Mateo Revised ASCA:NWO Proposal
Mateo Revised ASCA:NWO Proposal
Mateo Revised ASCA:NWO Proposal
3. Abstract
Decades after the global criminalization of psychedelic drugs in the 1970s, we are currently in the
midst of a “renaissance” of popular interest and research into their effects and benefits. This resurgence
has been made possible by a neuroscientific approach focused on their therapeutic value for a variety of
mental health conditions. Legitimizing psychedelic research, however, has come at the cost of the de-
politicizing psychedelics by extricating them from their association with the radical visions of the 60s
counterculture. No longer substances that could change the world, psychedelics are now enlisted to
change individual brains. This project will investigate the larger social potential of psychedelics by
asking, “how can we re-politicize psychedelics?” In order to do so, I will follow a phenomenological
method that can construe psychedelic experiences as impacting the world rather than only individuals. At
the center of this method will be the concept of “resonance” as developed by Hartmut Rosa in his
sociology of relationships to the world. This concept will allow me to consider the political dimensions of
“experience” and to think about the promise of psychedelic experience as a means to deal with three
contemporary crises - depression, environmental collapse, and the retrenchment of democracy. I argue
that by inducing profound experiences of interconnectedness and sensitivity to their context of use,
psychedelic experiences can directly inform a critique of individualism and help us relate to our world
according to a more collectivist logic. This possibility will require a critical psychedelic discourse which
is explicitly political.
4. Grant period
II. Project proposal (download the application template in your ISAAC account to describe the
following parts)
2. Co-applicants
State the details of any co-applicants here.
4. Summary
Decades after the global criminalization of psychedelic drugs in the 1970s, we are currently in the
midst of a “renaissance” of popular interest and research into their effects and benefits. This resurgence
has been made possible by a neuroscientific approach focused on their therapeutic value for a variety of
mental health conditions. Legitimizing psychedelic research, however, has come at the cost of the de-
politicizing psychedelics by extricating them from their association with the radical visions of the 60s
counterculture. No longer substances that could change the world, psychedelics are now enlisted to
change individual brains. This project will investigate the larger social potential of psychedelics by
asking, “how can we re-politicize psychedelics?” In order to do so, I will follow a phenomenological
method that can construe psychedelic experiences as impacting the world rather than only individuals. At
the center of this method will be the concept of “resonance” as developed by Hartmut Rosa in his
sociology of relationships to the world. This concept will allow me to consider the political dimensions of
“experience” and to think about the promise of psychedelic experience as a means to deal with three
contemporary crises - depression, environmental collapse, and the retrenchment of democracy. I argue
that by inducing profound experiences of interconnectedness and sensitivity to their context of use,
psychedelic experiences can directly inform a critique of individualism and help us orient our shared
world in more collectivist directions. This possibility requires that we produce a critical psychedelic
discourse which is explicitly political.
5. Resubmitted proposal
No
6. PhD candidate
Initials: M.
Surname: Sanchez
a) Education
- Research Master’s Philosophy (RMa), University of Amsterdam (09/17 - 05/21)
- Liberal Arts and Sciences (BA) (Summa Cum Laude), Humanities Major, Amsterdam University
College (09/14 - 06/17)
- International Baccalaureate, IES Ramiro de Maeztu, Madrid (09/12 - 06/14)
- Bachillerato LOE, IES Ramiro de Maeztu, Madrid (09/12 - 06/14)
e) Output
- The Acid Left (youtube), Reading Group, Herbert Marcuse’s The Aesthetic Dimension, January,
2022 (forthcoming).
- Dutch Research School of Philosophy (OZSW), Presentation, Tillburg, Philosophy in Mental
Health, December 2021.
- MIND Foundation, Extended INSIGHT webinar lecture, Berlin/online, Transforming Reality:
Psychedelic Therapy as Embodied Boundary-Work, November 2021 .
- The Acid Left (youtube), Reading Group, Herbert Marcuse’s Essay on Liberation, November,
2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kq65Jr2njQc
- Amsterdam Psychedelic Research Association (APRA), Journal Club Lecture, Amsterdam,
Psychedelic Therapy Immersive Reflection: a Phenomenological Perspective, October 2021.
