Concept
of Human Potentitalities, in Literatur und Lebenskunst: Festschrift fur Ger Rohmann
[Literature and the Art of Living: Essays for Gerd Rohmann], ed. Eva Oppermann (Kassel:
Kassel University Press, 2006), 146-156nn2 and 3. On Huxleys conceptualisation of
human potentialities more generally, see the Human Potentialities series, edited
Molecular Correspondences 41
Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake... We are making
use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.126
voke a term that is significant in pharmacology but does not precisely mean
this in that discipline: we are thus, we could say, extremely psychoactive
creatures. As I will explain in the remainder of this chapter, the microscalar
borderlands that divide this totality of brain activity from what might be de-
scribed as its more specific and intensive points, nodes, or sites of psycho-
activity, however, constitutes a terrain that can be addressed in a number
of different wayssuch as in ontological or biochemical terms, or (as I have
already spoken of it) in terms of the philosophy of subjectivity.
In any of these idioms, however, these borderlands appear at once both
sublimely expansive and intimately compact. This is why the mind of a mes-
caline user can appear to be so closely analogous with the mind of a schizo-
phrenicor, at least to Huxley and those psychiatrists who tutored him in
their 1950s psychiatric researches, such as Humphry Osmond.131 It is also, of
course, why psychosis can also appear so remotely foreign or aliena con-
ception I will address in the following chapters.
The topological illusoriness of the brain and its activity is also why, clos-
er to our current moment, Dick will be readily persuaded in the 1980s by the
best psychiatrist [he] ever saw of the truth of something he would never
have grasped on his own. The psychiatrist convinced Dick, that is, of the fact
that the massive dosages of amphetamines he had been consuming for over a
decade had been chemically ineffectual, even despite his having thought they
had been effectual. That is, Dick came to accept that any alteration he had
felt in his subjective state was simply a false artefact of his imaginationa
self-deception, or a placebo effect.132 This explanation had been acceptable
to Dick even when he recalled how often he had, when using the apparently
inert or innocuous methamphetamine, remained awake all night, writing
frantically and attentively under the impression he had been fueled by the
drugs. But perhaps it was precisely because of Dicks statusan author para-
noically interested in and convinced of the minds own deceptivenessthat
he could accept, with apparent glee, such a counter-intuitive, positivist, and
materialist explanation.133
134 On the benefit of the placebo effect in a majority of diseases, see Herbert Benson and
Richard Freidmann, Harnessing the Power of Placebo and Renaming it Remem-
bered Wellness, Annual Review of Medicine 47 (1996): 194; Arthur Kleinmanm Harry
A. Guess, Joan S. Wilentz, An Overview in Arthur Kleinmanm Harry A. Guess, Joan
S. Wilentz, John W. Kusek, and Linda W. Engel, eds. The Science of the Placebo: Towards
an Interdisciplinary Research Agenda (London: BMJ, 2002), 1-32, qtd. in Franklin G.
Miller, David Wendler, and Leora Swartzman, Deception in Research on the Placebo
Effect, in PLoS Medicine 2, no. 9 (2005): 853.
135 Although see the resources cited above at nn130 and 134.
Molecular Correspondences 45
and Guattaris direct efforts to explain the brain in the 1980s and 90s,
and despite the writings of many other recent neurophilosophers.
Of course, it is clear to most scholars in this field that humans possess,
as neurobiologist Gerald Edelman notes, a higher-order consciousness,
one that distinguishes us, as living organisms capable of semantic and sym-
bolic utterances, from those who experience only primary consciousness,
such as dogs and other mammals. However, even so, the precise differences
in brain chemistry between humans and other mammalian vertebrates, and
how each has evolved, is even now difficult for scientists to precisely ascer-
tain.136 This has probably been the result of a number of technical experi-
mental limitations, many of them probably related to the new medico-ethical
rules of surgery, which were ratified (for noble reasons) after the Nuremberg
trials at the end of the Second World War. But any technical limitationthe
result of an ethical rule or otherwisemay turn out to be immaterial; for
not only are there clear limitations on what can be achieved through im-
aging techniques as they currently stand, butmore problematicallythe
brain, which is by no means static, also seems to elude examination at the
functional level. It escapes our comprehension, that is, even in the wake of
functional neuroimaging such as fMRI.
A common hypothesis, however, is that those changes or adaptions that
an individual makes in response to their internal and external environ-
ment, which we often call learning are, as Michael Arbib reports, funda-
mentally also changes in the patterns of gene expression in neurons. Arbib
makes the fundamental argument clear:
The cellular architecture of the adult [human] brain includes not only the un-
derlying genotype but also the social and physical milieu as refracted through
individual experience, and this architecture includes not only the shape and
connections of the individual cells and the larger structures they form but
also the very chemistry of specific cells as differential experience changes the
pattern of genes that are expressed within each one.137
Edelman thinks of brains much as Arbib does, which is to say in a way that
is also similar to Whitehead: they are organs embodied not only within
the human corpus, but also within the world. The brain is situated within
136 On higher-order consciousness Gerald Edelman, Second Nature: Brain Science and Hu-
man Knowledge (London: Yale University Press, 2006), esp. chapter 2, Consciousness,
Body, and Brain, 12-22.
137 Michael A. Arbib, How the Brain Got Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012),
152.
Molecular Correspondences 46
bodies and within the world.138 And while it has been demonstrated that we
technically use almost all of our brain at any single momentwhich is
to say, as Edelman notes, no brain regions are ever completely silentit
is also important to note the possibility, as I have already described it, that
we may currently be aware of approximately only ten percent of the brains
actual activity.139 That imaging cannot yet identify to what specific use or
uses the brain is being put in each instance of its activity means that our
definition of activityhowever demonstrable it is by the neuroimaging of
bloodremains limited and unrefined.140
It is in recognition of these intellectual and technical limits in neurosci-
ence, and more specifically in connectomicsthe sub-discipline in which
scientists identify connectomes or connections within an organs nervous
systemthat the brain initiative, or the Brain Activity Map Project, a proj-
ect begun by the US Government in 2013, has been developed. The program
proffers the following as its motto: record every action potential from every
neuron in a circuit.141 In another locution, researchers seek to fulfill the
goal of Imaging every spike from every neuron.142
Another similar project begun in Heidelbergthe Human Brain Project
aims to build a comprehensive computer model of a functioning brain; seeking
to rectify what is ultimately a philosophical problem of the logos, it focuses on
what the brain can tell us about the gap or interstice between the subject and its
intelligence: that is, how it is that our brains seem to speak.143 All of these proj-
ects may be understood, in part, to share the goal of determining the longstand-
ing problem that has always been expressed in the mythos I have explained in
this chapter: that we currently underuseor know not how we useour brains.
The second crucial point regarding the mythos of the underused brain
may be understood to be merely the residuum of another proposition, howev-
er: namely, that the human subject does not, or cannot, exercise total agency
over their bodies or brains (a notion much elucidated in the chapters to fol-
low). Just as the body, according to a microbial definition of the bodys pri-
mary constitution, is effectively nonhuman, so too is the brain primarily
constituted by a substance about which we know precious little.
Only about ten percent of the brains cells are neurons, for instance,
those primary cellular elements involved in the transfer and processing of
information.144 The other nine-tenths of the organ consist of various types
of glial cells: formations whose function, apart from enveloping, protecting
and supporting the neurons, remains largely undetermined. But if the role of
glial cells remains mostly unexplored, the emerging evidence also indicates
their essential role in developing our nervous systems and maintaining the
normal functioning of the brain. It is proposed, for instance, that glial cells
play an important role in managing our breathing.145
The principle to be grasped from these observations is that it may yet be
possible to think of high percentages of our bodies and brains not simply
as unused, as Huxley proposed in his 1959 lectureor even as underused.
Rather, brains are better understood as underdetermined, for we know not
their precise functionality, nor even their precise non-functionality. To pro-
pose as much is to acknowledge little more, perhaps, than that we are igno-
rant of the brains full potential, leading us almost back to the place from
which we began. However, another point follows from this: that there abides
a possibility abides that this huge number of glial cells plays a role in what
we as humans experience as thinking, information processing, creativity,
andmost important for this thesiss purposeswriting and scrivening.
The what that writes, then, may be even more complicated than something
we ourselves, as humans, can yet (or ever come to) articulate.
Citing Gdels 1931 proof, Paul MacLean notes how, as a philosophical
problem, every semantic and symbolic expression of logic, and even math-
ematics,leads to the conclusion... that any complex system cannot avoid
contradictions because of self-reference. And, as MacLean further observes,
it was actually Jacob Bronowski whose remarks described this philosophical
situation. In what is a remarkably Dickian image, he observed the way in
144 See Christof Koch and Idan Segev, The Role of Single Neurons in Information Pro-
cessing, Nature Neuroscience Supplement, vol. 3 (2000): 1171-77.
145 This area of brain research, however, has undergone a massive transformation in the
last few decades. While some glial cells, such as astrocytes, were once long considered
to play only a simple, passive, and supportive role for the neurons that they enframe
(such as providing only conducive environmental conditions for neuronal function),
recent research challenges this classical idea. For a summary of recent data of this
kind see: Alfonso Araque and Marta Navarrete, Glial Cells in Neuronal Network
Function, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 365 (2010): 2375-81; J. K.
McQueen, Glial Cells and Neuroendocrine function, Journal of Endocrinology 143
(1994): 411-15. Also see R. Douglas Fields, The Other Brain (New York: Simon & Schuster,
2009), chapter 3: Transmissions from the Other Brain: Glia Know and Control Your
Mind, 48-63.
Molecular Correspondences 48
which the question of a systems reality creates an endless regress, and in-
finite hall of mirrors of self-reflection.146
But let us reconsider the kinds of answers that I have proposed in the
preceding pageswhere agency, for instance, is transferred to other forms
of life, or to non-functional material entities in the body. Even these answers
serve less to defer the problem than they, like all answers thus far in history,
fail to address its essential nature. For to impute subjectivity to material ob-
jects about which we currently do not know enough, much as object-oriented
ontologists have done, is also to presume that, at some future point, we will
know enough to confirm the reality of that subjectivity adequately. Worse
still, it is also to neglect what evidence already exists to affirm that there
remain, and may forever remain, physical uncertainties of measurement at
various orders of magnitude: at the particle-scale level, for example. To think
of the problem in this way is to conceive of the so-called quantum limit in
quantum mechanics, which arises in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle,
which I address in part in relation to Huxleys sometimes questionable allu-
sions to theoretical physics in chapter 4.147
Such limitations also appear as the limit faced by medical imaging
techniques, which cannot confirm even the relative number of physical neu-
rotransmitters in our brains at any one timelet alone understand each of
these neurotransmitterss natures or roles in each instance of this transmis-
sion.148 Perhaps it would only be sensiblein the face of so many impedi-
mentsto nobly admit that none of these questions is actually answerable.
There is no adequate philosophy or epistemology of life, writing, or subjec-
tivity, we might add, that is anywhere near up to the task of this exposition.
For who could even imagine a supernatural philosophyone sufficiently
objective and omniscientto provide satisfactory answers to these ques-
tions? Such a science would be, as Eugene Thacker observes in his After Life,
146 Jacob Bronowski, The Logic of the Mind, in American Scientist 54 (1966): 1-14, 7, qtd.
in Paul MacLean, Obtaining Knowledge of the Subjective Brain (Epistemics) in
Anne Harrington, ed., So Human A Brain: Knowledge and Values in the Neurosciences
(New York: Springer), 57-70, 66. Also see Gdel, ber Formal Unentscheidbare Stze
der Mathematica und Verwandter Systeme. English edition published in 1992 as On
Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems,
tr. Bernard Meltzer (New York: Dover, 1992).
147 On quantum limits see notably Vittorio Giovannetti, Quantum-Enhanced Measure-
ments: Beating the Standard Quantum Limit, Science 306 (2004): 1330-36.
148 On the error-proneness of radiotracing modulatory neurotransmitters in the brain
such as serotonin, and the ineffectiveness of this kind of imaging technique for clini-
cal diagnosis, see for instance, Ramin V. Parsey, Serotonin Receptor Imaging: Clini-
cally Useful? Journal of Nuclear Medicine 51 (2010): 1495-8.
Molecular Correspondences 49
Crisis in immanence. Drugs, it turns out, are not so much about seeking an
exterior, transcendental dimensiona fourth or fifth dimensionrather,
they explore fractal interiorities. This was already hinted at by Burroughss
algebra of need.151
Elsewhere in her book, Ronell writes explicitly about those revelations about
the body prompted by psychoactive drugs. In returning the user to a kind of
pre-subjective stateeffectively regressing them, however much that seems
anti-Freudiandrugs enable the body to be seen for what it is: as a pound of
flesh. Ronell explains:
When the body seems destined to experimentation, things are no longer in-
trojected but trashed: dejected. The body proper regains its corruptible, or-
ganic status. Exposed to this mutability, the body cannot preserve its identi-
ty, but has a chance of seeing this fall, or ejection, sublimated or revalorized.
Nautilus vs. the addict.152
149 Eugene Thacker, After Life (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), xiv.
150 Ibid.
151 Avital Ronell, Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1992), 15.
152 Ibid., 7.
Molecular Correspondences 50
What matter whos speaking, someone said what matter whos speaking?
Samuel Beckett1
however one may wish to conceptualise the relation of drugs, on the one hand,
and the range of questions orbiting the central enquiry Who writes? on
the other, it remains certain that no simple conceptualisation of this relation
will suffice. And equally, it seems that each time an earnest and rigorous
attempt has been made to rearticulate the difficult question of authorship,
the very origination of the question has been complexalmost as if sim-
plicity had been excluded from the very process of the questions enuncia-
tion. Thus, when Roland Barthess essay The Death of the Author was first
1 Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing (London: Calder and Boyers, 1974), 16; quoted in
modified form by Michel Foucault in What Is An Author? in Paul Rabinow, ed. The
Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 101-20. Originally published in
Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. and tr. Josue V. Hara-
ri (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 141-60.
2 Sen Burke, Who Speaks? Who Writes? Dialogue and Authorship in the Phaedrus,
History of the Human Sciences 10, no. 3 (1997): 49.
3 Michel Foucault, Theatrum Philosophicum, 185. Emphasis on activated mine.
51
The Psychoactive Scrivener 52
4 I adopt this expression about Aspens Fluxus project from Jill Walker, Death of the Au-
thor First Published in A Box, jill/txt (26 September, 2006), accessed 12 January, 2014,
http://jilltxt.net/?p=175.
5 While I invoke Logie here, I also note that Logie argues that scholars should move
away from their fixation on Barthess essay precisely as a node in this diachronic
tussle. It should be conceptualised, he says, in it synchronic moment, in a rhizom-
atic network with the other contributions to Aspen 5+6. But Logie himself also notes
the essays imbrication in this two-millennium-long conversation about authorship
and, given the appearance of his own contribution to Barthess cultural moment, it
may be now be possible, once again, to dehistoricise Barthess work: to read it in and
for its ideational exemplarity. Logie, 1967: The Birth of the Death of the Author, Col-
lege English 75, no. 5 (2013): 493-512, esp. 497.
6 Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author, in Image-Music-Text, tr. Stephen Heath
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 146; Logie, 1967: The Birth of the Death of the Au-
thor, 497.
7 Stephan Mallarm, The Book: A Spiritual Instrument, in Mary Ann Caws, ed. and
The Psychoactive Scrivener 53
Within only a few years of Barthess fluxus meditation having been pub-
lished, however, Michel Foucault would also formulate what was perhaps a
slightly more elaborate model of the author function, replacing the ethos of
minimalism with what we might understand as a cold and impersonal polit-
ical functionalism. Outwardly positivist in method, but inwardly something
other than this, Foucaults work sought to expose the Romantic idea of the
singular author, which was, he suggested, only a chimerical projectionan
effect of our modes of handling texts.8 In this context, the process of nam-
ing, identifying, taxonomising, and classifying the author in an attempt to
understand their privileges and creative role[s]or to know perhaps even
what Heidegger had called these authorss Geistsshould constitute, so Fou-
cault wrote, only a secondary endeavour in this primarily functionalist task.
For all these matters are far less important, he would argue, than the primary
aim of understanding the position of the subject who writes: they are an itin-
erant product, a changeable effect, and a variable function of discourse.9
With this, the concomitant disavowal of authorial subjectivity stud-
ies in literary criticism and theory throughout the 1980s and 90sin the
wake not only of Barthess and Foucaults works, but of many linguistss
workswill see literary scholarship take up afresh the axiom that writing is
a material practice. Throwing into sharp relief the significance of materi-
al culturesincluding, as I have already discussed, the political culture of
the authors bodythis material turn aptly countenanced what had become
an increasingly vexatious and ill-fated contestation of the authors rights in
their own written works. For if authors, following Barthes, were now to be
seen as dead, how were we to view the culture of their corpusesor their
corpses?
tr., Stephan Mallarm: Selected Poetry and Prose (New York: New Directions Books,
1982), 80-84, esp. 82. Also see Thomas H. Ford, Poetrys Media, New Literary History
44 (2013): 451.
8 Michel Foucault, What Is An Author? inLanguage, Counter-Memory, Practice: Select-
ed Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, tr. Bouchard and
Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 113-38, esp. 127. Notably,
there are significant and numerous differences between the Bouchard and Simon
translation and that by Harari. This is particularly remarkable given that the publi-
cation dates of these volumes are only one year apart, and both published by Cornell
University Press. Also see Bernard Stieglers discussion of science as the suspension
of handlinga withdrawal of the handand of the hands subsumption by the sci-
entific instrument: Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, tr.
Richard Beardsworth (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 266-7.
9 Ibid., 138, my emphasis. On Heideggers Geist, see Martin Heidegger, The Self-Asser-
tion of the German University and The Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts, Review
of Metaphysics 38, no. 3 (1985): 474.
The Psychoactive Scrivener 54
10 Molly Nesbit, What Was An Author? Yale French Studies 73 (1987): 229 and 240-2.
11 See, for instance, Michael Hiltzik, Science Fiction, Legal Reality, Los Angeles Times,
27 November, 2011, accessed 3 January 2014, http://articles.latimes.com/2011/nov/27/
business/la-fi-hiltzik-20111127.
12 Nesbit, What Was An Author? 240.
13 See T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, in The Sacred Wood: Essays on
Poetry and Criticism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921), 42-53; F.R. Leavis, Literature
and Society, in Scrutiny 12 (1943): 2-11, esp. 3. Rprt. in his Common Pursuit (New York:
The Psychoactive Scrivener 55
27 Just say no, of course, is the refrain introduced by Ronald and Nancy Reagan at the
Reaganss televised joint address of 1986, inaugurating the War on Drugs, a war
whose effectiveness and raison dtre would remain, until the 2000s, mostly unques-
tioned (or unquestionable). An interesting study of the expressions negative rhetorical
valency, deploying Kenneth Burkes work on the negative in language, appears in Su-
san Mackey-Kallis and Dan F. Hahn, Questions of Public Will and Private Action: The
Power of the Negative in the Reaganss Just Say No Morality Campaign, Communica-
tion Quarterly 39, no. 1 (1991): 1-17, esp. 6-7. On shifting attitudes to the War on Drugs
over the last few decades we need only consider the legalisation of cannabis under two
US state law regimes. On this, see Dwight Mark Anderson and Daniel I. Rees, The Le-
galization of Recreational Marijuana: How Likely is the Worst Case Scenario? Journal
of Policy Analysis and Management 33, no. 2 (2014): 221-31.
28 Lenson, On Drugs, x, my emphasis.
29 Christopher J. Rowe, Plato: Phaedrus, with Translation and Commentary (Warminster:
Aris & Phillips, 1986), 275d, quoted in Sen Burke, Who Speaks? 42. Cf. Robin Wa-
terfields newer translation of Phaedrus, where Socrates refers to the written word as
being capable of doing no more than jogging the memory of those already familiar
with the discussion topic. See Plato, Phaedrus, tr. Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford Universi-
ty Press, 2002), 275, 69.
30 Around both Huxley and Dick, for example, the strangeness of conspiracy theory
abounds. In Huxleys case, it is the author who is accused of conspiracy. In a range
of books associated with the Lyndon LaRouche Organisation, Huxley is postulated to
have been the architect or case officer of Britains Opium War, and the initiator of
the Aquarian Conspiracy: see Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal
and Social Transformation in the 1980s (Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher, 1980), 52; Konstan-
dinos Kalimtgis, David Goldman, Jeffrey Steinberg, DOPE, INC. Britains Opium War
Against The US (New York: New Benjamin Franklin House, 1978) 182n12, 213, 366-78.
The Psychoactive Scrivener 59
But if we are to speak of the relationship between the author and the
text as a binary or as a dialectic, then we must also surely wonder why this
particular bifurcation should so often take precedence in studies of author-
shipespecially when it is so syntonic, so harmonious, with a range of other
equally applicable, and yet largely unarticulated, dichotomies: subject and
object, psychology and biology, soft and hard, among so many others. In
expanding the model to account for these other forms of bilateral organi-
sation, this thesis embraces authorial psychobiographies just as vigorously
as it seizes on the actual literary works of both Huxley and Dick. And while
the latter half of this thesis will directly address the psychobiographies of
only these two authors, it also invests preponderantly in questions related
to these authorss psychopathological states, their individuated person-
hoods, and their altered or damaged selves in tandem with what might
be understood as particular biographical events: the loss of a loved one, the
tensions of marriage, and so on. Its concern, in other words, is to identify
what is most important in the lives of Huxley and Dick in relation to their
fictions, but not to draw the line simply there. If this thesis may be regarded
as overselective in the authors it examinesor too restrictiveit does, in its
defence, also aim to remain cognisant of these figuress representativeness of
all kinds of authors; it proposes ways, that is, in which these authorss works
can encapsulate the historical narrative of authorship itself.
The chapters in part 2 will also particularise the work of this and the fol-
lowing chapter, which treats psychopathology not as aberrant but as another
way of being in the worldhowever much such a claim may seem inimical to
certain politico-philosophies of public health, or even to those intellectuals
Also see Criton Zoakos, The Aquarian Conspiracys Road to George Orwells 1984,
Executive Intelligence Review 7 (1980): 19, 21-39, esp. 38. Huxleys collaboration with the
CIA in their mind-control Project MKULTRA is relatively well known, although there
is apparently no evidence to suggest that Huxley was ever himself a CIA agent. This
is in spite of the claims of Jan Irvin, who argues that Huxley was part of a CIA plot to
drug the world. For a response to Irvins claims, which are broadcast in the form of
video recordings on his Gnostic Media platform, see Simon G. Powell, An Outbreak
of Fear and paranoia in the Psychedelic Mushroom Community, Reality Sandwich,
5 October, 2012, last accessed 12 January, 2014, http://realitysandwich.com/162177/
paranoia_psychedelic_mushroom_community/. (This article embeds Irvines video).
On Huxleys collaborations, see Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The Com-
plete Social History of LSD: The CIA, The Sixties and Beyond (London: Grove Press, 1985),
45-6. In Dicks case, conspiracy theory is deployed by the author as a narrative device,
such as by drug-enhanced psi powers, mining the angst ridden folklore of mind
control. As Peter Knight argues, Dicks fiction so conspires at the same time as it pro-
duces the superficially more hopeful folklore of alternate realities. Peter Knight, ed.
Conspiracy Theories in American History: An Encyclopedia, 2 vols. (Oxford: ABC CLIO,
2003), 1: 222-4.
The Psychoactive Scrivener 60
or ethicists who would claim to advance the public good.31 More gener-
ally, the thesis frames authorial identity as an agon between environment
and phylogenesisnature and nurtureand, in the twentieth century, as
a range of more particular contests between psychoanalysis (qua psycholo-
gy) and psychiatry (qua neurobiology). Writing on drugs or psychoactive
scrivening now becomes the apotheosis of a history of questions about the
origin of textuality; this history prompts us to think of works of fiction that
are written on, about, or otherwise associated with drugs, as instances of
fabrication in which both the subject and the object produce material ev-
idence of a certain psychological and biological interactionan interdia-
logue between self and other, or a molecular correspondence.
As I briefly addressed in the last chapter, Ronells identification of the
conjugation of literature and drugs as a relation that animates questions of
law and generates ethical fractures permits us to see writers not simply as
agents of a ceaseless unfoldingor as the voluntary effacers of their own
subjective identities, as Foucault postulates.32 It allows us, rather, to under-
stand writers as the producers of documents that are implacably bound up
with juridico-legal processes; these interlocuters, always already engaging
with the formalistic procedures of the rule of law, are nomadic respondents,
reacting to the exigencies of nomacracy.33 To understand the delimitations
that those writers in this position facewhich is all of themhowever, is
important; and on these occupational hazards, Foucaults essay on author-
ship is particularly instructive.
For Foucault, it is essential that we understand what works are before
we can begin to recognise in any precise way the status of their authors. A
second, and perhaps even more significant prerequisite, however, involves
our specifying the presuppositions that readers bring to the question of what
writing does. Intrinsic in these two initial acts, of course, is the assumption
that an authors definitive attributestheir empirical characteristicsmay
be vaporised or transformed in and through the process of writing, so much
so that they themselves, as authors, may vanish into a transcendental ano-
nymity. And since we still employ, as Foucault notes, religious and critical
31 On the increasingly overlying fields of the so-called classical or conservative defini-
tion of public health as the provision of health-related public goods and related fields,
previously not regarded as part of public healths rubric, like social work, see Jonny
Anomoly, Public Health and Public Goods, Public Health Ethics 4, no. 3 (2011): 251-9.
32 Ronell, Crack Wars, 11; Foucault, What Is An Author? 102.
33 On nomocracy and its differences to fascism, see Luciano Pellicani, Fascism, Capital-
ism, Modernity, European Journal of Political Theory 11, no. 4 (2012): 394-409, esp. 404.
The Psychoactive Scrivener 61
tific worksand especially to those for which literary anonymity is not toler-
able.38 Averring that the author function characterises literary texts most of
all (since they are the most transgressive of texts), Foucault organises author-
ship into a schema of functionality that anticipates, at least grammatically,
what he would just a half-dozen years later describe as the Psy function.39 A
systematic code of functionalising operations or forces that generate the tax-
onomic horizon of the author, the author function conditions the authors
status and their categorical determination. Foucault schematises the codes
components, enumerating the author functions operations as follows:
38 Ibid.
39 See Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the College de France, 1973-74, ed.
Jacques Lagrange, tr. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 85; also
see Mario Colucci, Foucault and Psychiatric Power after Madness and Civilization,
in Michel Foucault and Power Today: InternationalMultidisciplinary Studies in the His-
tory of the Present, ed. Alain Beaulieu and David Gabbard (Oxford:Lexington Books,
2006), 61-69, 67.
40 Foucault, What Is An Author? 113.
41 See Flix Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies, tr. Andrew Goffey (New York: Blooms-
bury), xi-xiv.
42 One weakness of using Foucaults model as a starting point for a model of the author
The Psychoactive Scrivener 63
is that this quotation derives from Rabinows translation of Foucaults French, rather
than the original French. It is no less, I propose, valuable and comprehensive in and of
itself, however, for my purposes: producing a contemporary normative model.
The Psychoactive Scrivener 64
43 Guattari, Chaosmosis, 54; cf. Philip Goodchild, Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction
to the Politics of Desire (London: SAGE, 1996), 69. In psychiatry studies, the expres-
sion limit concept describes those psychopatholgies, such as schizophrenia, which
are defined by their place at the limit of classificatory definition. See, for instance,
Laurence Rickels: Act Out/Turn On: The More Complete Aversion, in Acting Out in
Groups, ed. Rickels (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 122.
44 See on historicistic literary studies Margaret Cohen, Narratology in the Archive of
Literature, Representations 108, no. 1 (2009): 51-75, esp. 51.
45 Gianfranco Denes offers a concise summary of the transition of gestural performanc-
es, or gestures, into language in Talking Heads: The Neuroscience of Language (New
York: Psychology Press, 2009), 12-17. For a comprehensive analysis of the various as-
pects of the literature of dynamic language organisation, see Helmut Schnelle, Lan-
guage in the Brain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 181-212.
The Psychoactive Scrivener 65
The third operant (O3), which I call the technomaterial labourial op-
erant, functions in two ways. First, it determines the authors work through
a series of interiorised or embodied (biological-endogenous) mental and
physical performances (endoperformances). These relate to processes of
thought-into-language composition (parsing), and I call these process-per-
formances endoperformative parsing (EnP). Second, this operant initiates
a string of exteriorised and gestural performances of a technical and tech-
nological nature, which give way to two further kinds of performance. The
first of these is an immaterial cognitive writing praxis (CP), one that has
been learned by the author, and involves semantic, lexical, grammatical,
orthographic, syntagmatic, graphemic knowledges, such as spelling, capi-
talisation, structural phrasing, and the like. The second of these involves
skilfully engaging with material composition technologiessuch as pens,
typewriters, computers, and similarto perform a certain material writing
praxis (MP). Together, these categories of process-performances, all of them
external to the body, may be described as forms of exoperformative pars-
ing (ExP).
Finally, the fourth operant (O4), which I name the virtual-identitarian
operant, determines those ways in which an author and their work is creat-
ed; that is, by which the work is risen, referred to, and recognised. Foucault
apprehended this operation in his description of the author-function; and
in many ways it accords with Platos account of the humans desire for rec-
ognition: their thyms. Aware that many of us strive for recognition, Plato
observed how important it is for individuals, including authors, to locate
themselves within a socius.46 The operation of the thyms drive instantiates
an inexorably hypotheticaland what is consequently only a very imprecise
dialectic between socius and citizen, civic populous and private individual.
Provisional and unknowable, this operant is virtual in the way that Deleuze
and Guattari understand the term to consist of generalised and collective
surface effects, just as those discovered by, as Deleuze notes, the Stoics.
But these surface effects are themselves underlain by certain causes not
necessarily coordinated with or mutually aware of themselves, but which are
nevertheless real. The institutional and historical valorisation of authors or
scholars, which takes place by means of a series of small procedures that
appear only at the surfaceexchanges between a prospective author among
46 On Platos thyms and the constitution of identity, see Nicolo Bellanca and Giancarlo
Pichillo, Identitarian Passions: The Overwhelming Power of the Human Recognition
Need, International Review of Economics 61 (2014): 13-38. Also see Terry Pinkard, He-
gel: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 170-1.
The Psychoactive Scrivener 66
47 This is the surface of the virtuality, of the simulacrum when it breaks its chains
that Deleuze speaks of in his essay Plato and the Simulacrum, October 27 (1983): 52-
3; cf. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, tr. Mark Lester (London: Athlone, 1990), 4-11.
48 See Hegels discussion of recognition in the System of Ethical Life and First Philoso-
phy of Spirit, tr. George Lasson (New York, State University of New York Press, 1979),
236n46, 236-9; Pinkard, Hegel, 170-1.
49 See David Macey, Introduction, in Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts
of Psycho-analysis tr. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin 1994), xxii, xxv; Claude Lvi-
Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, tr. James Bell, et al., ed. Rodney Need-
ham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 30.
50 On Guattaris metamodels see Guattari, Schizoanalytic Catrographies, xi-xiv; Simon
OSullivan, On the Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the Finite-Infinite Rela-
tion (London: Palgrave, 2012), esp. chapters 3 and 5, and 103-23; Watson, Guattaris
Diagrammatic Thought, 97-144 (chapter 3).
The Psychoactive Scrivener 67
58 See David Ferrier, The Functions of the Brain (New York: G. P. Putnams and Sons, 1886);
Ernst Pppel, Richard Held, and Douglas Frost, Residual Visual Function after Brain
Wounds Involving the Central Visual Pathways in Man, Nature 243 (1973): 295-6.
59 Lawrence Weiskrantz, Elizabeth Warrington, M.D. Sanders, and J. Marshall, Visual
Capacity in the Hemianopic Field following a Restricted Occipital Ablation, Brain 97
(1974): 70928.
60 Dehaene and Naccache, Towards a Cognitive Neuroscience of Consciousness, 5; on
blindsight as a plausible but abnormal phenomenon, see Morton Overgaard, Visual
Experience and Blindsight: A Methodological Overview, Experimental Brain Research
209 (2011): 473-9, esp. 478.
61 Dehaene and Naccache, Towards a Cognitive Neuroscience of Consciousness, 5. I
refer to the studies conducted by Ernst Pppel, et al., Residual Visual Function After
Brain Wounds Involving the Central Visual Pathways in Man, Nature 243, no. 405
The Psychoactive Scrivener 71
While the models first proposition (that which concerns the attribution
of voluntariness and automaticity to various actions) amounts to an interro-
gation of what elseweher constitutes free will and agency, this chapter
will engage with this question only inasmuch as it incidentally pertains to a
scriveners will to compose a text. And while it is true that this proposition
could have significant implications for addiction studiesor studies of other
conjugations between drugs and questions of self-controlit is the second
limb of Dehaene and Naccaches model to which the following pages will
more closely attend. As an attempt to account for the experience of conscious
access, this second proposition may be fruitfully compared to Huxleys own
model of the human perceptual system, described as it is in his The Doors of
Perception. Presented in figure 2.2 (above) is a diagram that refers to Dehaene
and Naccaches cognitive model of consciousness, and which includes the
authorss tripartite scheme of access (sets I1-3).
Although these authors do not themselves diagrammatise their model,
they note that it is itself an elaboration on Ned Blocks two-part model of
access, which distinguished between what Block describes as phenome-
The Psychoactive Scrivener 73
Each person is capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and per-
ceiving all that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain
and the nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by
this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what
we should otherwise perceived or remember at any moment, and leaving only that
very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful. According
to such a theory, each one of us is potentially a Mind at Large (dop, 10-11).68
Notably, Broads model does not suggest that a Mind at Large may come to
know all that has ever happened in the universe; rather, he writes, it may
grasp all that has ever happened to the subject alone: to him. In other
words, a Mind at Large cannot access information to which it has not itself
already borne witness. It has limited access to information, even if the lim-
itation constitutes only a temporal non-access.
In many ways, this specific formulation of Broads model corresponds
with Dehaene and Naccaches theorisation of permanently inaccessible
information (I1). When Huxley thus elaborates on his Bergsonian view (by
way of Broad), he affirms Broads tacit acknowledgment of Mind at Larges
limitations:
It is here that Huxley concedes that the finite mind can only ever wan-
der near to a zone in which the perception of everything in the universe
is possible; he acknowledges, that is, the constraints of this Broad-Huxley
or Mind at Large model of consciousness.70 Turning to Broads work, it is
notable that Broad himself does not specify which of Bergsons works his
reader should, as he puts it, do well to consider much more seriously. He
describes the type of theory that Bergson put forward rather, only as one in
which the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main elimi-
native and not productive.71 But Broads summary is possibly a reification of
a range of Bergsons claims, whichbeginning in lEnergie Spirituelle (1910),
and continuing to appear up to his The Creative Mind (1946)are as cogni-
69 While writing The Doors of Perception, Huxley is already oriented to the emergent
theorisation of psychotomimesis: to wit, the view that the true cause of psychosis in
humans is an endogenous psychotogen whose structure or chemical compositions
resembles mescaline. This is evidenced by the citations he gives in the books opening
paragraphs to Humphry Osmond and John Smythiess work on their original theory
such as in their article Schizophrenia: A New Approach, Journal of Mental Science 98
(1952): 3015-19. In view of this, what is interesting about Huxleys description of ego-
lessness is the work of psychotherapist Meredith F. Luyten, in which she identifies the
importance of egolessness in militating against psychological distress, and especially
in patients diagnosed with borderline personality disorder: Luyten, Egolessness and
the Borderline Experience, Naropa Institute Journal of Psychology 3 (1985): 43-70.
70 While the term Mind at Large has been redeployed many times since Broads and
Huxleys usages of the expression (often erroneously attributed to Huxley as its coin-
er), the expression does not appear to have been used in this manner before Broads
1949 usage. See, for instance, Charles T. Tart, Harold E. Puthoff, and Russell Targ, The
Mind at Large: IEEE Symposia on the Nature of Extrasensory Perception (Massachusetts:
Hampton Roads Publishing, 2002).
71 Broad, Religion, Philosophy and Psychical Research, 23.
The Psychoactive Scrivener 75
sant of the notions of overflow and attentionality as they are of the organic
limitations of the brain:
As the symphony overflows the movements which scan it, so the mental life
overflows the cerebral life. But the brain,precisely because it extracts from
the mental life whatever it has that may be played in movement, whatever is
materializable... secures at every moment that adaption of the mind to cir-
cumstances... is the organ of attention to life.72
The crucial problem for Bergson is how precisely we should articulate the
particular encounter in which an egoless symphony does not overflow, but
can in fact be apprehended by the Mind at Large. Bergson yearns for a phe-
nomenological dictionary to translate each figure of the cerebral into
the mental, lamenting the ineffability of these peak consciousness states.73
Ineffability, however, is perhaps also only a relative question, albeit relevant
to the language employed among those specializations in which, as Guat-
tari notes, simplistic attitudes [can be] taken toward the phenomenon of
drugs equally as much as toward the nature of consciousness itself.74
Joining with John Searle in critiquing the residual grip that Cartesian
dualism holds on philosophy, Dehaene and Naccache deride the continu-
ing essentialist philosophical tradition according to which consciousness
states are ineffable experiences of a distinct nature, challenging the notion
that some experiences are simply not amenable to a physical explanation.75
The authorss critique of the ineffability hypothesis, however, applies only
to normative states of mentation. Nowhere do they advert to the inarticula-
bility of altered states, for instance. And, just as they denounce the ineffa-
bility hypothesis on empirical grounds, the authors also elide the mystic
tradition out of which, as Richard Doyle notes, the ineffability of certain
states of conscious experience has been affirmed throughout history.76
The position Dehaene and Naccache later adopt also appears to con-
tradict their initial dismissal of ineffability. When they note, for instance,
72 Henri Bergson, Mind-Energy: Lectures and Essays, tr. H. Wildon Carr (New York: Hen-
ry Holt and Company, 1920), 59; The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics tr.
Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library of New York, 1946), 179-180. Also
see Patricia Pisterss discussion of Bergsons conception of the metaphysics of con-
sciousness in The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), esp. 131-3.
73 Bergson, Mind-Energy, 42.
74 Guattari, Socially Significant Drugs, 199.
75 Ibid., 4.
76 Richard Doyle, Darwins Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Nosphere (Se-
attle: University of Washington Press, 2011), 186.
The Psychoactive Scrivener 76
If we admitand in practice we all behave as we did admit itthat the heart has
its reasons and that there are modes of understanding which do not depend on
upon perception or logical inferences from perception, then we shall have to take
metaphysicians and especially the metaphysical symbol makers a little more se-
riously. I say especially the symbol makers; for whenever we are dealing with
a cosmic or subjective mystery, the verbalized concept is less satisfactory as a
means of presentation than the pictorial or diagrammatic symbol (Mother, 344).
Grove Press, 1987), esp. chapter 17, Pushing The Envelope, 208-20. Also see the sum-
mary history of Millbrook in Colin Wark and John Galliher, Timothy Leary, Richard
Alpert (Ram Dass) and the Changing Definition of Psilocybin, International Journal of
Drug Policy 21 (2010): 237.
85 Also see Jerome Meckier and Bernfried Nugel, eds. Aldous Huxley Annual 7 (2009): 171-
8. Here the editors offer a publishing history of this essay, whose title they record
simply as The Borderlands of The Mind.
The Psychoactive Scrivener 79
While Huxley directs our attention to symbols and diagrams in order to sug-
gest that certain universal experiences may be articulable (and destructuvely
so), Dehaene and Naccachewhile eschewing the notion of ineffabilityalso
denounce the possibility in which we can ever come to understand the full
contents of any one mind in all its diversity. They argue, that is, that we can
neither know of nor generalise about the details of the enormous combi-
natorial diversity that constitutes the repertoire of the possible contents of
consciousness. This is an impossibility because the constituents of any one
individuals consciousness are simply too idiosyncratic; even with advanced
knowledge of an individuals DNA (or even RNA), or functional knowledge
of their brain activity, it is the intractable historical process through which
their consciousness has arisenfrom the developmental process of epigen-
esisthat makes it both so difficult to comprehend, and so specific to each
individual.86
In essays such as The Far Continents of The Mind, Huxley experiments
with investigating consciousness as an aspect of vision; he studies and spec-
ulates on the visual schematics by which we perceive all kinds of colours, as
well as light and darkness.87 And although Huxley is almost exclusively pre-
occupied with visual experience in these writingsas much as he is similar-
ly concerned with this topic in his Art of SeeingHuxley also seems prescient
of what would become neurosciences tacit endorsement of the plasticity of
the visionary apparatus. Sensing that vision entailed more than simply the
functioning of the organic eye, Huxley conceives of seeing more broadly as
the optimisation of that modality of organic experience that we call seeing.
Adverting to the attainment of a specific cortical set or orientation state,
Huxley describes the dynamic relaxation through which so-called normal
vision can be restored:88
At an early state in the process of visual re-education one makes a very re-
markable discovery, It is this: as soon as the defective organs of vision acquire
a certain degree of what I have called dynamic relaxation, flashes of almost or
completely normal vision are experienced (AOS, 35, my emphasis).89
ris, Robert Leech, David Nutt, and Dante R. Chalvo, Enhanced Repertoire of Brain
Dynamical States During the Psychedelic Experience, Human Brain Mapping (23 May,
2014, ePub ahead of print at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/doi/10.1002/
hbm.22562/): 1-15.
90 See Weiskrantz, Conciousness Lost and Found, 127.
91 Jeffrey J. Kripal offers a concise history of the later Huxleys proselytisation of these
ideas, which were to transmogrify into the Human Potential Movement: see Esalen:
America and the Religion of No Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 86-
91; also see TPP, passim.
The Psychoactive Scrivener 81
the act of writing is itself an act of thinking because its a way of using lan-
guage in a fashion that allows us to precisely order our thoughts and convey
what we mean. The thought is produced by and through the act of writing.
Without writing, we couldnt have these kinds of thoughts.94
But if writing is actually a mode of thinking, then what can we say about a
mode of writing that is not used to order the writers thoughts, but as an
attempt to encounter an othernessthat is, to examine what is not thought?
What about a writing that conveys not so much what the writer means, but
rather that which problematises and challenges meaning itself, such as in an
experimental writing practice like Burroughss cut-up method?
As this chapter proceeds, the expression psychoactive scrivening will
signal the practice of writing on drugs, but it will also denote these other
forms of writing. It signifies the authoring of a work while encountering
thought in a uniquely free-wheeling or deautomatised way, in a subjective
experience that may generally be characterised by its alterity, abnormality,
or non-ordinariness. Casting a relatively wide net, this account of psychoac-
tive authorship apprehends what Ralph Metzner broadly describes as ASCs
or altered states of consciousness. Working within a necessarily figural or
suggestive cartography, I will use this term to allude and attend to a range of
aspects of these non-ordinary ontologies as they affect the writing process.
Some of these may be understood as contradictory or anathematic classes of
consciousness ab initio; however, this will enable the analysis to be supple
Subjective Undermin(d)ings:
Deleuze and Guattaris Brain-Subject
if we acknowledge that a great many individuals had developed, by the end
of the First World War, some familiarity with the ontological possibility of
madness and psychosiseven if only as de jure classificationsthen the
twentieth century may be understood to have itself inaugurated an increas-
ingly entrenched mode of apprehension, and even an episteme, one that was
increasingly typified by subjective encounters with the psychopolitical.97
This, it may be argued, remains true regardless of whether these individ-
uals were capable of acknowledging or explaining such an encounter as such.
the implacable needs of the brain.102 The authors revise the old postulation in
which the brain and the human compete: Man thinks, not the Brain. Thus
laying a new emphasis on the materiality of communication (so that now, it is
less a virtualizationa virtus that is fully real103than a crucible through
which the mind itself is assembled, an actualization) Deleuze and Guattari
insist that The brain is the mind itself.104 Deleuze and Guattari thus collapse
into one category the human subject and the brain itself, outlining the co-
presence or equipotentiality of these previously separate objects, and illus-
trating how [c]erebral movements also give rise to conceptual personae.105
But if the brain and the human are now one and the same, it is significant
that Deleuze and Guattari had already drawn what is perhaps a much more
forceful distinctionat least for thembetween two very different kinds
of concepts to these. In their dualistic analysis of time or temporality in A
Thousand Plateaus, the pair divide time into either a specifically nonhuman,
or evental time, called Aeon, and the measurable or chronometric time
that is accessible and in fact constitutive of the human, called Chronos.106
Situating things and persons in relation to one another, and placing
events into forms that are differentiated and associable with the memorys
temporal orderings, Chronos constitutes a metrical system that relativises
objects in the world according to durations. By contrast, Aeon time, which is
also expressed as a haecceity, is a phantasmic force of materialisation and
dematerialisation, determining what is understood as present (or as now)
and what is absent (or as then) through a cognitive mechanism that is un-
seen in ordinary perception. Aeon is a kind of time, then, that is visible to us
only insofar as we may see the specter that self-evidently and inexplicably
verifies our own consciousness. It appears, quite simply, as spaces, speeds
and durations.107 In What Is Philosophy? the brain becomes the same such
102 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, tr. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson
(London: Verso 1994), 210-219.
103 Ibid., 210.
104 Ibid. 211.
105 Ibid.
106 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 262; on those events that make lan-
guage possible, see Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 181-85.
107 Ibid. I adapt this summary of Deleuze and Guattaris development of the Aeon and
Chronos times from a paper that I prepared for the 2012 Annual Meeting of the So-
ciety for Literature Science and the Arts, titled Madness in Mad Time. See http://
www.rudge.tv/blog/madinmadtimes/, accessed 10 October, 2014. For a detailed dis-
cussion of the other time of which Deleuze speaks in Difference and Repetition, see
Jay Lampert, Deleuze and Guattaris Philosophy of History (London: Continuum, 2006),
31-52. On Deleuze and time generally, also see Todd May, When is A Deleuzian Be-
coming? Continental Philosophy Review 36 (2003): 139-53.
The Psychoactive Scrivener 85
108 As Deleuze writes, The virtual is opposed not to the real but to the actual. The virtual
is fully real insofar as it is virtual. Difference and Repetition tr. Paul Patton (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994), 208. Also see May, When is a Deleuzian Becom-
ing? 148; and Patricia Pisters, Delirious Cinema or Machines of the Invisible? in
Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema, ed. Ian Buchanan and Patricia MacCormack
(London: Continuum, 2008), 103-15.
109 A lvaro Leone-Pacual, Amir Amedi, Felipe Fregni and Lofti B. Merabet, The Plastic
Human Brain Cortex, Annual Review of Neuroscience 28 (2005): 377-401, 378. On neuro-
plasticity, also see notably: Dean V. Buonomano and Michael M. Merzenich, Cortical
Plasticity: From Synapses to Maps, Annual Review of Neuroscience 21 (1998): 149-86.
Also see David Goldman, Our Genes, Our Choices: How Genotype and Gene Interactions
Affect Behaviour (London: Academic Press, 2012), 13-4.
110 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 210.
The Psychoactive Scrivener 86
in their view, has been an overextended trajectory in the wrong direction: the
ascent of phenomenology beyond the Brain. Having reached toward a Be-
ing in the world, Deleuze and Guattari seek now to direct philosophy away
from its phenomenological concerns and toward the materiality of thought,
conceiving of humanisms history as yet another Barthesian mythology: an
Urdoxa posited as original opinion, or meaning of meanings.111
Consonant with the psychoactive scrivener, the brain subject is not a
subject at all, but an eject.112 If their principal characteristic is distinction
[and] discrimination, it is important to recall what agent allows these pro-
cesses occur: it is the brain that thinks and not the manthe latter being
only cerebral crystallization.113 But this does not mean that the twentieth
centurys engagement with the phenomenology of mind is a complete redun-
dancy. Along this itinerant pilgrimage, what punctuates the journey toward
the thought-brain is the variety of important identifications that organise
the very process of mans neurological morphologisation. Among these,
Pierre Teilhard de Chardins The Future of Man maps out the anatomical
and social phases of what he calls transhominization.114 It thus serves as
an engine text for what would soon emerge as a range of companion texts
to de Chardins work, often organised under the appellation transhuman-
ism.115 An early-adopter of this locution, Julian Huxley would himself write
in an essay titled Transhumanism that the human species can, if it wish-
es, transcend itself... in its entirety, as humanity.116
111 Ibid. I refer to Roland Barthess Mythologies here only in passing; yet is notable that
Barthes devotes a short chapter in this book to Einsteins brain: Barthes, Mythologies,
tr. Annette Lavers (New York: The Noonday Press, 1957), 68-70.
112 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 215.
113 Ibid., 210.
114 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man, tr. Norman Denny (New York: Double-
day, 2004), 273.
115 On the moral problematics arising from the disavowal of a Jamesian humanism and
the adoption of a transhumanism, see appositely Ingmar Persson and Julian Savules-
cu, Moral Transhumanism, Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 35 (2010): 656-69. Ex-
amples of contemporary transhumanists include, for instance, Ray Kurzweil, Francis
Fukuyama, and James Hughes. For an up-to-date explanation of transhumanism, see:
Humanity+, Tranhumanist FAQ 3.0, accessed 27 March, 2014, http://www.humanity-
plus.oeg/philosophy/transhumanist-faq/.
116 Julian Huxley, Transhumanism, in New Bottles For New Wine (London: Chatto &
Windus, 1957), 13-17, rprd. in The Journal of Humanistic Psychology 8 (1968): 73-6. As
Alison Bashford points out, Nick Bostrom copies James Hughess erroneous citation
to Julian Huxleys 1927 volume of essays Religion Without Revelation (London: Benn,
1927) when seeking to identify the coinage of the term. See: Alison Bashford, Julian
Huxleys Transhumanism, in Crafting Human: From Genesis to Eugenics and Beyond,
ed. Marius Turda (Taipei: National Taiwan University Press, 2013), 153-68, see 155n14;
and Nick Bostrom, A History of Transhumanist Thought, Journal of Evolution and
The Psychoactive Scrivener 87
Technology 14, no. 1 (2005): 1-25, esp. 6; and James Hughes, Citizen Cyborg: Why Dem-
ocratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future (Cambridge, MA:
Westview Press, 2004), 158.
117 Julian Huxley, UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy, Preparatory Commission of the
United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (Washington: Pub-
lic Affairs Press, 1946), accessed 11 January, 2014, http://unesdoc.unesco.org/imag-
es/0006/000681/068197eo.pdf.
118 Goldman, Our Genes, Our Choices, 14.
119 So observe Sara R. Jafee and Thomas S. Price in their introduction to Gene-environ-
ment Correlations: A Review of the Evidence and Implications for Prevention of Men-
tal Illness, Molecular Psychiatry 12 (2007): 432-42.
The Psychoactive Scrivener 88
long before the brain-subject of the twentieth century, however, there is the
personage of what I call the scrivener. Their work is to scriventhat is,
to engage in a mode of writing, inscription, or reproduction by which they
effect the production of documents under the instructions of an external
entity. Such documents often memorialise a special event or occasion; and
these documents are perhaps most frequently legal or administrative in na-
ture. The title of scrivener denotes the relative disempowerment of that
composer, who may otherwise be described as a scribe, amanuensis, clerk,
hansard, or even a technical writer. In all of these cases, the composer la-
bours under a fractured, diffused, or distributed subjectivity.121 A multilo-
cal self, the scriveners contemporary instantiations include, for instance,
those who operate such telepresent technologies as performance capture
animation and remote surgery with the aid of an electronic camera or op-
tical enhancement device. As Drew Ayers notes, these kinds of agents find
themselves distributed across a plurality of corporeal planes.122
Considering these kinds of roles, it is arguable that the metaphysics of
the scrivening subject are now even more complex than those that Heidegger,
as Derrida observes, humanistically reduced to the Spirit (Geist). Unavoid-
ably double, the Geist is the haunting other itself, multiplied and repro-
duced; and the one Geist always includes another: they are Geist as the Geist
of Geist, [and the] spirit as spirit of the spirit.123 Like the Geist and spirit,
though, the scrivener always comes with its doublefor just as the Spirit
is its double, so is the scrivener its own twin.124 But if the metaphysics of the
scrivener are even more complicated nowand even more so than Derridas
awesome equivocality in the face of Heideggers Geistit is because the
scrivener ventriloquises not simply a spirit in the sense of a revenant, but
is ghosted by a living agent far less mysterious than Heideggers Geist. They
are consigned to produce words that are not simply not their ownin the
sense that they are instead those of a Heideggerean Geistbut compelled to
produce their work as the invention of another non-scrivener, thus taking on
this non-scriveners Geist a the same time as they vitiate or otherwise also
come to grips with their Geist.125
The etymological associations of the term scrivener denote its moral-
istic and expiatory valences. It derives from the Old English scrifan, which
means to prescribe a penance on, and which itself morphed into the Middle
English scriven, schriven, and finally, shriven. Associated with these words are
the irregular Middle English schroftide and tide: the time of confession be-
fore Lent. The term also has antecedents in the fourteenth-century French
word escravain, as well as the vulgate Latin word scribanem, which is the ac-
cusative of scriba, a scribe. And it is from this that we derive the anglophone
scriber.126 However, as John Jackson points out, even more ancient origins
are available to us to examinenot only etymological but categorical:
The English Scrivener and the French Greffier may be related by descent as well
as profession; both words being thus referable to the same origin, the Greek
.127
Although no work has been singularly devoted to its history, the term scriv-
ener, and the profession of scrivening, is almost always described as writing
that is done in the service of an institution or sovereign as a professional
penman, a copyist.128
123 Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, tr. Geoffrey Benington and Ra-
chel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 40-1; Heidegger, The Self-As-
sertion of the German University and The Rectorate, 474n6.
124 Derrida, Of Spirit, 40
125 Ibid.
126 The word may also have roots in the Medieval Dutch, schriver, and the Dutch schrijver:
Eric Partridge, Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (New York:
Routledge, 2006), 597.
127 John Jackson, A Treatise on Wood Engraving: Historical and Practical (London: Charles
Knight and Co, 1839), 2.
