Timothy Leary

[solistus]

-neptune-: I have a... respect for D&G, but I have trouble reading anything from Anti-Oedipus on. They sort of launched their academic careers in opposition to Lacan with that work, and even if I could set my own dogmatic Lacanian beliefs aside, just knowing all the personal silliness that went on between the three of them makes it harder to take their 'magnum opus' seriously. Basically, Lacan was the center of the leftist intellectual scene in France at the time, so Deleuze and Guattari decided to frame their own budding theories as anti-Lacanian when they had previously been viewed as up-and-comers in essentially the same school of structuralist criticism. Then, they wanted to see what Lacan would say about it, but they were embarrassed so they sent Deleuze's wife instead. For three weeks she sat in on Lacan's seminars, and for three weeks Lacan (who noticed her) said nothing at all about the book. See what I mean by personal silliness? Also, they have almost the opposite problem of Zizek, who discusses very rigid structural theories in silly, casual language with lots of examples and tangents; D&G define their actual ideas in silly/postmodern terms (all the rhizomes / bodies without organs talk comes to mind, I prefer Zizek's inversion of organs without bodies myself) and talk about them in analytic language. As for gender, I think it's actually the weakest part of Lacan - Judith Butler has some pretty good critiques of psychoanalysis and how it 'performs gender' as she puts it; Freud was pretty clearly sexist and ascribed to a simple reductionist view of gender, Lacan moved away from this but kept the gendered language in many places which makes it tricky to read him without just thinking he's a sexist (like when he says "woman is a symptom of man" - he's not saying men are 'normal' and women are some sort of secondary, irrational outgrowth, but it sounds that way to a lot of feminist critics).

TheSmokingMan: "it is what it is" says nothing. It's a nice abstract thought to meditate on, but categorization is the only way human beings can understand complex systems rather than simply accept and romanticize whatever relationship we already happen to have with them. The psyche itself is deeply fragmented, yet there is a fundamental drive for the ego to define itself with a stable image that "is what it is" as you say - that's one way of stating the basic premise of psychoanalysis. Like it or not, your conscious and unconscious mind operates by the rules of language, which works by defining categories based on how they differ from one another. The whole 'finding yourself' thing, believing that "you" are some magical, intangible kernel of positive substance that cannot be reduced to 'mere words' and explains why your actions and desires are somewhat consistent... It 'feels right' on a fundamental level precisely because it isn't right, because it reproduces the same sort of egoic process to stabilize one's self-image as all the social customs we all love to identify as silly and irrational. On a personal level, if you refuse to analyse yourself in this sort of mechanistic way, how can you ever resolve your own irrational fears and hangups? Should you just accept that you, as a whole and indivisible entity, happen to include a bunch of destructive habits and behaviors, or should you try to analyse why those behaviors manifest even when you recognise them as destructive? How can you do the latter without this sort of "fragmented" analysis?

I disagree with Leary's model in its actual content, but not with the idea of modeling a formal structure to consciousness.

To be fair, -neptune-, while I see where you're coming from based on the popularity of silly romanticized views of 'the East' and demonized views of 'the West' among (mostly leftist) critical theorists, I don't think that's what The Smoking Man was implying - not "Eastern mysticism is better than Western rationalism," more of a post-structuralist argument if I'm interpreting it correctly, that we should not try to define ourselves in such structured/mechanistic terms, reducing our thoughts and actions to predictable results of some system at work, etc. As a die-hard psychoanalytic structuralist, I obviously disagree, but still.

To further harass our dear smoking man - how can you identify some methods of interpreting the world as more or less 'wrong-headed' or inaccurate without categorizing? You've attempted to define one of presumably many modes of understanding the world, then to introduce a hierarchy of which ones are better or worse. In my mind, at least, this is fundamentally the same sort of logic that I see you as criticizing, which would back up my inevitability claim.

