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Sciencing the mystical: the trickery of the psychedelic trip report

Noorani, Tehseen

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Abstract

Science has caught wind of mysticism once again. Operationalising metrics from the writings of perennial philosophers, psychopharmacologists are using psychedelics in a laboratory context to reliably induce ‘mystical experiences’. These experiences are scored along such dimensions as unity, noesis, transcendence of space–time and ineffability. How are we to read this moment? I draw on data from an ethnography of psychedelic science and take cue from Walter Benjamin's treatment of the threshold in Convolute O of The Arcades Project, to identify apophatic narratives of trickery that contrast with the positive knowledge prominent in the sciencing of the mystical experience. Read as apophatic labour, psychedelic trip reports reveal how the significance of the mystical encounter lies not in its point-like efficacy in transforming the subject, but in precisely the doubts, contradictions and aporias involved in the writing out of their experiences.

Citation

Noorani, T. (2019). Sciencing the mystical: the trickery of the psychedelic trip report. New Writing, 16(4), 440-443. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2019.1566375

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Jan 1, 2019
Online Publication Date Apr 9, 2019
Publication Date 2019
Deposit Date May 1, 2019
Publicly Available Date May 1, 2019
Journal New Writing
Print ISSN 1479-0726
Electronic ISSN 1943-3107
Publisher Taylor and Francis Group
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 16
Issue 4
Pages 440-443
DOI https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2019.1566375

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Copyright Statement
Advance online version © 2019 The Author(s).
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any
medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way






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