128 OED Online, Oxford University Press, s.v. scrivener accessed 28 March, 2013, http://
The Psychoactive Scrivener 90
anciently a Copist or Scrivener who transcribd fair, and at length what the No-
taries had taken down in Notes, or Minutes; which comes pretty near to what
we call Ingrossing. The Minutes of Acts, &c. were always taken down in a kind
of Cypher, or Short-Hand; such as the Notes of Tiro in Gruter: by which means
the Notaries, as the Latins called em, or the and , as the
Greeks called em, were inabled to keep pace with the speaker, or Person who
dictated. These Notes being understood by few, were copyd over fair, and at
length by Persons who had a good Hand, for Sale, &c. and these were calld
Calligraphi; a Name frequently met with in Primitive Writers. It comes from
the Greek , beauty, and , I write;... 130
www.oed.com/view/Entry/173623?redirectedFrom=scrivener.
129 Ibid.
130 Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia, or, An Universal Dictionary of Art and Sciences (Lon-
don: Printed for J. and J. Knapton [and 18 otrs.], 1728), 144, accessed 16 March, 2014,
http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/HistSciTech.Cyclopedia01.
131 See Francesco Ademollo, The Cratylus of Plato: A Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011), 22; Ademollo, Cratylus 393bc And the Prehistory of Platos
Text, Classical Quarterly 63, no. 2 (2013): 595-602, 596n6.
132 On these cognitive operations, see Arne Dietrich and Oliver Stoll, Effortless Atten-
tion, Hypofrontality, and Perfectionism, in Effortless Attention, ed. Brian Bruya (Cam-
bridge: MIT Press, 2010), 159-78.
133 For an excellent analysis of these processes, see Zaizhu Han, Luping Song, and Yan-
The Psychoactive Scrivener 91
similar scriveners prepare compositions that seek to capture the mind while
it is live and at work, graphing and mapping the speech or stimulus of the
body that is its master.
When the word psychoactive adjectivally modifies the term scrivener,
it functions in a number of ways, including in the way that this chapter has
already described: as a signification of the scriveners engagement with their
transhumanising and altered brains. However, this syntagmatic relation
may also describe the moment-to-moment neuromotor executions and ad-
justments that are characteristic of the following:
The latter processes may be understood to constitute the possibly (but not
confirmably) conscious operations that this chapter has already described
in terms of the Mind At Largein terms, that is, of Rosenthals descrip-
tion of a kind of first-order consciousness, and in relation to the eject or
brain-subject.134 In all instances, the scriveners mental engagements with
the materials that initiate these processes become differentiated as an array
of mechanistic operations that are typical of implicit information-process-
ing systems. Many of these processes have been described by researchers
as preconscious motor actions emerging from out of a primitive and evo-
lutionarily ancient system that does not form higher order representations.
If this description is accepted, then these processes must remain occulted,
even from the brain-subjectat least for as long as they cannot also be ob-
served and then explicated by them.135
But these preconscious operations are also routinised through an ex-
plicit information processing system.136 It is this proprioceptive mechanism
137 Ibid.
138 As I will address later in this chapter, Stieglers postulation that the writing subject
evolved through a process of epiphylogenesis, as the technical process of the exteri-
orization of memory, the methexis between the human and flint in what Stiegler
names a technical maieutics, corresponds neatly with my own analysis of the emer-
gence of the psychoactive scrivener. See Stiegler, Technics and Time 1, 140, 175, 257.
139 450 BC is the date that Eric Havelock ascribes to the transition to script-literacy in
classical Greecethe moment in which the ability of the average person to pick up a
manuscript and read it arose. See Eric A. Havelock, The Literature Revolution in Greece
and its Cultural Consequences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). The above
quotation, summarising Havelocks script-literacy, is taken from John D. Harvey,
Orality and Its Implications for Biblical Studies: Recapturing an Ancient Paradigm,
Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 45, no. 1 (2002): 99-109, esp. 100.
The Psychoactive Scrivener 93
to reveal its trickery. As van der Toorn notes of these scriveners: If the Bible
became the Word of God, it was due to their presentation of this Word.140
Tracing the co-presence of orality and literacy, Marcel Detiennes study of
ancient Greeces Orphic tradition focuses on Orpheus as the figure through
whom the Greeks could represent the rise of literacy.
A poet who courses through that vexed easement splicing the borderlands
between speech and writing, Orpheus reveals much about the problematics
and tensions associated with this transition in the Greek imaginary.141 The
persistent tension between oral and written may be understood precisely
through Orpheuss character, representative as it is of Greek civilisationss
primary psychopathological hamartia: a cultural malaise or syndrome
caused by a long mourning process over the perceived loss of the certain
intermediated procedures. An oral myth transcribed in the immediacy of
ritual, the story now becomes fatally divested both of its sacred mystery and
the dialogical or semiotic energeticsthose that are expressed through
and by merely this solitary author.142 This feeling of loss would continue to
haunt representations of authors throughout the Early and High Middle
Ages, up until a crucial shift in European iconography began to occur in the
late thirteenth century, where the scrivener and the author were united in a
move that monadised the composer.143
While authors of biblical works had been represented in the visual arts
since at least 800 AD, they were predominantly portrayed as the dictators of
their written works, dictating to their secretaries or transcribing the voice of
God themselves. But now they were depicted differently, almost exclusively
reading and writing silently on their own. These images, Lee Honeycutt ob-
140 Karel van der Toorn, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 2. Cf. John Van Seters, The Role of the Scribe
in the Making of the Hebrew Bible, Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 8, no. 1
(2008): 99-129.
141 Marcel Detienne, The Writing of Orpheus: Greek Myth in Cultural Context, tr. Janet Lloyd
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). While Detiennes study, which con-
cerns writing more generally may, be summarised in a number of ways, I adapt this
summary of chapter thirteen of Detiennes book from Elizabeth Marie Youngs article,
Inscribing Orpheus: Ovid and the Invention of a Greco-Roman Corpus, Representa-
tions 101, no. 1 (2008): 1-31, 10.
142 Walter Burkert, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, tr. John Raffan (Cambridge, MA:
1985), 297. I deploy this term after Guattaris description of Freuds Semiotic Energet-
ics in his Schizonalytic Cartographies, 49.
143 Lee Honeycutt, Literacy and the Writing Voice: The Intersection of Culture and Tech-
nology in Dictation, Journal of Business and Technological Communication 18, no. 3
(2004): 294-327. Also see, for variation and exceptions to this shift, Michael T. Clanchy,
From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307, third ed. (London: Wiley-Black-
well, 2013), 117-19.
The Psychoactive Scrivener 94
But Dicks conception of the barrel represents more than an image of joviali-
ty or labour. The image is also a metalepsis for the combustibility of writing,
time, and historyeach of which continues, albeit through newly psychotic
optics, the long Grecian commiseration of orality.
Radically desubjectivising the collective authorial project, and dis-
embodying the pantheons corpus, Dick compares the rolling around
and around of the cylindrical barrel to a rotational time thatakin to
Deleuze and Guattaris abstract time (equal for haecceities and for subject
or things146)is crucially related to human activity, or psychoactivity. The
drudging process by which a subject is compelled to reproduce the universes
tropisms now becomes critically assessed by the scrivener; and here these
tropes cease to be psychotropes: they are images now less of external events
than of the mind or brain itself.
Epiphanistic, Dick imagines that our combined total output forms a
gestalt in and of itself, a move under the force of which our ultimate place
in the universe can be transformed:
Oddly, no one before me has realized that the very drudgery of the human
(and of all) life indicates that we are rising; we think of rising as a weightless,
effortless thing, but a more mature study (a non-fantasy study) shows that it
must occur with actual expended effort. And we are certainly doing that. The
whole goddam barrel is rising. One day it will reach point B, which probably
jumps itand usinto another universe entirely (Ex, 131).
involved being learned in Latin, whereas writing was the process of making
a fair copy on parchment, which was the art of the scribe. Some authors did
their own writing, but they are the exceptions and they distinguished that ac-
tivity from composition.149
147 See Theodore C. Skeat, The Use of Dictation in Ancient Book Production, Proceedings
of the British Academy 42 (1956): 179-208, esp. 189.
148 On literacy as technology, see Jean Searle, Discourses of Literacy (Queensland: Lan-
guage Australia, 1999), 11; on literacy as critical literacy, see Uta Papen, Adult Lit-
eracy as Social Practice: More Than Skills (London: Routledge, 2005), 10-11; and Kevin
Harris, Critical Literacy as Political Intervention: Three Variations on a Theme, in
Critical Literacy: Politics, Praxis, and the Postmodern, ed. Colin Lankshear and Pater L.
McLaren (New York, State University of New York, 1993), 57-80. For a comprehensive
overview of the many frames of literacy, see Deborah K. Marrott, Defining Literacy:
How Basic Writers Define and are Defined by Literacy, PhD diss., The University of
Utah, 2008, ProQuest: AAT 3305688, esp. 16-45.
149 Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 272-3.
The Psychoactive Scrivener 96
what make the history of the phn fully enigmatic is the fact that it is insepa-
rable from the history of idealization, that is, from the history of the mind,
or history as such.154
150 Andrew Brown, Roland Barthes: The Figures of Writing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992),
152.
151 See Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, tr. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang,
1975), 40; Barthes, The Grain of the Voice, tr. Linda Coverdale (New York: Hill and Wang,
1985), 179.
152 For an apposite summary of Ongs and Derridas convergences and divergences in
relation to phonocentrism, presence and otherness, see John D. Schaeffer and David
Gorman, Ong and Derrida on Presence: A Case Study in the Conflict of Traditions,
Educational Philosophy and Theory 50, no, 7 (2008): 856-72, esp. 858-62.
153 Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some prolegomena for Cultural and Religious
History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 114. Also see Ong, Orality and Litera-
cy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Methuen, 1982),
154 Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserls Theory of Signs,
tr. David B. Allison and Newtown Garver (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1973), 75.
The Psychoactive Scrivener 97
There is no doubt, at least for orality, for the hearing and the hearing-one-
self-speak, a zone of experience where giving and receiving, inspiration and
expiration, impression and expression, passivity and activity can only be op-
posed to one another, or even distinguished.155
155 Jacques Derrida, The Rhetoric of Drugs, tr. Michael Israel, in Alexander and Roberts,
eds., High Culture, 19-42, 33. This interview with Autrement was originally published as
La rhetorique de la drogue, in a special issue of Autrement 106 (1989), LEspirit des
Drogues, edited by Jean-Michel Hervieu. This version was then translated (by Israel)
and published in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies: On Addiction 5, no.
1 (1993): 1-25.
156 Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 77.
157 See Angela Woods, Nev Jones, Marco Bernini, Felicity Callard, Ben Alderson-Day, Jo-
hanna C. Badcock, Vaughan Bell, Chris C. H. Cook, Thomas Csordas, Clara Humpsten,
Joel Krueger, Frank Lari, Simon McCarthy Jones, Peter Moseley, Hilary Powell, An-
drea Raballo, David Smailes, and Charles Fernyhough, Interdisciplinary Approaches
to the Phenomenology of Auditory Verbal Hallucinations, Schizophrenia Bulletin 40,
no. 4 (2014): S246-S254, esp. S246.
158 Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (Nebras-
ka: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 111.
159 Ibid.
The Psychoactive Scrivener 98
160 Carl J. Jung, The Psychology of Dementia Praecox, tr. R.F.C. Hull, in The Collected Works
of C.J. Jung, Bollingen Series 20 (Princeton: Princteon University Press, 1974), 95. I note
that a slightly different translation appearswith Jung speaking of the unintelligible
medley... which probably sounds similar to the stupid chattering with which many
patients are affectedin Jung, The Psychology of Dementia Praecox, tr. Frederick Pe-
terson (New York: The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Company,
1909), 95.
161 Pierre Falret, Jules Baillarger, Notes sur un genre de folie dont les accs sont charac-
triss par deux priodes rgulires, lune dpression, lautre dexcitation, [Notes on a
type of insanity in which attacks are characterised by two regular periods, one of de-
pression, the other of excitation], Bulletin of the Academy of Medicine 19 (1854): 340, and
Annales mdico-psycholgiques 6 (1854): 369. See Francois-Regis Cousin, Jean Garrabe,
Denis Morozov, eds. Anthology of French Language Psychiatric Texts (Le Plessis-Robin-
son: Institut Synthlabo pour le Progrs de la Connaissance, 1999), 127-44.
162 Falret and Baillarger, Notes sur un genre de folie, 340.
163 So argue Thierry Haustgen and Hagop Akiskal in French Antecedents of Contem-
porary Concepts in the American Psychiatric Associations Classification of Bipolar
(Mood) Disorders, Journal of Affective Disorders 96 (2006): 149-63, 150-1; Etienne Es-
quirol, Des maladies mentales considres sous les rapports mdical, hyginique et mdi-
co-lgal, 2 vols. (Paris: J.B. Baillire, 1838), 1: 414; also see Esquirol, Mental Maladies:
Treatise on Insanity, tr. E. K. Hunt (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1845). Esquirol
characterises all mania as attack[s], so that rage is but an attack of anger prolonged
[and] suicide is an attack of despair (26, my emphasis). Also see Robert Castel, The Reg-
The Psychoactive Scrivener 99
The shift from Genius to Genie in German takes place in the second half of the
eighteenth century, and it indicates not only the point of a fundamental shift
in aesthetic and poetological conceptions, but also the point where psycho-
analysis radically differs from psychology. [This shift] can be described as an
internalization of creativity, as a claim for creativity of the individual subject
that in turn is located in the ego. One can also describe it as a grammatical dif-
ference: one can have a Genius, but one can be a Genieat least, so it is said.167
quoted in Silke-Maria Weineck, The Abyss Above: Philosophy and Poetic Madness in Pla-
to, Hlderlin and Nietzsche (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002), 12.
168 See Irina Sirotkina, Diagnosing Literary Genius: A Cultural History of Psychiatry in Rus-
sia, 1880-1930 (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Albert Rotherburg,
Creativity and Madness: New Findings and Old Stereotypes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1990); Hans Eysenck, Genius: The Natural History of Creativity (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); David W. Chan, The Mad Genius Contro-
versy: Does the East Differ From the West? Education Journal 29, no. 1 (2001): 1-15, esp.
6-7.
169 Weineck, The Abyss Above, 12.
170 See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 5 vols. (New York: Cosimo, 2013), 3: (Part 2),
1339-1342, 1341.
171 Harold Bloom, for instance, argues that Wordsworth and Leopold, while different,
share in the tradition of the High Romanticist crisis-poem, in which the poet saves
himself from acedia if only to write the next poem, to make it possible. Bloom, The
Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2011), 164.
172 This is how Morel describes a 14-year-old patient with premature dementia in his
Etudes Cliniques sur les Maldies Mentales [Clinical Studies on Mental Diseases], 2
vols. (Paris: J.B. Baillire, 1852), 1: 7-8. Also see Bndict Augusten Morel, Trait des
dgnrescences physique, intellectuelle et morale de lespce humaine [Treatise on the
Physical, Intellectual, and Moral Degenerations of the Human Species] (Paris: J.B.
Baillire, 1857); also see Michel Foucault, The History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, tr.
The Psychoactive Scrivener 101
People who are very prudent and judicious; and who must excel, from Deep
Thought and Wisdom of Speech... so that Aristotle was right, when he said,
That melancholy People are the most ingenious.175
177 Tomas Quinlan, Marielle Leijten, and Luuk Van Waes, Coordinating the Cognitive
Process of Writing: The Role of the Monitor, Written Communication 29 (2012): 345-
368, 346.
178 Gunvant K. Thaker notes that, in the last century, the method by which psychiatrists
classify three broad categories of psychotic illnessas organic, affective, and poor
outcomehas taken root. Here, Morels poor outcome category (by which he in-
vented the prognostic method) has had great influence in distinguishing schizophre-
nia and bipolar. Thaker notes that the prognostic (poor outcome) category often di-
acritically indicates schizophrenic illness, so that bipolar affective disorder or autism,
for instance, when combined with the poor outcome criterion, will be so diagnosed
as schizophrenia. See Thaker, Neurophysicological Endophenotypes Across Bipolar
and Schizophrenia Psychosis, Schizophrenia Bulletin 34, no. 4 (2008): 760-73, esp. 760.
See Franois Llut, Du Demon de Socrate: Specimen dune Application de la Science Psy-
cholgique (Paris: Trinquart, Libraire-Editeur, 1836), 8. George Becker, for instance, ar-
gues that Lluts book is the first pathography in history: The Mad Genius Controversy,
28. Also see the relatively well-argued pathographic assessment of Socratess writing
in Morris J. Karpas, Socrates in the Light of Modern Psychopathology, The Journal of
Abnormal Psychology 10, no. 3 (1914): 185-200, esp. 188. On French psychiatric thought
generally, see, Pierre Pichot, The Diagnosis and Classification of Mental Disorders in
French-speaking Countries: Background, Current Views and Comparison with other
Nomenclatures, Psychological Medicine 12 (1982): 475-92.
179 Sirotkina, Diagnosing Literary Genius, 5-7.
The Psychoactive Scrivener 103
180 As Howells importantly asserts, under Morels model, precoc means rapid deteriora-
tion rather than early age of onset: John G. Howells, ed., The Concept of Schizophrenia:
Historical Perspectives (Washington: American Psychiatric Press, 1991); also see An-
thony Clare, Psychiatry in Dissent: Controversial Issues in Thought and Practice (Lon-
don: Tavistock, 1976), 121.
181 Adityanjee, Dementia Praecox to Schizophrenia, 438; German E. Berrios and Domi-
nic Beer, The Notion of a Unitary Psychosis: A Conceptual History, History of Psychi-
atry 5 (1994): 13-36, esp. 28-9.
182 See Plato, Phaedrus, tr. Waterfield, 69.
183 Bionic is a term that Ronell deploys here to register the seemingly increasingly
machinic nature of those patients under the psychiatric gaze: The Telephone Book, 118.
The Psychoactive Scrivener 104
184 OED Online, Oxford University Press, s.v. dement, adj. and n. accessed 14 January
2014, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/49628/.
185 Describing a periodic and circular insanity, for instance, Kraeplelin hypothesises
in his Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia that this condition was a single mor-
bid process and that all morbid forms brought together here as clinical entity, not
only pass over the one into the other without recognizable boundaries, but that they may
even replace each other in the same case. Emil Kraepelin, Manic-Depressive Insanity and
Paranoia, tr. George M. Robertson (Edinburgh: E & S Livingstone, 1921), 2, emphasis
in original. Also see David Healy, chapter 3, Circular Madness, in Mania: A Short His-
tory of Bipolar Disorder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 52-88, esp.
61-2.
186 Ronell, The Telephone Book, 118. The potential for what Ronell calls the bionic uncon-
scious perhaps achieves its most extraordinary narrativisation in the story of James
Tilley Matthews, the first person to insist that his mind had come under the control
of a machine. What is incredible about Tilleys psychiatric history is that, as Mike Jay
points out, almost all of the conspiracies in which Tilley claimed he was involved were
revealed to have a basis in fact. See Mike Jay, The Influencing Machine: James Tilly Mat-
thews and the Air Loom (London: Attractor Press, 2012). Tilleys case predates Morels,
Kraeplins, and even Bailliargers and Falrets, classificatory systems. Matthews was
treated by John Haslam, who described many of the features of schizophrenia in 1809,
before the aforementioned French psychiatrists adumbrated the category. But nota-
bly this was not before Philippe Pinels first integrated definition of schizophrenia in
1801. See Pinel, A Treatise on Insanity, 1806 (New York: Hafner, 1962); John Haslam, Ob-
servations on Madness and Melancholy (London: J. Callows, 1867); Adityanjee, Demen-
tia Praecox to Schizophrenia, 438; Nigel M. Bark, On the History of Schizophrenia,
New York State Journal of Medicine 88 (1988): 374-83; Foucault, The History of Madness,
201-2
The Psychoactive Scrivener 105
As Jung detects, both organs still function (for they usually belong to a young
person), and they remain gestural and deictic in spite of the schizophren-
ic-disaffective body relation, which now afflicts the subject, causing them to
articulate an anonymous flow of speech.187
Accentuating the automatisation of the schizo-hebephrenic, Jung mim-
ics the precocious dement, and tells us, by way of illustration, that they
might talk in this way:
For four months I have had queer ideas; it seems to me that I am obliged
to think and say them; someone makes me speak, someone suggests to me
coarse words and it is not my fault if my mouth works in spite of me.188
187 Jung, The Psychology Of Dementia Praecox, 81-4; I take the anonymous flow of speech
from Foucault, Theatrum Philosophicum, 174. Also see, in this same essay, Fou-
caults discussion of the mouth and Deleuzes phonodecentering at 179-80. On the
mouth as an organ of depths, see Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 181, 187-8, 196, and
esp. 223.
188 Ibid., 84. This passage is also quoted in Ronell, The Telephone Book, 118 (Ronells note
cites a different edition and translation of this work).
189 Ronell also notices the strikingness of this passage, asserting that here there exists
an accentuation on the physiological organization of the mouthpiece, a kind of mech-
anized vision of the body in response... Ronell, The Telephone Book, 118.
190 See Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, 266-7; Andres Vaccari and Belinda Barnet, Prole-
gomena to a Future Robot History: Stiegler, Epiphylogenesis and Technical Evolu-
tion, Transformations 17 (2009): http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/is-
sue_17/article_09.shtml/
191 Cf. Cohen and Poldracks study of writers in which they found the ability to inhibit
a motor response does not decrease with automaticity, suggesting that some aspects
of automatic behaviour are not ballistic. Jessica R. Cohen and Russel A. Poldrack,
Automaticity in Motor Sequence Learning Does not Impair Response Inhibition,
Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 15, no. 1 (2008): 108-15, esp. 108, emphasis mine. In
contrast, previous studies have shown that error correction may be inhibitedthat is,
The Psychoactive Scrivener 106
No longer simply a scribe, the scrivener is now responsible for more than
phoneme to orthographeme conversion (POC); they must also switch be-
tween multiple praxes, and this makes the scrivener increasingly subject to a
new form of cognitive depletion: namely, to torpor, fatigue, acedia, and au-
tomatisation.192 Now a machinic assemblage, the scrivener confronts what
Guattari calls their territorialised genome; they are continuously pushed
beyond their perfectly circumscribed potential, and must reveal their de-
generacy and dementedness, becoming the Deleuzoguattarian Body With-
out Organsor, as Ronell alternatively offers, a bionic unconscious.193
Now when the scrivener opens their automatic mouth they reveal the
place where cries are broken into phonemes, morphemes, semantemes, a
place where the profundity of an oral body separates itself from incorporeal
meaning.194 Acting as if on a kind of drugor else as if in need of some
recuperative medicationthese mad beings who have queer ideas and feel
obliged to speak them become at once present and absent, energetic and
morbid, dual yet singular, circular yet static. Their unicities, which were once
dispersed, have no become the schizzes and flows that begin to encumber
and attenuate the psychoactive scrivene. This new personage who could be,
in Heideggers words, an Anyone, Verfallena degenerated figure, living
writers will not adjust their behaviour, and will automatically continue scrivening:
Marille Leijten, Sarah Ransdell, and Luuk Van Waes, Correcting text production
errors: Isolating the Effects of Writing Mode from Error Span, Input Mode, and Lex-
icality, Written Communication 27, no. 2 (2010): 189-227; Marille Leijten, Luuk Van
Waes, and Danil Janssen, Error correction Strategies of Professional Speech Recog-
nition Users: Three Profiles, Computers in Human Behaviour 26 (2010): 964-75. Also see
Donald Norman and Tim Shallice, Attention to Action: Willed and Automatic Con-
trol of Behaviour, in Richard J. Davidson, Gary E. Schwarts and David Shapiro, eds.,
Consciousness and Self-regulation: Advances in Research and Theory (New York: Plenum
Press, 1986), 4: 1-18.
192 As one study proposes, the writer undertakes at least four processes, acting as a pro-
poser, which generates ideas; a translator, which converts them into strings, a tran-
scriber, which converts them to strings; and an evaluator/reviser, which evaluates
proposed and written language: John R. Hayes and N. Anne Chenoweth, Is working
Memory Involved in the Transcribing and Editing of Texts? Written Communication
23, no. 2 (2006): 135-141; cf. Hayes and Chenoweth, Working Memory In an Editing
Task, Written Communication 24, no. 4 (2007): 283-294; and Hayes and Linda S. Flower,
Identifying the Organization of Writing Processes, in Lee W. Gregg and Erwin R.
Steinberg, eds., Cognitive Processes In Writing (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1980), 3-30.
193 Disinclined to fully anticipate the dubious advent of Lamarckian epigenetics, Guattari
articulates the difference between the human and machine thus:
The reproducibility of the technical machine differs from that of living beings, in
that it is not based on sequential codes perfectly circumscribed in a territorialized
genome.
Guattari, Chaosmosis, 42.
194 Foucault, Theatrum Philosophicum, 179.
The Psychoactive Scrivener 107
195 Heidegger, Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit, tr. Joan Stambaugh (New
York: State University of New York Press, 1996), 133n3, 241-2. Also see Peter Sloterdijk,
Critique of Cynical Reason, tr. Michael Eldred, Theory and History of Literaure 40 (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 200, 212n47.
196 Criticising the immanentist critical- and anti-psychiatric theorists of the late twen-
tieth century, Peter Sedgwick argues that physical medicine does not simply belong
to the world of Fact [and] natural substances while psychiatry, on the other hand,
belongs to the world of Value [and] of ethical judgements. Unwilling to concede
medicines value-free, apolitical, and objective character, Sedgwick reconceives ill-
ness altogether, making visible the extent to which, while le folie circulaire has been
treated as a disease, it is less a medical than an anthropocentric description of the
body. See Sedgwick, Psycho Politics, 28-30. Foucault makes a similar point in his The
Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century, when he argues that the eighteenth
century prescribed new rules, and above all transposed the practice onto an explic-
it, concerted level of analysis such as had been previously unknown. At this point,
Foucault argues the age is entered not so much of social medicine as of a considered
noso-politics: The Foucault Reader, 273-291, 274, my emphasis.
Chapter Three
(De)automatising Subjects:
Scrivening in Modern Literary History
William S. Burroughs1
while much adumbrated in modern literary history, the image and nature of
the scrivener remains little assessed. Scriveners appear in literary fiction
ranging from Herman Melvilles Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall
Street (1853)2 to Neal Stephensons postmodernist science fiction novel
Cryptonomicona work in which a computer, a close relative to the scriv-
ener, is a human being. From around the 1850s and onwards, modern con-
ceptualisations of the scrivener elaborate an increasingly diffuse network of
pluralised articulations, illuminating the peculiar psychopathology of what
initially seems a newly machinic author. By contrast, these figures are also
increasingly the utterers of polyphonous voices, endowed with progressively
more liberal political freedoms, and given greater and intellectual capac-
ities, including critical literacy.3 And yet, as I will argue in this chapter,
the scrivener operates as a deauthorised author; that is, as a newly enhanced
model of the pre-modern scribe.
1 William S. Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night (London: Picador, 1982), xviii. Quoted in
Polina Mackay, Authorship in the Writings and Films of William S. Burroughs, in
Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and Polina Mackay, Authorship in Context: From the Theoretical to
the Material (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 111.
2 Melvilles short story first appeared serially without his name in the November and
December 1853 editions of Putnams Magazine under this title. It was reprinted with
minor amendments under the shortened title Bartleby in The Piazza Tales (New
York: Dix & Edwards, 1856). All references hereafter are given to the following edition:
Herman Melville, Bartleby, in The Piazza Tales (London: Constable and Company,
1923), 19-65.
3 On the scriveners mental capacity, see my chapter 1.
108
(De)automatising Subjects 109
4 Melvilles novel is almost certainly the capsule text of this genre, and it is for this rea-
son that I shall examine it in detail in chapter 4, the chapter that follows.
5 N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was A Computer (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 2005), 1. It is notable that in Stephensons novel it is a Lieutenant superior to
Waterhouse, a Colonel Earl Cornstock, who insists that A computer is a human be-
ing. As Hayles points out, this observation alludes to the etymology and usage of the
term computer, whose usage in the 1930s and 40s varied so as to denote to those
professionals who were employed to perform calculations. But Hayless etymological
analysis only scarcely suggests the way in which this scene demonstrates how their
term computer may traffics in both derogatory and delegatory meanings in the con-
text of present-day (and futurological) digital discourse. See Neal Stephenson, Crypto-
nomicon (New York: Avon, 2002), 599-600.
6 Also see Karen Scherzinger, The Jouissance of Influence: Being and Following The
Writer in Michiel Heynss The Typewriters Tale, Journal of Literary Studies 26, no. 1
(2010): 1-19.
(De)automatising Subjects 110
a scrivener merely of type: She was a typewriter, tout court, and persons of
quality did not as a rule dine with their typewriters (TT, 33). Here as in other
formulations of typists, secretaries, notaries, and the like, the scrivener is
subjectively reduced to a machinic body whose ontological functions
are wholly integrated with their authorial tasks. It is as Heinz Hartmann
writes: an instance in which the integration of the somatic systems
involved in the action is automatized, and so is the integration of the
individual mental acts involved in it.7
Politicising this complex institutionalisation of lexical servitude as it
subsists in the late twentieth century, Hayles identifies, in what she calls the
Computational Universe, a malignant compulsion that serves only to curtail
the typewriter or calculators freedom in a metaphysical sense. The Regime
of Computation, Hayles asserts,
7 Heinz Hartmann, Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation (New York: Interna-
tional Universities Press, 1958), 88-91; also see Arthur J. Deikman, Deautomatization
and the Mystic Experience, in Tart, ed. Altered States of Consciousness (New York: John
Wiley and Sons, 1969), 23-43, 30.
8 Hayles, My Mother Was A Computer, 21-22.
9 See Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, tr. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 1952), 50-51; and Sen Burke, Reconstructing the Author, in
Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern (London: Edinburgh University Press, 1995),
xxv.
(De)automatising Subjects 111
pretative pleasure, since what triggers and constitutes its emergent complex-
ity is precisely its status as knowable and quantifiable phenomena, that
freed both from the mysteries of the Logos and the complexities of discur-
sive explanations dense with ambiguitiesrelieves readers of the task of
decoding and decryption.10
Such a distinction between computation and metaphysics not only di-
vests computers of their metaphysical potentiality, however; it also downplays
the automatising or computational economy out of which the scrivener,
a computer in their own right, may be thought now capable of producing,
enacting, or performing something like an originary Logos. Disabusing from
this machinic author the power to reappropriate, redeploy, or experiment
with these technics in as-of-now unimaginable, metaphysical ways, Hayless
distinction delimitsalbeit as it deftly organisesour metaphysical under-
standing of computative or computational authorship.
Wielding what individual power is afforded to all subjectsor perhaps,
to invoke Latour, to all actantsthe scrivener yet remains partially com-
promised by his or her duty to write, a duty that is enforced by a surfeit of
socio-legal interdictions at the primary level of the institutional operant (see
O1 in Figure 2.1).11 It is arguable that an inexorable trace of some malaise
(speaking in affective terms), or simply an imprecisely expressed orientation
to loss, develops in the scriveners particularised and circumscribed act
of writing herea trace that derives from the abnegation of their individual
agency. Now the evidence of little more than their self-sacrifice, the scriven-
ers work is not simply contoured by what has been spent, for instance, in
terms of the writers metrical (Chronos) time; it is also a dessication of the
event, or a disoccasion of the moment (a never-occasioned or never-occasion-
ing instant), in which the scriveners own self-directed memorialisation of
historytheir own exteriorization or record of the pastaccedes to its
own supplantation under the weight of an exteriorised force.12
When Huxley, by way of Broad, indicates the end limit of the Mind at
10 Ibid., 41.
11 A clear introduction to actor-network theory appears in Bruno Latours Reassembling
the Social: an Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005), 10-11.
12 I use exteriorization here after Stiegler, who conceives of writing, through technics,
as the pursuit of life by means other than life. If Stieglers formulation is accepted,
then we may also posit that the scrivener is the subject (X) through whom another be-
ing (Y) pursues life. The formulation may thus read as follows: X pursues life by means
other than their life, but by what means exactly? By means of Ys life. See Stiegler,
Technics and Time I, 17.
(De)automatising Subjects 112
Large, he explains that, far from apprehending the universes past, this
Mind at Large has access only to that past which is actually witnessed by
the subject; here, the scriveners mind becomes a cipher (or perhaps a Mind
at Small) through which precisely this inaccessible but universal past (what
I call Infinitude in Figure 2.2) is made apparent to their controllernow
the master or critical reader of the writeras their past. Brought under the
umbrage of some externalitysome remote and foregone periodisation
the scrivener produces a set of inscriptions that, if they are to be dutiful-
ly accomplished, must be written at the expense of their own memorial
recollection, their own memory. The unwritten past of the scrivener now
suddenly becomes the universal past with respect to which even the Mind
at Large remains barred and excluded; it thus constitutes the Deleuzoguat-
tarian conception of Aeon time: the inexpressible, common, ontological
past shared between subjects and objects alike. When Stiegler identifies a
similar expanse of time in Heideggers lhistorical, he names this duration
the temporality of Dasein. For him, it is the past that I never lived but is
nevertheless my own.13
Imbricated in material technics as much as in transient moments, this
apparently inaccessible-yet-universal time also limns a phenomenology of
epigenetics and, as Stiegler so radically asserts, inherits much from the La-
marckian dimension of evolutionary philosophy. Lamarcks for-two-cen-
turies marginalised program for evolutionary adaptation is not, however,
simply brought into the Stieglerian fold for the French thinkers own archaic
or esoteric reasons. Recuperated as vociferously by modern scientific studies
as it is re-enchanted by Stieglers study of time, renewed interest in Lamarck-
ism opens the door to a novel conceptualisation of incarnate memory whose
dimensions may yet ramify as the rediscovery of his theory, a realisation that
transgenerational genetics do indeed involve the transfer, through some im-
perceptible media, of certain acquired or even misremembered character-
istics and experiences developed during ones lifetime.14
For Stiegler, the universal time of the past is the aporetic moment in
which the scrivener, as much as their tools, emerges not from a conscious-
ness present to itself, [the] master of matter, but will pursue a process
engaged long before the rupture between inside and outside, the break
between sovereign-dictator and scribe. While it represents only one break
after another, this new schism nevertheless constitute[s] a rupture, Stiegler
notes, and allows for a new organization of diffrance.15 Such a univer-
sal past is, or has been, transmitted not simply epigenetically, though, but
through what Stiegler calls the epiphylogenesis of manmeaning the
conservation, accumulation, and sedimentation of successive epigeneses,
mutually articulated.16 Reenchanting the evolutionary process, Stieglerian
epiphylogenesis casts a disorienting shadow over the history of writing; it
implies the way in which the scribes origin may be now reduced to a distinc-
tionto a newly organised diffrancebetween subjects.
Pivoting neither around a Marxian (dialectical material) nor a Foucauld-
ian (biopolitical) institutional difference (See O2, in Figure 2.2), however
nor around a difference grounded in subjective biological or phylogenetic
potentialities (underlying ability17)Stieglers conceptualisation of tech-
nics and time proposes that the writing subject acquires characteristics, in a
Lamarckian fashion, through a methectic frottage between mechanics and
biology.18 This mechanism of evolution, Stiegler avers, is enacted precisely
through writing or scrivening. And, as Stiegler indicates, the evidence for
this proposition could be no more clearly apparent than in the very fact of
the extantness (the existence) of certain textstogether with the lacunae
that mark the absence, the omission, of others. Yet, it is in the absence of cer-
tain kinds of work that we can perceive not simply a non-work, but the trace
of the scriveners unarticulated knowledge: that is, the very inaccessible
infinitude that now represents the scriveners own supplanted memories.
In other words, what is not written, as a kind of material that can itself be
examined and intuited, represents not, in the negative valency, what has not
been written, but rather, in the positive, the unwork or even the may-have-
been work that destroys memory by transforming it.19
As Stiegler puts this Platonian formulation: Technicization is what pro-
duces a loss of memory... hypomnesic logography menaces the anamnesic
memory of knowledge, and hypomnsis risks contaminating all memory,
thereby even destroying it.20 Hypomnesic writing, of course, is defined as
note-taking or scrivening; it is not, to be sure, analogous with the meta-
physical writing to which Haynes refers, but is rather an unreliable form of
memorisation. But if it this writing is not hypomnesically or mnemonically
preserved, then technicization through calculation will drive, as Stiegler
cautions, Western knowledge down a path that leads to a forgetting of its
origin, which is also a forgetting of its truth.21 If hypomnesic logography is
now a sovereign grammar, thoughone that is sanctioned by the Regime of
Computation, and glorious in its displacement of prior epistemess transcen-
dental writingthen to enact a mode of psychoactive scrivening might be to
treat writing as a mnemonic in its own right.
That is, to psychoactively scriven would now be to evacuate the word of
its metaphysical presence (its originary Logos) in order to accomplish, like
the scribe, an orthographical automatisation, one that is not anymore hewed
to an assymetrical dyadwhich is to say one that is not about master and
slave, sovereign and scribe, nosologist and patient. But to be so independent,
writing would also need to become deautomatised; it would need, somehow,
to enable a syntonic integration and incorporation of that authority that has
always constituted it. It would need to enculturate itself to, or inure itself
against, the torpor that threatens to afflict itto comport itself in such a way
as to find itself defended against the weight or threat of that antagonism that
also enlivens it.
Envisaging a similar break with the history of writing, Deleuze and Guat-
tari will come to name this mode of deautomatisation schizoanalysisa
form of writing that is as analytical as it is schizophrenic. But schizoanalysis
is Deleuzes own creation: it first appeared in his book Difference and Repeti-
tion, there appearing as a means of encountering Antonin Artauds method
of bringing into being the terrible revelation of thought without an image.
19 On extantness, see Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, tr. Albert
Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 70-2.
20 Stiegler, Technics and Time 1, 3.
21 Ibid.
(De)automatising Subjects 115
Going after the conquest of a new principle which does not allow itself to be
represented, schizoanalysis conceives of schizophrenia as the acme of this
deautomatisation process, the nadir of insight, the break that finally affords
a real possibility for thought.22
Rendering Artauds revelatory procedure in terms that indicate its imbri-
cation with evolution and biology, Catherine Dale proposes that whilein
all his nave sincerity Artaud is an embarrassment to philosophyhis sin-
cerity also
The dictation of reason, as the dictator of the Classical Age, has always
hung low above the scrivener like so many blades of Damocles. But reason
now sounds the echo of French psychiatry, which Foucaultin his Theatrum
Philosophicumencodes precisely as that futile symptomatologizing
that is carried out as another means of discovering the substantial truth
that lies behind realitys phantasms, lurking amid its unwritten history.24
Adopting Deleuzes formulation of the pure Event to recount what he ex-
periences as an emergent, Artaudian schizoanalytics, Foucault petitions his
reader to reconceive phantasms as corporeal materialities, encrypting his
own nosopolitical protest in the metaphoricity of spatial condonation25:
Phanstasms do not extend organisms into the imaginary; they topologize the
materiality of the body. They should consequently be freed from the restric-
tions we impose upon them, freed from the dilemmas of truth and falsehood
and of being and nonbeing... they must be allowed to conduct their dance, to
act out their mime, as extrabeings.26
22 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, tr. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1994), 147-8. These lines are for the most part also quoted in Catherine Dale,
Cruel: Antonin Artaud and Gilles Deleuze, in Massumi, ed. A Shock to Thought, 87.
23 Dale, Cruel, 87.
24 Foucault, Theatrum Philosophicum, 169.
25 See Gilles Deleuze, What is an Event? in The Fold: Leibniz, and The Baroque, tr. Tom
Conley (London: Continuum, 1991), 15, 86-94. Deleuzes discussion of hallucinatory
perception as a precursor to the event is also apposite here, especially in relation to
Foucaults premonition of LSD, seemingly avant la survenue: 107-108.
26 Foucault, Theatrum Philosophicum, 170.
(De)automatising Subjects 116
lenticular ghosts that are resident in the ordinary or sober material body.
Turning to drugs, and taking particular care to render the effects of LSD in
an arrestingly fertile dialect, Foucault illuminates in his description of the
emergent experience of the acid-trip those contours of thought that invari-
ably awake into contemplation.
These are those embryonic flashes that as soon as they arise become re-
cathected by what Isabelle Stengers names an event [that] does not have the
power to dictate how it will be narrated, and which serve only to advertise
the acid-trip as a fixall for acedia.27 Recalling Philip K. Dicks conceptualisa-
tion, in the Exegesis, of the rising barrel (Ex, 131)the procedure in which
one becomes aware of an oblique apperception of elevation and mobility
the hallucinogen presents an event that is difficult to put into words, and
is nearly, like the unwritten history of the scrivener, ineffable. Nevertheless,
the acid trip produces what Foucault describes as a
27 See Isabelle Stengers, The Invention of Modern Science, tr. Daniel W. Smith (Minneap-
olis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 67. On the event as an actant, see Bruno
Latour, The Pasteurization of France, tr. Alan Sheridan and John Law (Cambridge: Har-
vard University Press, 1984), 156; Rudge, Actants at Any Depth, 8.
28 Foucault, Theatrum Philosophicum, 190-1.
29 As Boothroyd argues, if the popular idiomatic expression, like X on acid... means
anything at all, [it] means something only in relation to its opposite, X not on acid
as if the not on acid is something constant, identifiable and normatively coherent or
straight. Boothroyd, Culture On Drugs, 157. I use Foucaults term counter-memory
here to signpost the development of his idea about resurrection, which he had devel-
oped in the 1970s, and around the time he would write Theatrum Philosophicum.
See Jos Medina, Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance, Foucault Studies
12 (2011): 9-35, esp. 24 and 29.
(De)automatising Subjects 117
30 See Boothroyd, Culture on Drugs, 166-7. Also see James E. Miller, The Passion of Michel
Foucault (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 274; Michel Foucault: Be-
yond Good and Evil, dir. David Stewart, 1993 (London: BBC2, broadcast as a part of a
series titled The Late Show, 29 June 1993), accessed 23 July, 2014, http://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=xQHm-mbsCwk/.
31 Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, 274. The lines of Artaud quoted by Simeon are
often miscited as having appeared in Artauds Voyage to The Land of the Tarahu-
mas. These lines actually appear in Artauds short piece titled Address to the Dalai
Lama. See Jack Hirschman, ed., Antonin Artaud: An Anthology (San Francisco: City
Lights Books, 1965), 64-5.
32 Quoted in Boothroyd, Culture on Drugs, 166, and cited by Miller, The Passions of Michel
Foucault, 245. Foucault elaborates on his acid trip:
We can easily see how LSD inverts the relationship of ill-humour, stupidity and
thought; it no sooner eliminates the supremacy of categories than it tears away the
ground of its indifference and disintegrates the dumbshow of stupidity...
Theatrum Philsophicum, 191.
33 See Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 58; The Fold: Leibniz, and The Baroque, 107-8.
(De)automatising Subjects 118
34 Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, tr. Alan Sheridan
(London: Tavistock, 1973), 4.
35 Foucault, History of Madness, 510, 251. Foucaults Part III, Figures of Madness, runs
from 251-96.
36 It was precisely after this line that Deleuze Guattari add a note (n20): What will peo-
ple think of us? Foucault had said the following:
... if it is given to thought to confront stupidity, the drugs, which mobilize it, which
color, agitate, furrow, and dissipate it, which populate it with differences and sub-
stitute for the rare flash a continuous phosphorence, are the source of a partial
thoughtperhaps.
(De)automatising Subjects 119
But, even we accept the impact of Deleuzes schizoanalysis, what will have
so changed for Foucault by 1970 to lead him to see a way to install, in place
of the psychiatric partition of mania and melancholia, the twin ills of the
philosopher?
It was Foucaults historicisation of madness, with its transcription of
nosologys history, and its influential apprehension of what he will later call
medical perception, that permitted Foucault to reimagine psychiatry as
itself an act of scrivening. It is a form, that is, of note-taking about mental dis-
ease in hypomnesic shorthand; a method of transcription by which the words
of a spectral, mythic sovereign are composed. Thus, what Pinel discovered
in fevers are not the diseases themselves, but what Foucault sees only as
the signs of the illness. Madness is not an original origin, but a signal
that permits psychiatry to manipulate the causal and temporal chain, and
to proceed from disease to lesion where it had formerly proceeded only
from lesion to disease.40 In rehearsing so many analyses of this kind, anal-
yses that abound in a metaphorology of emptiness and deception,41 Foucault
challenges positivism by means of a novel method in the confused, and
ill-structured domain of the history of ideas.42 And while this method tends
toward its own kind of anti-psychiatry, the usefulness of Foucaults history
inheres in the space it makes for a critical study of classificatory medicine in
terms that are essentially outside its own specialist lexicon.
Reinstating the classical ages ratiocination of madness in a new and
apparently ludic language, Foucaults history also distances itself from that
periods figures by leveling history under a primary bifurcation. Foucault
thus speaks of the ill wills and ill humors that arise in a drugless socius;
he does so in what is an undecidable, paranomastic frisson with the four
Hippocratic humors:
In a state deprived of drugs, thought possesses two horns: one is ill will (to
baffle categories) and the other ill humor (to point to stupidity and transfix
it). We are far from the old sage who invests so much good will in his search
for the truth that he can contemplate with equanimity the indifferent diver-
sity of changing fortunes and things... But we are also distant from the mel-
ancholy that makes itself indifferent to the world, and whose immobility
alongside books and a globeindicates the profundity of thought and the
diversity of knowledge.43
Doing away with those persistent figures that had been previously brought
into order by nineteenth- and twentieth-century psychiatry, both drugs and
Foucaultor drugs qua Foucaultexteriorise these symbolic valences and
denude these bipolar pulsations. Contemplating the indefinite equiva-
40 Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, 183. In this semiotic conceptualisation of Foucault, it
is possible to see the legacy of Saussurean linguistics, which a range of scholars (and
most notably Mark Bevir) have associated with the postfoundationalism of Ernesto
Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Antonio Gramsci, Nikolas Rose, and others: see Mark Bevir,
Political Science After Foucault, History of the Human Sciences 24, no. 4 (2011): 81-96,
85-6; and Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999).
41 In the concluding paragraph to The Birth of the Clinic, for instance, Foucault speaks of
the hidden figures of positivismthose which are hidden by it, by it also indispens-
able to its birth (199).
42 Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, 183.
43 Ibid., 191.
(De)automatising Subjects 121
lence of these horns, Foucault altogether eliminates the old necessity for
a theatre of immobility, making legible through epideictic allusion at least
two kinds of theatres. The first is the medical theatre, so characterised by
its patientss immobile bodies; the second is the Artaudian theatre of the
monological scriveners cruelty and turmoil. While the latter may be just
as readily characterised by immobility as the former, the latter is immobile
only insofar as it expresses the weaknesses of a mind that has not pondered
its weakness.44 Of course, Foucaults allusion to the old theatre of immo-
bility also suggests more than just the dynamic nature of these theatres: it
perhaps even more explicitly indicates the graphic theatre of the memorised,
exteriorised, and hyperstasised word on a page.
Equivocally stopping short of schizophrenia, Foucaults history of mad-
ness barely even scrivens a note on the rich forelives of the psychoses and
neuroses, omitting the important topological French texts of Baillarger
and Falret altogether.45 If these works remain unfit for archaeological dis-
interment, though, it is perhaps because they falsely mask that species of
alienation that has always been consubstantial with the awkward power
play intrinsic to the reality of the doctor-patient couple. And the alienation
of the patient in particular will remain suppressed until Freud, the ur-doc-
tor of the twentieth century, begins to concentrate reasons energies on psy-
choanalysis. Incarnating reason in his own oftentimes-cocaine-fuelled body,
Freud will come face to face with the unheimlich of madness itself, attend-
ing to it and assembling it in an exhaustive proliferation of observations.46
44 I take these lines from Artauds fascinating correspondence with Jacques Rivire,
which is notable for its influential illustration of the Deleuzoguattarian brain-sub-
ject. Describing his weak mind, Artaud says that if his mind truly had pondered its
weakness, then it would render that weakness in dense and forceful words. Here
the act of writing is consubstantial with classifying the weakness of the mind. At the
end of this letter, Artaud writes one of the most illuminating passages, explaining to
Rivire how the psychoactive scrivener comes to identify themselves, both by and as
their brains (psycho-) activity:
These foolhardy works often seem to you the product of a mind which is not yet
in possession of itself, but who knows what brain they conceal, what power of life,
what mental fever which circumstances alone have reduced. Enough about myself
and about my works that are still unborn. All I ask is to feel my brain.
See Artaud, Antonin Artaud to Jacques Rivire, June 6, 1924, in Antonin Artaud: An
Anthology (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1965), 21.
45 I have addressed these psychiatristss works in detail prreviously in chapter 2.
46 Foucaults genealogy of psychoanalysis (and its psychosis/neurosis dialectic) traces
it not to the dementia praecox texts, but to the influence of Pinels Bictre, a Paris
mental institution exclusively for men, and William Tukes York Retreat, a Quaker-run
institution. The influence of Tukes retreat on nineteenth-century psychiatry can be
measured in the major reforms that followed its establishment, and by the popularity
(De)automatising Subjects 122
50 Ibid., 202.
51 Ibid., 376.
52 The French Monopsychose or Psychose unique is different to Esquirols monomania,
the latter of which Foucault dismisses as only a meagre contribution to psychiatric
knowledge. See notably G.E. Berrios and D. Bear, The Notion of a Unitary Psychosis:
A Conceptual History, History of Psychiatry 5 (1994): 13-36; and Foucault, History of
Madness, 201.
53 On Foucaults anti-psychiatry and its reconfiguration as theorisation of power (for in-
stance, psychiatric power and biopower) from the 1970s, see Pat Bracken and Philip
Thomas, From Szasz to Foucault On the Role of Anti-Psychiatry, Philosophy, Psychi-
atry, and Psychology 17, no. 3 (2010): 219-28, esp. 225.
54 Sedgwick, Psycho Politics, chapter 5, Michel Foucault: The Anti-History of Psychiatry,
(De)automatising Subjects 124
125-148.
55 Sedgwick, Psycho Politics, 133; Foucault, History of Madness, 510.
56 Foucault, History of Madness, 510-11.
57 Ibid., 508-9.
58 Ibid., 510-11; The Birth of the Clinic, 199.
59 As Foucault argues, the Enlightenment itself has determined, at least in part, what
we are, what we think, and what we do today. Foucault, What is Enlightenment?
in The Foucault Reader, 32-50, 33. For scholars of the enlightenment such as Graeme
Garrard, Foucaults claim, is beyond dispute. Garrard, The Enlightenment and Its
Enemies, The American Behavioral Scientist 49, no. 5 (2006): 664-80, esp. 664.
(De)automatising Subjects 125
Two years after writing this letter to Rivire, and only five years following
Aldous Huxleys publication of his first collection of fiction, titled Limbo, Ar-
taud would publish his own collection of writings under a title that echoed
Huxleys book: The Umbilicus of Limbo. Here Artaud declared that where
others present their works, I claim to do no more than show my mind.62
Huxleys book had introduced, in both its title and contents, one of the
most important (psycho)tropisms in his oeuvre: the chiasmus. Indicated by
the interstitial locus or the in-betweenness connoted by the word lim-
bo, the chiasmus represents the young English authors turning away from
natures embracean act that represents the extent to which which he at-
tributed his partial blindness to a sense of being only ever half-present, and
between two worlds.63 (I will address this in detail in chapters 4, 5 and 6.)
For both authors, however, the titular word limbo operates as a metonym
for their subjective liminality; both writers feel as though they are situated at
the centre of an agon between truth and disorder, discovery and distraction.
It is a space in which the comfort of narrative coincides with the horrific
60 Foucault, History of Madness, 165. On the history of electric shock, see Edward Shorter
and David Healy, Shock Therapy: A History of Electroconvulsive Treatment in Mental Ill-
ness (London: Rutger University Press, 2007), esp. 9.
61 Antonin Artaud to Jacques Rivire, June 5, 1923, in Antonin Artaud: An Anthology, 7.
62 Aldous Huxley, Limbo (London: Chatto & Windus, 1920); Antonin Artaud, Antonin
Artaud: Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1976), 59-76, 59.
63 I elaborate on this in detail in chapter 6 and 7. See especially Figure 7.1.
(De)automatising Subjects 126
64 Taking up Karl Jasperss criteria for true delusions, this is how Sass describes the
combination of apathy (acedia) and certitude. Sass, Madness and Modernism, 291.
65 Sass, Madness and Modernism, 229, 531n42. For a commentary on what the reviewer
calls Sasss remarkable reconstruction of schizophrenia, see Robert J. Barrett, The
Schizophrenic and the Liminal Persona in Modern Society, Culture, Medicine and
Psychiatry 22 (1998): 465-498. On hyperreflexivity, see Marino Perez-Alvarez, Hyperre-
flexivity as a Condition of Mental Disorder: A Clinical and Historical Perspective, Psi-
cothema 20, no. 2 (2008): 181-7; and on diminished self-affection, see Sass,Self-dis-
turbance and Schizophrenia: Structure, Specificity, Pathogenesis, Schizophrenia
Research 152 (2014): 5-11, 6.
66 Appealing to the history of Saturn as the planet of melancholy under which the
Renaissance took refuge, Prez-lvarez argues that hyperreflexivity and mental dis-
orders only become understandable as such in the nineteenth century: Thus, reflex-
ivity under the sign of Saturn renders melancholy an aestheticpoeticemotion,
and under the clinical sign turns it into a clinicalprosaicemotion, which is what
comes to constitute depression. Prez-lvarez , Hyperreflexivity as a Condition of
Mental Disorder, 186. Also see, notably, Emily Brady and Arto Haapala, Melancholy
as an Aesthetic Emotion, Contemporary Aesthetics 1, http://www.contempaesthetics.
org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=214; Judith Misbach and Henderikus J.
Stam, Medicalizing Melancholia: Exploring Profiles of Psychiatric Professionaliza-
tion, Journal of the History of Behavioural Sciences 42 (2006): 41-59.
