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This is an un-peer reviewed and un-copy edited draft of an article submitted to Subjectivity.

Myth-Science and the Fiction of the Self

Simon O’Sullivan, Goldsmiths College

In the launch issue of Subjectivity a claim is made that ‘neo-liberal power establishes
a social order not primarily through liquidating otherness, inferiority or subjectivity,
but by fabricating and regulating otherness and subalternity through the multiplication
and assimilation of subjectivities’ (Blackman et al., 2008, p. 14). Indeed, it is no
longer a case of simply affirming ever more plural and diverse subjectivities as, in
many ways, this is precisely the terrain of contemporary regimes of subjectivation. It
is against this backdrop that the present article is pitched. However, rather than
attempt an explicit critique of this new social order it launches a more transversal
assault on the very notion of subjectivity, or what I call the ‘fiction of the self’. It also
turns, at least in part, to resources not typically deployed within the social sciences in
order to map out what we might call alternative modes of being in the world. The
latter might themselves be understood as fictions and, as such, my article is also
concerned with the way in which different fictions – or a practice of fictioning –
might be pitched against that more dominant fiction of a consensual and constraining
neo-liberal present. As far as this goes a further term, borrowed from Sun Ra, is
useful, naming, as it does, these other, often other-worldly narratives which
nevertheless have a very real traction on the present: myth-science.

Drugs and Writing Against the Self

All drugs involve an alteration in our body and thus our consciousness: put simply,
they introduce something different in to our experience. But it is especially with what
are known as psychedelic drugs that the particular fiction of the self is revealed.
Below I consider three examples of this kind of drug use from a specific moment –
the 1960s – especially as it is combined with a certain kind of writing about these
experiences that itself blurs the distinction between fiction and fact, or, precisely,
fictions these experiences.

Yage, Burroughs and the Cut-up

Listen. Cut and rearrange in any combination. Read aloud. I can not
chose but hear. Don’t think about it. Don’t theorize. Try it.
William Burroughs, The Yage Letters

Even those unfamiliar with Burroughs and his work know these two characteristics:
that he used drugs and that he developed the cut-up method alongside Bryon Gysin. A
third key triangulation point in what might be called the diagram of Burroughs was
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his queer sexuality. Both the cut-up and drug use involved the re-arrangement of the
habitual and, with that, the deployment of difference within the world as it is. They
are both fictioning technologies. Burroughs’ queer sexuality also meant he was an
outsider, living a non-heteronormative existence. Indeed, it seems to me that the term
‘queer’ also signifies a different lived fiction, one that is opposed to more straight
narratives and typical life scripts.

Burroughs’ drug ‘of choice’ was heroin and his writings, in general, are marked by
his experiences with that drug (and the very particular space-times opened up by it).
But he also experimented with other drugs, especially psychedelics, and, perhaps
most famously yage – or ayahusaca – as ‘recorded’ in his exchange of letters with
Allen Ginsburg published as The Yage Letters (Burroughs and Ginsberg, 1963).
Burroughs went looking for this drug that he heard could ‘change fact’ – the ‘drug of
drugs’ as he called it – in South America. He hoped, that it might ‘cure’ his heroin
addiction, but also, more generally, offer him a different mode of being in the world.
Indeed, Burroughs writes of yage (when he eventually takes it and it has an effect up
and beyond the vomiting) that it is precisely ‘space time travel’ (Burroughs and
Ginsberg, 1963, p. 44). It puts Burroughs (and Ginsburg who repeats the journey and
experiment seven years later) in touch with a more magical reality (Ginsburg himself
encounters ‘The Great Being’) whilst also revealing the edges of the dominant fiction
of a single coherent and centred self.

Although yage does indeed offer up a series of profound experiences and visions,
crucially it is with writing that this disruption of the self and its reality is to be
completed. The cut-up is the technology that ultimately is able to change fact. When
Ginsburg writes to Burroughs in panic about losing his sense of self – the ego death
brought on by yage – Burroughs responds in one of the final letters with a cryptic
injunction to Ginsburg to keep going and, specifically, to use the cut-up method to
continue and consolidate the drug’s work. For Burroughs, language with its typical
sequencing and syntax produced a certain reality (or what he come to call ‘control’).
The cut-up was then a veritable cutting in to this reality system and, with that, the
concomitant production of something different.

The Yage Letters are also, however, a kind of fiction themselves, or, at least, not
straightforward reportage. Certainly Burroughs made the trip (and took the drug), but,
as Oliver Harris (the editor of the ‘redux’ edition of the letters) makes clear the
various dates and sequence of letters do not make sense in any strictly linear manner
and there are writings included that are not directly connected to the trip, such as the
compelling ‘I Am Dying, Meester’ script which ends up – reworked – in The Naked
Lunch. Indeed, the book blurs the boundary between fact and fiction or, we might say,
works to fiction Burroughs’ journey and his drug experiences, not least as Burroughs
is as much a character in his text (could we even say a conceptual personae?) as he is
author. In fact, there is a confusion between these two roles as indicated by Burroughs
signing his letters ‘William Lee’. But, in all this, The Yage Letters tells a story more
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appropriate and adequate to its subject matter: the enigmatic yage. Indeed, Burroughs
also wrote a more scientific article about the drug and its effects, but it is certainly
unclear whether this would be in itself a more useful, accurate or appropriate
‘account’.

