Cyber-Ecstasy and the Visionary in American Politics

In the instant Karmic History of the 1970s, “dreamtime” shaped American culture, beginning with the ganja and acid subcultures, and ending in the dispropriation of crystal-meth, heroine, and myriad other death-cult chemical hybrids of pharmocapital and narcoterrorist invention. Throughout it all, from its erotic birth to its Thanic end, the drug culture was seen, is still seen—except for “legitimate” pharmo-industrial treatment regimens—as narcissistic self-absorption by both the junkies of Neo-conservative certainties and the wizened academic epigones of New Left politics. To many, especially in academia, the warning cries of the 1960s denim revolution against dominant culture’s co-optation and reformulation of the drug-culture as chic countercultural rebellion went unheeded and led to predictable ends—the demolition of sixties radicalism and the birth of Reaganism’s narcissistic consumerism. The result of all of this chemical tumult and turmoil was the rejection at virtually all levels of political and cultural life of the use of hallucinogenic substances toward claimed spiritual ends. Eventually New Ageism channeled its earlier hallucinogen-fueled shamanic impulses into the pale visage of a kind of libertarian transcendence, without danger to the newly chastened body/minds of alternative culture.

Strange Attractors remained, however. Within the post-Nixon silicon culture of Southern California¹, the tattered remnants of the hallucino-tactical rear guard were incubating electric dreams of global consciousness through their uplinked Univacs and Eniacs, giving birth, finally, to the computerized episteme of the Information Age. During midnight codings and late night peyote trips into the desert (during which the High Guru of post-structural thought, Michel Foucault was inducted into certain forms of cyber-ecstasy) the alchemical quests continued, later elaborated in the travels of psychic pioneers like Terrence and Dennis McKenna, within the retorts and crucibles of Alexander Shulgin’s dusty kabalistic lairs, and in the resuscitated visionary impulses of sixties alchemical culture, ultimately directing scores of burnedout cultural materialists to find their souls in the mystical frontiers of the tantric mind, the ether-space of cybermagick, the Great Apothecary of the Amazon basin where hallucinogenic “drugs” gave way to sacred medicine, and finally, in the Ravespace of shamanic TechnoEcstasy. While these cyber-alchemies were being rendered, other extensions of sixties-mind were underway—primarily the relocation of sixties political activism into the academy by way of various theoretical and culture-critical positionings: from traditional Marxist critique and its laminations—feminism, queerness, multicultural and post-colonial studies, or visibility politics—through the more abstruse psychoanalytical and continental streams of political thought—Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida and the others (though the various strains and variations of critical theory of course continue, and continue to overlap)—each theoretical position unique, but all sharing with Technocapitalism an enduring belief in the ultimate materiality of culture, mind, and power.

And here is where the various twists and turns of the rise of cyber culture get interesting: for while the gurus of global cyber consciousness up in Silicon Valley were becoming increasingly absorbed into the materialities of late-stage Capitalism, the ideologically strident academic leftists began to find themselves at the raveling selvage of rather uncomfortable theoretical impulses: the Deleuzean cosmos of becoming-Sorcerer, for example, in the articulations of chaos-magick, or the rise within academic discourse of increasingly unsettling artistic and cultural forms, archaic hip-hop chant, of course, but also the raving, crumping ecstatic practices of an emergent urban shamanism—a problematic term whose slippery, rhizomatic indeterminacy underscores a larger issue of academia’s refusal to understand the import and impact of a new urban spiritualism. An article by Scott Hudson in the January 2000 issue of Anthropology Quarterly, for example, presents the phenomena of the rave—a large, often impromptu ecstatic trance-dance led and orchestrated by DJ Impresario, often lasting throughout the night, sometimes days, held in out-ofthe- way obscure venues—as the locus of a vast, specifically shamanic healing energy, best understood by realigning it along anthrospiritual lines rather than simply seeing it as an “urban music” (read African-American) phenomena:

[T]he rave can be conceptualized as a form of healing...