Psychedelics and New Materialism: Challenging the Science–Spirituality Binary and the Onto-Epistemological Order of Modernity

Abstract

This essay argues for the reciprocal benefits of joining the new theories of matter emerging out of critical posthumanism and the psychedelic drugs currently experiencing a so-called “renaissance” in global north societies. While the former’s twin emphasis on relationality and embodiment is perfectly suited to capture and ground the ontological, epistemological, and ethical implications of psychedelic experiences of interconnectedness and transformation, these substances are in turn powerful companions through which to enact a “posthuman phenomenology” that helps us with the urgent task to “access, amplify, and describe” our deep imbrication with our more-than-human environments. In other words, I argue that while the “new materialism” emerging out of posthumanism can help elaborate a psychedelic rationality, psychedelics can in turn operate as educators in materiality. It is from this materialist perspective that we can best make sense of psychedelics’ often touted potential for social transformation and the enduring suspicion that they are somehow at odds with the “ontoepistemological order” of modernity. From this point of view, I contend that a crucial critical move is to push against the common trope that this opposition is best expressed as a turn from the narrow scientific and “consumerist materialism” of modern Western societies to more expansive “spiritual” worldviews. Pushing against this science-–spirituality binary, which in fact reproduces modern “indivi/dualism” by confining psychedelic experience inside our heads, I argue instead that what is in fact needed to think through and actualize such potentials is an increased attention to our material transcorporeality. In a nutshell, if we want psychedelics to inform social change, we must be more, not less, materialist—albeit by redefining matter in a rather “weird”, non-reductive way and by redefining consciousness as embodied. By the end of the essay, attaching psychedelics to a new materialism will enable us to formulate a “material spirituality” that establishes psychedelics’ political value less in an idealistic or cognitive “politics of consciousness” and more in a “materialization of critique”.

Keywords

• psychedelics
• new materialism
• modernity
• science
• spirituality
• transcorporeality