In blogdom the tone has recently been getting ever more rational, in control. To the point where some are seen keen to refute the role of hedonism, either in their earlier years or its general application. People are making serious points, and in doing so are keen to distance themselves, like proper publications, from any frivolous drukqs chat. Never mind that all this delicious music analysed to its last waveform is frequently the offtake of bent minds, the free territory of cyber think is increasingly in denial about the validity and role of drugs – not people when they’re on them of course, but the later effects they can have in the subversion of reality and the propagation of alternatives. Yet some are coming back round to the idea that an enlightened usage is a lot more than simple weekend escapism (its outward gaze) and able to directly inspire a different design for life. Can our transcendental materialism help mutate the Big Other? Or is that inherent promotion of temporary escapism mere flipside approval of authority and capital?

Control: self-medication as expanding the range of experiences, widening empathy, exploring the outer reaches of what can be thought and felt, mindful that we'd need to be certain that it's deliberate; that the less helpful effects are somehow desired and good, rather than being simply debilitating.

Surrender: succumbing to hedonistic temptation, habit, dependency, in ways already concretely shown ultimately to reduce your capacity to be the centred, reliable, focused individual who can do stuff, who finds life joyful and people interesting (as opposed to resolving into fellow drug-conspirators and squares). Feeling a night is incomplete without x, y, z.

Altered states – Control and surrender
So this is about the drugs going to work, and how we can use that when we can go back to work. At the heart of the debate seems to be the issue about control and surrender during the drug trip itself (not on the wider level of succumbing to authority). How much genuine surrender is there? And how much theoreticising input is there, even at the time of the high? Extensive Cull research allows us to state that this is a false dichotomy: ie, one can never completely surrender faculties and one can never be permanently out of control. Back to life, back to reality. We are just as naturally sceptical as the sober about the majority of claims made for substances over and above being ‘fun’, but on the other, well aware of their counter-cultural power, and the sense that those who abstain are missing out on valuable and powerful adventures/transformations of reality. So it is important to note three, perhaps contestable, things about drug use:
i) that for many it’s a purely nihilist, polydrug thing, to get fucked, out of control or just out of it, for no further use than the usurping of one empirical reality with another. These are society’s parasites, offering no contribution of their own;
ii) that the fragments of revelation are, regrettably, often lost to the moment;
iii) that you surrender only for the duration of your experience, no one here in the cullshed is going to pretend that one can be permanently in thrall to a superior conception of reality. Unless you are Jaz Coleman.

The stereotypes of losing oneself and being out of control do not match up to the much more complex cerebral push and pull. I have certainly stood guilty before of being ‘out of it’ but sloppily musing on my ‘experience’ at the same time. Even with the more conventional sensibility suppressant of booze it’s often better not to completely surrender to the chemical but to use it for ‘chat’. Either you go in with your theory at the ready (and have it confirmed or modify it accordingly), or you have the experience and theorise about it later, or it’s just this ineffable gap about which nothing should be said. Thus in becoming Under the Influence, users – at least ‘experimenters’ rather than escapist caners – are admitting to their beguilingly active role in the trip; they have interest in the effects beyond the brilliant collapsing of clock time. Out of it for its own sake? Hopefully not, or we’re casually letting clinical addiction creep on us. Even the heroin addict coming clean, who then attempts to write about or in some other way convey his extreme medication, has been in thrall but kept something of his ‘descent into hell’ to relate back. A good tab, meanwhile, and you can seefeel the impressions being printed on your swedge, valuable (and indeed probably unrelatable) revelations whose provenance would be inexplicable. Same with mushies. Drop an E, and there’s a willing on, a self-activation, of the rush. Control your body then let go.

It’s that demon weed, a B or a C drug depending on which week we’re in and who’s enforcing it, that adheres the most to the traditional (mis)understanding of ctrl and surrender. Very strong weed, the stuff that’s only really been around for 20 years at the most (and if you smoke it pure you’ll get even ‘furthr’) is the substance that corresponds most to the stereotype that it’s all surrender and no control, because you do flip out, lose all track of time or conversation, without willing to. This is the element that scares people the most about it, and no wonder it’s the moral guardians’ pet scare subject, or at least makes them justly wary, because the effects won’t let you pursue a linear cause of inquiry. It’s fucking with our kids’ heads, ‘off on a tangent’ the phrase de nos jours reflecting its widespread usage. And it says something about society that such a strong drug is so popular. Nevertheless, is the panic/paranoia sometimes associated with such states a useful theoretical tool, with which to strip away society’s conceits and artifices, or is the brain in hyper-excited distress (and hence less able to cope with whatever may or may not be there)? And I’ll always defend weed in terms of its long-term liberatory effects – just don’t expect much at the time because the drug has taken over.

Asylum
So one can mentally take note AND be in flight, lose one’s ‘co-ordinates’. But as we’ve been hinting at, one’s lysergic lessons might be impossible to convey to the central crowd in a meaningful manner. Of course the best moments are beyond language, but this links in to the prevailing notion that the drug users, with their uncanny experiences that they can’t fully explain and in which some constantly seek refuge, are inherently ‘mentally Ill’ for the purposes of the label-happy. Like in Alzheimer’s, some can no longer distinguish between the flight and the getting lost. But many disorders are attributable to the fact that newly discovered paradigms do not translate well, and are indeed certifiable. There’s no point tripping to discover life’s one-ness, because society ain’t ready for what you got to say. How they react to your worldview and how you react to that letdown are what lead many to conventional psychosis.