As a book The Yage Letters then confuses any clearly demarcated genre. It is, to quote
Harris, ‘a hybrid of the comic picaresque tradition, travel writing, the ethnobotanical
field report, political satire, psychedelic literature and epistolary narrative’ (Harris,
2006, p. xi). There are other aspects that are also a-typical: it is, of course, a
collaboration – as much by Ginsburg as by Burroughs – but, more radically, there is a
kind of folding of the one in to the other – or, to say the same differently, each works
as avatar and foil for the other. It also contains a more basic play with form (the letter
form itself, but also the use of capitals) and deploys other registers beyond the textual
as with Ginsburg’s drawings of ‘The Vomiter’ and ‘The Great Being’.1

The book then records a journey and quest, but before yage is found there is a sense
that travel – what we might call Burroughs’ nomadism – is also a way of side
stepping the fiction of the self (insofar as the latter tends to be solidified by habit) and,
indeed, that writing might be its own kind of ‘stationary voyage’. There is also a
twisted post-colonialism at work here, and, indeed, in other of Burroughs’ writings.
Burroughs ‘goes native’ in the different places he visits, but he also remains outside
them – the proverbial loner – an observer who is as much denigrating as affirming of
the people and places he visits. Although The Yage Letters operates as a critique of
sorts of US expansion (and especially the rubber and oil industry), it does contain, at
least superficially, this colonial consciousness. But, it seems to me, there is a more
radical decolonisation at play with Burroughs, one that operates at the level of the
production of subjectivity. Burroughs’ books operate by cutting up the forms by
which a dominant Anglo-American (and imperialist) subjectivity might recognise
itself and be confirmed/affirmed in its existence.

One of the fabled characteristics of yage (as stated by Burroughs in one of the letters)
is that it produces visions of a city, and, indeed, The Yage Letters ends with
Burroughs’ compelling account of a kind of composite city (a collapsing of New
York, Mexico City and others) in which desire has been unleashed. Indeed, with yage
a strange combinatory logic seems to be at play – a kind of flattening of space-time –
and, with that, the production of ‘a place where the unknown past and the emergent
future meet in a vibrating soundless hum’ (Burroughs and Ginsberg, 1963, p. 46).
Burroughs’ writings involve both a spatial and temporal syncretism in this sense.
Indeed, typical causality and, again, linear sequencing, are seen as simply one more
aspect of a moribund consensual reality.

With both yage and The Yage Letters it seems to me we have then a form of fictioning
that could also be understood as a myth-science, when this names those alternative
narratives – and myth-systems – produced in the here and now, but for a people who
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do not recognise themselves in the dominant scripts. Indeed, with Burroughs’ book
we have the beginnings of a new mythos that is then more fully deployed in the cut-
up Nova Trilogy (as he remarks in relation to those books: ‘I am attempting to create a
new mythology for the space-age’) and, indeed, later in The Cities of the Red Night
trilogy. Such a myth-science operates against that key anchoring fiction of dominant
and consensual reality: the self. But this ‘against’ is itself the side effect of a more
joyous affirmation of a different mode of being, one that has been untethered from the
self, and that we might, perhaps, describe here as a kind of experimental post-
humanism.

Casteneda (and Other Sorcerers)

The world, according to Don Juan, had to conform to its description;

that is, the description reflected itself.
Carlos Casteneda, Tales of Power

Another work about psychedelic drugs and the dissembling of the self and which also
operates on the border between fiction and fact, dream and reality, is Carlos
Casteneda’s Tales of Power, the second in the series of books about the author’s
encounter – and training – with the Yaqui shaman and sorcerer Don Juan (Casteneda,
1974). As with the The Yage Letters, Casteneda’s book is as much about the counter-
culture of the 1960s, and the exploration of altered states and other realities therein, as
it is an anthropological or ethnobotanical study (though the first in the series of
Casteneda’s books about Don Juan is certainly more akin to this kind of ‘factual’ field
work). In fact, subsequent to the publication of the series it was also ‘discovered’ that
Casteneda had invented at least much of the content of his books. Marcel de Lima has
convincingly referred to Casteneda’s oeuvre as a form of ‘ethnopoetics’ in this sense
of blurring the distinction between fiction and fact, but de Lima also points to the
importance of using different forms of representation in order to adequately account
for the different reality that the books are ‘about’ (de Lima, 2014, pp. 161-208).
Indeed, the very ambiguous status of Tales of Power is part of it ‘message’. The book
– and, indeed, whole sequence of ‘novels’ about Don Juan – might then be described
as a kind of fictioning set against the dominant and Western reality paradigm.

In the book Casteneda himself goes through a series of initiations and other training in
what Don Juan calls the ‘way of the warrior’, many of which involve the drug peyote,
but also a certain discipline (what Don Juan calls a ‘becoming impeccable’) that
allows for the shrinking of the ego and, with that, a ‘side stepping’ of the typical sense
of self. In particular, this involves the halting of internal dialogue and description –
the ‘stopping of the world’ as Casteneda puts it – and the concomitant ‘seeing’ of a
‘deeper’ reality. Ultimately, this means that the warrior himself moves in a different
space-time to consensual reality, hence the various miraculous feats of travel
performed by Don Juan and the startling coincidences and so forth that knock
Casteneda off balance (they are, precisely, counter to his own description of reality
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and the laws by which it operates). Throughout these experiments and adventures
Casteneda writes in his notebook as way of maintaining a sense of self that is itself
pinned to a propensity to interpret and explain through reason and rationality. Indeed,
Tales of Power is as much about this, the confrontation between two realities – the
scientific and the magical – as it is a kind of instruction manual (as Giles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari point out, the importance of Casteneda’s books is in large part that they
lay out a programme of transformation that operates irrespective of their status as
fiction or fact (see Deleuze and Guattari, 1984, pp. 161-2).