(De)automatising Subjects 127
something more than causal interaction; they are, in a sense, different as-
pects of the very same phenomenon, but described from two different stand-
points.69
Huxleys Limbo, Artauds The Umbilcus of Limbo, and later, Dicks duplica-
tion of himself in (or as) Horselover Fatthe protagonist of his 1981 novel
VALISeach become textual operations that may be correlated with Sasss
reformulation of the positive and negative syndromes of schizophrenia.70
67 Artaud, Antonin Artaud Anthology, 35. While Sass does not explicitly give the title of
this short essay in his article, it is this work that he cites: Louis A. Sass, Negative
Symptoms, Schizophrenia, and the Self, International Journal of Psychology and Psy-
chological Therapy 3, no. 2 (2003): 153-180, 156. Of interest here is Bretons claims that
Artauds La Rvolution Surraliste attained the highest point of phosphorescence
in the magazines entire serieswhether this was uttered before or after is unclear:
qtd. in John H. Matthews, Andr Breton: Sketch for an Early Portrait (Indiana: John
Benjamins Publishing Company, 1986), 110. On ipseity see Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as
Another, tr. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 2-3. Also
see Shaun Gallagher, Stephen Watson, Phillippe Brun, Phillippe Romanski, eds., Ip-
seity and Alterity: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Intersubjectivity (Rouen: Universit de
Rouen Press, 2004); and in terms of ipseitys central place in Sasss recently refined
self-disorder model of schizophrenia, see Sass, Self-disturbance and Schizophre-
nia, 5-11, 6; and Sass, The Catastrophe of Heaven: Modernism, Primitivism, and the
Madness of Antonin Artaud, Modernism/Modernity 3 (1996): 73-91.
68 Louis A. Sass, Negative Symptoms, Schizophrenia, and the Self, 156; Ricoeur, One-
self as Another, 2.
69 Ibid.
70 The word Horselover Fat is characteristic of Dicks tendency to employ paronoma-
sia, and especially German plays on words. Dick is a German adjective for fat
(De)automatising Subjects 128
(thick; stout; swollen), and Philip, derived from the Greek or Phillipos, lit-
erally means lover of horses. See Oxford Dictionaries, Oxford University Press, s.v.
dick, adj. accessed 25 November, 2014, http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/trans-
late/german-english/dick/; M.G. Easton, Illustrated Bible Dictionary (New York: Harper
& Brothers, 1893), s.v. Philip, 546. But what is perhaps even more important about
Dicks life and work concerning these positive and negative syndromes, and about
Valiss relation ship to them, is what Dick determines articulates in a recorded inter-
view during the making of the so-called Platt tape, of 1979. After a long dialogue of
questions and answers about his mania, schizophrenia, manic depression, catatonic
excitement, and so forth, which symptomise as what Dick describes as an AI [or
artificial intelligence] voice, Dick concludes that the Vast Active Living Intelligence
System, or VALIS, so painstakingly portrayed the novel VALIS, is in fact female, on
the other side, and, most importantly, his twin sister Jane. See Dick, VALIS, passim;
Ex, 518-21; and Dick, In Pursuit of VALIS: Selections from the Exegesis, ed. Lawrence Su-
tin (California: Underwood-Miller, 1991), 161.
71 Sass and Nelson cite Sasss Madness and Modernism as their reference point for Sasss
conception of the psychotic break; however, Sass does not explicitly develop a new
model of the break in that work, but rather offers only a general description of psy-
chosis. See Sass and Barnaby Nelson, The Phenomenology of the Psychotic Break and
Huxleys Trip: Substance Use and the Onset of Psychosis, Psychopathology 41 (2008):
346-55, esp. 351.
72 The term psychotomimetics was coined, as Osmond points out, by Ralph W. Gerard.
See Gerard, Neuropharmacology: Transactions of the Second Conference (New York: Jo-
siah Macy Jr. Foundation, 1956), 123 (also see my chapter 1). Cf. Humphry Osmond,
A Review of the Clinical Effects of Psychotomimetic Agents, Annals of the New York
Academy of Sciences 66 (1957): 418-34; Steven J. Novak, LSD Before Leary: Sidney Co-
hens Critique of 1950s Psychedelic Drug Research Isis 88, no. 1 (1997): 87-110, esp.
90-92; Humphry Osmond, Chemical Concepts of Psychosis, in Chemical Concepts
of Psychosis, ed. Max Rinkel (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1958), 3-26, esp. 10-11;
Jonathan O. Cole and Martin M. Katz, The Psychotomimetic Drugs: An Overview, in
David Solom, ed., LSDThe ConsciousnessExpanding Drug (New York: G.P. Putnams
Sons, 1964), 231-40, originally published in The Journal of the American Medical Associ-
ation 187, no. 10 (1964): 758-61.
(De)automatising Subjects 129
ence, these drugs are understood to modulate the ipseity or mere being
figures that Sass develops throughout his phenomenology of psychosis.73
While the standardised psychiatric instrument for measuring these
negative and positive syndromes had been proposed in 1987 in the Positive
and Negative Syndrome Scale for Schizophrenia (PANSS), it is Sass and Joseph
Parnass task to focus on the socio-culturalrather than the clinicalreso-
nances of this bifurcated syndrome scale.74 Identifying the prevalence of the
distinction between positive-versus-negative symptoms, which is typical-
ly used in the Anglophone literature, the authors assert that this division
is only a synecdoche for a broader distinction between human excess and
lack.75 But if, as Sass and Parnas argue, thought blocking or deprivation
may be interpreted as a negative symptomand thought-insertion76 re-
garded as an exemplary positive symptomthen the process in which Fou-
cault describes the subject becoming contemplative in a kairotic moment
of continuous phosphorescence, represents the latter: the insertion of a
thought, a positive symptom. Finally gaining access to what Foucault calls
a partial thoughtprecisely by confronting and, in an important way, re-
classifying stupidityit is also in this instant that the subject ceases to
automatically dismiss stupidity. And here, the subject perhaps even begins
to disrecognise otherness altogether, as well as to dismiss or question the
73 What is surprising, however, is that Sasss article, while advising that it should be
read as an exploratory effort, seems to omit this historical theory, the primary work
on which was undertaken by Huxleys personal friend Humphry Osmond. On this
friendship, see Joel Deshaye, The Psychedelic History of The Doors of Perception and
Island, Aldous Huxley Annual 2 (2002): 181-202; Ronald W. Clark, The Huxleys (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 347-8; David King Dunaway, Huxley in Hollywood (New York,
Bloomsbury, 1989), 285-6; Humphry Osmond, May Morning in Hollywood, in Mi-
chael Horowitz and Cynthia Palmer, eds. Moksha: Writing on Psychedelics and the Vi-
sionary Experience (1931-1963) (New York: Stonehill Publishing, 1977), 32-39; Humphry
Osmond, Foreword, in Brian Wells, Psychedelic Drugs (New York: Jason Aronson,
1974), 7-12; Also see chapters 6 and 7 of this thesis. On the pharmacological action
of hallucinogens, see notably David E. Nichols, Hallucinogens, Pharmacology and
Therapeutics 101 (2004): 131-181, esp. 138-168.
74 Stanley R. Kay, Abrham Fiszbein, and Lewis A. Opler, The Positive and Negative Syn-
drome Scale (PANSS) for Schizophrenia, Schizophrenia Bulletin 13, no. 2 (1987): 261-
276; Victor Peralta and Manuel J. Cuesta, Psychometric Properties of the Positive and
Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) in Schizophrenia, Psychiatry Research 53 (1993): 31-
39.
75 Louis A. Sass and Joseph Parnas, Schizophrenia, Consciousness and the Self, Schizo-
phrenia Bulletin 29, no. 3 (2003): 427-444, 431.
76 On thought insertion, see Johannes Roessler, Thought-Insertion, Self-Awareness, and
Rationality, in K.W.M Fulford, Martin Davies, Richard Gipps, George Graham, John
Sadler, Giovanni Stanghellini, and Tim Thornton, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Philos-
ophy and Psychiatry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 658-673.
(De)automatising Subjects 130
reality of that much grander and critical category of human otherness, the
definition of which is so crucial to Foucaults project: illness.
Deautomatising the incarnate drive toward negativitytoward what
Ricoeur names thought in its negative formLSD and its related com-
pounds begin to temper or militate against that basic reflex or deictic whose
beginning implies that the movement of thought is halted in pursuit of a
prior cause.77 Foucaults seemingly uninitiated description of LSDs effects
is an account avant lheure that, given its language, seems anchored in Ar-
tauds, not to mention Bretons, description of the phosphorescent point.
In a crucial way, it also indicates how LSDs phenomenology may, for Fou-
cault himself, operate in such a way as to rouse the melancholic from their
lethargy and acedia.
In some ways, Foucaults and Sasss analyses of madness and drugs are
compatibleeven complementary. While Sass argues that schizophrenia
becomes, with Modernism, a self-deceiving condition... that is generated
from within rationality itself rather than by the loss of rationality,78 Fou-
cault articulates a parallel view, asserting that madness, in the nineteenth
century, entered a new cycle that was now uncoupled from unreason, but at
the same time intimately and secretly bound up with history and culture.
Now, madness is simplybut also invisiblythe counterpart to the history
of reason.79 For both scholars, reason is itself constitutive of madnessat
least in its most recent cyclesince, as Foucault asserts, and as Derrida will
later affirmthe wild state of an originary madness (a madness ex nihilo)
possesses an inaccessible primitive purity.80
Protected by virtue of its being inassimilable into the language of rea-
son, this originary form of madness can, Derrida postulates, be repatriat-
edbrought out of the anchorage of its barely undetectable silenceonly
by convoking the first dissension in which, by a fiat, a decree, and as a
schism a division arose within the very act of sentire.81 For only a single
act... links and separates reason and madness and thus, in the moment
of that act, the exterior (is) the interior. Such a tension now generates a
fission that produces and divides [madness] along the lines of the Hegelian
Entzweiung,82 so that the category itself remains trapped within Hegels di-
alectical quarrel. Echoing the words in which Foucault adumbrates his own
ambition, Derrida asserts that the remit of Foucaults projected archaeolo-
gy of silence leadsor aims to leadto no less than his
reach the origin of the protectionism imposed by a reason that insists upon being shel-
tered... Derrida, Cogito and the History of Madness, 46.
82 Ibid.
83 Derrida, Cogito and The History of Madness, 51. Foucaults incisive essay in re-
sponse to Derridas criticism, titled Michel Foucault Derrida e no Kaino, would first
appear in Japanese magazine Paideia 11 (1972); 131-47, and later be elaborated as My
Body, This Paper, This Fire. See Foucault, History of Madness, Appendices 2 and 3,
550-90.
(De)automatising Subjects 132
the only decision possible is the impossible decision. It is when it is not possi-
ble to know what must be done, when knowledge is not and cannot be deter-
mining[,] that a decision is possible as such.85
In any event this book was terribly daring. A transparent sheet separates it
from madness. (Joyce, speaking of Ulysses).86
In its emptiness and nudity, the transparent sheet metonymises that which
is absent in the madness equation: the irretrievable silence that Derrida crit-
icises Foucault for pursuing in his own history of the subject. If any such
transparent sheet serves to cordon off the book from rationality, its invisi-
bility also effectively vaporises the distinction, reconverting the sheet into
nothingness itself: an eminently pourous boundary.
But of course, it is not this absent sheet that actually exists, but the
far-from-transparenteven instensively opaquepassages contained in Ul-
ysses itself that, in their very givenness and material presence, distinguish
the work from madnesseven as madness may lie always orthogonally to or
adjacently by the book. If for Derrida, though, the instant of the decision to
write such a book is madness, then whatever evidence remains of this origi-
nary madness takes the form only of a ringing in our earsan apparition or
chimera of that transparency, absence, invisibility, and undecidability, that
this madness itself has become and will be read as in the book.
The act of writing, and the production of words, by contrast, brings such
a decision into order by writing across and through this transparent sheet,
a boundary whose non-presence signifies a decision provisionally begun but
not yet acted upon, cognised but not yet operationalised. It is a decision that
remains undecidable in the divisiveness of its transparencyan impossi-
bly invisible sheet that lies between presence and absence, parchment and
carbon dioxide. For Derrida, it is in writing itself that the madness of the
decision to write is escaped or transcoded. What is in Sarah Woodss terms
alarmingly permeableor in Andrew J. Mitchell and Sam Slotes idiom a
permissive... boundarynow divides madness from reason; and it does so
by leavening the very pages upon which madnesss historya work of writ-
ing in its own rightis produced.87
It is because of this essential diffrance, the one that distinguishes the
virginity of the yet unwritten page from the present unveiling of the pres-
entthis monstration, manifestation, production, [and] althiathat
Derrida cannot accept Foucaults archaeology of silence. For to write what
is otherwise unwritten, and to enunciate the unspeakable language of
madness, would be to move away from the instant of decision, from that
zone wherein the acme of undecidability is reached, and to move elsewhere,
toward the instant of the decided or the decidable, where madness can
only ever be abortively represented, or meaninglessly retraced.88
For all its faultiness, it is Derridas engagement with the origin of writing
as a decisionso well emblematised here by his questionable translation of
Kierkegaards aphorismthat distinguishes his work from, as Bennington
suggests, Foucaults madness history, as well as from perhaps any other phi-
losophers history of the subject.89 It is only in Derridas writing, for instance,
that the words first invention is so emphatically and pervasively portrayed as
87 Sarah Wood, Derridas Writing and Difference: A Readers Guide (London: Continuum,
2009), 47; Andrew J. Mitchell and Sam Slote, Derrida and Joyce: On Totality and Equiv-
ocation, in Mitchell and Slote, eds. Derrida and Joyce: Texts and Contexts (New York:
State University of New York Press, 2013), 5.
88 Derrida, The Double Session, in Dissemination, tr. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: Chi-
cago University Press, [1970] 2008), 222, 216; On Derridean undecidability, and its
relation to, for instance, some of the concepts addressed in my introduction, such as
Gdels incompleteness theorems, see Paul Livingstone, Derrida and Formal Logic:
Formalising the Undecidable, Derrida Today 3, no. 2 (2010): 221-39.
89 Bennington, A Moment of Madness: Derridas Kierkegaard, 104-5.
(De)automatising Subjects 134
gives one the impression that it is a memory of his early reading of Kierke-
gaard, of a moment of reading, precisely, something like a snapshot or screen
memory of a (traumatic) event rather than a scholarly reference.
But even more important than this screen memory is what Benningtons
93 Ibid., 231.
94 Foucault, Theatrum Philosophicum, 191.
(De)automatising Subjects 136
makes your head spin. The point is that it is a matter of indecision or an in-
determinacy between a determinacy and an indeterminacy. So that to link up
more visibly and clearly with the problematic of sovereignty that actually has
not left us, I would be tempted to say that any decision... is both mad (every
decision is madness, says Kierkegaard) and bte, or stupid, that it involves a
risk of, or a leaning toward btise.101
99 Ibid., 122.
100 Avital Ronell, Stupidity (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2002).
101 Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign I, tr. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago, Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 2009), 173
(De)automatising Subjects 138
the idea that decision is madness? Or does this ambiguous quotation rep-
resent a more forceful disavowal, however unconscious, of the very stupidity
that Kierkegaard had himself called out to be named?
As Ronell observes, naming stupidity can do as much to exclude the cat-
egory, both as a being and as a becoming, as its complete omission can.
Socialisation, for Ronell, requires one to disavow stupidity in at least one of
a number of mandatory ways. It is, she writes, the ur-curse to renounce
stupidity, the renunciation of which primes socialization in this culture.102
And it is perhaps by virtue of these kinds of considerations or formulations
regarding stupiditys unspeakability, that the word itself, as btise, does not
appear among Derridas recurrent epideixes to Kierkegaard; in fact, it will
never appear in this contextnot until, at least, Ronell directly identifies the
category as having been so unspoken.
If Derridas disavowal of stupidity is an erasure, though, then Ronell is
Derridas restorative Geist, the one who writes the book on stupidity, and
provides what is precisely a Joycean transparent sheet for Derrida, or one
to lie between Derridas critique of madness and the madness of critique
itself. Thus providing exactly the verso to Derridas work, in a way that pre-
cisely accords with Derridas intimate characterisation of Ronell herself as
his metaphysics and his verso, Ronell also inherits stupidity from her
post-structuralist masternot so much in a pathological way as in a topi-
cal or nominal manner.103 Published exactly a decade following her book on
drugs, Ronells book on stupidity opens its second part with what is an im-
placably literaryand ineluctably Derrideanreading of Foucaults History
of Madness; it attends to what she reveals as Foucaults peculiar adoption of
Pascal and Dostoesvsky as his exempla. Recombining Foucaults and Derri-
das mad histories, Ronells book performs a work whose function is to
disorientand to disorient in precisely the way that Foucault had, in his
Theatrum Philosophicum, observed LSD to disorient.104
If Foucaults essay provides an example of what it might mean to become
stupid or to know stupidity, thento bear witness to a fool, but to see them
not so much as stupid as the official scapegoat of a sovereign reason (as the
pharmakos, marginalized and blamed for the crimes of all)then it also
offers a description of stupiditys possible recalibration.105 It makes clear, for
instance, that while, in our stupidity we are distant from the melancholy
which makes itself indifferent to the world, we are also at this time closer
to that torpor within which madness becomes more approximately within
reach.106 Diametrically, Derridas resistance to countenancing this other,
unintentional though it may be, relates to his assertion that we have pre-
cisely stupidity to blame for that disorder or disaffection that enchains the
melancholic. For, try as they might, those inured in the dirge of melancholia
cannot bring themselves to compose words on a page. And it is in this torpor
and hebetude that the scrivener, then brought under reasons dictation
and asked to reason, but then refusing, not abiding by its lawis driven to
madness. For it is in the performance of writing that reason accrues, and it
is by such a performance that the subject is cleared, sanitised and, finally,
assessed as not mad at all.
In an inversion of Carl Jungs impatient criticism of the stupid chat-
tering of the schizophrenic107or even in a reversal of Deleuzes irritation
with the mentally ill (expressed by the apocryphal question that Deleuze
once posed to Guattari, How can you stand these schizos?108)Foucaults
text on the subject of acid indicates how stupidity itself might prompt one
to contemplate what might be called, after Isabelle Stengers and White-
head, an evental moment. This is a moment in which catatonia, acedia,
or melancholy are seen for what they are: as depersonalised collusions with
stupidity.109 Melancholy is, after allas Branka Arsi notes in her description
105 Dale Pendell, Pharmako/Gnosis: Plant Teachers and the Poison Path (Berkeley: North
Atlantic Books), 307.
106 Foucault, Theatrum Philosophicum, 191.
107 See my chapter 2, and Jung, The Psychology of Dementia Praecox, 95.
108 In Franois Dosses biography of Deleuze and Guattari, Alain Aptekman, a friend of
Deleuze, recalls how Deleuze asked this question of Guattari having heard that a pa-
tient at La Bordethe institution at which Guattari was a clinicianhad set fire to
the chateau chapel, and had run into the woods. According to Aptekman, Deleuze
couldnt bear the sight of crazy people. See Franois Dosse, Gilles Deleuze and Flix
Guattari: Intersecting Lives, tr. Deborah Glassman (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2010), 8 and 526n30. On idiocy and stupidity, also see Slavoj ieks typology of
the inverse forms of idiocy in Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2010), 365-66.
109 Stengers, The Invention of Modern Science, 67; Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), esp. 14-5. As Whitehead writes, sky-blue is
seen as situated in a certain event. Also see Whitehead, Process and Reality, 80-1; and
Adventures of Ideas (New York: The Free Press, 1967 [1933]), 187-8. Deleuze also discuss
Whitehead and the event in What is an Event? in The Fold: Leibniz, and The Baroque,
86-93. Also see, apropos my discussion of the decision and its relation to eventual-
(De)automatising Subjects 140
capable of giving reason a fright... not only because it shows how its extreme
truth is madness but because it makes clear that it is in collusion with stupid-
ity.110
In contrast to a stupidity that tries to penetrate deep into thought but fails
to do so because it cannot manage to follow the movement of differences
which is why its truth is the catatonic theatre of the dead black brick wall
melancholy succeeds at that very thing. It arrives deep with the interiority of
thought, at its very center. But in order to reach that center it stops its mo-
tion and collapses into it, thus losing its own I. Stupidity and melancholy
are two different forms of impoverished and depersonalized thought.112
While both categories, as Bennington suggests, may run across parallel vectors,
straddling either side of the central axiom of madness, where stupidity fails to
enter the interiority of thought, melancholy cannot return from this interiori-
ty. Ever thus in the middle, madness must watch over thinking, structuring
both its stupid and melancholic satellites.113 But what if the melancholics
pathway out of this interiorisationout of this ineffable stupefaction that pre-
cludes rich and personalised thoughtrequires no less than an event, one
that itself, as Justin Clemens and Oliver Feltham suggest, inspires new forms
of thought that cannot be resolved except at the cost of inconsistency?114
ity and stupidity (or stupefaction), Justin Clemens and Oliver Felthams essay, The
Thought of Stupefaction; or, Event and Decision as Non-ontological and Pre-political
factors in the Work of Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou, in Roland Faber, Henry Krips,
and Daniel Pettus, eds., Events and Decision: Ontology and Politics in Badiou, Deleuze,
and Whitehead (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 16-47.
110 Branka Arsi, Passive Constitutions, or, 7 Times Bartleby (Stanford: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 2007), 65-6.
111 Prez-lvarez, Hyperreflexivity as a Condition of Mental Disorder, 186; Foucault,
Theatrum Philosophicum, 191.
112 Arsi, Passive Constitutions, 66.
113 Jacques Derrida, A Madness Must Watch Over Thinking, in Elisabeth Weber, ed.
PointsInterviews, 1974-1999, tr. Peggy Kamuf and others (Stanford: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 1995), 339-64.
114 Clemens and Feltham, The Thought of Stupefaction, 20.
(De)automatising Subjects 141
115 Maurice Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus, and Other Literary Essays , ed. P. Adam Sit-
ney, tr. Lydia Davis (New York: Station Hill, 1981), 23, qtd. in Stiegler, Technics and Time
1, 264 (although this works editors name, Sitney, is given as Stirney in Stieglers
citation on 291).
116 See T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed.
Frank Kermode (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1975), 38-9.
117 Here Steiglers analysis echoes my discussion in my introductory chapter 1 of the
other, and notably, as Stiegler writers, this relates to the Lvinasian arguments con-
cerning the death of the other. Stiegler, Technics and Time 1, 265; Emmanuel Lvinas,
La Mort et le temps (Paris: Editions Grasset & Fasquelle, 1993). Published in English as
God, Death and Time, tr. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: University of Stanford Press, 2000),
16-20, 140-3.
118 For a short history of such conceptions of this impulse, see Burke, Reconstructing
the Author, xv-xxx, xvii.
(De)automatising Subjects 142
sive gamblingrepetitive and hypomanic acts that involve the prolific out-
put of writing, drawing, and painting have, throughout the last decade, been
tied to the subjects underlying experience of (or reaction to) a hyperstim-
ulation. This is linked to acute and persistent agonisation of the brains
dopamine receptors (dopaminergia).119 In more recent research, ICDs have
been dismissed as a correlate of this writing activityor, more specifically,
have been understood only as useful as a metaphor for these comprehension
and creativity tests. This is because dopaminergic agonists, such as most
specifically the drug L-DOPA (or L-3,4-dihydroxyphenylalanine), have been
found to cause a genuine change in [the] neuropsychological processes un-
derlying creativity.
Producing enhanced originality, flexibility, and elaboration in Parkin-
sons disease (PD) patients undergoing dopamine therapy, the importance
of dopamine is demonstratable in these studies, where the PD patientss
performance in the TACT-Visual and the novel metaphor comprehen-
sion tasks improve markedly. Performing better on tasks that tap into major
components of creative thinking, these patients exhibit higher skills in di-
vergent thinking as well as in combinatorial novelty.120
Blanchot identifies the tension that emerges at the point when a writers
wish or impulse to write enters into exchange with the question of wheth-
er they have the requisite talent to do so; but these neurological findings
suggest Blanchots formulation should be reframed, for it now seems at least
119 See, for instance, Stanley R. Kay, Abraham Fiszbein, and Lewis A. Opler, The Posi-
tive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) for Schizophrenia, Schizophrenia Bulletin
13, no. 2 (1987): 261-76, esp. 261; Tim J. Crow, Molecular Pathology of Schizophrenia:
More than one Disease Process? British Medical Journal 280 (1980): 66-8. As the au-
thors of one study put it, it was debated that obsessive drawing or writing might
be interpreted as another ICD associated with dopaminergic therapy. See Ach-
inoam Faust-Socher, Yoed N. Kenett, Oren S. Cohen, Sharon Hassin-Baer, and Rivka
Inzelberg, Enhanced Creative Thinking under Dopaminergic Therapy in Parkinson
Disease, Annals of Neurology 76, no. 6 (2014): 935-42, esp. 936. Such a debate or prop-
osition was postulated in studies including the following: Daniel Weintraub, An-
drew D. Siderowf, Marc N. Potenza, Joseph Goveas, Knashawn H. Morales, John
E. Duda, Paul J. Moberg, Matthew B. Stern, Association of Dopamine Agonist Use
with Impulse Control Disorders in Parkinson Disease, Archives of Neurology 63
(2006): 963-73; Margherita Canesi, Maria Luisa Rusconi, Artistic Productivity and
Creative Thinking in Parkinsons Disease, European Journal of Neurology 19, no. 3
(2012): 468-72; and Ruth Walker, Robin Warwick, and Stephen P. Cercy, Augmen-
tation of Artistic Productivity in Parkinsons Disease, Movement Disorders 21, no.
2 (2006): 285-6.
120 Achinoam Faust-Socher, Yoed N. Kennett, Oren S. Coehn, Sharon Hassin-Baer, Rivka
Inzelberg, Enhanced Creative Thinking under Dopaminergic Therapy in Parkinson
Disease, Annals of Neurology 75, no. 6 (2014): 938-9.
(De)automatising Subjects 143
121 On DDS see, for instance, Pera Schwingenschuh, Petra Katschnig, Ronald Saurugg,
Erwin Ott and Kailash P. Bhatia, Artistic Profession: a Potential Risk Factor for Dopa-
mine Dysregulation Syndrome in Parkinsons Disease? Movement Disorders 25, no. 4
(2010): 493-6.
122 Henri Michaux, Light Through Darkness: Explorations Among Drugs (New York: Orion
Press, 1963), 7-9.
123 Timothy Leary, The Religious Experience: Its Production and Interpretation, Psyche-
delic Review 1 (1964): 324-46, 330-9. On the increasing emphasis in neuroscience on a
distributed visual processing system, as opposed to an emphasis on visual perception
as a function of the eye, see Daniel Collerton, Rob Dudley, and Urs Peter Mosimann,
Visual Hallucinations, in Jan Dirk Blom, Iris E.C. Sommer, eds., Hallucinations: Re-
search and Practice (New York: Springer, 2011), chapter 6.5 (Mechanisms of Visual
Hallucinations), 83-5.
124 Cristina Missale, S. Russel Nash, Susan W. Robeinson. Mohamed Jaber, Marc G.
Caron, Dopamine Receptors: From Structure to Function, Physiological Reviews 78,
no. 1 (1998): 189-225, esp. 190; Daniel P. Czech, Joohyung Lee, Jeanne Correia, Hannah
Loke, Eva K. Moller, and Vincent R. Harley, Transient Neuroprotection by SRY Upreg-
ulation in Dopamine Cells Following Injury in Males, Neuroendocrinology 155, no. 7
(De)automatising Subjects 144
(2014): 2602-12.
125 A very thoughtful and rigorous study of these developments is offered in Paula Gar-
dener and Britt Way, From Lab to Living Room: Transhumanist Imaginaries of Con-
sumer Brain Waves Monitors, Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology 3
(2014): http://adanewmedia.org/2013/11/issue3-gardnerwray/.
126 On the figures of the schiz and flow, used often for the ruptures in the body with-
out organs, see Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 39, 242, 315, 351.
127 Andrew Murphie, Putting the Virtual Back into VR, in Brian Massumi, A Shock to
Thought: Expressions After Deleuze and Guattari (New York: Routledge, 2002), 188-214,
204; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 181, 479.
(De)automatising Subjects 145
ousness, and strangeness that had previously been traced through the am-
bulative procedure of authorship and textual production, the particularity
of this new automatisation represents, as Sherry Turkle points out, only
another node in the history of self-care devices.128 What Foucault would later
call a technology of the self, or, more generally, a mode of the Care of the
Self (epimeleia heatou) becomes, at least in this instance, a vitiation of the
same madness that writing has always also soothedor a mitigation of that
impulse that, at other times, as Derrida would have it, writing invented.129
But Blanchots impasse could also be more conventionally overcome,
such as when a scrivener is endowed with (or burdened by) a sense of stress
whether eustress of distress.130 Here the drive to write obtains in an anxi-
ety or urgency that, as in what Freud calls a trieb, the subject is implacably
incited to write away, compelled to write right away.131 Such an impulsive
assemblage could arise, of course, in the context of a range of mercantile,
political, biopolitical, or other heterogeneous socio-materialist stressors (see
Figure 2.1), each of which may then animate the scriveners performance
as they realise they must write to survivefor their livelihood or even for
their life, as Dick might have sometimes felt (see chapter 7). And it is at this
originally socio-cultural rather than molecular level, where the whole pro-
cess becomes, as Barthes puts it, a laborand where it is deployed like a
function whose dividends remain entirely divorced from the performance
itselfthat it is automatised, brought over the edge of the Kierkegaardian
128 See Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (New York: Simon
and Schuster, Inc. 1984). Taking up Zygmunt Baumans conceptualisation of a liq-
uid modernity, where society is viewed less as a structure than a network or matrix
of random connections, Gardner and Wray argue, echoing Deleuze and Guattaris
conception of the human subject as machinic assemblage, that the age of the cy-
borg is past and we are now living in the age of machine augmentation. See Bauman,
Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty (London: Polity, 2007), 1-4; and Gardener
and Way, From Lab to Living Room: Transhumanist Imaginaries of Consumer Brain
Waves Monitors.
129 See Foucaults essays on this subject, Technologies of the Self, and Self Writing,
both in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, Volume
One), ed., Paul Rabinow, and tr. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 2000), 223-52, and
209-14; and Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collge de France,
1981-82, tr. Graham Burchell and ed. Frederic Gros (New York: Picador, 2005).
130 On the various forms of stress, including remembered stress from childhood and
creativity (divergent thinking), see notably Joye W. Shanteau, The Relationship of
Locus of Control and Remembered Stress to Creativity as a Cognitive Process, PhD.
diss, University of Southern Mississippi, 1987. ProQuest (AAT 8806636).
131 On triebs, see Freud, Instincts and their Vicissitudes, Standard Edition of the Com-
plete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14, ed. James Strachey (London: Hoga-
rth Press, 1957), 111-40.
(De)automatising Subjects 146
Writers of course are considered the mavens of Sloth. They are approached all
the time on the subject, not only for free advice, but also to speak at Sloth Sym-
posia, head up Sloth Task Forces, testify as expert witnesses at Sloth Hearings.
The stereotype arises in part from our conspicuous presence in jobs where
pay is by the word, and deadlines are tight and finalwe are presumed to
know from piecework and the convertibility of time and money. In addition,
there is all the glamorous folklore surrounding writers block, an affliction
known sometimes to resolve itself dramatically and without warning, much
like constipation, and (hence?) finding wide sympathy among readers.134
Accidie in its most complicated and most deadly form, a mixture of boredom,
sorrow, and despair, was now an inspiration to the greatest poets and novel-
ists... an essential lyrical emotion, fruitful in the inspiration of much of the
most characteristic modern literature.136
How could acedia, from the Greek , meaning noncaring state, and
deriving from , which means care or accuracy, now be reformulated by
the romantics as inspiration?137 And how could it then be reformulated by
Huxley himself, among other cynics of the 1920s, as a reification of what
he calls fate?138 Why, in other words, is for Huxley acedia the inevitable
evil that he and his contemporaries can [now] claim with a certain pride
that we have a right to... ?139
The incongruity between, on the one hand, this depressed state of con-
135 Aldous Huxley, Accidie, Baker and Sexton, eds. Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays, Vol-
ume 1: 1920-25, 351-4.
136 Huxley, Accidie, 353.
137 See Jennifer Raddens introduction to Cassians Accidie, in Jeniffer Radden, ed. The
Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000),
69. For a comprehensive account of the usages of the term acedia, from Evagrius Pon-
ticus through to Gregory the Great and Thomas Aquinas, see Patricia Murphy, Aqui-
nass Teaching on Acedia: Flight From God As Friend, PhD diss., Boston College,
2003. ProQuest: AAP: 3103298, 245-306.
138 On Huxleys cynicism, see David Ayers, Sexual Cynicism and Intellectual Despair, in
English Literature of the 1920s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 162-5.
139 Huxley, Accidie, 353.
(De)automatising Subjects 148
potentially at least, though habit of matter has separated us, all animals
are unanimous.145 But despite these indications of Huxleys mid-1940s turn
to mystical thought, Huxleys early novels treat acedia and disillusionment,
as June Deery avers, with a cerebral and restless cynicism.146
In Those Barren Leaves (1925), Calamys positive but churlish advertence
to mysticisms virtues is emblematic:
... its not fools who turn mystics. It takes a certain amount of intelligence and
imagination to realize the extraordinary queerness and mysteriousness of the
world in which we live (tbl, 298.)
145 Ibid.
146 June Deery, Aldous Huxley and the Mysticism of Science (London: Macmillan Press,
1996), 104.
147 Philip K. Dick, Beyond Lies the Wub: The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick, 6 vols.
(London: Gollancz, 1988), 1:9-10. This Letter to John Betancourt is dated 14 May, 1981.
Also see my detailed analysis of Dicks conceptualisation of sf (science fiction) in chap-
ter 7.
148 On mysticism in VALIS, for instance, see Rickels, Endopsychic Allegories, Postmod-
ern Culture 18, no. 1 (2007); and on Dicks mystical episodes, see James Burton, Ma-
chines Making Gods: Philip K. Dick, Henri Bergson, and Saint Paul, Theory, Culture &
Society 25, nos. 7-8 (2008): 262-84.
149 Recent phenomenological studies of depression and motivation, for instance, have
emphasised the association of perceptual and affective conditions in the disorder. See
for instance, Benedict Smith, Depression and Motivation, Phenomenological Cog-
nitive Science 12 (2013): 615-35. Also see, less recently, Jennifer Church, Depression,
Depth and the Imagination, in James Phillips and James Morley, eds. Imagination
and its Pathologies (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 335-60.
(De)automatising Subjects 150
Conversation tells us, among other things, that writing never occurs simply
by our own initiative; rather, it sends us. Whether one understands oneself to
be lifted by inspiration or dashed by melancholia, quietly moved, controlled
by muses or possessed by demons, once has responded to remoter regions of
being in that circumstance of nearly transcendental passivity that I am call-
ing Dictations.150
150 Avital Ronell, Dictations: On Haunted Writing (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1986), xiv.
151 Ibid.
152 Ibid. I take the diamond-miner and diamond-polisher analogy from a comment
Deleuze himself made about the relationship between he and Guattari. As friend Ar-
lette Donati remarked in an interview, Deleuze said the Flix was the diamond miner
and he was the polisher. So he [Guattari] needed only to send him the texts as he wrote
them; thats how it went. Dosse, Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, 8
and 526n29.
153 Dick, Radio Free Albemuth (New York: Arbor House, 1985). Originally titled Valisystem,
this novel was written in 1976, but not published until 1985, three years following
(De)automatising Subjects 151
... for me, its a blessing. Because Im an obsessive writer, and if I didnt get
writers block, Id overload, short circuit, and blow my brain out right away...
If I didnt get writers block, I would die. I mean, its the greatest relief to me.
Now, when most writers get writers block, they get frantic. I know that on an
Dicks death.
154 On the surveillant subject under the imperial gaze of Google Earths satellite im-
ages, see Chad Harris, The Omniscient Eye: Satellite Imagery, Battleship Awareness,
and The Structures of he Imperial Gaze, Surveillance and Society 4, nos. 1-2 (2006):
101122. On the intoxicating potential of tracking devices or similar technologies,
like Google Earth, see Paul Kingsbury and John Paul Jones III, Walter Benjamins Dio-
nysian Adventures on Google Earth, Geoforum 40 (2009): 502-513, esp. 504-5.
155 Surveillant eyes also appear, for instance, in Dicks novels Eye in the Sky (New York: Ace
Books, 1957), Flow my Tears, The Policeman Said (London: Doubleday, 1974), and Our
Friends From Frolix 8 (New York: Ace Books).
156 Consider, for instance, Dales description of Artaud as truly sincere and the way in
which this modality is tautologous in Artauds writing of truth. For Dick, sincerity
and truth is, in fact, shocking, and it is precisely the exemplary status of his narratives
as romans clef mimetic fiction with a key to the truththat enables his sincerity
to be, with Artauds, an overperformance of the truth. It is by pulverizing the fatal
oneness of a true sincerity, that Dicks fiction, as Artauds writing, anticipates the
radical multiplicity of individual truths in the world. It is this reversal of truth, that is
precisely Dicks sincere truth. And this is why Dick can say, sincerely, as in the quoted
lines above, that without writers block, he would die. See: Dale, Cruel, 85-6.
157 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 126.
(De)automatising Subjects 152
158 Gwen Lee and Doris E. Sauter, Worlds of Sound and Colour, Starlog 165 (1991): 51-57,
51.
159 Ronell, Dictations, xxi.
160 Lenson, On Drugs, 118. On amphetamine culture generally in the US throughout the
1950s and 60s, see Nicolas Rasmussens On Speed (New York: New York University
Press, 2008), esp. 87-180.
(De)automatising Subjects 153
But this insuperable proximity is not simply the effect of the others near-
ness; this spatial distance is itself constitutive of it as an other. It is only
near, that is, because it is not in. Crucial to the identity of the very thing
whose demands are written by the scrivener, then, is the question of its spa-
tial orientation. What bearing does the others presumed insuperability, its
impossibly distant position, have on the act of writing when the mediatic
spaces of composition are dissolved and, becoming no longer zoned out-
side of you, but inscribed on the body itselfdirectly on its organs from
withinare of apiece with the writer?163 This is the question that implicitly
appears when Ronells works on writing are put into dialogue.
The nearly two-decade breach between Ronells Dictations and Crack
Wars, however, marks a dizzying trajectory in which the author migrates
from body to body. It begins with Goethe who, as an awesome signifier
and an insuperable phallus-mountain text, may yet be like the phallus...
effectually powerful but empty; but it ends with a narcoanalysis of Gustave
Flauberts Madame Bovary, an analysis through which Ronell trespasses into
161 See, for instance, Rose, The Politics of Life Itself (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2007), 12-13; Thacker, The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics and Culture
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); and Rabinow, Essays in the Anthropology of Reason
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). On Deleuze and Guattaris analytic of
molecularisation, see Philip Goodchild, Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the
Politics of Desire (London: SAGE, 1996), 186.
162 Ronell, Dictations, xiv.
163 Ronells science fiction narrative in Crack Wars recalls the present in these terms:
It used to be that mediatic spaces were zoned outside of you... It was bizarre back
then, everyone hoping they were autonomous, but in fact more or less hypnotized
by these allotechnologies, held off at a distance that was just that much more fasci-
nating.
Ronell, Crack Wars, 67 (my emphasis.)
(De)automatising Subjects 154
164 Ronell, Dictations, ix. And see, for instance, those pages in Crack Wars in which Ronell
emphasises Emmas intoxication and the literary fact... that [she] swallowed poison,
not her pride (84).
165 See Flix Guattari, The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis (California: Se-
miotext(e), 2011), 9-22.
166 Ronell, Dictations, xxi.
167 See Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, tr. Robert B. Louden
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 62-5; Ronell, Crack Wars, 59.
(De)automatising Subjects 155
eties crudely defined under the single category called drugs.168 Just as
drugs is a crude term, however, so is the reductive contours of sobriety
signify only ever very obliquely those freedoms granted to a normativised,
and automatic state of consciousness. The work of defining these terms has
been not simply an instantiation of consciousness regulation, however, but
as Ronell argues, an exercise of power that itself proceeds under the aegis or
control of a new ontic, one that is itself instituted by the drug.169
So if it is obvious that, as Ronell argues, De Quinceys opium use in his
Confessions of an Opium Eater perturbs ontology only in order to institute
something else, then what exactly is entailed by this ontological revision?
What does it produce that is not subject to the regime of althia, that ex-
cuses it from truth-telling, and makes it not dependent upon a prior unveil-
ing?170 It may ensure, in Timothy Learys indelible turn of phrase, that the
hallucinogen-using subject, for instance, can turn on, tune in, and drop
out.171 And while in Learys formulation, dropping out defines not a radical
break from society or from responsibility so much as a solution to the
problem of escape, dropping out may yet have a side-effect: that of vision-
ary revelation. And while such a vision may answer what Leary calls the es-
cape question, it also restructures the full battery of Derridean binaries and
Manichean oppositions: off-on, in-out, start-stop, light-dark, flash-delay.172
In the face of such a psychosis, or in what became known as the bad trip,
the terrorized reluctance to go with it can be, as Leary remarks, fatal. One
must submit to the very notion that ones narratorial voice may be silenced
or erased, and must come to grips with acedia and ego-lossdespite ones
Frantic grabbing for the intangible switch and even as one frets and pan-
ics, as the Ego cries, keep it on!173
The very different perturbations of ontology occasioned by the ingestion
of opium might similarly guarantee, in Ronells cognate explanans, that
one can find a discreet if spectacular way out of acedia through opium.
As an atopical place of exit in which the drug forces decision upon the
subject, opiates enable the subject to witness ab extra the internal conflict
of freedom, and the cleave of subjectivity where it encounters the abyss of
destructive jouissance.174 In the specific case of each drug, and even (if not
especially) in the case of the SSRI-class anti-depressants, it is precisely by
means of reconfiguration of perceptual experienceone that deautomatis-
esthat these myriad topoi of egress and decision, these psychotropes of in
and out, are engendered.175
And so if the writer who suffers from acedia is troubled, as Walter Benja-
min describes, by an indolence of the heart, then they perhaps also suffer
from the saturnine and slow process of indecisiveness at whose root
lies a particular style of thought; it is a tropism, or a psychological image of
some descriptionnot an illnessand it is these entities that I have thus
far called a psychotrope.176 But such an indolence, as Robert Smithson ar-
gues, also instigates a very real and constant state of erosion; it leads to
mental rivers [that] undermine cliffs of thought, and ensures that ideas
decompose into stones of unknowing. In this elaboration of acedia, further,
the conceptual/crystallisations break apart into deposits of gritty reason,
going on to produce barely an echo of the bleached and fractured world.177
This chapter has sought to suggest the myriad ways in which writers, as
subjects, can become deautomatisedrather than automatisedby alterna-
tive modes of engaging the other that propels their writing praxes. It con-
cludes part 1 of this thesis, which is a theoretical elaboration on the forms of
writingmolecular correspondence, psychoactive scrivening, and deautom-
atisationthat may be induced by writing on drugs. In part 2, which begins
with chapter 4, I will offer a series of close readings of Huxleys and Dicks
work; in so doing, the models I have developed in this part 1 will be not only
mobilisedand put into practicebut further refined and developed.
how did aldous huxley, one of the most well-known writers and public literary
intellectuals of the twentieth century, develop such a profound interest in
psychopharmacological compounds and psychobiological chemistry? How
was Huxley encultured to think and feel the way that he did about science,
the arts, food, the body, and the science of vision?3
Holding a range of views as distinct as they are subtle about these sub-
jects, and about most subjects he considered, Huxley represents a speci-
men case, as Freud might have put it, for the twentieth-century polymath.4
1 Aldous Huxley, Selected Letters, ed. James Sexton (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007), 107-8.
2 Sybille Bedford, Aldous Huxley, 1: 2.
3 While I acknowledge that the term enculturation is often deployed in contexts relat-
ed to behaviourism, social psychiatry and social studies, I want to use it here, as cul-
tural anthropologist Margaret Mead has done elsewhere: to think about the actual
process of learning as it takes place in a specific culture. Margaret Mead, Papers in
Honor of Melville J. Herskovits: Socialization and Enculturation, Current Anthropolo-
gy 4, no. 2 (1963): 185.
4 Freud in fact did not use the term specimen case, but used the expression specimen
dream when referring to his so-called Irma dream, that in which he injected one of
his female patients. See Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 107. On the use of the
term specimen cases in the context of Freudian psychoanalysis, see for instance
Horst Kchele, Cornelia Albani, Anna Buchheim, Michael Hlzer, Roderich Hohage,
Erhard Mergenthaler, Juan Pablo Jimnez, Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber, Lisbeth
Neuder, The German specimen case, Amalia X: Empirical Studies, International
Journal of Psychoanalysis 87 (2006): 809-26, 809n2.
158
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 159
While the thematics of Huxleys fiction and essays reflect his transition from
empiricist to mystic, he is also always both of these things at once.5 But it
is Huxleys lifelong affiliation with the life sciencesand particularly with
chemistry, biology and evolutionary sciencethat ultimately leads him to
formulate his speculations on the chemistry of the brain. It is his rejection
of Freudianism and his belief that there remains so much more to discover
about the mind, moreover, that prompts Huxley to experiment with mesca-
line and LSD, to address the pestilence of mental illness, and to enquire into
what he called the vast problem of schizophrenia.6
To encounter Huxleys intellectual career is to bear witness not simply to
an exemplary case of polymathism, however, but to study a deeper structural
tendency. His broad and often esoteric knowledge across the arts and scienc-
es betrays a drive to perform ersatz-messianic acts of revelation: a propensity
doubtless fostered by the influence of his grandfather, Thomas H. Huxley
(henceforth TH).7 A biologist and professor, TH performed as a vociferous
public rhetorician within the increasingly scientific intellectual landscape
of the nineteenth century. The power of THs drive for recognitionor what
I have named thyms in this thesisis just as apparent in his lectures on
science as it is persistent in his grandsons writings and performances.8 But
myriad scientific innovations during Huxleys lifetime meant that even more
was expected of those who, like Huxley, sought to champion and publicise
the state of scientific and philosophical knowledge in the twentieth century.
Testament to the scope of Huxleys intellect is his having been commis-
sioned in 1945 to write an encyclopedia for Encyclopedia Britannica. And
while Huxleys work on this project was never published, it was a task for
which Huxley had been well prepared. When Huxley, at fourteen years of age,
was given an encyclopedia by Julian, his eldest brother, Huxley gave the im-
pression of his rapid and arcane learning: I now know everything, from who
invented dice to the normal temperature of the sea-cucumber.9 To write an
encyclopedia was thus an appropriate assignment for Huxley for, as William
Pritchard attests,
no English writer of the last century was more encyclopedic in his rangelit-
erature, philosophy, history, mathematics, natural science, for startersthan
Huxley; nor was there anyone who moved with such graceful ease among the
various realms of knowledge.10
9 William Pritchard, Huxley in his Letters, Sewanee Review 117, no. 1 (2009): 121-124,
121.
10 Huxley to Julian Huxley, Summer 1908, in Aldous Huxley: Selected Letters , ed. James
Sexton (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007), 14. Also quoted in Pritchard, Huxley in his Let-
ters, 122.
11 T.S. Eliot, The Man of Letters and The Future of Europe, The Sewanee Review 53, no. 3
(1945): 333-42, esp. 333. I also note that this is the name of a volume of essays constitut-
ing the proceedings of the third international Aldous Huxley Symposium (2004). See
Bernfried Nugel, Uwe Rasche, and Gerhard Wagner, eds. Aldous Huxley: Man of Letters:
Thinker, Critic and Artist (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2007). Also see LAS, 11.
12 Plato, The Dialogues of Plato, tr. Benjamin Jowett, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1892), 1: 487. Also see Plato, Phaedrus, tr. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2003). Here the passage is translated as follows: Youre talking about
the living ensouled speech of a man of knowledge. Wed be right to describe the writ-
ten word as a mere image of this (70).
13 Plato, Phaedrus, tr. Jowett, 537; Phaedrus, tr. Waterfield, 69-70.
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 161
14 Matthew Arnold, The Function of Criticism, in Essays by Matthew Arnold, ed. Hum-
phrey Milford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1914), 11. For further discussion of the
Arnoldian influence on the Huxleys, see: on Arnolds and THs controversial yet am-
icable relationship and debate, David A. Roos, Matthew Arnold and Thomas Henry
Huxley: Two Speeches at the Royal Academy, 1881 and 1883, Modern Philology 74, no
3. (1977): 316-24; and on Huxleys resolution of the struggle waged between his pater-
nal grandfather and Arnold by symbiotic [chiasmic] accommodation, see Milton
Birnbaum, Aldous Huxleys Quest for Values (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee
Press, 1971), 75. Also see LAS, 5.
15 Grover Smith, ed. Letters of Aldous Huxley (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 39n23.
16 Huxleys ambition in his Eton days was to be a doctor not a writerthough his later
friend Gerald Heard claimed that his wish also was to be a painter. Murray, Aldous
Huxley, 29n17. Also see Smith, Letters, 38n22.
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 162
17 On Deleuze and the thought image, see Difference and Repetition, 129-67.
18 See Frans Alfons Janssens, La thorie de la Chiasmatypie: Nouvelle interpretation
des cinses de maturation, La Cllule 25 (1909): 389400; Romain Koszul, et. al.,
The Centenary of Janssenss Chismatype Theory, Genetics 191 (2012): 309-17; James
Schwartz, In Pursuit of the Gene: From Darwin to DNA, (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2008), 182-3, 324n70. Also see Mark Taylor, Altarity (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1987), 71n12 and 71n13.
19 On the rhetorical aspects of the chiamus, see notably Patricia Lissner, Chi-thinking:
Chiasmus and Cognition, PhD diss., University of Maryland, 2007, esp. 369-71.
20 See, for example, Louis A. Sass and Josef Parnis, Schizophrenia, Consciousness, and
the Self, Schizophrenia Bulletin 29, no. 3 (2003): 427-44, esp. 427.
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 163
dles the visual and the textual, finds some resonance with Leah Ceccarellis
deployment of the expression cultural chiasmus in her Shaping Science with
Rhetoric. In this monograph, Ceccarelli underscores the importance of the
chiasmus as both a rhetorical and a scientific shape.21 My approach to the
chiasmus also finds another partial antecedent in Judith Butlers invocation
of the term chiasmus in her description of the extra-linguistic body. The
presence of this body, which is as a kind of other, outside of the selfa body
that does not speak and cannot know languageallegorizes the problem
of the chiasmic relation between language and body.22 When Butler asserts
that attempts to express what is outside of the body form allegories for what
is the irreducible interdependence and extrication of the body and language,
she permits us to think of Huxley as one of the twentieth-centurys foremost
allegorists of this very phenomenon.
In this chapter, then, the chiasmus denotes a series of strategies or fea-
tures that are visible in Huxleys writing as investments in the disentangle-
ment of oppositional forces. These include such drives as those that obtain
between language and the body, but also between representation and reality.
Huxleys writing also seeks to soften the coarse edges that demarcate these
oppositions, as well as the many others that appear in the range of intellec-
tual, discursive, psychological, and spiritual epistemologies he addresses;
but whatever topic he addresses, Huxley lays an instructive emphasis on the
psycho-physicalon the extent to which, in all things, the physical-in-
stinctive biological forces serve to structure our experience.23
While Freuds philosophy prioritises the development of a unity within
the egoa process that is brought about, he suggests, by primary narcis-
sismHuxleys The Perennial Philosophy (1945) accords highest importance
to knowledge as a function of being (TPP, 70). For Huxley, we rational
beings who are capable of apprehending the eternal essence of human
creatureliness see in ourselves what is already a form of unitive knowl-
edge (TPP, 71). And while this knowledge appears to its apprehender as a
singular and complete entity, it is yet only one of the infinite number of
points where divine Reality is wholly and eternally present (TPP, 71-72).24
To achieve this kind of freedom requires less a disciplining of the will than
a thorough disciplining of the consciousness (TPP, 86). It requires a total
and radical change of mind, typified by a more or less sudden revulsion
of consciousness (TPP, 86). Less than two decades after Huxleys death, R.D.
Laing will identify this kind of revulsion as a metanoia (): a kind of
After-Mind that consists, as Treadwell Walden notes, of the Mind in an act
of progress, a progress that involves a change taking place either by evo-
lution or revolution.25 Like Huxley, Laing intuits that a metanoiac voyage
could be inaugurated by the use of LSD-25; and even despite the therapeu-
tic and other benefits elicited through this procedure, Laing concludes that
Mental hospitals should define this voyage as ipso facto madness per se,
and treat it accordingly.26
Following from these preliminary considerations, I want to suggest that
the figure of the chiasmus may be understood as resonant with the topog-
raphy of Huxleys map of consciousness. The no-mind appears to exist,
for instance, at the centre of a quadrant of vectors: self, other, perception,
and intellect. As Huxley suggests, a combination of carelessness and an
eagerness for salvation must strike a delicate balance on a knife edge
to allow for the no-mind to be discovered. It is less a formation that can be
thought of by the subject as an entity or intuition that permits the subject
to be thought by it (TPP, 86, emphasis in original). The self-enclosure that
thus occults metanoic experience functions like a maieuticsone between
25 Treadwell Walden, The Great Meaning of Metanoia: An Undeveloped Chapter in the Life
and Teaching of Christ (New York: Thomas Whittaker, 1896), 7.
26 R.D. Laing, Metanoia: Some Experiences at Kingsley Hall, in Hendrik Ruitenbeek,
ed. Going Crazy: The Radical Therapy of R.D. Laing and Others (New York: Bantam,
1972), 11-22, esp. 12.
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 165
the careless self who wanders, and the careful self who seeks salvation. And
while the broad mystical project of being is, for Huxley, a solitary path for
separate individuals (TPP, 86), Huxley privileges literary artists as among
those fortunate few who have the capacity to
transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same
time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars, in which, by some
unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen as the divine source
of all existence (DOP, 7).27
27 On istigkeit, see, for instance, DOP, 7; TPP, 39; and Huxley to Dr Humphry Osmond,
23 December 1955 (Letter 730), in Letters, ed. Smith, 779.
28 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, tr. Alphonso
Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 139; also see David Levin,
Outside the Subject: Merleau-Pontys Chiasmic Vision, in The Philosophers Gaze
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 216-33.
29 Christopher Isherwoods description of Huxleys blindness is quite remarkable in that
it portrays Huxley to be both blind and exceptionally acute, although the latter facil-
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 166
while Huxleys title, The Doors of Perception (1959), quotes William Blakes
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, it is also an unconscious analepsisa
quotationof Merleau-Pontys The Phenomenology of Perception (1945). The
title thus generates a syntagmatic chiasmus between these philosophical
works, as well as a conceptual one.30
In Merleau-Pontys essay, the chiasmus is figured as what Mark Taylor
intuits as a complex structure of implication (im-pli-cation), enfoldment
ity, Isherwood suggests, might not be based on clear oracular vision, but of a mental
perceptuality or proprioception. To me, Isherwood writes,
one of the most mysterious things about Huxley was what he could see and what he
couldnt, and how, exactly, he saw what he saw. How much did he actually see and
how much did he cognize, by some kind of in-built radar?
