Centrifugal Self

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Discussion

From a review of the book of Erik Davis, High Weirdness, by Rob Latham:

"The result, in Davis’s words, was a “weirding of religious experience” that ushered in a “consciousness culture” of “intense, enchanting, and liberating altered states,” navigated by “a restless mode of subjectivity that I call the centrifugal self.” This deracinated ego, adrift amid a “kaleidoscopic relativism” of arcane beliefs and alternative lifestyles, was less a coherent identity than an endlessly mutating “project”: “On the one hand, the decentered self becomes a charged vector of exploration and creative re-invention; on the other, it spins like an aimless and lonely satellite through random space.” As Davis argues in his concluding chapter, this nomadic subjectivity was particularly suited to — if not outright engendered by — “the complex and abstract behavior of networks, systems, and information ecologies” that emerged as a “new social paradigm” during the postwar years, especially in California (here, Davis builds thoughtfully on Manuel Castells’s 1996 sociological classic, The Rise of the Network Society). The quasi-mystical perception that everything in a network is potentially connected gave rise to both libertarian dreams of empowerment, including the hacker ethos of information freedom, and conspiratorial fantasies of mind control, such as the belief that a “psychic mafia” of paranormal researchers might be “soften[ing] people’s brains” telepathically.

There is thus a key ambivalence — a “strangely doubled gnosis” — at the heart of the visions Davis anatomizes: they seem to give access to higher states of reality while at the same time suggesting that this contact could be manipulative or delusional. A deep strain of doubt underlies the surface credulity: all three psychonauts reported “encounters with enigmatic nonhuman intelligences they could neither shake nor entirely believe in.” A “cautionary” counterexample is provided by another figure who didn’t quite make it into Davis’s mystic pantheon: neuroscientist John Lilly, who used sensory deprivation as a trigger to extra-human communication and “supraself metaprogramming,” but who eventually became convinced, under the dissociative influence of ketamine, that a Borg-like “Solid State Intelligence” was in the process of “conquering all biological, carbon-based life in the universe.” McKenna, Wilson, and Dick all came close to surrendering to such crippling chimeras themselves, but each was saved, finally, by a capacity for wry humor, cool pragmatism, or skeptical self-analysis. Moreover, Davis is less interested in appraising the putative truth of their mystical visions than he is in exploring the rhetorical and conceptual resources these “garage philosophers” marshaled to narrate and interpret their experiences, in a series of highly imaginative, curiously engaging, and boldly genre-bending texts." (https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-ravages-of-revelation/)