DRUG THEORIST SADIE PLANT sucks on the long, bendy tubing of a hookah at Kush, a Moroccan-style bar in downtown Manhattan, and exhales a cloud of tobacco smoke. "This is the real thing, not like the crap you get in these," she says, gesturing at the packet of name-brand cigarettes next to her glass of mint tea. "And it's really quite potent." Halfway through the six dollar chunk of apple-scented tobacco, she does indeed look at bit dizzy.
Referenced in Alice In Wonderland and Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit," the hookah is one of many examples of the way drugs have long been identified in our imagination with the mystic Orient. From its flow-oriented spirituality to its ego-dissolving herbal potions, the East beckons those who yearn to defect from the Occidental tyranny of sober reason. And Plant shares this view: she sees drugs as the anti-Enlightenment in powder or pill form, directly challenging Western humanist confidence in the power of will. "It's a big Western error to think that individual humans, or even groups of them, can control things," she says. "Drugs are a perfect place from which to interrogate that notion."
A thirty-five-year-old cyberfeminist and renegade from British academia, Plant has always been interested in anything that unsettles and undermines control structures. Her first book, written as a Ph.D. dissertation, was a study of Situationism, the Dada-influenced anarchist movement whose ultra-extreme theories influenced the May 1968 riots in Paris and inspired many key combatants in British punk. Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + The New Technoculture, written while Plant was a research fellow and director of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick, has been hailed as a '90s equivalent to The Female Eunuch. "With Zeroes, Sadie was working on the cutting edge of understanding cyberculture from a feminist perspective," says N. Katherine Hayles, a professor at UCLA and the author of the acclaimed How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. "Her really important contribution is recovering the secret history of women working in computing, which is still seen as a male-dominated field." Beyond its gender polemic, though, Zeroes is also a poetically written verging on anarcho-mystical paean to chaos -- the promiscuous, border-dissolving and mutagenic flows of information, desire, trade. In her new book, Writing On Drugs, the first fruit of her post-academic career as a "freelance thinker," Plant adds drugs to her litany of chaos-generating agents that mess with consciousness on an individual level and cause all kinds of turbulence in the body politic, through the seemingly ineradicable black markets they create.
One of Plant's key polemics in Writing On Drugs -- which is set for early summer publication by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux -- involves demolishing the real/unreal, authentic/vicarious distinction that still governs much thinking about drug experiences. For her, the interesting thing about drugs is that they are material substances that make relatively specific, physical interventions in consciousness. Although she has sympathies with the grand tradition of using drugs as part of a spiritual quest for higher states of consciousness and as ritualized encounters with a transcendental beyond, Plant has more in common with the demystified approach of today's post-rave generation, who increasingly explore drugs purely for the intrinsic interest of their precise perceptual distortions and sensory enhancements, without making the kind of investment in ideas of the visionary or shamanic that characterized the generation of psychonauts that included Aldous Huxley, R. Gordon Wasson, and Tim Leary. For Plant, "the scrambling of perceptions" is itself the revelation -- the discovery that reality is "just a deeply contingent effect of the interaction between your environment and one of many possible neurochemical brain-states," that the bandwith and processing-speed of your cranial computer can be drastically expanded. Plant's materialist approach makes her the Scully to Terence McKenna's Mulder -- the cautious, sensible, almost incongruously grounded woman in a boy's club of crackpot speculation and wild-eyed messiah complexes.
IN HER NATIVE BRITAIN, Plant is one of the country's most famous "media academics," writing for quality newspapers and pontificating on the highbrow BBC Radio program Start The Week alongside fellow guests like Gore Vidal and Martin Amis. None of which is bad for a woman who comes from "not at all a literary or intellectual background. My parents left school at 15, and ran their own engineering business, so I grew up amongst heavy machinery and engineering blueprints." Born in 1964 and bred in Birmingham, the dowdy industrial heartland of the UK, Plant spent her childhood reading and writing, and her late adolescence reveling in and on the "free festival" scene -- a nationwide circuit of drug-and-music-fueled bacchanals similar to today's raves or Burning Man but far more disorganized. Going to her first festival in 1981, she remembers being stunned by the sheer size of "what back then was known as the Peace Convoy"-- a nomadic hippy calvacade of thousands of trucks, vans, cars, and horse-drawn caravans that spent the summer migrating from festival to festival, despite police roadblocks and persecution from local residents. These events were Plant's introduction to anarchist practice, and a key influence on the anti-politics of self-organizing activity she subscribes to. "I used to love the way a town of sorts would emerge in a few hours, with temporary landmarks and streets. It still intrigues me how they did it. There was one festival I went to that drew fifty thousand people and lasted a couple of weeks -- long enough to have its own urban history, with three deaths and an outbreak of meningitis!"
