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”.

1. Introduction

This essay argues for the reciprocal benefits of joining the new theories of matter emerging out of critical posthumanism to 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 (Oostveen 2023), 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 (Neimanis 2017). In other words, I argue that while the “new materialism” emerging out of posthumanism (Coole and Frost 2010) can help elaborate a psychedelic rationality, psychedelics can in turn operate as educators in materiality. This conjunction stems from the need, already expressed by Herbert Marcuse (1969) during his defense of the new social movements coalescing at the end of the 1960s, to orient the “new sensibility” fostered by altered states of perception away from logics of domination and towards socially emancipatory projects. As late cultural theorist Mark Fisher (2004) elaborated in a blog post titled “Psychedelic Reason”, this potential passes by developing a rationality that enables the “art of maintaining” the dissolution of the “Human ego” beyond the strict psychoactive duration of drugs. A key move in this direction is, I contend, to push against the common trope that the socially transformative potentials of psychedelics are best expressed as a turn from the narrow scientific and consumerist “materialism” of modern Western societies to more expansive “spiritual” worldviews. Instead, I argue that what is in fact needed to think through and actualize such potentials is an increased attention to materiality. 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 (E. Davis 2019). By the end of the essay, attaching psychedelics to a new materialism will enable us to formulate a “material spirituality” (Gilbert 2017). From this point of view, psychedelics’ political value lies less in an idealistic or cognitive “politics of consciousness” and more in a “materialization of critique” in the “material objects, practices, and events” (Chari 2015) that constitute psychedelic trips.

Given the above, my point of entry into the social contestations occurring around psychedelics is the eternally recurring binary between science and spirituality, whose ostensible opposition, I argue, often obscures a convergence on indivi/dualist premises that in fact reproduce the “onto-epistemological order” of modernity and its socioecological exclusions (Escobar 2018). “Indivi/dualism” is the spelling I use to signal the implication of individualism with a whole set of dualisms, such as those between the inside and outside, mind and body, spirit and matter, or culture and nature, that not only structure the hierarchies built into “Western thought” but also the historical inequalities characteristic of modern social formations. That the “renaissance” of psychedelics in the global north is implicated in such indivi/dualism is itself visible in the division between (neuro)scientific and (psycho)spiritual perspectives on psychedelic experience that separate questions of matter from questions of meaning while simultaneously containing them both inside individuals’ heads (Petrement 2023b). Such containment directly contradicts these same discourses’ continued insistence on the constitutive role of the “set and setting” (Leary et al. 1964) or context of use for such experiences. It is precisely this inherent contradiction (between psychedelics’ emphasis on material context and the indivi/dualist frames in which much of the science–spirituality debate is caught up in) that informs my turn to decidedly postmodern theories of matter and subjectivity and my insistence on the political potential of psychedelics to challenge modern forms of life. As the many theoretical strands that inform posthumanism’s critique of liberal humanism have shown again and again (Braidotti 2013; Nayar 2014), indivi/dualism is heavily involved in the hierarchization of some beings, knowledges, and social worlds over others (Grosz 1994; de Sousa Santos 2014) according to longstanding and ongoing patterns of social exclusion and the ecological destruction characteristic of “colonial–modernity” (Quijano and Ennis Nepantla 2000). Thus, I follow Joshua Falcon (Falcon 2021a, 2021b, 2021c) and others (Gonzalez Romero 2022; Hauskeller et al. 2023; Williams and Brant 2023) in framing psychedelics as allies for the “decolonization of consciousness”. While my emphasis here is on “new materialism”, it is important to mention that I view it as complementary to “old” historical materialism (with its focus on questions of political economy) and with the cosmologies and forms of life we might refer to as “indigenous materialisms” (discussed further below).

This essay is structured in two parts. The first aims to clarify the ways in which framing psychedelics through the science–spirituality binary is caught up in the modern onto-epistemological order and reproduces its matrix of exclusions. By working through the pitfalls of modern conceptualizations of “indigenous” uses of psychedelics, 1960s hippie counterculture, contemporary transhumanism, and psychedelic science, we will also be able to form an idea of the type of materialism necessary to take us beyond them—one that (1) respects the animacy of matter, that can (2) provide a social account of how matter connects and differentiates us, and that (3) considers the material–discursive contexts and consequences of our epistemic practices. The second part of the essay elaborates the link between psychedelics and a posthumanist theory of matter in three subsections. The first is dedicated to the ontological register of relationality, embodiment, and animacy. The second deals with the ethical implications of the former in terms of an expansion of moral boundaries and of our sense of self. As I argue, a crucial move to materialize the ethical dimensions of psychedelic “consciousness-expansion” is to reformulate them through the alternative concept of “transcorporeality” (Alaimo 2010). The third section briefly considers epistemological questions raised by psychedelics from the point of view of “situated knowledge” (Haraway 1988), with a focus on how this helps us make sense of some of the dilemmas in contemporary psychedelic research (e.g., regarding its “objectivity”). Finally, by means of conclusion, I twist the science–spirituality binary through a concept of “material spirituality” in which it is science that renders our “extraordinary” interconnectedness tangible, while spirituality is rooted in becoming attentive to the materiality of ordinary experience.

2. Colonial–Modernity and Psychedelic (Trans)humanism

In order to grasp the need to sublate the science–spirituality binary in psychedelic studies, we must first understand the way it is connected to the onto-epistemological order of colonial–modernity and its harmful socioecological exclusions.

Put briefly, the modern historical period—which dates its “early” commencement to the “discovery of the New World”—reproduced and spread an ontology of isolated substances and an epistemology of detached knowledge in its global project to master nature and free humanity from necessity. From the point of view of the European “Enlightenment”, science would be a liberating form of knowledge because it constituted a true, objective, and neutral mode of access to the world from a disinterested and detached “view from nowhere” (Haraway 1988). A major promise of this view was that it would enable a more democratic and egalitarian—because it is publicly verifiable—form of authority that could bolster social cohesion amidst the social and religious conflicts of the early modern era. Moreover, modern science promised to “demystify” religious superstitions and to uncover the machine-like workings of nature. Construing it as inert matter, the mechanical view of nature typified by Cartesian dualism technically and morally enabled a disembodied form of “reason” to control, bend, and even break the latter towards “human progress”.

Immediately, we can begin to pick out the dualisms that structure this cultural–economic project—science/religion, human/nature, mind/body, subject/object, spirit/matter, reason/emotion, living/inert, progress/backwardness, freedom/necessity, light/dark, true/false, etc. According to this dualistic matrix, each pair is defined by a clear demarcation and hierarchical relationship between terms, such that one is of higher value and therefore meant to exclude and rule over the other. Ecological and nonhuman exclusions notwithstanding, the danger and perversity of this system become apparent in how these exclusionary binaries enter “lateral associations” (Grosz 1994, p. 3) with human differences based on race (white/BIPOC, or white supremacy), gender (male/female, or patriarchy), and class (enlightened individual elites versus the irrational collective “mass”, mob, or crowd). Thus, modernity is a historical system built on both ecological and social exclusion where, as Marcuse ([1964] 2002, p. 170) put it, “the domination of nature has remained linked to the domination of man”.

