"Shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception": vision, culture and technology in the psychedelic sixties

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“SHAKEN OUT OF THE RUTS OF ORDINARY PERCEPTION”:
VISION, CULTURE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE PSYCHEDELIC SIXTIES

by
Andrew Derek Syder

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
CINEMATIC ARTS (CRITICAL STUDIES)

May 2009

Copyright 2009 Andrew Derek Syder
ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank my dissertation committee (Tara McPherson, Steve Anderson, and
Doug Thomas) for all of their incredible assistance, astuteness, and attention — and for
actually making the defense an enjoyable experience. I would also like to thank Jeffrey
Sconce, Lynn Spigel, Dana Polan, Marita Sturken, Michael Renov, and Fred Turner for
their invaluable help, counsel, and feedback at various stages of the project.
Immeasurable gratitude must also be extended to the friends and family members who
patiently endured me using them as a sounding board for my crazy theories. The Santa
Cruz gang, in particular, provided the kind of support network about which a doctoral
candidate could ordinarily only dream: Sara Smith, for your compassionate, take-charge,
fix-all, can-do spirit; Ted Tripp, for your precise proof-reading and quizzical annotations;
and Lisa Tripp, above all, for your love, companionship, encouragement, support,
wisdom, pragmatism, perseverance, and good humor, and for your unwavering faith that I
would, one day, indeed finish writing this thing.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ii
Abstract iv
Introduction 1
Chapter One: Theorizing Vision 10
Mapping the History of Vision and Technology: Visual Culture
Studies and the Psychedelic Movement 15
Aldous Huxley: “The Doors of Perception” 38
Ken Kesey: “The Movie Screen of our Perceptions” 55
Timothy Leary: “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out” 81
John C. Lilly: “The Human Biocomputer” 106
Conclusion 122
Chapter Two: Expanding Cinema 126
Hollywood Heads and the Psychedelic Feature Film 129
Cinematic Acid Trips: An Inventory of Effects 140
Psychedelic Style as an Interrogation of Cinematic Models of Vision 152
The Psychedelic Cinema of Attractions 189
Table 1: Entertainment and Utopia: The Hollywood Musical 198
Reconfiguring Cinematic Vision at Psychedelic Happenings 205
Conclusion 230
Chapter Three: Going Electric 236
Defining Cybernetics in the Popular Discourses of the Sixties 240
Psychedelic–Cybernetic Technologies of Vision and the Electronic
Evangelism of Marshall McLuhan 269
Electronic and Digital Media Productions in the Psychedelic–
Cybernetic Age 291
Network Television 296
Mixed-Media Happenings 312
Computer and Video Art 320
Psychedelic Style as Art for Cybernated Life 336
Conclusion 345
References 355