Another crucial aspect of Casteneda’s book is the focus on dreaming. Indeed, dreams,
like drugs, offer up a different reality from within this one. Specifically, in
Casteneda’s writings dreaming is a technology involving the production of a double
(the self in the dream) that then allows a shift in perspective on so-called reality (and
on the sense of any ‘real’ self). Dreams also offer something different and
unexpected, something that arrives from an elsewhere and, as such, surprises the
subject as is (it is worth noting that Burroughs himself kept a diary of his dreams as a
kind of resource for his writing). The same is true of visions in general which involve
either the superimposition or revelation (depending on ones point of view) of one
reality on/from another.

In passing we might mention a further figure – to position alongside Burroughs and

Casteneda – Timothy Leary, who conducted his own pharmaceutical experiments
especially with the synthetic psychedelic drug LSD. Leary’s seminal text The Politics
of Ecstasy is not a fiction, but it does involve a style of writing that moves between
the scientific and poetic (and, in general, concerns itself with the fiction of the self)
(Leary, 1970). In terms of its ‘scientific’ status Leary suggests a number of ‘sub-
disciplines’ that he thought would inevitably develop attendant on the increasing
experimentation with psychedelics (the list reads like the one on ‘Solarist studies’ in
Stanislav Lem’s Solaris) (Leary, 1970, pp. 280-1). In fact, for Leary, LSD offered a
genuine mystical experience, altering the consciousness of its users and allowing the
exploration of different space-times. In relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s Bergsonian
thesis about organic and inorganic ‘memories’ (more on this below), Leary claimed
that LSD put the user in touch with past and future states of being, and not least a
‘cellular consciousness’. Crucially, and like Burroughs, Leary also saw the new forms
of consciousness attendant on drugs as involving a refusal of control/consensual
reality and a concomitant and radical affirmation of self-determination (Leary’s key
slogan was ‘think for yourself and question authority’). For Leary this would
necessarily involve people inventing their own mythologies and religions.

There are other figures involved in what might be called this psychedelic myth-
science, for example Aldous Huxley and Ken Kesey, both of whom wrote about their
drug experiences (Huxley, of course, also wrote fiction and with Kesey and the
‘Merry Pranksters’ we have a kind of ‘performance fiction’ with the fabled Acid test
parties). In terms of peyote and mescaline use two other key figures, one a fellow
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traveller the other a precursor of sorts to this particular scene, are Henri Michaux and
Antonin Artaud. In an almost direct pre-parallel with Casteneda, Artaud travelled to
South America to the tarahumans to take peyote. Like Burroughs, he was also a
heroin addict (and looking for a cure), but it was peyote that fostered the invention of
fictions and even new languages. It also put Artaud in touch with other – and older –
cultures (again, drug use was a kind of space-time technology). Michaux’s
experiments with mescaline were more clinical, but they also elicited a certain kind of
writing which, necessarily, involved formal experimentation (as, for example, in the
marginal notes to Miserable Miracle) – although Michaux himself suggested that to
really describe his experiences ‘would require a picturesque style which I do not
possess, made up of surprises, of nonsense, of sudden flashes, of bounds and
rebounds, an unstable style, tobogganing and prankish’ (Michaux, 1983, p. 6). Again,
the resonances with Burroughs are remarkable.

Artaud and Michaux are also central figures for the two philosophers who perhaps
more than any others are responsible for a kind of ‘stoned’ concept creation. Indeed,
in A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari also turn directly to Casteneda’s
fictions – alongside others, including Burroughs – in order to develop their own
particular ‘description’ of reality and, from this, their experimental ethics (following
Spinoza’s definition) or, to refer back to an older understanding, their ‘philosophy as
a way of life’. In particular they develop their concept of ‘becoming-molecular’ and,
especially, ‘becoming-imperceptible’ from Casteneda’s writings and refer to key
concepts in Casteneda such as the ‘tonal’ and ‘nagual’ (phenomena and noumena, but
on a continuum); the idea of the ally and of alliance with an outside; and the well-
known concept of the rhizome. Indeed, in the crucial Deleuzoguattarian concept of
multiplicity it is Casteneda as much as Spinoza who offers the adequate resources and
in the central ‘Becoming’ plateau it is the ‘Memories of a Sorcerer’ that are
themselves central (the sorcerer here operating to blur the distinction between
aesthetic figure and conceptual personae).

In this very particular post-human ethics – or schizoanalysis as they call it – drugs are
an important, albeit, for Deleuze and Guattari, limited mode of experimentation.
Drugs eliminate, at least temporarily, forms and subjects (they undo the plane of
organization). They are a kind of Spinozist technology, involving ‘modifications of
speed’, or, more simply, changes in perception (they allow the hitherto imperceptible
to be perceived) (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988, p. 282). As Deleuze and Guattari
remark drugs have, in this sense, changed the ‘perceptive coordinates of space-time’
even in non-users (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988, p. 248). It is here that Deleuze and
Guattari posit a ‘pharmocoanalysis’ that would be concerned with an unconscious of
these impersonal microperceptions. Drug users such as Artaud and Michaux are, for
Deleuze and Guattari, a kind of pharmaceutical avant-garde in this sense.