As Isherwood notes, while he seemed like a blind man while crossing the street,
Huxley had also called to Maria [his first wife] to stop the car because there was a
clump of mariposa lilies, at least a hundred yards from the highway. See Julian Hux-
ley, ed., Aldous Huxley: A Memorial Volume, 156. This particular anecdote is also in-
structive for recognising Huxleys botanising eye. For an insightful reading of chias-
maticity, hyperreality and blindness (apropos Merleau-Ponty), see Edith Wyschorgrod,
Blind Man Seeing: From Chiasm to Hyperreality, in Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor,
eds., Chiasms: Merleau-Pontys Notion of Flesh (New York: State University of New York
Press, 2000), 165-76.
30 Huxley uses Blakes line, from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, as the books epigraph:
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is,
infinite. See William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Boston: John W. Luce
and Company, 1906), 26. Notwithstanding a range of similarities between the texts,
Huxley and Merleau-Pontys views are in many ways very different. On the subject of
madness and schizophrenia, Merleau-Ponty asserts that there is no strictly elective
disturbance and that the core of... disorders such as apraxia and agnosia is to
here to be found in the domain of language, there in that of perception, and elsewhere
in that of action. Then Referring to Schneider, a war veteran whose visual pathology
stemmed from a traumatic injury to the brain incurred during the First World War,
Merleau-Ponty notes that It was through his [Schneiders] sight that mind in him was
impaired, emphasising that these disorders stem from the disturbance of the per-
ceptual apparatus for the subject rather than from some pre-perceptual neurological
disturbance. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, tr. Colin
Smith (London: Routledge, 2005), 144-5 (my emphasis; henceforward PP in this note).
Huxley, on the other hand, suggests, in his context of working with Humphry
Osmond that while it would be rash and premature to affirm it, that each one of
us may be capable of manufacturing a chemical, minute doses of which are known
to cause profound changes in consciousness [certain of which] are similar to those
which occur in... schizophrenia. For Huxley, schizophrenia thus has the broad char-
acter of originating from withinbe it biochemically or biologicallywhereas for
Merleau-Ponty, the disorder originates from the subjects relation to his body; whether
it is an (epi)phenomenon that is linked to the atomistic conception of time (PP, n60)
or visuality (PP, 145), or to geometrical space and the pure constituting conscious-
ness which deploys it (PP, 335). For a brief note on further correlations between Hux-
ley and Merleau-Ponty, see Laurie Spurling, Phenomenology and the Social World: The
Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and its Relation to the Social Sciences (London: Routledge,
1977), 184n4.
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 167
seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Be-
ing from becoming, and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of
the Idea. He could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining
with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the
significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that
what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and
nothing less, than what they were... (DOP, 7).
38 Samuel Ward Boardman, Platos Idea and Aristotles Entelechy, The Monist 20, no.
2 (1910): 297-8.
39 See William Blake, Auguries of Innocence, in Selected Poems, ed. Gerald E. Bentley
(London: Penguin, 2005), 295-6.
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 170
progressively more dense, more tightly packed, until he finds himself at last
reduced to being the agonized consciousness of an inspissated lump of mat-
ter, no bigger than a stone that can be held between the hands (HAH, 50).
Reduced to a compact and static entity, the negatively charged visionary fears
the structural boundaries that characterise what has become their materi-
al experience of displacement. By contrast, the positively charged visionary
embraces this transfiguration as an opening, associating it with feelings of
transcendence.
These protocols of visionary experience are in many ways akin to what
Deleuze and Guattari describe as the itinerant, ambulant sciences, which
consist in following a flow in a vectorial field across which singularities are
scattered like so many accidents. Such a following confers on these itin-
erant wanderer-practitioners a quasi-nomadic status, one in which they are
left to experiment, like the visionary, with what can be composed and con-
ceived of within this new vectorial field.40 As Deleuze and Guattari stress,
however, what can often detract from the transcendental view of itineration
is a reduction of this experience to its biochemical or phenomenological op-
erations; in these cases, it is easily dismissed, like a ghost in the machine, as
merely the capacity of technologies or applied science.41 This is, as Hux-
ley suggests, just as true of the artistic object as of other technologiesfor
its reduction to a mathematical idea can undercut its significance (DOP, 7).
not at all the same thing as reproducing, and one never follows in order to repro-
duce. The ideal of reproduction, deduction, or induction, is all a part of royal
science, at all times and in all places, and treats differences of time and place
as so many variables, the constant form of which is extracted precisely by the
law... [implying] the permanence of a fixed point of view external to what is re-
produced: watching the flow from the bank.45
43 Ibid., 372-4.
44 Ibid., 372.
45 Ibid., 372 (emphasis in original).
46 Ibid.
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 172
But if it is surprising that the Huxley of the 1920s partly dismisses vi-
sualisation in Varieties of Intelligencewhere he notes that a pronounced
visualiser is to a considerable extent at the mercy of his visualizations (VOI,
179)it is equally notable that such a dismissal is less abandoned than more
precisely expressed in Heaven and Hell. With the emergence of late capital-
ism in the 1950sa period that gave rise to a moment when, as Huxley notes,
it often appears as though We have seen too much pure, bright colour at
Woolworthsit can be difficult for truly visionary experiences to remain
intrinsically transporting (HAH, 34). Accordingly, Huxley asserts, modern
technology has tended to devaluate the traditional vision-inducing mate-
rials, (HAH, 34) prompting potential mystics to seek out newer and more
impactful adjuvants.47
It is in this context of visual hypersaturation that individuation takes on
an even more critical significance. In post-industrial economies, the abun-
dance of vision-inducing materials ironically means that transportation
is so much the rarer. But even more influential than the inundation of bright
lights and the ever more various forms of colour displays is the range of po-
litical and psychochemical changes available to the visionary. And this devel-
opment explains what Huxley sees as the ever shrinking dearth of visionaries
in the Western world of the 1950s (HAH, 59). In the then fashionable picture
of the universe, Huxley notes, there is no place for validly transcendental
experience (HAH, 59). The contemporary picture of the world is an utterly
transformed neurochemical milieu. As Huxley writes,
So, while the Huxley of the 1920s proposes that varieties of intelligence
are divisible across such binary schemata as visual/non-visual, geometric/
analytic, and talented/untalented (VOI, 177-80), the Huxley of the 50s in-
clines to a different orientation. The older Huxley feels that almost any kind
of intelligence can be brought to the surface under the appropriate chemical
conditions. Following his experiences with psychoactive drugs and psychia-
try, Huxley now zealously adopts an optimistic view of biochemical interven-
tion; he asserts that by appropriate biochemical methods we can transform
[adults and children as they are] into superior individuals (DTSMM, 299).
This transition in Huxleys thought coincides with a more general shift
within the life sciences in the twentieth century, one that moves from a
Freudian (or neo-Platonian)and even a behavioural view of the human
(with B.F. Skinner among others)to a primarily chemical and molecular
theory of the individual. It represents the beginning of what Nikolas Rose
identifies as the molecularization of psychiatry.48 From the 1960s onward,
as Rose and Joelle Abi-Rached note, the neuromolecular vision of the brain
was fundamental to the rise of psychopharmacological societies over the
closing decades of the twentieth century.49 Similarly for Deleuze and Guat-
tari, the molecularand what they call the molarare always in compe-
tition. While the former articulates the fugitive, non-linguistic, rhizomatic,
and chemical aspects of the humanall of which occur at the micro-level
the latter, an earlier form of conceptualising the human, articulates those
macrobiological forces that have a tendency to encourage simple binaries
and oppositions.50
But in Huxleys writing of the 1920s, what is true of the molar is also true
of the molecular. While orthodox thinkers may impugn heretics as unsta-
ble-minded, as scholars who take pleasure in all that is new and revolu-
tionary, it is to these heretics, Huxley argues, that we owe progress in all its
forms (VOI, 185). These are those molar figuresthose nomadswho, even
if they are [l]ess subject to the habits of thought formed in youth, also now
utter a singular opinion, which is to say an opinion that has not been
sanctified by general acceptance (VOI, 185). By the 1950s, however, it was in
psychopharmacology that Huxley intuited another plane along which the
48 Nikolas Rose and Joelle M. Abi-Rached, Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Man-
agement of the Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 6; also see Nikolas
Rose, The Neurochemical Self and its Anomalies, in Richard V. Ericson and Aaron
Doyle, eds. Risk and Morality (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 407-37.
49 Rose and Abi-Rached, Neuro, 47; also see 200-2.
50 See Paul Elliott, Guattari Reframed (London: I.B. Taurus, 2012), 25.
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 174
mass of humanity may be divided (VOI, 184). Focusing now on the molecular,
he sought to experiment more directly with chemical brain interventions.
When Huxley spoke with a friend who had undergone LSD testing and had,
when sat in front of a stroboscope, seen new visions, Huxley was impressed
by his friends report that the drug and device conspired to produce in him
the image of a Japanese landscape... charged with praeturnatural signifi-
cance (HAH, 56). Whereas Huxley had always meditated on the mystery by
which visions could and do appear, this process had now become merely a
particular case of a larger, more comprehensive mysterythe nature of the
relations between visionary experience and events on the cellular, chemical,
and electrical levels (HAH, 57).
The prohibition of LSDand, ultimately, its related triptamines, ergo-
lines, and phenythalaminesfrom the mid-1960s and onwards, however,
ensured that the nature of these events at the microbiological levels would
remain almost entirely a mysteryat least, that is, for the next four to five
decades.51 Nonetheless, this was a mystery that might ultimately prove, as
Huxley suggested, a problem less of biochemistry than philosophy. Con-
founding the distinctions between self and otherbetween psychoactive
substance and psychoactive subjecttogether with its problematisation of
inside and outsidethe question of a final substance persists in subjectivity
studies even today, where the dominance of a Cartesian framework remains
distinctly apparent. This is, of course, despite the fact that Descartess ideas
have been repudiated by so many philosophersLeibniz, Spinoza, Deleuze,
among many othersalmost all of whom want to amplify the principles by
which numerical and real distinctions are not identified in nature, but pro-
duced, and then transplanted onto it.52
But this substance problem is also an epistemological oneand one
anticipated in the pre-molecular and even pre-chemical history of the philos-
ophy of science. When Hegel, in his Science of Logic, for instance, described a
particular mode of thinking as chemism, he posits that chemically differ-
entiated objects, in distinction to the mechanistic and Newtonian objects
of physics (namely atoms and molecules),
51 On the history of LSD prohibition, see Erika Dyck, Psychedelic Psychiatry, 128-32; Drug
Abuse Control Amendments of 1965, 89 P.L. 74; 79 Stat. 226. 19 July 1965; and Matt
Oram, The Trials of Psychedelic Medicine: LSD Psychotherapy, Clinical Science, and
Pharmaceutical Regulation in the United States, 1949-76, PhD diss., University of Syd-
ney, 2014, 94-5.
52 See Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, tr. Martin Joughin (New York:
Zone Books 1990), 17-39; also see Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in
Philosophy (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1993), 59-63.
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 175
are explicitly what they are, only through their difference, and they are thus
the absolute drive to integrate themselves through and with one another.53
With the emergence of quantum physics after the advent of Einsteinian and
Reimannian geometry in the early twentieth century, atoms and molecules
could no longer be seen as the mechanistic elements that Hegel had per-
ceived them as. If chemical objects were able to integrate themselves with
one another, that is, then so tooas Einstein would proposed in his 1905
PhD thesiscould atoms and molecules interact and transform.54 Never-
theless, the distinction between physics and chemistry sustains itself even
today; and, even at the molar level of the university curriculum, these dis-
ciplines remain distinct, their procedures and practices designated to and
contained in segregated buildings and rooms.
Less a consequence of the abandonment of physical theories of the
brain than representative of the enthusiastic adoption of molecular models
of the self, this division between physics and chemistry is reflected in the
constituency of ideas that are today a part of what Rose calls our styles of
thought of biological psychiatry. In competition with one another, various
styles of thought, and various thought imagesand the chiasmus among
themproduce varying models of the modern, chemical self: for instance,
the synaptic self, the molecular self, brainhood, and so forth.55
As already intimated in the first part of this thesis, Deleuze and Guattari
chart a philosophical trajectory of these very changesthese very chemical
modelsin What is Philosophy? There the authors reject Freudian mod-
els of the neurotic self, and privilege the new neurological models of the
brain-subject. Almost in reverse to Hegel, the authors speak of the brain as
an individual cogniser in its own right: Philosophy, art, science are not the
mental objects of an objectified brain, but three aspects under which [the]
brain becomes subject, [or] Thought-brain. Elsewhere, the authors declare
that the brain is the mind itself.56 But more than this, What is Philosophy?
We require just a little order to protect us from chaos... all that the association
of ideas has ever meant is providing is with these protective rulesresem-
blance, continuity, causalitywhich enable us to put some order into ideas,
preventing our fantasy (delirium, madness) from crossing the universe in
an instant, producing winged horses and dragons breathing fire.60
But the order of which Foucault writes in his History of Madness is even
more explicit than this: Foucault is attentive to the impact of nosological
reason and positivism on nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought, and
similarly, in his Birth of the Clinic, Foucault emphasises the importance of
the clinical gaze in an attempt to underscore this new optics impact on
psychotherapy and medicine in the twentieth century.
son (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1994), 210-19; also see Ian Buchanan and
Gregg Lambert, Deleuze and Space (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 6.
57 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 10.
58 See Stengers and Prigogine, Order Out of Chaos: Mans New Dialogue with Nature (New
York: Bantam Books, 1984).
59 Ibid.
60 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 201.
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 177
61 See Foucault, History of Madness, 158-9; Foucault, Birth of the Clinic, 120.
62 See Naomi Goldblum, The Brain-Shaped Mind: What The Brain Can Tell Us About the
Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 2-3.
63 Ibid., 218.
64 Ibid., 70.
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 178
on the thing in itself, which is to say that to which the word refersnot its
signified but its referent.65 In this way, Foudraine promotes a view similar to
that which Huxley proposes: Huxley, ever intent to see things as they really
are, intently pursues the Is-ness or Istigkeit of the object, and is uninter-
ested in the way in which representation itself functions in the ontological
economy of objects (DOP, 7).
Comparing altered mental states and psychotic episodes in phenom-
enological terms, Huxley cites an article in the Journal dune schizophrene
in his Heaven and Hell. This work presents an autobiographical record of a
young girls passage through madness, one in which, from the point of view
of the apparently psychotic young girl, her surroundings become a le Pays
dclairement [or] the country of lit-upness (HAH, 48-9). Huxley argues that
this description suggests the ostensible similarity of psychosis to visionary
insight; and he notes that the country of lit-upness is a name which a
mystic might have used to denote his heaven (HAH, 48-9).66 But the field of
light is also encoded with a transitive or transversal intensity that diverges
from the visionarys realisation; and this diacritical distinction denotes the
two statess underlying phenomenological differences. As Huxley concludes,
the autobiographical description, unlike the visionary account, is charged
with a hateful significance that is negatively transfigured:
The negative inversion of the visionary experience is, for Huxley, typified by
punishments of pressure and constriction, carceral pressures of a kind also
described in the various accounts of hell. The sinners in Dantes Inferno,
Huxley notes, are buried in mud, shut up in the trunks of trees, frozen solid
in blocks of ice, crushed beneath stones (HAH, 50). It is in these passages,
near the end of Heaven and Hell, that we can begin to sense the collision of
65 See Jan Foudraine, Not Made of Wood: A Psychiatrist Discovers His Own Profession, tr.
Hubert H. Hoskins (London: Quartet Books, 1974); Foudraine, On the Power of Med-
ical Maya: An Update of Not Made of Wood, Keynote address at the Critical Psychia-
try Network conference, Sheffield, 27 April 2001, see http://www.critpsynet.freeuk.com/
Foudraine.htm. On Foudraine and critical psychiatry, see D.B. Double, ed. Critical Psy-
chiatry: The Limits of Madness (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 6-7.
66 Also see HAH, 52.
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 179
by the very nature of its basic approach precludes the possibility of under-
standing a patients disorganization as a failure to achieve a specifically per-
sonal form of unity.
67 See R.D. Laing, The Divided Self, chapter 1, The existential-phenomenological founda-
tions for a science of persons, 18-26.
68 Ibid., 24.
69 Ibid.
70 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 373.
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 180
brought to bear on the visual plane in Heaven and Hell, Deleuze and Guattari
unwittingly function as the elaborators of Huxleys nascent geometrical phi-
losophy, engaging with Euclids conception of space as it is founded on the
famous parallel postulate. As the authors assert, Euclids postulate takes
gravity as the universal constant that governs all forms.71 Knowing this, we
can detect in Huxleys description of the quivering bunch of flowers a sub-
tle deduction of this Euclidean principle: what is a quiver of significance for
Huxley may now be read as an artifact of gravitys forces. But an emblematic
questionand one that disrupts such an appeal to physical explanationis
this: to what extent do the flowers actually quiver under a gravitational force
rather than merely appear to quiver? And from Huxleys perspective, in his
lucid apprehension of the flowers, to what extent is this quiver the product of
the mescaline intoxication?
These questions are epideictic; not in that they praise or blame, but
that they gesture at possibility. That is, their enunciation is in itself a per-
formance, one that yearns less for any conclusive explanation than serves
to illustrate the impossibility of any positive answer. Dividing physics from
language, the question can elicit only answers that are already charged with
the very methodological presuppositions that Huxleys observations attempt
to transcend. Rather than seeking answers, Huxley valorises itinerancy; he
ambulates in the hope of hitting upon one of those inexplicable and ac-
cidental processes that come unsought and yet lead to an experience of
cosmic consciousness (TPP, 81). Attempts to distinguish between the flow-
ers gravitational charge and its apprehension are, as Huxley time and again
affirms, constitutive of the most vital answers themselves; for it is only ever
within the intrinsic limits of the logos, such as they are, that questions of
this kind can be engendered and, ultimately, answered.
Thus, Huxley will conclude his Literature and Science with a resigned de-
scription of languages limits:
Words are few and can only be arranged in certain conventionally fixed ways;
the counterpoint of unique events is infinitely wide and their succession in-
definitely long (LAS, 99).
Huxleys view of the relative power of nature and languageof logos and
physisunderscores Mallarms essay slogans on the finitude of language,
which I addressed in chapter 2. While only twenty-six letters are enough to
71 Ibid., 370. Huxley also directly discusses Euclid and Riemann in Do What You Will
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1929), 262-3.
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 181
consecrate language, it is always the text itself (and in fact its typography),
rather than its author, that speaks.72 But for Huxley, scientific language is
even less promising than the comparably richer language of literature:
That the purified language of science or even the richer purified language of
literature should ever be adequate to the givenness of the world and of our ex-
perience is, in the very nature of things, impossible (LAS, 99).
72 See Thomas Hope, Poetrys Media, 451; Stphane Mallarm, The Book: a Spiritual
Instrument, 82.
73 Deery, Huxley and the Mysticism of Science, 60.
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 182
ism and feel sadly worried by Einstein and Eddington, butsince Hes a
scientisthe must also maintain principles that make him fight again-
stany scientific theory thats less than fifty years old (PCP, 213).
Tethered to these political ideals, Illidge must
believe that the only fundamental realities are space, time and mass, and that
all the rest is nonsense, mere illusion and mostly bourgeois illusion at that
(PCP 213).
And yet, however assiduous Huxley and his fellow misti-scientists are in
their wish to dematerialise reality, they less dissuade their readers of realitys
material construction than advance a metaphysical assessment of sciences
inadequacy as a conceptualisation of reality. If science alienates the human
and does so in the same breath that it privileges the immaterial or demateri-
alisedit is not because it excludes the subject or freezes the subjects words
in a static logos. It is, rather, because science omits and excludes parts of
74 Aldous Huxley, One and Many, in Robert S. Baker and James Sexton, eds., Aldous
Huxley: Complete Essays, Volume II: 1926-1929 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 302-19, esp.
314-16.
75 Boon, The Road of Excess, 218.
76 Deery, Huxley and the Mysticism of Science, 159 (my emphasis).
77 Ibid., 160.
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 184
reality: God thinks neither in terms of Euclid nor of Riemann (Along, 108).
Science is not simply an inadequate way of representing absolute reality
(Along, 108), then, but also insufficiently well narrativised; it is lacking in
the obvious attributes of the picturesque (LAS, 90). Threatening to become
ever more influential, however, science also equips the political bosses who
control the various national states with unprecedentedly efficient instru-
ments of coercion (SLP, 6). Less an alleviation for the alienated individual
than their increasingly punitive and sovereign master, the applied sciences
are pharmakonic. They are predisposed to political exploitation and expro-
priation, even as they denude the operations of previously unseen structures.
While Huxleys engagements with the geometrical and physical sciences
of Einstein, Euclid, and Riemann are by no means as technical as Deleuze
and Guattaris commitments to these sciences, Huxleys writing alludes to
the shockingness of the shift augured by general relativity, and particularly
by its adoption of a Riemannianthat is, a non-Euclidean, model of space-
time. This is a shift whose effects ramified in the social world as acutely as
they also reshaped the social sciences; for Riemannian physics began to
deploy metaphors, for instance, from the human community to illustrate
its propositions. As Arkady Plotinsky notes, Reimanns incorporation of the
language-concept of the neighbourhood suggests a kind of sociological
definition of space.78 Elaborating on this newly socialised mathematical
space, Plotnitsky describes how general relativity enshrined at least a cer-
tain conception, topos, of a spatial type, one that had been also developed
in the so-called topos theory introduced by Alexandre Grothendieck. In
its introduction of the concept of the manifold or manifoldness (Mannig-
faltigkeit), moreover, Riemannian spatial mathematics repudiates crucial
limbs of Euclids geometry; it enables spatiality to become a primary con-
ceptand an even more primary concept than that which later became
known as set theory, a mathematical formulation introduced by George
Cantor, shortly after Riemanns death, in 1866.79
For Deery, Huxleys response to Einsteins relativity theories appears in
the decades following those theoriess publications. What are apparently
raises difficulties and, as for the discovery of reality: this is, he argues, no
longer [even] the aim of the research (LAS, 64-5).82 The problem now, Huxley
suggests, is to explain those ineradicable fingerprints left by the human on
the apparently nonhuman processes of the sciences themselves. For what is
the point of a nature subjected to human questioning when, after all the
trials and operations, man, once again, meets only with himself (LAS, 65)?83
It is true that Huxleys little lesson in relativity is less a product of Hux-
leys studies of Einsteins theory than his own means of identifying the so-
cial constants thatmuch like light or gravity themselvesorder the social
context out of which the Mohammadens poem arises. For Huxley, Einsteins
processes function as detectors of difference in a given context; but whereas
Einstein strives to detect physico-material differences, Huxley is tasked with
identifying those that are historical, religious, and most of all social. Relativ-
ity represents another means by which Huxley can communicate not a static
theorem but propose thatin spite of science, and in spite of unpurified
languageit remains possible to effect the creation of a comprehensive
philosophy in which... reality remains forever whole, seamless, and undivid-
ed (LAS, 67). Both the poem that teaches Huxley his lesson and Einsteins
theory itself offer what Philip K. Dick calls a shock of dysrecognition to
those who apprehend it. Like the metanoic voyage, Huxleys dysrecogni-
tion of the poem allows him to access the direct physical knowledge of
the Urdu versification; it offers him a kind of apprehension that is distin-
guishable from the intellectual knowledge, abstracted and generalized out
of the physical knowledge (Spinoza, 314).
Such a distinction is congruent with Einsteins Equivalence Principle,
where a kind of dysrecognition is occasioned when an indistinguishable
mimesisor equivalencebetween two uniformly accelerated frames of
reference can be recognised for what it is: the expression of an underlying
order, that of curved spacetime. Now, constant speed can be recognised
as suchnotwithstanding that it appears homologous with stasis. As a con-
ceptualisation through which a direct knowledge of these relative frames
may be encountered afresh, general relativity thus operates to powerfully
illustrate the dissolution of subject and object, self and other. All the while,
82 On Huxleys vitalism or sensitivity to the life of the body, see Nicholas M. Williams,
The Sciences of Life: Living Form in William Blake and Aldous Huxley, Romanticism
15, no. 1 (2009): 41-53.
83 Abraham Pais, Subtle is the Lord... : The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1982), 182n45. Also see Werner Heisenberg, Philosophic Problems of
Nuclear Science (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), 117; Baghramian, Relativism, 63-7.
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 187
The gravitational field has only a relative existence in a way similar to the elec-
tric field generated by the magnetoelectric induction. Because for an observer
falling freely from the roof of a house there existsat least in his immediate
surroundingsno gravitational field. Indeed, if the observer drops some bod-
ies then these remain relative to him in a state of rest... independent of their
articular chemical or physical nature... The observer therefore has the right to
interpret his own state as rest.85
As Torretti suggests, for Einstein to speak in terms of rest and falling free-
ly is actually to continue to think of spacetime in Euclidean termsand to
imagine that, for instance, a particle falling in a field would fall in a straight
line, one that runs exactly perpendicular to the earths surface. It is akin to
thinking that the city of Manhattan, as Torretti suggests, appears to be di-
vided into rectangular blocks, although no true rectangle can ever be drawn
on the curved surface of the planet.86 Realising that objects do not fall in
these kinds of straight lines in the coming years, Einstein would soon incor-
porate Riemannian geometry into his model of the problem of equivalence.
Inspired by the work of Carl Friedrich Gass, who had proposed that particles
move in geodesics (that is, along the shortest possible distances across a
surface), Riemanns manifold model had shown how the rate at which adja-
cent geodesics converge toward, or diverge from, each other depends on the
dimensions of the local curvature between them.
As Torreti argues, it was this discovery that enabled Riemann to see
that the apparent mutual attraction of nearby particles under the influence
of gravity turns out to be, on this view [only] a manifestation of spacetime
curvature.87 Such a model of what Torretti describes as the movement of
particlesof those that run parallel to themselves along their respective
worldlinesis analogous to the way in which Huxley would defend Crome
Yellow (1921). Parts of the novel only resembled certain events and personag-
es from his real life at Garsington, he would argue, a defence that became all
the more axiomatic in the context of his dispute with Lady Ottoline Morrell.
In 1921, Huxley would write a letter to Morrell, one in which he would
express his apparently sincere regret that she had taken offence to his novels
depiction of her and the other guests for whom she had played host while
Huxley lived with them in her manor. Huxley would also refer in his letter to
the words of the character Denis Stone, whose words he describes, interest-
ingly, as his own:
I said in the book: we are all parallel straight lines destined to meet only at
infinity. Real understanding is impossibility. I write something which seems
85 Pais, Subtle is the Lord... , 178. As Torretti notes, this is Paiss own translation of the
passage; it appears on a manuscript of circa 1920, archived in the Pierpont Morgan
Library: Torretti, Gravity as Spacetime Curvature, 133n16.
86 Torretti, Gravity as Spacetime Curvature, 126.
87 Ibid., 127.
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 189
88 Huxley to Lady Ottoline Morrell, 3 December 1921, in Aldous Huxley: Selected Letters,
ed. James Sexton (Chicago; Ivan R. Dee, 2007), 107-8.
89 Henry Somers-Hall, Hegel, Deleuze, and the Critique of Representation, 94.
90 Ibid.
91 Ibid., 93.
92 Ibid., 96.
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 190
But the reasons adduced by the cynical Huxley of the 1920s to defend
his fiction from such accusations as it had been directly wrested from reali-
tythat it is an obvious roman clefstill seem to rely on a metaphorology
of outmoded Euclidean geometrical physics. And while Huxleys analogy or
apologia may be criticised for its advertence to this increasingly superseded
theory in physics, it is also possible to see Huxleys assertion of Euclids the-
ories as disingenuous or fallible in its own right, and for reasons that do not
betray his failure to understand the science.
The problem that endures for Huxley, however, is thatno matter how
it is expressedHuxleys mystical, visionary, or artistic philosophy of
reality soon becomes entangled with other totalising philosophies that he
purports to reject, such as those of Euclid or Riemann. In another of his trav-
el diaries, Along The Road (1925), Huxley praises Holland as a rationalists
paradisethat is, as a nation in which one is led to conclude, flushed with
mental intoxication, that
his totality, and therefore so much less representative of the humans im-
measurable and infinitely complex ontology (PS, viii).
An even deeper problem than this, however, is a sociological one: the
problem in which sociological theory, accepting human difference as real,
attempts to understand those differences, and so reduces them. Neverthe-
less, as Huxley notes, even this problem can be articulated in the terms of
Riemannian physics. As Huxley proposes in Proper Studies (1927), there are
organizers and Utopians. While the organisers fail to critique the institu-
tions whose processes they seek to refine, Utopians begin from the wrong
assumptions about these institutions. The latter behave as if they were radi-
cal astronomers, compelled to write
books about what would happen if there were no such thing as gravitation
and if the earth, in consequence, moved in a straight line and not an ellipse.
Such books might be very edifying if their authors began by showing that
movement in a straight line is better than movement in a curve. (PS, x)
Conjugating the shift from Euclidean to Riemannian geometry with the so-
cio-political imperative felt by intellectuals to persuade their readership of
the superiority above all others of their better model, Huxley again alludes
to the importance of the socio-political promotion of ideas. Having learnt
from the history of physics, it is important, Huxley claims, that impossible
assumptionssuch as Euclids or even Reimannsare not simply accepted,
but rather made subject to contestation, trial, and justification. In his last
novel, Huxley will summarise this tendency in an aphoristic quotation from
Aristotle, one that serves as the novels epigraph: In framing an ideal we
may assume what we wish, but should avoid impossibilities (Island, 6).
In Huxleys philosophy, framing an ideal becomes a means of intuit-
ing the world within an accepted rubric of uncertainty and approximation.
When Huxley recounts the Urdu verses in Jesting Pilate, the fact that the
words of the poem were incomprehensible does not obviate the possibility
that Huxley, in attending to this distant language, might recognise that
distinguishing feature of the Euripidean chorus which Aristophanes derides
and parodies in the Frogs (JP, 24). Such possibilities are real, because they
are contemplations; and they are true, therefore, because contemplations
occur, for Huxley, without intentionality: they suggestively and meaningful-
ly appear like so many unconscious thoughts arising spontaneously in the
Mind-at-Large. For Deleuze and Guattari, the tendency to acquire new data,
and to habituate oneself to them, is singularly ingrained in English philos-
ophy. British practitioners, they claim, treat the plane of immanence as a
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 192
to be carried away by such a flow, one must often instigate a blockage. If the
multiple must be made, it is because its unfolding demands a refrain... The
univocal identity called self gets blocked, refrained, flattened, and this
Neither suffering nor enjoying a static point of view, the itinerant continu-
ally acquires novel capacities to flow, the strange capacity for invasion that bi-
ologist Lynn Margulis links to the emergence of endosymbiosis and Deleuze
and Guattari refer to as thought.103
100 See Jesting Pilate : an intellectual holyday (1957) [sic], Internet Archive, accessed 20
April, 2014, https://archive.org/details/jestingpilateint00huxl.
101 Lindsay Banco, Psychedelic Trips: Travel and Drugs in Contemporary Literature,
PhD diss., University of Maryland, 2007, 4, 215; cf. Banco, Travel and Drugs in Twenti-
eth-Century Literature (London: Routledge, 2010).
102 Doyle, Wetwares, 11.
103 Ibid. While Marguliss proposition that symbiosisor serial endosymbiotic theory
(SET)which engenders the origin of plastids and mitochondria, contributed much
to the dissolution of the concept of the individual organism, the theory itself was first
postulated by Russian botanist Konstantin Mereschkowski in his Thoerie der zwei
Plasmaarten als Grundlage der Symbiogenesis, einer neuen Lehre von der Entstehung
der Organismen, Biologisches Centralblatt 30 (1910): 253-64. Also see Lynne Margu-
lis and Gregory Hinkle, Symbiosis and the Origin of Eukaryotic Cell Motility: Cur-
rent Status, Endocytobiology IV: 4th International Colloquium on Endocytobiology and
Symbiosis, ed. P. Nardon, V. Gianinazzi-Pearson, A.M. Grenier, L. Margulis, and D.C.
Smith (Paris: Institut National de la Recherche Agrnomique, 1990), 523-5; and John Ar-
chibald, One Plus One Equals One: Symbiosis and the Evolution of Complex Life (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2014), esp. 50-2.
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 195
104 Raphael H. Valdivia and Joseph Heitman, Endosymbiosis: The Evil Within, Current
Biology 17, no. 11 (2007): R408-10, esp. R408.
105 Examples of the operations of cross-kingdom symbiotic pathogenesis reveal the
striking co-dependency of pathogens and endosymbionts. As Valdivia and Heitmann
notes of The interaction between Burkholderia and its fungal host [Rhizopus micro-
spores], the relation appears to straddle a fine line between mutualismwhere both
organisms benefit from the common exploitation of the plant hostand parasitism,
where Rhizopus is held hostage by Burkholderia. Ibid., R408.
106 Siv G. E. Anderson, Alireza Zomorodipour, Jan O. Andersson, Thomas Sicheritz-Pontn,
U. Ceceilia M. Alsmark, Raf M. Podowski, A. Kristina Nslund, Ann-Sofie Eriksson,
Herbert H. Winkler, and Charles G. Kurland, The Genome Sequence of Rickesttsia
prowazekii and the Origin of Mitochondria, Nature 396 (1998): 133-43.
107 See Ekaterina Dadachoca and Arturo Casadevall, Ionizing Radiation: How Fungi
Cope, Adapt, and Exploit with the Help of Melanin, Current Opinion in Microbiolo-
gy 11 (2008): 525-31; Ekaterina Dadchova, Ruth A. Bryan, Xianchun Huang, Tiffany
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 196
Ought to live and move and have our being in the infinite rather than the fi-
nite, that we should do our thinking in terms of the universal unity, not in
terms of individual particulars. In a word, that we should cease to be worms in
the blood and becomewhat? Butterflies, I suppose, winging freely through
space (SW, 62).
110 On this work, see Alison Bashford, Julian Huxleys Transhumanism, 157. Bashford
relies on typescripts comprising the Julian S. Huxley Papers, which can be found in
Rice Universitys Woodson Research Center, Fondrean Library. A report on the flat-
worm experiments can be found, as Bashford notes, in Box 6, Folder 4, Newsclipping,
1921.
111 Bashford, Julian Huxleys Transhumanism, 157.
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 198
selves from the human plane, Huxley writes, philosophers and mystics
have, in their search for superhuman wisdom, sacrificed much valuable
human knowledge, without, however, being rewarded. They have no angelic
power, for instance, and perhaps nothing like the scientist dreams of pos-
sessing (SW, 65-6). Despite that Huxley is ultimately inclined to dismiss the
goal of transcendence or transhumanismor what he calls superhuman-
ismdescribing it as illusory, he also believes that no such ideal is the
worse of for being unrealizable (SW, 66). Attributing the ideal of superhu-
manness to the influence of Christianity, Huxley asserts that humans, just
as worms, should be permitted to try to be superlatively [themselves], and
to become Humanity perfected and consummate[even though] it is a
high and finally unattainable ideal (SW, 69).
It is by adopting this pragmatic view of the human environmentwith
all the biological constraints that such a milieu imposes on humans
that Huxley diverges from classical metaphysics to invoke a free and wild
creation of concepts. As described earlier, this is a kind of tendency that
Deleuze and Guattari characterise as the essence of English philosophy;
it expresses a wild freedom in relation to what can be thought, albeit within
the constraints of long-acquired habit.112 It is ironic, then, that Huxley turns
to Eastern philosophy in order to breach the fold of Western metaphysics
(and of English philosophy)for as alien as such philosophical systems
might have seemed to a British philosopher of the twentieth century, Huxley
had always nurtured an interest in them.
While for Huxley science and language are inadequate heuristics, mod-
els that shall forever be ill-equipped to describe the givenness of experi-
ence, history, by contrast, comprises the very indeces of that givenness in
the form of the many inventions, technics, and models that have driven the
adoption of our eschatological ideas about Reality. These technological
developments, Huxley writes, structure all our phenomenological expe-
riences, just as they have also allowed for the development of increasingly
advanced epistemologiesgenealogical connections through which we
have more directly perceived the world. Advances in biochemistry, such
as knowing which endogenous biochemical compounds are generative of
certain mental states, and ascertaining what genotypes generate what men-
tal disorders: these are the very kinds of knowledge that advance humanss
ability to understand reality in its totality.
progress which can be described in theological terms as the passage from Ha-
des to Heaven, in chemical terms as the substitution of mescalin and lysergic
acid for adrenolutin, and in psychological terms as the advance from catato-
nia and feelings of unreality to a sense of heighted reality in vision and, final-
ly, in mystical experience (HAH, 84).
113 A contemporary analogy for this kind of procedure has been the mapping of the hu-
man genome, which is now continued in research that seeks associations between
certain diseases and disorders with a range of isoform neurotrophins. This is argu-
ably one way in which humans seek to understanding the entirety of our genetic and
genotypic (and epigenetic) environmentthe equivalent of the worm seeking to know
the blood as a whole. In a much publicised study, for example (the first of its kind)
polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was used to quantitatively map the isoform expres-
sion of the neurotrophin Neuregulin 1 (NRG1), specifically types I-IV, and NRG1-IVNV,
during human neocortical development and aging. PCR was applied in real-time to
human postmortem prefontral cortex tissue samples at 14-39 weeks gestation and
postnatal ages 0-83 years. Having studied the association of these NRG1 expressions
and the rs6994992 genotype, the study identified a potential mechanism of ear-
ly developmental risk for schizophrenia at the NRG1 locus, involving a novel class
of NRG1 proteins. See Clare Paterson, Yanhong Wang, Joel E. Kleinman, Amanda J.
Law, Effects of Schizophrenia Risk Variation in the NRG1 Gene on NRGI-IV Splicing
During Fetal and Early Postnatal Human Neocortical Development, American Journal
of Psychiatry 171, no. 9 (2014): 979-89. Also see John M. Grohol, 8 Disorders Instead of
One? The Role Gene Clusters Play in Schizophrenia, PsychCentral, 16 September 2014,
accessed 18 September 2014, http://psychcentral.com/news/2014/09/16/8-disorders-in-
stead-of-one-the-role-genes-clusters-play-in-schizophrenia/74981.html.
114 See, for instance, Kenneth R. Pelletier and Charles Garfield, Consciousness: East and
West (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 232-3; Jeffrey J. Kripal, Esalen: America and the
Religion of No Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 85-9.
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 200
115 Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, tr. Geoff Ben-
nington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiv.
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 201
chological, and ultimately material sciences can also serve, if they are super-
latively efficient, only to improve the total efficiency of a power structure
that increasingly leaves human needs unaddressed (UD, 209). As a means of
cautioning against the dangers of efficiency, Huxley introduces, in his final
novel Island (1962), the character of Mr Menon, the Under-Secretary of Schools.
Menon evangelises a program of humanist science, or the sciences of life:
Our primary emphasis isnt on physics and chemistry; its on the sciences of
life... We dont have the money for large-scale research in physics and chemistry,
and we dont really have any practical need for that kind of researchno heavy
industries to be made more competitive, no armaments to be made more dia-
bolical, not the faintest desire to land on the backside of the moon (Island, 210).
116 On Mr Menons educational program as but one part of a Rortian liberal utopia, see
William M. Curtis, Rortys Liberal Utopia and Huxleys Island, Philosophy and Liter-
ature 35 (2011): 91-103, esp. 98-9.
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 202
I was thinking of two people I met last time I was in England. At Cambridge.
One of them was an atomic physicist, the other was a philosopher. Both ex-
tremely eminent. But one had a mental age, outside the laboratory, of about
eleven and the other was a compulsive eater with a weight problem that he re-
fused to face. Two extreme examples of what happens when you take a clever
boy, give him fifteen years of the most intensive formal education and totally
neglect to do anything for the mind-body which has to do the learning and
the living... Theyre grotesquely funny... But goodness, how pathetic! And poor
things, how curiously repulsive! (Island, 208)
117 Aldous Huxley, Vulgarity in Literature, Complete Essays, Volume II: 1926-1929, ed.
Robert S. Baker and James Sexton (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), 19-48, 38-9. This essay
was originally published in The Saturday Review of Literature on 27 September, 1930.
118 Ibid., 38.
119 Ibid., 39.
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 203
120 Hull, Representative Man, 397; also see Huxley to John Middleton Murry, 26 May 1946
(Letter 517), in Letters, ed. Smith, 545.
121 On Huxley and the Alexander Technique, see Aldous Huxley, A Psychophysical Edu-
cation, in More Talk of Alexander, ed. Wilfred Barlow (London: Gollancz, 1978), 1-3.
122 Doyle, Wetwares, 10.
123 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 204
And, even as the authors qualify this view by asserting that the operations of
such a perceiving force must be, following Bergson, far more rich and com-
plex than they can articulate, they also acknowledge that, in geometrical
terms, one always
135 A cursory search for this quotation on Google.com, for instance, returns a range
of websites of atheist organisations. Similarly, a large number of non-scholarly,
neo-mystical or New Age self-published books adopt this passage as epigraphs at
the head of their chapters, although in almost all none of these cases is a page refer-
ence, citation, or the passages context offered. Like many writers described as public
intellectuals, Huxley has become a quotable source, used both to bolster and refute
an argument. The changing nature or historical context in which Huxley uttered his
thoughts is rarely considered in those works that adopt his words in this way. See, for
instance, Patricia Tesco and Rowan Hall, Animal Spirits: Spells, Sorcery and Symbols
from the Wild (New Jersey: New Page Books, 2002), 75; V.C. Thomas, The God Dilemma:
To Believe or Not to Believe (Bloomington, XLibris, 2009), 131; and Donald L. Avery, Re-
leasing the Bean Within: Practicing Spirituality in Everyday Life (New DeHaven: Infinity
Publishing, 2006), 38.
136 Jerome Meckier, Aldous Huxley: From Poet to Mystic (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2006), 4.
137 Ibid.
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 208
tale story of Dr. Freudit remains true that both mythologies imagine a
form of transportation or deterritorialisation. They are thus different of de-
gree rather than of kind. And what may in fact be caught up in both these
instances of mythological perceptionwhether one sees a Heaven in a
Wild Flower or a symbol in a dreamis the amelioration of psychic distur-
bance. They who perceive the wonder of the flower take nothing so material
as its pollen (like the wasp), but they may experience a form of relief from
psychopathological strain. While we are often depressed from too much
thinking, or bored by too little, Huxley writes, remembered daffodils flash
upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude (LAS, 16).
Thus while Freuds obscene allegorical interpretations of simple
dreams (OCHP, 316) are anathematic to Huxleys insistence on scientific
proof in the 1920s, he remains satisfied to endorse as palliatives for the mind
the importance of images such as daffodils in later decades. And as Huxley
suggests, scientific knowledge can often threaten to detract from this relief;
it may regularly interrupt these peaceful scenes of ecstasy by interposing its
own pronouncements on them:
Very nice! comments the botanist, and proceeds to inform us that the genus
Helianthis contains about fifty species, chiefly natives of North America. A few
being found in Peru and Chile. In parts of England, he adds, hundreds of
plants are grown for their seeds on sewage farms (LAS, 16).
138 As Huxley wrote in Usually Destroyed, The worst enemy of life, freedom and the
common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency. See
Adonis and the Alphabet (London: Chatto & Windus, 1956), 204-16, esp. 209; published
in the US as Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (New York: Harper and Brothers,
1956), 213-26.
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 209
it), but the potions status as a digestive that elicits gaseous waste, promoting
flatulence (CY, 221-25).139
Different to Derridas diffrancewhere meaning is to be understood as
that which arises not simply from morphological differentiation but also tem-
poral deferrment and suspensionHuxleys thought is chiasmatic in that it
prioritises direct experience and participative observation over distanced
analysis. Time and again Huxley acknowledges thateven if we think it im-
possible to intuit the convergence of different parallel vector linesvisionary
moments may yet be occasioned through which a visualisation of this paral-
lelism itself appears. This is the moment in which the geometrical configura-
tion in which a vector moves through the perceiving subject, both in space and
time, inaugurates a punctum or kairos moment, one of direct apprehension.140
Feeling as though he has crossed over, and resides interstitially between two
worlds (proxies for any dichotomy, binary, or polar opposition that is seem-
ingly irreconcilable), Huxley imagines himself to be at the centre of what is a
virtualisation of reality. His early fiction thus creates literary puppet-shows of
a harmonious and divine Reality that, for Huxley, can never be brought into
the reality of the present world. The characters in Crome Yellow, for instance,
are puppets, devoid of emotions devoid indeed of most of the attributes of
living humanity.141 This applies equally to the characters in each of the short
stories in Huxleys Limbo (1920), whose puppet-show qualities were captured in
its 1924 cover artwork (see figure 4.1, below).
In his book on Foucault, Deleuze discusses two forms of knowledge, and
refers to this state of betweenness simply as Being. This state, Deleuze
writes, lies between two forms and prompts one to reflect: Is this not pre-
cisely what Heidegger had called the between-two or Merleau-Ponty termed
the interlacing or chiasmus?142 Placing emphasis on what I have in previ-
139 I will revisit this scene from Crome Yellow, and this tendency to vulgarity in Huxleys
fiction, in more detail in the following chapter.
140 The rhizome moves within and with the forms of life (and non-living things) with
which it participates and interacts; the chiasmus, by contrast, turns all things inside
out and to its own interest. It moves not with life, but in precisely in the opposite direc-
tion and by the opposite movement to it. On the rhizome, see Deleuze and Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus, 7.
141 In his letter to Lady Ottoline, Huxley discussed how the characters in his works, and
specifically in Crome Yellow, function merely as puppets, devoid of emotions, devoid
indeed of most of the attributes of living humanity. As he would go on to write, Real
understanding [between humans] is an impossibility. James Sexton, ed. Aldous Hux-
ley: Selected Letters (Chicago; Ivan R. Dee, 2007), 108.
142 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (New York: Continuum, 1999), 92. Also quoted in Leonard
Lawlor, The Beginnings of Thought, in Paul Patton, John Protevi, eds., Between
Deleuze and Derrida (London: Continuum, 2003), 67-83, 82-3n12.
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 210
ous chapters described as the limbotic state between torpor and hyper-
excitation, the model of the chiasmus illustrates the principle that entities,
humans, and actants, are in reality always in between two states. To think
in chiastic terms is thus to adopt a heuristic much like what Bruno Latour
describes in his Actor-Network Theory: this is a schema in which individual
entities or monads are determinednot by their essential substancesbut
by the entirety of their relations in a network.143 This is why, as Huxley ar-
gues, it is the
143 See my Actants at Any Depth: Bruno Latour and Henri Bergson at the Surface of Sci-
ence.
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 211
complex a modality than one that can be accessed with the right methodif
only one can apply the appropriate deautomising technique (hypnotism, the
Alexander Technique). It is also more than the moment in which disindi-
viduation can be achievedif only once can only discover the most crucial
among those unsought data that arise. Huxleys chiastic thinking, rather,
depends on a history of socio-biological patternation (phylogenesis), one in
which filiality, biology, kinship, and genealogy each allows for this genetic or
evolutionary heuristic to be sensed, perceived, and incorporated. As Frances
Wynn writes in an essay on embodied chiasms, the relationship between
mother and infant, for example, is formed as much by the infants holding
of the mother as it is by the mothers holding of the infant.145
For Huxley, these psycho-physical relations are crucial to the evolution of
the human mind and spirit. In a variety of dramatic moments in Brave New
World, for instance, savage relationships between mothers and children
are devalorised; they are characteristic, we find, of a kind of madness. In-
sanity is infectious, causing the pre-moderns of Brave New World to feel
strongly (BNW, 33); however, this insanity also triggers what Huxley calls
144 Edward de Bono, Parallel Thinking: From Socratic Thinking to de Bono Thinking (Lon-
don: Viking 1994), 178-9.
145 Frances Wynn The Embodied Chiasmic Relationship of Mother and Infant, Humans
Studies 19 (1997): 253-70, esp. 253.
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 212
Huxleys observations accord with what Luce Irigaray will write of the chi-
asmus: it is a figure that, she argues, is very often inaccessible to women
precisely because of a womans nonsublimation of herself. In the psychical
space within which women think, work, ambulate, and perform, Irigarary
contests that the procedures and powers of repression arise in womens
minds; these stem, she posits, from the womans inability to capitalize on
the energy that she has expended in developing a better relationship to the
social. This is a relationship that she has prioritised above others, and that
she has spent time developing in a far more strenuous way than have her
male counterparts.151
Preventing women from freely experimenting with their qualities or
aptitudes, womens labour ensures thatas Catherine Waldby and Melinda
Cooper arguethese skills in fact, in Irigarays words, disappear without
leaving any creative achievements.152 Predestined to disappearance, a wom-
an always tends toward without any return to herself as the place where
something positive can be elaborated.153 Irigaray continues:
150 Huxley, Mother, in Baker and Sexton, Aldous Huxley: Complete Essays V: 1939-1956
(Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), 339-45, esp. 341.
151 Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, tr. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (New
York: Cornell University Press, 1993), 8-9.
152 See Catherine Waldby and Melinda Cooper, Clinical Labour: Tissue Donors and Re-
search Subject in the Global Bioeconomy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 16-17.
153 Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 9. Elsewhere in the book Irigaray writes the
following:
Whereas man must live out the pain and experience the impossibility of being cut
off from and in space (being born, leaving the mother), woman lives out the pain-
ful or impossible experience of being cut off from or in time. (Is this their empiri-
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 214
156 Although few critics other than James Hull seem to have identified Point Counter
Points Elinor as Maria Huxley (Nys), it is possible to conclude this is the case on at
least two bases. Elinor, firstly, is Phillips wife, and Phillip is well recognised as a thin-
ly veiled representation of Huxley himself. Secondly, the kinds of feelings that Elinor
describes about her intelligence parallel those that Maria had herself expressed in
a range of letters that she, while troubled, wrote to Lady Ottoline Morrell. In these
letters, Maria asks Morrell why she had ever become involved with Huxley, who she
envisages in her letter as more adept in literary matters than she could ever be. Point
Counter Points narrator describes a similar situation from the point of view of Molly:
Molly launched into her regular description of Philip. Whereas his wife, she
concluded, rather painfully aware that Burlap had not smiled as frequently as
she should have done, is quite the opposite of a fairy. Neither elfish, nor learned,
nor particularly intelligent. Molly smiled rather patronizingly. A man like Philip
must find her a little inadequate sometimes, to say the least. The smile persisted,
a smile now of self-satisfaction. Philip had had a foible for her, still had. He wrote
such amusing letters, almost as amusing as her own. (Quand je veuxbriller dans le
monde, Molly was fond of quoting her husbands compliments, je cite des phrases
de tes lettres.) Poor Elinor! A little bit of a bore sometimes, Molly went on. But
mind you, a most charming creature. Ive known her since we were children togeth-
er. Charming, but not exactly a Hypatia. Too much of a fool even to realize that
Philip was bound to be attracted by a woman of his own mental stature, a woman
he could talk to on equal terms (PCP, 122).
As Hull notes, offering further evidence for the connection, aspects of Huxleys char-
acter Maria deplored were just the same as those Elinor complains of with regard to
Phillip. Hull, Representative Man, 136.
157 Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, 205.
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 216
When Mary dreams she is falling down wells and climbing ladders, for
instance, she expresses her ontological displacement in spacea position
accorded to her, as in Irigarays theorisation, because she is a woman. This
is, writes Irigaray, the place of the spatial [that] women can occupy. In this
place, and performing this role, the figure of the woman is always
assisted... by her relation to the cyclical. But not in the traditional act of love
(in which, notably, she has no access to language as temporal scansion). Even
if she extends infinitely into space, and thereby risks losing time... this is be-
cause her sexuality does not have to obey the imperatives and risks of erection
and detumescence.158
While Irigaray asks whether being distemporalised and displaced in this way
can disqualify the woman from chiasmic relations, she also suggests that
this may be a kind of empirico-transcendetal chiasmus in itself: a place
in which woman must relate to herself and no longer depend on mans re-
turn... for her self love.159 Yet whether it is conceptualised as political, onto-
logical, biological, or otherwise, the womans position cannot be thought of
as such: it is not, for instance, a chiasmusand it is strictly not a pathology.
That is, a woman does not, as Irigaray reminds us, experience her spatial
cyclicality in the form that Jacques Lacan proposed: as a jouissance that is
pathological.160 Proposing to short-circuit womans predestined relegation to
a non-place, Irigaray avows an autotelic or autoerotic love of the self that
renounces the other as it also harvests an innerness, self-intimacy that is
characteristic of the feminine divine.161
Crome Yellow appears to intuit this formation in its depiction of the wom-
en characterss collective will to power. When Anne and Mary come together,
for instance, their collectivisation determines who, if any, among the men
would make an appropriate partner. While at Garsington, women such as
Morrell, Maria (Huxleys wife), and Mary HutchinsonHuxleys lover through
the 1920sdiscussed their sexual relationships with one another, and exhib-
ited their openness to various conjugations and pairings; in this way, they
short-circuited the univocality of male homosocial relations.162 As David Dun-
away points out, Maria had in fact fallen under the spell of Ottoline Morrell,
Bloomsburys flambuoyant (and bisexual) hostessand she had once even
attempted suicide when she thought Ottoline had abandoned her.163 Accord-
ing to her sister Jeanne Neveux, Maria had been a lesbian and, for Huxleys
nephew, Francis, it often seemed as though Marias taste for beautiful wom-
en was what Huxley enjoyed most about herfor it was through this that he
and Maria were able to become more intimate as between themselves. The
situation brought them together, Francis remarked in an interview.164
Irigaray does not explicitly refer to lesbian or homosexual interactions
when she describes the configuration in which a woman remains in la-
tency, in abeyance by fostering love among women. However, she does
criticise the nagging calculations of orientation and sexual preference that
paralyze the fluidity of affect.165 Irigaray implores women to fabricate an
alternative ecology of the divine through the reestablishment of greater love
for one another: a love of the same, within the same, which is affirmed by
a deep form of innerness.166 When Irigaray turns to biblical stories, not-
ing how [a] traditional reading of the gospels places very little stress on the
good relations between Mary and Anne, it becomes notable that these are
precisely the names of Crome Yellows principle women charactersa pair
whose good relations are made apparent other than by these aptronyms.167
For Irigaray, it comes as no surprise that a love of the same is already
normativised or institutionalised as between father and son, man and man:
masculinity, she writes, has always been the traditional subject of dis-
course.168 But Irigarays analysis anticipates the extent to which intellectual
163 David King Dunaway, Huxley in Hollywood (London: Bloomsbury, 1989), 72.
164 Ibid., xvii-xviii.
165 Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 103.