- Insight Conference, Poster Presentation, Berlin, Psychedelic Therapy as Reality Transformation,
September 2021.
- International Conference for Psychedelic Research (ICPR), Poster Presentation, Haarlem (NL),
Connecting People: Psychedelics, Phenomenology, Psychiatry, Posthumanism, Politics,
September 2020.
- Insight Conference, Poster Presentation, Berlin, Connecting People: Psychedelics,
Phenomenology, Psychiatry, Posthumanism, Politics, September 2019.
8. Period of funding
- X fte
- 4 years
- September 2022
The last few decades have seen a “renaissance” of popular interest and research into the effects
and benefits of psychedelic drugs such as LSD (acid), psilocybin (magic mushrooms), ayahuasca (DMT)
and MDMA (ecstasy)(Pollan 2018, Lu 2021). While some of this interest regards their religious uses,
research has been largely dominated by a neuroscientific approach to their therapeutic application to treat
a variety of mental health conditions. By its claim to scientific neutrality, it is this approach which has
made possible the resurgence of psychedelic research after the global illegalization of these substances in
the early 1970s. However, by extricating psychedelics from their association with the radical visions of
the 60s counterculture, the renaissance has come at the price of their de-politicization (Langlitz 2013). No
longer thought of as having the ability to change the world, psychedelics are now strictly enlisted to treat
individual problems.
Contextualized historically, however, this shift parallels a larger social trend that commentators
associate with the rise of “neoliberalism” as a reality principle and a mode of governance (Brown 2015;
Fisher 2009). Promoting in practice an individualist ontology which separates individuals from their
social context and considers free market capitalism the ultimate and natural form of social organization,
neoliberalism aims to produce subjects which can be governed “at a distance” by shaping their self-
understanding and conduct (Foucault 2008). One part of this mechanism consists in supporting and
disseminating knowledges which share and reinforce individualism, thereby obscuring the possibility of
transforming our shared world through collective action. From this point of view, the renaissance appears
less apolitical than it often presents itself. Hence, a critical humanities perspective can challenge this
apparent neutrality and retrieve a broader view of what psychedelics can do. To this end, the main
question guiding this project is, “how can we re-politicize psychedelics?”. This is a question previous
interventions from the humanities (Langlitz 2013; Hartogsohn 2020; Letheby 2021; Sjöstedt-H 2015)
have been largely uninterested in, and where they have been (Devenot 2016; Falcon 2021; Davis 2019),
they have not engaged with and been critical of psychedelic research itself - a gap I aim to fill.
The urgency of this question is not only a matter of intervening critically in psychedelic
discourse, but by the need to find ways out of several major crises that individualism has trapped us in:
disabling depression (WHO 2021), as an extreme form of mental isolation and separation from the world;
environmental collapse (Servigne and Stevens 2020), by enabling the exploitative instrumentalisation of
non-human nature; and the retrenchment of democracy, since the “valorisation of individual sovereignty
and the democratic principle of shared, collective sovereignty are, when carried to their logical
conclusions, mutually exclusive” (Gilbert 2014, 72-73). Appearing in different forms throughout (late)
modernity, notably liberal humanism, the detachment of the individual as the basic unit of human
experience from a social and natural environment that appear as foreign givens links these crises together.
What do psychedelics have to do with any of this?
