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Shamanic technology: exploring the Techno-Genetrix
Article in Scrutiny2 · May 2008
DOI: 10.1080/18125440308566003
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Shamanic Technology: Exploring the Techno-Genetrix
Carstens, Delphi. 2003. Scrutiny2, 8(2):24-32. ISBN: 1812-5441.
Despite all their apparent logic and certitude today’s scientific and technological
discourses stand on shifting ground.
Chaos mathematics, non-linear dynamics, and
quantum physics have struck at the very linear heart of old-school science whilst its
offshoot, technology, has been derided as organized mysticismi.
In fact, on closer
inspection, the twin pillars that uphold the myth of progress appear to be nothing
other than that which reason sought to displace - myth and magic.ii Drawing heavily
on chiliastic prophecy and notions of transcendence, technology plunges toward an
uncertain future.iii
As we hurtle rapid-fire toward probable ecological disasters and
perceived Armageddon scenarios, hallucinatory maps that point the way to strange
imagined futures hover at the edges of our vision. One such map at the hybrid
crossroads of science, myth, and magic – one I have attempted to draw into focus - is
the Techno-Genetrixiv, a fable of generative technology that seeks to obliterate
distinctions between human/machine, nature/culture, and primitive/modern as it plots
a way past the ‘end’ of (linear) history.
This map tracks through the marginalized
literary discourse of science fiction, informs cultural historians such as Manual de
Landa, fuels the conversations of media critics such as Marshall McLuhan and Erik
Davis, appears on the radar-screens of contemporary theorists such as Sadie Plant and
Delueze and Guatarri, and invigorates the dreams of ethnobotanists and future-gazers
such as Terence McKenna.
Tracing the roots of technology down into an archaic (cyclical) past(s), the TechnoGenetrix leads us to the ancient figure of the shaman, the first machinic artisan and
boundary-blurring cyborg.
It is on this ecstatic technologist and wildcard that the
Techno-Genetrix pins all hope for a no-longer-human future.
The merger between humans and their tools arguably started when the first stone
implement was wielded. In today’s technologically-driven world – where carving
flints and bone needles have been replaced by machines of all shapes and sizes and a
barrage of cultural, economic ‘machineries’ inform even the most ‘backward’ of
human populations - the faint boundary between humans and their machinic
‘extensions’ has seemingly been breached. “In our time, a mythical time, we are all
chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are
cyborgs,” proclaims Donna Haraway in her seminal “Cyborg Manifesto.” Unlike the
hardbodied Arnold Schwarzeneggers and Linda Hamiltons popularized by the
Terminator
movies,
Haraway’s
human/machine
hybrids
aren’t
necessarily
characterised by steel prosthetics and infrared eyes. Instead, they are “an elementary
aspect of late capitalism,” nimble fingered women working 12 hour shifts on
machines in Malaysian sweatshops, workers glued to computers and cell-phones, and
housewives operating their dishwashers and automatic top-loaders. In her ontology,
our use of tools and machines has set in motion a transmogrification of our species.
“Part of the world’s population is already post-human,” concurs critic Mark Dery,
“the future has already happened” (1992:102).v
Evolving at unparalleled rates, the proliferation of communication technologies seems
to be ushering in a totally new, global social fabric. Territories of “production,
reproduction and imagination” are all at stake in the “border war” between organism
and machine, argues Haraway, adding, “All who would remain in control of their
bodies … (must) come to terms with the essentially cyborgian nature of lived reality
in a technoculture.”
Facing up to the dialectic of the machine-as-us is, however, no simple navigational
feat. Complex new body politics, the buzzing new networks of information exchange,
and the micro-political power-struggles between the technocratic elite and the
information-poor masses all conflate and add to a brimming sense of technological
unease. Fed on a steady diet of televised and billboarded media-bytes, our sense of
historical time and ways of comprehending the external world seem to be dissolving
into a constant electronic buzz. “We are abandoning ourselves to an “ecstasy of
communication … a cold and schizophrenic fascination with a gluttony of
information,” deliberates French postmodernist Jean Baudrillard in a bleak
observation (in Davis 1998:278).