In all, therefore, modernity’s promising universalistic pretensions were ultimately undermined by the fact that only some (white, male, European) subjects could claim full humanity (rational, free, disembodied), while their “less-than-human” others suffered the consequences of being marked by their non-normative bodies (Braidotti 2013). Through this association to the body, these “others” became “defined into nature” (Mies 1986)—viewed as a mere resource to be extracted, mastered, and exploited for the benefit of those embodying the norm. To this day, global capitalist society and its grave socioeconomic inequalities remain persistently dependent on regimes of exchange value and labor structured by these divisions for their continued reproduction (Federici 2004; Fraser 2022). At the center of its imaginary, then, stands the normative ideal of liberal humanism—a rational, independent, disembodied subject capable not only of unbiased knowledge but also of limitless self-control and endless “productive” work. Contrary to the common notion that Western societies are defined by their materialism, it appears that a spiritualized mind, consciousness, or “psyche” must remain atop and in command of internal and external matter (body and nature) for the benefit of an abstract law of profit rather than tangible “use values” (Marx [1867] 1976). It is within this “collective set and setting” (Hartogsohn 2020) that we must first understand the meaning of “psyche”-delics.

• I

From its inception, this historical matrix has also implied that the non-scientific knowledges and alternative social worlds sustained by modernity’s “others” have been systematically devalued, pirated, exploited, eliminated, or “wasted” (de Sousa Santos 2014). Of course, the clearest and most discussed example of this dynamic in modern psychedelia is the (neo)colonial relations between indigenous knowledges and Western science (from their first colonial encounters to the psychedelic science of the 1950s/60s wave and today’s “renaissance”). While several authors writing from decolonial perspectives have illuminated how such relations are often extractivist and hierarchizing (Dev 2018; Ens 2021; Fotiou 2019; Hauskeller et al. 2023; Williams and Brant 2023), I would argue that the ways in which they mobilize the science–spirituality and associated binaries have been insufficiently explored. Take, for example, Corbin’s (2012) feminist sociology of how psychedelic science “legitimizes” itself by “assimilating” spiritual experiences “associated with divinity, mystical metaphysics, or transcendental knowledge” into its own frameworks. In doing so, Corbin concludes, psychedelic science denies the “challenge” the latter pose to “materialist ontologies” (pp. 1420–21). The way this opposition is presented is such that “spiritual” becomes conflated with subjugated indigenous epistemologies and materialism with its bio-reductionist versions. While this is a common, well-intentioned, and not exactly “false” opposition to draw, the history of the study of religion allows for a reverse interpretation.

As scholar of religion Birgit Meyer (2012) noted a widespread “Protestant bias” in Western conceptions of religion assumed that non-Western “religious” practices were inferior precisely because of their overly material character. Judged insufficiently mental, spiritual, and “inward”, this excessive materiality was manifest in the reliance on “fetish” artifacts endowed, like the land and its other nonhuman inhabitants, with a life of their own and/or an ability to mediate the divine. At one level, such mediation implied a more distant—and thus lesser—relation to the sacred, because less im-mediate or internal. At another level, “animistic beliefs” were also interpreted by anthropologists as a sign of “backwardness” and less-than-human status of people who did not reserve agency for humans alone and “failed” to grasp the inertness of nature (Bird-David 1999).1 In other words, in their purported misunderstanding of matter as animated and failure to respect the spirit–matter distinction, such cultures proved that their reason and humanity were insufficiently evolved. While we cannot deny that many indigenous ontologies do include “spirit beings” or “immaterial” realms of one sort or another, what I want to emphasize is the twist whereby such cultures have been devalued, not for being spiritual rather than materialist, but for being too materialist and not spiritual enough.

While it is relevant to distinguish the relatively distinct geographical genealogies of modern discourses around animism (mostly the Americas) and fetishism (Africa), the common point is that both express ontologies of practice and value at odds with a capitalist world economy based on the scientific mastery of nature. Indeed, it was not until modern science was able to “reduce” the plant knowledges of other cultures to the mere mechanical causation of inert chemical atoms that certain “drugs” could be culturally and physically extracted and transported into global markets. Before such processes of abstraction and translation, a “fetish” was precisely the “other” of the commodity—non-reducible, controllable, or containable within the regime of commercial equivalence (Breen 2019; Pels 1998). Compared to the quantified monetary idealization of global “exchange value”, their use value was eminently tied to the material (re)production of local forms of life. It is perhaps no wonder that several indigenous scholars find a critical affinity with Marxism’s focus on land (dis)possession (Coulthard 2014; Estes 2013) and resist being “collapsed into this kind of spiritual connection to the land” that risks bypassing its material importance to their “quality of life as indigenous peoples” (Estes quoted in Denvir 2024, np).

In all, two crucial points can be gleaned from the above for our rethinking of psychedelics through a more responsible concept of matter that is more attuned to its socioecological consequences. First, indigenous ontologies such as those labeled “animist” point less to a “spiritual” alternative to modern materialism than to the possibility of an understanding of materiality that exceeds that of reductive physicalism—a sense of matter as animated rather than inert. Such theories suggest, and this is the second point, that we do not need to grasp for something “immaterial” to find an alternative paradigm. Indeed, non-dualistic reconceptualizations of matter and spirit of the sort I will be arguing for below were already prefigured in some countercultural theories of the 1960s - such as Alan Watts’ rejection of the material–mental division and the inertness of matter in his 1962 classic, A Joyous Cosmology (prologue). Below, however, I take issue with the indivi/dualist turn of dominant strands of psychedelic counterculture and its cybercultural offshoots.

• II

(A)

From 1960s Counterculture…

While countercultural valorizations of psychedelically induced “non-dual” states often echoe, and perhaps even anticipated, contemporary critiques of Western dualism, the psychedelically inflected “inward” turn of many a youth during the 1960s could not, despite its great hopes and effective mobilizing power, ultimately escape the cultural matrix of modernity (Petrement 2023a). This is because, in their attempt to drop out of the “materialist” games of “external” validation, individual status, consumerism, and domination of Western society, they unwittingly repeated the inside–outside distinction that is so central to the latter’s indivi/dualism. More relevant to our current argument, we can find in their well-intentioned turn to mystical experience another of the guiding assumptions of modernity and the matter–spirit binary—namely, that the true unity of humanity resides in a shared and pure spiritual substance over and above the visible differences of the material world. Thus, the latter becomes coded as both other-than-human and as marked by social divisions and narrow, egoistic self-interests. As a result, liberation must consist of transcending these externally imposed, “illusory” material divisions through an inward journey to a deeply buried “authentic self” and common humanity - both of which coincide in an immaterial mental substance. Thus, fully in line with the historical premises of liberal political theory, collectivism must imply sameness and cannot accommodate difference (Gilbert 2014). As the repeated critique of such “perennialism” goes, the emphasis on the direct experience of a universal because disembodied “mind” resulted in a blindness to social differences mediated by axes of gender, race, and class (Shortall 2014). As their contemporary New Left “politicos” already noted, such blindness would render “hippies” unable to properly understand, much less confront and transform, the social world (Lee and Shlain 1985). Incidentally mirroring popular critiques of John Rawls’ famous thought experiment of the “veil of ignorance” in his 1971 classic, A Theory of Justice (Rawls 1971), this was a thoroughly liberal view of the world in which differences did not matter—or conversely, as a self-described mode of “ideal theory”, to which matter made no difference (Mills 2005).2 From this point of view, “spiritual bypassing”—resorting to spiritual discourses to avoid rather than address “real world” personal or social problems—appears as a bypassing of materiality.

