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Dialects of Experience,

On Drugs and Madness.


I. Interpretation

Index I II III IV V VI VII
 Science and Common Sense generally approach drugs and madness, in a manner of speaking, from the Outside... That is, as an object for study or a case for diagnosis, an exoticized daytrip into the Wholly Other, a dangerous deviation, a completely unique and almost monadic vantagepoint... or, even as a Supertruth that is too sublime for words.... Whatever the case, drugs and madness very often represent, for fans and foes alike, an incommensurable region of human experience. Something distant and distinct, on another shore, from everyday thinking.


As a kind of personal experiment, what I want to do is to approach drugs and madness more from the Inside. Not as in the inside of a skull or a mind, but as in the inside of a group or culture. I want to understanding the ostensibly weirdball modes found in drugs and madness by entering their worldviews and symbologies, while refracting the common world through their "horizon of prejudices," and pulling off a passable translation of their meanings, insights, and self-assertions.




What I have in mind is something like the work of Ernst Cassirer, especially in the second part of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms— the volume on mythic thinking. By now, many of us late-Westerners understand how mythic thinking gets mangled and manhandled when interpreted according to our own categories and symbolic order. Cassirer, however, goes further by unmangling the mess and laying out exactly how such thinking could be translated— be made intelligible— by certain shifts in our orders and categories— usually, for him, of the Kantian variety. Very systematically, he takes up early religious and cultural forms— like sacrifice, animism, numerology, and many others— and handles them within their own categories and orders... and by doing so, makes them seem so fully sensible that you cannot believe you didn't think of it yourself.


Let's take prayer and incantation... We cannot fully understand prayer and incantation with an Enlightenment conception of language and causality. Doing this, of course, would just be to misunderstand them. For one, words— for earlier tribes and peoples— were not pale images of the world, as they became for the Enlightenment; mere reflections and representations. They were substantive chunks of the cosmos. Bits and pieces. Likewise, causality was not the streamlined mechanics given to us by 17th-century science; a mechanics that parses the accidental from the essential. For early and ancient peoples, causality was something all-pervasive, with little room for coincidence. A sticky web connecting together every last bit, piece, and substantive chunk of their cosmos.


So, given this swollenness in their Kantian categories— of substance and causation— is it any wonder that they treated language for the charged and powerful thing that it actually is? Prayer and incantation were not a vague beseeching of hidden forces, as it might appear from outside— like mere superstition— but as Cassirer says, "real and effective action." A force that directly manipulates the world about us.


By the end of the book, Cassirer, with some historicized Kant and some clever story-telling, seems to have revealed the deep contours of an entire form of thinking. And how? By assuming and accepting the self-assertions of this other weltanschaung. By mindfully carrying back meanings, like pails of water from a distant river. By bridging that perfect "fusion of horizons" that, in the Gadamerian sense, is constitutive of understanding. He arrives at a faithful translation between discourses— or more truthfully, between diverse thinkings and semiologies.


So Understanding, for our purposes here, is not the grasping of causes or the determination of essences. We come to understand these forms of life and thought as one learns to understand a foreign language. We don't try to understand a foreign language— like Japanese or Korean— from examining its causes or essences. Instead, we simply enter the discourse, adopt its terms and meanings, and assume them to be more or less meaningful. This is known, in the biz, as the Principle of Charity. We learn to speak by striving, guesswork and blunder; by making the discourse translatable and roughly commensurable with our native tongue...


Well, the same goes for those wayward states I've designated as dialects of experience. We should also strive to understand them on and in their own terms; according to their own weighted shapes and capital vocabulary. This practice puts us somewhere, in Ricoeur's distinction, between the "hermeneutics of belief" and the "hermeneutics of suspicion." We are putting stock in the assertions, yeah, but all the while knowing that they need a bit of squinting, polishing, parentheses, and scare quotes— a little help to get them from as-is to such-as... A little of that detective work usually learned in the School of Suspicion.


Dialects of Experience.
I. Interpretation.
II. Twilight Orderings.
III. Subjecthood and Hypersemia.
IV. In Secret.
V. In Letters.
VI. In the Forum.
VII. The Axiom of Mood.
VIII. Quick Visions
IX. Lines of Force


2009



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