Psychotropes: Models of Authorship, Psychopathology, and Molecular Politics in Aldous Huxley ...

446 Pages·2015·7.89 MB·English

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Psychotropes
Models of Authorship,
Psychopathology, and Molecular Politics
in Aldous Huxley and Philip K. Dick
Chris John Rudge
A thesis submitted to the
Department of English and
the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
at the University of Sydney in fulfillment of
the requirements of the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
2015
ii
Declaration of Originality
This thesis contains no material that has been accepted for the award of any
other degree or diploma in any university or institute of higher learning.
I affirm that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my
own work, and I certify and warrant to the best of my knowledge that all
sources of reference have been duly and fully acknowledged.
25 August 2015
_____________________________ _____________________________
Chris Rudge Date
The body of this thesis has been typeset in Arnhem, a typeface designed by
Fred Smeijers in 1999 and comercially released in 2002. Headings of various
sizes have been set in LL Circular, which was designed by Laurenz Brunner
in 2013.
This work is typeset and designed by Chris Rudge.
See http://www.rudge.tv
Abstract
among the so-called “anti-psychiatrists” of the 1960s and ‘70s, it was Félix
Guattari who first identified that psychiatry had undergone a “molecular
revolution.” It was in fact in a book titled Molecular Revolutions, published
in 1984, that Guattari proposed that psychotherapy had become, in the de-
cades following the Second World War, far less personal and increasingly
alienating. The newly “molecular” practices of psychiatry, Guattari mourned,
had served only to fundamentally distance both patients and practitioners
from their own minds; they had largely restricted our access, he suggested,
to human subjectivity and consciousness.
This thesis resumes Guattari’s work on the “molecular” model of the
subject. Extending on Guattari’s various “schizoanalytic metamodels” of hu-
man consciousness and ontology, it rigorously meditates on a simple ques-
tion: Should we now accept the likely finding that there is no neat, singular,
reductive, utilitarian, or unifying “model” for thinking about the human
subject, and more specifically the human “author”?
Part 1 of this thesis carefully examines a range of psychoanalytic, psychi-
atric, philosophical, and biomedical models of the human. It studies and re-
formulates each of them in turn and, all the while, returns to a fundamental
position: that no single model, nor combination of them, will suffice. What
part 1 seeks to demonstrate, then, is that envisioning these models as differ-
ent attempts to “know” the human is fruitless—a futile game. Instead, these
models should be understood in much the same way as literary critics treat
literary commonplaces or topoi; they are akin, I argue, to what Deleuze and
Guattari called “images of thought.” In my terminology, they are “psycho-
tropes”: images with their own particular symbolic and mythical functions.
Having thus developed a range of theoretical footholds in part 1, part 2
of the thesis—beginning in chapter 4—will put into practice the work of this
first part. It will do so by examining various representations of authorship
by two authors in particular: Aldous Huxley and Philip K. Dick. This part will
thus demonstrate how these author figures function as “psychoactive scriv-
eners”: they are fictionalising philosophers who both produce and quarrel
with an array of paradigmatic psychotropes, disputing those of others and
inventing their own to substitute for them.
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More than this, however, the second part offers a range of detailed and
original readings of these authors’s psychobiographies; it argues that even
individual authors such as Huxley and Dick can be seen as “psychotropic.” It
offers, that is, a series of broad-ranging and speculative explanations for the
ideas and themes that appear in their works—explanations rooted in the
theoretical work of the first part.
Finally, this thesis concludes by reaffirming the importance of these
authors’s narcoliteratures—both for present-day and future literary studies,
and beyond. For while Huxley and Dick allow us to countenance afresh the
range of failures in the history and philosophy of science, they also prom-
ise to instruct us—and instruct science—about the ways in which we might
move beyond our received mimetic models of the human.