If psychoanalysis offers a very particular kind of fiction about the self (and an account
of how the self – the ego – is itself a fiction), then Deleuze and Guattari’s
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schizoanalysis invites us to experiment not only with dissembling and dissolving the
self, but also with other configurations and modes of organization. A Thousand
Plateaus contains a whole selection of these other war machines and probe-heads
(and uses fiction as a resource in assembling their components), but Anti-Oedipus is
also a rigorous account of the fiction of the self, or, indeed, of how the self is a series
of retroacting fictions. In both volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia there is the
sense that any given individual is composed of a diversity of different individuations,
of other durations organic and inorganic (at one point they suggest that this is why
science fiction is itself a kind of philosophy). These two books are also written in a
very particular style that performs this content: composed of different speeds and
slownesses, they are themselves works of myth-science. Indeed, like Casteneda,
Deleuze and Guattari, it seems to me, operates in a grey zone (and as trance) between
fiction and philosophy.

Visions, World-Building and the PKD’s Exegesis

‘One day the masks will come off, and you will understand all’ – it
came to pass, and I was one of the masks.
Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis

Philip K. Dick is known for his tremendous productivity (which included a total of 44
novels; at one point 4 in a single year) and, perhaps unsurprisingly given this output,
also his amphetamine use. But he also experimented with LSD and other
psychedelics. This is not to say that his novels can merely be understood as drug
writing (they contain, for example, many other references to other myth-systems and
dream-worlds), but it is to say that for Dick writing and drugs use were inextricably
bound with one another, both, involving the production of altered states. Indeed,
Dick’s novels question what I have been calling consensual reality (it is this that can
give them their paranoid edge, and also the resonances with Burroughs accounts of
control), but they also explore other realities and how these intersect with the more
familiar (Dick was, afterall, a science fiction writer in this sense). This also meant a
continuing questioning of the self and, ultimately, Dick’s questioning of his own
personal identity.

Nowhere is this more clear than in what he came to call his ‘Exegesis’ (only an edited
selection of which has so far been published as The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick)
comprising the notes, essays and diagrams made after (and in response to) a series of
revelatory experiences – but also a crisis – in February and March of 1974
(collectively titled ‘2-3-74’) (Dick, 2011). The primary event in this sequence
involved a young woman (delivering a medical drug) whose particular necklace – of
an early Christian fish symbol – when catching the sun, ‘activated’ the revelation or
vision (Dick was, at the time, on sodium penthanol for tooth ache). Dick’s Exegesis
then involves his attempts to work out what had happened to him when, in this single
moment (and then in subsequent episodes of what he called an ‘anamnesis’) he was
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suddenly party to a vast non-human intelligence. Indeed, it is unclear to the reader –

but also to Dick himself – whether this knowledge is from a distant past or a future to
come; or, indeed, from space (or God) or from himself (drug induced or the result of
neuro a-typicality).

The status of the Exegesis is then uncertain. On the one hand, at times, Dick
dismissed the years of work he had put in to it as a waste of time – and that his visions
had, indeed, been simply acid flash backs. But some of the details are difficult to
account for in these terms, as for example the knowledge he gained of his son’s life
threatening medical condition which doctors subsequently confirmed. Is the Exegesis
fact or fiction? In fact, the question, it seems to me, is not whether Dick was
hallucinating, or, indeed, was seeing a deeper reality (these two attitudes being
broadly representative of Western and Eastern paradigms), but that he was, in the
Exegesis – as well as in his books more generally – constructing a world and, with
that, working out who ‘he’ was (or might become) within that world (especially once
all the typical coordination points (the sense of self) had been removed).

In fact, the Exegesis also involves Dick reflecting on his own writings that he comes
to see as precursors to the monumental event of 2-3-74, or, at least, as foreshadowing
it and, as such, giving him material with which to make sense of it. His fictions were
like forward hurled probes in this sense – writing a reality to come. Indeed, Dick’s
life, especially after 2-3-74, reads like one of his novels. It is worth emphasising here
that Dick seems to be producing a certain reality through his writing. The novels that
come after 2-3-74 likewise involved a continuing – could we say fictioned? – enquiry,
not least with VALIS the title of which stands for the ‘Vast Active Living Intelligence
System’ that Dick had accessed. Which, we might ask, is the true account: VALIS or
the Exegesis?