iv
ABSTRACT
This study examines the interconnected and symbiotic relationship between vision and
technologies of vision. It investigates how visual media technologies have been employed
historically as tools and metaphors for understanding human sensory perception; and it
explores, in turn, how ideas about perception have influenced the ways in which imaging
technologies have been thought about and used. To investigate these histories, the study
focuses on the psychedelic movement of the 1960s as a case study. It examines how
relationships between vision, technology, and culture were explored through such texts as
commercial feature films, “mixed-media” happenings, computer and video art, and the
published writings of such influential authors as Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary.
The study is intended to contribute to a larger project within visual culture studies of
mapping a “history of vision” — or, more precisely, a history of how ideas about vision,
technology, and culture have been fought over and shaped. It argues that the 1960s
represented a cultural and historical moment in which the relationships between vision
and technology were being hotly contested and reconfigured — a moment when
photographic and cinematic metaphors for seeing (which had been dominant since the
nineteenth century) were being challenged by metaphors deriving from emergent
electronic and digital technologies — and it argues that the works of the psychedelic
culture from the period played a significant role in framing ideas about vision around this
shifting technological landscape.
1
INTRODUCTION
This study examines the interconnected and symbiotic relationship between vision and
technologies of vision. It investigates how visual media technologies have been employed
historically as tools and metaphors for understanding human sensory perception; and it
explores, in turn, how ideas about perception have influenced the ways in which imaging
technologies have been thought about and used. To investigate these histories, the study
focuses on the psychedelic movement of the 1960s as a case study. It examines how
relationships between vision, technology, and culture were explored through such texts as
commercial feature films, “mixed-media” happenings, computer and video art, and the
published writings of such influential authors as Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary.
With this study, I hope to contribute to a larger project within visual culture studies of
mapping a “history of vision” — or, more precisely, a history of how ideas about vision,
technology, and culture have been fought over, contested and shaped.
Throughout human consciousness, technologies of vision have been a central component
in our understandings of what it means to see. From microscopes, telescopes, and the
camera obscura to cinema, television, and the computer, instruments for seeing have been
mobilized at different points in history to describe, investigate, develop, enhance, expand,
promote, contest, codify, regulate, regiment, and legitimize different “ways of seeing”
(Berger, 1972). As new technologies of vision are developed, new “scopic regimes” also
emerge: understandings of human perception are modified; the practices of visual culture
are transformed; and the technologies themselves are reconceptualized and redeployed. In
2
any culture, at any point in history, we can identify a plurality of these scopic regimes
that overlap, intersect, and battle for dominance. As Martin Jay explains:
[T]he scopic regime of modernity may best be understood as a contested
terrain, rather than a harmoniously integrated complex of visual theories
and practices. It may, in fact, be characterized by a differentiation of
visual subcultures, whose separation has allowed us to understand the
multiple implications of sight in ways that are now only just beginning to
be appreciated. (Jay, 1988, p. 4)
In this regard, the current study will pay particular attention to a contested terrain within
psychedelic culture (and Western society at large) of two different technological models
of vision: one, which I loosely term “cinematic” perception, derives from the optical
processes of cinema and photography; the other, which I equally loosely term
“cybernetic” perception, derives from the circuited, networked technologies of electronic
and digital media.
The dominance of photography and cinema as metaphors for human visual perception
throughout much of the twentieth century can be see in a myriad of different examples.
Between 1934 and 1963, one of Kodak’s most popular lines of still photography cameras
was called the “Retina” series, evoking a conceptual similarity between the lens optics of
the camera and the lens optics of the human eye. Other camera manufacturers mobilized
similar strategies for emphasizing a connection between camera and eye: a 1949
campaign for Mycro’s Petal camera argued that it “operates on the principle of the retina
in the human eye”; a 1973 Nikon campaign proclaimed their camera “is the one camera
which has transcended the optical-mechanical mechanism [to] become an integral part of
the photographer’s eye”; and automatic-exposure cameras were commonly described as
possessing “electric eyes” throughout advisements of the 1960s and 1970s.
3
Cinema history is likewise rich with allusions to the camera–eye. Particularly notable
examples include such films as Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Luis Buñuel and
Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou (1929), and Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie
Camera (1929), all of which offer up different ways of exploring the film camera’s
privileged relationship to the eye. In the opening titles for Vertigo, we are confronted
with an extreme close-up of a woman’s eye staring back at us, immediately establishing
the themes of erotic voyeurism and the “gaze” (Mulvey, 1989) that will permeate the
film. For Hitchcock, we, the audience, are always morally implicated in the film camera’s
power to look. In Un Chien Andalou, Buñuel and Dali provide another extreme close-up
of an eye. This time it is sliced open by a straight razor: a surrealist gesture designed to
provoke in the film spectator a more visceral and convulsive set of camera–eye relations.
Meanwhile, in The Man with a Movie Camera, Vertov superimposes a close-up of an eye
over the image of a camera lens, producing what is perhaps cinema’s most iconic
representation of the camera–eye. For Vertov, the fusion of human vision and the filmic
apparatus in the figure of the kinok — literally, “the camera-eye man” — could produce a
cinema that penetrates more deeply into the visible world than the naked eye alone. In his
manifesto of the “kino-eye,” he wrote:
The main and essential thing is:
The sensory exploration of the world through film.
We therefore take as the point of departure the use of the camera as kino-
eye, more perfect than the human eye, for the exploration of the chaos of
visual phenomena that fills space. (Vertov, 1984, p. 14-5)
In the twenty-first century, electronic and digital technologies have also come to occupy a
dominant role as tools and metaphors for understanding vision. It is extremely difficult
4
these days not to think of our brains as neural computers that process and store the
sensory information that has been transmitted through the wires and circuits of our
central nervous systems. In everyday speech, words like “scanning,” “streaming,”
“processing,” and “uploading” have become a not uncommon part of the vocabulary used
to describe human sensory perception: e.g., “The eye is not a single frame snapshot
camera. It is more like a video stream” (Clark, 2007, para. 12). Some people have even
sought to measure the resolution of the human retina in terms of megapixels: the
conventional wisdom of the Internet suggesting that it would be somewhere close to 576
megapixels (huGoFdeStruction, 2007). Current cybernetic research suggests that this
trend is only likely to accelerate. Kevin Warwick has experimented with wiring his
central nervous system to the Internet for the sending and receiving of sensory data
(Warwick, 2007; Warwick, 2002). Mark Humayun has been involved in developing
“bionic eye” implants that are designed to restore sight to the blind (Fildes, 2007). And,
at the 2007 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Emotiv Systems unveiled a