Of course, the 60s’ turn to spirituality was in fact materialized in certain practices—not only drug use but also, for example, in the wave of communization that took inspiration from Native American cultures. If this was certainly mired in problematic romanticizations and a reductive containment of such cultures to “pre-modern” status, it was nonetheless a potent source of experimentation with alternative modes of being and a meaningful site of cross-cultural contact (Smith 2012). Nevertheless, the framing of “back-to-the-land” experiments as “spiritual” repeats the disavowal of their materiality. This sort of disavowal is also behind the seemingly inexplicable phenomenon that the lessons received in life-transforming psychedelic retreats—such as a sense of enchanted nature or egalitarian collectivism—are hard to live by once returning to a social world structured around fundamentally different assumptions. Such “surprise” not only mystifies the material reasons for this “failure” but also responsibilizes individuals for it—you must be at fault for not living by your newly found principles (you are either too weak to do so or a hypocrite).

What we also find as another outgrowth of 60s’ psychedelia is a “non-relational” spirituality (Lahood 2010) that, by focusing on the internal and progressive “enlightenment” of some individuals who stand above the unenlightened mass, repeats the hierarchizing exclusions discussed above. Indeed, the belief that psychedelic-induced insights grant and justify special privileges above and beyond the “mass” of people is clearest in today’s psychedelic transhumanism (see below).

Before turning to it, however, we can summarize the key takeaways from the counterculture’s turn to (often non-Western) spirituality as an antidote to the “mindless” consumerism and scientific domination of (Western) materialism. According to such a view, the real interconnection of humanity would be revealed only in a “mindful” transcendence of the divisions of the material world in favor of an immaterial realm of global consciousness (later epitomized by the internet). This belies an inability to conceive of the very real ways we are materially interconnected—not least, through the material transfers, flows, and exchanges of the global economy—and of staying with, rather than disavowing, the ways we are differentially constituted by such flows. While I do not wish to deny the existence of more ethically grounded and relational forms of spirituality, I want to highlight a common pitfall of many countercultural framings of psychedelics and their transformative effects—namely, that they are too spiritual and not material enough. This tasks our new psychedelic materialism with being able to account for how we are materially—rather than spiritually—connected through and from our situated embodied position—rather than a delocalized mental substance.

If, on the other hand, contemporary transhumanism has made more room for scientific materialism and an acknowledgement of social difference, it has been by completely dropping the egalitarian horizon that constituted the most promising aspect of the counterculture’s psychedelic utopianism (Petrement 2023a).

(B)

…to Contemporary Transhumanism

Even as it is a historical offshoot of the 60s’ psychedelic counterculture, contemporary psychedelic transhumanism more explicitly embraces the “materialist” institutions of science and technology (Dymock 2023). From this point of view, shared by many psychedelic industry leaders gravitating around Silicon Valley and studied in most detail by Tvorun-Dunn (2022) and Devenot (2023), psychedelics are prescribed to promote a particular project for the “greater good” of “humanity” that must be kept safe from democratic derailment by lower, less enlightened classes (Evans 2023). Here, as their description as “spiritual technologies” makes clear, the logic of scientific mastery and enhancement of individual capabilities meets the spiritual claims of elite Gnostic insight to justify their rightful stewardship of our planetary future. The keys to this convergence of science and spirituality are not only their shared claims of privileged and direct access to “truth” (to which I will return) but also their indivi/dualist premises. As Nicolas Langlitz wrote about the psychedelic renaissance over ten years ago, “in contemporary neurotheology, an experience-centered spirituality and the heuristic individualism of cognitive neuroscience meet in the abstraction of experience from its social and cultural context” (2013, p. 49). Viewing consciousness as a matter of brain chemistry and simultaneously as a dematerialized psychological experience of “information” (Hayles 1999), this abstraction from material context allows psychedelic transhumanists to claim—in classic modern fashion—that the legitimacy of their mission stems from the superiority of their minds and brains. Paradoxically, these self-appointed genius-saviors can master the world and solve its problems by designing any number of technological “fixes”, but cannot tackle social inequalities—which they take as naturally given but in fact actively reproduce.

According to a circular meritocratic ideology, therefore, the very power of these elites to make decisions that bypass collective deliberation is a sign that they can see further, judge better, and act faster—thus justifying their total disregard for the broader socioecological consequences of their technocratic program (not least, neo-colonial patterns of mineral and value extractivism (Couldry and Mejias 2019)). Indeed, dropping the egalitarianism of other strands of 60s’ psychedelia, these apologists of the inherent liberatory value of psychedelics look down on whole populations in a manner reminiscent of older eugenicist and colonial projects, as lesser and disposable. It is little surprise, then, that self-described liberals such as the infamous Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson tie “ecodelic” experiences to conservative defenses of “natural hierarchy” (Pace and Devenot 2021, pp. 9–12).

The crucial insight revealed by psychedelic transhumanism is the affinity between science and spirituality—matter in the form of drugs and “cyberdelic” technologies (Hartogsohn 2023) and spirit in that of immaterial informational consciousness—and their shared reproduction of modern exclusions. If the “progress” of scientific materialism is here more explicitly avowed than in the 1960s, it still remains confined to the indivi/dualist obfuscation of broader material contexts and an inability—or unwillingness—to consider action on these contexts as either viable or desirable. In this instantiation, psychedelia is both material and spiritual but thoroughly indivi/dualist and elitist. For all the “hype” about the disruptive and game-changing potential of psychedelics pushed by these actors, their social imaginary remains imprisoned within “capitalist realism” (Fisher 2009) and the psychedelically enchanted cage of modernity. It is truly easier to imagine a transhuman vanguard saving itself in the name—and at the cost—of others than an inclusive social transformation. We desperately need a psychedelic materialism that can once again imagine radically democratic and egalitarian social change, precisely the sort of “acid communist” horizon rendered unthinkable by decades of neoliberal “consciousness-deflation” (Fisher 2018).