While psychedelics have shown results in targeting certain mechanisms of these crises directly -
reducing depressive symptomatology (Watts et al 2017; Carhart-Harris et al 2018c), enhancing users’
connection to nature (Kettner et al 2019), and even being associated with decreased authoritarian views
and increased concern for others (Lyons and Carhart-Harris 2018; Lerner and Lyvers 2006) - their
greater promise is to shift our ways of thinking, perceiving and relating to more contextual and
collectivist modes. Research has repeatedly found that psychedelic experiences are heavily influenced by
the context of use, or “(mind)set and setting” (Carhart-Harris et al 2018b; Leary et al 2008), and that they
are experiences of “connectedness” with self, world and others which can have transformative effects
(Carhart-Harris et al 2018c). Thus, psychedelic research poses a frontal challenge to individualism and
psychedelic drugs enable this challenge to be directly experienced. This challenge, however, is defused by
individualist accounts of psychedelic experience which reduce it to a brain or mind on drugs and as such
to an internal hallucination and escape from external reality. By doing so, they not only betray the central
insights of this research and the defining quality of psychedelic experience, but also de-politicize the
latter as having nothing to say about reality itself. Therefore, to politicize psychedelics, i.e. consider that
they may act on reality itself, we need a conception of experience that goes beyond such premises. Since
the experiences they produce are sensitive to influence, it follows that different discourses can lead
psychedelics to different effects - such that we may still turn psychedelics into tools of politicization.
Method
To begin with, the domain in which the value and effects of psychedelic resonance are most
direct is that of their therapeutic application to mental health conditions, notably depression.
Characterized by patients as fundamentally an extreme form of disconnection from the world and others
that produces the sensation of being trapped in one’s mind and that one’s reality cannot be changed
(Watts et al 2017; Ratcliffe 2015), depression is the lived confirmation of individualist premises. This
suggests that these premises are inadequate to capture the nature of our usual experience and explains
why patients describe psychedelic “connection” as a “more normal” state. In re-establishing a sense of
responsiveness between self and world that shows that each can be transformed, psychedelic therapy is a
privileged site for the study of resonance and its potential. Moreover, through the conceptual resources of
phenomenological psychiatry (Laing 2010; Fuchs 2013, 2017; Ratcliffe 2008, 2015), I will interpret
depression as an expression of “problems in living” rather than, as dominant psychiatric discourse
suggests, a deep rooted neuro/psychological - that is, individual - disorder. This requires situating the
mind and the brain back within the holistic relation between the organism and its milieu (Fuchs 2007; de
Haan 2020) - a crucial task for the future of psychiatry (Rose 2019) for which psychedelics may prove
“paradigm-shifting”. Seen through this lens, studying patient reports of depression and psychedelic
therapy will allow me to consider depression as a form of experience shaped by its context, and therefore
to politicize it - i.e. to view depression, as cultural critics suggest (Ehrenberg 2010; Fisher 2009;
Cvetkovich 2012), as fundamentally related to our current social reality and thus as something which can
be ameliorated through its collective transformation.
Secondly, at a broader level, I will enquire into the possibility of gearing psychedelic experiences
of “interconnectedness” towards the formation of new ethical relationships with nature. To this end, I will
argue that psychedelics - sometimes also called “ecodelics” - can be tools for a posthuman
phenomenology (Neimanis 2017) that aims to experientially “access, amplify and describe” our
embeddedness in a rich web of “more-than-human” interdependence in order to expand the boundaries of
our moral community (Alaimo 2010, Chen 2012, Bennet 2010; Abrams X). Emerging and informing not
only from environmentalism but also feminism, decolonial theory and others (Nayar 2014),
posthumanism provides my project with an ontological and ethical orientation beyond individualism. One
the one hand, it forwards the view that each being (and reality as a whole) is constituted by the set of
relations in which it participates rather than by a self-contained and immutable essence. This implies that
neither is any individual truly “independent” nor is the world fixed, but that each is constantly being
changed by relational processes of “becoming-with” (Haraway 2016). On the other hand, this transcends
the long Western emphasis on (certain) humans as the privileged object of ethical concern and opens onto
the inclusion of all non-human nature (Braidotti 2013). By not conceptualizing the latter as dead, i.e.
“mute” and passive, but as alive, i.e. with a voice and agency of its own (Coole and Frost 2010),
posthumanism dramatically enlarges our potential field of resonance. This defense of animate nature
leads me to study ethnographies that illuminate the animist worldviews and practices of different
indigenuous cultures (Graham 2017; Viveiros de Castro 2014) - some of which incorporate the ritual use
of native psychedelics (Dev 2018; Fotiou 2020) - as an example of alternative ecological relationships. At
the frontiers of the ecological struggle (Klein 2015), these marginalized cultures have much to learn from,
and psychedelics can be a door to their traditional knowledges. At the broadest level, however,
developing and integrating new understandings and relations to mental suffering and our ecological
predicament requires conditions that give more of us more space and time to explore and enact such
shifts.