As the editors suggest in their introduction to the published Exegesis, the latter might
be understood as a ‘laboratory of interpretation’), involving a ‘long experiment of the
mind regarding itself’ (Letham and Jackson, 2011, p. xiii and xx). Certainly there is a
sense in reading it that Dick is involved in an interminable self-referential study, with
interpretations nested in interpretations, fictions nested within fictions. The Exegesis
constitutes its own dense world in this sense and thus the very terms with which to
approach it. In terms of the fiction of the self more specifically, Dick’s writings
explore the edges of the single consistent self – especially in the questioning of
consensual reality – and, with that, also the production and proliferation of multiple
avatars. In this there is something of psychoses (indeed it is well known the
amphetamines can bring on psychoses). In fact, the Exegesis can read – in its style as
well as some of its content – like Schreber’s Memoirs of my Mental Illness. In both
there is the same attention to detail, a certain puzzlement (and, often, a melancholy) –
and, especially, a desire to interpret (in fact, a veritable interpretosis). A characteristic
of both is also that certain ‘thoughts’ are felt to come from outside (these are wilder
forms of thought untethered from the self and which do not obey the typical laws of
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connection, contiguity and causality). Like drugs, psychosis involves the production
of difference from within the same – and, once again, the question of reality versus
hallucination is paramount.

Dick was involved in these kind of explorations and enquiries before 2-3-74, not just
with drugs but also with technologies such as the I-Ching, which, we might describe
in this context as a particular technology that allows ‘access’ to something outside the
self (Dick used it to write Man in a High castle). In fact, VALIS was also partly based
on the bardos and dreamtime of The Tibetan Book of the Dead (as well as the Dogon
myth-system). As with Burroughs then drugs were just one technology in this
questioning of the self – and, as such, part of a tradition that reaches way back in time
(indeed, the past was a kind of living resource for Dick; one of the key phrases in
VALIS and The Exegesis is precisely that ‘time can be overcome’).

Richard Doyle in his afterword to the published Exegesis places Dick in the tradition
of the shaman, and, as such, as part of the ‘perennial philosophy’ which Huxley wrote
about (a tradition, for Doyle, that goes back to Blake, Coleridge, Julian of Norwich
and, indeed, Dionysius) (Doyle, 2011). For Doyle the shaman is involved in practices
intent on ‘dissolving the self’ so as to allow a glimpse of reality. This might be
achieved by drugs (or various other magical substances and potions), but also by other
means – for example the repetitive beating of drums or other percussion. Doyle
suggests that Dick’s writing of the Exegesis (which is nothing if not obsessive and, at
times, repetitive), might itself be understood as a shamanic practice in this sense, with
consciousness, as it were, altered through its writing.

For my self it is not entirely clear that writing, for Dick, was this kind of shamanic
technology exactly, but certainly the labour of writing the Exegesis involved Dick
attempting to construct meaning out of chaos: again, the Exegesis reads as a kind of
world (and thus self) building exercise. It is worth noting Dick’s particular style of
writing in relation to this. In the Exegesis it tends to the baroque, a veritable
proliferation of frameworks, narratives and descriptions (that, again, draws on many
other sources – in fact a veritable archive). The book can feel channelled in this sense.
But, as the editors also make clear, it has an aphoristic quality to it not unlike Cioran
(certain phrases are incredibly condensed but also cryptic and themselves revelatory).

Burroughs once suggested that writing was an alien parasite that had invaded its
human hosts (hence the resonances with psychoanalysis and, especially Lacan) and
there is something of this with Dick and in his own relationship with the signifier.
Doyle also makes the connection that Dick’s account of a kind of ‘info-world’ – a
universe teeming with information – is deeply prescient in terms of our own
networked present. In fact, for myself, the Exegesis, operates as a kind of myth-
science. In its systematic laying out of a different system of knowledge and
understanding (that draws in both history and the future) it is not unlike Sun Ra’s own
cosmic framework, or, indeed, L. Ron Hubbard and his Scientology (the editors of the
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Exegesis suggest the possibility of a ‘Dicksian religion’ – and, certainly, the Exegesis
itself has the character of a book of revealed wisdom). It is then not simply a work of
literature, but something stranger. Something either with a deeper traction on a deeper
real – or that attempts another construction of reality from with this real.

Buddhism as Technology of the (Non) Self

The world is the movie of what everything is

It is one movie, made of the same stuff
Throughout, belonging to nobody, which is what
everything is.
Jack Kerouac, The Scripture of Golden Eternity

A characteristic of Dick’s novels that I pointed to above is that they can exhibit a
certain paranoia and, at times, tend towards conspiracy theory. In this there are
resonances with psychoanalysis which itself shows us the fictional nature of the ego,
and how there is always something else ‘going on’ besides that which we apparently
know (or, indeed, might even be able to account for). Dick’s novels also have
something in common with schizoanalysis, a therapeutics that skirts closer to chaos
and the real, and, as I suggested above, one that offers alternative fictions and models
(indeed, this is what Guattari’s other term for schizoanalysis – ‘metamodelisation’ –
gestures towards). In fact, when I write the phrase ‘the fiction of the self’ I have both
of these orientations in mind: the fiction that is the typical self (and especially our
dominant Anglo-American subjectivity) and other fictions of other possible selves. As
I have also suggested above certain drugs can dislodge the first of these – they nudge
our reality, show us the edges of our world – but they can also contribute to the
second in the opening up of a different reality and a different way of inhabiting the
latter (though, to follow Deleuze and Guattari once more, all drugs come with their
own very real dangers).

