Historicizing Psychedelics: Renaissance, Counterculture and the Neoliberal Matrix

In this discussion based on his recently published essay, Mateo suggests that the historical transition of psychedelics from an association with counterculture to becoming part of the mainstream is related to the rise of what late cultural theorist Mark Fisher termed “capitalist realism” – the notion that there is no alternative form of social organization and, as such, capitalism simply is reality. For Fisher, the main agent behind the re-instauration of capitalist hegemony after its de-stabilization by the convergence of several radical forces at the end of the 1960s and early ‘70s was the economic and political project of neoliberalism. Psychedelic “consciousness-expansion” was one of those forces.

Thus, historicizing psychedelics within the shifts in political economy and culture associated with the “collective set and setting” of neoliberalism can serve both to understand the current shape and operations of the psychedelic “renaissance” as well as help us retrieve these substance’s lost political potential. Concretely, this essay argues that such potential was not inherent to psychedelics but embedded in the political economy of the New Deal order, which supported both the formation of discourses, demands, and hopes based on “the social” (and, relatedly, the idea that “the personal is political”).

As neoliberalism displaced this object of reference in favour of individualism, the personal was de-linked from the political and the dreams – and the threats – of psychedelic utopianism were successfully defused and forgotten. In the process, concretely, the anti-work and collective dimensions of the psychedelic counterculture have been all but lost as psychedelics have returned to enhance or treat individual brains while leaving capitalist society unchallenged. In light of our ecological and social predicaments, the famous context-dependence of psychedelics can be a powerful reminder that, contra individualism, the social and political traverse the personal – and thus that to change the self in line with the psychedelic values of love and connection ultimately requires changing the world

Mateo is a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam, where he researches the political potentials of psychedelics. Theoretically, he stands at the crossroads of phenomenology, posthumanism, and Marxist-leaning analyses of political economy, amongst others. Central to his work is the category of “experience” in general, and in particular its conceptualizations based on embodiment. This implies situating experiences within the material and discursive contexts that produce them and inquiring into how they become mobilized and oriented towards different political ends and visions. More specifically, his research focuses both on social movements of the 1960s and ’70s and the emergence of neoliberalism, and more generally, on the history of capitalist modernity.

University of Amsterdam, Roeterseiland Campus (ABC Building – Room B2.10)