Despite the seemingly sterile and frivolous nature of our interaction with
contemporary media machineries all may not be lost to the so-called ‘infoglut.’
Baudrillard’s mind-numbing ecstasy can ostensibly be coaxed into facilitating a newfangled and vital non-linear ontology. Part of our cyborg adaptation, muses critic
Erik Davis, “may actually involve moving the ecstasy of communication to a higher
ground, where we might grab this [potentially] visionary bull by the horns”
(1998:279).
In our techno-confused world, no figure could be better suited to the task of gaining
this new technological terra-infirma and re-seizing the ontological tiller of being than
the ancient arbiter of the sacred and master (and mistress) of communicative ecstasy –
the shaman. So important was shamanism to our collective forebears “that if one
equated its impact upon their way of life to that of the combined influences of
religion, science, and art upon contemporary industrialized peoples, one would not be
exaggerating or hyperbolic” (Dragoin 1997:236).
As overarching as such an organization must have been to the humanity of prehistory, when confronted with the technologies, images, simulations, and social
relations of today’s postmodern world it seems out of place. Nevertheless, shamans
may have much to teach us about technology, healing the disintegrated self and
realigning our deranged ecstasy of communication. Armed with a “savantlike talent
for emotional communication” the shaman is an exemplar of the ecstatic interface
(1997:242).
Possessed of an ability to “transcend time and space,” overcome
dualities, merge with other life forms or abstract/non-physical entities and rise above
the “profane human condition,” the shaman is able to “to restore the
‘communicability’ that was the law in illo tempore (Eliade 1989:171). The shaman is
– in effect – the a-political prototype of Haraway’s wildcard, the cyborg; a being that
she describes in shamanic language as an agent of “transgressed boundaries, potent
fusions and dangerous possibilities” (1991:154).
Aside from sharing a mutual
boundary-blurring function, both cyborg and shaman are also intimately bound up in
the ecstasies (and agonies) of the contemporary technological discourse – bearing in
mind one crucial difference: Whereas the cyborg’s ecstasy is a by-product of
technology, the shaman’s is evidently responsible for hastening the birth of
technology itself.
As a frenzied master (or mistress) of fire, the shaman has been
described as playing the role of technological midwife (1989:474).
“Fire is the fundamental and most basic example of man’s harnessing of natural
forces that led to technology proper – modern technology is a fire based technology,”
states Carrol Brown, linking the fire-magic of shamans with the Promethean mythvi
that underlies the origins of the machine (1993:167-168). Anthropologist Mircea
Eliade also connects the shaman with the craftsmen who literally fired early
civilizations into technological shape – smiths (1989:473-476). “Shamanism begins
with a kind of deep penetration into early metallurgy. In this process, the smith and
the Shaman are twin brothers linked together in the extraction of energy from matter,”
explains physicist and mathematician Ralph Abrahams. “This 'whispering from the
demon artificers,' as Jung put it, has led us into technological self-expression, and
even self-expression per se” (1992:98).
For the purposes of the Techno-Genetrix, the process of transformation and regeneration that the shaman activates via fire magic is of primary interest. Although
Eliade records numerous techniques for engendering magical heat (such as extreme
bodily deprivation, repetitive chanting, drumming, and relentless ecstatic dancing), he
fails to give much credence to one of the fundamental agents of ecstatic boundary
dissolution.
“There is every reason to believe that the use of narcotics was
encouraged by the [shamanic] quest for magical heat,” he avers, adding the proviso
that the presence of these substances more than likely indicated a “decadence of the
(original) technique of ecstasy” (1989:470).vii
As agents of the polymorphous and perverse,viii it comes as no surprise therefore, to
discover that cyborgs had their origin in the boundary transgressions facilitated by
drug-use. “The cyborg deliberately incorporates exogenous components extending
the self-regulatory control function of the organism,” wrote the research space
scientists that first coined the term cyborg on the threshold of the psychedelic sixties.ix
For Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline these “exogenous components”
constituted various “psychic energizers” administered via inbuilt osmotic pumps that
would enable space-faring cyborgs to control the functioning of their central nervous
systems and, like shamanic initiates, cope with extremes, augment their perceptions,
and even heighten their spiritual awareness (1995:31-33).