brain/computer interface system for controlling video games, making it possible to
“manipulate a virtual world with one’s thoughts and emotions” (Lombardi, 2007, para.
1). Indeed, if science fiction movies like Strange Days (1995), The Matrix (1999), and
Minority Report (2002) are anything indication of things to come, we will soon be living
in a world were all visual experiences are subject to the designs and protocols of
information technologies. Contemporary discourses about sensory perception, in other
words, often tend to emphasize the role of neural activity and the central nervous system;
the ocular processes of the eye are just one (and not necessarily the most important) node
in the system of transmitting of visual data to the brain.
5
The camera–eye metaphor is, of course, still with us; but electronic and digital metaphors
of vision have emerged in recent decades as a competing way of seeing. In fact, few areas
of life have been as profoundly shaken up by the digital revolution as the scopic regimes
of photography and cinema. As recently as 1980, for example, Roland Barthes wrote: “in
photography I can never deny that the thing has been there” (Barthes, 1980/1996, p. 76;
emphases in original). In the age of Photoshop, this remark of course sounds charmingly
naïve. We have lost a certain faith in the veracity of photographic evidence: when
pictures become pixels, we abandon any notion that the camera never lies. Beyond just
transforming our attitudes towards photographic texts, however, these changes also
contribute to shifts in how we think about ourselves. Our own relationships to vision are
modified. New ways of seeing are produced and circulated. We might ask, therefore,
whether a paradigm shift is in fact beginning to occur in the history of vision. Are
electronic and digital technologies in the process of usurping photography and cinema as
our era’s dominant models of perception? If so, what kinds of things might be at stake in
a shift from “cinematic” to “cybernetic” regimes of vision?
To address these questions, this study will examine the cultural and intellectual
productions of the psychedelic movement from the 1960s. There are a number of reasons
why I believe the psychedelic era is particularly significant in these histories of vision,
technology, and culture. First, the 1960s was a period of considerable upheaval and
transformation. In the film industry, the old Hollywood studio system was crumbling, and
New Wave cinemas were emerging around the globe to revitalize the medium as an art
form. At the same time, new video and computer technologies were entering the
marketplace, and cybernetics as a field of study was beginning to take root in the lexicon
6
of popular discourse. Meanwhile, the “television generation” was metamorphosing into a
countercultural movement that was challenging many of the most deeply held
presuppositions of the ruling parent culture. This is not to say that these technological and
cultural upheavals were the causes of a scopic regime change in any immediate, direct, or
tangible way. (Paradigm shifts, after all, do not happen overnight; and we should always
be wary about invoking “crisis narratives” in the historicizing of the sixties.) Rather, it is
simply to say that the psychedelic era represented a moment of contestation and counter-
hegemonic questioning. It represented a moment when terrain was shifting; a moment
different visual, technological, and cultural formations were overlapping and competing,
producing new visual subcultures and new networks of power/knowledge.
Second, issues of sensory perception and awareness were a core concern of the
psychedelic movement. Through drug-fueled explorations of expanded consciousness,
the psychedelic community made vision and visuality central topics of discourse in the
wider culture of the 1960s. Indeed, there are few periods in recent history when
investigations into the phenomenology of perception have so permeated Western society.
The psychedelic movement, after all, believed that a political revolution could only occur
after a revolution had taken place in how people use their sense organs; and central to this
project were radical reconfigurations of both the eye and the central nervous system as
loci of perception. As such, the 1960s represents a moment in the history of vision as
profound in its implications as that of the modernist revolution of the nineteenth century
or the digital revolution of the twenty-first century.
7
Third, one of the primary means by which the psychedelic movement explored these
issues of perception was through the use of media technologies, both as conceptual
metaphors and as tools for exploration. The intellectual and cultural productions of the
psychedelic movement were saturated with allusions to and experiments with a wide
variety of different technologies of vision. Movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
and The Trip (1967) provided cinematic representations of the psychedelic experience;
psychedelic researchers like Timothy Leary and John C. Lilly, meanwhile, developed
cybernetic theories of perception that posited similarities between the human sensory
apparatuses and electronic/digital technologies. Through these investigations of different
technologies of vision, the psychedelic movement engaged in a process of testing and
interrogating the dominant scopic regimes of the era. By attempting to simulate acid trips
on screen, for example, psychedelic films challenged many of the visual codes, reading
protocols, and spectator positions associated with classical Hollywood cinema.
To analyze these histories, this study is divided into three main chapters. In Chapter One,
“Theorizing Vision,” I situate the psychedelic movement’s explorations of perception
within the histories of vision and technology that have been developed by the field of
visual culture studies. I pay particular attention to the emergence of the idea of a “modern
observer” in the nineteenth century (Crary, 1990/1999a); and I argue that the construction
of a “psychedelic observer” in the 1960s represented a reemergence and a reconfiguration
of many of that earlier century’s debates about vision and technology. I also analyze the
visual–technological metaphors that underlie the central theories of four of the
psychedelic movement’s most significant and influential thinkers: Aldous Huxley, Ken
Kesey, Timothy Leary, and John C. Lilly. Through this discussion, I argue that the
8
psychedelic movement was engaged in a broad-ranging exploration of “cinematic” and
“cybernetic” models of perception that produced a quite contested terrain of visual
theories and practices.
In Chapter Two, “Expanding Cinema,” I investigate how cinematic models of perception
were tested, explored, and transformed by the creative productions of the psychedelic era.
I survey the cultural explosion of “head films” in the late-1960s, examining how they
used the cinematic apparatus to represent psychedelic experiences, and assessing the
terms on which they framed psychedelic perception as a new way of seeing. I also
analyze the central role that cinema played in the psychedelic mixed-media happenings of
the era. Throughout the chapter, I argue that these cultural productions emphasized a
connection between “expanded consciousness” and “expanded cinema,” and I probe the
implications of such an idea in within the context of the histories of vision and
technology that were established in Chapter One.
In Chapter Three, “Going Electric,” I investigate how the psychedelic movement
explored and developed cybernetic models of perception. I situate the psychedelic
movement’s interpretations cybernetic theory in the context of a broader popularization
of cybernetic discourses within mainstream sixties’ culture; and I examine how these
psychedelic–cybernetic discourses were influenced by Marshall McLuhan’s grand
theories about electronic communications technologies. I also investigate how electronic
and digital technologies were put to use by artists and media producers in the creation of
psychedelic visual culture, assessing the extent to which cybernetic theories of perception
were explored in these creative productions. Finally, I argue that, regardless of the
9
technologies used to produce them, the signature visual traits of psychedelic style
(swirling patterns, vibrating colors, strobe lights, etc.) were, in their essence, a visual
expression of cybernetic theories of perception.