• III

To finalize this overview of the confinement of psychedelics to an all-too-narrow understanding of materialism, we should add that this confinement does not only find expression in our understanding of the brain as the central locus of human subjectivity but also in the modern notion of drugs as self-contained substances with fixed qualities—quite literally, a “substance ontology”. In turn, the epistemological implication is that true knowledge of the nature of drugs can come via direct subjective experience or scientific objectivity. While the path of immediate noetic insight is mostly sustained by those who defend the inherent “sacredness” of “entheogenic” substances (Letcher 2007), the latter is enacted by the methodological standards of Random Control Trials (RCTs) that aim to isolate pharmacological from placebo effects. This is itself a telling distinction that, as many have noted, is particularly ill-suited to understanding psychedelics due to their fundamental dependence on the extra-pharmacological factors of “set and setting” (Giffort 2020; Hendy 2018; Oram 2018). (Yet, this paradigm was still upheld as an epistemological criterion by the recent FDA decision to reject the approval of MDMA therapy (Schenberg et al. 2024).) While the term “placebo” already signals the aim to demarcate the real material effects of drugs, “set and setting” captures what becomes separated from them and thus, de-realized—the “mental” expectations of patients and therapists (not material) and the surrounding material infrastructures of use (too material).3 These are the unruly factors that are hard to pin down in the efforts by neuropsychological disciplines to domesticate and instrumentalize these substances towards medical and financial gains through standardization and “scaling”. The complex overdeterminations of material contexts complicate the biopsychiatric project of discovering and marketing “magic bullet” therapies in which pharmaceutically designed drugs directly target demarcated diagnostic categories (without “side effects”) (Whitaker 2010). Incidentally, this medical “pharmacologism” (Degrandpre 2006) is the very logic behind the drug war’s moralizing claim that it can delineate between “good” and “bad” drugs irrespective of contexts and modes of use. Of course, the irony of the magical-military metaphor used to describe this medical model should not be lost, for it simultaneously epitomizes and satirizes the scientific project of domination and the drug war itself.

In addition to framing what is to be known (the “pure” effects of chemical substances) and how (a neutral and detached stance that avoids “contaminating” the results), the history of psychedelic science has also frequently repeated characteristically modern distributions of harms and benefits in terms of who is doing the knowing and on whom drugs are being tested. Thus, its “experts” were and are still drawn from a predominantly white, male, and middle-class demographic that has to play along with the “respectability politics” of the scientific game (by wearing, for example, “lab coats and ties”) (Giffort 2020, chap. 5), and it has a history of experimenting on “unwilling and often unwitting subjects, including prisoners, psychiatric patients, foreigners, sexual ‘deviants’, and ethnic minorities” (Hartogsohn 2020, p. 58).4 This is not a cheap attack on the ethical standards and credibility of psychedelic science—for one, questionable patterns of power and authority also abound in more spiritual contexts and exist in other pharma-medical fields. What it certainly is, however, is a foregrounding of larger social and historical patterns that keep repeating for reasons that we ignore at our own peril and whose mechanisms of reproduction far exceed what psychedelics alone could possibly redress.

As feminist historians have shown, modern science and capitalist patriarchy have common roots in the witch hunts of the long 16th century—with Francis Bacon’s discursive construction of the scientific method as a violent inquisition and “penetration” into the secrets of nature, coded as feminine. This construction paralleled the historical elimination of the herbal, medicinal, contraceptive, and perhaps even hallucinogenic knowledge (Winkelman 2019) of female “witches” and its replacement by masculine scientific expertise (Ehrenreich and English [1972] 2010; Federici 2004; Merchant 1980).5 Differences notwithstanding, this certainly reminisces the attempt to weaponize LSD to “torture the truth” out of the communist enemy (the McCarthyist exorcism of which is itself often described as a “witch hunt”) in the context of the Cold War (Marks 1979). Similarly, this effort also propped up the knowledges and expert consultants of the military-industrial complex that stood behind the “pharmacological revolution” of the 1950s, which itself paved the way for the biopsychiatric and neuroscientific turn that has made the psychedelic renaissance possible (Langlitz 2013). Returning to early modern times, of course, science’s privileged view into “the secret workings of nature” was also constructed on the extraction of the botanical, medical, and drug knowledges of indigenous peoples and their translation into the mechanical model of chemical reactions at the heart of the pharmaceutical industry (Breen 2019). From the latter’s point of view, such reactions are the real or true mechanism behind the magical explanations provided by other—lesser—forms of knowledge and practice—a valuation that does the “boundary work” (Gieryn 1983) of distinguishing rational scientists from irrational “charlatans” (often associated with ethnic or spiritual discourses) (Nathan and Stengers 2018).

In conclusion, remaining attentive to the multiple exploitations that historically constitute the background conditions for the ostensible neutrality of science should remind us that such knowledge is socially mediated. In other words, the “materialism” of psychedelic science is too narrow, as it has largely disavowed the effects of broader material contexts on drug action as well as on its own practice. This underscores the need for an expanded theory of materialism that can account for the “coproductive” feedback between social context, drug experience, and drug knowledge (Jasanoff 2004).

3. Towards a Posthumanist New Materialism for Psychedelic Studies

However partial the critique of modernity sketched above, the current trajectory towards ecological collapse is increasingly pressing the conclusion that “we are facing modern problems for which there are no modern solutions” (Escobar 2018, p. 34). This demands that we construct alternative ways of orienting ourselves towards the world that are appropriate to navigating the resulting context of common—but uneven—vulnerability. If I described the modern onto-epistemology as one of detached knowledge and isolated substances, then it would seem that a focus on “situated epistemology” (Haraway 1988) and ontological relationality is a good place to start.

Indeed, as we will see, psychedelics’ insistent “amplification” of the contextual mediation of experience makes them powerful teachers of such posthumanist principles. In turn, the alternative and more expansive conception of materialism offered by some posthumanist thinkers will help us make sense of the tacitly felt ethical promise of psychedelic experiences. To recap, this “new materialism” will have to provide us with a conception of matter (1) as animated rather than inert, (2) as that which connects rather than only separates us while also being attentive to differences of social positionality, and (3) capable of viewing our epistemological practices and drug experiences as emerging from and having consequences on the broader material contexts in which they are implicated. Thus, I will address these requirements in three sections dedicated to rethinking psychedelics through the ontological, ethical, and epistemological dimensions of posthumanist theories of “vibrant” matter (Bennett 2010). Perhaps even more crucial to this reconceptualization of psychedelics, and connecting the notions of situatedness and relationality, is a conception of embedded and extended embodiment that will help us reconceive of psychedelic “consciousness-expansion” as a form of material “transcorporeality” (Alaimo 2010).

• I

Perhaps the guiding theme behind the shared “political ontology” of critical posthumanism and decolonization projects is that “nothing pre-exists the relations that constitute it” (Escobar 2018, p. 101). In other words, reality is not composed of separate entities that only then inter-act, but of constant “intra-actions” that constitute what then appear as distinct phenomena (Barad 2003). One of the main inspirations for this posthumanist challenge to substance ontology has been a Spinozan–Deleuzian view of the world as composed of the infinite array of human and nonhuman bodies that simply constitute different expressive modulations of a single material substance. If this fundamental “oneness” of reality speaks to the mystical insights of unity often associated with psychedelic experiences of “oceanic boundlessness”, this liquid ontology also emphasizes the constant “becoming” and transformation of the world as bodies come into contact and affect one another. In other words, according to this relational view of reality, bodies are constantly coming together to form loose “assemblages” that shift and reconfigure upon encounters with other bodies (Bennett 2010). In doing so, bodies alter their capacities to act, experiencing “joy” if the alteration increases this capacity and “sadness” if it decreases it. Thus, Spinoza’s monism not only bypasses the human–nature divide by leveling all bodies (which are made of the same ‘stuff’) but also implies that all beings, “though in different degrees, are nevertheless animate” (Spinoza [1677] 2005, p. 40). In other words, there are no mere objects, essentially passive and inert, but only “actants” that make a difference (even if without conscious intention) (Latour 1993).