The ability to reach a pitch of contemplative intensity and transmute oppositions (such
as human and machine) is brought about by the shaman’s (often drug-induced) fiery
trance. Popularised by Gordon Wasson, Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley and a range
of other ‘wayward’ thinkers, a range of shamanically powerful central nervous system
stimulants and ‘psychic energizers’ took the flower-power generation of the 1960’s by
storm. The mind-altering substances that were used and abused by disturbingly large
numbers of students, literati, and ‘drop-out’s’ were the by-products of the burgeoning
revolution in biotechnology (for example, LSDx) or the rediscovered agents of an
ancient shamanic gnosis (for example, ‘magic’ mushrooms, Mescaline, Pyote, Datura,
etc.).
Slipping through the chemical filters of brains, “drugs are very direct and very
intimate means of modifying human perception and behaviour,” writes Cyberhistorian Sadie Plant, “they are an example advanced biotechnology” (or wetwarexi)
that shamans have accessed for thousands of years(1998: 3).xii
Seemingly on intimate terms with technological and cultural advancements,xiii drugs –
whether synthesized or organic – allow humans to perceive at larger or smaller scales,
or at slower or faster speeds. Not only do they re-engineer the brain and augment its
ability to “process, retrieve, and store information,” drugs are arguably “changing the
body to suit technological developments” (Plant 1998: 3). ‘Dropping’ the infamous
‘brown acid’ and amped on the feedback distortions of electronic Rock, the frenzied
hippies at Woodstock were apparently doing more than simply advocating free love.
They were, according to Marshall McLuhan, “miming the electric speeds and the
externalization of nervous systems created by newly crafted electric circuitries”
(McKenna 1992:49).
Running rife through the margins of the counterculture, the ‘electrical’ effects of LSD
and its vegetable kin have literally reverberated through the wires.
Drug
experimentation has left its mark on users and non-users alike, speculate Delueze and
Gauttari - “it has changed the [social] perceptive coordinates of space-time and
introduced us to a universe of microperceptions” (1988: 248). Tangled up in minute
circuitry and woven molecular strands we have logged into the latticeworks of light,
vibrations and frequencies that characterise the contemporary communications/media
revolution and the nascent networks of cyberspace.
In our emerging globally networked village our bodies are “intertwined as never
before with increasingly dynamic flows of capital, goods, immigrants, pollution,
software, refugees, pop culture, viruses, weapons, ideas, and drugs” (Davis 1998:
301). Such a blurring of boundaries places us at a potentially treacherous crossroads,
under the sign of the Techno-Genetrix. “We're talking seriously mutated worlds that
never existed on this planet before … and it's not just ideas - it's the new flesh”
(Haraway 1997:3).
Drugs, of course, have not disappeared from the scene. Whilst LSD and a host of
designer wetwares continue to proliferate on the margins, a dizzying barrage of
chemicals, pharmaceuticals, vitamins, additives, nicotine, and caffeine fire up the
mainstream’s ‘ecstasy of communication.’
“Televisual communication” – as
Marshall McLuhan predicted - has itself become an enveloping “psychedelic” drug,
“plunging us into a mesh of pervasive energy that penetrates our nervous system
incessantly” (Plant 1998: 185). Caught up in a barrage of projected simulations, we
long to join “teleactors and teleactresses [and] give up our flesh to become part of a
datastream, a sequence of electronic pulses … to slip into an adjacent universe”
(Miller 1999:12).
The social hallucinations conjured by the communications revolution are by no means
restricted to the phantasms of television and cinema. Far more ‘subversive’ than the
unreal world of media icons are the hybrid identities and gender doubles (known as
avatars) available to the burgeoning millions of network gamers (MUDs), Playstation
kids, and online chat-roomers.