Finally, following the work of cultural critic Mark Fisher, I will explore how psychedelics can
act as gateway drugs to the revolutionary democratic potentials halted by the “neoliberal
counterrevolution”. In an unfinished book introduction titled Acid Communism (2016), Fisher explained
his intention to return to the 60s and early 70s for a now forgotten and submerged “postcapitalist desire”
that was expressed in several converging forms of radical consciousness at the time - class consciousness,
socialist-feminist consciousness-raising, the civil rights movement, psychedelic consciousness-expansion,
the counterculture, etc. Essentially referring to “experiments in democratic socialism and libertarian
communism” emerging at that time, the term “acid communism” was meant as a “provocation” that
sought to critically reevaluate the simple narrative that the “60s led to neoliberalism” by investigating
how such experiments were rendered unthinkable over the next few decades, ending with the installation
of “capitalist realism” - the idea that capitalism is reality and there is no alternative. While others building
on his work have taken his reference to “acid” (LSD) as a mere model or metaphor for the kind of altered
perception of reality he was after (Gilbert 2017; Colquhoun 2020), my project investigates the
historiographic material (e.g. Lee and Shlain 1985) linking psychedelic experiences to the confident
atmosphere that a “social and psychic revolution of almost inconceivable magnitude” was possible.
Perhaps non-coincidentally, the illegalization of psychedelics coincided historically with the loss of this
atmosphere. Translated into Rosa’s framework, I can conceive of “postcapitalist desire” more concretely
as a desire for resonance that is thwarted by capitalism’s drive towards acceleration, investigate the
conditions that made such a desire a political force in the 60s, and how its many manifestations were not
only blocked or suppressed, but also captured, compensated for and re-directed by reactionary forces. In
other words, how have our axes of and access to resonance changed since the 60s and due to what powers
and structural changes? And how can psychedelics help us recover lost practices and axes of resonance
and an overall sense of their importance? Most importantly, can psychedelics bolster the desire for a
democracy which responds to our quest for resonance, and give us a glimpse of what collective agency
feels like?
September-January 2022/3
- Review relevant historiographic literature on “acid communist” juncture and its “defeat”
- Conduct analysis of the former in terms of resonance theory (shifts in axes of resonance,
change in conditions that facilitate or obstruct it, etc).
February-June 2023
- Draft chapter 1
- Finish relevant reading
- Find opportunity to present research at critical psychedelic conference (e.g. Horizons) and/or
political theory and activism conference (e.g. The World Transformed).
- Finish chapter 1
- Publish article based on first chapter as contribution to discussion on the conditions for
democracy (e.g. New Formations)
September-January 2023/4
- Review clinical literature on psychedelic therapy for patient experiences of depression and
psychedelic experience
- Conduct analysis of the former through the lens of phenomenological psychiatry (and its
understanding of “resonance”), form a critical view of the individualist underpinnings of said
literature
February-June 2024
- Draft chapter 2
- Finish relevant reading
- Find opportunity to present research and psychedelic conference (e.g. INSIGHT conference by
the MIND foundation)
- Finish chapter 2
- Publish article based on first chapter as contribution to discussion on psychedelic therapy (e.g.
Journal of Humanistic Psychology)
September-January 2024/25
February-June 2025
- Draft chapter 3
- Finish relevant reading
- Find opportunity to present research at psychedelic conference (e.g. Breaking Convention)
and/or environmental humanities conference (e.g. Posthumanaties hub’s STREAMS
conference)
- Finish chapter 3
- Publish article based on first third as contribution to discussion on affirmative possibilities to
address environmental crisis (e.g. Journal of Psychedelic Studies)
September-June 2025/26
17. Title and summary for newsletters and website (in Dutch and English)
Provide a title and a summary (both in Dutch and in English) that, if the application is granted, will be
used in the newsletters and on the website. The summary should be 50-100 words long.