The relevance of such posthumanist ontologies to psychedelic experiences seems confirmed by research that has shown that the latter often produce “ontological shocks” that alter “metaphysical beliefs”, turning users away from “hard materialist” towards more “panpsychist” views (Timmermann et al. 2021). As the title of an article by Nayak and Griffiths (2022) states most clearly, “a single belief-changing psychedelic experience is associated with increased attribution of consciousness to living and non-living entities”. While the terminology of “psychism” and “consciousness” (even “belief”) shows how researchers’ and subjects’ vocabulary remains marred by modern dualisms, these studies do hint at a search for alternative ontologies that can make sense of the animacy of the nonhuman world. In this, new materialism is clearly in solidarity with, and thus able to learn from rather than discount, indigenous cosmologies (Alaimo 2020, p. X even calls them the “original new materialists”) (Oostveen 2023; Williams and Brant 2023). If we put together the view of such cosmologies as materialist, discussed earlier, with the notion that they are often turned to as an alternative to consumerist lifestyles, we can begin the important task of disarticulating “materialism” from “consumerism”.

In any case, the crucial contribution of a new materialist ontology is that we do not need the ontological doubling of matter against spirit, consciousness, or psyche in order to make sense of and incorporate these transformations in metaphysical orientations—as our psychedelic companions demonstrate, matter is itself animated and animating.

Indeed, the Spinozian perspective has been productively put to use in the analysis of psychedelic “tripping” and other “drug assemblages” to emphasize that the “effects […] of [drugs] are the outcome not solely of the chemical qualities of psychoactive substances or the nature of the individual users, but of more or less unforeseeable interactions between the variety of bodies that make up particular events of consumption” (Bøhling 2017). While this definition gravitates against psychedelic exceptionalism, it is perhaps this category of substances that most dramatically evinces such sensitivity to “set and setting”. In fact, I would argue that in their essential relationality, it would be best to think of psychedelics as “anti-substances”—what they “are” cannot be isolated from their constitutive relation to their context of use.

Moreover, psychedelics themselves put things into relation by acting as animating “catalysts” of the variety of human and nonhuman agencies that together constitute a “context” (Coole 2005). In other words, psychedelics are not only (chemical, vegetal, fungal) agents that affect us in their own right but also transform our capacity to be affected by other bodies. By inviting a whole range of new agencies to come into play, psychedelics appear less as supporters of delusions of grandeur than as humble hosts of larger collective parties that prefigure forms of “collective joy” currently inhibited by the structures of compulsory indivi/dualism (Gilbert 2014). Acknowledging, respecting, and building on the fact that drug use often plays a role in facilitating non-heteronormative sexual and gendered identities and desires (Pienaar et al. 2020; Race 2009; Chacruna 2022), we might suggest that psychedelics open us to “queer socialities” that, for Chen (2012), disturb the broader order of things defined by modern indivi/dualism.

To use their term, such indivi/dualism is defined by an “ontology of affect” (p. 30), according to which humans are in permanent control and therefore affect the world, but not vice versa. Of course, therapy is itself a prime site where this ontology breaks down. In such contexts, psychedelics are deployed to help patients “let go” of such control and “realize” how a whole array of “things” do and have in fact affected them in profound ways (a suppression or “avoidance” of which previously “de-realized” them). To play again with the connotative registers opened by the term “queer”, it is worth recalling Marcuse’s (1969) suggestion that the “new sensibility” unleashed in a liberated world would consist of a more “erotic” relationship to an “aestheticized environment” as a whole, rather than limited to (heterosexual) sex. If psychedelic love is by nature expansionary, it might demand we transcend the indivi/dualist norm that proper ‘human’ bodies are not affected or only affected by certain “things” (an assumption that, in fact, reproduces our differential affect-ability). From the point of view of liberal freedom, responsibility, and meritocracy, for example, historical legacies of exploitation and the differential life conditions they create do not affect capacities for achievement.

Yet, since the Age of Reason, drugs have precisely epitomized the threat implied by a loss of the ability of an immaterial will to remain above, rather than “under the influence” of, its material conditions. Given the modern obsession with individual independence, it is no wonder we struggle to think of drugs beyond their pejorative association with “dependence” and an “enslaving” loss of freedom (Courtwright 2019; Fraser and Gordon 2013). These, however, are the very norms that psychedelics challenge and even transvalue as they reframe sensitivity to our “set and setting” as a fundament of joy, healing, and empowerment rather than pain, weakness, or failure.

In all, psychedelics are the ultimate “transcorporeal” agent to the extent that both their literal “in”-take and animating effects undo the distinction between our self “in here” and the environment “out there” (Alaimo 2010).6 Complicating the inside–outside distinction even further, we might even say that, by altering our relationship to our surroundings, it is not psychedelics that are in us, but rather that we are in them (Anton 2012). In re-embedding us in the world, these anti-substances act as “ecodelics” (Doyle 2011) that render tangible what was previously imperceptible—how our subjectivity is constituted by our material involvements and is thus always collective and more-than-human. In fact, what we take in when we ingest, inject, or snort any drug is always much more than a substance, since we thereby invite a swarm of histories, agencies, and imaginaries to carve their impression in and upon our bodies. In turn, by helping us recognize our mutual constitution with even the nonhuman members of an expanded “social” community (Lindemann 2005), psychedelics demand an ethical revaluation of (inter)dependence.

• II

If the relational view of reality and conception of animated matter are able to account for the apparent “weirdness” of psychedelic experience from the point of view of substance ontology, they also help elaborate the tacit ethical implications often attached to psychedelic “consciousness-expansion”. These implications begin from the renewed perception that our very being is inevitably entangled with that of others in diverse and ongoing processes of “becoming-with” (Haraway 2016). At this point, I part with the view that the recognition of such interconnection requires a turn to an undifferentiated spiritual realm of immaterial consciousness accessible through “extra-ordinary” mystical experiences. Instead, I argue that our interdependence is best honored by redirecting attention to our everyday embeddedness within multiscalar material flows. The fundamental principle of our involvement in these flows, however, is that we are embodied, and thus placed within—rather than above or beyond—them. Thus, I argue that the notion of “transcorporeality” serves to avow a sense of our moral boundaries and our very self as psychedelically-expanded while remaining response-able towards our particular position within unequal distributions of harm and vulnerability. In short, this is to insist that even as we become expanded and connected, we remain situated. Thus, the shift to a new materialism proposed here views materiality as the ground of our interconnectedness without losing sight of our differences (like the counterculture) nor thinking of these differences through hierarchy and exclusion (like transhumanists). This insistence on situated interdependence is one of the crucial feminist insights that psychedelia stands to learn from due to their common interest in matters of affect, care, and repair (Dymock 2023).