166 In Irigarays book, this is of course a reference to Anne, the mother of the Mary, moth-
er of Jesus (according to Christian and Islamic tradition); whether such a reference
obtains in Huxleys work is less clear, although it is certainly possible that this is the
case.
167 Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, 68. Mary was also the name of Huxleys Aunt
Mary, for whom he felt great affection. See Bernard Bergonzi, Aldous Huxley and Aunt
Mary, in Aldous Huxley: Between East and West, ed. C.C. Barfoot (New York: Editions
Rodopi B.V. Amsterdam, 2001), 9-18.
168 Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 106. A well-known and related conceptualisa-
tion of masculine discourse emerges with Jacques Derridas neologism phallogocen-
trism. A portmanteau of phallocentrism and logocentrism, this term denotes the
privileged position of the masculine in writing. Derrida employed the locution in a
number of his later works, and claimed in an interview of around 2002, that all the
deconstruction of phallogocentrism has been linked to the paternal figure. Derrida
had similarly attested in an earlier interview that, when speaking of feminist polit-
icalization, it is important to recognize this strong phallogocentric underpinning
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 218
that conditions just about all of our cultural heritage. See Derridas interview in Kir-
by Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman (dirs.), Derrida: A Film by Kirby Dick and Amy Zier-
ing Kofman (USA: Jane Doe Films/Zeitgeist Films, 2002), qtd. in Penelope Deutscher,
Derridas Impossible Genealogies, Theory and Event 8, no. 11 (2005): 1. Also see Ma-
ria-Daniella Dick and Julian Wolfreys, The Derrida Wordbook (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2013), 118, 187. In The Speculum of the Other Woman, Irigaray herself
adopts this term and coins a range of variations, including phallosensicial, phallo-
tropic phallocratic ideology, phallogocratism, and so forth: see 52, 65, 121, 229.
Also see Ellen T. Armour, Questions of Proximity: Womans Place in Derrida and
Irigaray, Hypatia 12, no. 1 (1997): 63-78. Benot Peeters attests to Derridas profound
interest in Irigarays work: see Peeters, Derrida: A Biography, tr. Andrew Brown (Cam-
bridge: Polity Press, 2013), 270-1.
169 See, for example, Frederick J. Hoffman, Aldous Huxley and the Novel of Ideas, Col-
lege English 8, no. 3 (1946): 129-137.
170 Bedford, Aldous Huxley, 1: 123 (my emphasis).
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 219
In Quarless model of novel writing, precisely where the novelist begins and
ends their work is arbitrary; of more importance is reduplication. A seeming-
ly random process of recombination, the habit of exchanging one character
or event for another now functions less as a means of producing literary work
than a heterodox or counter-normative manipulation of a functional system.
It is a mode that militates against that injunction imposed on the scrivener
by which they merely reproduce either:
173 See Aldous Huxley, The New Romanticism, in Baker and Sexton, eds. Aldous Huxley:
Complete Essays III: 1930-1935 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), 250-4; Baker and Sexton
describe this emergent belief system as A celebration of Enlightenment modernity
and an excessive faith in instrumental reason and applied science: back dust jacket
flap. Cf. Robert Baker, Science and Modernity in Huxley, in Barfoot, ed., Aldous Hux-
ley: Between East and West, 35-58, 38n8.
174 Meckier, Aldous Huxley: From Poet to Mystic, 2.
175 Martin Green, Children of the Sun, 86-113.
176 For instance, in his 1930 essay Fatal Ladies, Huxley writes that he detest[s] and
utterly reprobate[s] what he, in 1930, called the spiritual vampire. Defining this
creature as a modern type that had arisen out of both the feminist movement and
the Romantic period of the nineteenth century, Huxley chided the vampire of the
soul and spiritual adventuress who is only satisfied if she can persuade herself
that she had a large soul and a large intellectnot to mention high ideals and a wide
culture, and deep thoughts. See Aldous Huxley, Fatal Ladies, in Baker and Sexton,
Huxley: Complete Essays III, 226-9, esp. 227.
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 221
And while Huxley might have even begun to adopt elements of those
emergent feminist formulations about Victorianisms male repressiveness
those that had been advanced at the turn of the century by a range of women
in his companyHuxley would also reinscribe a liberal form of chauvinism
in his writing, one that strikes us today as straightforward sexism. In The
Battle of the Sexes (1929), for example, Huxley observes how our ideas about
sexual morality are very different from those current fifty years ago; and he
laments that the modern young person, through a course of libertinage
only reproduces the hatred and fear of sex that affected the Victorians.
Then, after deliberating on the changes in consciousness that have arisen
as a result of feminine patriotism, Huxley tepidly identifies with aspects
of proto-feministic thought, musing on the disappearance of the fallen
woman. In a language whose tone is characteristically difficult to identify
as either sincere or parodic, Huxley notes that
the modern young woman gets the best of both worlds... succeeds in being
fashionable and rational about sex, without running any risk of being swept
off her conscious feet by the physical-instinctive biological forces which a gen-
uine warm, wholehearted abandonment might dangerously let loose.177
188 See Birnbaum, Huxleys Quest for Values, 14 (emphasis mine); Avital Ronell, Loser Sons:
Politics and Authority (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 6.
189 On the origin and genealogy of this kind of combination of andreia and rhetoric, see
Joseph Roisman, Rhetoric, Manliness and Contest, in Ian Worthington, ed., A Com-
panion to Greek Rhetoric (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 393-410, esp. 294. On andreia gen-
erally, see Ralph Mark Rosen and Ineke Sluiter, eds. Andreia: Studies in Manliness and
Courage in Classical Antiquity (Leiden: Brill, 2003).
190 Ultimately, Huxleys novel After Many A Summer Dies the Swan will appear in Tom
Fords adaptation of Christopher Isherwoods A Single Man (directed by Tom Ford),
where the protagonist, George (Colin Firth) uses the novels themes to broach the sub-
ject of the denigration of homosexuals and homosexuality in history. See A Single Man,
directed by Tom Ford, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2010, DVD. In Isherwoods
novel, George will defend Huxley against being a dope addict and an anti-Semite,
and when someone else tries coyly to turn the clef in the roman, suggesting a con-
nection between the plutocratic character of William Randolph Hearst, Jo Stoyte, and
a certain notorious lady, George refutes these claims, calmly offering an extempo-
raneous speech on the subject of persecution: Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man
(London: Vintage, 2010 [1964]), 52-4.
Huxleys Chiasmic Enculturation 224
1 See Adrian Desmond, Huxley: Evolutions High Priest, vol. 2, (London: Michael Joseph,
1999), passim; Keith Johnson, Darwins Bulldog and Huxleys Ape, Twentieth Cen-
tury Literature 55, no. 4 (2009): 572-96, 585. As Murray notes, Juliette Huxley, in her
interview with David Dunaway of 1985, emphasises the burden that was imposed
on Huxleys to succeed at all costs to be worthy of TH. As she exclaimed, Worthy of
Gran-Paterright! You must be worthy of grand-pater. See Nicholas Murray, Aldous
Huxley: An English Intellectual (London: Little Brown, 2002), 18; Huntington Library
Oral History Transcripts, Interview between Juliette Huxley and David King Dunaway,
5 July 1985; David King Dunaway, Aldous Huxley Recollected: An Oral History (London:
SAGE, 1999), 9-10.
2 On Aldouss vomiting, see Murray, Aldous Huxley, 17; on the general ceremony of the
monument, see Clark, The Huxleys, 121-24.
225
Reforging the Law 226
Figure 5.1 The statute of Thomas Henry Huxley in the London Natural His-
tory Museum London. Photography by CherryX (published under Wikimedia
commons Licence), http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NHM_London,_
Thomas-Henry-Huxley-Statue.jpg
sion, Huxley would remark that one of his early recollections was of being
taken to church in Godalming and disgracing [himself] by vomiting during
the sermona precocious expression, no doubt, of anti-clericalism.3 Abject
instances of vomiting and regurgitation, as well as abstinences from eating,
thus become important underlying tropes in Huxleys satires through the
1920s. Just as Huxley wrote of vomiting humorously as a kind of ideological
or anti-clerical expression, so does his fiction adumbrate vomiting as illus-
trations of reactions to political and spiritual ideologies.4
This chapter interposes the biological and the biographical in rela-
tion to Huxley by focusing on instances of the kind just described: events in
Huxleys life, or incidents in his fiction, that prompt in him or his characters
what may be described as a biological or embodied reaction. Huxleys pre-
occupation with vomiting and the sense in which he might have felt that
a certain pleasure or political cathexis could be accorded to the act, may
have led to his unusual employment of the term vomitorium in Antic Hay.
Seemingly using the term to denote a place designed by the Ancient Ro-
mans in which they could purge themselves between feasts, Huxleys usage
is what some dictionarians have described as the first erroneous usage of
the term in history.5 Citing Tobias Smolletts Travels Through France and Italy
as evidence, the OED notes, for instance, that the word originally denoted a
place entered by avenues, at the end of which were gates, called vomitoriae.6
These were the gates out of which those who had attended a show in an am-
phitheatre would spew forth at its denouement. As William Nericcio notes,
however, the OED, in offering both definitions, allows herself to have it both
ways, since it defines the vomitorium as theatre portal and erron, a Roman
space of post-feat purginga theatre and a toilet.7 Elsewhere in his travel
book, Smollett describes the Romanss
delicate custom of taking vomits at each others houses, when they were invit-
ed to dinner, or supper, that they might prepare their stomachs for gorman-
dizing; a beastly proof of their nastiness as well as gluttony.8
5 As the OED states, the erroneous conceives of the word to mean a room in which An-
cient Romans are alleged to have vomited deliberately during feasts. Oxford English
Dictionary, s.v. vomitorium accessed December 10, 2013, http://www.oed.com/view/
Entry/224638?redirectedFrom=vomitorium&.
6 Tobias Smollett, Travels Through France and Italy (New York: Tauris Parke, 2010 [1776]),
312.
7 William Nerricio, Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the Mexican in America (Tex-
as: University of Texas Press, 2007), 154.
8 Smollett, Travels Through France and Italy, 255.
9 See Derrida, Positions, tr. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981),
71.
Reforging the Law 228
The door of his sacred boudoir was thrown rudely open, and there strode in,
like a Goth into the elegant marble vomitorium of Petronius Arbiter, a hag-
gard and disheveled person whom Mr Mercaptan recognized, with a certain
sense of discomfort, as Casimir Lypiatt (AH, 197).
A word that aptly describes both Huxley and Lypiatt (and, in effect, Smollett
as well), Grant Overton alludes to its usage as a metonym for the sickness
that comes with the accumulation of travel knowledge:
he has been everywhere and seen everything... He will show them their prece-
dents and quote for them their textswhich they may ponder before passing
out to the vomitorium.10
10 Grant Overton, The Twentieth Century Gothic of Aldous Huxley in Cargoes for Cru-
soes (New York: Appleton, 1924) (84-97), excerpted in Donald Watt, ed. Aldous Huxley:
The Critical Heritage (New York: Routledge, 1975), 98-113, 99.
11 I will address logophilia (and logophobia) in detail in chapter 6.
Reforging the Law 229
metonym for expurgation, Lypiatt brings into sharp relief the horror of in-
finity (HAH, 49-50) represented by the Goetheian or gothic sublime.
In After The Fireworks (1930), protagonist Miles Fanning reflects on the
connection between Christian ritual and vomiting; he considers the extent
to which, after drinking excessively, one may come to feel more pious in
having purged. Christians, he thinks, paraphrasing Pascal, ought to live
like sick men; conversely, sick men can hardly escape being Christians (ATF,
444). Subtly elevated as a figure for redemption through expurgation, vom-
iting is also understood as capable of virtualisation; since in inducing oneself
to vomit through biological manipulations (such as by drinking excessively),
Christians might be guided to live in a better way: illness begins to prescribe
how one ought to live. This chiastic description of the biological and theo-
logical leads Fanning to cynically ponder the manner in which vomiting and
love are interwoven:
12 Huxley, After the Fireworks in Charles Rolo, ed. The World of Aldous Huxley: An Omni-
bus of his Fiction and Non-Fiction Over Three Decades (New York: Grossets Universal
Library, 1971), 367-458, esp. 444. It is interesting to think of the chiasmic relation be-
tween sentiments-centimetres in itself, where two near-homonyms are parallelised
in a meditative phrase. Sentiments-centimetres also resembles a phrase deployed
by Bruno Latour in his analysis of actants in The Pasteurization of France. There La-
tour says of actants that associate with others: Who speaks? Them [the others] or
it [the actant]? Traditore-traduttore [Translator-traitor]. One equals several. It cannot
be determined. Like Huxleys centimetres-sentiments, Latours translator-traitor
syntagm functions as a chiasm between opposing forces that, to the cynic-scientist,
amount to one and the same operation or agent. See Latour, The Pasteurization of
France, tr. Alan Sheridan and John Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984),
160.
13 Huxley will redeploy this pun twice in Brave New World: firstly, when the Assistant Pre-
destinator will cite a piece of homely hypnopdic wisdom by noting that One cubic
centimeter cures ten gloomy sentiments (BNW, 46); and, secondly, when Lenina will
remind Bernard not to lose his temper, reminding him of the sentiment-centimeter
wisdom, reinforcing the efficacy of the drug Soma by uttering its slogan: a gramme is
Reforging the Law 230
youre merely rubbing yourself into yourself, if you see what I mean. Whereas
what were all looking for is some way of getting beyond our own vomit! (EG,
553)
Imagining a means of getting beyond his own bile, Beavis then reflects on
how he himself might attempt to transcend those objects that so appeal to
his biological senses; he wonders how he might move
beyond the books, beyond the perfumed and resilient flesh of women, beyond
fear and sloth, beyond the painful but secretly flattering vision of the world as
menagerie and asylum (EG, 553).
about giving lectures about the need for religious revival. Hes even published
a book about it. Complete with preface by someone at the Harvard Divinity
School. Its all part of the campaign against Palanese independence. God is
Dipas alibi. Why cant criminals be frank about what theyre up to? All this
disgusting idealistic hogwashit makes one vomit (Island, 72).17
17 My emphasis.
18 On vomiting in Huxley also see, for instance, Peter Bowering, Aldous Huxley: A Study of
the Major Novels (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013 [1968]), 124. Richard Crouse
also discusses filmmaker Ken Russells attention to Huxleys detailed treatment of
vomit in Devils of Loudun, where, misquoting the novel, Russell notes how the narrator
describes how the incompetent inquisitors, Ibert, Adam, and Barre, inspect the bile of
Sister Jeanne. In his misremembered analysis, Crouse remarks on the narrative: They
analyzed her vomit. Of this line, Russell, notes that Its in the book but people dont
believe it or cant visualize it. This precise line in fact does not appear in The Devils
of Loudun, however, the novel does describe how the exorcists sought to examine the
vomit of the nuns whom they thought were possessed by the devil (or a black bile).
See Richard Crouse, Raising Hell: Ken Russell and the Unmaking of The Devils (Toronto:
ECW Press, 2012), 50; Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudun (London: Vintage, 2010),
166-8.
Reforging the Law 233
lighted through stained glass, glass that singularly resembles the coloured
microscopic slides with which Grandfather Huxley was intently preoccupied.19
19 Grant Overton, The Twentieth Century Gothic of Aldous Huxley, in Watt, The Critical
Heritage, 99.
20 That there is considerable uncertainty about whether the so-called Huxley-Wilber-
force debate ever took place indicates that it probably did not. Jonathan Smith argues
that [t]here was no such thing as the Huxley-Wilberforce debate, and instead that
historians have shown that the debate occurred more than twenty years after the
event, in the 1880s and 90s. The debate, he continues, is a construction, almost ex-
clusively, of the Darwinians and their allies. Notably, Smith asserts, it was construct-
ed particularly through the work of Darwins son, Francis [... ] himself a botanist, and
Huxleys son, Leonard, in their respective Life and Letters volumes of their fathers...
See Jonathan Smith, The Huxley-Wilberforce Debate on Evolution, Branch, avail-
able at: http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=jonathan-smith-the-huxley-wil-
berforce-debate-on-evolution-30-june-1860. Also see Keith Stewart, Huxley, Wilber-
force and the Oxford Museum, American Scientist 88, no. 3 (May-June, 2000): 210-3;
and William Irvine, Apes, Angels and Victorians: The Story of Darwin, Huxley and Evolu-
tion (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955), 5-8. Contemporaneous reports from 1960, howev-
er, record that a discussion involving Huxley and Wilberforce took place on that date.
See, for instance, Letter from Harpocrates, The Morning Chronicle, 9 July 1860.
21 On scientific vocations in the first half of the nineteenth century, see Robert Kargon,
Science in Victorian Manchester: Enterprise and Expertise (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1977); Morris Berman, Social Change and Scientific Organization: The
Royal Institution, 1799-1844 (London: Heinemann Education, 1978); Susan Cannon,
Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period (New York: Science History Publications,
1978); Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray, Gentlemen of Science: Early Years of the British
Association for the Advancement of Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981);
and Ian Inkster and Jack Morrell (eds.), Metropolis and Province: Science in British Cul-
ture, 1780-1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1983). On the mid- and late-Victorian period,
see T.W. Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England (New York:
St. Martins Press, 1982), James A. Secord, Controversy in Victorian Geology: The Cam-
brian-Silurian Dispute (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); and Paul White,
Thomas Huxley: Making the Man of Science (London: Cambridge University Press,
2003), 7.
Reforging the Law 234
While the task of political advocacy had proved difficult for TH as a young
man, his resourcefulness and ambition enabled him, when he married
Henrietta, to model his genius in what White highlights as a startlingly
literary manner. Calling upon the Romantic philosophy of a century earlier,
TH would assert and develop what would become a particularly Huxleyan
style of positivism or empiricism.23
Having methodically copied lines from Thomas Carlyles essay Char-
acteristics in his diary while working as a medical apprentice in 1842, TH
would later adopt Carlyles belief that genius was a divine essence. Like
nobility, he thought, genius was innate; and yet it was alsosurprisingly
enoughto be discovered more commonly in those of humble origins than
in elites.24 Associated with a range of attributes that had been feminised by
the Victorians, TH felt that to be an ingenious man of science was to adopt a
particular mode of masculinityand even to be demasculinised. This meant
that one should avoid the mercantilism of public life and develop a private,
domestic setting for ones work.25
Inheriting much from Coleridge and the Romantic poets, TH adum-
brated a post-Enlightenment, non-Cartesian, and post-mechanistic model
of the mind. He felt, just as Coleridge had felt, that the potential for the
human to know him- or herself depended on their ability to discern differ-
ences between modes of sensibility and sensuality.26 But TH also departs
are the keys to his critical perception. Trevor H. Levere, Coleridge, Davy, Science
and Poetry, in John Christie and Sally Shuttleworth, eds.,Nature Transfigured: Science
and Literature, 1700-1900 (New York: Manchester University Press, 1989), 97. Also see
Irving Massey, Review: British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind, Criticism
44, no. 1 (2002): 78.
27 See Thomas Henry Huxley, Upon Animal Individuality, Edinburgh New Philosophical
Journal 53 (1852): 172-77. On this lecture see notably John Vernon Jenson, Thomas Hen-
ry Huxley: Communicating for Science (London: Associated University Presses, 1991),
56-7; Eveleen Richards, The Romantic Gestation of Nature, in Romanticism and the
Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1990) 139-40.
28 Scott F. Gilbert, Jan Sapp and Alfred I. Tauber, The Symbiotic Way of Life: We Have
Never Been Individuals, The Quarterly Review of Biology 87, no. 4 (2012): 325-41, esp.
328.
29 T.H. Huxley, Upon Animal Individuality, Proceedings of the Royal Institution 1 (1851-
54): 184-9, esp. 187.
30 Quoted in Jenson, Thomas Henry Huxley, 57; see also Alan Boyden, Perspectives in Zool-
ogy (New York: Pergamon Press, 1973), 51.
Reforging the Law 236
While TH had made his views relatively public in his lectures and ad-
dresses, he also had maintained a certain moral and incarnate drive to tran-
scend the economic base reality of an increasingly commercial society. TH
expressed this in his exemplary style of domesticated living: he sought to
domiciliate and familiarise the pursuit of the sciences as much as to orator-
ically perform and proselytise them. And while for TH the newly domes-
ticated man of science should be cleaved from the public domain of com-
merce, he would be unfazed that sexism remained normalised in sciences
institutions, where biologists and anthropologists continued to identify the
location of inferiority in womens bodies [and] minds.31
As I have suggested in chapter 4, Henrietta Heathorn was an important
figure in this historyand in contouring THs masculinity. Her poems and
reminiscencesas well the symbolically ordered nature of the Huxleyss
Victorian home (ruled by sympathy and affection)doubtlessly influenced
and enabled TH s career to progress and fructify.32 Through Heathorn, TH
recognised that to be a man of science was to be capable of experiencing the
world sensually. Preparation for the fine discriminations that the sciences
increasingly required a practitioner to make were developed in the home,
where sensual refinement was first nurtured and engendered; these domes-
tic sensibilites, TH felt, were the most usefulboth at the theoretical and
experimental levelsfor those who wished to conduct scientific enquiry.33
The sensual, literary, and romantic origins of THs scientism would
transform as he grew older, and as he began ever more seriously to imagine
himself as a man of letters. As White notes, literary sensibility had always
been among THs first intellectual instinctshowever much it had been
unrecognised in his lifetime.34 In his 1932 memorial lecture for his grand-
father, a piece titled T. H. Huxley as a Literary Man, Huxley contends that
it is as evident as a proposition of Euclid that TH was much more a lit-
erary than a scientific man.35 Yet, it was less for poesys than for veracitys
31 White, Thomas Huxley, 30n75; on the subordination of women through scientific dis-
course and practices throughout this period, see Evelleen Richards, Darwin and the
Descent of Woman, in David Oldroyd and Ian Langham, eds., The Wider Domain of
Evolutionary Thought (Boston: Hingham, 1983), 57-111 ; Cynthia Russett, Sexual Sci-
ence: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989).
32 On THs domestic life, see Whites chapter Improvement by Domestication in White,
Thomas Huxley, 19-22, 28-31.
33 Ibid., 29-30.
34 White, Thomas Huxley, 68.
35 Aldous Huxley, T.H Huxley as a Literary Man, in The Olive Tree (London: Chatto &
Windus, 1973), 46-62, esp. 47.
Reforging the Law 237
for all those rhetorical devices by means of which the sophist and the poli-
tician seek to make the worse appear the better cause Huxley felt an almost
passionate disapproval.36
In this nineteenth century, as at the dawn of modern physical science, the cos-
mogony of the semi-barbarous Hebrew is the incubus of the philosopher and
the opprobrium of the orthodox. Who shall number the patient and earnest
seekers after truth, from the days of Galileo until now, whose lives have been
embittered and their good name blasted by the mistaken zeal of Bibliolaters?
36 Ibid.
37 See also Adrian Desmond, From the Devils Disciple to Evolutions Priest (London: Pen-
guin, 1998), xviii; qtd. in Rebecca Stott, Masculinities in Nineteenth Century Science:
Huxley, Darwin, Kingsley and the Evolution of the Scientist, Studies in History and
Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Science 35 (2004): 199-207, esp. 203-4. Notably,
TH was also a social organiser. In the the 1860s, he formed the X Club: a group of
nine prominent thinkers who met on the first Thursday of every month, enabling the
elite of Victorian science to exchange personal pleasantries. See Clark, The Huxleys,
65. Notably, the X Club also affords another example of the Huxleyan chiasmus.
38 Huxley, T.H Huxley as a Literary Man, 54-5.
Reforging the Law 238
39 Charles Blinderman, Semantic Aspects of T.H. Huxleys Literary Style, The Journal of
Communication 12, no. 3 (1962): 171-8.
40 Ibid., 176-7.
41 White, Thomas Huxley, 94.
42 Rebecca Stott, Masculinities in Nineteenth Century Science: Huxley, Darwin, King-
sley and the evolution of the Scientist, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological
and Biomedical Science 35 (2004): 199-207, esp. 205.
43 White, Thomas Huxley, 94, 57.
44 Ibid., 58, my emphasis.
Reforging the Law 239
45 Thomas Henry Huxley, Charles Darwin, Nature 25 (27 April, 1882): 597.
46 Stott, Masculinities in Nineteenth Century Science, 205.
47 White, Thomas Huxley, 8n9. The term homosocial was coined and defined by Jean
Lipman-Blumen in 1976 in the context of her examination of segregation of women in
social institutions (of which scientific academies are certainly one). As Lipman-Blu-
men defined it, homosociality is the seeking, enjoyment, and/or preference for the
company of the same sex. It is distinguished from homosexual in that it does not
necessarily involve (although it may under certain circumstances) an explicitly erotic
sexual interaction between members of the same sex. See Jean Lipman-Blumen, To-
ward a Homosocial Theory of Sex-Roles: An Explanation of Sex Segregation of Social
Institutions, Signs 1, no. 3 (1976): 15-31, esp. 16. In developing the term, and extending
its use to gender, literary, and cultural studies, Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick employs the
expression male homosocial desire to describe a passage of English culture through
the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century constituted by the emerging pattern
of male friendship, mentorship, entitlement, rivalry, and hetero- and homosexuality
[that] was in an intimate and shifting relation to class. See Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick,
Between Men, in Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, eds., Literary Theory: An Anthology
(Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1998), 697-712.
Reforging the Law 240
undervalued scientist whose work may well have spoken for itself.48 But THs
motivation for remaining, at least in his own view, a scientist and a man
of letters arose out of the zeal with which he had been persuaded of his
own classificatory schemasas well as those of Darwin, his close friend
and colleague. Such was the openness of Huxleys experimental imagina-
tion that he often seemed to be open to amplifying and applying almost any
idea. There should be no fixed means of interrogating questions of natural
classification, TH would often argue. Rather, as Blinderman comments, TH
subscribed to a view well expressed in Ernst Cassirers proposition of radical
openness: There is no rigid and pre-established scheme according to which
our divisions and subdivisions might for all be made.49
In his criticism of the same mathematical abstractions that Huxley
would himself disparage in The Doors of Perception, TH exhibits an aware-
ness that it is almost a kind of madness or divine theia of its own: a belief that
the scientist courts nature rather than solves it. In 1884, in a response letter
to his friend, philosopher Lady Welby, TH wrote that Most of us are idola-
tors since we ascribe divine powers to the abstractions Force, Gravity,
and Vitality, which our brains have created.50 Conscious of the importance
of labeling and naming, TH confessed to Welby that
as you get deeper into scientific questions you will find that Name ist Schall
und Rauch even more emphatically than Faust says it is in Theology.51
48 Blinderman, T.H. Huxleys Literary Style, 172. Also see Edward Clodd, Thomas Hen-
ry Huxley, 1940-1930 (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1902), 65-6. Clodd ad-
umbrates the many ways in which Huxleys work has been neglected, and, quoting
Chalmers Mitchell, he notes that his work has been incorporated into the very body
of science. See Peter Chalmers Mitchell, Thomas Henry Huxley: A Sketch of His Life and
Work (New York: G.P. Putnams Sons, 1900), 34-5.
49 Blinderman, T.H. Huxleys Literary Style, 172.
50 Ibid., 173.
51 Thomas Henry Huxley, Letter to Lady Welby, in Leonard Huxley, The Life and Letters
of Thomas Huxley, 3 vols. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1900), 2: 67-8. Also see Blinder-
man, T.H. Huxleys Literary Style, 173.
Reforging the Law 241
52 See Thomas Henry Huxley, Evidence As To Mans Place in Nature (New York: D. Appleton
and Company, 1863), 22; Christopher Ernest Cosans, Owens Ape and Darwins Bulldog:
Beyond Darwinism and Creationism (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2009), 111-16;
Edward Clodd, Thomas Henry Huxley (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1902), 113.
53 Blinderman, T.H. Huxleys Literary Style, 172; Aldous Huxley, T.H. Huxley as a Liter-
ary Man, 55.
54 Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2004), 21. I note that Grosz misnames T.H. Huxley T.E. Huxley, 98.
55 Thomas Huxley, Letter to Lady Welby, in Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Huxley, 2:
68.
56 Greenberg, Darwin and Literary Studies, Twentieth-Century Literature 54, no. 4
(2009): 429.
57 There is no evidence to suggest that Huxley, however, coined the term epiphenome-
nalism. As John Greenwood writes,
Epiphenomenalism is historically associated with Thomas Huxley, who promoted
a version of the doctrine in his August 24 address to the 1874 meeting of the British
Reforging the Law 242
Association for the Advancement of Science [BAAS] in Belfast, entitled On the Hy-
potheses That Animals Are Automata, and Its History. [But the] term epiphenome-
nal comes from medicine, where it was originally employed to describe symptoms
of a disease that have no causal influence on the development of the disease, with-
out supposing that these symptoms have no physical (or medical) effects.
Greenwood, Whistles, Bells and Cogs in Machines: Thomas Huxley and Epiphenome-
nalism, Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences 46, no. 3 (2010): 276-99, 277-8.
Also see W. Whately Carington, Matter, Mind, and Meaning (London: Metheun and Co,
1949). Carington notes that he believes is T.H. Huxley this blessed word, 231n2.
Cf. William Robinson, who notes that it is unusual that no trace of this word is found
in Huxleys writings. Robinson proposes that this omission was probably because
Huxley preferred the term automata, and may have uttered epiphenomenal or a
variant in his lectures: Robinson, Epiphenomenalism, The Stanford Encyclopaedia
of Philosophy (Summer 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta, ed., http://plato.stanford.edu/
archives/ sum2012/entries/epiphenomenalism/, accessed 20 July, 2011. Also see Hux-
leys original essay, published prior to the 1874 meeting of BAAS: On the Hypothesis
that Animals are Automata, and its History, Nature (September, 1871): 362-6; and Neil
Campbell, What was Huxleys Epiphenomenalism? Biology and Philosophy 16 (2001):
357-75, esp. 357-8.
58 Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely, 21 and 22; cf. Greenberg,
Darwin and Literary Studies, 429.
59 As Greenberg argues, Darwin can be conceived of as a proto-postmodernist. Green-
berg, Darwin and Literary Studies, 429-30.
60 See Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How To Follow Scientists and Engineers Through
Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 84-86. For an excellent collection
of essays by the so-called continental materialists or speculative realists, see Levi
Bryant, et al. eds., The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (Mel-
bourne: re-press, 2011). While thinkers such as Quentin Meillassoux critique correla-
tionism as the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation
Reforging the Law 243
knowledge, for he recognised more than anything else that the work of any
scholar of nature could only ever amount to a work of organisation. This work
could then be disseminated in communications between humans, where its
systems of information transfer would secure its veracity, and usefulness,
as an organising model. Huxley had known this about his grandfather, and
had himself emphasised the extent to which even mathematicians are men
of lettersmen of algebraic letters, no doubt. And while some of these let-
ters are more aesthetically good or bad than others, they can also, Huxley
wrote, be litterae humaniores or inhuman letters.61
But no matter how well organised, the dialectical frisson between signifi-
er and signified, science and nature, human and nonhuman, it may never be
fixed, frozen, or stabilised. It remains enlivened by the reader who encounter
this frisson in action: in the words themselves and their correlates in reality.
But what is important, Huxley notesprefiguring Marshall McLuhans anal-
ysis of the mediais that some kinds of literature are more widely accessi-
ble than others.62 To argue that the communication of such popular or uni-
versal experiences as love may be more accessible than observations
on, say, deep-sea fish, TH argues, would be to presuppose that an audience
cannot be moved by their subject. But then again, it matters less what the
subject of discussion is, TH argued, than whether the speakers own relation
to and treatment of the subject is constructive and edifying:
It has been laid down as a sound rule for rhetorician and poet, that those who
desire to stir the minds of others should be themselves moved by their sub-
ject; and the maxim has no less force for the man of science who desires to
bring before an audience, unskilled in any special department, the leading
facts and results of investigations into that department.63
between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the oth-
er, it is arguablein terms of the sensuousness that I have identified that contours
THs intuition and belief in scientific conduct and masculinitythat THs philosophy
actually begins to depart from correlationism in placing a post-Kantian emphasis on
the Romantic sensuality of language and of thought. See Quentin Meillassoux, After
Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (London: Continuum, 2008), 5.
61 Huxley, T.H. Huxley as a Man of Letters, 56.
62 Ibid., 57. On McLuhans landmark work in media studies and his description of the
communication sciences after Descartes, see McLuhan, Understanding Media: The
Extensions of Man (Ca. Massachusetts: MIT University Press, 1994 [1964]), 161.
63 Quoted in Blinderman, T.H. Huxleys Literary Style, 174. Blinderman notes that this
quotation is derived From The Huxley Papers, Vol. 221 (of my catalogue), a collection
of mostly unpublished letters, lecture notes, essays, in the Haldane Library of The Im-
perial College of Science and Technology, University of London. Quotations from this
collection are made with the permission of the Governors, 174n1.
Reforging the Law 244
64 Although I should note that TH Huxley only survived Aldouss birth by a short year;
he died before Aldous was one year old. The influence was thus through the expecta-
tions of Leonard and Julia, rather than from TH directly: see Sybille Bedford, Aldous
Huxley, 1: 2.
65 Greenwood, Whistles, Bells and Cogs in Machines: Thomas Huxley and Epipheno-
manalism, 278.
66 On Bergsons differences with Einstein, see Jimena Canales, Einstein, Bergson, and
the Experiment that Failed: Intellectual Cooperation at the League of Nations, Mod-
ern Language Notes 120 (2005): 1168-91; Mili apek, What is Living and What is Dead
in the Bergsonian Critique of Relativity, in The New Aspects of Time, ed. Robert S. Co-
hen (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991).
67 Quoted in Douglas Wood, Men Against Time: Nicolas Berdyaev, T. S. Eliot, Aldous Hux-
ley, & C. G. Jung (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1982), 115.
68 Richard Doyle, Darwins Pharmacy: Sex, Plants and the Evolution of the Nosphere (Lon-
don: University of Washington Press, 2011), 58, emphasis mine.
Reforging the Law 245
the survey one can make of Huxleys life does not suggest that it will ever be
very profitable to use the events and patterns of the writers life as keys that
unlock the mans great mass of writing... [the] most one can predict is that
some of the keys would be quite useful; others not at all.69
Wattss theory is worth testing, thoughif only to identify those keys that
might be useful among the many that are not at all. But what can use-
ful mean here? And how is any kind of unlocking to be achieved?
While Barthess postulations about the death of the author, which I have
addressed in chapter 2, may seem to vitiate any critical method in which
conclusions are to be drawn from studying an authors life, Nicholas Rombes
suggests that it may now be time to declare the authors rebirth (the rebirth
of the author). If to unlock an author has been difficult to achieve in previ-
ous decades, that is, it may have since become less problematic. As much as
we are all authors now, writes Rombes, we are also each of us
69 Harold H. Watts, Aldous Huxley (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1969), 17.
70 Nicholas Rombes, The Rebirth of the Author, 1000 Days of Theory (June, 2005, edited
by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker), at http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=480.
Reforging the Law 246
Extrospective Aldous:
An Epiphenomenal Man
life and career bear the character of having been pre-
in many ways, huxleys
71 See Craig Saper, Artificial Auteurism and the Political Economy of the Allen Smithee
Case, inDirected by Allen Smithee, Jeremy Braddock and Stephen Hock, eds. (Minneap-
olis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 33.
72 See Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, tr. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1996), 103.
73 See Bernard Knox, Author, Author, Philosophy and Literature 20, no. 1 (1996): 76-88,
81; Raymond E. Legg Jr., The Son of His Fathers (Chapter 1) in The Intellectual
Tourist: A Study of Aldous Huxleys Spirituality, DA diss., Middle Tennessee State
University, 1996, 1-4.
74 Legg, The Intellectual Tourist, 1.
Reforging the Law 247
said nothing, but looked at something else or gazed abstractedly into the dis-
tance with a fixed, enigmatic smile, and I began to think that he liked neither
Switzerland nor his father.79
If THs different relationship with various men, such as Darwin and Owen,
may be explained psychologicallyor even in terms of a dynamic of chang-
ing homosocial gender relations, as I have suggestedthen Huxleys relation
to his father may offer even more to such a psychoanalytic reading. It may
75 Holmes point out the scarcity of personal materials kept by Huxley, and the imper-
sonal nature of his poems: He left no journals as frank as Gides, few poems so obvi-
ously personal as Yeats. Charles Holmes, Aldous Huxley and The Reality (Connecticut:
Greenwood Press, 1970), 4. Of course, as many critics lament, much of Huxleys per-
sonal archive perished in the fire that ravaged their house on 12 May, 1961. See Laura
Huxley, This Timeless Moment, 69-73; Dunaway, Huxley in Hollywood, 358-9.
76 See James Sexton, Aldous Huxley: Selected Letters (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007).
77 Huxley, T.H Huxley as a Literary Man, 48-50.
78 Ibid.
79 George Woodcock, Dawn and the Darkest Hour: A Study of Aldous Huxley (London:
Faber and Faber, 1972), 37; also see Bedford, Aldous Huxley, 1: 10.
Reforging the Law 248
Perhaps as with all psychological conflicts, Huxleys inner conflict had its
origin in a range of idiopathic aetiologies. But many of Huxleys biographers,
including Woodcock, emphasise the role that grief must have played in Hux-
leys anguished life:
Three times before he assumed his vocation as a writer [the] realization [of
suffering and death] beat upon Aldous Huxleys mind: when his mother Julia
died in 1908; when his eyesight failed him less than three years later; when his
favourite brother Trevenen committed suicide in 1914.82
But when Huxley begins writing as a young man, it will bedespite or be-
cause of these tragediesin the satirical mode of the cynic; he will become
the one who parodies the very nature of the split-personality, even as he him-
self possesses it.
Apparently familiar with the plight of the schizoidal or divided self that
Arnold Pick had characterised only as recently as the middle decades of the
nineteenth century as dementia praecox, Huxley makes light of the affective
position of the schizophrenic, lambasting the mental state on which Emile
80 As Adam Sidaway argues, each of these words might serve to adequately represent
the [different] periods of Huxleys life. For my own purposes, it suffices to note that
Sidaway understands Huxleys trauma ridden childhood to be constantly threat-
ened by madness. Sidaways argument is here suggestive of the ways in which Huxley
is for psychoanalyticand, to focus on his possible madnesseven psychopatho-
logical readings, an exemplary model or candidate, both in his life and fiction. See
Adam Sidaway, Madness, Badness, Sadness: Aldous Huxley and the Shifting Shadow
of Psychoanalysis, MPhil diss., University of Birmingham, 2011, 5, available online
at http://etheses.bham.ac.uk/1639/1/Sidaway11MPhil.pdf, last accessed 20 September
2013. Sidaways thesis title quotes Huxleys 1956 essay see Aldous Huxley, Madness,
Badness, Sadness. See Aldous Huxley: Complete Essays, eds. Robert S. Baker and James
Sexton, 6 vols. (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), 6:179-187.
81 Holmes, Aldous Huxley and the Way to Reality, 4, 8, also qtd. in Legg, The Intellectual
Tourist, 1.
82 Woodcock, Dawn and the Darkest Hour, 37.
Reforging the Law 249
Kraepelin and Eugene Bleuler had already elaborated during the late-1800s.83
Portraying the paradox of splitness (schizotypy) as a nosological category in
its own right, Huxley
satirizes his characters not only for being divided from one another, but for
being split within themselves. His painters, poets and scientists... comprise
so many dichotomies of mind against the body.84
These satirical split-men on their quests for wholeness range from Rich-
ard Greenow in The Farcical History of Richard Greenow, to Young Calamy
in Those Barren Leaves, to Hugh Ledwidge in Eyeless in Gaza. Each of these
split-men serve to reveal the difficulty, as Meckier notes, of Huxleys malad-
justment to a world increasingly confounded by new empirical truthsones
that could only ever be perfectly provisional and temporary (TBL, 34-5).85
The characterss presences in these texts also underscore the restrictive-
ness of the simple faith in nineteenth-century materialism that had led
to the problem of certainty and uncertaintywhich is to say to this psychic
schismin the first place. What had been a rift between Cartesians and epi-
phenomenalists in THs day is now transmogrified into an agon between
productivity and pathology. No longer a philosophical debate, Descartess
dualism now divides again; if it were once two, it now is four and, so redupli-
cated, presents not just a differently structured debate, but a newly complex
structural problema chiasmin the mind itself.
As Huxley often suggests, causation and origin can themselves be myths:
for every cold, materialist, or univocal explanation of the world that he faced,
Huxley had prepared (or extemporaneously would prepare) a relatively more
complex and multifaceted theory. Often he would articulate what may be
described as his mottoa pithy phrase that expressed his view that nature
accumulated rather than reduced in its causative models: not only, but al-
so.86 And when Huxleys 1920s satire ridicules men who, at the thought
of chaos, fall into panic, Huxley also begins to mock, at least privatelyin
his lettersthose who engaged in complex introspection, and who thereby
fruitlessly sought the truth of their own subjectivity.87
In 1929, at thirty-five years of age, Huxley would write a letter to his long-
time American correspondent, Mrs Flora Stroussea woman who wrote
to Huxley under the pseudonym Floyd Starkey. In his letter, Huxley rails
against what he sees as a tendency toward self-introspection. Confessing
that he is disinclined to have ideas about himself, Huxley could scarcely
make his principled sense of extrospection clearer:
I have almost no ideas about myself and dont like having themavoid hav-
ing themon principle evenand only improvise them, when somebody like
you asks to know them. For know thyself was probably one of the stupidest
pieces of advice ever giventhat is to say, if it meant turning the self inside
out by introspection. If one spent ones time knowing oneself in that way, one
wouldnt have any self to knowfor the self only exists in circumstances out-
side itself and introspection which distracts one from the outside world is a
kind of suicide.88
duction to the Toronto Luncheon Colloquy 1961, 193. This is comparable with what
Huxley writes in Meditation on the Moon: Nothing but is mean as well as stupid [...
] Enough of Nothing but. It is time to say again, with primitive common sense (but for
better reasons, not only, but also. Aldous Huxley: Complete Essays III: 1930-35, eds.
Robert S. Baker and James Sexton (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), 110. Furthermore, as
Bedford notes in the first chapter of her biography: Aldous was Different; at the same
time a young child. Not only, but also, as the later Aldous would have said. Bedford,
Aldous Huxley, 1: 3.
87 As Meckier argues, Huxley knew that
In a disintegrated society, the artists, who should see life as steadily and whole, are,
Huxley complains, almost incurably split inasmuch as each is either Houyhnhnm
or Yahoo, all intellect or all genitals.
Meckier, Satire and Structure, 26. Of course, while this position appears syntonic with
Freudianism, it is, in Meckiers analysis, and evidently throughout Huxleys fiction, a
different kind of reduction.
88 Huxley to Flora Strausse, 7 January 1929 (Letter 284) in Smith, Letters, 306. For a sim-
ilar sentiment expressed elsewhere see The Education of an Amphibian, 21. Here
Huxley discusses Descartess affirmation Cogito ergo sum [I think therefore I am], re-
placing it with Cogitor ergo sum [I am being thought, therefore I am].
Reforging the Law 251
sionary experience (hah, 48-9), and they indicate his preference to study the
construction of meaning in the outside world rather than in terms of the
inner world of the mind. As an intellectual with a mistrust of the mind and
language,Huxley studied the fact that one exists, rather than the question
of what or how one exists.
This is a metaphysical preference confirmed by Huxleys earlier remarks
in his letter:89
92 As the ship now becomes a psychotrope for Huxleys displeasure, having witnessed
those interior images produced by his mind, it also becomes a figure for madness in
Foucaults History of Madness. But what is interesting about this is the way in which
the so-called ship of fools, a mythical trope or psychotrope for madness, had at least
in Foucaults work become the subject of some controversy. HCE Midelfort makes the
crucial point that the image of the stultifera navis, or the historical Ship of Fools
(from which name Foucault takes the title of his opening chapter in Histoire de la
folie) represents little more than a fanciful rhapsodya product of Foucaults sym-
bol-searching. There is, Midelfort argues, no evidence that such a ship existed. Nor is
there, as Colin Gordon adds, evidence for the practice of riverborne deportation: the
medieval treatment of the insane. But numerous mistakes appear Midelforts reading,
and, by and large, in both Huxleys and Foucaults divergent appeals to this psycho-
trope the apocryphal ship becomes an ideal symbol for madness: denoting isolation,
the impossibility of escape, and a sense of physical envelopment or suffocation.
What makes Huxleys ship even more interestingand what tethers it to Philip K.
Dicks psychotropic imaginary, is its scale and its cheapness. One experiences mes-
caline
as though one were below decks in a ship... A five-and-ten-cent ship... [whose] gim-
crack mobiles of tin and plastic were [his] personal contributions to the universe
(DoP, 26).
Organised into colour blocks, this is a visual mode echoed in Dicks novels The Three
Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and A Scanner Darkly, both of which I address in chapter 8.
Also see Madness and Civilization in Early Modern Europe: A Reappraisal of Michel
Foucault, in After the Reformation: Essays in Honour of J.H.Hexter, ed. B.C. Malament
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), 24765; Colin Gordon, Histoire de la
folie: An Unknown Book by Michel Foucault, in Arthur Still and Irving Velody (eds.),
Rewriting the History of Madness: Studies in Foucaults Histoire de la folie (London:
Routledge, 1992), 32. John Rittmeister compares the hallucinations of lone travellers
at sea to Descartess hallucinations: John Rittmeister, Die Mystiche Krise des Jungen
Descartes, Zeitschrift fur Psychosomatische Medizin 15 (1969): 204-44, qtd. in Laurence
Rickels, Politics and Psychosis, The Germanic Review 83, no. 1 (2008): 25-41.
93 Yet Huxley does suggest the potential for a positive interior symbolic of the self (an
inscape):
Mescalin had endowed me temporarily with the power to see things with my eyes
shut vision; but it could not, or at least on this occasion did not, reveal an inscape
remotely comparable to my flowers or chair or flannels out there (DOP, 26).
While Huxleys account records no positive account of these interiorised mental im-
ages, he leaves the door open, as it were, for such a positive experience to arise. His
reluctance to examine to study his interiorised mental images while on mescaline, or
Reforging the Law 253
True, facts and theories can be communicated in terms that give the reader
no aesthetic satisfaction. So can the passions, But neither passion, nor facts
and theories can be communicated rapidly and persuasively in such terms...
We have a certain difficulty in taking in anything that is not intrinsically el-
egant; a certain eagerness to accept anything that moves us aesthetically.96
to entertain the notion that positive mental images might be seen by others, perhaps
reflects Huxleys own disposition (what Leary would call ones set) at the time of his
mescaline session.
94 See Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, tr. Denis Savage
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 32-3; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Paranoid
Reading and Reparative Reading; or, Youre So Paranoid, You Probably Think This In-
troduction Is about You, in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, ed. Eve Kosovsky
Sedgwick (London: Duke University Press, 1997), 5. Also see Brian Leiter, The Herme-
neutics of Suspicion: Recovering Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, in Leiter, ed. The Future
for Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 74-105.
95 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, 3.
96 Huxley, T.H. Huxley as a Literary Man, 54.
Reforging the Law 254
Ive got something important to say and the power to say itonly I dont know
what it is, and I cant make any use of the power. If there was some different way
97 For a detailed analysis of some of these satirical elements, see Meckier, Our Ford,
Our Freud and the Behaviorist Conspiracy of Brave New World, Tahlia 1 (1978): 35-9;
Buchanan, Oedipus in Dystopia, 103-4; Peter Firchow, The End of Utopia: A Study of
Huxleys Brave New World (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1984), 55.
98 Kimberley Allyn Hewitt, Psychedelics and Psychosis: LSD and Changing Ideas of
Mental Illness, 1943-1966, PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2002, 100.
Reforging the Law 255
of writing. Or else something else to write about. He was silent; then, You see,
he went on at last, Im pretty good at inventing phrases, you know, the sort of
words that suddenly make you jump, almost as though youd sat on a pin, they
seem so new and exciting even though theyre about something hypnopdical-
ly obvious. But that doesnt seem enough. Its not enough for the phrases to be
good; what you make with them ought to be good too (BNW, 59-60).
99 See Henry Staten, Nietzsches Voice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 6-7.
Reforging the Law 256
An artist is bound in any case to detach himself from actual life in favour of
the fictitious existence of his creationsis bound to, unless he happens to
possess, which I dont, the exuberant vitality and power which suffices for two
simultaneous lives: he is therefore the last person who can afford to go about
cultivating ideas of himself.101
Having less than enough power to live out two simultaneous lives, Huxley
yearns for a unifying synthesis of the actual and the fictional in what
must always remain an ironically double-sided or chiasmic structuration.
This is a synthesis whose misbegotten origin as the cultivation of a suturing
100 I describe this performance as a kind of apostasy in view of Huxleys subtle suggestion
that Freudianism functions as a religion for many of its followers. Testament to this is
Huxleys oft-noted custom of satirically making the sign of the cross at the mention of
Freuds name. Huxley was seen to do this while at conferences, and when in casual or
formal conversation. See Buchanan, Oedipus in Dystopia, 118n3.
101 Huxley to Flora Strausse, in Smith, Letters, 306.
Reforging the Law 257
106 Sean Latham, The Coterie as Commodity: Huxley, Lawrence, Rhys, and the Business
of Revenge, in The Art of Scandal: Modernism, Libel Law, and the Roman Clef (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009), 140.
107 Ibid., 138-9.
Reforging the Law 259
tronage offers no refuge from the mass marketneither for Huxley or for
Chelifer. Rather, it implicates Huxley, his reader, and his critics, at least as
much as his characters, in a tangled web of capital exchanges in what is
another rearticulation of the scriveners disempowerment.108
I was born wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to
be born, and have made, in a curious way, the worst of both. For each requires
that one should be whole-heartedly there, at the momentwith Micawber, as
he is and for his own sake, while he is drinking his punch: with the Clear
Light of the Void as it is and for its own sake, in an analogous way. Whereas I
have always tended to be somewhere else, in a world of analysis, unfavourable
equally to Micawberish living, Tolstoyan art and contemplative spirituality.
The title of my first book of stories, Limbo, was, I now see, oddly prophetic!110
G.D. Chaitin, Rhetoric and Culture in Lacan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996), 151; cf. Samo Tomi, The Invention of New Love in Psychoanalysis, Filozofski
Vestnik 31, no. 2 (2010): 189-204. On Huxley being in love with Mary Hutchinson, see
Sexton, Selected Letters, 5, 6, 120-21.
112 Huxley to Sybille Bedford, in Smith, Letters, 476.
113 Ibid.
Reforging the Law 261
jectivity that had resonated in all his writing. Dr. Andrew MacPhail will seek
to overcome the enormous folly of trying to make a marriage between hell
and heaven, (Island, 156) in his effort to establish what Gorman Beau-
champ calls a psychedelic utopia.114 At one point, the Scottish Dr MacPhail,
a trained physician, joins in with the spiritualist Raja (the Palanese King), to
make the best of all worlds:
If the king and the doctor were now teaching one another to make the best of
both worldsthe Oriental and the European, the ancient and the modernit
was in order to help the whole nation to do the same. To make the best of both
worldswhat am I saying? To make the best of all the worldsthe worlds al-
ready realized within the various cultures and, beyond them, the worlds of
still unrealized potentialities. It was an enormous ambition, an ambition to-
tally impossible of fulfillment; but at least it had the merit of spurring them
on, of making them rush in where angels feared to tread with results that
sometimes proved, to everybodys astonishment, that they had not been quite
such fools as they looked. They never succeeded, of course, in making the best
of all the worlds; but by dint of boldly trying they made the best of many more
worlds than any merely prudent or sensible person would have dreamed of be-
ing able to reconcile and combine (Island, 129).
Later defending his ambition to convoke these worlds, MacPhail will claim
that there was nothing in that best-of-both-worlds program to offend the
susceptibilities of even the touchiest and most ardent of religious patriots
(Island, 221). Later still, Dr. Robert MacPhailAndrew MacPhails grandson
and a surrogate for Huxley himselfwill instruct those who take the mok-
sha-medicine to watch as Shiva-Nataraja dances the dance of endless be-
coming and passing away (Island, 167). Dancing in all the worlds at once,
Shiva-Nataraja attains a state of infinite and eternal bliss where play is an
end in itself, everlastingly purposeless (Island, 167-68).
If Huxley envisions a way to overcome the burdensome feeling that he
is equally as split as the split-men of his satires, then one way of repairing
this dehiscence is through what he will call A Psychophysical Education
(1962). In his essay of that name, Huxley emphasisesas he had also em-
phasised the realization of a state of no-mind (TPP, 86)the importance
of mental and physical non-attachment.115 This non-attachment may be
114 See Gorman Beauchamp, Island: Aldous Huxleys Psychedelic Utopia, Utopian Stud-
ies 1, no. 1 (1990): 59-72.
115 Aldous Huxley, A Psychophysical Education, in More Talk of Alexander, ed. Wilfred
Barlow (London: Gollancz, 1978), 1. I note that Barlow confirms that Huxleys essay
(chapter 5) is reprinted from the Alexander Journal, of which he is the editor. However,
Reforging the Law 262
distinguished from the detachment that Huxley had, earlier in his life, pro-
pounded through his satires, such as through Beaviss aloofness in Eyeless
in Gaza.116 Non-attachment requires more than an attitude of indifference:
bodily modification must be employed too; and this will ameliorate the
problems of a maladjusted physique, restoring it to its potential as the
instrument used to establish contact with the outside world.117
It was in the late 1930s, and perhaps by the time that Huxley had finished
writing Ends and Means (1937), that he, as Woodcock notes, began to feel that
his earlier philosophy of cynical or satirical detachment was insufficient.