A further technology of transformation, one that also reveals the fiction of the self, is
Buddhism, understood as a living tradition whose aim, at least in one understanding,
is to produce a different mode of being to the typical subject/object dichotomy
(indeed, the Buddha ‘names’ this other mode). For Buddhism the idea of a separate
self is one of the key fetters that keeps us in the world-as-is (or, in Buddhist terms,
samsara). Crucially, Buddhism is not a philosophy, although it can be read as such (it
does, afterall, involve certain ontological claims, pre-eminently of ‘conditioned co-
production’; or how all phenomena arise and cease dependent on conditions), but,
rather, a pragmatic ethics (in Spinoza’s sense of the term). Its aim is the alleviation of
dukka – the unsatisfactoriness of existence – caused simply by the desire for fixity in
a world that is transitory. Again, in this reading, the self – understood as a particular
bundle of fixed habits – is the anchoring fiction that holds others in place.
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At a basic level then Buddhism offers a variety of techniques – a programme as it

were – aimed, in the first instance, in producing a certain state that will allow more
concentrated focus on impermanence. These foundational practices involve ethical
living in its more typical understanding (right speech, right action and so forth)
alongside various mindful meditation practices (known as samadhi), all intended to
quieten and focus the mind. The more important aspect of Buddhism, however, is
insight practice, such as meditating on impermanence (known as vipassana), and,
especially, the impermanence of both the mind and body (inextricably linked in
Buddhist understanding). The subject (a particular mind/body configuration) is the
laboratory in this sense, both site of enquiry and enquirer. Introspection replaces
scientific analysis (at least as this is narrowly understood) in this kind of ‘knowledge’
of the self. In passing, we might note a key reason that typical science is suspicious of
introspection (and this can include the social sciences as well); simply that it involves
a mutable subject of analysis (that changes under observation). But we might also
note the very real connections between this form of enquiry and quantum accounts of
science where, likewise, observation affects results.

Vipassana then involves certain meditation practices, but it can also involve a
combination of these with more conscious (and rational) reflection and enquiry. One
tradition here is to give sustained attention to ones own experience to see ‘where’ the
self is located. Ultimately, through a kind of process of elimination the enquirer finds
that it is not located anywhere, and, with that, a gestalt happens and the particular
fiction – or what neuroscientists call the emergent property – of the self is ‘seen
through’ (the self, as a kind backdrop to experience ‘drops down’). Traditionally this
is a seeing that cannot be unseen. In relation to the themes of my article the interesting
point here is not only the ability to see through this dominant fiction – to change fact
in Burroughs’ terms – but also the question of what lies on the other side of this
insight. What is the ‘terrain’ – or, simply, experience – without a self, or, with a sense
of self held very lightly and contingently (precisely, as a fiction)? On the one hand
there is indeed a compelling terrain of sorts to explore here: a world that has not been
produced by the self with its particular likes and dislikes, its judgements, the running
commentary as Casteneda might say. Insofar as our experience is mediated by this
self then this other ‘place’ will be decidedly unfamiliar and alien (at least to ‘us’ as
we typically are). On the other hand there is also the equally compelling idea (at least
for myself) that we might be able to construct and inhabit other fictions. Indeed, what
other kinds of fiction are possible and what, in turn, would they allow?

In fact, following Deleuze and Guattari once more, it seems to me that there is not so
much a pre-existing terrain to explore on the other side of this gate, beyond the fiction
of the self, but one that must be constructed (François Laruelle’s non-standard
philosophy also gestures in this direction in his attention to the production of what he
calls ‘non-standard worlds’ outside of philosophical thinking). We might point back
to Burroughs especially here: the novels – or, indeed, a book like The Yage Letters –
is involved in a kind of experimental construction of a different reality in this sense
   12  

(one that was not their ‘before’ as it were), not least with the compelling passages I
pointed to above about the composite city.

We might note that Burroughs’ book also points to the importance of a certain scene –
of collaboration and collectivity – which, in itself often involves an interrogation (and
disruption) of the single self-possessed ego, but also – at least in some manifestations
– the production of an alternative collectve fiction. To a certain extent some forms of
Buddhism also involve this kind of scene, especially in the West, with the production
of a community (or ‘sangha’), alongside certain texts and images, practices and
rituals. We might also note that Western Buddhism invariably draws on its own
heritage of pre-modern imagery (for example paganism) and, indeed, other
‘technologies of the self’ as Michel Foucault once called them, as well, more
generally on Western counter-culture; all of these offer resources that might be set
against typical understandings of the self (and help map out an alternative to
neoliberal subjectivity). In particular, there is a line to be drawn here between
psychedelia (and drug use) and Buddhism: Timothy Leary, for example, wrote an
important essay on a kind of acid-Buddha (‘The Buddha as Drop Out’) and Ginsberg
himself, following in the footsteps of Kerouac, practiced Buddhism (under Chogyam
Trungpa).

There is always the danger that these fictions merely replace one another (there is, as
it were, no ‘seeing through’ the fiction); but, on the other hand, these alternate
perspectives and myth-systems can also provide an important context and resource for
other modes of being. In fact, we might point here to a particular tradition of
Mahayana Buddhism that involves the proliferation of worlds (and avatars). This
form of Buddhism can read like science fiction. Here the vast cosmic time spans and
space/landscapes serve as device to communicate certain truths (about the rarity of a
Buddha for example – or the preciousness of a human life). But they also offer other
models and fictions, operating, again, as there own kind of myth-science.