We can glean a first ethical implication of psychedelic experience from our previous discussion of its relation to an experience and understanding of matter as animate rather than inert, for this shift denies the a priori possibility of discounting something as a subject of moral concern. In other words, expanding the realm of beings who might be conscious or are otherwise agentic in their own right serves to extend our “moral boundaries” and care to that which and those who had previously been left out (de la Bellacasa 2017; Tronto 1993). As Bennett (2010) contends, new materialism fosters a “countercultural kind of perceiving” (p. xiv) that, by extending animacy beyond the limits of the human, is not only up to the ecological challenge of considering our nonhuman companions and conditions but also “set[s] up a kind of safety net for those humans […] made to suffer because they do not conform to a particular […] model of personhood” (p. 13). As she claims elsewhere in an argument against Marx’s critique of “commodity fetishism” (Bennett 2001, chap. 6), this view of things as animate can also help resist their consumerist reduction to mere objects that can be carelessly thrown away and replaced (see Morton 2017 for a similar argument). Altogether, when nothing is simply inert, lesser-than and thus disposable or killable, moral consideration becomes detached from the condition of being human in a normatively defined sense.

Returning to the concept of transcorporeality, we should emphasize that it understands all corporeality—not only special kinds of it—as expanded by default.7 Indeed, from a posthumanist perspective, bodies never quite end at our skin but extend outwards into an environment that folds inward in turn. As described above regarding psychedelic experience, it is the material exchanges with this purported “outside” that connect bodies by making them affect, traverse, and transform each other, perpetually (un)making us as a certain type of being. Epitomized by our consumption of food and drugs, it is the fundamental openness of our bodies to such materials that continuously and simultaneously constitute us—render us capable—and challenge our integrity—render us vulnerable.

From this point of view, it becomes possible to deflate the processes of ego-death and the sui generis nature of mystical experience. From a relational account of the self, we are always-already in the midst of “little deaths” and rebirths, and it is our default bodily openness to the world that stands as the condition of possibility of mystical-type experiences (Tuckett 2017). In other words, if these experiences seem “extra-ordinary”, we must interpret this in the sense of being very ordinary rather than as radically beyond “normal waking consciousness”. They are not different in kind, but only in intensity—a difference that renders them conspicuously perceptible. As “non-specific amplifiers” of experience (Grof [1975] 1996), we can say that psychedelics merely help to sensitize us to this pre-existing, though previously imperceptible, material relationality that unsettles our comfortable and misleadingly secure identifications with immaterial consciousness. Indeed, it is arguable that our material relationality far surpasses anything conceivable through the spiritual imaginary—such as the “sublime” scale of supply chains for even the most basic consumer goods (Robins 2023) or, as a more specific example, the intoxication of Inuit children by industrial pollutants travelling through atmospheric currents and the breastmilk of their mothers (Neimanis 2017, pp. 35–36).

The deconstruction of the ordinary/non-ordinary and drug/non-drug binaries is key to integrating “ecodelic insights” into everyday life and our cultural “matrix” (Eisner 1997). Otherwise, the danger is that the focus on the uniqueness and desirability of a full-blown experience of ego-dissolution and “pure consciousness” diverts attention from its risks (Gearin and Devenot 2021), from the more mundane instances of “connection” that users typically report, and from insights into the social conditions that might obstruct or sustain such everyday connections. As I argued elsewhere (Petrement 2023b), it is presumably these “real-world” connections that will make or break patients’ long-term ability to sustain a healthy degree of “openness” and “flexibility” in everyday life. Put differently, while neuroscience is looking too closely at the individual and the surface of the brain to see these connections (Fuchs 2018), transpersonal spirituality is looking too far into the cosmos and deep into the self. As indivi/dualist discourses, they both ultimately frame psychedelic consciousness-expansion as occurring in the head rather than through our bodily extension into and material exchange with the “outside” world. By contrast, an embodied view of psychedelics sees them as “active super-placebos” (Dupuis and Veissière 2022) that teach us how to appreciate the pervasive, if more subtle and harder to grasp, effects of “extra-pharmacological context” on everyday non-drug experience. This view is what renders us more response-able to the world around us—that is, more capable of ethical response.

If psychedelic consciousness-expansion can be usefully reconstrued as an extension of our moral boundaries to what previously appeared wholly “other”, this is because our sense of self also becomes “torqued” beyond recognition by indivi/dualist norms (Neimanis 2017). Crucially, this material torquing does not amount to neuro-spiritual dismissal of the self as a mere “illusion” (Harris 2014) or “online hallucination” (Metzinger 2004) and a concomitant search for “technologies of the non-self” (as Gilbert 2017 provocatively calls them). The self is very much real—but against indivi/dualism, it is transcorporeally constituted by expanded-situated relations with its environment. Thus, we arrive at an expanded sense of self that nonetheless remains embedded, which enables us to account for and distribute responsibility in a way sensitive to differences of social positionality and location. We are all extended transcorporeal selves, but some bodies extend further than others, since our relative power to extend into and incorporate the world remains structured by longstanding patterns of inequality and exclusion (Ahmed 2006). Yes, “‘we’ are all in this together […], but ‘we’ are not all the same, nor are we all ‘in this’ in the same way” (Neimanis 2017, p. 15, paraphrasing Braidotti)—including, of course, within the “psychedelic community” (Psymposia 2016).

Ultimately, the ethical demand psychedelics encourage us to take up is to be more curious about the material interdependencies we participate in—leading us to assume responsibility for our potentially “infinite relationality” (Gilbert 2014). This entails withdrawing from networks that reproduce harm—including, but not limited to, the exploitative ones that fuel hyperconsumerism—and re-orienting ourselves towards those that produce collective joy and flourishing (Braidotti 2008; Segal 2017). In turn, this does not require a wholesale and extraordinary dissolution of the self and sacrificial “altruism”. In fact, accounting for our place and response-abilities in such networks is hindered by such self-effacement. Instead, our transcorporeality calls for an expanded notion of material self-interest (Bennett 2010, chap. 8); since we never know precisely where our bodies end and others begin, we are forced to consider the more-than-human scales and horizons that align our well-being with that of others (Gilbert and Williams 2022, chap. 4). Such is the basis for a sort of “materialist spirituality” that has no need to supplement matter with spirit in order to make us less self-ish, since it is matter that connects us in a way that recourse to an abstract spirituality risks overlooking. Before we turn and end with some reflections on such a materialist spirituality, however, we will briefly consider how a posthumanist new materialism offers an alternative epistemological vantage point well suited to the idiosyncrasies of psychedelic research.

• III

At least two epistemological consequences follow from the above presentation of the ontological and ethical orientations of posthumanist theories of matter. On the one hand, the ontological view of reality as constituted by relations implies a view of knowledge production as a social practice, and concomitantly, on the other, the ethical consideration of embodied embeddedness requires us to recognize the positionality of the perspectives from which knowledge emerges. In other words, from this point of view, knowledge does not arise from a detached “view from nowhere” that can achieve a transparent and immediate access to the world but is always mediated by its very materiality. As Donna Haraway famously put it, all knowledge is “situated knowledge” (takes place from somewhere), and all vision is “prosthetic” (made possible through different instruments that determine the scope of the visible) (1988). Psychedelics are a perfect exemplar of this epistemological standpoint given their insistent emphasis on the effects of “set and setting” on the knowledge produced through and around the experiences they induce.

