Realer than Reality: Neo-Psychedelia and Anti-Ideology
The world appears to us in two forms. First in a “raw data” of sorts, in the way in which our eye perceives prior to the “decoding” process our brains are responsible for. Secondly, ideologically. The way in which our brain processes and decodes this information is by and through ideological registers within the unconscious psyche. This remains self apparent, as implicit biases (for example) arise from the unconscious i.e. the way in which we process and decode visual light in turn reciprocates the way in which we draw conclusions about society at large. The brain’s “accuracy” decoding of visual light is based solely upon ideological basis. Our experiences are thus rooted materially in the social and cultural practices that exist around us as the way in which ideology is interpellated is through material practices, a transmission of bourgeois ideology is only possible through controlling the experience of the proletariat. The proletariat consciousness, not just unconsciousness, is therefore infected with the capitalist construction of ideology; thus conscious reality becomes inseparable from capitalism. This is a relatively new psychosociological phenomena, in which conscious reality itself is linked directly to the conscious interpretation of social relations. The effects of unconscious and conscious constructions predicated upon socio political state apparatuses in turn requires a breaking of self consciousness, a radical separation of consciousness from the being-for-itself and affirming the capitalist subject as a being-in-itself; a firm, unchanging existence in which the consciousness of the subject is no longer conscious of the self, but rather represents a reaction to and from ideological apparatuses ie the police as the true material representation of the enforcement of order, the state as the extension of an expression of individual will, the law as an extension of moral code and so on. This, as it were, is the source of a said “capitalist realism.” The restructuring of conscious reality from the interpellation of ideology creates a confine, a limit, of what one is capable of perceiving as rational in which anything that exceeds or supersedes the current ideological apparatus becomes an alienable, untenable, goal.
The psychedelic experience offers the ability to not only radically deconstruct consciousness into a primordial state. One in which experience becomes disconnected from material reality and condition as the subject experiences a reality both entirely different, but at the time juxtaposed with, ordinary reality. Psychedelics offer a passage beyond current material apparatuses and into the purely spiritual. The augmentation of reality is not purely explicable by interactions between matter, psychedelic experiences offer a view beyond that which is formed, and produced, in capitalism. When one views a commodity produced via capitalist MOP they interact and engage with the ideological underpinnings of production; as Marx wrote the use-value of a good is inseparable from its production and physical characteristics, so it is only by viewing produced goods from a transmogrified consciousness that the fetishism of capitalism is able to dissipate. The psychedelic experience, the connection with reality purely and not obscurificated, tainted, with the residue of ideology. An ameliorated consciousness, beyond that which is confined by psychological factors and fully exposed to exogenous chemicals offers a glimpse not necessarily beyond capitalism; but that of which supersedes the expression of capitalism. As Althusser correctly noted, ideology is expressed and maintained through material means so it is only by disrupting the circuit of purely phenomenological interpretation of these false realities.
It should be noted here I am not implying there is some sort of Marxist tinge to a psychedelic experience. It does not belong to one ontological or phenomenological domain. All systems require ideological underpinnings (feudalism required the pre belief in divine placement for castes, for example) so the psychedelic experience does not offer a glimpse into a new ideological system; rather a view beyond ideology as a system. It is a gaze into a reality realer than real. The mystic nature of psychedelia opens a door on consciousness which is always there, but not always active. The chemical represents a key to a world beyond symbolic and imaginary; to a world that can’t be expressed, only experienced.
