Neuropsychedelia. Nicolas Langlitz
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a living body, in which the person is no longer present, was adopted quite willingly in Europe and North America while meeting fierce resistance in Japan. Descola, however, also argues that, more recently, the bipartite ontology of naturalism thus understood has become unstable and is about to give rise to and will possibly be replaced by a different scheme. This emergent ontology not only promises to leave behind the timeworn modern dichotomies of nature and culture or mind and body but will break with the more fundamental underlying dualism, which, according to Descola, has structured all previous ontologies: a genuine anthropological revolution, it would seem. As an ethnographic case study, this book examines this ongoing transformation of dualist naturalism into monist materialism. It focuses on a mystical variety of the latter, eventually looked at in a perennialist framework that emphasizes recurrence over radical novelty (thereby diverging from Descola’s ontological trajectory and analytic approach).
Since the 1980s, many Anglo-American sociocultural anthropologists (most prominently Asad 1986) have come to question the value of such ethnographic archives in light of doubts about cross-cultural translatability of supposedly universal anthropological categories. Yet this study, although contrasting the United States and Switzerland (and sometimes Germany), does not presuppose or reveal any kind of incommensurable cultural difference. It would be put to good use if readers decided to compare it with other, especially non-Western ethnographic cases—and I will briefly gesture at animistic hallucinogen use in Amazonia when examining an animal experiment with a synthetic ayahuasca concoction in chapter 5.
However, the overall project of Neuropsychedelia does not in itself aim at such ethnology. Instead it aspires to a peculiar kind of philosophical anthropology. It refunctions ethnography as a form of “fieldwork in philosophy” (Austin 1970; Rabinow 1989, 2003; Bourdieu 1990) that has not grown out of an encounter with cultural otherness (the point of departure of so many ethnographic narratives) but with a different sort of alterity: a pharmacologically altered state of human consciousness. It presents a working through of this experience not in psychological but in cultural and biological terms. Historical epistemology and ontology add temporal depth to the project’s ethnographic breadth (Daston 1994; Hacking 2002; Rheinberger 2010b). Ultimately, however, the goal is not to show how a new scientific fact has made us into a different kind of human being (which has been the rationale of numerous anthropological studies of medicine and science in the past two decades) but to find a way out of the stale standoff between science and spirituality.
For this purpose, the inquiry will not look to supposedly premodern cultures for solutions to a modern conundrum. Even though the author is neither Swiss nor American, but German, Neuropsychedelia falls into the genre of “anthropology at home” (see Peirano 1998), in that the ethnographer has not only been shaped by philosophy seminars but also graduated from medical school shortly before setting out for fieldwork in two psychopharmacology laboratories investigating hallucinogenic drugs in Zurich and San Diego. Considering that my disciplinary identity is multiple, my approach to this field is not confined to ethnographic observations and historical narration but will occasionally extend into the realms of philosophy and psychopharmacology itself. This shunning of the intellectual asceticism marking strictly disciplinary perspectives is the methodological correlate of my personal engagement with the problem at the heart of this inquiry. The book will show that fresh ways of responding to a problematic situation do not necessarily have to be sought in far-flung idylls but can often be found by attending to marginalized and therefore only partially realized possibilities in one’s own domains (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982: 262–263; Dreyfus 1991: 329–331).
When I set out on this research project, the use of hallucinogens promised to have the liberating potential of such marginal practices. Where Prozac had come to be seen as a quick fix for a profound spiritual vacuity, psychedelics were taken as “entheogens,” as drugs revealing the “God within” (Wasson et al. 1978). Prozac was criticized for making subjects temperamentally more alike, a psychopharmacological makeup robbing people of their individuality. The ease it gave seemed to lure consumers into social conformity. Hallucinogens, on the other hand, continued to be identified with authenticity and nonconformism. Prozac was said to adjust people to the competitive spirit of capitalism while hallucinogen-inspired drug mysticism appeared to undermine the underlying Protestant ethic. And while mescaline had been described as a vessel taking us on a journey into the terra incognita of the “mind’s antipodes” (Huxley 2009/1954: 86), Prozac was accused of producing complacent subjects who had given up looking for anything other than their medically prescribed happiness (Kass 2008b).9
Despite this stark contrast between the discursive constructions of Prozac and the psychedelics, hallucinogenic drugs have been part and parcel of the emergence of late-modern materialism and its identification of mind and brain as a space of psychopharmacological intervention. In fact, the recent popularization of neurochemical self-conceptions had been anticipated by Timothy Leary’s writings from the 1960s that teemed with brain metaphors and neuro- prefixes. The immediate and mind-blowing effects of hallucinogenic drugs were even better suited than Prozac to convince their consumers of Leary’s (1965: 123) message that consciousness was a biochemical process—and that consequently chemicals were the keys to its expansion. As the following ethnographic account will show, early twenty-first-century hallucinogen researchers continue to “listen” to all sorts of psychopharmaceuticals, which have taught them, just like Peter Kramer’s patients, to conceive of the human mind in neurochemical terms. But, mediated by Huxley’s perennial philosophy, this materialism has taken a mystical form.
IN A NUTSHELL
The book is organized in six chapters and a conclusion. As it is about the revival of academic hallucinogen research since the Decade of the Brain, the first two chapters provide a historical explanation of what happened to make such a revival necessary in the first place. Jointly framed by an ethnographic account of the 2006 LSD Symposium in Basel, Switzerland, chapter 1 lays out the rise, fall, and resurgence of psychedelic science in the United States, while chapter 2 examines the prominent role of Switzerland in the transnational dynamics of this process. The American part of the narrative reveals that, due to broader developments in drug regulation, hallucinogen research was already on the wane before this class of substances came to be associated with the counterculture’s resistance to the Protestant work ethic. It outlines the “political neurotheology” underlying the subsequent clash between psychedelia and the Establishment, which eventually led to the prohibition of hallucinogens and the breakdown of most research. Based on interviews with several key actors of the current revival, the first chapter also shows how this new generation of scientists and activists employed both disenchantment and spiritualization of psychedelic drugs as political strategies to overcome the ruinous antagonisms surrounding this class of drugs.
Chapter 2 turns to Switzerland, where the historical continuities were as important as the caesura of “1968.” Oral-history accounts of the government administrator in charge of research with controlled substances and his closest scientific ally track the emergence of the regulatory framework of contemporary psychedelic science at the time of Swiss drug policy reform in the 1990s. Largely untroubled by the aggressive ideological rifts that had divided American society, the Swiss government not only permitted but actively supported hallucinogen research. Exploiting such transnational differences between regulatory regimes, psychedelic entrepreneurs and philanthropists from the United States funded human experiments in Switzerland: an engagement producing both synergies and tensions. Thus, the investigation of hallucinogen action, which chapters 3 and 5 will reveal as molded by local context, is simultaneously a global phenomenon.
The remaining chapters zoom in for ethnographic close-ups of laboratory life in Zurich and San Diego. Based on observations of Franz Vollenweider’s group and this anthropologist’s own participation in one of their experiments, chapter 3 examines the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity in psychopharmacological research, including the correlation of psychometric and neurophysiological measurements and pilot studies in which the scientists provisionally served as test subjects themselves. Gradually, the chapter moves from second-order observations of these activities to an ontological argument: shaped by “set” (the subject’s personality, mood, and expectations) and “setting” (her social, cultural, and physical environment), hallucinogenic drug action is maintained to be a hybrid