Aesthetic Intoxication
“A contrary pancake surely, a fingerish atrocity but not without a queer charm all its own.”
The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brien
Killing time in a bookshop a few weeks back, I found a copy of Walter Benjamin’s On Hashish. The book is an odd collection of recollections, half-essays and field notes, in which Benjamin attempts to document his thoughts and experiments on what must now surely be the world’s most pervasive illegal drug. It is a particular pleasure to read if you are at all familiar with Benjamin’s thought and style, since here it acquires an aphoristic quality only the stoned can really achieve:
5. Unlimited goodwill. Suspension of the compulsive anxiety complex. The beautiful “character” unfolds. All of those present become comically iridescent. At the same time one is pervaded by their aura.
Benjamin takes the chemical experience seriously: he subjects it to experiments, and is profoundly wary of it. To be high is, for Benjamin, a strongly aesthetic experience. The subject becomes a frenzy of perceptions, misperceptions, recombinations. Faces morph, insignificant details capture the attention. The world becomes a text whose surface is constantly shifting. Simple abstract patterns become objects of fascination. The two terms Benjamin most often employs in relation to this experience are ‘”the comical” and “the poetic.” At one point he writes: ‘…no sooner had I made an assertion than I’d have used the very word in answer to a question merely by the perception (so to speak) of the length of time in the duration of sound in either of the words. I sense that as poetic evidence.’
If you disentangle the prose, the idea is fairly straightforward: our stoned Benjamin begins to perceive speech as poetry, as sound-patterns. The drug provides the context for an experience of disruption and recombination. Had Roland Barthes ever read of Benjamin’s experiences with hash, he would have recognised them as an example of the objectivity of pleasure. In The Pleasures of the Text, Barthes makes the radical claim that the pleasure of reading might elevate the reader’s capacity for objectivity, since this pleasure is based on texture rather than ideological content: ‘in the text of pleasure, the opposing forces are no longer repressed but in a state of becoming: nothing is really antagonistic, everything is plural. I pass lightly through the reactionary darkness.’
It sounds illogical to claim that being high could make someone more objective, yet the particular relish for the comical, the farcical, and the contradictory that accompanies weed might recognize itself in an idea like negative capability. The narcissist in me is waiting to be mobbed by Keats scholars roughly around now.
I can’t resist citing a story I remember from my high school history class: the Romans related how certain Germanic tribes, before committing to an important decision, would consider it first sober, then drunk. If they came to the same conclusion in both states, they could be sure that they were making the right choice. Note that here intoxication is not elevated into some higher, spiritual plane, but rather is given equal footing with sober, rational thought. Reason is self-aware enough to understand its limits, and accepts intoxication as a potentially constructive experience. That is not to say that getting high should be justified as an aesthetic experience, and certainly Benjamin himself was profoundly conflicted over the use of hashish. He used it infrequently, never alone, and never had his own supplier. Hash was a source for
experimentation and a topic for theory, but not a lifestyle choice. In his First Impressions he writes: “The entrance gates to a world of grotesques seem to open up. I simply prefer not to enter.” Even Aldous Huxley became worried in later life that mescaline was nothing more than the simulation of a true spiritual experience. Whatever we take a “spiritual experience” to mean, the problem is plain enough: no one can function high or drunk 24/7. Therefore feasible drug use can either be a form of temporary escapism, totally detached from sober life, or else a prism through which to view that life.
In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson’s character Raul Duke appears to use drugs as a form of extreme escapism, but what the drug experiences really reveal is the monstrosity of his surroundings. Are the reptiles in the hotel bar any more horrifying than the system of compulsion that brings people into the casinos? Drugs here act as a guide into the heart of the American Dream. Hunter S. Thompson never advocated drug use in the way that Timothy Leary did, but again, he took the experiences seriously. In the movie version, the drug sequences are suitably surreal, but I’m not sure they are in any way realistic. Translating the experience onto screen has always been problematic, and plenty of films have been ruined by a clichéd drug scene (you know the drill: psychedelic lights, spinning frames, echoes, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead…). The problem with film is that it must commit to an image, even if it is that of a blank screen. Words, thankfully, don’t need to commit to anything. It is questionable whether they can commit to anything.
I began by quoting a section in The Third Policeman, in which a police sergeant attempts to explain the contents of a box: no one knows what it is, because seeing it causes madness, and so they can only relate what the object feels like. Or rather, what it doesn’t feel like: “not smooth and not rough, not gritty and not velvety. It would be a mistake to think it is a cold feel like steel and another mistake to think it blankety.” This “fingerish atrocity” must be described in the negative, something only literature can do. I would like to consider this object as a symbol of aesthetic pleasure/intoxication, a disrupting experience that challenges the idea of experience itself.
If hash is to be of experimental use to Benjamin, it isn’t as an experience in itself, but rather in its relation to the sober self. I have claimed that the experience of being high is one of disruption, of texture and indeterminateness. The true question is whether being sober is the opposite of this or not. Certainly the rational subject has been carefully codified in such a way that a concept such as realism could be invented. Which is to say that the sober, rational subject is always necessarily entangled in ideology. Is the intoxicated self therefore outside of ideology? I don’t think we can make such a neat binary distinction. What I do believe to be true is that the escapist and potentially damaging use of drugs might can cause the subject to experience the contradictory quality of sober “reality”. If drugs have ”truth content”, it is this: through the extreme of absolute subjectivity (viewing the world as a text of pleasure), one might begin to understand how objectivity might operate in sober reality.
The problem every drug user must eventually confront is that of illusion. But it is important to define this illusion as an experience that can’t be properly recollected, translated, transferred. Experience that brings no salvation, to use a Benjaminian turn of phrase. It resembles the “fingerish atrocity,” indeterminate, disturbing, and yet its very disturbance gives it the possibility of meaning. As long as drug use is considered a lifestyle choice, it is nothing more than another form of self-narration or self-dramatisation. For it to be constructive it must be understood in terms of the fear and frustration, as well as the pleasures that it causes. I would argue that weed, by exaggerating our susceptibility to sensory input, and temporarily suspending or reimagining our interpretation of this data, essentially denies the importance or even the existence of the “total sensory experience.” Pleasure, or at least positive, radical pleasure, is all interpretation and reinterpretation.