Words, Huxley would insist in Literature and Science, are only ever so pow-
erful, limited in number and configurable in only so many conventionally
fixed ways (LAS, 99). But even before 1963s Literature and Science, in The
Perennial Philosophy (1945), Huxley would criticise what he, in Woodcocks
view, regards
Huxleys essay does not appear in the contents pages listed in the Alexander Journals
online database (see http://www.mouritz.co.uk/131alexanderjournal.php). It thus re-
mains unclear on which year this essay was written or first published. However, the es-
say is likely to have been written in the immediate years before Huxleys 1963 death
probably around 1962and perhaps at the same approximate time as his similar
essay, Education on the Nonverbal Level. See Huxley, Education on the Nonverbal
Level, Daedulus 91, no 2 (1962): 279-93. The latter essay also appears in Aldous Huxley,
Complete Essays, Volume VI: 1956-63, ed. Robert S. Baker and James Sexton (Chicago:
Ivan R. Dee, 2002), 303-20.
116 Woodcock, Dawn and the Darkest Hour, 136.
117 Huxley, A Psychophysical Education, 1.
118 Woodcock, Dawn and the Darkest Hour, 34.
119 For an excellent essay from an Eastern perspective written by an Indian scholar on
The Perennial Philosophy, The Doors of Perception, and Island, see The Philosophia Pe-
rennis, Synthetic Divine Conciousness and the Buddhist Pala, in B.L. Chakoo, Aldous
Reforging the Law 263
Earlier in his life, in 1925, Huxley had addressed the subject of com-
parative psychology in a letter to John Murry by reference to his essay Our
Contemporary Hocus-Pocus.120 Containing one of Huxleys most direct and
forceful critiques of Freud, the letter condemns psychoanalysis as one of
the finest specimens of pseudo-science to have been designed by the
mind of man.121 Of course it is true, argues Huxley, that the individual left
to himself, with nothing to support him may soon be drawn to reflect on his
own shortcomings. But in a prolepsis of Derridas theorisation of diffrance,
as well as of the notion of espacement in language, Huxley underscores the
destructiveness of analysis; it a process whereby even arriving at a positive
meaning is likely to prompt the analyst to consider its merits as against its
negative corollary.
As deconstruction emphasises the extent to which the presence of lan-
guage always differs from, and serves only to momentarily defer a consid-
eration of, what is absent, so does self-analysis, for Huxley, elicit only the
negative valency, signaling what is absent:122
Huxley and Eastern Wisdom (Delhi: Atma Ram & Sons, 1981), 213-58.
120 Huxley, Hocus-Pocus, 313-20.
121 Ibid., 315.
122 See Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 82-3.
123 Huxley to John Middleton Murry, 5 March, 1925 (Letter 225) in Smith, Letters, 243-4.
Bentley theorises that Huxleys dichotimisation of love and hate operates here to ex-
press his Manichean consciousness. See Bentley, Anatomical Vision, 96.
124 That Huxleys fiction might have served to so desublimate is the gravamen of Bentleys
argument in Anatomical Vision, 171-84.
Reforging the Law 264
When Huxley airs his political views about war before the middle decades of
the twentieth century, he indicates the extent to which the specter of war might
have played a role in shaping his feelings of alienation and depersonalisation.129
125 See Daphne Simeon and Jeffrey Abugels discussion of Heaven and Hells illustration of
depersonalisation in their chapter Depersonalization in Philosophy and Literature
in Feeling Unreal: Depersonalization Disorder and The Loss of the Self (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006), 145-50.
126 See Laurent S. Lehmann, Depersonalization, American Journal of Psychiatry 131, no.
11 (1974): 1221.
127 Franois Villa, The Psychoanalytical Method and the Disaster of Totalitarianism:
Borderline States as the Psychical Equivalent of the Discontent in Civilization? Criti-
cal Inquiry 40, no. 2 (2014): 267-87, esp. 267.
128 Ibid.
129 See Laurence Rickelss series, Nazi Psychoanalysis, especially in volume 3 (Psy Fi),
in which Rickels briefly writes on Huxleys Brave New World, and in which, as Bennet
notes in the volumes foreword, Rickels moves at the end from sci to psy [to give
Reforging the Law 265
At the same time as he begins writing his pacifistic novel Eyeless in Gaza
and a series of essays on society in Ends and Means, one of which, War,
is a thorough refutation of wars defensibility, Huxley would also zealously
expresses his pacifism in political pamphlets such as What Are You Going To
Do About It? The Case for Constructive Peace (1936) and An Encyclopaedia of
Pacifism (1937).130
Repudiated and denigrated, the former pamphlet elicited a harsh re-
sponse from critic C. Day Lewis, who penned his own screed titled Were
Not Going To Do Nothing (1936). Huxley will then reconfigure this situation
in Eyeless in Gaza, where Beavis characterises negative pacifism and scep-
ticism about existing institutions as so many holes in the mind, and an
emptiness waiting to be filled (EIG, 425).131
As conduits for excessive self-consciousness, Huxleys holes in the mind
resemble the reducing valves to which the author would later advert in The
Doors of Perception. These are the ducts or valves through which paranoiac
introspection might enter; once in the brain it infects an individual, plant-
ing and programming a suspicious mind with whatever positive content
may serve as its fillers (EIG, 425). Transcoding actuality into fiction, Eyeless
in Gaza and other of Huxleys romans clef also function as the authors per-
sonal fillers for those parts of his own mindand for those of his readerss
mindsthat might otherwise be filled with a deceptive if not alluring posi-
tive doctrinehowever criminal or crazy its positiveness may be (EIG, 425).
And while pumping full the negative void of the mind with this positive
pacifism is precisely what Eyeless in Gazas Beavis seeks to do, his ability
to effectively propagandise is increasingly as uncertain as the potential of
Huxleys pamphlets to persuade: even if we assume that we have the time,
Beavis asks, have we the ability? (EIG, 425).
While Huxleys pamphleteering reflects his negative opinion of the First
World War, Huxleys increasingly disillusioned view about his political influ-
ence heavily impacts on him as he realises his limitations as an artist.132
the volume its title, Psy Fi] by a neat transition that uses Huxleys Ford/Freud in
Brave New World: Laurence A. Rickels, Nazi Psychoanalysis, Volume Three: Psy Fi (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press), xiii, 215-21.
130 See Aldous Huxley, What Are You Going To Do About It? The Case for Constructive Peace
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1936); Huxley, An Encyclopaedia of Pacifism (London: Chat-
to & Windus,1937).
131 See Anna Deters, Eyeless in Gaza: Mystical Means and Socio-Political Ends, Aldous
Huxley Annual 5 (2005): 151-66, esp. 155-6; Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of
the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 70; C. Day-Lewis, Were Not Going
To Do Nothing (London: The Left Review, 1936).
132 As Cunningham writes, Huxleys Case for Constructive Peace was one of the 30ss
Reforging the Law 266
When faced with the ineluctable fact of World War II, Huxley will outgrow
his desire to produce propaganda; he realised, as Anna Deters notes, the
naivety of the claim that changes in the individual alone can alter the course
of society.133 Now turning his back on the question of pacifism and toward a
mystical-spiritual outlook, Huxleys transition also marks a point of return.
Here, once again, Huxley will repress and resist those feelings of paranoid
introspection and self-attachment, rebranding them as mystical non-at-
tachment.134
In her essay On Mental Health, Melanie Klein describes a well-inte-
grated personality as the foundation for mental health. But integration
also relies, she writes,
Despite his negative self-feelings, Huxleys great capacity for love is illustrat-
ed throughout the many letters that pass between him and his father, as well
as between he and his brother Julian. But Huxleys belief in love is also evi-
dent in what is known about his long marriage to Maria Nys, which begins
in 1919 when Huxley is only 25, and which would last until Marias tragic
death in 1955in spite of what may have been a number of challenges.136 A
most persistently denigrated texts. Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties, 70.
133 Deters, Eyeless in Gaza: Mystical Means and Socio-Political Ends, 156.
134 Ibid.
135 Melanie Klein, On Mental Health, in Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude and Other
Works 1946-1963, ed. M. Masud R. Khan (London: The Hogarth Press, 1984), 271.
136 Unfortunately, correspondence between Maria and Huxley (they wrote to each other
every day in the years leading to their marriage) remains lost, despite the relatively
recent discovery that five letters were preserved by a private collector. It is assumed
destroyed, having probably burnt alongside almost all of Huxleys papers in a house-
fire in his and Laura Huxleys Hollywood home on 12 May 1961. See Sexton, Selected
Letters, 4n1; Bedford, Aldous Huxley, 1: 84. Nevertheless, the story of Maria and Hux-
leys love affair is mostly known. In a letter written in 1952 to Matthew Huxley (son of
Aldous and Maria), Maria asks why she had ever allowed Huxley to approach her, per-
mitting herself to become exposed to the intellectual strain of a life (at Garsington)
for which she was ill-prepared. Huxley had known, she writes, that he could never
teach me to write poetry or remember what I read in a book, or spel [sic] or anything he
did set value on. (Bedford, 1: 94-5). Murray describes her as possibly suffering anorex-
ia nervosa and speaks of her suicide attempt in 1915, about which D.H. Lawrence had
been outraged. (Lawrence had written a chiding letter concerning this topic to Lady
Ottoline Morrell in 1915): Murray, Aldous Huxley, 69; Bedford, Huxley, 1: 80. Ottoline
had restored Garsington Manor, near Oxford, and had turned it into an aristocratic
refuge for leftists and artists. Maria and Huxley had lived there for a time, and, as I
have already addressed, it inspired Huxley to write Crome Yellow, in which Lady Otto-
Reforging the Law 267
Belgian refugee, Maria does not appear to have objected to their pairs open
relationship, and it is possible, as I have suggest of her attraction to women
in the previous chapter, that Maria herself had even proposed it. Of course,
the precise details of Marias sexuality, and the nature of her marriage to
Huxley, remain only approximately understood.137
Nevertheless, one assertionthat D.H. Lawrence had been Huxleys ho-
mosexual lovera claim made in book of political history that also claims
Huxleys central role in Britains alleged Opium War against the U.S., ap-
pears inflammatory and unsubstantiated; especially as it is offset by what
Huxleys friend Don Bachardy, in an interview with David Dunaway, says of
Huxleys sexuality: I dont think Aldous had a queer bone in his body.138
While Bachardy stresses that his claim is only on instinct and relies on no
evidence, Bachardys speculations conform to the testimony of others. For
Huxley was, as Dunaway writes,
one of those menthere are quite a few of themwho actually find lesbian
women attractive or masculine: women who have lesbian tendencies are more
attractive to them than just ordinary heterosexual women.139
after 1955the year in which Maria died and, not long after, when Laura first
used mescaline with Huxley.141 In an address before a prodigious group of
people, all doctors, PhDs, [and] probably Nobel Prize winners, Laura writes,
Huxley could only advise his audience to Try to be a little kinder to each oth-
er. That Huxley was, according to Laura, embarrassed that after forty-five
years of research and study this was the best advice he could give to peo-
ple, is a fact that reflects not Huxleys intellectual failure but the silliness he
felt in realising the greater importance of this piece of wisdom than all else
that he had learned.142 As I have already intimated, Huxleys reluctance to
engage in excessive introspection also serves as an exemplary counterpoint
to certain diagnostic descriptions of psychotic mental disorders, such as the
following description of schizophrenia advanced by Louis Sass:
145 See Clark, The Huxleys, 168; Huxley to Dilip Kumar Roy (date unknown), in Sisirkumar
Ghose, Aldous Huxley: A Cynical Salvationist (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1962),
187. Also see A.A. Mutalki Desay, India and Aldous Huxley: A Symbiotic Relationship,
in Sumita Roy, Annie Pothen, K.S. Sunita, eds., Aldous Huxley and Indian Thought (New
Delhi: Sterling, 2003), 26-36, esp. 29.
146 Clark, The Huxleys, 164.
147 See Aldous Huxley, History of Tension, in Moksha, 121-28; Henri Bergson, Two Sourc-
es of Religion and Morality, tr. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton (London: Mac-
millan and Co., 1935), 186.
148 Sass offers a helpful discussion of German psychiatrist Kurt Schneiders list of First
Rank Symptoms for schizophrenia: Introspection, 4. As Huxley notes, he borrows
the term autoconditioning from Duke University sociology professor Hornell Hart:
see Hart, Autoconditioning: The New Way To a Successful Life (New Jersey: Prentice Hall,
1956).
Reforging the Law 271
Each an immaterial force its own right, every single disease is idiopathic
or sui generis. And if none is translatable it is precisely because it tends
to narrow the patients awareness until, in extreme cases, he is conscious
of nothing but himself (HOT, 118). For this reason the history of illness is
also incapable of being understood as experience, and must instead be
understood only as medicine. A universal phenomenology of disease is
impossible, Huxley argues, just as medicine can be nothing more than the
history of theories about the nature of diseases and of the recipes employed
at different times for their treatment (HOT, 118).
But if in refuting the proposition that mental disorders are generalisa-
bile Huxley repudiates the possibility of a phenomenological medicine, this
appears to be an inadvertent consequence of his observations. For Huxley
himself valorises William Jamess descriptions of alcohol and even religion
as keys to the transcendent to the world of everyday experience (HOT, 121).
Arguing that the treatment for tension and other psychosomatic disor-
der[s] might involve the education systems incorporation of a few simple
courses in the art of controlling the autonomic nervous system and the sub-
conscious mind, Huxley proposes that students carry [their own] resolu-
tions into practice (HOT, 126). But students should also be made vigilant,
Huxley argues, against herd poison, having already been exposed to the
absurd and discreditable secrets of propaganda (HOT, 126). And finally, Hux-
ley recommends that young students must embrace the pharmacological
revolution that will occur, he writes, whether we like it or not, and which
will allow for the discovery of scores of new methods for changing the qual-
ity of consciousness (HOT, 127).
Much like his brother Julian and his colleague and close friend, the bio-
chemical psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond, Huxley imagines breaking the
dominance of psychoanalytic theory in (American) psychiatry. Conceiving
of disease on the animal level, and as exclusively biological, Huxley notes
that the disease of tension for instance,
Reforging the Law 272
However, Huxley also accepts that biological distress, such as that caused by
a traumatic event, could also affect biology, producing even further mental
distress. In The Doors of Perception, he rhetorically asks the following: Is the
mental disorder due to a chemical disorder? And is the chemical disorder
due, in its turn, to psychological stress affecting the adrenals? (DOP, 3)
Meditating on the relation of psychology and biology, Huxley thus resists
dualistic explanations of the subject-object relation and increasingly consid-
ers the human as an amphibian, that is, as a being who resides between
the aquatic and non-aquatic, and the biological and psychological worlds
(EOA, 9). For all his resistance to self-analysis, then, what else dominates in
Huxleys thought is his recurrent belief in the human as a biologically deter-
mined animal.
This chapter has shown how much of this view of the world had been
gifted to Huxley by his grandfather. However, Huxley arguably went fur-
ther than his grandfather in expressing and developing this view, nurturing
an interest in the metaphysical imagery of the East in his later yearsin
addition to the scientific and evolutionary classification schemata he had
learned from Western science in his young adulthood. And it is to this limb
of Huxleys epistemology that the following chapter shall now turn.
149 I have already cited the paper that Julian Huxley and Humphry Osmond (et. al) pub-
lished in Nature in 1964. It is De Bont, Schizophrenia, Evolution and the Borders of
Biology, 144-59. For more recent work on the psychobiological basis of schizophre-
nia, see Takeshi Sakurai, et. al., Schizophrenia Research in 2013: Are we Making
Progress? Neurobiology of Disease 53 (2103): 1-2. On the relatively new atractin, pan-
tonate-kinase2, oxytocin, and arginine-vasopressin hypothesis (linked with what was
formerly known as Hallervorden Spatz Syndrome), see Omri Teltsh, et. al., Oxytocin
and Vasopressin genes are significantly associated with schizophrenia in a large Ar-
ab-Israeli pedigree, International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology 15 (2012): 309-
19. Also see Katherine E. Burdick, Benjamin Glicksberg, and Gary Donohue, Genetic
Influences on Cognition on Schizophrenia, (chapter 10) in Cognitive Impairment in
Schizophrenia: Characteristics, Assessment and Treatment, Phillip D. Harvey, ed. (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge, 2013), 161-75, esp. 166-9.
Chapter Six
An Amphibical
Anthropology1
1 I borrow this title from a chapter title in Peter Sloterdijks Neither Sun Nor Death, tr.
Steve Corcoran (New York: Semiotext(e), 2011), 303.
2 It is perhaps worth noting here that Huxley made continued reference to Balzacs
Comdie Humaine throughout his life and, in Hocus-Pocus, Huxley observes that
it was Balzacs serious interest in the science of Lavater, Gall and Mesmer, that
led Balzac to offer pseudo-scientific expositions of the theory of bumps and phizes
and magnetic fluids (OCHP, 313). Further, Lilian McNairs analysis of Huxleys en-
gagement with Balzac is instructiveand not only in terms of the general adoption in
Point Counter Point of Balzacs methods and philosophy a materialistic philosophy.
McNairs essay lends weight to my proposition that Huxleys writing is overlain with
structuring figure of the chiasmus, underscoring Huxleys tendency to employ coun-
terpoint. Instead of using complete novels as themes for his work [as Balzac was able
to do], McNair asserts, Huxley, restricted by the limitations of a single book, de-
veloped a more concentrated counterpoint, and secured an effect similar to Balzacs
by astute and sensitive combinations of chapters, paragraphs, even phrases. Such
combinations develop a construction of the Comdie Humaine... but in miniature.
See McNair, Balzac and Huxley: A Short Study of the Comdie Humaine on Point Coun-
terpoint [sic], The French Review 12, no. 6 (1993): 476-9, esp. 477.
273
An Amphibical Anthropology 274
genus of which the conflicting terms were opposite specieshe also re-
alised that the nitrous oxide could be used as a perceptual instrument. It
could, he realised, reveal how it is precisely the mechanical nature of human
activity, apparently guided by transcendental forces, that is the source of
laughing gass laughter.3 Only two years later, Henri Bergson would make
a similar observation when, in an essay on comedy, he would write that the
mechanical interpretation of human behaviour ought to be one of the
favourite devices of parody. But while Bergson and James had reached this
result through deduction, it would also seem, wrote Bergson, that clowns
have long had an intuition of the fact.4
These anecdotes form two suitable analogues for the revelation that
Huxley purports to expose in his satirical fiction: the one by which humans
are made suddenly visible through a zoological lens, and shown to be guided
by transparent social forces.5 Joseph Bentley describes this optic as Huxleys
anatomical vision of human life. To produce his images, Huxley often
takes the unrefined or animalistic elements of humans andthrough a
process of semantic gravitation and satiric reductionproduces a pan-
tomime show in which the human becomes a mind ineluctably and comed-
ically embedded in an unruly or even overruling body.6 If anything impedes
Huxleys strategy, it appears in the literary mechanics: for, if humans are
simply animal organisms, which is to say the expressions of bodily drives,
then how might we transcend that very fact when we read Huxleys fiction?
And how has just such a simple animalHuxley theartist, produced these
omniscient words, these zoological observations?
One crucial explanation is that Huxleys sardonic cynicism typifies what
Herbert Marcuse identifies as the Great Refusal in the language of litera-
ture. Exemplifications of the rationality of negation, Huxleys satires of
the 1920s, as with his essays of the 1950s, function like all art in advanced
positions, which is to say they protest against that which is. Among vari-
ous literary expressions, the
modes in which man and things are made to appear, to sing and sound and
speak, are modes of refuting, breaking, and recreating their factual existence.
3 See William James, On Some Hegelisms, in The Will To Believe: Essays in Popular
Philosophy (London: Longmans Green and Co, 1912), 263-98, esp. 296-7, my emphasis;
Marcus Boon, The Road of Excess, 121.
4 Bentley, The Anatomical Vision, 158-176; and Bentley, Semantic Gravitation: An Es-
say on Satiric Reduction, Modern Language Quarterly 30 (1969): 3-19.
5 See Marcus Boon, The Road of Excess, 121.
6 Bentley, The Anatomical Vision, 158.
An Amphibical Anthropology 275
But these modes of negation pay tribute to the antagonistic society to which
they are linked.7
Using language to refute his society and its epistemologies, Huxley also
deploys what Derrida describes as writings arche-violence, or what Fou-
cault similarly describes as languages implicit violence.8 And while for
Derrida language is violent only when it is logocentricwhen the text
that this language constitutes is supposed to correspond to realityFou-
cault regards all language as violent, embracingor rather acknowledg-
inglinguistic violence as a necessity. It is imperative that there is, Fou-
cault argues, a conceptual order. But this is a violent intervention from
which Foucault does not resile: so we will make one, only we will not shy
away from it.9
Syntonic with what seems to propel Huxleys satirical mode is what
leads Foucault to defend this necessity of violence in language. As Mark
Kelly argues, Foucaults postulations about the establishment of a new
order indicate his view that the only thing to do in response to the objec-
tionable aspects of existing discourse is to establish a new violence, a new
way of ordering things, albeit one which understands itself as violent.10
But Foucault also identifies the trace of a certain fear that hides behind
this apparent supremacy accorded, this apparent logophilia in language.
This fear, which I addressed in the previous chapter, is a form of suspicion,
one that is aimed at mastering and controlling the speaker or writer. It
affects, as Foucault writes,
7 Marcuse rails against the increasingly one-dimensional nature of the human, and
argues that art, whether ritualized or not, proceeds by means of the rationality
of negation. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (London: Routledge, and Kegan Paul,
2007), 66.
8 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, tr. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon,
1972), 228-9.
9 Mark Kelly, The Political Philosophy of Michel Foucault (London: Routledge, 2009), 24.
Kelly goes on to assert that Derrida is aligned with Nietzsche in a way that Foucault,
and in my reading Huxley, is not. Arguing that while for Derrida there is nothing but
signsthat is, no outside of significationKelly says that for Foucault, contrasting-
ly, there is such an outside: it is the antagonism inherent in nature that is the basis
for the discontinuity of language with previously-existing reality. For the purposes
of my argument, it is this discontinuity of language that Huxley seeks to exploit in
his early satirical fiction; although, rather than simply the case that nature at large
is the source of discontinuity, it is for Huxley the human in its totality that is discon-
tinuous, paradoxical, and chiasmic. As Bentley puts it, Huxley sees the human as a
total, or unselective image of an object [that] would include all the known facts about
ithigh facts as well as low facts... Bentley, The Anatomical Vision, 169.
10 Ibid., 25.
An Amphibical Anthropology 276
Just as Huxleys desire to control his own body is evident in his adoption of
the Bates Method and the Alexander Techniqueabout both of which he
writes in The Art of SeeingHuxleys desire for psychophysical control will
also prompt his drug experimentation in the 1950s. It is precisely to control,
through language, the bodies of othersperhaps even as a substitution for a
lack of control over his own bodythat Huxley produces what Bentley calls
his art of satiric reduction. In the tradition of Aristophanes, Rabelais, and
Swift, Bentley writes, Huxley often evokes the image of man as a totally
physiological being, as a grotesque animal, preposterously convinced of his
spirituality and refinement.12
Reducing humans to their excretory and other biological functions,
Huxley gives us his most obvious self-projection in the personage of Philip
Quarles in Point Counter Point. Quarles is what Norman Carlin describes as
a cosmobiological novelist; he combines his research on the reproductive
processes of animals (in the case of the novel, rare fish) with his observations
on the cosmopolitan and amorous intrigues of the Bloomsbury sophisti-
cates.13 In a series of paronomastic references to fish, Molly dExergillod
calls Philip The Zoologist of Fiction, for he is both learnedly elfish, and
a scientific Puck (PCP, 114). At a later point, Philip himself will decide to
make the fictional novelist who appears in his novel a biologist, generating
a triadic mise en abyme of Huxley, Quarles, and Quarless novelist character:
Since reading Alverdes and Wheeler I have quite decided that my novelist
must be an amateur zoologist. Or, better still, a professional zoologist who is
writing a novel in his spare time. His approach will be strictly biological, He
will be constantly passing from the termitary to the drawing-room and the
factory, and back again. He will illustrate human vices by those of ants, which
neglect their young for the sake of intoxicating liquor exuded by the parasites
that invade their nests (PCP, 414).
If the structure that assembles Huxley and these characters into a novel is
chiastic or symbiotic, it is so because this assemblage represents another
instance in which Huxleys mixed up starting points promote psychobi-
ographical investigation, and lead us back to that essential shape or psycho-
trope, which I introduced in chapter 4 and 5. Thus, having read Alverdes and
Wheeler, Quarles will begin to write like them. But does this repetition and
imitationthis mimicrynot also suggest that Huxley will have himself
previously read Alverdes and Wheeler, and that he has also begun to write
like them too?14 But Huxleys decenterings and mix ups are not restricted to
substitutions among fictional and non-fictional humans. What is indicated
in the novels observations about its characters is Huxleys view of them as
animals: Quarles, for Molly, is a fish; and later, Beatrice Gilray will become
ant-like in her industriousness (PCP, 225).
If these zoological and animal metonyms in Huxleys 1920s fiction per-
sist in his essays of the 1950s, they are in these later works less comedic than
directly philosophical. In the declarative opening of his 1956 essay The
Education of an Amphibian, for instance, Huxley describes the human in
unambiguously direct language, not very different that which TH had once
deployed:
14 See Jerome Meckier, Quarles Among the Monkeys: Huxleys Zoological Novels, in
Aldous Huxley, Blooms Critical Views: New Edition, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: In-
fobase, 2010), 59-78, 77n13.
15 Also see Peter Firchow, Aldous and Julian: Men of Letters, Men of Science, Aldous
Huxley Annual 4 (2004): 205-25, esp. 205.
An Amphibical Anthropology 278
16 Huxley would also write in this foreword that It is through self-knowledge, not
through belief in somebody elses symbols, that a man comes to the eternal reality, in
which his being is grounded (12). For an insightful discussion of the satirical way in
which Huxley viciously portrays Krishnamurti as the obnoxious Murugan, future rul-
er of Pala, see Jerome Meckier, Enemies of Utopia: Young Krishnamurti and Madam
Blavatsky in Aldous Huxleys Island, Aldous Huxley Annual 10/11 (2010/11): 299-316.
17 I rely here on Luis Pesets historical overview of medicines development. See On The
History of Medical Causality, in Corinna Delkeskamp-Hayes and Mary Ann Gardell
Cutter, eds. Science, Technology, and the Art of Medicine: European-American Dialogues
(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993), 57-74..
18 Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological (New York: Zone Books, 1991),
33.
An Amphibical Anthropology 279
Huxleys discovery that human afflictions are integral or unitary, rather than
discrete unicities (as in nineteenth-century psychiatry), anticipates the
emergence of holistic or integrative medicine in the years after his death.
Precisely this kind of whole-person approach to health is given lucid ex-
pression in the pragmatic holism practised by the Palanese institutions
in Island, for instance (Island, 78). Imagining a method of schooling or
training in which, as Huxley writes in his Amphibian essay, the de-
bauched kinaesthetic sense may be restored to its pristine integrity (EOA,
13), Huxley mourns the specialisation of medicine at the same time as he
commiserates educations specialised efficiencies (see Island, 210).19 In all
the activities of life, Huxley writes,
from the most trivial to the most important, the secret of proficiency lies in an
ability to combine two seemingly incompatible statesa state of maximum
activity and a state of maximum relaxation. The fact that these incompatibles
can actually coexist is due, of course, to the amphibious nature of the human
being. That which must be relaxed is the ego and the personal subconscious,
that which must be active is the vegetative soul and the not-selves which lie
beyond it. The physiological and spiritual not-selves with which we are asso-
ciated cannot do their work effectively until the go and the personal subcon-
scious learn to let go (EOA, 20).
19 On holism in Island, see William Curtis, Rortys Liberal Utopia and Huxleys Is-
land, Philosophy and Literature 35 (2011): 91-103, 97-8.
20 For a thoroughgoing analysis of Huxleys man-as-amphibian argument, see Hull, Ald-
ous Huxley: Representative Man, 484-6.
21 See Steyer, Darwin, the Amphibians, and Natural Selection, Evolutionary History of
Life 8 (April 2009): 233-41, esp. 239; and Darwin, A Naturalists Voyage Around The World
An Amphibical Anthropology 280
But the example of the amphibian also provides Darwin a means by which
distinguish his own evolutionary arguments from those of Jean-Baptiste La-
marck. Calling on Aesops fable The Ox and The Froga story in which
a frog is shown to blow itself up from vanity and envy until it burst[s]
Darwin notes how these amphibious creatures enlarge themselves when
alarmed or angry by inhaling air.22 Darwins observation underscores not
only the relationship between affective or mental stress and physiognomy
that Huxley would describe in The Doors of Perception; it also instantiates a
productive collision of literary description and scientific discovery.
Huxley had asked the following of butterflies in Spinozas Worm: Can
they transform themselves at will into butterflies? Is the miracle within
their powers? (SW, 62-3). But now the amphibian, not the butterfly, becomes
the exemplary figurethe special creature through which Huxley will even
more seriously explore the possibility of biological transformation and
metamorphosis.23
In 1955, only one year before the publication of Huxleys Education of
the Amphibian, it had been Julian Huxley who coined the term genetic
morphism, a term he had invented in an attempt to describe the non-mu-
tational genetic anomalies that, as he now discovered, co-existed, in equi-
librium, with any one organisms genetic norms.24 But where Julian focuses
on the anomalies of the body, Huxley attends to aberrant thoughtsthe
anomalies of the mind. Axiomatic in Education is the crucial notion that
laguagewhile it is the greatest of all our gifts (EOA, 11)cannot prevent
certain bad habits arising in the mind. Disconnected from the body, lan-
guage produces only a
world of light and air [that] is also a world where the winds of doctrine howl
destructively; where delusive mock-suns keep popping up over the horizon;
where all kinds of poison come pouring out of the propaganda factories and
tripe mills. Living amphibiously, half in fact and half in words, half in imme-
(London: John Murray, 1913), and especially those paragraphs related to the frogs
bladder as necessary for its existence (408).
22 Charles Darwin, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (London: John Murray,
1872). Also see Laura Gibbs, ed., Aesops Fables (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002),
166.
23 Notably, the thyroid hormone, rich in tadpoles and frogs, was as Donald Brown ob-
serves, the first developmental morphogen ever discovered. Brown also notes that
the discovery of this morphogen stimulated the research of generations of anato-
mists, endocrinologists, physiologists, and biochemists. Donald Brown, Amphibian
Metamorphosis, Developmental Biology 306, no. 1 (2007): 20-33.
24 See Raf De Bont, Schizophrenia, Evolution and the Borders of Biology, History of
Psychiatry 21, no. 2 (2010): 144-59, esp. 145 and 145n1.
An Amphibical Anthropology 281
diate experience and half in abstract notions, we contrive most of the time to
make the worst of both worlds (EOA, 11).
The possibility that psycho-analytic cures are really due to suggestion must be
considered. Psycho-analysts, of course, indignantly repudiate the notion and
declare that suggestion is entirely foreign to their system and is, as a matter
of fact, never practised by them (OCHP, 319).26
25 See Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, tr. Barbara Johnson (New York: Continuum, 1981
[1972]), 95-116, esp. 112.
26 Justin Clemenss comments about the paradoxical situation that renders the psycho-
analytic cure very fraught are relevant here See Clemens, Psychoanalysis is an Antiphi-
losophy, 53.
27 Bedford, Aldous Huxley, 1: 122-3.
28 Peacocks satirical ballad Sir Proeteus, appeared under the pseudonym P.M. ODon-
ovan, Esq. See Howard Mills, Peacock: His Circle and his Age (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1969), 48.
An Amphibical Anthropology 282
ensued that lasted many years. Aldous and Maria were distressed, and Aldous
genuinely surprised. If the setting of the novel, the country house party, was very
much based on Garsington, was this not a rather elegant house to its hosts?29
surely then people must see that all these were conceived in a spirit of
light-hearted comedy and that their absurdities did not belong to life and
dreary Realismus, but to a summers masque?30
Lasting a period of about six years (from 1921 until 1927), the social breach
between Huxley and Morrell may be understood to have been a symptom of
what Foucault describes as a Manichean struggle between logophilia and
logophobia in his essay The Discourse on Language.31
Behind the aggrandisement of discourse in Western civilisationor
what Foucault calls this apparent logophiliathere lies a certain fear of
the irruption of languages most dangerous elements and uncontrolla-
ble aspects. These may and will explode, Foucault notes, into the activity
of our thoughts and language.32 Moreover, this profound logophobia con-
stitutes nothing less than the
dumb fear of these events, of this mass of spoken things, of everything that
could possibly be violent, discontinuous, querulous, disordered even and per-
ilous in it, of the incessant disorderly, buzzing of discourse.33
I hope you will like Aldous latest book... it is very good, and also much bet-
teryou know what I mean by this unpleasantly clumsy way of expressing my
thoughts.37
35 Ibid.
36 Quentin Bell, Bloomsbury Recalled (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 163-4.
37 Sexton, Selected Letters, 5.
An Amphibical Anthropology 284
this time: first, the availability of money; and second, his being absurdly
miserable for having not received a letter from his then girlfriend, Maria.38
But these letters also indicate Huxleys propensity to develop his witty
and satirical observations about others, and about the situations in which he
found himself. One of these amusing narratives within these letters detail
Huxleys observations of Alix Strachey, for instance, the sadly red-nosed and
wind-pinched woman whose features spoilt her statuesque appearance.
One of these stories also tell of the time that Huxley visited the strangely
Conradesque lodgings he had intended on adopting as his home. In what
became a most amusing experience, Huxleyapprehending the sight of
the room and its occupants as a scene pregnant with nightmaresis led
to promptly decline in haste and take care not to be done in.39 That there
have appeared no extant copies of Morrells original letters to Huxley, howev-
erincluding no copy of the specific letter in which Morrell expresses her an-
guish to Huxley over Crome Yellowis a fact that makes it difficult to analyse
the full extent of Morrells feelings of betrayal. As much as Morrells unhappi-
ness may be gleaned from the apology and response that Huxley writes to her,
it is likely that even Huxley had understated his wrongs, and that Morrell had
been far more offended than even Huxleys letters even make out.40
Huxleys surprise and bewilderment that Morrell could suppose that
this little marionette performance... was the picture of a real milieu offers
to him only another proof that we are all parallel straight lines destined
to meet only at infinity. Demonstrating that real understanding between
humans is in fact an impossibility, Huxley remains firmly of his view that
humans are unable, or simply unwilling, to distinguish between the two
worlds that are constituted by, on the one hand, real living people and
on the other, puppets, devoid of all emotion, devoid indeed of most of the
attributes of living humanity.41 It is evident from Huxleys defence of his
novela defence mounted in the face of Morrells disdainthat he had been
accused by her of treating his friends with contempt.42 Denying this and,
in Sextons view, feign[ing] shock at Lady Ottolines outrage, Huxley asserts
that Crome Yellow merely imbues perfectly fantastic marionettes with gen-
eralized qualities and a capacity for talking.43
And while, in the strict terms of Huxleys apologia, his fantastic work of
fiction constitutes only a ludic puppet-comedy of ideas, it is also true that
Crome Yellow had satirised not simply elements of Morrells persona in
the character of astrology enthusiast and patroness Priscilla Wimbush
nor even simply the folly of other members of Bloomsbury.44 Rather, Crome
Yellow paints a satirical portrait of Huxley himself in the character of Mr
Barbecue-Smith, even as Huxley asserts that he deliberately and studiedly
avoided making this character like any whole or complete human being.45
In the meditative title of his book Pipe-Lines to the Infinite, Barbecue-Smith
offers a tantalising augury of the Bergsonian Mind-at-Large that Huxley
would incorporate into his 1940s studies of the mind. Intimating Huxleys
crumbling belief in the possibility of the faithful representation of a general
logos, Huxleys philosophical defence of Crome Yellow suggests its success
not only as a comedy of ideas but as a comedy of the precarity and volatility
of language.46
Just as Foucaults comes to visualise Western thought as a kind of per-
manent anthropologism, which is to say a succession of modulated episte-
mes that are nevertheless always already inadequate, so Huxley now comes
to view language as the hopeless expression of what is ultimately, in the
words of Claire Colebrook, an anthropological sleep. As adumbrated in
Crome Yellow, Huxley understands the ephemerality of the logos as its fatal
element; it is precisely his own authorial specificityhis own experience
at Garsingtonthat, as it turns out, is untranslatable. In a letter to Morell,
Huxley underscores the limits of linguistic morphology: I write something
which seems to me immediately and obviously comprehensible for what it
is.47 But in a way that is antithetical to Foucaults understanding of the lo-
gophilicin which the writer no longer distinguishes between words and
the worldHuxley is logophobic: he understands that literature is a kind of
writing that is separated... from all other language with a deep scission,
and can never represent the same thing as that which must be thought
by the writer.48
44 Ibid., 108.
45 Ibid.
46 See Foucault, Archaeology, 229. Cf. Claire Colebrook, Foucault: Anti-Representational-
ism and Logophobia, in Philosophy and Post-structuralist Theory: From Kant to Deleuze
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), 162-201, esp. 172 and 191.
47 Sexton, Selected Letters, 108.
48 Foucault, Archaeology, 43-4.
An Amphibical Anthropology 286
49 Bentley, Anatomical Vision, 172. Aldiss notes that the fatal break is the sign of a
writer who has suffered a severe discontinuity in his or her private life, and generally
early on, in the formative years, The discontinuity in life is echoed in their fiction. See
Brian Aldiss, Fatal Breaks, in Michele Langford (ed.), Contours of the Fantastic: Se-
lected Essays from the Eighth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (West-
port: Greenwood Press, 1990), 4-5. Of course, mescaline and LSD would later serve to
generate a similar break for Huxley, acting like a salve and showing him in the old
Zen way of a kick in the ass or a blow on the head... what he didnt know before. Hull,
Aldous Huxley: Representative Man, 505n11.
50 Bentley, Anatomical Vision, 172.
51 Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers, J. Strachey, ed., vol. 2 (Basic Books, New York, 1959),
279-80, qtd. in Bentley, Anatomical Vision, 172-4.
52 Bentley, Anatomical Vision, 174. Also see Sandor Ferenczi, Further Contributions
to the Theory and Technique of Psycho-Analysis (London: Karnac, 2002), 85; Monique
Cournut-Janin, Dora: Fragment of an Analysis of Hysteria, in Freud: A Modern Read-
er, ed. Rosine Perelberg (London: Whurr Publishers Ltd, 2005), 47-60, esp. 57. While
Bentley and others attribute this displacement mechanism to Freud, the psychoana-
lysts words are relatively indirect. The notion of this mechanism appears in his case
study of Dora, where Freud describes how the fourteen-year-old girl [who] coughed a
great deal was asked about her symptoms. In response,
all the girl could think of was that her grandmother, who was said to have catarrh,
coughed like that. Then it was clear that she too had catarrh, and did not want to
have any witness to her careful cleansing of herself in the evening. The discharge
of mucus, thus shifted from lower to higher in the body by the use of the word catarrh,
was even of unusual intensity.
Emphasis mine. Freud, A Case of Hysteria (Dora), tr. Anthea Bell (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2013), 70n1. In addition to Bentley, it is notable that in a discussion of Oe-
An Amphibical Anthropology 287
Whereas high theory from Plato on irrevocably cuts off the threads to ma-
terial embodiment in order instead to draw the threads of argumentation all
the more tightly into a logical fabric, there emerges a subversive variant of low
theory that pantomimically and grotesquely carries practical embodiment to
an extreme. The process of truth splits into a discursive phalanx of grand the-
ory and satirical-literary troupe of skirmishers.53
dipalism and self-enucleationthe stabbing of the eyesthe authors note the preva-
lence since Freud of The theory in which self-enucleation was an expression of the
patients wish to punish themselves by castration, after upward projection from the
testicles to the eyes. See Matthew Large and Olav Nielssen, Self-enucleation: Forget
Freud and Oedipus, its all about untreated psychosis, British Journal of Opthalmology
96 (2012): 1056-7.
53 Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 1988), 102.
54 Sunday [London] Times Weekly Review, 12 April, 1970, 25, quoted in Birnbaum, Aldous
Huxleys Quest for Values, 131; also see Dunaway, Aldous Huxley Recollected, 6n8.
55 Robert Kirsch, in Lawrence Powell, et al., Aldous Huxley, 1894-1963: Addresses at a Me-
morial Meeting Held in the School of the Library Service, February 27, 1964 (Los Angeles,
1964), 4, qtd. in Birnbaum, Aldous Huxleys Quest for Values, 5. Also see the relation
that Eli Zaretsky describes as between the Bloomsbury set and psychoanalysis in the
1930s: as Zaretsky asserts,
The integration of psychoanalysis into the welfare state began in England during
the 1930s, and culminated during World War II. At the centre of analytic thought
during this period was the idea of ruptured connection. Along with the emphasis
on the mother, British analysis developed a new view of the ego, as ethically re-
An Amphibical Anthropology 288
doubtless had a significant impact on Huxley, the origin of his cynical drives
are as diverse and as general as those that had also driven the ancient cynics.
As with the Greek practitioners of Cynicism, of whom Diogenes is emblem-
atic, Huxley cast a sceptical eye over the world only to affirm the view that,
as David Mazella notes, human conduct is directed... wholly by self-inter-
est or self-indulgence, and that appearances to the contrary are superficial
and untrustworthy.56 Inasmuch as Huxleys cynicism is of a political kind,
thenand precisely as much is amply confirmed in Brave New Worldit also
derives from his philosophical meditation on the possibility of a mental
mechanism that seeks to make, as Bentley argues, high values descend...
toward concomitant low values.
Huxley sensed the modernist paradox in which low and high values
would be forever engaged in a play of appearances. What Quentin Bell de-
scribes as the contradiction between Morrells stupendous dramatic pos-
sibilities, and her realitythe one in which she was decidedly dullis a
contradiction that Huxley seeks to reverse in his novels. And this an impulse
driven by a desire to reveal to his readers the way in which the unfavourable
aspects of the image of reality are suppressed or filtered out, bringing the
previously excluded reality back into the picture.57
As I have already noted, Bentley calls on Freud to propose that Huxleys
satire is a desublimation. Analysing an exemplary scene in Crome Yellow,
Bentley observes how Denis Stone, a young man, narrates how his amorous
relation to the word carminativea word he has long associated with such
features as warmth, passion, and spiritleads only to a tragically embodied
bathos. Stones high regard for the word, he relates, is what has prompted
him to compose a poem upon it: a work he entitles And passion carminative
sponsible, i.e., not reflecting upon universal considerations, but rather involved in
concrete obligations to others. This ethic expressed a new attitude towards person-
al life and represented, in effect, a feminine alternative to Freudan ethic of care
instead of an ethic of justice.
Notwithstanding Huxleys cynical attitude toward the Bloomsbury set and toward
Freud, is it not precisely this kind of relation to the mother and to new feminine
Freudianism that Huxley enacts, both in his fiction, and, later, through the 1940s
and 50s, in his works on pacification? See Eli Zarestsky, Melanie Klein and the Emer-
gence of Modern Personal Life, in Lyndsey Stonebridge and Joan Phillips (eds.), Read-
ing Melanie Klein (New York: Routledge, 1998), 34.
56 David Mazella, Cynicism and Dandyism, in The Making of Modern Cynicism (Char-
lottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), 176. I note that Mazellas description is
taken from a 1913 dictionary definition of cynicism.
57 Bell, Bloomsbury Recalled, 162; Bentley, Aldous Huxley and the Anatomical Vision,
175.
An Amphibical Anthropology 289
A word Ive treasured from my earliest infancy [... ] treasured and loved. They
used to give me cinnamon when I had a coldquite useless, but not disagree-
able. One poured it drop by drop out of narrow bottles, a golden liquor, fierce
and fiery. On the label was a list of its virtues, and among other things it was
described as being in the highest degree carminative. I adored the word. Isnt
it carminative? I used to say to myself when Id taken my dose. It seemed so
wonderfully to describe that sensation of internal warmth, that glow, that
what shall I call itsphysical self-satisfaction which followed the drinking of
cinnamon. Later, when I discovered alcohol, carminative described for me
that similar, but noble, more spiritual glow which wine evokes not only in the
body but in the soul as well (CY, 221).
58 Bentley seems to misquote the poem, giving it the title And Love Carminative as
Wine! See Bentley, Aldous Huxley and the Anatomical Vision, 175.
An Amphibical Anthropology 290
and all at once I felt I would like lexicographical authority for it. A small En-
glish-German dictionary was all I had at hand. I turned up C, ca, car, carm.
There it was: Carminative: windtreibend. Windtreibend! he repeated. Mr.
Scogan laughed. Denis shook his head. Ah, he said, for me it was no laugh-
ing matter. For me it marked the end of a chapter, the death of something
young and precious, There were the yearsyears of childhood and innocence
when I had believed that carminative meantwell, carminative. And now,
before me lies the rest of a lifea day, perhaps, ten years, half a century, when
I shall know that carminative means windtreibend.
59 See Clment Marot, De soy-mme, in uvres de Clement Marot: Reves sur plusieurs
manuscrits, vol. 1 (La Haye : P. Gosse et J. Neaulne, 1731), 71.
60 See Bentley, Anatomical Vision, 177.
An Amphibical Anthropology 291
bers as august as the mystical Mme. Guyon... [and] St. Francis of Assisi.
This group, Huxley notes, seeks the glow of satisfaction which follows the
accomplishment of some act in the teeth of an instinctive resistance (sWIFT,
25-6). If Swifts hatred of bowels may be read as the rationalization of an
intense disgust, Huxley wonders, then why would Swift pore so lingeringly
over what revolted him? (Swift, 26) To answer this question, Huxley then
assembles in a few clauses a string of axiomatics that are characteristic of
his ontological perspective on art. And, in his conclusion, he charts his view
of the Derridean arche-violence of language, invoking a familiar geometrical
analogy:
Swifts greatness lies in the intensity, the almost insane violence of that ha-
tred of bowels which is the essence of his misanthropy and which underlies
the whole of his work... Like Shelleys apocalyptic philanthropy, it is a protest
against reality, childish (for it is only the child whose refuses to accept the or-
der of things), like all such protests, from the fairy story to the socialists Uto-
pia. Regarded as a political pamphlet or the expression of a worldview [these
stories] are preposterous... Regarded as works of art, as independent univers-
es of discourse existing on their own authority, like geometries harmonious-
ly developed from a set of arbitrarily chosen axioms, they are almost equally
admirable (SWIFT, 27).
Infants at the breast, Freud assures us, experience a genuine sexual pleasure;
and to prove this, he bids us look at their faces which wear, while sucking,
that perfectly contented expression which, in adult life, only follows the ac-
complishment of the sexual act. We might as well say that the expression of
profound wisdom and rapt contemplation which we often see on the faces of
babies lying contentedly in their cradles is a proof that they are great philos-
ophers and are thinking about the problems of free will and predestination
and the theory of knowledge (OCHP, 318).
62 Notably, however, Huxley, in The Critic in the Crib, writes of the profoundly phil-
osophical eyes of the child. See Baker and Sexton, eds., Huxley: Complete Essays III,
10-14, esp. 14.
63 See, for instance, Alison Gupnik, The Philosophical Baby (London: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2009); Alison Gopnik and Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Bayesian Networks, Bayes-
ian Learning and Cognitive Development, Developmental Science 10, no. 3 (2007):
281-7; Susan Carey, Conceptual Change in Childhood (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985);
Alison Gopnik, Andrew Meltzoff and Patricia Kuhl, How Babies Think: The Science of
Childhood (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999); Henry Wellman and Susan Gelman,
Knowledge Acquisition in Foundational Domains, in Handbook of Child Psychology,
Volume 2: Cognition, Perception and Language, ed. William Damon (Hoboken, NJ: Wi-
ley, 1998), 523-573. For a broader discussion of children in British Literature, see Adri-
enne E. Gavin, ed., The Child in British Literature: Literary Constructions of Childhood,
Medieval to Contemporary (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), esp. 205-6, in which
reference is made to Huxleys Point Counter Point in a discussion of child deaths and
the inaccessibility of childrens minds.
64 Lacan, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function, in crits: A Selection, tr.
An Amphibical Anthropology 293
erased by the novels biopolitical economy. In one scene, when the Director
of Conditioning and Hatcheries castigates Bernard Marx, dismissing him
from the Bloomsbury Centre (BNW, 127), the Director characterises Marxs
defiance as the psychopathological residue of a poor and disobedient child-
hood. Now a persona non grataand an enemy of the stateMarxs public
shaming highlights his troublesome infancy:
... even as a little infant, (here the Director made the sign of the T), he has
proved himself an enemy of Society, a subverter, ladies and gentlemen, of all
Order and Stability, a conspirator against Civilization itself (BNW, 129).
One such scenario arises in the novel when it is revealed that John the
Savage is in fact the delicious creature, which is to say the son, of the hatch-
ery Director. Upon learning that John is indeed his son, the Director makes
a scene before all of Londons upper-caste, resigning immediately and
swearing never [to] set foot inside the Centre again (BNW, 133). Meckier
identifies the way in which this terrifying episode may be distinguished
from the Swiftian ironies and Dickensian zaniness that typify much of
the novels action. Confirming the sincerity of Huxleys disapprobation of
state-sanctioned social engineering, he argues for the novels dreadful illus-
tration of a dystopian future riven by familial discord.
But this scene is also a singularly sincere derision of the biopolitical con-
trol, a regulation whose vicious social critique is now all the more sugges-
tively amplified by the gravitas of its articulation as an Oedipal, father-son
conflict. Anticipating what would be taken up by Foucault in his lectures
on biopolitics some forty years later (in 1973-4), Huxleys novel thus lays the
groundwork for what Foucault will explicitly theorise as the torqued dialec-
tic between the administration by the state of psychological and psychiatric
apparatuses, and the role or institution of marriage or the family.72
More than simply a history of diagnosis and institutionalisation, howev-
er, Foucaults lectures identify, much like Brave New World, what is the less
apparent, but more insidious function of psychiatric power. Naming this
function the Psy function, Foucault characterises psychiatry as a disci-
pline that will occupy any and all of those interstices of power left unfilled
and open by the family:
What I will call the Psy function, that is to say, the psychiatric, psychopatho-
logical, psycho sociological, psycho-criminological, and psychoanalytic func-
tion, makes its appearance in this organization of disciplinary substitutes for
the family with a familial reference. And when I say function, I mean not
only the discourse, but the institution, and the psychological individual him-
self. And I think this really is the function of these psychologists, psychother-
apists, criminologists, psychoanalysts, and the rest. What is their function if
not to be agents of the organization of a disciplinary apparatus that will plug
in, rush in, where an opening gapes in familial sovereignty?73
havourism, it also allows him to envision that which he apprehends as the vi-
olence of the Psy function at its most extreme. Rendering what is a proto-Fou-
cauldian vision of the family as criminological, Huxleys Hocus-Pocus
essay detects the amusing image of the infant philosopher, only to lambast
the Freudian babythe quizzical figure who is now vulnerable but radically
perceptive.
Despite this, the prodgious infant will also be the heuristic through
which Huxley will envision the potential of political subversion in Brave New
World. Substituting the personage of John the Savage for Freuds baby, the
novel envisions a sanguine image of the child geniusalbeit that in Hux-
leys work, genius appears only in rare cases, such as in this case of John
the Savage. At the same time as Huxley mocks the idea that a babys face
might reflect an underlying wisdom, he also leaves ambiguous the question
of what constitutes the infant Johns exasperation with the beastly embry-
ology textbook: Is it is his illiteracy or his disagreement with the books mor-
al tenets that dissuades him from reading it? That Huxley himself is often
characterised in terms that reflect his precocity as an infant (D. H. Lawrence
described Huxley, even as an adult, as a talented adolescent) helps to ac-
count for what appears to be his personal reluctance to altogether disavow
the possibility of infant precocityeven as he mocks the idea as it arise in
Freuds work.74
When in his considerations of Freudianism Huxley is led to contemplate
the infant philosopher, he elucidates a number of questions, many of which
remain among those that are most intractable in psychoanalytic theorisa-
tions of childhood trauma and repression (OCHP, 318). The dubiety of the
procedure in which a psychoanalyst can attribute wisdom to a child based
on their expression, for instance, is no more, Huxley argues, than a panto-
mimed version of the ordinary psychoanalytic procedure, the one in which
values are read and accorded to individuals based on their expressions
and verbalisations.
That is, where the analyst imputes to the analysand any among the skein
of dubious traumas, affects, and experiences that they do, such imputations
are based solely on symptoms that are detected in just as arbitrary a manner,
as those which are imputed to child. For psychoanalysts can provide no
74 See, for instance, the narrative in which a four-year-old Huxley is asked what he is
thinking about while sitting at a window, to which he replies Skin. Julian Huxley,
Aldous Huxley: A Memorial Volume, 21. Also see descriptions of Huxleys huge head and
often pensive expression in Bedford, Aldous Huxley, 1: 1; D.H. Lawrence, The Letters of
D.H. Lawrence, ed. Aldous Huxley (New York: Viking, 1932), 765.
An Amphibical Anthropology 298
better proofs than those that are subjectively observed or in other discred-
itable ways adduced by lay persons (OCHP, 319).
From Huxleys perspective, Freuds inability to provide evidence of a
nexus between affect and past trauma is axiomatic. It brings into view not
only the question of the existence of the analysands symptoms, but also the
question of the importance of the trauma to which the putatively symptom-
atic affect is attributed. Nonetheless, it is difficult to take Huxleys rejection
of Freudianism completely seriously; for Huxleys attention to Freuds writ-
ing appears, at best, cursory and scant. Even among the few quotations and
summations of Freud advanced by Huxley in his Hocus Pocus essay, none
appears to be anything more than a random, scattershot line from the air; it
is as though Huxley has read the neurologist at second hand.