Narco-intello union
The devil’s voice hits me after my first weed hit. There’s a lot of blogspeak about hauntology, the uncanny and so on, but these are terms that can be seen as theoretical proxies for what the narcos experience regularly, in doing so instinctively appreciating what these unsettling terms mean. Visions, out of body/levitation sensations, sui/homi-cidal thoughts, ‘the fear’ and so on – strange brews that may be ‘artificially’ generated but which link into the experience of the mentally ‘unwell’. And not all of these are comedown side-effects but are generated as part of the core experience (all of which makes an irony of the distinction between ‘party drugs’ and ‘the harder stuff’).

You see it with recreational drug users – how they inherently don’t trust anything they say or hear and how they don’t trust what others would purport to be their real feelings. Newly ushered in post-addict Russell Brand totemicises for the low-grade end of this aspect, subverting everything he and everyone else says, while Burchill for all her coke blah-blah-blah is astute in saying she never really believed those Modern Reviewers who said they had real feelings. We can teach the cold, controlled commentator a lot.

But this is not a post urging schism – this is a cold and calculating piece now, hardly representation through art – rather for propagating the continued mutual support of the narcos and the intellos. Their artificial eyries, an ecstatic reverie from reading a great passage of prose or the joy of joining the dots on theory, getting the high from intellectualising/controlling an experience, indeed through writing itself, dialogue, whatever, are just like ours. We’ll bring our joint force to bear on those who don’t get inspired or immersed. Not we are the mods, but we are the boffs. Some of the best narc-offs are those where a group seem to hit a probing and revelatory mode of inquiry. From this you also derive a substantive oneness; notably some people also recoil from it, which as a metaphor sums up the control-surrender balance predicament. Such situations are to be relished/treasured/celebrated. If and when these are narcotically enhanced, all well and good.

Value?
So how can we have, with our drugs and our views and our books, any wider bearing other than to salve ourselves? Can the marginalized but united hedonists, intellos and artistic visionaries play guru to the Babylonian hordes? For the drug user much more than the theorist, the onus is on them to see if what’s interesting about inhaling/ingesting/injecting can be made accessible to non-partakers. Otherwise, it inevitably turns into ‘Go on! Give it a try! You’re missing out!’ – an empty entreaty to join the club. And it also behoves not just to be on some impossible quest to get ‘lost’, but to ride out the come-down despondencies, see them as part of the cycle but come back stronger.

The question of the Progressive Worth of they mindalterers is a live one, not only affecting how society treats life’s part-time sadhus but also what influence we have on society. Check yourself first: if you are forgetting the best points, recoiling from the conclusions and returning to Kapital and the inherent propping up of the Big Other later, then Cull’s pages aren’t for you! Is it even wrong to put the conceived value of the drug-driven mindset in the traditional terms of turning on, tuning out, (or whatever), pulling away from the central crowd but coming back and adding to it? No, this is a realistic utilisation and a way of understanding. In the absence of any likelihood of either embarking on armed struggle or fleeing to the mountains, adding to the central crowd seems like the way forward. At low-grade level this is what the western cultural revolutions are – the mass media-led adoption of new thinking and insights – hippies, punks, ravers – but the trick is not to go all Veryphonics on our arses and corrupt the very essence of what it is that made you interesting in the first place. But there are new ways of doing this. Blogs, where they are now, are still valuable because they offer new viewpoints without seeking the validation of the Big Other but with the will of the virtual proletariat in mind.

And we can retrieve insights that apply beyond the self and fellow ‘progressives’ to people across the board. Let’s use that rare immersion/oneness in a rave crowd; the release from negative loops of subjectivity, or other insights into what’s negotiable and nonnegotiable in yourself and your reality; those encounters with the Other and the Outside; and the valuable sense of self . Articulating truths, shattering myths, heightening and strengthening connections, facing ‘demons’, easing destructive tensions, increasing individual and group puissance and so on... that’s where we come in.

Taking things forward
In this piece, we have overlooked certain psychological elements of the trip (are we succumbing to desire/the desire to transcend, what a Culla once called the ‘thirst for annihilation’?). We have been coy about the potential downsides of usage (there has never been a better time than now to learn before you experiment); and neutral about the role of criminalisation and the blood-drenched intertwining of the black market with Kapital. Why? Because this is a conscious attempt to realise and raise the value of the individual drug trip beyond the self, a ‘what using drugs can do for society’. Optimists would say a lot where others would see negligible effect. So if you’re about to step out on a life of reasoned hedonism, be mindful that it’s very difficult to then proselytise about it to bring about mass change. The world is not leverageable on the art, thought, science or technology of one individual or group. This is the next lesson.

The interplay between control and surrender here is vital – both within yourself and to what the Big Other of Society is or is not telling you. Neither control or surrender should be valorised over the other. It’s a constant dialectic. Victories for control would on one level no doubt tend to correspond with losses in other zones/on other levels. To make matters worse, tuning in to one level undoubtedly means you take your eye off the ball on other levels. Assuming the goal isn’t actually annihilation of the self, but rather some kind of shaping of the self into something vaguely tolerable, you have to decide which level(s) matter most.

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