It was through the Situationist pamphlets she found at the free festivals that Plant also encountered anarchist theory. The result was her first book, The Most Radical Gesture, where she used the Situationists' fervent utopianism as a stick to bash postmodern defeatism. It was while she was writing the book as her Ph.D. at Manchester University that she witnessed another chaotic outbreak of cultural dissidence: the rave movement, born of the synergy between futuristic electronic dance music and the designer drug Ecstasy. Her experiences at Manchester's clubs are the seeds that bloomed eight years later as Writing On Drugs.
"What really got me started was the mystery of Ecstasy," she recalls. "MDMA has been around for most of the twentieth century; it had moments of popularity in the '60s, but it never became a culture until the late '80s." Why this strange time-lag, given MDMA's intense pleasures -- euphoria, hyper-tactile sensuality, overwhelming feelings of trust, intimacy, and affection? Plant's answer was that Ecstasy was "waiting" for the right technology to arrive and "potentiate" it, to use the pharmacological term for the synergistic interaction of two drugs. "There's something about the clean precision of the MDMA experience that seems to fit digital technology, the same technology that enabled the creation of that very precise rhythmic dance music." Beyond this, she sees Ecstasy and rave music as training the nervous system and human sensorium in preparation for the Internet and virtual reality. In Writing On Drugs, she describes how ravers in the raptures of Ecstasy feel "overwhelmed by their own connectivity," merging not just with music and with the crowd but with machines too: the sound-system, the dazzling lighting effects and lasers, and all the other high-tech elements used to "engineer atmospheres." Melting what Reich called character armor, Ecstasy creates a kind of porous, permeable ego that's supple and open to connection and contact. It's a process that Plant describes as "positive self-destruction, a self-destruction without death-wish."
Plant originally planned to write a single book on drugs and technology that would cover the entire terrain she ended up dividing between Zeroes + Ones and Writing On Drugs. "The Zeroes + Ones element was gonna be the exterior technology -- computing, the Internet, VR. Drugs were like the interior technology, the 'soft' or 'wet' technology that reconfigures the brain," she explains. Plant sees drugs as cyborgizing -- inorganic elements "inserted" into the body and interfacing with the nervous system to enable perceptions and sensations inaccessible to the undrugged organism.
"Drugs are the perfect example of a subtle prosthesis, working on the internal wiring of the body in a way that makes the traditional notion of becoming a cyborg through adding robotic attachments seem really quaint and archaic. And I'm sure there'll come a point where drugs themselves will seem very clumsy and dirty -- in that sense of being imprecise -- compared with future forms of enhancement."
The "bionic," superhumanizing aspect of drugs helps explain why the military has been so intimately involved with them in this century, using stimulants like amphetamine to enhance soldiers's fighting capabilities and R&D-ing the potential applications of LSD and MDMA as disorientation-inducing weapons and/or "truth serums." In Writing On Drugs, Plant traces this drug/warfare interface back to the vegetable kingdom: the herbal, Gaia-given substances that some drug enthusiasts regard as superior to synthesized man-made drugs originally evolved to discourage animal predators by causing nausea, delirium or death when ingested. Intoxicants are all, at root, toxins; drug experiences, says Plant, are little infusions of death into life. Which is why the shamanic traditions of using plant hallucinogens tend to imagine the trip as a journey across the border between life and death.
WRITING ON DRUGS IS ALL ABOUT the myriad ways in which the production, trafficking, and use of mind-altering substances has shaped our economic, political, and cultural history. Half the book is taken up with a survey of drugs' influence on literature, taking in suspects usual and unusual (Coleridge, Poe, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Sherlock Holmes, Wilkie Collins, etc.) and arguing that a hefty strand of high culture has been precisely that -- "high" as a kite. Plant argues that even the most sober, abstemious regions of society have been contaminated by druggy consciousness, because drug-derived sensations get encoded in cultural forms -- not just books, but movies, music, and TV commercials.