Psychotropes
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Contents
Abstract iii
Acknowledgments viii
Abbreviations x
List of Figures xii
introduction
To Gaze Upon the Sun xiii
Part One Principia Literaria Psychobiographia:
The Principles of Literary Psychography 1
chapter one
Molecular Correspondences:
Writing With, On, and About Drugs 2
Our Bodies Are Not Our Own:
Reformulating Bodily Constructivism 7
Encountering Molecular Psychography 21
A Grey Matter: “The Brain’s
Latent Potentialities” 40
chapter two
The Psychoactive Scrivener: Modelling
the Writer in the Psychopolitical World 51
The Workspace of the Brain 66
Subjective Undermin(d)ings:
Deleuze and Guattari’s Brain Subject 82
The Long Road to the Writing
Subject: A Short Scribal History 88
chapter three
(De)automatising Subjects:
Scrivening in Modern Literary History 108
Writing Madness into Reason 118
From Acedia to Acid,
From Injunctions to Adjuncts 143
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Part Two Psychobiographic Speculations 157
chapter four
“Born Wandering Between Two Worlds”:
Aldous Huxley’s Chiasmic Enculturation 158
Huxley’s Ageometry and
the Neurochemical Self 170
Huxley and the Metaphysics of Science 196
Huxley’s Polyamorous Phallogocentrism 211
chapter five
Reforging The Law of the Father:
Huxley’s Expurgation and Extrospection 225
The Statu(t)e of T.H. Huxley, or The Law
of the “Grandpater” 225
T.H. Huxley and the Masculinities of Science 232
Extrospective Aldous: An Epiphenomenal Man 246
Thinking the Interstitial Self 259
chapter six
An “Amphibical Anthropology” 273
The Enucleating Family: Aldous as Oedipus 304
chapter seven
“The Shock of Dysrecognition”: The Disorienting
Biopolitical Visions of Philip K. Dick 330
Unworking the Socius: Drugs and Writing 346
Sf-ing the Acid Nightmare 353
The Transmolecularisation of Philip K. Dick 367
conclusion
Aldous’s Atropine Eye Drops and
The (St)Art of Seeing 376
Bibliography 384
Acknowledgments
It is difficult to imagine what kind of author could claim to be free of any
indebtedness; but no matter, since I am no such kind.
This work has come to exist through the efforts of a constellation of ac-
tors and agents. To my loving partner and my closest friend, Camilla, I owe
you an especially heartfelt and profound show of thanks. You have all of my
love. To my parents, Marian and John, thank you for your ample patience.
And to my ingenious sister, Alecia, thank you for coming to my aid in my mo-
ments of sincerest need. Thank you also to the Gulli family: Ralph, Carmel,
and Emily.
Thank you to my sagacious and intrepid supervisor, Associate Profes-
sor Peter Marks, without whose thoughtful remarks, perceptive reading,
and energetic companionship, this thesis would not nearly be so lucid as it
might now claim to be. To my other advisors—persons who are also admired
colleagues, cherished friends, and intellectual heroes—Associate Professor
Kate Lilley and Dr Melissa Hardie: my profuse thanks for your many years of
extraordinary advice.
Thank you also to Catherine Waldby: your encouragement in all matters
biopolitical has been, for me, a great source of strength; and to Nikolas Rose:
my sincere thanks for your supportive remarks, and for our thoughtful and
enjoyable exchanges.
Thank you also to my Dickian colleagues: Richard Doyle, Roger Luck-
hurst, David Gill, Laurence Rickels, Mark Bould, Alexander Dunst, Umberto
Rossi, Stefan Schlensag, Ted Hand, Frank Hollander, Frank Bertrand, Fa-
bienne Collignon, James Burton, and Yari Lanci. Thank you to those in my
beloved Philip K. Dick Reading Group, to my friends and colleagues Adam
Hulbert and Pat Cronin.
I would also like to thank Geoffrey Roche, Bernfried Nugel, Angela
Woods, and Elizabeth A. Wilson. And thank you especially to Kate Hayles for
suggesting I attend the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts, a group
of which I am proud to be a member.
Thank you to the University of Sydney, to the department of English,
and to its abundance of talented members of staff: Liam Semler, Carole
Cusack, Mark Byron, Vanessa Smith, Bruce Gardiner, David Kelly, Sarah
Gleeson-White, Will Christie, Richard Smith, Alan Cholodenko, and Laura
Ginters.
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I should also like to acknowledge and thank the University for its sup-
port, which come to me in an array of forms. Thank you to Georgia Holmes
and Eileen Corrigan. To turn ever so briefly to matters economic, I thank the
University for its extension to me of the Australian Postgraduate Award, for
the travel monies it awarded, and for the casual tutoring that it allowed me
to so regularly enjoy and undertake.
To my very many thoughtful and inspiring colleagues and friends with-
in the University of Sydney’s postgraduate community, thank you for your
friendship, advice, and inspiration. To my very good friend and companion
Tahlia, thank you for everything that you have done and said throughout
these years. To Alice, thank you for your calm companionship, and your ever
surprising and wholly unnecessary humility. To my good friends Liz and
Mark, thank you; and to my world-adventuring pal, Dan, thanks for all the
fantastic experiences. To my close and talented friend, Anna Breckon, I look
forward to continuing our never-ending repartee.
C. J. R.