Dr Tehseen Noorani tehseen.n.noorani@durham.ac.uk
Seminars/Lectures (PTT)
Sciencing the mystical: the trickery of the psychedelic trip report
Noorani, Tehseen
Authors
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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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
Published Journal Article
(767 Kb)
PDF
Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
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