To be sure, in highlighting the contextuality of knowledge, psychedelics certainly underscore its “partiality”—but this is not to be confused, dismissed, and devalued as rendering such knowledge relativist or “merely subjective”. From the standpoint of feminist epistemology, the partiality of situatedness is not only unavoidable but the very condition of knowledge, for only by being placed in the world can we make contact with and learn from it. Furthermore, as actor network theory would add, and as I discussed above with regard to the animating agency of psychedelics, the “social” collectives involved in the coproduction of knowledge are always more-than-human (Latour 2005a). As a corollary, what we know through psychedelics are not eternal truths derived from immediate gnostic insights, but what particular drug assemblages are capable of. In other words, psychedelic research is more akin, as Franz Vollenweider understands it (Langlitz 2019), to an enchanted form of “cosmic play” and tinkering with a variety of (f)actors than to the transparent visions suggested by Stanislav Grof’s comparison of psychedelics to the microscope and the telescope. If psychedelics are like these instruments, it is because, in conjunction with the material–discursive practices they are embedded in, they enact some realities and not others. In other words, by mediating, amplifying, and orienting our perception, they alter—not merely describe—the larger world around them. Before returning to how this world-creating capacity of research instruments charges psychedelics with broader political significance, it is important to explore how situated epistemologies help disentangle some of the pressing dilemmas of psychedelic research.

One place to start is to consider how a notion of “strong objectivity” (Harding 2004) deflates the “psychonaut’s dilemma” and the issue of “the persistence of subjectivity” in psychedelic research. The first of these terms is Giffort’s (2020) name for the paradox implied by researchers’ previous experience with psychedelics, or lack thereof—namely, that if their perspective is overly informed by their personal experience, it is biased, but if, conversely, they have never tried the drugs, they could not possibly understand what they are studying. The fact that this even appears as a paradox is in itself telling of the assumptions still prevailing in psychedelic research—that of detached, impersonal, disinterested knowledge and, simultaneously, of the noncommensurability of non-ordinary and ordinary experience and the commensurability of all psychedelic experience. Under the alternative assumptions of a strong objectivity based on the recognition, acknowledgement, and factoring in of the social position of research(ers), however, the paradox disappears—reaching for “objectivity” means exploring, clarifying, and reflecting on how one’s life experience affects experimental results, rather than hiding and denying that it does.

Such an understanding of objectivity as an orienting value is defended by Langlitz (2010) when he describes how subjectivity “persists” in psychedelic studies through the intromission of researchers in test subject’s experience during experiments to calm them and safeguard their well-being, for example. The upshot, of course, is that this seeming interference with pure objectivity in fact produces better measurements.8 A similar point can be made about more recent conversations regarding the ambiguities of patient autonomy under the enhanced suggestibility of psychedelic experience—under a properly relational view of experience, there is simply no means of bypassing mutual affectation. Precisely because a “gentle touch” (Timmermann et al. 2022) is required to navigate the unavoidable inequalities of the therapeutic relationship, it is crucial to start from an ethics that is attentive to how differences in social positionality matter. Indeed, posthumanist ethics are precisely designed to care for the type of situated affective responsibilities that arise in psychedelic-assisted therapy.

Furthermore, this consideration of the ethical relevance of embodied position also provides tools to investigate questions of diversity in psychedelic research. For one, it would certainly insist on the frequent lack of such diversity in both researcher and patient demographics and echo Jamila George et al.’s “call for indigenous and ethnic minority inclusion” in what to this day remains a “white-dominant medical framework” (George et al. 2019). Indeed, that the central demographic driving psychedelic (counter)culture in the global north since the 1960s is mostly white—and also male and middle-class—has been frequently pointed out – usually in order to critique its blindness to its social position and its false universalization of its own (often orientalist) understandings of these drugs (Shortall 2014). The importance of this call to minority inclusion and the critique of white psychedelia cannot be voiced loud enough. Without this, our knowledge of what psychedelics can do will be inevitably incomplete and skewed, it will reproduce longstanding patterns of injustice, and it will betray the ethical horizons often claimed for this field and class of substances. At the same time, this very call also summons other critical questions that could benefit from some additional attention.

Put bluntly, what might psychedelics teach us about whiteness and/or masculinity (Amezcua 2019; Reisenwitz 2022)? While the answers to this question are certainly complex and would merit their own research agenda, we can at least wonder why so many within this demographic (including myself) are drawn to psychedelics as the purveyors of an experience that seems (to us, and at least initially) so fantastically out of the ordinary that we throw ourselves at understanding and spreading it without proper self-reflection and self-criticism. As I have been suggesting, psychedelics are sensitizers to context and to questions of affect, care, and mutuality in ways that challenge the reality principle of the social worlds that constitute and privilege us. Might they not then bear the potential to confront us with the limits of our identities and with the harms implied by the indivi/dualist myths that support them? In other words, could psychedelics help reveal the trouble with whiteness and/or masculinity by amplifying the gap between the ideals implied in these founding myths and reality? Logically, by living in worlds adapted to support our bodies (Ahmed 2006), those occupying this identity category and “inhabiting the densest liberal worlds” (Escobar 2018, p. 103) might need to be sensitized to the effects of social context on life experience in ways that others already understand. Concretely, we need to understand the ways our agency is made possible by the labor, care, and exclusion of others—in other words, by their exploitation. If, then, our “white ignorance” (Mills 2008) consists of a denial and invisibilization of our conditions of possibility, could psychedelic perception instigate noetic “outsights” (Smail 2005) into these larger material conditions? Is that not, in turn, a necessary (if not sufficient) condition to work on “disidentifying” from and disempowering the systems that structure our subjectivity according to logics of domination?

As contemporary right-wing and transhumanist psychedelia suggests, this more emancipatory possibility will remain conditional on the material–discursive frameworks through which we enact psychedelic experience. A persistent danger is that by translating the latter into familiar medical frameworks, we will “whiten” psychedelics and blunt their political potential. On the other hand, as hippiedom’s more “liberal” legacy makes clear, a simple spiritual disavowal and transcendence of the violent material realities required to sustain white worlds will not do either. Indeed, the two come together in psychedelic conspirituality (Evans 2022) and its doubling down on the social hierarchies of modernity. A third option, essayed here, is to encourage a view of psychedelics as educators in matters of care (de la Bellacasa 2017) that attaches them to a critique of longstanding structures of power and inequality. This point of view takes the latter as the proper locus of our contemporary pathologies of “disconnection” and the proper level at which healing must be contextualized. While this approach is hardly without pitfalls, can itself be hard to navigate, and risks a hopeful partiality towards psychedelics’ social potential, discounting it altogether cedes the ground to more exclusionary discourses and is the surest way to disable a more ethical “socio-psychedelic imaginary” (Schwarz-Plaschg 2022).