One of Plant's most provocative arguments is that advertising in its modern sense began as a surrogate for more direct forms of hooking the customer. "The Coca Cola company was the first big company to invest in mass advertising, and they did that in an attempt to keep the market they'd first acquired when they still had a substantial amount of cocaine in the drink. If you can't hook consumers one way, you have to find another. Every commodity today tries to be as close to a drug as it can possibly be without actually being a drug." The intimacy of drugs and "normal life" goes much further than the way they've insinuated their influence through all levels of our culture. As Plant notes in Writing On Drugs, every single one of us is guilty of "possession," because the human brain runs on neurochemicals that are similar to or near-identical to illegal substances. (Endorphins, for instance, are so named because of their proximity to the opium derivative morphine.) It's obvious, really: Drugs wouldn't work if the brain wasn't full of receptors predisposed to being activated by these electro-chemical triggers. The upshot of human brain chemistry is that there is no such thing as "sobriety"; consciousness itself is an ever-shifting tissue of different drug-states. "There are all sorts of non-drug activities that obviously change that neurochemical balance -- sex, exercise, food," notes Plant, sipping a cappucino at a Lower East Side cafe where you still have to ask for a key to the bathroom -- a relic of the pre-gentrification era, when it was necessary to discourage junkies from sneaking in them to shoot up. "Then there are all the more extreme techniques for achieving an altered state, be it yoga or whatever."
There are points in Writing On Drugs where Plant flirts with the idea that drugs can access certain "revelations." The twist is that it's not a transcendent reality "out there," but one deep within the hard wiring of the brain itself. She subscribes to Henri Michaux's mescaline-inspired conviction that there's a kind of pre-cultural commonality underlying all the many forms of psychedelic experience through history and across the globe. The deranged geometry of lattices, honeycombs, lacework, and spiderwebbing, the baroquely infolding spirals and proliferating ornamentation, and the mosaic vision and kaleidoscopic turbulence, seen by users of LSD, peyote, DMT, psilocybin, and other hallucinogens, find a visual echo in such cultural forms as the "coptic light" patterns of Arabian carpets and the paisley fabric of the Indian subcontinent. Michaux speculated that all this drug-induced eye candy constitutes an amplification of brain wave activity, especially that of the visual cortex. The fact that some migraine sufferers see similar patterns -- known as the migraine aura -- suggests that in certain extreme states, the MS/DOS and subroutines of the brain can be apprehended by consciousness. "Some people can get the aura effects without the pain of migraine," says Plant. "It's happened to me about three times in my life, at times of extreme exhaustion. This almost kaleidoscopic stuff kind of creeps across your visual field from one side to the other. It's really quite stunning, and not at all scary. The fact that there are 'natural' equivalents to drug-induced experiences suggests the possibility you are in some sense observing what's going on in the brain." Noting the similarity between these psychedelic hallucinations and the self-similar patterns of Mandelbrot's fractals, Plant characterizes the drugged or migrained brain as a cranked-up biochemical computer capable of picturing the self-organizing behavior and nonlinear dynamism at play within normally staid reality.
THERE ARE TWO SIDES TO PLANT: One is the sane, pragmatic, down-to-earth daughter of self-employed parents. This is the Plant who diligently slogs through scientific writings for nuggets of inspiration, who's prudently cagey about her "field research" for the new book on the grounds that talking about her drug use might result in problems with visas to foreign countries. The other side of Plant is the anarchist free spirit -- the seventeen-year-old whose eyes were blown by the free festivals, the avid reader of books by drug fiends like Burroughs and Dick, the writer who herself plans to abandon fact for full-blown fiction, the neuro-philosophical adventurer who eventually reveals that she's tried almost all the illegal chemicals mentioned in Writing On Drugs.
All these tendencies converge in Plant's controversial endorsement of "market forces," which figure in the new book as an ambivalent appreciation of the international drug trade -- a dark parody of globalization, the id of the New World Order. Appropriately enough, it was at Pharmakon, a 1992 drug culture symposium in Brighton, England, that Plant threw down her gauntlet at the left-wing orthodoxies that still dominate British academia, in the form of a paper cowritten with Nick Land called "Cyberpositive." The title is a twist on cyberneticist Norbert Wiener's ideas of "negative feedback" and "positive feedback." Where the conservative Wiener valued "negative feedback" (homeostatic equilibrium), Plant and Land embraced positive feedback (vicious circles, runaway tendencies) and specifically celebrated the propensity of market forces to generate disorder and destabilize control. There's a gleeful, gloating tone to the way in which the duo exalt capital as "a viral contagion" that scorns national boundaries, deletes cultural traditions and overrides human priorities: "Everything cyberpositive is an enemy of mankind."
