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COPYRIGHT AND USE OF THIS THESIS This thesis must be used in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. Reproduction of material protected by copyright may be an infringement of copyright and copyright owners may be entitled to take legal action against persons who infringe their copyright. Section 51 (2) of the Copyright Act permits an authorized officer of a university library or archives to provide a copy (by communication or otherwise) of an unpublished thesis kept in the library or archives, to a person who satisfies the authorized officer that he or she requires the reproduction for the purposes of research or study. The Copyright Act grants the creator of a work a number of moral rights, specifically the right of attribution, the right against false attribution and the right of integrity. You may infringe the author’s moral rights if you: - fail to acknowledge the author of this thesis if you quote sections from the work - attribute this thesis to another author - subject this thesis to derogatory treatment which may prejudice the author’s reputation For further information contact the University’s Director of Copyright Services sydney.edu.au/copyright Psychotropes Models of Authorship, Psychopathology, and Molecular Politics in Aldous Huxley and Philip K. Dick Chris John Rudge A thesis submitted to the Department of English and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney in fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 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. This work is typeset and designed by Chris Rudge. See http://www.rudge.tv Abstract AMONG THE SO-CALLED “ANTI-PSYCHIATRISTS” of the 1960s and ‘70s, it was Félix Guattari who first identified that psychiatry had undergone a “molecular revolution.” It was in fact in a book titled Molecular Revolutions, published in 1984, that Guattari proposed that psychotherapy had become, in the de- cades following the Second World War, far less personal and increasingly alienating. The newly “molecular” practices of psychiatry, Guattari mourned, had served only to fundamentally distance both patients and practitioners from their own minds; they had largely restricted our access, he suggested, to human subjectivity and consciousness. This thesis resumes Guattari’s work on the “molecular” model of the subject. Extending on Guattari’s various “schizoanalytic metamodels” of hu- man consciousness and ontology, it rigorously meditates on a simple ques- tion: Should we now accept the likely finding that there is no neat, singular, reductive, utilitarian, or unifying “model” for thinking about the human subject, and more specifically the human “author”? Part 1 of this thesis carefully examines a range of psychoanalytic, psychi- atric, philosophical, and biomedical models of the human. It studies and re- formulates each of them in turn and, all the while, returns to a fundamental position: that no single model, nor combination of them, will suffice. What part 1 seeks to demonstrate, then, is that envisioning these models as differ- ent attempts to “know” the human is fruitless—a futile game. Instead, these models should be understood in much the same way as literary critics treat literary commonplaces or topoi; they are akin, I argue, to what Deleuze and Guattari called “images of thought.” In my terminology, they are “psycho- tropes”: images with their own particular symbolic and mythical functions. Having thus developed a range of theoretical footholds in part 1, part 2 of the thesis—beginning in chapter 4—will put into practice the work of this first part. It will do so by examining various representations of authorship by two authors in particular: Aldous Huxley and Philip K. Dick. This part will thus demonstrate how these author figures function as “psychoactive scriv- eners”: they are fictionalising philosophers who both produce and quarrel with an array of paradigmatic psychotropes, disputing those of others and inventing their own to substitute for them. iii iv More than this, however, the second part offers a range of detailed and original readings of these authors’s 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 works—explanations rooted in the theoretical work of the first part. Finally, this thesis concludes by reaffirming the importance of these authors’s narcoliteratures—both 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 us—and instruct science—about 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 To Gaze Upon the Sun xiii Part One Principia Literaria Psychobiographia: The Principles of Literary Psychography 1 CHAPTER ONE Molecular Correspondences: Writing With, On, and About Drugs 2 Our Bodies Are Not Our Own: Reformulating Bodily Constructivism 7 Encountering Molecular Psychography 21 A Grey Matter: “The Brain’s Latent Potentialities” 40 CHAPTER TWO The Psychoactive Scrivener: Modelling the Writer in the Psychopolitical World 51 The Workspace of the Brain 66 Subjective Undermin(d)ings: Deleuze and Guattari’s Brain Subject 82 The Long Road to the Writing Subject: A Short Scribal History 88 CHAPTER THREE (De)automatising Subjects: Scrivening in Modern Literary History 108 Writing Madness into Reason 118 From Acedia to Acid, From Injunctions to Adjuncts 143 vii Part Two Psychobiographic Speculations 157 CHAPTER FOUR “Born Wandering Between Two Worlds”: Aldous Huxley’s Chiasmic Enculturation 158 Huxley’s Ageometry and the Neurochemical Self 170 Huxley and the Metaphysics of Science 196 Huxley’s Polyamorous Phallogocentrism 211 CHAPTER FIVE Reforging The Law of the Father: Huxley’s Expurgation and Extrospection 225 The Statu(t)e of T.H. Huxley, or The Law of the “Grandpater” 225 T.H. Huxley and the Masculinities of Science 232 Extrospective Aldous: An Epiphenomenal Man 246 Thinking the Interstitial Self 259 CHAPTER SIX An “Amphibical Anthropology” 273 The Enucleating Family: Aldous as Oedipus 304 CHAPTER SEVEN “The Shock of Dysrecognition”: The Disorienting Biopolitical Visions of Philip K. Dick 330 Unworking the Socius: Drugs and Writing 346 Sf-ing the Acid Nightmare 353 The Transmolecularisation of Philip K. Dick 367 CONCLUSION Aldous’s Atropine Eye Drops and The (St)Art of Seeing 376 Bibliography 384 Acknowledgments It is difficult to imagine what kind of author could claim to be free of any indebtedness; but no matter, since I am no such kind. This work has come to exist through the efforts of a constellation of ac- tors and agents. To my loving partner and my closest friend, Camilla, I owe you an especially heartfelt and profound show of thanks. You have all of my love. To my parents, Marian and John, thank you for your ample patience. And to my ingenious sister, Alecia, thank you for coming to my aid in my mo- ments of sincerest need. Thank you also to the Gulli family: Ralph, Carmel, and Emily. Thank you to my sagacious and intrepid supervisor, Associate Profes- sor Peter Marks, without whose thoughtful remarks, perceptive reading, and energetic companionship, this thesis would not nearly be so lucid as it might now claim to be. To my other advisors—persons who are also admired colleagues, cherished friends, and intellectual heroes—Associate Professor Kate Lilley and Dr Melissa Hardie: my profuse thanks for your many years of extraordinary advice. Thank you also to Catherine Waldby: your encouragement in all matters biopolitical has been, for me, a great source of strength; and to Nikolas Rose: my sincere thanks for your supportive remarks, and for our thoughtful and enjoyable exchanges. Thank you also to my Dickian colleagues: Richard Doyle, Roger Luck- hurst, David Gill, Laurence Rickels, Mark Bould, Alexander Dunst, Umberto Rossi, Stefan Schlensag, Ted Hand, Frank Hollander, Frank Bertrand, Fa- bienne Collignon, James Burton, and Yari Lanci. Thank you to those in my beloved Philip K. Dick Reading Group, to my friends and colleagues Adam Hulbert and Pat Cronin. I would also like to thank Geoffrey Roche, Bernfried Nugel, Angela Woods, and Elizabeth A. Wilson. And thank you especially to Kate Hayles for suggesting I attend the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts, a group of which I am proud to be a member. Thank you to the University of Sydney, to the department of English, and to its abundance of talented members of staff: Liam Semler, Carole Cusack, Mark Byron, Vanessa Smith, Bruce Gardiner, David Kelly, Sarah Gleeson-White, Will Christie, Richard Smith, Alan Cholodenko, and Laura Ginters. viii ix 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.