The final epistemological point, then, is that the perspectives we bring to bear on psychedelic experiences not only describe them differently but also shape what they become—as part of the “set and setting”, knowledge production has performative effects. Discussing psychedelic therapies, Sydney Cohen already noted in the 1950s the curious phenomenon whereby “the fondest theories of the therapist are confirmed by his patient” (quoted in Pollan 2018, p. 158)—Freudians would “find” Oedipal complexes; Jungians, archetypes; Grofians, pre-natal experiences; and so on. Today, we might add that neuropsychologists find “rigid” neural pathways and cognitive patterns. What the association of “psyche” with an internal mind or brain keeps giving us, in any case, is an eternal return of indivi/dualism and the concomitant impossibility of thinking the “sociogenesis” of our subjectivity (Fanon [1952] 1967).9 Psychedelics’ emphasis on context, however, makes them uniquely suited to challenge indivi/dualism and to render such a thought possible again. By demanding a reconsideration of extra-pharmacological environmental factors on experience; of the positionality, experience, and power of researchers, therapists, and subjects; of drugs as temporary “assistants” to therapy rather than “magic bullets” of daily normalization; of models of top-down, expert-driven, standardized treatment to more “client-centered” and egalitarian therapies; and even of the boundary between mainstream and counterculture—psychedelic research is already twisting many norms crucial to the modern onto-epistemological order and acting on crucial institutional sites of its reproduction. If we want to go beyond the exclusions that define this social order and actualize the ethical promises of psychedelics, we need not grasp after the spiritual. Instead, we would be better served by adopting a broad, non-reductive, “new materialist” point of view that can articulate these tensions as radical alterations to the modern order of things.

4. Conclusions: Towards a (New) Materialist Spirituality

To repeat, the argument of this essay has been that a “new materialist” onto-epistemology can orient the ethical and political promise of psychedelics beyond their containment within a science–spirituality binary that reproduces the dualistic exclusions of modernity. This materialism is “new” beginning from its view of (1) matter as animate, rather than inert, and therefore (2) as actively constituting us, rather than something separate, and (3) worthy of ethical consideration, rather than instrumentalizable. Furthermore, the resulting “materialism” no longer “reduces” us to brain chemistry but is capable of understanding our sense of self as transcorporeally expanded, connected, and ethically interdependent. Thus, the need to turn to a spiritual substance to accommodate our interconnection through an expansion of our consciousness disappears, and with it the danger of overlooking that while we are expanded, we remain situated through bodies that occupy highly divergent social positions. Finally, the new materialist emphasis on the world-making effects of our interactions with human and non-human actants not only helps us make sense of the sensitivity of psychedelic experience to its more-than-human contexts but also to remain response-able to the social effects of the material–discursive practices and knowledges we bring to bear on them. Attaching psychedelics and new materialism, therefore, has both descriptive and normative benefits. Since the psychedelic counterculture of the sixties (and even before then, the Romantic experimentation with drugs), there has remained a certain suspicion that altered states induced by psychoactive substances challenged the reality principle of Western civilization and offered some hope of escaping its many discontents. Their error, in my view, was defining this challenge as one of spirituality against materialism, thereby remaining within and reproducing the latter’s troubling indivi/dualisms. Sublating these, then, will require a material spirituality that reconceptualizes the respective roles and the relationship between science and spirituality.

While my final suggestions will inevitably be brief and incomplete, I believe the work of religious scholar Birgit Meyer (2012), and science and technology studies theorist Bruno Latour (2005b) are crucial stopovers on the way to such a material spirituality. From the first, we are set to pick up a “material approach to religion” that does not downplay the agency of material objects, practices, and spaces in mediating and making present those dimensions of our existence that usually remain out of our reach—the very role of religion being that of “making the invisible visible, of concretizing the order of the universe, […] in order to render them visible and tangible, present to the senses and in the circumstances of everyday life. Once made material, the invisible can be negotiated and bargained with, touched and kissed, made to bear human anger and disappointment” (Orsi quoted in Meyer 2012, p. 24). Whether it be through “fetishes” and idols, collective and embodied rituals, or sacred “settings”, this approach reminds us that spirituality is always-already deeply material. Obscured by terms like “mindfulness” that repeat a mentalistic ontology, it reminds us that even meditation is a practice—i.e., a particular form of bodily engagement with the world. Notably, as Hartmut Rosa (2019, p. X) notes of joining hands in prayer, spiritual rituals encourage bodily orientations that suspend instrumental relations to the world and render us aesthetically open to it instead.

Latour’s reflections on science and religion, in turn, endorse a similar view of mediation and making present while inverting their respective roles. Agreeing that religion attempts to renew our sense of presence in everyday life, Latour nonetheless disagrees that this is a matter of reaching for and approximating the invisible because “far away”—be it a supernatural, infinite, divine, or otherwise otherworldly realm—in contrast to a scientific drive to stay “close” to the direct, visible, and tangible “matters of fact” of the actual world. On the contrary, Latour inverts these associations by claiming that the task that religion sets for itself is to redirect attention to what is close at hand in order to break away from our indifference and habituation to it, while science is in the business of building “extraordinarily long, complicated, […] indirect, sophisticated paths so as to reach the worlds […] that are invisible because they are too small, too far, too powerful, too big, too odd, too surprising, too counterintuitive” to grasp (Latour 2005b, p. 36). Indeed, this is reminiscent of the decidedly pro-science stance of posthumanist theorists. Alaimo (2010), for example, endorses a view of science and its instruments as extended “sensory organs” to track our material entanglements beyond the threshold of human perception. Indeed, it has been my argument here that psychedelic science is in a privileged position to enact Neimanis’ (2017) wager for a “posthuman phenomenology” that can “access, amplify, and describe” our material involvements with and ethical responsibility towards the more-than-human environments that constitute us.

In all, we might do well to remember that Spinoza called the common substance we are all made of, and which he encouraged us to get to know in order to become joyful, “god” or “nature”. While the term “ecodelic” might be better suited to capture this environmental orientation, we can also remember and add another of the original connotations of “psyche” - not as soul or mind, but as “breath” (Abram 1996, p. 73). For despite its invisibility, air is that very material tissue that connects us all and which, as urban pollution or George Floyd’s murder remind us, is very much political (Górska 2021). It is precisely the invisibilization of the materiality of such connection that can be resisted through “spiritual” or drug-taking practices such as those involving smoking—when air itself becomes visible by exhaling the ‘smoke of the gods’.

Now, the theory of politics advanced by posthumanism is certainly a ‘cultural’ one that aims to transform our common sense view of the world, our values, and our behavior. As a decidedly postmodern theory, its focus lies more in the internal twisting of established norms than in total opposition to them (DeKoven 2004)—a type of politics of desubjectification and politics of knowledge that is well suited to the immediate sites of action of psychedelics (personal identity, forms of knowledge, and cultural values). The resulting vision of social transformation and the underlying hope is that, by altering the norms in these domains, psychedelics can slowly gain territory and diffuse a logic in tension with their exclusionary versions—the sort of Trojan-horse-harm-reduction theory of psychedelic transformation perhaps most clearly advocated by Rick Doblin and MAPS.

As countercultural hippies already warned the New Left, this might indeed be the gradual route to a deeper and more fundamental transformation than that allowed by an instant revolution based on the very logic of opposition and exclusion that has to be transcended. Nevertheless, the neoliberal evolution of the counterculture and the recent contestations around MAPS’ model of change suggest that we would be well advised to consider the power of the system to defang and even incorporate any challenges to its fundamental logic (Petrement 2023a). Understanding this logic and the limits it poses to psychedelics’ potential to challenge the modern epistemological order will require contextualizing the possibilities of a new materialist cosmopolitics of psychedelia within the narrower structural and historical view of the “old” materialism. For if you open your mind too much, your capacity to change the world might fall out.