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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