Indeed, Buddhism, it seems to me, can open up the possibility of constructing and
inhabiting other models of reality (even if the Buddha himself names a mode that is,
in many ways, no longer a model). Might we again suggest that this is a kind of post-
humanism? Certainly our increasing interaction with new technology allows us to
inhabit other fictions (post-humanism is typically figured in this sense), but, it is also
this very old technology of the self (technology understood in its most broad sense)
that allows us to become something different. In fact, it is also here also that the
oldest of techniques can be productively brought in to encounter with one of the
newest: neuroscience and its own particular account of the fiction of the self.

Neuroscience and Other Self Models

   13  

Ultimately subjective experience is a biological data format, a highly

specific mode of presenting information about the world by letting it
appear as if it were an Ego’s knowledge.
Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel

In relation to a Western perspective on the fiction of the self, an interesting opposition

that I have gestured to above is that between a point of view that posits an ultimate
reality (a reality that ‘goes all the way down’ as it were) and an approach that
suggests reality is a simulation of sorts produced by the brain and, as such, posits an
extreme idealism albeit one often making claims to a materialism. My particular take
on this is to refuse the binary, which is to say that reality is certainly not a projection
of the brain (at least as this is typically understood), but nor is it a ‘place’ as such. As
I suggested above, reality, it seems to me, is always to be constructed.

Thomas Metzinger, himself a vipassana meditator, would perhaps not go so far as

this, but, certainly, he is one of the leading exponents of the neuroscientific account of
the self as a kind of myth or illusion (what Metzinger calls the ‘phenomenal self-
model’). For Metzinger we live and experience life in and through our own particular
‘ego tunnel’: ‘the content of our conscious experience is not only an internal construct
but also an extremely selective way of representing information …What we see and
hear and smell and taste, is only a small fraction of what actually exists out there’
(Metzinger, 2009, p. 6). For Metzinger this sense of self was originally an
evolutionary survival mechanism, but, it also invariably limits ‘the enormous wealth
and richness of reality in all its unfathomable depth’ (Metzinger, 2009, p. 6). At the
beginning of his book on The Ego Tunnel Metzinger suggests that his key idea
develops, in part, from counter-cultural ideas of a ‘reality tunnel’ (although he is also
keen to point to problems with this more popular account) as laid out by figures such
as Robert Anton-Wilson and Timothy Leary (Metzinger, 2009, p. 8-9). As far as this
goes, drugs were clearly important in ‘revealing’ the tunnel as tunnel, but, we might
note, Metzinger’s framework also has clear resonances with psychoanalysis which
itself gives a further account of how the ego and sense of individual self comes about
(as in Lacan’s mirror-stage).2

Adrian Johnston has pursued this particular connection between neuroscience and
psychoanalysis (especially in its Lacanian formularisation), alongside certain aspects
of continental philosophy, in his various books. Indeed, it is his contention ‘that no
authentically materialist theory of subjectivity defensibly can sideline the life sciences
specifically’ (Johnston, 2013, p. ix). In Self and Emotional Life, written with
Catherine Malabou (and from where the previous quote was taken), Johnstone pitches
his own take on the conjunction (simply that psychoanalysis has much to learn from
neuroscience) against Malabou who (in Johnstone’s reading) sees a radical
disjunction between the two, not least in the inability of psychoanalysis to deal with
certain neuropathologies – or what Malabou calls the ‘new wounded’ – where some
kind of trauma or disease has affected the workings of the brain and caused
   14  

significant changes in personality and so forth. As a riposte Johnston brings up

schizophrenia as an example of a disease that might still be ‘treatable’ by
psychoanalysis, but, for myself, it is noticeable that no reference is made to
schizoanalysis which was developed precisely from the experience of schizophrenics
and in order to ‘treat’ them. It is also noticeable that Johnstone does not look to
Lacan’s own seminar on The Psychoses (Lacan 1983)

In terms of the fiction of the self, Lacan’s seminar is especially interesting in two
respects: first, it draws upon Schreber’s diary – itself a fictioning of sorts (and which,
as I mentioned above, has much in common with Dick’s Exegesis); and second, Lacan
writes about the importance of what he calls ‘quilting points’ in maintaining a sense
of self (Lacan, 1983, p. 268-9). I have written about this in more depth elsewhere (see
[reference to be added]), but want to note here that these quilting points (there might
be more than one) operate to organise the fiction of a subject around them (as well,
paradoxically, as operating as points of collapse for these fictions). We might also
note the connections with Guattari’s own writing on the importance of what he calls
an ‘operational narrativity’ and concomitant autopoetic nuclei (or ‘Z-Points’) that
operate to collect and cohere a subjectivity (Guattari ,1995, p. 85-6).

As oppose to Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari themselves were very interested in

neuroscience and, indeed, their last collaboration ends with a consideration of the
brain and of what thinking, once it is untethered from a centred subject might involve.
In fact, that book – What is Philosophy? – ends with some cryptic comments about a
different kind of subject (or non-subject perhaps?) that might be ‘of’ these different
kinds of thinking once set free as it were. A thinking extracted ‘from the chaos into
which the brain plunges’ and which involves ‘mass-people, world-people, brain-
people, chaos-people’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 218). Certainly, for Deleuze
and Guattari, the centred subject is merely a kind of reduction or even illusion, one
that restricts the possibilities of thought. Indeed, ‘it is the brain that thinks and not
man – the latter being only a cerebral crystallisation’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p.
210). What, we might ask – as Deleuze and Guattari themselves do – will happen
when this brain, a kind of virtual horizon and reservoir, itself becomes subject?