With a host of animal, wizard, or hero ‘digital
doubles’ to choose from, today’s digital gaming worlds bear an uncanny resemblance
to the realms traversed by ancient shamans who donned the shapes of beasts, battled
cosmic forces, and scrambled their genders as they journeyed through shifting
territories of spiritualised information space. “Of course, the shaman returned from
the bowels of the earth with medicine to heal the tribe, whereas we return from a
[usually caffeine-driven] night of MUDing or netlust with aching eyes, sore wrists,
and often a vaguely hollow feeling of spent life force,” remarks Erik Davis. “The
psychological, social, and even spiritual fallout from the widespread adoption of
digital avatars remains a complex question … Disincarnating into fleshless ‘godlike’
forms online … are we ascending or descending … enhancing or distorting our
perception of reality?” (1998:223-224).
Whether or not we possess, are possessed by (or dream of) the artificial ‘comforts’
brought about by light bulbs, cars, televisions, or the Internet, we are caught up in an
omnipresent technological epidermis that - however thin in places - stretches over the
entire globe. Underneath this skin, humans and their machines are ‘touching’ one
another in unheard of ways. “This is only the beginning,” remarks Sadie Plant, “of a
synaesthetic, immersive zone in which all the channels and senses find themselves
embroiled in an unclean promiscuity” (1998:186). With the “instant speed of electric
information” at our fingertips the machine is no longer just a bodily attachment, but
an immersive “environment, a space to be explored” (Johnson 1997:24).
According to Manual de Landa, our forays into emerging digital networks are birthing
electronic life-forms and computational societies that mimic the self-organisational
feats of all manner of abstract machines.xiv
“Human artisans,” he reasons, “are
playing the role of historically necessary channelers” of the new flesh (1991:8).xv
The immense exploratory and formative potential of technology has catapulted us into
a symbolic maze of abstraction and matters are literally heating up under our
machinic second-skin. “Technological change has been a lightning rod for all manner
of cultural electricity” and the info-based economies that have emerged out of
machine-driven global capital are often more rooted in the ether than they are in
corporeal (Johnson 1997:5). “We are no longer enchanted by production, but by the
reproduction of images and information,” states Erik Davis, noting that this
enchantment is construed as sublime only because it is terrifying and potentially
volatile (1998:306).
Trafficking with the abstract demons of cyberspace,xvi we are
tearing ourselves away from “sidereal time and circadian rhythms,” entering a
perpetual “artificial electronic day of information commutation” (Dixon 1998:125).
Clearly, our old flesh, animated by a sluggish sensory motor system, simply can’t
compute a way forward.xvii
At first, conceived of as an affirmative extension of man in his war against nature,
technology has since, however, mutated in the annals of postmodern panic theory into
a negative restraint, which copies without originals and drains away the golden aura
that once surrounded human agency and will-to-power. Explaining the techno-dread
that seems to permeate much contemporary philosophy, Joan Dixon writes that
postmodern theorists “are beginning to understand that even “agency has always been
a technologically produced category anyway” (Broadhurst-Dixon 1998:124).
“Coded, mapped, registered, saturated … [today’s] universal market of merchandise,
values, signs, [and] models leaves no room for the [human] imaginary,” postulates
Baudrillard (1995:123).
Marred by the supposed death of imagination and the
subsequent “hemorrhaging of reality,”(124) the real world once inhabited by the
human species has – according to Baudrillard - been sucked into a media-driven
technological “black hole” of artificial simulations and representations. This ‘morbid’
technological fascination, opines Paul Virilio, has now turned into a fatal psychosis “a spectacle of velocity in ruins” (in Kroker 1992:33).
In the grip of a veritable techno-terror, theorists such as Virilio, Baudrillard, Barthes,
Lyotard, and Foucault appear to be grappling with “the aftermath of the implosion of
the technological dynamo” (Kroker 1992:13). They are by no means alone, however,
in imagining that technology has become an internalized agent of our immanent
destruction.
According to self-described ex-human and cultural critic Stephen
Metcalf, a “postmodern panic” seems to have gripped a vast swathe of contemporary
theorists and critics the world over.