And while Huxley is certainly justified in detecting that it was under the
influence of Charcots view of the traumatic origins of hysteria that Freud
had initially considered aetiologically significant the statements of patients
in which they ascribed their symptoms to passive sexual experiences, Hux-
ley makes nothing of the fact that Freud soon abandoned an attendant no-
tion: that the aetiological origin of a patients complexes could lie in any
particular physical or biological trauma.75
For when Freud realised that, as M. Guy Thompson notes, children are
capable of repressing virtually anything that is too painful to bear, Freud
moderated his theory to permit this very discovery. Fictionalisations of
trauma, Freud argued, could also engender neurosis. He thus accepted that
the precipitation of negative affect or the emergence of a negative syndrome
could no more reflect the violence of a particular physical event than the im-
pact of an imaginary one. And around this time, Freud also proposed that
fictionalisations of trauma might substitute for, and aid in the repression of,
an actually-experienced traumatic event; through a kind of self-deception,
then, one might be enabled to overcome the neurosis.76
What Lacan would later call a mconnaissance, then, is first proposed
by Freud. For Freud now realises that patients are prone to misconstrue,
misidentify, or displace the origin of their own traumas, to trace their
symptoms to traumas that are fictitious . . . If this be true, Freud speculated,
then the new fact which emerges is precisely that they create such scenes in
phantasy, and this psychical reality has to be taken into account alongside
practical reality.77
77 Ibid., 17-18; Lacan, crits: A Selection, 5-6; also see notably Leni Marshall, Through
(with) the Looking Glass: Revisiting Lacan and Woodward in Mconnaissance, The
Mirror Stage, and Old Age, Feminist Formations 24, no. 2 (2012): 52-76, 54n2.
78 Philip Thody, Aldous Huxley: A Biographical Introduction (London: Studio Vista, 1973),
16-7.
79 Sigmund Freud, The Taboo of Virginity, Standard Edition, vol. 11 (London: Hogarth
Press, 1953), 191-208.
80 Ibid.
81 This claim seems to have affinity with a variety of the reversality conjectures of Sla-
An Amphibical Anthropology 300
Huxley thus applies what Bentley calls an inbred frame of mind to express
his rejection of what is socially or even linguistically excluded from the
socio-cultural imaginary. Influenced by Wolfgang Khler, Bentleys analysis
characterises Huxleys dancing attitude of rejection as a kind of Gestalt
voj iek: for instance, that it is precisely because one wants not to suffer the con-
sequences of utilising or imbibing a particular product (coffee), that one then drinks
the decaffeinated product. With Huxleys writing, it seems that the author sometimes
offers us Freudian material without the Freudianism. See, for instance, iek, Wel-
come to The Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (London:
Verso, 2002), 10-11.
82 Bentley, Aldous Huxleys Anatomical Vision, 176.
83 Ibid.,95.
84 Ibid., 167.
An Amphibical Anthropology 301
in its own right: the given fact, [and] the mathematical constant in the
equation of his artistic personality.85
But Bentley also attributes to Huxley a particular perspicacity, a vision-
ary ability through which, as he argues, Huxley can see important elements
where we, as readers, cannot. If Huxley sees neither the minutiae nor even
the omissions of our lived experiences, then he perceives the more general
Gestalten of reality, but he denigrates this Gestalten in his fiction in the
same instant in which he reveals it.86 When the romantic Mr Staithes takes
Marys hand in Eyeless in Gaza, for instance, this imagethis Gestalt of
refined female eroticismis reduced to the excrement of polecats, for this
is what Staithes suddenly detects in Marys perfume (EIG, 182).87 Similarly
in Point Counter Point, Lord Edward Tantamount devalues the Mozartian
Gestalt by illustrating to his listeners the way in which musicians can be
seen, at least in evolutionary terms, as no more valuable than the hind legs
of sheep (PCP, 34).88
While Bentley does not address it, Huxley would come to see Gestalt
therapists as the revivers of procedures which were current in various
systems of Oriental philosophy and psychology one or two thousand years
ago.89 As the adopters of theories that had languished largely in obscurity
for centuries, Gestalt psychologists were, Huxley observes, the first to see the
potential in this wisdom, which had been allowed to remain as some sort
of vague Oriental superstition which we havent bothered about.90 In The
Doors of Perception, Huxley laments that teachers had not already embraced
Gestalt psychology:
And while Renshaws methods for enhancing vision had been part of the
institutional program in the American Army during the Second World War,
they had not been employed much since that time. Then, navy sailors had
been given tachistoscopic training based on Renshaws principles, and
85 Ibid., 183.
86 Ibid., 168.
87 Ibid., 152.
88 Ibid., 121-22.
89 Aldous Huxley, Latent Human Potentialities in The Human Situation: Lectures at San-
ta Barbara, 1959, ed. Piero Ferrucci (London: Harper and Row, 1977), 247.
90 Ibid.
An Amphibical Anthropology 302
this had enabled them to identify airplanes at a rapid speed and from great
distances, enhancing their military skills.91 Huxley, of course, as an avid re-
searcher into methods of improving eyesight, is familiar with this history;
and it is in these Gestalt methods that Huxley sees potential to improve the
psychophysical human.
And yet ironically, it is this same optimistic attitude toward reforming
and improving the body that motivates Huxley to displace and devalue what
is already valorised in society as civilisations Gestalt imagery. If Huxley is
justified to propose that, in our urban-industrial civilization, the kin-
aesthetic sense and the autonomic nervous system are prone to become
debauched, the problem must relate to what this society prioritises above
these senses, to what this socio-political milieu prizes more than them.
Compelled by these Gestalts, the individual develops a habit of using his
psycho-physical instrument improperly, Huxley writes; the human thus
loses his sense of what we may call muscular morality, his basic standard of
physical right and wrong (EOA, 19-20).
It is a problem for the whole body that, insofar as physical events condi-
tion mental events, also precipitates a situation in which everything [can]
go wrong... in the mind as well as in the body (EOA, 19-20). Irreducible to
discrete symptoms, the kinaesthetic degradation that Huxley describes is
aptly described by the contemporary psychiatric definition of Gestalt:
91 Sailors would be exposed to images in a tachistoscope so that the rate at which their
visual perceptions were grasped by them increased. See Edwin G. Boring, ed. Psychol-
ogy for the Armed Services (Washington: The Infantry Journal, 1945), 297-8.
92 Parnas, A Disappearing Heritage, 6. On this definition, also see Sass and Parnas,
Explaining Schizophrenia: The Relevance of Phenomenology, in Man Cheung, Bill
Fulford and George Graham, eds., Reconceiving Schizophrenia (London: Oxford Univer-
sity press, 2006), 63-95.
93 See, for example, the range of articles in Cheung, Fulford and Graham, eds. Reconceiv-
An Amphibical Anthropology 303
ing Schizophrenia, or in K.W.M Fulford, Martin Davies, Richard Gipps, George Gra-
ham, John Sadler, Giovanni Stanghellini, and Tim Thornton, eds., The Oxford Hand-
book of Philosophy and Psychiatry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
94 Parnas, A Disappearing Heritage, 8.
95 On Huxleys incorporation of F.M. Alexanders methods into Eyeless in Gaza, see A.
Guin Nance, Psyche and Soma: Huxley and the Mind-Body Connection, in The Peren-
nial Satirist: Essays in Honour of Bernfried Nugel (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2005), 278-90.
An Amphibical Anthropology 304
In order to understand the history of modern humanity and its technical constitution,
it is necessary to go through a sort of death by exposure. It is necessary to look from
the absolute outside into the inner world, with eyes of death or schizo-eyes...
Peter Sloterdijk97
in 1911, during theEaster Half at Eton, Huxley awoke with swollen and red
eyes. Apparently the inflammation had been the result of a contamination
98
of his eyes by airborne dust or allergens; and shortly thereafter, a stye mate-
rialised in Huxleys right eye. It had appeared after Huxley, a member of the
Officer Training Corps, had stood guard at Edward VIIs funeral procession
to Windsor. Writing in a 1911 letter of how he had struggled to keep the
rabble back with the butt end of [his] rifle, Huxley details an unfortunate in-
cident that recalls the misfortune of those earlier episodesat the ceremony
honouring TH, or on his first visit to a Churchin which the young Huxley
had also been biologically injured or affected.99
96 This is how the line is translated in the Henry Hargreavess translation of 1990:
Bernard le Boiver de Fontenelle, Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, tr. H.A.
Hargreaves (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 11. In an older translation,
it is written thus:
Madam, says I, all philosophy is founded upon these two propositions, I. That our
minds are curious; and, 2. That our eyes are bad; for if our eyes were better than
they are, we could not discover whether the stars were suns that enlighten other
worlds, or note; and if, on the other hand, we were less curious, we should not care
whether it were so or otherwise; which, I think, is much to the same purpose.
See M. De Fontenelle, Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, tr. unknown (Dublin:
Peter Wilson, 1761), 6, available at http://archive.org/details/conversationson00font/,
last accessed 28 August 2013.
97 Sloterdijk, Neither Sun Nor Death, 216.
98 Bedford, Aldous Huxley, 1: 33.
99 As summarised at the beginning of chapter 6, Huxley had also experienced a bio-
logically-affecting incident when he first visited a Church. Ironically, in this letter to
Gervas, Aldous blames Gervass eyes for his unintelligible letter: I could only read
about half of it. Damn your bloody eyes. Huxley to Gervas Huxley, 24 May 1910 (Let-
ter 18), in Letters, ed. Smith, 36. It is perhaps also remotely possible, assuming that
Ernest Clarkes diagnosis of staphylococcus aureaus was correct, that the infection had
been contagiously or infectiously passed between Gervas and Huxley. It is most coin-
cidental that Gervass eyes should have been agitated at the same time that Huxleys
had been. As Huxley wrote in an earlier letter to Gervas, Im sorry your optics have
purpureated [sic]. It must be rotten in the sun now. Huxley to Gervas, 29 June, 1908
An Amphibical Anthropology 305
Huxley, to be sure, was a vulnerable child. While no one had been partic-
ularly anxious about Huxleys eye, which had been diagnosed by a medically
nave Matron as conjunctivitis or pink eye, the persistence of the injury,
and the increasingly severe inflammation of Huxleys cornea, led Dr Henry
Huxley and others, some time later, to attempt to treat it.100 Unsuccessful,
the Huxleys then consulted Ernest Clarke, the leading eye surgeon in Lon-
don, who diagnosed the condition in that year as staphylococcus aureus. Per-
sisting long after this diagnosis, however, the infection was rediagnosed no
less than two years later as keratitis punctate: a condition characterised by
alterations in the corneal tissuessuch as the appearance of diffuse ede-
mae: plaques that which make the cornea more opaque.101
The greasy, white-coloured deposit that appeared on Huxleys right eye,
visible in almost any picture of him, would become an important feature of
the writers personality. Throughout his life, it was a feature that was high-
lighted in myriad portraits of the young man, including in the photographs
produced by Cecil Beaton, which portray Huxley as a figure of obscurement
and occlusion, a man who was ever peering through a veil (see figures 6.2,
6.3 and 6.4, below). The extremely painful inflammation would leave Huxley
virtually blind for eighteen months, permanently impairing his vision.102 Ir-
reparably weakened, Huxley presented as a tragic child on whom great
damage had been done and there he was. The boy with the immense curiosity
about the world, the boy who wanted to read all the books, was nearly blind...
He could not read.103
(Letter 10) in Letters, ed. Smith, 28; also see Murray, Aldous Huxley, 30. Pathogenesis
of certain keratitis strains, notably, has often been considered infectious in origin,
specially viral, although not proven so. Savitri Sharma, Keratatis, Bioscience Reports
21, no. 4. (2001): 422.
100 Bedford, Aldous Huxley, 1: 33.
101 As Phillips Thygeson notes in his 1950 article,
The term superficial punctate keratitis was introduced by Fuchs in 1889 to describe
superficial keratitis secondary to acute conjunctivitis. This disease is not generally
known under the more descriptive name of epidemic keratoconjunctivitis.
Whether this diagnosis was accurate in Aldouss case remains indeterminable. See
Phillips Thygeson, Superficial Punctate Keratitis, Journal of the American Medical As-
sociation 144, no. 18 (1950): 1544; Ernst Fuchs, Keratitis punctate superficialis, Wie-
ner klinische Wochenschrift [The Central European Journal of Medicine] 2 (1889): 837.
102 Thody, Aldous Huxley, 7.
103 Bedford, Aldous Huxley, 1: 33.
An Amphibical Anthropology 306
Figure 6.1 A portrait of Huxley, by Cecil Beaton, reproduced from Cecil Bea-
tons Scrapbook (London: B.T. Batsford, 1937), 130. In this portrait, Huxley tears
aside the veil of bourgeois respectability. Opening a part in a sheet that has
been torn through its middle, Huxley reveals himself to the viewer. The visu-
al metaphor in which Huxley tears the veil also indicates Huxleys potential
acuity: while partially blind, Huxley yet sees more than others. The image also
infantalises Huxley, who appears to be peer through the maternal genital tract.
See Murray, Aldous Huxley, 246-7.
An Amphibical Anthropology 307
zard observes, at his eyes with interest in the looking-glass, it might have
been a particularly difficult stade du miroir through which to pass. As much
as blindness may have forced Huxley to mature, then, it had also made a
deep and enduring impact on his self-image.104
To look deeply into ones own eyes is, as Sloterdijk suggests, to incite a
monumental catalysis, and to provoke philosophical speculation. Inviting
consideration about the bodys organic processes and their relation to the
experience of subjectivity, the practice prompts a process of examination
that is as personal as it is medical. As the organic prototype of philosophy,
then, the eyess
enigma is not only that they can see but are also able to see themselves see-
ing. This gives them a prominence among the bodys cognitive organs. A good
part of philosophical thinking is actually only eye reflex, eye dialectic, see-
ing-oneself-see.105
104 Hull, Representative Man, 7; Buzzard is quoted in Bedford, Aldous Huxley, 1: 32, 32n2.
105 Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 146.
106 Ibid., 146-7.
An Amphibical Anthropology 308
Figure 6.2 Portrait of Huxley in 1934 by Howard Coster, from the archives
of Time magazine, and subsequently donated to the National Portrait Gallery.
Source: The National Portrait Gallery, London. Source: Terence Pepper and
Arthur Strong, Howard Costers Celebrity Portraits (London: Dover Publica-
tions, 1985), 10.
An Amphibical Anthropology 309
Huxleys cousin and close childhood companion, Gervas, put the dis-
turbing situation clearly:
We were all appalled. The shock of it. I was shattered, but not Aldous. He faced
it with fantastic courage; and a complete absence of self-pity.107
Figure 6.3 Aldous Huxley in 1956. Portrait by Richard Avedon, New York.
Richard Avedon. Source: Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Accession no. 2002.379.55, see http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/
the-collection-online/search/284313.
An Amphibical Anthropology 311
111 David Michael Levin, ed. Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (California: University
of California Press, 1993), 205; Merleau-Ponty, The Film and the new Psychology,
in Sense and Non-Sense (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 48. Also see
Juhani Palassmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture of the Senses (West Sussex: John
Wiley & Sons, 2012), 18-9.
112 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French
Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 149-435; also see William Paul-
son, Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Blind in France (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1987); Tunstall, Blindness and Enlightenment, 14.
113 Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 146.
114 Damage is the name of Murray chapter on Huxleys blinding accident: see Murray,
An Amphibical Anthropology 312
Aldous Huxley, 25-40. Cf. Bedfords chapters on Huxley mothers death, and Huxleys
blindness, respectively titled First Damage and Second Impairment. Bedford, Al-
dous Huxley, 1: 24-27, 32-6.
115 Legg, The Intellectual Tourist, 3.
116 Sybille Bedford, Aldous Huxley, 1: 124. The Leonard Huxley who is Aldous Huxleys fa-
ther should not be confused with his relative and namesake Professor Leonard George
Holden Huxley, the Australian physicist (the latter is a second-cousin once removed
from Thomas Huxley, Leonards father and Aldous Grandfather). This is not to dis-
count the fact that some of Aldouss earliest comments in respect of his father were
exultant and as acknowledging of his paternal figures notable achievements in liter-
ature: Have you read Life and Letters by my father? asked Huxley in his adolescent
years. Its a good book. See Bedford, Aldous Huxley, 1: 124.
117 Marilyn Blackwell, Strindbergs early Dramas and Lacans Law of the Father, Scan-
dinavian Studies 71, no. 3 (1999): 311-24, esp. 311.
118 Martin Green, Children of the Sun, 87-8.
119 Ibid.
An Amphibical Anthropology 313
adds to this portrait by illumining the peculiar competitiveness that ran be-
tween Huxley and his father, a contest that appears to derive from Huxleys
advanced maturity, or his self-image of serious maturityeven in his adoles-
cent years. Later, Julian would observe that Huxley maintained an innate
superiority, which called for respect even in the nursery jungle.120
When Leonard invented and named words that were not in the dictionary
during the familys regular games of charades, Huxley issued correctives to
his father, excoriating Leonard as silly and accusing him of wrongdoing:
Fathercheating again?121 While invariably kind and loving, Leonard,
Gervas confirms, was not exactly the kind of father that one looked up to;
or went to when one was in trouble. He remained, at least from the per-
spectives of Gervas and Huxley, aloof and unaware that grown-ups were
supposed to act like grown-ups and not like fellow school-boys.122
It was in the face of Leonards avuncular wordplay and jocular moods
that Huxley became increasingly obsessed by the hard facts of scientific
discovery and the new clarity of understanding which they provided. In-
creasingly at this time, he also began to dismiss his apparently inexacting fa-
ther as immature. As Gervas notes, it was this lack of respect that troubled
Aldous and marred his relationship with his father.123
Serving as a model for Huxleys novelistic representations of father-son
dyads, Huxleys relationship with Leonard had a significant impact on his
fiction.124 For Sidaway, Huxleys relations with his parents exhibit a great
deal in common with [another] famous blind man from antiquity; Oedipus,
the tragic victim of fate, to whom it dealt the worst possible hand.125 Iden-
tifying the extent to which the blind, disgusted Oedipus is rampant in
Huxleys debut short story The Farcical History of Richard Greenow (1920),
Sidaway also observes how it is in a character developed slightly later than
Greenowthe figure of Mr Wimbush from Crome Yellowthat we encounter
the pseudo-father for whom utopia is a life lived entirely secure from any
human intrusion.126
Which comes to the same thing, said his father parenthetically, as being
interested in nothing (AH, 17).
While the tense hostility between the Gumbril men already alludes to the
novels imbrication with the myth of Oedipus, it is also true, as Deborah Mod-
delmog suggests, that readers of Sophocless myth may be tempted to identify
traces of the narrative in almost all literary depictions of father and son.127
Yet, it is nonetheless apparent that it is in the agon between the Gum-
brilsan implicit tournament for the hand of Myra Viveashthat the Oe-
dipal configuration more explicitly appears. Modelled on Nancy Cunard, a
woman with whom Huxley had himself been intimate, Viveash is the ar-
chetype of the promiscuous post-war flapper.128 Breaking Gumbril Juniors
heart, Viveash prompts the son to attempt to improve his prowess in his
conquest of the fair sex (AH, 95).
Inspired by his Lothario friend Coleman, whose recently grown beard
enables him to seduce any number women, Gumbril Junior buys a false or
artificial beard, one that, at least in his mind, makes him appear not only
more virile, but presumably older tooas though he were, in fact, his fa-
127 On the identification of the Oedipal myth in a wide range of literature, see Deborah
Moddelmog, Readers and Mythic Signs: The Oedipal Myth in Twentieth Century Litera-
ture (Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993), xii-xiii.
128 See Murray, Aldous Huxley, 146. Murrays descriptions of Cunard are particularly in-
sightful in terms of Huxleys portrait of Myra Viveash. As Murray attests, Cunard was
strong-willed, certain of herself...the Giaconda of the Age. Green notes that Huxley
had an affair with her [Cunard] in 1922 and was very badly treated, so in his portraits
she is quite viciously cruel: Martin Green, Children of The Sun, 290.
An Amphibical Anthropology 315
ther.129 While the Oedipal triangle between Gumbril Senior, Gumbril Junior,
and Viveash partly betrays Huxleys own contest with Leonard, it also sati-
rises the very notion of competition between father and son, providing what
Meckier describes as the most amusing episode of Antic Hay.130
Deeply symbolic, Gumbril Juniors beard becomes a mournful append-
age and an amorous arm, one that enables its wearer to transform from
The Mild and Melancholy Man who has suffered all too frequently, into
the Complete Man (AH, 95). This transformed man is now imbued with the
confidence of a patriarch such as Gumbril Senior, who himself clutches at his
beard when angered or ponderous (AH, 19, 27). In this transposition of son
and father, the two Gumbrils are condensed into one being; the son becomes
that complete and Rabelasian man who, when faced with the right oppor-
tunities... could know how to take them (AH, 94). The transposition of the
beard from father to son is also an implicit affront toor deauthorisation
ofGumbril Senior, one that metonymises a parricidal event, instantiating
the paternal equivalent to what Kristeva calls a psychical matricide.131
Paraphrasing Kenneth Burke, Bentley notes that satirists like Huxley ap-
pear to overcome and exceed paternal authority by acting out their desire
to resist, mute, transmute, or to otherwise overpower the progenitors law.
They seek to demolish, he writes, the gods held sacred by the satirists fa-
ther.132 Gumbril Juniors transposition or erasure of his fathers authority is
enacted in more than simply this way, however. As Ronald Sion observes, the
129 Bentley characterises this character as a kind of living-dead woman: Myra Viveash
(does [her] name mean living death?) seems always to be speaking from a death bed,
expiringly and with a perpetual death-rattle in her pronunciation. While Viveash is
generally at odds with descriptions of Huxleys mother, the sense of death that follows
her in the novel refracts Huxleys mourning for his own dead mother. In this way,
Gumbril Senior and Junior compete for the affections of a living-dead woman, the
ghost of Huxleys mother, Leonards wife. Bentley, Aldous Huxley and the Anatomical
Vision, 61-2.
130 Meckier, Structure and Satire, 35. As Murray attests, Nancy Cunard had lost her lover,
Peter Broughton-Adderley, in the War and, as such, it is possible that Huxley may also
be expressing here, through Gumbril Junior, something like his sense of disaffiliation
from the figure of the grieving woman. This figure expresses her devotion to anoth-
er man, and in this way becomes consubstantial, symbolically, with the maternal or
mother figure. See Murray, Aldous Huxley, 146.
131 As Kristeva declares, [f]or man and for woman the loss of the mother is a biological
and psychic necessity, the first step on the way to autonomy. Matricide is our vital ne-
cessity, the sine qua non of our individuation. Julia Kristeva, Depression and Melancho-
lia, tr. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 38, qtd. in Alison
Stone, Against Matricide: Rethinking Subjectivity and the Maternal Body, Hypatia
27, no. 1 (2012): 118.
132 Bentley, Aldous Huxley and The Anatomical Vision, 182.
An Amphibical Anthropology 316
heard of their publication was [in] a letter from A. C. Benson to my father congrat-
ulating him on the extreme beauty of the verses and quoting Coleridge, aptly and
with charm, to prove the fact. And now wherever my father goes, showers of felic-
itations fall upon him and he live haloed with a reputation entirely fictitious.137
Originally seeking to work in the law and read for the bar, Leonard found
only moderate success in his writing career; he published his biography on
TH in 1900 before joining the publishing firm Smith, Elder & Co. There Leon-
ard found some success as a reader; and he went on to become assistant
editor of a literary journal titled Cornhill in 1901.138 But it was less Leonards
133 Ronald T. Sion, Aldous Huxley and The Search for Meaning: A Study of The Eleven Novels
(London: McFarland and Company, 2010), 35.
134 See Smith, Letters, passim.
135 Bedford, Aldous Huxley, 1: 2.
136 Ibid.
137 Ibid., 1: 66; and Huxley to Frances Peterson, 23 August 1916 (Letter 98) in Letters, ed.
Smith, 110.
138 Bedford, Aldous Huxley, 4.
An Amphibical Anthropology 317
lack of talent than his humility, as his assistant John Murray writes, that de-
nied him the public recognition he deserved. For so firm was his basis of
literary scholarship that he could afford to be gentle and humble in dealing
with authors of every age or degree of experience or conceit. Leonards kind-
liness as a critic was so unusual, in fact, that it had once led one contributor
to remark that they preferred a letter of rejection from Leonard Huxley to
one of acceptance from any other editor.139
Equivalents of these courteous letters of rejection were exchanged be-
tween Huxley and his father throughout the course of their lives. When Leon-
ard announced that he would be remarrying in February 1912, becoming
the husband of Rosalind Bruce, Huxley would write what Bedford describes,
referring primarily to its brevity, as a pathetic letter to Leonard. If it is
evidence of Huxleys implicit disavowal of his fathers second marriage, the
letter is also testament to Huxleys difficulty in writing at this time, when his
eyes remained severely impaired:140
Dearest Father
Many thanks for your letter, which, I regret to say was rather too small for
me to read with any comfort. In fact I was only able to take the cream off
each sentence by picking out one word in every four or so. Typewriter would
be all right but a lot would be rather trying, I think.141
Taking only the cream off his fathers words by picking out only a quar-
ter of them, Huxleys letter narrates an exercise in selective reading as it also
functions as a synecdoche for Oedipuss self-enucleation in Oedipus The King.
Stabbing himself in the eyes with the aid of his mother Jocastas beaten
golden brooches, Oedipus would become similarly impaired, the trauma of
his desires too great to bear.142
By not acknowledging his fathers news of his second marriage in the
wake of his mother Julias death, Huxley remains as blind to this event
as he is unseeing of Leonards other clausesor spouses. A psychoanalytic
reading of the short letter might detect in it Huxleys own drive to self-enu-
cleation: it may be seen, that is, as an expression of Huxleys wish to punish
[himself], or even his father, by castration, after upward projection from
the testicles to the eyes.143 And of course while Huxleys blindness cannot
itself be understood as self-inflicted or as Oedipal in any causative sense,
the confluence of these oedipal coordinates in Huxleys early life would seem
remarkable for their resemblance to the mythif these elements were not
also so woefully tragic.
Huxleys Oedipal perspective is not lost on Philip Thody, for one, who
writes on Huxleys letters to his father with as much acuity as any other critic
of the writer:
There may also, of course, have been subconscious motives at work in deter-
mining the hostility which Huxley reveals, throughout his fiction, towards the
man he always addressed in his letters as Dearest father. To a Freudian, it
would be quite obvious that Huxleys adoration of his mother implied feelings
of intense jealousy for his father, and that these were translated into the sub-
conscious notion that Leonard Huxley was at least partly guilty for his wifes
death.144
The situation in which Huxley mourned for his mother was not helped by
the fact that, as Bedford observes, the ground seems not to have been well
enough prepared for Leonards announcement of his second marriage. This
is a point confirmed by George Clarks observation that the marriage had
been only very casually announced to the boys.145
In the following years, Huxley would recall that the announcement had
been impersonal, suggesting that he carried the imprint of the event at least
until the 1920s. As Peter Firchow notes, while Huxley writes Point Count-
er Point, he seems not to have forgiven [Leonards] marriage to the much
younger Rosalind Bruce not long after his mother Julias death
If the portraits of the older Quarles in Point Counter Point or the older Beavis
in Eyeless in Gaza are anything at all like Huxleys own father (and the latter
definitely resembles him, at least in part) then its clear that Huxley consid-
ered his father to be something of a pompous ass and a pious hypocrite.146
143 Large, Self-enucleation, 1056. Also see Karl Meninger, A Scientific Study of Self-Mu-
tilations, Psychoanalytic Quarterly 4 (1935): 408-66; Lowell Edmunds, The Body of
Oedipus, Psychoanalytic Review 75, no. 1 (1988): 51-56; Lowell Edmunds, Oedipus: The
Ancient Legend and Its Later Analogues (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1985), esp. 50-2.
144 Philip Thody, Aldous Huxley: A Biographical Introduction (London: Studio Vista, 1973),
16-7.
145 Bedford, Aldous Huxley, 1: 37-8.
146 Peter Firchow, Aldous and Julian: Men of Letters, Men of Science, 207.
An Amphibical Anthropology 319
it.152 More crucial than these elements for Leonards and Huxleys dispute
was Antic Hays representation of the protagonist Gumbril Juniors mothers
death. This is what had, apparently, invoked Leonards fulmination.
In Antic Hay, Gumbril Juniors motherwho is Gumbril Seniors wife
dies of malignant diseases, suffering creeping and devouring pain while
Gumbril Junior is still a boy (AH, 3). The scene is unequivocally a transpo-
sition of the early circumstances in which Julia Huxley, Aldouss mother and
Leonards wife had died. The scene even echoes what had been Julias tortu-
ous cries while on her deathbed: Why do I have to die, and die so young?
she had asked.153 When the distraught Gumbril Junior bawls, crying, still
crying at his mothers bedside (AH, 3), he reaches a deeply inspiring cathexis
of the kind that Huxleywho had stood in stony misery, at his mothers
funeralhad perhaps himself never realised.154
Huxleys unquestionable adoration of his mother, to use Thodys words,
underlay his having been astonished at his fathers imputation that he hadm
in the novel, appropriated his mothers death merely for the purposes of his
fictional experiment. Admitting that he did not expect his father to enjoy
the book, but only that he hoped and imagined his contemporaries would,
Huxley abruptly ended the disagreement:
And there, I think, I had better leave it, only pausing long enough to express
my surprise that you should accuse me, when I speak of a young mans tender
recollections of his dead mother, of botanizing my mothers grave.155
That Huxley deploys the odd expression botanizing here seems crucial,
especially when it is placed in the context of this words prior utterances.
Not having Leonards letter as evidence, however, makes it impossible to
know whether the adjective had first been employed by Leonardand mere-
ly rearticulated by Huxleyor had been employed by Huxley only. But the
word ineluctably invokes the early years of Huxleys early education in Surrey
152 Joceyln Brooke, Aldous Huxley: Supplements to British Book News on Writers and Their
Work 55 (London: Longmans, 1954), 15. Also see Watts summary of the range of crit-
icisms levelled at the novel, including a report that two American readers who had
reportedly burnt the book, and another New York critic who regarded the novel as
highly immoral. Watt, Aldous Huxley: The Critical Heritage, 9. Furthermore, David
Bradshaw writes that Antic Hay was so blasphemous that it had been burned in Cai-
ro. See Bradshaw, Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), in Brave New World (London: Vintage
Books, 2007), xxxi.
153 Julian Huxley, Memories, 1: 64.
154 Huxley had, however, initially sobbed in the wake of his mothers death. See Wood-
cock, Dawn and the Darkest Hour, 37; Murray, Aldous Huxley, 26.
155 Huxley to Leonard Huxley in Smith, Letters, 224.
An Amphibical Anthropology 321
where, alongside Julian and Trevenen, Huxley had collected flowers to study
in Leonards botany laboratory. There Huxley had sought to identify partic-
ular species of birds and to study plants, and so for Huxley to botanize an
object is to connote this image of Huxley as a child, and to revitalise this
moment long before his mothers death, and before the Huxleys had moved
from those hills.156
Of course, forms of botanising also appear in Brave New World, such
as when Huxley satirises the apparent dangerousness of raising a child on
merely books and botany (bnw, 16-17). When in the Infant Nurseries the
Director begins to rub in the lesson with a mild electric shock, guarantee-
ing what the psychologists used to call an instinctive hatred of books and
flowers, he ensures that they would be safe from books and botany all their
lives (BNW, 17). Associated with childhood throughout Huxleys oeuvre, the
word botanize thus marks a site of trauma; it indicatesand even more so
if it is one of Leonards wordsprecisely that which may have been Huxleys
apparently aloof and scientific response to his mothers death.
And it is, of course, a word whose offensive meaning is only now exacer-
bated, at least in Leonards eyes, by its literary reappropriation by his son.
Expressing yet another of Huxleys mixed up starting points, the term also
names the agon into which Huxley imaginatively placed his mother and father,
pitting them one against the other. While Leonard the patriarch encouraged
Huxley to work with botanical specimens, Julia is the woman who uttered,
as Gumbril Junior narrates, a few words only, but with all the wisdom he
needed to live by (AH, 3).157 Inscribed on a letter that Julia had given the young
Huxley while on her deathbed, her kind words would echo in Huxleys ears for
the rest of his life, inspiring him to Judge not too much and love more.158
If Leonard cannot reconcile himself to what are clearly Antic Hays thin-
ly-veiled autobiographical or clef elements, then it is perhaps because the
novel is such a farce. It operates, as James Mulvihill writes, along the lines
of one of the painful jokes that Huxley had already attributed to Ben Jon-
sons plays in an essay of 1920. There is, Huxley had written on Jonsons
plays, three years before writing Antic Hay,
156 For a detailed discussion of these early naturalizing expeditions see Woodcock,
Dawn and the Darkest Hour, 37.
157 Ibid. Bedford notes that it was Leonard who took Aldous, Gervas, Julian, and Trev-
enan on mountain climbs, such as on their climb of Saddleback mountain in Bla-
senthwaite, near Keswick, in 1905. See Bedford, Aldous Huxley, 1: 14.
158 Quoted by Sybille Bedford addressing the P.E.N. meeting In Honour of Aldous Hux-
ley, 15 November 1978. Tape in National Sound Archive, cited in Murray, Aldous Hux-
ley, 27n9.
An Amphibical Anthropology 322
In the 1920s London of the novel, stewing in its disillusionment and cynicism,
is the prevailing legacy of an older, more specifically Victorian generation that
has clearly failed to come to terms with the trauma of war. Huxley depicts a
younger generation so disillusioned as if to be terminally ill.163
159 The essay was first published in The London Mercury in 1920. See J.C. Squire, ed. The
London Mercury 1, nos. 1-6 (November 1919-April 1920), published as an eBook in 2014,
184-191, available at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/45116/45116-h/45116-h.htm, ac-
cessed 30 June 2014. Also published in Aldous Huxley, Ben Jonson, On The Margin
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1923), 202; and Baker and Sexton, eds. Aldous Huxley: Com-
plete Essays I: 1920-25, 119-126. Also see James Dalton Mulvihill, Antic Hay: A Study in
Post-war Disillusionment MA diss., McMaster University, 1978, 16.
160 Ibid. Also see Mulvihill, Antic Hay, 16.
161 Ibid., 4.
162 Sidaway, Madness, Badness, Sadness, 2.
163 Ibid., 2.
An Amphibical Anthropology 323
He knew with what a paternal affectionno, more than paternal; for he was
sure that his father was more whole-heartedly attached to his models than his
sonwith what pride he regarded these children of his spirit (AH, 287).
164 As Nicholas Murray notes, Huxley travelled to India in 1925, only two years after Antic
Hays publication. There Huxley noted the uniquely provident conditions under which
philosophical activity of this kind was available to the upper-classes: Born an Indian
or brought up in the slums of London, he writes, I should hardly be able to achieve so
philosophical a suspense of judgement (JP, 137); also qtd. in Murray, Aldous Huxley,
13.
An Amphibical Anthropology 324
with other humans as though he were the first to be endowed with such a ca-
pacity: I let my telepathic faculty lie idle, he comments, preferring to em-
ploy an elaborate and cumbrous arrangement of symbols in order to make
my thoughts known to you through your senses (AH, 244). This description
of his capacities functions as an excuse for the failure of the capacity that he
had earlier adverted to: his ability to telepathically communicate.
Initially positing that his reluctance to develop telepathic skills is simply
a matter of preference, Gumbril Senior soon reveals his foolishness when
indulging in a fancyhe tests his presentiment that his faculty of telep-
athy could be as sharp as that of those well-developed mind-readers who,
by the twenty-first century, will be capable of direct communication with
other minds, whether they want to or not (AH, 244-5). Predicting that the
birds will wake-up and begin their half-minute of chatter in the dark at the
very instant in which he ceases to speak, Gumbril Senior, now having fin-
ished his speech, commands Viveash to Wait! And Hush, before placing
his hand over his mouth, as though by commanding silence on himself he
could command it on the whole world (AH, 245).
After a full minute of silence has passed, Gumbril Junior, realising now
that no chirping will occur, narrates how the old gentleman burst out hap-
pily laughing in an echo of the fit of esoteric laughter into which the fa-
ther had erupted at an earlier point of the novel (AH, 53).
In these scenes, the father becomes what Gumbril Junior had earlier de-
scribed as the non compos [and] not entirely there figure of the clowna
figure into which Gumbril Junior had feared he himself would transform
while in the presence of Myra Viveash (AH, 183-84). But it is now Gumbril
Senior who is exposed to Viveash as an impotent and unsuccessful seducer;
it is the father, that is, who is revealed to be the alienated, lonely man among
the two, the one whose most affectionately cherished friends have depart-
ed so rapidly (AH, 18-19).
But this father lacks not only human company; or rather, his quickly
disappearing companions are not only human: now they also take the form
of those starlings that, when Gumbril Senior searches for them, cause him
continually to be gazing up, round-spectacled and rapt (AH, 19). Cauteris-
ing the figure of the lonely, stargazing father who looks for answers in the
skyonly to be refused themHuxleys novel is an unforgiving depiction of
the erring father, a searing portrait of paternal impotence (AH, 19).
If these allusions to Leonards impotence are too obscure, then the more
explicit allusions to Huxleys father that appear at an earlier stage of the Antic
Hay confirms its biographical verisimilitude. As he begins to work on his
An Amphibical Anthropology 325
Give a brief account of the character and career of Pope Pius IX, with dates
wherever possible. Gumbril leaned back in his chair and thought of his own
character, with dates. 1896: the first serious and conscious and deliberate lie.
Did you break that vase, Theodore? No, mother. It lay on his conscience for
nearly a month, eating deeper and deeper. Then he had confessed the truth.
Or rather he had not confessed; that was too difficult. He led the conversation,
very subtly, as he thought, round through the non-malleability of glass, through
breakages in general, to this particular broken vase; he practically forced his
mother to repeat her question. And then, with a burst of tears, he had answered,
yes. It had always been difficult for him to say things directly, point-blank. His
mother had told him, when she was dying... No, no; not that (AH, 9).
This oblique adumbration not only implies the indirect manner in which
Huxley could not himself say things directly. It also exemplifies the mode
of provocation that constitutes both Gumbril Juniors and Huxleys meth-
ods. In other words, this is a conversation that very subtly addresses a
number of related or orthogonal subjects until, as with Huxleys allusions
to Leonard Huxley or Ottoline Morrell, the reader is practically forced to
recognise the narratives true meaning, its real-world imputation. And, while
this provocative method appears programmatic, it also recalls the instinc-
tive and ambulative manner in which Huxleyas I argued in chapters 4 and
5tends to illustrate and deduce particular ideas.
Denis Stones misuse of the word carminative, for instance, in a scene
in which Stone and Mr. Scogan serve as surrogate father and son, is an apt
illustration of the way in which wordss meaning can be ambiguousequal-
ly as much for the speaker as for the listener. Allusions that are sensitive or
proscribed are equally as likely to be misspoken accidentally as prone are
likely to be uttered strategically and provocatively.
But irrespective of whether Huxleys illustrations are intentionally allu-
sive or merely the product of his subconcious, they lead only and ultimately
to Huxleys melancholia. And even if he is not disappointed that Leonard
and Morrell dislike his narratives, he certainly feels melancholy when he
discovers that his words, such as the word carminative, mean something
other than he had originally thought; for Huxleys misspoken allusions, such
as they are seem to, signal the death of something young and precious (CY,
223-24).
An Amphibical Anthropology 326
Thus, when read at its most radical, Derridas claim that the origin of
logos is its father allows us to identify Denis Stone, the surrogate son to
Mr. Scogan, as a metonym for the Stones dual misapprehension. That is,
Stone does not only misconstrue the meaning of carminative, but he also
misattributes the sympathetic qualities of the father to an indifferent and
non-filial elder man. And just as what initially appears a rich and noble word
is later revealed as only an ignoble and unpleasant one, so is the man who
initially appears fatherly exposed only as an aloof and distant strangernot
a literary mind but a man who might in fact require, as Denis concludes, a
mental carminative (CY, 224).
Huxleys fiction, in short, produces a configuration of paternal symbols
and linguistic associations that is just as subtly imbricated as that which
Derrida unpacks (or deconstructs) in his essay on language:
One could say anachronously that the speaking subject is the father of his
speech. And one would quickly realise that this is no metaphor, at least not in
the sense of any common, conventional effect of rhetoric. Logos is a son, then,
a son that would be destroyed in his very presence without the present atten-
dance of his father. His father who answers. His father who speaks for him
and answers for him. Without his father, he would be nothing but, in fact,
writing without his father, he would be nothing but, in fact, writing. At least
that is what is said by the one who says: it is the fathers thesis. The specificity
of writing would thus be intimately bound to the absence of the father... The
reader will have noticed Socrates insistence on misery, whether pitiful or ar-
rogant, of a logos committed to writing: ... It always needs its father to attend
to it, being quite unable to defend itself or attend its own needs.165
It is out of just such a pitiless and arrogant misery that Huxleys fatherless
cynicism, and his agonistic satires, as Bentley suggests, seem to arise.166
Confronted with the chiasmic relation of the father and son, the son-cynic
luxuriates in the spoils of his fathers authority while he furtively disguises
his implacable dependence on him; he also hides the fact that the value of
his words is determined by the qualifying imprimatur of the father: that is,
by that fatherly procedure in which value is accorded to the sons words, and
authority transferred to the sons speech.
This procedure is often given vital expression in Huxleys life and work;
in almost all allusions to the father-son dyad, for instance, Huxley denies
Leonard the opportunity to bear witness to his own means of endowing his
may then erase itself, [and] the master may depart, in the assurance of auton-
omous truth; a truth which will carry the signature forward in itself, in its
sons and brothers, who bear the name and the names genius under names
of their own.167
A thorough-going Freudian would also see the hostility which Huxley always
shows for Freuds ideas as an indication of the fear which he had that such a
diagnosis might be true, and the fact that almost all fathers in Huxleys fiction
are caricatures would lend weight to this view.169
But if Huxleys fiction can provide any trace of an answer for his position
any way to explain his repressed hostilitythen his historical writing is at
least equally as instructive as his fiction.
167 Sen Burke, The Ethics of Writing: Authorship and Legacy in Plato and Nietzsche (Edin-
burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 120.
168 Quoted in Andreas Huyssen, Foreword: The Return of Diogenes as Postmodern In-
tellectual, Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis: Minnesota Press,
1988), ix. For an alternative translation, see G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of
Right, ed. Allen Wood, tr. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),
see section 195, 231.
169 Philip Thody, Aldous Huxley, 17.
An Amphibical Anthropology 328
There remained with him, latent at ordinary times but always ready to come
to the surface, a haunting sense of the vanity, the transience, the hopeless pre-
cariousness of all merely human happiness (GE, 22).
More than what has been simply understood as an instance of chiastic in-
versionas Huxleys transference of his own feelings onto the French monk
who has now lost his fatherit is also possible to see this passage as Hux-
leys commission of the symbolic parricide to which he had, some twenty
years earlier, only ever coyly alluded.
Now this malaise is all the more defensible, albeit invisible: here, in a
non-fiction work, one written nearly ten years after Leonards death, and
published on the cusp of Huxleys mystical turn, the artist finally comes
to grips with his history of repressed violence. Executing the symbolic
parricide that he had for so long deferred, Huxley now composes a work
of truth, confessing, through the figure of Franois, the love that had
always been deeply resident in himeven despite his own inward-turning
nature (GE, 22).
This chapter began by examining the way in which Huxley, in much of
his post-1940s fiction and essays, represents the human as an amphibian.
It then went on to scrutinise Huxleys depictions of sons and fathers in his
wider oeuvre. Just as chapters 4 and 5 before this concluded that Huxleys
complex psychological profile is representableeven solubleas a kind of
structure that I have nominated as the chiasmus in this and previous chap-
ters, this chapter will now conclude by reinforcing the notion. Huxley, torn
between love and hate, anxiety and affection, expressed a complex mixture
of feelings towards his father. This was a chiastic combination of affects that
170 Bedford, Aldous Huxley, 1: 25. Also see Hewitt, Psychedelics and Psychosis, 2; Brian
Aldiss, Fatal Breaks, 4-5; Murray, Aldous Huxley, 27n6.
An Amphibical Anthropology 329
330
The Shock of Dysrecognition 331
3 See Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, tr. Martin Milligan, (New
York: Prometheus Books, 1988), 10.
4 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 4.
5 Uwe Anton and Werner Fuchs, So I dont write about Heroes: An Interview with Philip
K. Dick, SF Eye 14 (1996): 37-46. Accessed 12 February 2014, http://2010philipkdick-
fans.philipkdickfans.com/frank/anton.html, transcribed by Frank Bertrand.
6 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti Oedipus, 246. Dick divorced from his first wife, Jeanette
Marlin in 1949, from his second wife, Kleo Apostolides, in 1959, and then from his
third wife, Anne Rubenstein, in 1964. Dick would marry twice more: firstly, to Nancy
Hackett in 1966, and then finally, to Leslie Tessa Busby, in 1973. See Chronology,
in Philip K. Dick, Philip K. Dick: Valis and the Later Novels, ed. Jonathan Lethem (Unit-
ed States: The Library of America, 2007), 823-38. Also see Jonah Peretti, Capitalism
and Schizophrenia: Contemporary Visual Culture and the Acceleration of Identity For-
mation/Dissolution, Negations (Winter 1996), accessed at http://www.datawranglers.
com/negations/issues/96w/96w_peretti.html.
The Shock of Dysrecognition 332
have something left over, [and] to produce.7 Constituting not the identi-
ty of capitalism, but, on the contrary its difference, its divergence, and its
death, the schizo is a rogue whose real operations of desire in the material
world constitute only so much as the outgrowth or expression of their far
more particular and intensive desires.
The schizo is a far cry from Freuds Oedipal subject whoas for the
portrait I have sketched of Huxley in chapters 4 to 6remains blinded to
realitys contours. Where Freuds subject is conditioned by a polymorophous
perversity that is endlessly and statically repeated, the desiring-machine ap-
prehends their libidinal assemblage with a much differentand in fact an
unassailableacuity. Giving themselves over to the pulses of the ego and
the schizzes of desire, the desiring-machine becomes a new kind of human,
one who is fully integrated into and consubstantial with their every psycho-
biological pulse, their every embodied stratagem, and their every calculat-
ed machination.8 Constituted less (if at all) by infantile sexualisation (like
the psychotic or neurotic)and less still by some ground of an originary
syndromethe schizo is a dynamic, decentering knot in which the desire
and the social efficiently and seamlessly thrust, torque, and tangle. And, in
view of these procedures, schizos are also exemplary operators within their
fields; they are masters, that is, within the very same context that Huxley had
mournfully anticipated in his critique of total efficiency (UD, 209).
But if for the schizo There is, as Deleuze and Guattari write in Anti-Oe-
dipus, only desire and the social, and nothing else, then this reality can
only ever be reimagined or reconfigured in or as other equivalents of this
principal binary. Schizos are thus reduced always to an inside and outside;
they are constituted by a social matrix whose values, codes, and norms ap-
pear only incidental toor perhaps even invisible withinthe autonomous
and automatising field of desire that propels and accelerates their social
existence. They are always, then, outside of the social, exiled and alienated.
So excluded, the desiring-machine or schizo must peregrinatewhich is to
say ambulate or itinerateeven as they do no fit, do not work, within the
socius. And while they remain near this locusor nearby itthey remain
there only in the spirit of realising or satiating their own desires needs. And
7 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 41-2 (my emphasis). On what Jeery Aline Flieger
argues is probably a much more facile distinction than Deleuze and Guattaris them-
selves suggest, between their own model of the subject and Freuds model, see Jer-
ry Aline Flieger, Overdetermined Oedipus: Mommy, Daddy and Me as Desiring Ma-
chine, The South Atlantic Quarterly 96, no. 3 (1997): 599-620, esp. 605-6.
8 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 37, 38.
The Shock of Dysrecognition 333
12 Francis Mason, Nostalgia for the Future: The End of History and Postmodern Pop
T.V. Journal of Popular Culture 29, no. 4 (1996): 27-40, esp. 28.
13 Thus putting Phil and Tessa into dialogue, the work fabricates what the artists de-
scribe as an implausible exchange across time and space. Also see the artists press
release: http://www.novamilne.net/news.php?news=20111214215601.
The Shock of Dysrecognition 335
Figures 7.1-7.3 Stills from the video installation work entitled XEROX MIS-
SIVE 1977/2011 by Mr&Mrs. Notably, this works title makes reference to what
Dick, in the Exegesis, describes as the Xerox missive: a letter he claims to
have received from the FBI, seeking his cooperation in reporting communist
sympathisers to them. In a letter of 2 September 1974, Dick, adhering to these
orders, wrote a letter to the FBI warning them of science fiction (and literary)
critic Darko Suvin as well as three other Marxists: Frederic Jameson, and
Petter Fitting. See Dick, The Exegesis, 900n80; Philip K. Dick, The Selected
Letters of Philip K. Dick, 1974, ed. Paul Williams (California: Underwood-Miller,
1991), 235-6.
The Shock of Dysrecognition 336
narrative and only a Dickian narrative has often seemed an arbitrary and
confusing distinction.14
Thus, whether because of or in spite of this profusion of paratexts, Dicks
fiction has become difficult to particularise, to examine or apprehend di-
rectly; its totality is all too readily reducible in the popular idiom to the
imaginative scrivenings of a drug-addled nut. And if Dicks writing now
seems difficult to apprehend in other ways, it is perhaps because contempo-
rary admirers of Dicks fiction encounter his works almost always through
their cinematic paratexts. Many new readers in particular are familiar with
Dicks works only through what are in effect poor substitutes for themand
by this I mean not only the cinematic adaptations of his novels and short
stories. Rather, the increasing number of articles that seek to confirm Dicks
oft-vaunted presciencewhich is to say the accuracy of his social and ma-
terial prognostications and his prophecy15are also often of critical inter-
est to erstwhile readers of his fiction.
It is precisely this state of affairs that perhaps led Jonathan Lethem, ed-
itor of Dicks 2009 Library of America editions and co-editor of Dicks Exe-
gesis, to title his 2002 article in Bookforum You Dont Know Dick.16 While
Lethems acerbic title suggestively foregrounds his yearning to get on pa-
per what that special condition known as Dickheadedness meant in the
14 There have been a significant number of direct adaptations of Dicks fiction, and per-
haps more than any other science fiction writers work. These include, in order of re-
lease: Hampton Fancher, et al., Blade Runner, dir. Ridley Scott (California: The Ladd
Company, 1982); Nikos Nikolaidis, Morning Patrol, dir. Nikos Nikolaidis (Greek Film
Center, 1987); Ronald Shushett, et al., Total Recall, dir. Paul Verhoeven (United States:
Carolco Pictures, 1990); Jacques Audiard, et al., Confessions dun Barjo, dir. Jrme
Boivin (Levallois-Perret: Aliclo, 1992); Dan OBannon, et al., Screamers, dir. Chris-
tian Duguay (Los Angeles: Columbia, 1995); Caroline Case, et al., Impostor, dir. Gary
Fleder (New York: Dimension Films, 2001); Richard Linklater, A Scanner Darkly, dir.
Richard Linklater (Burbank, California: Warner Independent Pictures, 2001); Scott
Frank and Jon Cohen, Minority Report, dir. Steven Spielberg (California: Amblin Enter-
tainment, 2002); Gary Goldman, et al., Next, dir. Lee Tamahori (California: Paramount
Pictures, 2007); John Alan Simon, Radio Free Albermuth, dir. John Alan Simon (2008,
independent release); George Nolfi, The Adjustment Bureau, dir. George Nolfi (Califor-
nia: Universal Pictures, 2011); and Kurt Wimmer, et al., Total Recall, dir. Len Wiseman
(California: Columbia Pictures, 2012).
15 As an example of the kinds of articles that regularly appear promoting Dicks prescience
or prophesy, see Brent Staples, Philip K. Dick: A Sage of the Future Whose Time has
Finally Come, New York Times, 8 June 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/08/opin-
ion/08fri4.html?_r=0. Also see the documentary The Prophetic Vision of Philip K. Dick,
directed by Mark Steensland and Andy Massagli (New York: First Run/Icarus Films,
2000), VHS; and Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, The Apocalyptic Vision of Philip K.
Dick, Cultural Studies <-> Critical Methodologies 3, no. 2 (2003): 186, 202n6.
16 Jonathan Lethem, You Dont Know Dick, Bookforum 9, no. 2 (2002): 22-3.
The Shock of Dysrecognition 337
lost years after [the authors] death and before his recent and ongoing can-
onization, it also uses the kind of language that signifies Lethems hybrid
identity: equal part fan and archivist. Such a hybrid position is common in
Dickhead circles; fans qua specialist independent researchers such as Per-
ry Kinman, for instance, have begun extremely small-runs of newsletters on
Dick, documenting in them such obscure facts as how many real and fiction-
al drug references appear in each of his novels (see figures 7.4 and 7.5, below).
The censorious side-effect of Lethems title, of course, is that it emphasises
the extent to which Dicks authorial statuswhether he is understood as an
acid-crazed visionary, an exemplar for Deleuze and Guattaris model of the
schizo, or as a preeminent critic and theorist of late-capitalismremains
now, as in those lost years, unresolvedespecially in relation to what
might now be understood as the postmodern literary canon.17
Even during his lifetime, however, Dick had been primed to anticipate
the likelihood of his canonisation as a drug useralthough he had also
already contested the extent to which his works should be considered the
direct products of his drug use. Dick felt that his experimentation with d-ly-
sergic acid diethylamide (LSD) in particulara drug that he had ingested
on fewer occasions than Aldous Huxley had used ithad been overplayed,
especially in the promotional tactics and ploys designed to popularise cer-
tain of his novels. Such a motivation prompted the publication of a German
version of Dicks 1965 novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch under the
new and radically different title LSD-Astronauten, that is, LSD-Astronauts (see
figure 7.6, below).18 According to Dick, in an interview given during his vis-
it to Metz, France in 1977, it was the literary critic Franz Rottensteiner, an
agent of science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, who had been responsible for
the titlea title of which Dick apparently disapproved.19 Following the Ger-
man publication of LSD-Astronauten, Dick would also specify Rottensteiners
name among those who he identified as the dedicated outlets in a chain of
command from Stanislaw Lem in Krakow, Poland.20
When Dick wrote a letter to William C. Sullivan, then head of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation, he described Rottensteiner as one among a collec-
19 This is what Dick reports in his interview with Anton and Werner, So I dont write
about Heroes: An Interview with Philip K. Dick.