The connections between this and Buddhism are remarkable, but we might also note
the resonances with Metzinger. Indeed, with all of these there is a disavowal of any
‘real’ existence of a self: ‘no such things as selves exist in the world. A biological
organism, as such, is not a self. An Ego is not a self, either, but merely a form of
representational content – namely, the content of a transparent self-model activated in
the organism’s brain’ (Metzinger, 2009, p. 8). In fact, according to Metzinger there is
no way we can access or experience a greater reality outside our particular
representations or models: ‘the whole idea of potentially being in touch with reality is
a sort of romantic folklore’ (Metzinger, 2009, p. 9). Any knowledge we have is then
through representations. Indeed, this, for Metzinger, is what knowledge is
(Metzinger’s view on things is profoundly Kantian in this sense). As Metzinger
   15  

remarks, in a statement that sums up his particular take on matters: ‘All evidence now
points to the conclusion that phenomenal content is determined locally, not by the
environment at all but by internal properties of the brain’ (Metzinger, 2009, p. 10).

Metzinger’s intention is to understand how and why this self-model came in to

existence and, indeed, operates. But, for myself, the more interesting question, again,
is what other models might be possible. In relation to this we might note Ray
Brassier’s compelling account of a ‘nemocentric’ subject that is, as it were, in the
world without the filter of a self (Brassier, 2011). This self-less experience of the
world – a ‘view from nowhere’ as Brassier puts it – is one in which the processes of
representation are opaque rather than transparent and thus, precisely, are available for
introspective examination. The self model itself becomes apparent as model and a
little room is introduced in to the set up. This is a subject (if it can be called as such)
that ‘lives’ the scientific image of what’s actually going on (as opposed to the folk
image of the self that occludes this). This is also the theme of some of Steven
Shaviro’s writings on consciousness, and, as Shaviro also notes, a subject of much
recent science fiction writing (not least Peter Watt’ Blindsight that explores the idea
of a sapience without sentience) (Shaviro, 2016). It is also, of course, a key question
for developments in Artificial Intelligence: could there be a form of intelligence that
does not go by way of a subject centred model? An augmented or
collective/distributed intelligence perhaps? And what might our relationship be to
these other kinds of intelligence? Indeed, ultimately, will we be able to relate to them
at all?

In fact, for myself a Kantian view of things (and especially the positing of a gulf
between phenomena and noumena) is productive, but also limited. Other
philosophical perspectives (as well as Buddhism) would suggest that rather than a
curtain drawn, there is, in fact, a continuum between us and the world. Henri Bergson,
for example, suggests the possibility of ‘opening up’ further to the world of which we
are already a part (in works like Matter and Memory and The Two Sources of
Religion and Morality there is the suggestion that ‘beyond’ the habitual self we have a
species and, indeed, more inorganic and cosmic ‘memory’). Likewise Spinoza’s
Ethics suggests we can develop an increasing affective receptivity (through giving
attention to our encounters) leading to ever greater ‘knowledge’ and, ultimately, to a
state in which there is a kind of ‘becoming-world’ of the subject (the resonances
between Spinoza’s account of the third kind of knowledge and Buddhist accounts of
insight is remarkable). Bergson and Spinoza are two of the key precursors to Deleuze
and Guattari who, we might say, continue in this vein, not least with the idea that the
subject can, precisely, access different durations, or, in their terms, go through
different becomings. In relation to neuroscience, clearly, the durations of technology
and of man-machine becomings are of particular and increasing importance.

But, once again, this is also to turn back to previous pre-modern accounts of the self
/non-self as well as to non-Western ones. In relation to the latter we might also note
   16  

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro exploration of a certain idea of perspectivism, a

‘switching’ of viewpoints, that is present in some aboriginal cultures, where, for
example, animals are seen as humans and human are animals. As de Castro himself
suggests in his Cannibal Metaphysics there are clear resonances with Deleuze and
Guattari’s writings on becoming here, despite some important differences (Viveiros
de Castro, 2014). This also dovetails with recent object orientated philosophies and
other ‘animal studies’ that displace the human from the centre of their particular
fiction of the world, and, indeed, in some cases flatten hierarchies (as in the idea of
‘flat ontologies’). There is more to say here about what can be a strange occluding of
the human (or a kind of moving too fast to its expulsion), but, in relation to what I
have been calling myth-science, we can say that these accounts offer a different
fiction and, with that, the possibility of a different ethics and politics that leads from
this (a specifically non-anthropocentric attitude as it were). In fact, for myself, it is
when these fictions are put in to practice – performed we might say – that we see their
real importance; and in so far as this is concerned it is the above case studies own
attention to what might be called lived practice that is crucial.

Notes

1
In the original City Lights publication the cover – an image chose by Burroughs of a
shaman – and whole look of that particular edition also gives the book a certain affect.
2
Lacan’s psychoanalytical accounts (especially in the Seminars) use fiction, but are
also – like Freud – themselves fictions of the self. A book like Ecrits insofar as it is
not to be read for meaning, might also be said to be ‘for’ a different kind of self
‘behind’ the one looking for meaning (Lacan’s suggests that rather than to be
understood, his writings ‘must be placed in water, like Japanese flowers, in order to
unfold’ (Lacan, 2013, p. 70)). Lacan’s use of diagrams and mathemes might also be
said to partake of this ‘communication without meaning’.

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