“Failing to conceive of any possibility of
inhabiting any space save the ruins of the old world order,” many of these “logicians”
have “conveniently” annulled “the uncertain future … as unthinkable or impossible”
(Dixon 1998:111-115).
Some, however, view the cataclysmic uncertainties of the present in a favourable
light. “Everything may be imploding … but let’s not mistake this for some type of
Armageddon scenario,” writes anarchist-philosopher Hakim Bey. “After all, it’s not
the world coming to an end, only the outmoded and empty husks of the social
catching fire and disappearing” (1991:80). For Bey, and others of his ilk, the way
forward lies in embracing “the hallucinations of speculative fiction and the [chemical
and magical] technologies of the imagination” (46).
Part of our journey into strange future worlds of the cyborg may – as Erik Davis
suggests – necessitate mastering the shaman’s knack for ecstatic communication and
moving our technologically frenzied ecstasy to a higher ground.
Rapturous
ascendancy doesn’t, however, come easily - it necessitates “a difficult process … a
dangerous passage” (Eliade 1989:484).xviii
Panic – if experimented with - can be a
fructifying event, avers Coil - a group of artists operating on the digital frontiers of
music.
Part of our healing, they declare, lies in performing self-surgery and
“deliberately nurturing states of mind usually regarded as dangerous and insane … a
kind of Murder in Reverse” (1988:3).
In short, we have to abandon our so-called
‘rational’ world-views before we can find our feet in the weird new tech-driven
paradigms that are emerging from the pure warxix of the present.
“Shamanism provides a new imperative to do something about the crises that are
threatening the planet,” opines theologist Graham Harvey, adding that the budding
digital underground provides the ideal platform for the contemporary ecstatic
voyager, whom he describes as a Techno-Shaman (Harvey 1997:124).
We should be revamping the tenets of shamanism and “merging the technologically
transformed human world with the archaic matrix of vegetable intelligence,” agrees
Terence McKenna (1992:93). The various wetwares employed by the shaman and his
cyber-age contemporaries seem to constitute the ideal agents of such an ecstatic
boundary disillusion. Their neurochemical effects plunge users into “a raging a
universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and decidedly
alien” (McKenna 1983:6).
Such a dive into “flows of intensity” replaces the self with “becomings-animal,
becomings-molecular” (Delueze & Guattari 1988:162).
Able to glimpse “other
universes and other levels of reality,” the shamanic traveler can tap into “what it is
like to be(come) every animal and plant … a blood cell, an atom, a thermonuclear
process inside the sun” (Talbot 1996:69).
In a sense, the destabilized shaman
becomes an “abstract machine … a probe-head capable of exploring a place of
possible forms [and becomings]” (De Landa 264).
Delving into the “memories of a sorcerer,” Delueze and Gautarri point out that,
alongside “experimentation with drugs,” the speculative hallucinations of science
fiction (SF) provide another shamanic probe-head that explores all manner of
interlinked states of evolution and progression – from animal, vegetable, and mineral
to “bacteria, viruses … and unnamable waves and indefinable particles” (1988:248).
Distorting the boundaries between genres and signs, SF becomes a veritable
technological bestiary that walks “the wavering line between science and myth”
(Brown 1993:169). Occasionally this hybrid genre becomes an ideal destabilising
laboratory for “causing a metaphorical destruction of the real world in the reader’s
head” (Clute 1999:314).
This suspension of the socially defined real provides a
platform from which to view novel technological forms and to expand our awareness.
The genre may even help us realize that the visionary ‘scientist’ or hero/heroine who
charts nature’s bizarre and unexplored levels of organization into science-fictional
techno-enhanced futures is no different to the mythical ecstatic shaman who traverses
the magical topographies of planetary information spaces.
Seen from orbit, our Earth’s night-side glitters with a bizarre latticework of lights.
From this glowing artificial ‘nervous system’ escapes a continuous stream of TVsignals and radio-waves that undulate outward through the seas of space, announcing
the birth of the new-flesh (and the potentially immanent destruction of the planet’s
biosphere)
to
any
extra-terrestrial
that
would
care
to
tune
in.
