Mad Thoughts on Mushrooms

OC1802_05 11/21/07 12:12 PM Page 74 Mad Thoughts on Mushrooms: Discourse and Power in the Study of Psychedelic Consciousness1 andy letcher Andy Letcher is a freelance writer, researcher, and lecturer based in Oxford, UK. [email protected] abstract This paper addresses the question of what happens to consciousness under the influence of psychedelic drugs—specifically of psilocybin, or “magic” mushrooms— and performs a Foucauldian discourse analysis upon the answers that have been variously proposed. Predominant societally legitimated answers (the pathological, psychological, and prohibition discourses) are those that, in Foucault’s sense, are imposed from the outside as “scientific classifications,” that is, they are based upon observations of the effects of mushrooms on others. By contrast, a series of resistive discourses (the recreational, psychedelic, entheogenic, and animistic discourses) have been constructed in opposition, as a means of making sense of the subjective experience of taking mushrooms. When critiqued, only the animistic discourse— the belief that mushrooms occasion encounters with discarnate spirit entities, or animaphany—transgresses a fundamental societal boundary. In the West, to believe in the existence of spirits is to risk being labeled “mad,” and as such the phenomenon of mushroom-induced animaphany goes largely ignored. It nevertheless remains a phenomenon in need of further scholarly research. keywords: magic mushrooms, consciousness, Foucault, animaphany introduction What happens to consciousness under the influence of a psychedelic drug? Given the importance of psychoactives in both indigenous and modern cultures (whether culturally legitimated or not), this is a question that anthropologists are 74 OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 75 mad thoughts on mushrooms 75 increasingly being forced to confront. In the West, for example, the last thirty to forty years have seen a huge growth in the intentional consumption of “magic mushrooms.”2 A practice that was once confined to indigenous cultures in what is now Mexico has spread to become a global phenomenon—typically in spite of prohibition—thanks to the discovery that psilocybin-containing mushrooms grow naturally in many parts of the world (Letcher 2006). Recent developments in cultivation have enabled commercial production such that psilocybin mushrooms are now sold on the internet and, in Holland at least, where there exists a loophole in the law, openly over the shop counter.3 For a brief while, before a similar loophole was closed in 2005, mushrooms were on sale in Britain, too, and could be bought from head-shops, barrow stalls, and even tourist boutiques in London’s West End. That many people are choosing to adjust their consciousness through the action of magic mushrooms makes it a timely moment to be asking this question. My concern here, however, is not with answering it per se, but rather with exposing how the various answers that have been proposed are historically contingent and inseparable from relationships of power and knowledge. My thinking is influenced by the French philosopher, Michel Foucault (1926–1984), for, in a Foucauldian sense, the differing ways in which psilocybin mushrooms have been categorized constitute competing discourses, each of which make certain “truth- claims” about the effects of mushrooms upon physiology, psychology, consciousness, and so on, but in doing so disallow, marginalize, or even criminalize others. In this paper, therefore, I wish to rehearse old and well-worn debates about the ways in which mushrooms have been categorized and delineated (and hence about how the question of mushrooms and consciousness has been answered), but to do so through the fresh lens of Foucauldian discourse analysis. My argu- ment is that the culturally dominant discourses about mushrooms (what I term the “pathological,” “psychological,” and “prohibition” discourses) have arisen from what Foucault called “scientific classification.” That is, they have been constructed on the basis of observations of how mushrooms appear symptomatically to affect others. On the other hand, a series of resistive discourses (“recreational,” “psychedelic,” “entheogenic,” and “animistic” discourses) have arisen out of the needs of practitioners, people who actually consume mushrooms, to find more faithful ways of representing their own subjective experiences. The discourse that increasing numbers of practitioners claim most accurately achieves this, however—the “animistic discourse” in which mushrooms are regarded as occa- sioning the perception of discarnate intelligences or spirits—cannot be counte- nanced or taken seriously within mainstream culture because it transgresses a fundamental ontological, but discursive, boundary. In a post-enlightenment, materialist culture, where a disbelief in spirits prevails (at least among the intel- ligentsia), to believe in the agency of mushroom-revealed spirits is to risk being thought mad.4 OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 76 76 anthropology of consciousness 18.2 foucault and discourse The many theories of discourse and methodologies of discourse analysis that now exist owe their origins to the French philosopher Michel Foucault. A discourse may be defined in simple terms as “a particular way of talking about and understanding the world (or an aspect of the world)” (Phillips and Jörgensen 2002:1), but Foucault’s insight was to describe how relations of power are deter- mined discursively through these differing representations. That is: In a society such as ours, but basically in any society, there are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterize and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and func- tioning of a discourse. [Foucault 1980:93] Of the functions of discourse that Foucault identified, two are relevant here: first, that discourses serve to divide people into objectified subjects; and second, that they establish boundaries around what can be done and said. One way in which subjects are routinely divided is through “scientific classification” (Rabinow 1984:8). For example, when you or I go to see a medical doctor, a power relationship is established—in which doctor and patient are expected to fulfill certain roles—by means of an institutionalized medical discourse, under which our bodies are subjected to the “medical gaze” and divided (diagnosed) according to the symptoms they exhibit (Foucault 1973). For Foucault, the act of looking “is to assemble information, which combined with knowledge already possessed by the gazer, leads . to the subjection of the subject. The gaze is thus the means by which medical authority is established, as a contingent effect of the interrelationship between power and knowledge” (Voase 2003). Subsequent “dividing practices,” such as those that separate the “sane” from the “insane” for instance, consist of processes of “social objectification and categorization, [in which] human beings are given both a social and a personal identity [which are accompanied by]...the practice of exclusion—usually in a spatial sense, but always in a social one” (Rabinow 1984:8). Or, as Foucault put it bluntly, “It is in fact a simple matter to show that since lunatics are precisely those persons who are useless to industrial production, one is obliged to dispense with them” (Foucault 1980:100). A pertinent example of these dividing practices may be found in the predominant cultural discourse about “drugs” (the “prohibition discourse”). Typically this term refers to two broad antithetical categories: to pharmaceuticals, produced by large, licensed, and hence legitimated, multinational companies, and administered by trained members of the professional medical establishment for OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 77 mad thoughts on mushrooms 77 prophylactic and analgesic purposes; and to a range of plants, plant extracts, and chemicals, typically grown or produced illicitly and self-administered for the purposes of pleasure, introspection, or escape, but consequently derided and criminalized, usually on the grounds of public health. The range of substances placed in this second category is so wide as to obscure any commonalities of chemical action, psycho-physical effects, duration, toxicity, and addictive potential beyond their shared delineation as being socially undesirable because of their potential for “abuse.” To self-administer any of these substances is to be branded by mainstream society a “drug-abuser,” a discursive label that castigates and marks one as a deviant member of society, someone who has forfeited the normal rights of citizenship and become a justified target for the “war on drugs.” Drug-users/abusers are socially excluded and, if caught and brought to justice, may be spatially excluded in prisons and detention centers. The label carries connotations of pollution and danger (on which see Douglas 1994; Hethering- ton 2000), largely due to the constructed image of the heroin-injecting addict— as a morally degenerate vector of disease or as “drug-crazed” criminal—about which most anxieties about drugs are orientated (see Jay 2000; Davenport-Hines 2001).5 By contrast, the use of a drug such as aspirin for pain relief carries no such stigmas, while the use of certain other addictive or habit forming substances, caffeine and alcohol for example, have been naturalized to such an extent that it would be laughable even to consider

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