20 See Philip K. Dick, The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick, 1974, ed. Paul Williams (Cali-
fornia: Underwood-Miller, 1991), 235-6. I note that William C. Sullivan is, in this ed-
ited collection of letters, misnamed William A. Sullivan; also see Philip K. Dick, The
Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, ed. Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), 908n80.
The Shock of Dysrecognition 339
tive of American literary critics including Darko Suvin, Fredric Jameson, and
Peter Fitting who were operatives of the Iron Curtain Party group. Identify-
ing Stanislaw Lem as the total [communist] Party functionary and the man
behind the publication of a great deal of Party-controlled science fiction,
Dick expressed a great suspicion for those in his science fiction circle.21 While
Rottensteiner went on to exhibit a special interest in visionary and drug-re-
lated fantasy literatureor what may be called psychotropic literatureit
was perhaps the influence of Harlan Ellisons Dangerous Visions collection,
first published in 1967, that led Rottensteiner to retitle Dicks 1964 novel.22
21 Ibid.
22 Rottensteiner is notably one of a paucity of scholars to have investigated the literary
works of Leo Perutz, the author who wrote what appears to be a prediction of LSDs
1937 (or, as psychoactive, 1943) discovery in his 1933 novel Saint Peters Snow, tr. Eric
The Shock of Dysrecognition 340
When Ellison had asked Dick to write a story about or under the in-
fluence of (if possible) LSD, it was perhaps less to elicit an interesting sto-
ry than to allow him to write a marketable introduction to The Faith of
Our Fathersthe short story that Dick ultimately contributed to Ellisons
collection. As Ellison would write, both this story and The Three Stigmata
of Palmer Eldritch (henceforth Stigmata) had been the product of an LSD
While it is true that Dick experimented with and wrote about a variety
of drugs throughout his lifeamphetamines, psychedelics, anti-psychotics
and heroic dosages of orthomolecular vitamins, to name only a fewto
propose that Dick understood these kinds of drugs as tools that offered only,
or even offered any, strictly positive benefits to himself or others, would be
to miss the point. It would also be to ignore the gloomy, even alarmist tenor
of most of his writing on the subject.27
The roles that drugs play in Dicks fiction are as so many tropes and psy-
chotropes; they are variously symbols of terror, malevolence, disillusionment,
and shrewd parody. And Dicks readiness to accept a variety of medical expla-
nations for drugss actions and inactionseven despite the fact that his own
experiential accounts contradicted this evidencesuggests Dicks pointed
distrust for the predictability and value of biochemical alteration in general.
Ever apprehensive of the economic structures that scaffold drug-controlled
societies, Dicks fiction and biography signal his materialist suspicion of the
political, economic and cultural structures through which both legal and
illegal drugs are developed, regulated, prescribed, proscribed, and sold.
In this chapter, I want to elaborate on Dick as a writer on drugs. I will
consider his fiction as an example of what Sadie Plant calls writing on
drugs, and examine the relation of the historical questions of Dicks drug
use contemporaneous developments in medical and economic psychiatry.
But why should it be important for literary scholars to examine Dicks per-
sonal drug use in this way, and not simply the representations of drugs in
his works?28 Building on the initial concerns of this thesis with the status
of authorship in part 1and conceiving of a writers drug use as part of a
larger pursuit in literary studies to develop novel images or models of what
Huxley calls the psychophysical organismthis chapter proposes that
the material circumstances of textual production, including those related
to the authors biography, are always in some way available to the analyst.
27 On Dicks use of LSD and psychedelics see Sutin, Divine Invasions, 127, 141-2; on am-
phetamines, including speed and the methamphetamine compound Semoxydrine,
see Sutin, Divine Invasions, 107, 123, 164-5, 169-70, and Rickman, To The High Castle,
49-52; on the anti-psychotic Stelazine, see Sutin, Divine Invasions, 124, and Anne R.
Dick, The Search for Philip K. Dick,188-89; and on Dicks drug use generally, see Kinman
Rouzlewave, (unpublished, 2008). Also see David Lenson, On Drugs (Minneapolis: Min-
nesota University Press, 2002); Boon, The Road of Excess, 189.
28 That this might constitute a scholarly-critical transgression is indicated by the re-
marks of critics such as Andrew M. Butler. In his 2005 essay, Butler argues that we
should try to keep his life and his work separate and not overplay Dicks use of drugs.
Butler, LSD, Lying Ink, and Lies, Inc., Science Fiction Studies 32, no. 2 (2005): 265-80,
esp. 265.
The Shock of Dysrecognition 343
29 On the printing press, see Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early
Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Marshall McLuhan,
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1962), 4-6. On electronic and digital writing, see notably N. Katherine Hayles,
Writing Machines (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002) and My Mother Was a Computer:
Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005).
And see David Boothroyd, Culture on Drugs: Narco-Cultural Studies of High Modernity
(Manchester: Manchester University Press), 9.
30 I refer here to works I have previously cited including Boothroyds edited volume Cul-
ture on Drugs, Lensons On Drugs; Boons Road of Excess; as well as Avital Ronells Crack
Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992); Sadie
Plants Writing On Drugs (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), see 114 and 169; and Rich-
ard Doyles Darwins Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Nosphere (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2011), 49.
31 For a summary of these changes, see for instance, D. Mark Anderson, et al., The Le-
galization of Recreational Marijuana: How Likely is the Worst Case Scenario? Journal
of Policy Analysis and Management 33, no. 2 (2014): 221-31.
The Shock of Dysrecognition 344
World War. As Lethem observes of Dicks 1964 novel Clans of the Alphane
Moon, it is an antic psychiatric farce, written as if cribbed from the DSM-
IV.32 Dicks familiarity not only with psychiatric drugs, however, but the
epistemology of psychiatric diagnosis and classification, is not only redo-
lent in his fiction but also central to a number of his prose essays, letters,
transcribed interviews, book forewords and, of course, his own seemingly
endless torrent of theoretical philosophy: The Exegesis. While this archive
cannot be fully addressed in this chapter, the companion essays that Dick
wrote on the subjects of drugs and schizophrenia during a time of unprec-
edented personal anxiety and prescription drug use were scrivened by him
during the same period that forms this chapters focal point: the years 1963
to 65. Dicks concern particularly with the relation of hallucination, schizo-
phrenia, and drugs during this period indicates the significance of these
years in Dicks writing life, as well as their difficulty for him.33
Influenced by the philosophy of psychiatry expressed in Rollo Mays edit-
ed collection Existence, Dicks theorisations on hallucinations and psychotic
illnesses readily entangle themselves with a range of more detailed elabo-
rations on the politics of psychiatry, enunciated at this time by the likes of
Thomas Szasz, Foucault, Laing, Franco Basaglia, and Guattari.34 In his ear-
nest and scholarly engagement with the phenomenology of consciousness
and his implicit concern to locate the origin of what Foucault understood
simply as madnessDick distinguishes himself from other drug-oriented
literary figures of the time. He is in many ways unlike those who formed the
Beats, for example, for as a group they were less persistently concerned with
epistemologising than with experientialising their interiorities.35
36 Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, ed. Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), 693; also see Steve Ericksons and Simon
Critchleys separate notes on this expression.
37 On the massive increases in amphetamine production and sales in the United States
between the late 1950s and 1970 see Richard DeGrandpre, The Cult Of Pharmacology
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 146-8.
The Shock of Dysrecognition 346
42 Each book in Dale Pendells Pharmako series is published by North Atlantic Books,
California: Pharmako/Poeia: Plant Powers, Poisons and Herbcraft (1995); Pharmako/Dy-
namis: Stimulating Plants, Potions and Herbcraft (2002), see esp. 151; and Pharmako/
Gnosis: Plant Teachers and the Poison Path (2005). Also see Doyle, Darwins Pharmacy,
passim.
43 Doyle, Darwins Pharmacy, 33, 121.
44 See Youngquist, Score, Scan, Schiz: Dick on Drugs, Cultural Critique 44 (2000): 84-
110; Anthony Enns, Media, Drugs and Schizophrenia in the Works of Philip K. Dick,
Science Fiction Studies 33, no. 1 (2006): 68-88; and Butler, Lying Ink, and Lies, Inc.,
passim.
The Shock of Dysrecognition 348
45 See Avital Ronell, Toward a Narcoanalysis, in Crack Wars, 47-64; Gilles Deleuze, A
Thousand Plateaus, 248. See also Anna Powell, Pharmacoanalysis (ch. 2) in Deleuze,
Altered States and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 54-9; and John
Fitzgerald, Pharmacoanalysis: Discourses of Hidden Drug Use, PhD diss., Monash
University, Melbourne, 2001 [unpublished].
46 Strangely enough, in Michael Bishops science fiction book The Secret Ascension (New
York: Tor Books, 1987) the second printing of Dicks novel VALIS is censored by the
censorship board: 33. Also see Ronell, Crack Wars, 50, 55-6.
The Shock of Dysrecognition 349
serve of virtual reality, then it is probable that electronic culture shares a cru-
cial project with drug culture.47
If the crucial project in which electronic and drug cultures share is a lit-
erary oneand if it is discernible in both formal and material objects, such
as those that lie outside Dicks or Gibsons identities or oeuvresthen this
project is also an axiom around which each of their works orbits. This project
is a tendency or drive to reproduce and redeploy material technics, but now
in a syntagmatic or textual shape. Equally trussed to electrical forces as it is
sutured to molecular operations, this literary project, moreover, arranges its
modes of formal expression around the incidental or itinerant movements
of a stimulus that is anterior to and yet propulsive of it. And given that drugs
and electronic technologies routinely feature in Dicks novels as what James-
on calls adjuvantsas adjuncts or aids to the protagonistss mental lives
it is notable that these related cultures must also orbit around the practice of
what was once called the tekhne iatrike: the mechanical arts.
Where one adopts the outlook in which the medical and mechanical arts
may be productively brought together, the techniques (tekhne) of physical
medicine (iatros) begin to consist in those practices by which subjects var-
iously experiment with nothing less than the power to heal themselves.48
Remedying ones illssuch as by satiating ones desires, investing in the ma-
terial consumption of a substance, or performing an apparently therapeutic
procedure by self-medicatingbecomes a procedure that is presumed to
further the subjects own ends, no matter the net result.
For its part, the text itself, at least in literary studies, serves to allow for
a similar restorative and restitutional work; like a drug, or a drug-use proce-
dure, a book points to those lacunae that are, as Ronell suggests, not there
in any ordinary sense.49 In doing so, bookslike drugsallow us to access
particular kinds of thoughtsor even images of thoughts, or psychotro-
peswhich are not easily accessed in other ways.
If drugs make legible a wider spectrum of ontological experience,
though, they can also be used in another way: namely, in the way in which
47 Ibid., 68.
48 Consider in Stigmata, for instance, the interrelation of the drug Can-D, the E Therapy
that is used by Dr. Denkmal, and the computer psychiatrist, Dr. Smile. I employ the
term tekhne iatrikes as it was used in ancient Greek to refer to medicine as a mechan-
ical art. On this, see Robert Arayas essay The outlook of the Tekhne Iatrike and the
Medical Act to the Third Millennium, Theoretical Medicine 17, no. 2 (1996): 163-73.
49 See William S. Haubrich, Medical Meanings: A Glossary of Word Origins (New York:
American College of Physicians, 2003), 115.
The Shock of Dysrecognition 350
they are deployed by the figures of Dicks novels. Almost invariably, charac-
ters in Dicks fiction use drugs to mitigate their human sufferingto vitiate
what they have come to experience as a depressed or hyper-routinised (au-
tomatised) economic milieu. In other words, drugs, as I have already made
clear in chapter 3, can allow for the deautomatisation of what might have
become all too automatic or automatised.
Almost all of Dicks future worlds constitute outlines, for instance, of
disturbing future conditions. They are dystopias, then, that invariably depict
the mere fact of being alive as reason enough to imbibe something, or to
make oneself subject to some invasive or otherwise subjugating intervention
through some device or drug. These disturbing diegeses are thus Dicks own
visionary illustrations of the same state that Giorgio Agamben describes as
biological modernity: the period characterised by the politicisation of
bare life as such.50
It is also in Dicks fictionalisations of future narcoeconomies and tech-
nopolises that we can identify the unworking that Ronellcalling on Jean-
Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchots word, dsoeuvrementdescribes as the
disoperationalisation of the cultural, political, and social forces that abide
in a collective, governmental state. Representing such societiesdystopic
as they areis Dicks own way of offering a digressive corrosion of the sov-
ereign; it is his means of adumbrating those forces whose contours we can
begin to read, as Ronell notes, in the literature on drugs.51 In Dicks science
fiction, moreover, such an unworking of these forces plays out within the
very reserve of virtual reality that is itself opened up by the disorienting
and heterogeneous psychoscape of the novel. These are those diegetic set-
tingsalready characterised by chaos and an endlessly hallucinating drug
culturein which the apocalyptic vision is no longer monumental, but rather
mundane and banal. It is a vision that is emblematised, for instance, by the
tract area of cheap but durable houses, long ago vacated by the straights
that appears in A Scanner Darkly (SD, 4).
50 See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, tr. Daniel Hell-
er-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 4.
51 Ronell, Crack Wars, 68; Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, tr. Susan Hanson
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 424. Also see Jean-Luc Nancy, The
Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 156n40;
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Lit-
erature in German Romanticism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 57-8;
Scott Shershow, The Work and The Gift (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005),
165-83, 193-205.
The Shock of Dysrecognition 351
There must be a coherent idea involved in this dislocation; that is, the dislo-
cation must be a conceptual one, not merely a trivial or bizarre onethis is
the essence of science fiction, the conceptual dislocation within the society so
that as a result a new society is generated in the authors mind, transferred to
paper, and from paper it occurs as a convulsive shock in the readers mind, the
shock of dysrecognition.53
52 This letter is reproduced as the preface to Beyond Lies the Wub: The Collected Stories
of Philip K. Dick, 6 vols. (London: Gollancz, 1988), 1: 9-10. This is from a letter to John
Betancourt dated 14 May, 1981.
53 Dick, preface to Beyond Lies the Wub, 1: 9-10.
54 The word socius is Latin word for a kind of social gathering. I use it throughout this
The Shock of Dysrecognition 352
chapter (and have done in previous chapters) in place of society (which Dick uses) in
order to more fully denote what Deleuze and Guattari call a social machine: Anti-Oe-
dipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Robert Hurley, et al. (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1983), 33, 141.
55 Erika Dyck, Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD from Clinic to Campus (Baltimore: The John
Hopkins University Press, 2008), 119.
56 Dyck, Psychedelic Psychiatry, 121.
57 See Rasmussen, On Speed, 163.
The Shock of Dysrecognition 353
Throw back their ersatz Immortality... Flush their drug kicks down the drain
They are poisoning and monopolizing the hallucinogenic drugslearn to make
it without any chemical cornAll that they offer is a screen to cover retreat
from the colony they have so disgracefully mismanaged. To cover travel ar-
rangements so they will never have to pay constituents they have betrayed
and sold out.60
Published less than a year after the publication of Nova Express, Dicks Stig-
mata proves a companion text to Burroughss cautionary tale regarding the
newly drug-controlled society. For Dick as for Burroughs, the world had
increasingly become a place at whose center of gravity laid the vision and
promise of ersatz Immortality. It was a place that did little more than elab-
orate on the acid nightmare that had been dreamed up by, or had been
visited upon, a mainstream media already predisposed to drug hysteria.
61 This thematic is also explored in The Simulacra (New York: Ace Books, 1964), where
psychotherapy has been outlawed under pressures from A.G. Chemie, a Berlin based
pharmaceutical company.
62 See notably Brett Levinson, Biopolitics and Duopolies, Diacritics 35, no. 2 (2005): 65-5.
63 Dyck, Psychedelic Psychiatry, 101-118.
The Shock of Dysrecognition 355
even in the Perky Pat worldand perhaps especially in this world as Dicks
novel suggestsa need or desire is felt for therapy, a psychological consulta-
tion of the kind that the users had back on Earth (TSPE, 37-8).
Dick, of course, had been influenced by the materials and devices that
appeared around him at various times in his various homes, which included
his own childrens toys. As he reported in a 1975 interview in Rolling Stone
with Paul Williamsan interview that would be widely read, escalating Dick
to relative notorietyDick got to where he would literally look up while
typing to generate his ideas for narrative action: I was literally looking up,
type type type and look up... he noted. With one character I deduced he
had a child because I could see a tricycle in the driveway.64
As with the invention of the man with a childan idea engendered by a
tricyclethe idea for Perky Pat arose when Dick had witnessed his daugh-
ters playing with their Barbie and Ken dolls. Dick rapidly became fascinated
with these posthuman bodiesthese strange figurineswhich could not be
real: They couldnt exist in the real world, he remarked, Their heads are
much too small for their bodies.65 But Dick had also been fascinated by the
ritual itself: How, if they could not exist in the real world, might one be led to
bridge this schism between irreality and the real?
Deported and deterritorialised, those who live in the hovels of Mars find
that while Can-D facilitates a subjective distantiation from their immediate
worldoffering them a brief respite from their miserable realitythe drug
also ensures the continuation of their gloomy quasi-life of involuntary ex-
patriation in an unnatural environment (TSPE, 51). And that the malaise
of these hovels is specifically biological is signaled by the viral inflection of
the name given to its central Martian milieu: Chicken Pox Prospects. As
a chewable elixir, Can-D is derived from a lichen fungus; and this fact tele-
graphs its relation to such similarly fungus-based drugs as the psychedelic
mushrooms, psilocybe cubensis, as well as to LSD itself, which is crucially
synthesised from a number of ergot fungi, and most commonly the Claviceps
purpurea fungus.66
64 Paul Williams, The True Stories of Philip K. Dick, Rolling Stone (6 November 1975):
47.
65 Quoted in Anne Dick, The Search for Philip K. Dick, 217. Also see Patricia S. Warrick,
Mind in Motion: The Fiction of Philip K. Dick (Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1987), 95; Emmanuelle Carrre, I am Alive and You are Dead: A Journey into the
Mind of Philip K. Dick, tr. Timothy Bent (New York: Picador, 1993), 105; Laurence A.
Rickels, I Think I Am Philip K Dick (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010),
425n1.
66 See Vladimr Ken, et al., ed., Ergot: The Genus Claviceps (Amsterdam: Harwood, 2005),
The Shock of Dysrecognition 357
94-104.
67 Foucault defines biopower as the set of mechanisms through which the basic biologi-
cal features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general
strategy of power: Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, ed. Michael Senellart, tr.
Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 1. Cf. Foucault, The Subject
and Power, Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (1982): 785; Agamben, Homo Sacer, 9; cf. Hung-chi-
ung Li, Out of the Biopolitical Double Bind: Universal Singularity, Singular Inversion,
and Subtractive Unworking, Concentric 37, no. 2 (2011): 111.
68 Puttering About in a Small Land is the name of one of Dicks non-science fiction novels;
it was written in 1957, but not published until 1985, three years after Dicks death: see
Dick, Puttering About in a Small Land (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1985).
The Shock of Dysrecognition 358
from which this citizenry cannot escape. While Can-D guarantees that the
colonists will think they are generating uniquely bespoke and individual-
ized trip reports in their use of the drugthat they are becoming more
intimately connected with themselveswhat underscores the narrative more
broadly is the extent to which the users striated and stratified accounts of
the drug experience are increasingly characterised by anxiety. This is an anx-
iety that the users feel not simply about their situations, however, but about
their own use and insight into Can-D. Does the drug, they begin to ask, have
any real significance or meaning?
Increasingly contending with one another, the various contentions of
users about the drugss operations and metaphysical ramifications serve
only to obscure what is their collective inculcation into a state of political
disenfranchisement. The narrative functions as an allegory of Spinozas
wormthe philosophical thought experiment reviewed by Huxley. In this
experiment, which I addressed in chapter 5, Huxley compares the worms
myopic, circumscribed view of their world to the reality of the substance
that we, as humans, see and know as blood. Similarly, Dick portrays a contin-
gent of humans whose bare lives remain invisible to those who live them;
only the reader, watching from afar, can identify that the substance to which
they are so addicted has the pernicious and unworthy origins it does.
Constituted by a subsistence exclusively on Can-D and its fantasies, users
cannot see beyond their next translation; they thus remain oblivious to the
regime of dependency and deportation that defines and sustains their en-
tire living environment.69 The structure of this biopolitical economy is also
obscured by the Burroughsian screen under which Leo Bulerochairman
of P. P. Layoutsdisguises his geopolitical and international business in-
terests. Using a hidden subsidiary to cooperate with what Bulero calls a
dark-skinned [and] sneaky little unevolved politician (TSPE, 19)namely,
the General Secretary of the UN Narcotics Bureau, Hepburn-GilbertBule-
ros operation not only manufactures the accessories for Can-Ds ritualised
translations, but also processes and distributes the drug itself. It has, in
short, monopolised that which has now become a public health (or public
illness) regime, one that crucially shapes the lives of an entire off-world pop-
ulation (TSPE, 17-18).
69 On the increasing usefulness of internet trip reports to medicine, instance, Paul Dar-
gan, ed. et al., Novel Psychoactive Substances: Classification, Pharmacology, Toxicology
(Oxford: Elsevier, 2013), 61.
The Shock of Dysrecognition 359
70 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 22; Agamben, Homo Sacer, 12, 17; cf. Li, Out of
the Biopolitical Double Bind, 111.
The Shock of Dysrecognition 360
71 Anne Dick asserts that in 1963 Phil has such a bad trip he never tried LSD again. See
Dick, The Search, 124. In contrast, Sutin describes Dicks 75 microgram acid trip two
years later, in 1965: Sutin, Divine Invasions, 149. Of course, Dicks initial castigation of
hallucinogens is moderated in his introduction to Faith of Our Fathers, in Danger-
ous Visions, vol. 2, ed. Harlan Ellison (London: Sphere Books, 1974 [1969]), 68-9.
The Shock of Dysrecognition 361
72 See Paul Williams, Only Apparently Real: The World of Philip K. Dick (New York: Arbor
House Publishing Company, 1986), 4-5, 66-71.
The Shock of Dysrecognition 362
tween two worldshe is also neither of these identities completely, but both
of them at once and forevermore. Rather than realising, for instance, that
he is in fact Sam Regan and not Walt Essex, Regan is permitted here only to
realise that he is a singular figure who is yet split: he discovers that in reality
he is not Sam Regan at all, but Walt-and-Sam at once.
What Stigmata reveals, then, is the chimerical procession of what Jacques
Alain-Miller, after Lacan, famously called the suture. As Alain-Miller
indicates, this word names the relation of the subject to the chain of its
discourse, and describes the element which is lacking in the economy
between subject and language. In the diegesis of Stigmata, the suture func-
tions as a stand-in for what otherwise should appear as an obvious lacu-
na in Can-Ds translation narrative.73 Even having seen the handwritten
note, for instance, Regan is precluded from appreciating the illusion of the
layout world. This is because he is still unable to grasp the illusoriness of
the apparent proposition that he is Walt Essex, that he lives in 1950s San
Francisco, and that his shirts come from Italy, and his shoes were made in
England (TSPE, 50). Regan, moreover, is prevented from remembering the
other world in which he is only Sam Regan.
If the dreary colonistss hovel exists at all, then, it is only ever remote
and vitiated and not convincing in Regans mind (TSPE, 51). Increasingly
perplexed and even a little depressed at the sight of the notean object
whose irreducible excess and pure presence threatens to wreck his trip
Sam hastily disposes of it, dropping it in a bathroom disposal chute, a hole or
gap that now is metonymic of a portal or threshold between the two worlds.
Having disposed of this trace of the other world, Regan will nonethe-
less obey it. In a way, Regan must now erase the memory and existence of the
note; he must hastily supplement it, that is, by means of another technicthe
vidphone. But to do so is also to authorise and confirm the notes legitima-
cy. The vidphone is thus the superior device on which Sam, following the
notes instructions, he contacts Pat pronto. Substituting this new memory
for the note, and for the notes disappearanceeven as he follows the notes
instructionsthe vidphone conversation enables Regan to play his role as
Walt convincingly, whose realness he expresses in a tone as firm and full of
conviction as possible (TSPE, 52). But what operates as the crucible in which
the Can-D narrative is sustainedwhile the Martian hovel, meanwhile, is
73 Jacques-Alain Miller, Suture (elements of the logic of the signifier), tr. Jacqueline
Rose, Screen 18, no. 4 (1977): 26. As Slavoj iek observes, this is what Deleuze alter-
natively calls the floating signifier which is the disability of all finite thought. See
iek, Less Than Nothing (London: Verso, 2013), 585.
The Shock of Dysrecognition 363
screened outis more than simply this substitution and repression of the
note. Rather, in these operationsand throughout all of these affirmatory
proceduresit is not Can-D itself but the suture that allows Sam to recog-
nise the schismatic rupture that has dissected his identity, the schism that
distinguishes Walt from Sam.
Of course, the suture allows for this rupture to reappear as a unity a
unicityeven as it also enables Regan to screen this rupture out, to mask
over the very same dehiscence that underpins it in reality. The procedure,
interestingly, resmbles that which I addressed in chapters 2 and 3 when I
historicised the developments in the theory of psychosis. There, it may be
recalled, the polar affects of meloncholy and hyperexcitability were joined
together in a unitary diagnosisat first as circular madness, then as psy-
chosis, and finally as and bipolar disorder. Here, Regan enters into a kind
of bipolar ontology: he has two identities, the one (Sam, in reality) asleep
and slothful, the other (Walt) now hyper-excited. For Regan to recognise that
both of these figures exists at once may thus represent his insight into his
own disorderalbeit that this disorder is a chemically-induced one.
In his mobilisation of Lacanian theory, Slavoj iek argues that the su-
ture is responsible for producing the effect of self-enclosure with no need
for exterior. In Stigmata, Can-D offers the grammar in which Regan comes
to guarantee that his particular self-enclosure remains consistent and un-
impeachable. As a supplement, the suture also ensures that the virtualis-
ing layout, or the biosociality of this Perky Pat world, can remain intact;
meanwhile, of course, the reality of the hovelor what iek might call the
exteriorcan ever remain ablated, repressed, and forgotten.74
But if Stigmata seeks to separate the Can-D experience from everyday life,
then the indistinct vector that distinguishes the layout world from the hovel
zone remains only marginally more fuzzy than that which divides Mars from
Earth. After all, Earth is not entirely excluded or cordoned off from the delu-
sional order of simulacrum that is engendered by the process of translation;
rather, this originary planet seems at times even less inured to the forces of
biopolitical incursion predominant on Mars. Indeed, integral to the novels
progression is the restructuration of Can-Ds biopolitical monopoly, which
begins at about the novels halfway pointits volta. What has occurred on
Mars now begins to infect the entire universe, including on Earth; for anoth-
74 iek, Less Than Nothing, 844. Paul Rabinow coined the term biosociality in reference
to the formation of social identity through geneticised knowledges and practices: Ar-
tificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality, in Essays on the An-
thropology of Politics (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 1996), 91-111.
The Shock of Dysrecognition 364
75 This is what Philip Mirowski nicknames the Modern Globalized Regime of Big Phar-
ma in Science Mart (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2011), chapter 5.
The Shock of Dysrecognition 365
These are the effects that are brought about by just one dose of Chew-Z;
and, of course, the everlasting effects of the drug signal Dicks prescient vision
of the so-called acid flashback phenomenononly eleven cases of which
had been clinically reported in 1967, three years after Stigmatas publication.
But Dicks illustration of Chew-Zs effects also suggest Dicks recognition of a
darker and more phantasmatic semiotics of illusion, the basis of which had
been gleaned from industrial history.76 Unlike the seemingly unified and at-
avistic images of 1950s American life that are engendered by Can-D and the
synthetic P.P. Layouts, Chew-Zs imaginal realms feature a humanand
a landscapethat is fully rebuilt, totally novel. Less a prelapsarian fanta-
sy than a sublime, futurological apparition, Chew-Zs hallucinations thus
thematise a world of increased mechanisation and phantasm. But it also
thematises randomness, featuring the strange products of Palmer Eldritchs
mind: creatures named glucks (TSPE, 107), for instance. These creatures, as
Eldrich explains to Leo Bulero,
showed you with absolute clarity that this is not a fantasy. They could actual-
ly have killed you. And if you died here that would be it. Not like Can-D is it?
(TSPE, 102)
Where Eldritch has the advantage over everyone and anyone whos consumed
Chew-Z is that recovery from the drug is excessively retarded and gradual; its
a series of levels, each progressively less an induced illusion and more com-
pounded of authentic reality. Sometimes the process takes years. This is why
the UN belatedly banned it and turned against Eldritch; Hepburn Gilbert ini-
tially approved it because he honestly believed that it aided the user to pene-
trate to concrete reality, and then it became obvious to everyone who used it or
witnessed it being used that it did exactly the
Then I never recovered from my first dose.
Right; you never got back to clear-cut reality (TSPE, 235).
Chew-Z facilitates not simply the totalisation of biopower, however; but rath-
er, before it is banned, it inaugurates a new, duopolistic economic regime.
In this way it leverages and then supplements Can-Ds popularity, trading
on the existing brand. And it is in fact in this way that the drug prompts
the emergence of the Can-D/Chew-Z duopolythe economic precondition or
valency that presages the end of any hope in the novel for a civilized... de-
ployment of biotechnology.77 Building on Baudrillards formulation of the
duopoly and the symbolic exchangea structure popularly emblematised
in twentieth-century economic history by Coca-Cola and Pepsis apparent
duopoly in the soft drink marketBrett Levinson observes how biomedi-
cine and bioterrorism are wont to converge under the load of such a dou-
bling. As Levinson argues, the terrorist enemy or the enemy of the terrorist
materialize as competitors for the same space of the bios, initiating a sim-
ulation of war that is only ever a rendering of private economic and political
capital for both sides... a means to sustain [their] duopoly.78
In Stigmata, the very proliferation of Chew-Z metonymises the ubiquitous
nature of such a totalising desire, especially as this desire proliferates in a
poorly regulated neoliberal marketplaceone that is undergirded in this
case by a ruthless competition for biopower. To consider such a thematic
requires Dick, however, to imagine a product that is universally desirable,
to develop as a convincing metonym for the market forces themselves. And
while Chew-Z is a remarkable tropism, such a universally desirable object
will reach even dizzier heights in Dicks 1969 novel Ubik. In this novel, what
77 Levinson, Biopolitics and Duopolies, 74. Cf. Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and
Death, tr. Iain Hamilton Grant (London: SAGE, 1993).
78 Levinson, Duopolies, 74-5.
The Shock of Dysrecognition 367
79 Peter Fitting, Ubik: The Deconstruction of Bourgeois SF, Science Fiction Studies 2,
no. 1 (1975): 50.
80 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 6.
The Shock of Dysrecognition 368
81 See, for instance, Nicholas Rasmussen, Americas First Amphetamine Epidemic 1929-
71: A Qualitative and Quantitative Retrospective with Implications for the Present,
American Journal of Public Health 98, no. 6 (2008): 974-85.
82 Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself, Theory, Culture, and Society 18, no. 6 (2001):
1-30; and see Scott Timberg, Philip K. Dicks Masterpiece Years, The New York Times
(23 November, 2010).
83 Anton and Fuchs, So I dont write about Heroes, 37-46.
84 Ibid. Emphasis mine.
85 Ibid.
The Shock of Dysrecognition 369
this time. Dick felt a deep, abiding obligation to provide for and honour his
new familyan onus that was all the more difficult to discharge in the wake
of Dicks own traumatic childhood, which had been punctuated by the death
of his twin sister Jane. Janes death, caused by malnutrition, had taken place
just over a month after her birth.86 While rarely expressed in his interviews
or prose writing, Dicks familal anxiety symptomatises in various events
both in his life and fiction.87 As a new father, Dick struggled to meet the
demands of responsibly breadwinning enough money for his and Annes
daughter Laura; but Dick also felt pressured to provide for the three children
to whom he had become a surrogate father when he took the place of Annes
deceased former husband, the respectable literary poet Richard Rubenstein.
Suffering from what Anne describes as a major inner conflict, Dick fell into
a general clinical depression in the 1963-5 period, a disorder for which he
was prescribed a range of drugs, including Sparene, Stelazine, Preludin,
and amphetamine, and others.88
But given that, of these numerous drugs, it was amphetamine that
had been, as Nicolas Rasmussen notes, the antidepressant of choice for
family doctors in the mid-1960s, Dicks personal circumstances made him
what would have been the typically invisible or unaccounted-for drug-de-
pendent subject of this period. After all, Dicks circumstances involved a
confluence of two difficult elements: first, his apparently anxiety-laden and
neurotic desire to use stimulants in order to write as much as he could, and
second, his increasingly depressed mood, one whose pathological legitima-
cy authorised his ingestion of more of these compounds. And this was Dicks
position precisely at a time when amphetamines were still widely accepted
as innocuous medications by the medical establishment.89
Even as evidence began to demonstrate that amphetamines were, unlike
caffeine, truly addictive drugsand almost certain to produce psychosis
if taken in high dosagesit was precisely because amphetamine improved
86 On Janes death, see, for instance, Dick, The Exegesis, 520, asterisked note; Sutin, Di-
vine Invasions, 11-13.
87 As Dick would remark in his SF Eye interview,
I was supporting, at one time, four children and a wife with very expensive tastes.
Like she bought a jaguar and so forth. I just had to write and that is the only way I
could do it. And, you know, Id like to be able to say I could have done it without the
amphetamines, but Im not sure I could have done it without the amphetamines, to
turn out that volume of writing.
Anton and Fuchs, So I dont write about Heroes, 37-46.
88 Anne Dick, The Search, 104. Preludin, or phenmetrazine, is a stimulant.
89 Rasmussen, Americas First Amphetamine Epidemic, 977.
The Shock of Dysrecognition 370
One sentence under the subtitle HUMAN TOXICITY particularly made my de-
cade. It reads like this, gang: Overdoses, may, in addition, cause hallucina-
tions, delirium, peripheral vascular collapse and death. (Eeg, gak, wach, fug,
gugh, whuh!)92
90 Ronald R. Koegler, Drugs, Neurosis and the Family Physician, California Medicine
102, no. 1 (1965): 5-8, 7. Also see Nicolas Rasmussen, On Speed: The Many Lives of Am-
phetamine (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 162; Rasmussen, Americas
First Amphetamine Epidemic, 977; Young D. and W.B. Scoville, Paranoid Psychoses
in Narcolepsy and Possible Danger of Benzedrine Treatment, Medical Clinics of North
America 22 (1938): 637-46; J. Norman and J. Shea, Acute Hallucinations as a Compli-
cation of Addiction to Amphetamine Sulfate, New England Journal of Medicine 233
(1945): 2701; F.A. Freyhan, Craving for Benzedrine, Delaware State Medical Journal
21 (1949): 1516; P. Knapp, Amphetamine and Addiction, Journal of Nervous and
Mental Disease 115 (1952): 40632; A.H. Chapman, Paranoid Psychosis Associated
With Amphetamine Usage, American Journal of Psychiatry 111 (1954): 435; Connell
P.H., Amphetamine Psychosis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958).
91 Koegler, Drugs, Neurosis and the Family Physician, 7; Philip K. Dick to Terry and
Carol Carr, , October 1964, quoted in Sutin, Divine Invasions, 119.
92 Philip K. Dick, October 1964 letter to Terry and Carol Carr, qtd. in Sutin, Divine Inva-
sions, 119.
The Shock of Dysrecognition 371
cisely just such an amphetamine psychosis that, as Sutin suggests, may have
produced the visage of perfect evil that Dick, just before writing Stigmata,
would apprehend in the sky in 1963.96
Echoing the incident in which Dicks father, Edgar, had donned a gas-
mask and caused terrific anxiety in his four-year-old son, the omnipotent
Palmer Eldritch would always function as a reverberation of Dicks fathers
96 While it is difficult to know how to read them, Dicks interview remarks of 1978 suggest
that neither Stigmata nor this Eldritch vision was catalysed, as some critics have sug-
gested, by LSD. As Dick asserts, he had at that time only read of the visions caused by
LSD in Aldous Huxleys Doors Of Perception. See Joe Vitale, An Interview with Ameri-
cas Most Brilliant Science-Fiction Writer, The Aquarian (11 October 1978), reproduced
in PKD Otaku 4 (2002): 7-11, available at www.philipkdickfans.com/resources/journals/
pkd-otaku/.
The Shock of Dysrecognition 373
discovered something odd about me... that when I took amphetamines... they
never reached my brain!... The consensus, signed by the four doctors whod ad-
97 See Dick, Eye in The Sky (New York: Ace Books, 1957).
98 Sutin, Divine Invasions, 14, 126-7.
99 Dick did, however, often express his excitement at LSDs uses. In Schizophrenia and
The Book of Changes, for instance, Dick notes that LSD has made the discovery of
[temporal distortion] available to everyone. Sutin, ed. The Shifting Realities, 177. Dick
had also been effusive at the prospect of religious experience being scientifically
studied through LSD. See Faith of Our Fathers, 68-9. Also see Sutin, Divine Inva-
sions, 127, 141-42; Gregg Rickman, Philip K. Dick: The Last Testament (Long Island: The
Valentine Press, 1985), 12, 58.
100 Sutin, Divine Invasions, 175.
101 Anton and Werner, So I dont write about Heroes: An Interview with Philip K. Dick.
102 Dick, The Exegesis, 21.
The Shock of Dysrecognition 374
ministered the physical and psychological tests, was that the amphetamines
were not affecting me physically, they were not reaching the neural tissue, but
they were being excreted through the detoxifying process of the liver.103
Demonstrating that there was nothing wrong with [him], the physical and
psychological exam brought Dick a long-awaited sense of relief and reassur-
ance: he was not, as it turned out, a drug addictat least not neurologically.
Yet this exam also generated more questions than answers. If the amphet-
amines had never been psychoactiveand had, in fact, never crossed the
blood-brain barrierthen how and why had Dick been so compelled to use
the amphetamines, and so habitually? How had he been apparently experi-
encing their effects for almost a decade? And what, now, could account for
his visions, paranoia, and, most stunningly, his singularly prolific output?
Suggesting no clear explanation to improve on the hypothesis that he had
been taking [the amphetamine pill] for a placebo effect of some kind,104 Dick
fills in the gaps by postulating his own theory, his own suture. He attributes
his drug use to his desire to apparel himself in a protective coloration that
disguised him amid Californias drug subcultures: Everybody else was tak-
ing some form of drugs, he said, and I wouldnt have known how to behave
if I didnt have something to take.105 Following his physical exam in 1971,
Dicks newfound belief in the indeterminacy of drugs would be reworked and
revamped in his later novels as their total unpredictability.
In A Scanner Darkly, for instance, protagonist Bob Arctor faces a psychiat-
ric exam not unlike Dicks ownonly to discover a similar, although inverted,
biomedical revelation. Informed that Substance Dthe toxic drug that Arctor
has used to infiltrate and surveil a group of suspectshas now done things to
his brain that should never happen and may be permanent, Arctor pon-
ders his biological intervention as the cause of an abnormal condition the
body isnt prepared for (ASD, 218-19).
In both his science fiction and life, then, Dicks drugs become agents of
dysrecognition whose value lies in their shocking signification of precisely
that which is unknown and unknowable. By virtue of the kind of pharmako-
nicity that Derrida imputes both to speech-acts and to writing, the drug as a
literary psychotrope becomes as seductive for Dick in the 1960s as it is had
been terrifying at that time for the general public, and had been revelatory to
103 Paul Williams, The True Stories of Philip K. Dick, 46-7. Cf. Daniel DePerez, An Inter-
view with Philip K. Dick, Science Fiction Review 19, no. 5 (1976): 6-15.
104 De Perez, An Interview with Philip K. Dick, 8-9.
105 Williams, The True Stories of Philip K. Dick, 47.
The Shock of Dysrecognition 375
his readers. Both then as now, Dicks drugs provide exemplary allegories for
Derridas interminably undecidable phenomenonology; the drug produces
both real and literary disorientations through its myriad detours of a signifier
foreign to it.106
Perpetually standing in for institutional operations or signifiers that are
extrinsic to its own effectsreligion, market capital, and even the communi-
ty or socius in which drug use is normalised, proscribed or enforceddrugs
like Can-D and Chew-Z enigmatically disappear into their contexts so that, as
Ronnell notes, simply being-on-drugs indicates that a structure is already in
place, [even] prior to the production of the materiality we call drugs.107
If the precise contours of the structure that scaffolds the invisible neuro-
logical operations of drugs could be made visible, then they might be more
clearly understood; they might be revealed, in fact, to have had their own
indeterminacy or unknowability exploited by othersby those who know
not all, but something more, than the population about them. Drugs would
be shown to have been colonised and co-opted by those who produce and
purvey them, now deployed by a governmentality for purposes unknowable
to the end user, and by a government that depends on its biopower for its
continued control. Regulated, reappropriated, and revalued, drugs in Dicks
novels are revealed to be distributed by just such a force. They are no more
controlled by the state as agents of a late-capitalist economic power than
they are enshrouded by private actors in the enigma of their indeterminate
and invisible production. Highly controlled lest any drug should be used as
an end in and of itselfor discovered to be something other than what their
purveyors suggest they aredrugs, like those in the biopolitical state in Stig-
mata, and as in other of Dicks science fictions, bring into incisive relief the
shocking reality of psychopharmacological experimentation in the global-
ised twentieth-century.
Unlike any of the chapters before this one, this final chapter has exam-
ined the way in which literary science fiction may serve as a grand allegori-
sation for biopolitical control and powerespecially in relation to drugs.
And while it has extended on the work of the first part of the thesis, it has
also, much like the psychobiographical chapters on Huxley, examined Dicks
biographical history in order to better explain the authors relation to am-
phetamines, psychosis, and the human body.
some twenty years before the publication of Norman Yoders fabricated sto-
ry of the six LSD-using students who were blinded by sun-gazinga story
recounted in this thesiss introductionHuxley himself would experiment
with what he called sunning the eyes.1 In 1939, Huxley, who was now for-
ty-five years of age and recently settled in America, adopted this practice
after having sought assistance for what he, dismayed, had discovered was
his steadily and quite rapidly failing eyesight. Desperate, Huxley met with
Margaret Corbett, a teacher at the School of Eye Education in Los Angeles.
This was a school that Corbett had founded herself, and which lay not too far
from Aldous and Lauras Hollywood home.2
It was at this school that Huxley learned the Bates Method: a relatively
controversial alternative therapy proposed by William A. Bates in his study of
vision, The Cure of Imperfect Sight By Treatment Without Glasses (1920). As one
of Batess most faithful disciples, Corbett demonstrated to Huxley the vari-
ous ways in which Batess techniques could be used to treat visual dysfunc-
tion through the reeducation of the mental and visual senses.3 It would be
from among this range of sensorimotor techniques that Huxley would learn
to do precisely what Yoder later sought to caution about: to expose ones eyes
directly to sunlight.4 Having experienced significant improvement immedi-
ately upon adopting this and other of Batess techniques, Huxley promptly
disposed of his eyeglasses. Within two years, when he wrote his Art of Seeing
(1942), Huxley would promote the technique to his readers: Those who have
1 Aldous Huxley, The Art of Seeing (London: Chatto & Windus, 1974), 1.
2 See Bedford, Aldous Huxley, 1: 373-5; Dunaway, Huxley in Hollywood, 133; Murray, Ald-
ous Huxley, 319.
3 See William Bates, The Cure of Imperfect Sight By Treatment Without Glasses (New York:
Central Fixation Publishing Company, 1920).
4 In addition to his 1920 book, William Bates also published a magazine, Better Eyesight,
between 19191930. The theory that imagining blackness was therapeutic was, ac-
cording to Huxley, modified by Bates toward the end of his life, when he instead in-
structed his followers to remember pleasant scenes and incidents out of [their] own
personal history. See AOS, 23.
376
Conclusion 377
the sense to sun their eyes wisely, he claimed, perform a ritual that will
certainly do them good (AOS, 65).56
Like his experiments with hypnotism and his subscription to the Alexan-
der Technique, Huxleys adoption of Batess methods speaks not only to his
serious interest in alternative medicine, but of what would become his in-
creasingly mystical intuition and faith in the psycho-physical instrument.
For Huxley, these methods represented, as he wrote in a letter of 1942, no
less than the
But it is also possible that even these methods had an antecedent: a prac-
tice whose description is neither quite as mystical nor as instinctive as these
complete reconditioning[s]. This was an altogether more molecular than
physiological technique that, while discussed in detail in Batess book, had
been known to Huxley long before he had encountered either Batess or Al-
exanders names. And while none of Huxleys biographies appears to provide
a source for Huxleys knowledge of this method, it is certain that Huxley, at
least by 1914, had begun using it.8
The method consisted of Huxleys application of an atropine solution to
his eyes, which, as it bathed and diluted them, enabled the eye muscles to
relax. This allowed Huxley to see round, as he writes in The Art of Seeing, a
heavy patch of opacity at the centre of the cornea (AOS, 8). What is fascinat-
ing, however, is that Huxleys atropine eye solutionat least if administered
in a high enough dosageis also an extremely powerful psychoactive alka-
loid, a substance that is known to produce profound mental changes in
those who are exposed to it.9 A naturally occurring tropane alkaloid found
5 Valentine Basnayake, Fifty per cent terrific! Fifty per cent non-existent: Aldous Hux-
ley and Medicine, Ceylon Medical Journal 49, no. 4 (2004): 142-4, esp. 142.
6 A more recent assessments of Bates refractive method appears in a report of
the American Academy of Ophthalmology: Jennifer K. Harris et al., Complemen-
tary Therapy Assessment Visual Training for Refractive Errors, August 2013, ac-
cessed 13 November 2013, http://one.aao.org/Assets/9ddadf62-c784-4a58-9193-
bc404272fe2c/635121685199770000/visual-training-for-refractive-errors-2013-pdf. Also
see H.R. Hildreth, W.H. Meinberg, et al., The Effect of Visual Training on Existing
Myopia, American Journal of Ophthalmology 30 (1947): 1563-76.
7 Huxley to Miss Hepworth and Mr. Green (Letter 458) in Letters, ed. Smith, 473-4.
8 Bedford offers the most detailed account: Aldous Huxley, 1: 43.
9 See for instance, E.K. Perry, R.H. Perry, Acetylcholine and Hallucinations: Disease-Re-
lated Compared to Drug-Induced Alterations in Human Consciousness, Brain and
Conclusion 378
Cognition 28, (1995): 240-258. Even in the foreword to Albert Schweitzers book on the
possibility of diagnosing the historical Jesus Christ with psychopathy (an elaboration
on Schweitzers PhD thesis), the author underscores the possibility of developing hal-
lucinations from relatively small dosages of therapeutic drugs, such as atropine. See
Schweitzer, The Psychiatric Study of Jesus, tr. Charles R. Joy (Boston: The Beacon Press,
1948), 14.
10 See, for instance, Peter Brawley and James C. Duffield, The Pharmacology of Halluci-
nogens, Pharmacological Reviews 24, no. 1 (1972): 31-66, esp. 33,
11 On witches flying ointments, see Michael J. Harner, The Role of Hallucinogenic
Plants in European Witchcraft, in Hallucinogens and Shamanism, ed. Michael J. Har-
ner (London: Oxford University Press, 1973); Francis King, Sexuality, Magic, and Per-
version (London: Neville Spearman, 1971), 63, 68. For another discussion of atropine
induced flight, also see Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of
Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 131-6, 203-4.
12 See, for instance, Albert Hofmann, Richard Evans Schultes, Plants of the Gods: Origins
of Hallucinogenic Use (New York: Van der Marck Editions, 1987), 88.
13 James S. Ketchum, Chemical Warfare Secrets Almost Forgotten: A Personal Story of Med-
ical Testing of Army Volunteers with Incapacitating Chemical Agents During the Cold War
(1955-1975) (California: Chem Books, 2006), 322. Also see Henry G. Mortona, Atropine
intoxication: Its Manifestations in Infants and Children, Journal of Pediatrics 14, no.
6 (1939): 755-760; Burin Sanlda, Okan Derinz, and Nagehan A. Yldz, A Case of
Pediatric Age Anticholinergic Intoxication due to Accidental Datura Stramonium In-
gestion Admitting with Visual Hallucination, The Turkish Journal of Pediatrics 56, no.
Conclusion 379
In a more recent and better documented emergency case, the authors not-
ed that, while uncommon, the patients anticholinergic toxicity had been
caused by opthalmologic atropine. And while here the patients symptoms
consisted of acute visual hallucinosis, the emergency staff concluded that
these hallucinations were likely to resolve within days of discontinuing the
offending agent.14 When in 1916, Huxley had requested, by letter, that his
father Leonard forward him his package of atropine, he wouldby asking
his father to help him heal his eyesfiguratively invert the scenario in which
Oedipus wrests the golden brooches from his mothers gown, and dares to
perform that vicious self-enucleation.15 However, Huxleys request would also
form a prefiguration of the scene in which, on his deathbed, he would also
seek his final dosage of moksha-medicine from Laura, his adoring wife.16
And yet, despite these figurations and prefigurations, none of Huxleys
remarks indicates that he had been aware of atropines potential to induce
hallucinations. Indeed, to pose such a question is to speculateas this the-
sis has done throughout its pageson the possibility that Huxley had, with-
out even having realised it, already communicated with an other, alterity, or
psycotogen within the body or braineven at an early age. It is to suggest
that Huxley would have already developed an instinctive or intuitive under-
standing of the otherness and the potential of psychoactive scrivening in
his adolescent years. And if the worst that such a speculation as this can do
is to generate propositions of the kind just articulatedpostulations whose
truth, at least at this point in history, can be neither confirmed nor entirely
dismissedthen it is toward such a work of speculation that pharmacogra-
phy aspires, and in pursuit of such a truth that studies of narcoliterature,
such as this one, will proceed.
Huxley would never have been one to dismiss such a speculation, anyway.
His experiments at the borderlines of medicine testify to his radical open-
ness to just such possibilities as these. For in addition to hypnosis, the Bates
Method and other unorthodox techniques, Huxley also adopted, at least
for a short time, and often for specific ailmentsthe practices of dianetics,
acupuncture, and E-medicine (a variety of meditation treatment).17 But the
3 (2014): 313-15.
14 Andrew G. Bishop and John M. Tallon, Anticholinergic Visual Hallucinosis from Atro-
pine Eye Drops: Case Report A, Canadian Journal of Emergency Medicine 1, no. 2 (1999):
115-6.
15 See my chapter 6.
16 See Huxley to Leonard Huxley (Letters 100 and 102) in Letters, ed. Smith, 113-6.
17 Basnayake, Fifty per cent terrific! Fifty per cent non-existent, 142.
Conclusion 380
... it should be added that this is only an incidental observation; but that phar-
macologists err in believing that atropine acts only on unstriped muscle is
part of [Bates] general argument, for Bates found that this drug will paralyse
the extrinsic muscles which produce accommodation. One experiment... ap-
pears to show that the dead fish still has a living mind; its brain is pithed to
induce relaxation. The treatment based on these revolutionary observations
aims at mental relaxation, and the pithed fish appears to be its prototype.21
While it was not until Huxley had already finished his The Art of Seeing that
he had seen this annotation (at which he point he included it in the book as
an appendix), there can be no doubt that Huxley had read of the experiment
in Batess Cure of Imperfect Sight himself.22 Huxley had already suggested, for
instance, that the production of mental relaxation through such techniques
as sunning, could be propitious... not only for memory, but also for vision
(AOS, 104). But nowhere in The Art of Seeing does Huxley describe atropine or
its beneficial effectsother than in the books preface, where he indicates
not its benefits, but only notes that he had used it as a child (AOS, 8).
18 Huxley had conveyed to Julian a detailed summary of the empirical facts of his own
case of improvement in a letter of 30 July 1939: Huxley to Julian Huxley (Letter 431) in
Letters, ed. Smith, 441-3.
19 J. Parness, Remedy for Defective Sight, British Medical Journal 2, no. 4210 (September
13, 1941): 389.
20 Perfect Sight Without Glasses, British Medical Journal 2, no. 4210 (September 13,
1941): 383.
21 Ibid.
22 This appendix (Appendix I) is not reproduced in the Creative Arts Book Companys
1982 publication, which this thesis cites. It appears, however, in seemingly all the ver-
sions published by Chatto & Windus, including the first edition of 1942, 74-6.
Conclusion 381
Given that Huxleya candid and, like TH, passionately honest think-
erdid not, neither in his correspondence, nor in essays or fiction, describe
anything other than his ordinary usage of atropine, it perhaps seems likely
that, had Huxley ever experienced an altered state of consciousness while
using the drug, he had himself remained unaware of it. But this conclu-
sion, as with this thesis more generally, is less concerned with proving that
Huxley had already encountered an altered state in his youth (or during his
Cambridge year), than with proposing the means by which Huxley, like Dick,
came to view medicine and the body as two sites that are as much liable
to philosophical expression and literary speculation as they are the proper
studies of positivistic and scientific inquiry.
Huxleys complete indifference to the correctness of his adoption of
the Bates Method, for instance, suggests the gravamen of his epistemology
of openness:
Whether Dr. Bates was right or wrong in his rejection of the Helmholtz theory
of accommodation, I am entirely unqualified to say. My own guess, after read-
ing the evidence, would be that both the extrinsic muscles and the lens play
their part in accommodation. This guess may be correct; or it may be incor-
rect. I do not greatly care. For my concern is not with the anatomical mech-
anism of accommodation, but with the art of seeingand the art of seeing
does not stand or fall with any particular physio-logical hypothesis... 23
For Huxley as for Dick, then, pathology and the art of medicine (the tekhne
iatrike) function as trustworthy indices of truth only when they may also be
artfully and flexibly apprehended or reappropriated by their students and
patients. To reflect upon and conceive of the body and the brains physical
condition is not simply to reflect upon ones health, then, which is to diag-
nose or pathologise the body. It is rather to infinitely conceive of the very
possibility of the body and brains infinite potential to be interpreted either
as good or bad, positive or negative, well or ill, right or wrong.
That is, the art of medicine for both these writers involves a recursive,
continuous, and endless adaptation to the body and brains every movement
in a following that represents a lifelong manipulation and refinement of
the manner in which this very process proceeds. It is in precisely this artful-
ly chiasmic and pharmakonic mode that Huxley and Dick conceive of their
psychotropes, producing in their compositions, and scrivening in their nar-
ratives, the very potentiality of their having intuited a sovereign poweran
23 Ibid. 7-8.
Conclusion 382
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