Actually, “the first signs of an alien intelligence may well come from this planet,”
declares performance artist Stellarc, suggesting that we should learn to love the transhuman cyborg that’s evolving in our midst (Dixon 1998:118). Invoking a vision of
“bionauts” and “evolutionary guides” launched on multiple trajectories into “different
and perhaps significant [technologically-augmented] biological landscapes,” Stellarc
calls for nothing less than a wholesale transmogrification of the flesh (Dery
1992:104).
“All I can tell you is that we are [becoming] fluid, luminous beings of fibers …
Crossing thresholds [and] stringing borderlines together,” we are entering strange new
worlds of hybridization (Delueze & Gauttari 1988:249-252).
i
1. According to sociologist William Stahl technology is “permeated with symbol and myth”
that exert pervasive powers over us. Anything but neutral, the mythological components of the
technological discourse are “implicit and hidden,” and hence doubly insidious. Equating the position
held by technology in modern society with that of a religious fervor, Stuhl opines that the technological
myth of progress has come to constitute the “One True Faith” – a meshwork of beliefs, values and
goals that’s tightly woven into the Western (and increasingly into the global) world-view. Technology
is tangled up in everything from “fads and fashions to the deepest symbols around which people
structure their identities and order their societies,” he cautions. “Much of the (technological) discourse
is mystification … (its) language is that of potency and mastery. Through our machines we command
the transformative power of the numinous, or at least we appear to” (1999: 3-18).
Science, technology, and mythology all “seek to produce ontological stability,” notes Caroll
Brown adding that myth is by far the oldest and most pervasive off these discourses (1999:169). “The
myth of an engineered utopia propels the ideology of technological progress, with its perennial
promises of freedom, prosperity, and release from disease and want,” declares Erik Davis (1998:3).
Underlying even myth, magical practices and metaphors have equally informed technology and
science. Illustrating the extensive presence of magical metaphors in computing jargon, Chris Cheser
remarks that the technologies that underlie both the industrial and communications revolutions are
magical in that they are invocational - “they mediate powers of invocation - the power to call things
up” (2002:2). The relationships between the oldest form of magic – namely, shamanism – and the
technological discourse are further explored here.
ii
“Chiliasm is a Christian form of apocalyptic prophecy which emphasizes the immediacy of
‘Judgement Day’ and the utopian ‘Kingdom of God,’” explains William Stuhl (1999:44) whose book
God and the Chip (1999) explores the relationship between apocalyptic and chiliastic notions and the
technological discourse.
iii
iv
According to the ancient myth of the Petra Genetrix (generative stone) the human race was
gestated in the dark and stony womb of the earth. This shamanic myth held that metals and minerals
were developing embryos that aided in nature’s birthing process (Ben-Tov 1995:93). The notion of a
Techno-Genetrix (generative technology) reworks the theme of the maternal rock, suggesting that
technology has now come to occupy the same cultural role originally held by nature – namely, that
technology is beginning to self-organize, utilizing humans to play the roles of obstetrician (or
midwife), shaman, and artisan in its own process of generation/creation.
v
For Dery, the cyborg is the ultimate expression of post-modernity, a hybrid monster that
permeates technocultural discourse. As a signification of “biology morphed by technology … its
physiology reconciles technoculture and nature, dystopia and arcadia, simulacrum and original”
(1992:101). Dery, however, restricts his contemporary examples of cyborgs to the mechanisms of
Hollywood (re. the Terminator and Alien movies) as well as to the privileged rich whom can afford
plastic surgery and organ transplants. Haraway, on the other hand, locates her cyborgs in every walk of
life – from export-processing and free-trade zones where the globalised poor slave on assembly-lines to
financial districts where stocktraders and magnates speculate on the abstract electronic movements of
capital. This “cyborg mutation” is the ideology of modern production, she notes, it is an “elementary
fact of late-capitalism” (1991:162).