Today, Plant says the essay was written as a provocation. Her real attitude is more humanely ambivalent. During the '80s, she opposed the modernizing policies of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government -- the crushing of Britain's once enormously powerful labor unions, the dismantling of the welfare state, the privatization of nationally owned industries and utilities. But by the early '90s, she was coming to terms with the idea that Thatcherism's assault on "dependency culture" really had been a revolution, creating the climate for this decade's upsurge of British fashion, art, and pop culture (including her beloved rave scene, which, for all its Ecstasy-addled utopianism is anarcho-capitalist to the core, from its illegal warehouse parties, pirate radio stations, independent record labels, and the drug dealers themselves). Plant stresses the fact that she's no fan of huge corporations -- she sees capitalism not as a coherent system but as a pluralistic warzone organized around a perpetual tension between centralizing entities (wannabe-monopoly corporations, government agencies) and bottom-up, grass-roots activity (plucky entrepreneurs, street markets). You can guess which side she's on.
Sympathy for the underdog and small-is-beautiful sentiments notwithstanding, there are those who reject Plant's ideas as a merely a postmodern update of nineteenth-century laissez-faire economics -- the update aspect being the way she uses ideas from chaos theory and cybernetics to effectively "naturalize" what is really a human construction, the free market. "Natural's not in it," says Judith Williamson, Professor of Cultural History at Middlesex University, and writer for the left-leaning British newspaper the Guardian. "All these excitingly eroticised ideas about the flows of capital absolve one from morality. Most of capitalism's flows are deeply pernicious." She castigates Plant's attitude for its fatalistic underestimation of the power of human beings to change things on both the individual and collective level. "Human will is not nothing. All through history there have been huge acts of courage and altruism." Indeed, Plant's understanding of how things change leaves no role for charismatic, far-sighted individuals, for a Bill Gates or Fidel Castro.
What Williamson denigrates as "inevitabilism," Plant herself characterises as a Zen or Taoist view of the world -- not so much devaluing the power of human agency as putting it in perspective. "Nothing takes the credit -- or the blame -- for either the runaway tendencies at work or the attempts to regulate them," she wrote in Zeros + Ones, arguing for a radically depersonalized conception of how history works. "Political struggles and ideologies have not been incidental to these shifts, but cultures and the changes they undergo are far too complex to be attributed to attempts to make them happen or hold them back." In Writing On Drugs, she sees a kind of equivalence between drugs and capital: both are the quintessence of trade and traffic, both make a mockery of national boundaries, both resist governmental attempts to regulate their flows. (The Soviet Union, for instance, was ultimately unable to stay uninfected by "the contagion of markets.") In the twentieth century's history of drugs prohibition, she sees a powerful demonstration of human hubris: the struggle to suppress the drug trade hasn't just failed, it's created a monstrous, hydra-headed narco-military-industrial complex that perfects its wares through refinement (cocaine to crack), researches and develops new products, and aggressively markets its wares to consumers. If the impersonal laws of supply and demand had been allowed to play themselves out without interference, the global drug problem and its equally cancerous double -- the industry of policing, surveillance, incarceration, and civil rights infringement -- would never have reached anything like their current proportions.
When it comes to the war on drugs, neither cops nor crooks have anything to gain from an armistice. "In Britain, there's a big reassessment going on about drugs, and someone who argues the case for decriminalization told me he'd been accosted at a public meeting by a drug dealer who asked 'are you trying to put me out of business?'" Plant chuckles grimly. "There's a lot of very different interests that are well served by the status quo." A sane, pragmatic solution to the drug problem? Plant isn't convinced we'll see decriminalization in our lifetime. Sitting with the hookah pipe in her hand in the mock-Moroccan murk of Kush, she doesn't look too bothered, though -- there'll always be the fascinating trail of havoc left by drugs for her to follow.
Simon Reynolds is the author of Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture (Routledge) and operates a website at http://members.aol.com/blissout.
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