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Writing On Drugs by Sadie Plant (1999)
Old Favourites: Weird news from inner space
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Sadie Plant wrote an impressive study of the immense role drugs have played in shaping Western civilisation.
Photograph: David Sleator
Rob Doyle
Sat Aug 10 2019 - 06:00
Myths are fun, they enrich life, and the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (Ccru) that emerged
at Warwick University in the mid-1990s, and briefly threatened to upend all academic and
philosophical orthodoxies in a riot of Jungle music and incendiary rhetoric, is an irresistible
subject for mythologising. The Ccru was a renegade thought-collective whose enduring
theoretical innovation was accelerationism – a glamorously dangerous political orientation
that, despite the left or right colourings it is often lent, is at core a submission to nihilistic
jouissance: getting off on the race towards a posthuman catastrophe wherein all prior
certainties vanish.
Among the Ccru’s chief agitators were the unsettlingly immoderate Nick Land, who once
suggested he was an android sent back from the future to undermine human security, and
would offer his students such helpful advice as, “Think of life as an open wound, which you
poke with a stick to amuse yourself”; Mark Fisher, who went on to produce brilliantly fertile
cultural criticism until his suicide in 2017; and Sadie Plant, a once-lauded writer who has
fallen into obscurity since the turn of the millennium.
Having established herself with a book on the Situationist International and another on
Digital Women and the New Technoculture, Plant wrote an impressive study of the immense
role drugs have played in shaping Western civilisation, from science and technology to
literature and warfare. While there have been some notable additions to the narco-bookshelf
in recent decades, Writing On Drugs is among the few written by a woman; indeed, Plant
suggests that drugs may not be such a big deal for women, who “have a pre-existing sympathy
for the worlds their male counterparts explore on drugs”.
Underpinning Writing On Drugs is Plant’s conviction that any “war on drugs” is a pointless
absurdity. Drug-users who bring weird news from inner space have always replenished
mainstream culture. Besides, there’s nothing more human than craving temporary escape
from the brutal skull-hotel of consciousness – what Land, before his acceleration into
seriously ugly politics, called the “headcase”.
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