“The Greeks deferred fire, the first support of all human [technological] culture, to the worldtranscending deed of their Prometheus,” writes Joseph Cambell (1993:35). As with any archaic
shaman - who’s journey, according to Eliade, is either one of ascent into the heavens or descent into the
underworld (1989:180) – “Prometheus ascended to the heavens, stole fire [technology] from the gods,
and descended” to teach humans the fiery arts (Cambell 1993:30).
vi
vii
Despite the fact that contemporary Shamanism is far more prevalent in South America than it
is anywhere else in the world, the region is given a cursory overview in Mircea Eliade’s magnum opus
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, with barely a mention made of what contemporary
anthropologists and ethnobotanists construe as the very crux of shamanic practice – the use of
hallucinogens. “As in Mexico [another part of the Americas almost completely untouched by Eliade’s
account], shamanism in South America tends to be almost exclusively psychedelic, making frequent
use of plants which contain hallucinogenic alkaloids,” notes Nevil Drury (1989:17). Following Gordon
and Valentina Wasson (the founders of ethnomycology), enthobotanist Terence McKenna claims in his
seminal Food of the Gods, “it is the presence of the hallucinogen which indicates that Shamanism is
authentic and alive” (1992:61). According to McKenna, one probable explanation for Eliade’s
omission is that “Western society regards psychoactive drugs as either frivolous or dangerous”
(1992:6). The failure of Eliade to take active cognisance of the use of hallucinogens has, of late, been
construed as a grave error, leading to “biased preconceptions” and “hapless and unfounded assertions”
about the true nature of shamanism (Ripinsky-Naxon 1993:132).
Unlike the ‘uncivilised’ sexual fantasies of Freud’s ‘primitive’ child, the cyborg’s assiduous
perversity transgresses the boundaries of the human flesh. “The cyborg signifies biology morphed by
technology, a playfully perversion notion that permeates technocultural discourse,” writes Mark Dery
viii
in Mondo 2000 no. 8 (1992:1). Similarly, for Donna Haraway, cyborgs originate precisely where
culturally-mediated boundaries are deliberately perverted, breached, discredited, and mixed-up (152).
“The term psychedelic means 'mind manifesting" and it describes the effect of LSD, peyote
and other psychoactive substances” (Schultes 1992: 178).
ix
x
Remarkably similar in its chemical composition to the legendary Ololiuqui - a plant widely
utilised by Shamans in Central America (Schultes 1992:158-163), LSD (or Acid) was utilised as a
marginal psychiatric tool in the 1950’s. During the Sixties, however, this powerful hallucinogen
became the avatar of higher consciousness for an entire generation of literati, students, and dropouts.
“My experiences with LSD and other psychedelics during the sixties influenced everything,” admits the
pioneer of Dynamical Systems Theory (a radical synergy of chaos math and quantum physics), Ralph
Abrahams (1992:153)
Just as human culture begins with the human body and its fleshiness, the ontology of today’s
machines begin with the metals and silicon that compose hardware; “the machinery - computers, wires,
plugs, keyboards, monitors - that define the material culture of cyberspace” (Bell 2001:217). Extending
the scope of hardware, software can be defined as “programs - instructions written by humans to tell
computers what to do” (Bell 2001:219). Wetware, on the other hand, refers to biotechnologies (drugs –
synthesized or organic) that ‘tell the human hardware (the mind/body) what to do.’ Augmenting the
human/machine interface (especially in the case of virtual reality interfaces) or – in the case of Cline
and Klyne’s cyborgs - to enable humans to function as machines, wetware – in many ways - represents
the actual genesis of the cyborg (Plant 1998:2-4). In terms of hacker jargon, the term (wetware) has
also been used to denote the ‘meat’ - i.e. the human body/brain with its onboard chemical factory.
xi
Employed as ‘biological microscopes,’ hallucinogens are ostensibly soft or ‘wet’
technologies that enable shamans to operate at a molecular level and download complex
pharmacopoias from the vegetable matrix. This is how the shamans manage to assemble complex plant
brews that “couple brain hormones with monoamine oxibase inhibitors,” or “discover forty different
sources of muscle paralyzers.” (Narby 1993: 68).
xii
xiii
Biologist Rupert Sheldrake connects the renaissance in the sciences that occurred during the
1960’s with the psychedelic revolution (Abraham et al. 1992: p.4). Sadie Plant concurs and claims
that drug-usage has always been on the forefront of technological and social upheaval. She cites the
large scale usage of opiates during the industrial revolution, the popularity of cocaine in the electric
early years of the 1900’s, the ascendance of LSD in the televisual and quantum 1960’s, and the
proliferation of ecstasy in the networked 1990’s as examples (1998:3).