edit: sorry to further threadjack, but one thing I love about Lacanian psychoanalysis that may resolve some of your issues with this method of thinking about the mind: while psychoanalysis certainly does describe in great detail the mechanistic workings of language and the ego, it does NOT try to define how each individual will relate to these systems. It's not an attempt to 'define away' free choice or agency and, in fact, has some very interesting things to say about our free agency as subjects. Basically, it tries to define the structure of language and our own brains and how this shapes the ways we are able to think about and interact with ourselves and the outside world. Beyond that, it describes some common 'pitfalls' of reasoning that this structure can cause people to fall into (like the drive to find a stable, positive self-image), but it leaves open the question of how each of us will relate to this system. If you use the common computer user analogy for our mind's relationship to the physical brain (it's the computer, we're the user), psychoanalysis describes the OS and software interface on that computer but not which buttons we will choose to press or what we will choose to _do_ with that computer. That analogy falls apart a bit because in this case the computer and its users are intrinsically connected rather than being two separate entities, one of which autonomously chooses to interact with the other, but it imparts the basic idea that psychoanalysis is not deterministic. Much as we (almost) all have mouths and vocal cords, yet describing their mechanical functioning in no way denies our autonomous ability to choose what to say, psychoanalysis explains the structure of our consciousness but doesn't rob it of the 'consciousness' part, like some deterministic science-derived ontologies of empirical reductionism try to when they say consciousness is just an illusion and thoughts are just patterned chemical reactions.

 

[The Smoking Man]

TheSmokingMan: "it is what it is" says nothing. It's a nice abstract thought to meditate on, but categorization is the only way human beings can understand complex systems rather than simply accept and romanticize whatever relationship we already happen to have with them. The psyche itself is deeply fragmented, yet there is a fundamental drive for the ego to define itself with a stable image that "is what it is" as you say - that's one way of stating the basic premise of psychoanalysis. Like it or not, your conscious and unconscious mind operates by the rules of language, which works by defining categories based on how they differ from one another. The whole 'finding yourself' thing, believing that "you" are some magical, intangible kernel of positive substance that cannot be reduced to 'mere words' and explains why your actions and desires are somewhat consistent... It 'feels right' on a fundamental level precisely because it isn't right, because it reproduces the same sort of egoic process to stabilize one's self-image as all the social customs we all love to identify as silly and irrational. On a personal level, if you refuse to analyse yourself in this sort of mechanistic way, how can you ever resolve your own irrational fears and hangups? Should you just accept that you, as a whole and indivisible entity, happen to include a bunch of destructive habits and behaviors, or should you try to analyse why those behaviors manifest even when you recognise them as destructive? How can you do the latter without this sort of "fragmented" analysis?

"It is what it is" was a gross oversimplification. Maybe "it is a, b, c, d,...; and a, b, c, d,... is it" would be more accurate to what I was trying to say. As in, "it" is the synergy of a combination of different bits and pieces that are unique to "it". Suppose that would still be some kind of grouping. But it's more breaking one thing down into its components, or describing it, rather than trying to categorize different things into an arbitrarily defined whole based on their sharing of some common base components (which seems to have a very nasty tendency of breeding assumptions). The example of how we rigidly define sexuality would fall under the latter. Taxonomy would be another example (also consider how taxonomy is difficult due to trying to determine what makes a single unique species).

To further harass our dear smoking man - how can you identify some methods of interpreting the world as more or less 'wrong-headed' or inaccurate without categorizing? You've attempted to define one of presumably many modes of understanding the world, then to introduce a hierarchy of which ones are better or worse. In my mind, at least, this is fundamentally the same sort of logic that I see you as criticizing, which would back up my inevitability claim.

I am only saying that x is wrong-headed in my eyes and am attempting to explain why. I am seeing "wrong-headed" as a subset of x, not x as a subset of "wrong-headed". Keep in mind this is an approach to thinking.

 

[yougene]

Leary's 8 circuit model attempts to build on Piaget's developmental model. These sorts of models are predated by thinkers like James Baldwin and Sri Aurobindo by centuries which include peak states of consciousness in their models( though not through psychedelics ).

A pitfall Leary makes is he doesn't differentiate between states of consciousness and stages of consciousness. The psychedelic experience is both one of unfolding stages and cascading peak states. A modern model that does take this distinction into account is the wilber-comb lattice. The grid basically conveys that states can be experienced at any stage of consciousness.

 

[Delsyd]

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[CFC]

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