Ten theses on the politics of psychedelics

Psychedelics are interruptive, deautomating political technologies that can foster radical democracy rather than reinforce liberal-democratic systems. The article argues that understanding the political implications of psychedelics requires reconceiving psychedelic mysticism and phenomenology to recognize their embodied, agential, and politically potentiating dimensions, correcting neuro-centric views and incomplete phenomenologies. It also links the deautomating aspects of psychedelic experience to an analysis of anti-democratic forces like automation, administrative reason, and computationalist abstraction.

Study at a glance

Abstract

This article liberates discussion of the politics of psychedelics from its present impasse. Across ten theses, it asserts that psychedelics are interruptive deautomating political technologies, which makes them conducive to democratic politics, in the radical sense: rather than consolidating liberal-democratic systems of representative or managed democracy, psychedelic experience tends to open such regimes up to the ferment of radical democracy. To conceptualise the political ramifications of psychedelics requires that psychedelic mysticism and the phenomenology of psychedelic experience be reconceived in ways which give due recognition to their embodied, agential and politically potentiating dimensions, which involves correcting restrictively neuro-centric conceptions of psychedelic mysticism and expanding incomplete phenomenologies. It further requires that the “deautomating” dimensions of psychedelic experience be conceptualised alongside an analysis of the prevailing anti-democratic forces of automation, administrative reason and computationalist abstraction.