Manual de Landa defines abstact machines as “sorting operations” or “structure-generating
processes” that run rife at all levels of self-organisation (1997:263-269). Elsewhere he tells us that
these abstract machines are scattered throughout the universe – from ‘prebiological adaptation
mechanisms’ such as chemical clocks, ‘sorting devices’ like rivers, to ‘symbol manipulating’ devices
such as DNA and software. Indeed, “the sophisticated programs created by Artificial Intelligence to
endow robots with self-organising behaviour are beginning to resemble those created by nature through
evolution … We can learn much from what nature has ‘created’ in order to evolve new [technological]
paradigms” (1991:134-135). From the vantage of the new-flesh, he avers, it is necessary to “blur the
distinction between organic and non-organic life” and to recognize that human artisans and shamans
“tap into the resources of self-organising processes (which are all, on a deep level, essentially similar)
in order to create lineages of technology” (1991:7).
xiv
xv
The New Flesh refers to the morphing of the biological body and mind by technology. It
refers to the datafat of science fiction (animated and hybridised futuristic ‘substances’ that bind human
nerves to the hardwired flesh of machines), the virtual substance of information flows and simulacra, as
well as a new cyborg consciousness emerging at the nexus of biology and technology. “The digital
machines of the late twentieth century (and beyond) are not add-on parts that serve to augment an
existing human form,” explains Sadie Plant. “Quite beyond their own perceptions and control, bodies
are continually engineered by the [technological] processes in which they are engaged” (1998:182).
xvi
The Internet of today is teeming with strange new non-human lifeforms known as
‘independent software objects.’ These are packets of information such as text-based expert systems, emails, add-ons, plug-ins, hyperlinks, viruses, and an array of web-services that are described in
programming jargon as “actors, agents, or demons” (Davis 1993:602). True to their pet name, these
‘invocational objects’ are quite literally stirring up a pandemonium on the world-wide-web. No longer
controlled but rather “invoked” into action by changes in their environment, “demons … like vortices
and other natural phenomena … are beginning to form ‘computational societies’ that resemble
ecological systems such as insect colonies or social systems such as markets” (De Landa 1991:117121).
“Humans do not appear to be competent to solve all the problems (ecological and otherwise)
that we're starting to face today on a grand scale,” notes Marvin Minsky, founder of the Artificial
Intelligence (AI) Lab at MIT. “One solution is to make something that’s smarter than us, like an AI
machine” (Knight. 2001:3).
xvii
xviii
According to Eliade, the journey of the shaman involves a symbolic death, dismemberment,
and a contemplation of the skeleton. Having experienced the death of the self/mortality, the shaman
descends through the interior landscape of the individual body and ascends/descends into the realms
beyond the borders of the self via a spiral ladder or a bridge of swords into the connected realms of
minerals, animals, plants, humans, as well as that of the invisible and abstract. This “paradoxical
passage” (1989:490) brings the Shaman into contact with the “suprasensible world … (and involves) a
total transformation of the individual (human) into something other” (1989:179).
“If truth is what is verifiable, the truth of contemporary science is not so much the extent of
progress achieved as the scale of technical catastrophes occasioned,” writes Paul Virilio in The
Information Bomb (2000: 1). This is “pure war - a telematic panoptic, a matter of digital information,
which in itself has only he status of an algorithmic hallucination … a purely mathematical equation
floating in competing computer systems dominated by a technological ‘will to nothingness’” (Kroker
1992: 37-41).
xix
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