Psychedelic Orientalism
<p>Psychedelic Orientalism
 
That The Doors of Percention's spontaneous insight into Asian religion occurs under the influence of mescaline, which Huxley describes as that "friend of immemorially long standing" to "primitive religion and the Indians of Mexico", helps to contextualize the theoretical problem of just how Psychedelic Orientalism, that scheme for representing Asian Americans, comes to bear on Native Americans as well during this period. One of the crucial transformations of the Psychedelic Orientalist tradition in its second historical stage is the extension of its logic to include Native North, South, and Central Americans. Orientalism is an elastic system, developed by Europeans (including Euro-Americans) to designate certain modes of otherness more, in many ways, than certain geopolitical categories. Its use is warranted, however, in discussions of Psychedelic Orientalism of the Sixties and after, because that discourse so completely, and repeatedly, confounds Asian and Native American cultures, using the traditional mechanisms of Orientalism (as historically elaborated to describe peoples in Asia and the Middle East). Of course, the culture and history of Yaqui Indians, for example, are radically dissimilar from those of the Chinese--but no more so than the Chinese from Algerians, Orientals of equally long standing. (pages 212-214)
 
Unlike the form of Psychedelic Orientalism that prevailed from before the Opium Wars to World War II, Huxley's The Doors of Percepetion does not construct the Orientalization of the white narrator as pathogenic or nightmarish; instead, the experience takes the form of ecstasy and illumination. In Aldous Huxley's work can be seen the transformation of values that 1950s-1960s Psychedelic Orientalism represented in the philosophical evaluation of drugs, and the underlying structures of anti-Asian racism that remained untouched throughout the upheaval. This may be imagined as a dialectic between Huxley's psychedelic dystopia, the soma-opiated planet of Brave New World (1932), and his psychedelic utopia, the moksha-illuminated society of Island (1962). "Soma" refers to the mysterious ecstatic drug of the Rig Veda, which Robert Gordon Wasson contended was the fly-agaric mushroom; the 1932 novel depicts the Fordist world-controllers using a drug whose very name bears the stamp of Asian religious mysticism to keep the populace passive and languorous--in other words, to psychedelically Orientalize (in the negative sense of the first historical phase of the genre) the entire world. By contrast, the mushroom in Huxley's last novel, by which the idealized nation of Pala is enlightened, is also associated with Asia, but instead of embodying the most despised aspects of that continent, it now represents the spiritual possibility of the Orient; the moksha mushroom is the Asian half of the longed-for "unproblematic" synthesis of East and West, the counterpoint to Europe's contributions--Pala's language, logic, and science.
 
After The Doors of Perception, Huxley published Heaven and Hell, which made clear that the De Quinceyan tradition of being "transported into Asian scenery" was not abolished in the new Psychedelic Orientalism, but merely transformed. What remains intact in this revaluation is the colonial epistemology of travel as "discovery," a near-total synonym in the history of Europe for conquest and domination. This procedure, according to Huxley's metaphorical structure, did not reside in history, but in the psyche:
 
A man consists of what I may call an Old World of personal consciousness and, beyond a dividing sea, a series of New Worlds--the not too distant Virginias and Carolinas of the personal subconscious and the vegetative soul; the Far West of the collective unconscious, with its flora of symbols, its tribes of aboriginal archetypes; and, across another, vaster ocean, at the antipodes of everyday consciousness, the world of Visionary Experience. (pages 216-217)
 
The metaphor of the colonial exploration and conquest for the psychedelic revolution did not end with Huxley. This language is picked up by the Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary, a writer who, while studying and emulating Huxley, consistently took Huxley's rhetorical innovations in Psychedelic Orientalism much farther than would be dared in Island, The Doors of Percention, or Heaven and Hell. The materials created by Aldous Huxley, Alan W. Watts, Robert Gordon Wasson, and Louis Lewin are transformed into Psychedelic Orientalism in its purest state in the crucible of Timothy Leary's theoretical work. Leary is undoubtedly the thinker of the 1960s least understood by contemporary scholarship. It is customary either to compose elegies to him, as Allen Ginsberg does, as "a hero of American consciousness" ("Foreword' xviii), or to dismiss him as a dated crank. In terms of his contemporary reception, Leary's writings are irrelevant; as a demigod like pioneer or as a joke, Leary is always a metonymic stand-in for the Sixties legacy itself on trial. Such programmatic responses have obscured serious analysis of his influential and sophisticated theoretical work, and the central position it occupies in Psychedelic Orientalism's power to elaborate and affirm racist and colonialist ideology while ostensibly discussing human consciousness. This is the key to Leary's work, and through it to all of Psychedelic Orientalism. (page 218)</p>