10
CHAPTER ONE: THEORIZING VISION
On December 2
nd
, 1964, Mario Savio delivered an impassioned speech to a large crowd
of Berkeley student protestors in which he famously proclaimed:
There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious,
makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even
passively take part; and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and
wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you’ve got to make it
stop. (Rorabaugh, 1989, p. 31)
It was one of the inaugural battle cries of the Free Speech Movement, and it remains one
of the most iconic sound bites of the sixties. It was also a defining statement of the
counterculture’s attitudes towards the increasingly technological society that surrounded
them. As Fred Turner notes:
To the protestors, the university was both a knowledge factory in its own
right and microcosm of the rigid, highly rationalized military-industrial
complex it served. In that sense it modeled the hierarchical world of cold
war corporate adulthood for which many feared they were being trained.
And at that time, no machine more commonly represented this stratified,
depersonalized social order than the computer. Hal Draper, a librarian at
Berkeley in 1964, explained that for a student, “the mass university of
today is an overpowering, over-towering, impersonal, alien machine in
which he is nothing but a cog going through pre-programmed motions —
the IBM syndrome.” (Turner, 2006, p. 12)
In his 1968 book, The Making of a Counter Culture, Theodore Roszak described this
attitude as a rejection of the “technocracy” — which he defined as “that society in which
those who govern justify themselves by appeal to technical experts who, in turn, justify
themselves by appeal to scientific forms of knowledge. And beyond the authority of
science, there is no appeal” (Roszak, 1968/1995, p. 8). The technocracy’s primary
11
objective, Roszak argued, is to keep the technological heart of the society beating: “social
prestige of technical skills has assumed authority over even the most seemingly personal
aspects of life: sexual behavior, child-rearing, mental health, recreation, etc” (Roszak,
1968/1995, p. 7). It was in personal-political counterpoint to this rigid, hierarchical,
social-technological organization that the counterculture emerged: the flower children of
Haight-Ashbury, the New Left, the peaceniks, the back-to-the-land movement. The
agrarian ideals of commune life, for example, advocated non-hierarchical social
formations, a return to the natural world, and a rejection of the corporate–capitalist values
of mass media and the technocracy. And, in the popular memories of the sixties
counterculture, few images have been more enduring than that of flower-powered hippies
dropping out of the modern world by loading up on psychedelic drugs and venturing out
into nature.
Needless to say, however, the line between the counterculture and the technocracy was
not quite as clearly defined as such memories might suggest. In October 1967, for
example, one of the most radical chapters of the Haight-Ashbury scene, The Diggers,
held a mock funeral that proclaimed “the death of the hippie, devoted son of the mass
media” — a recognition of the degree to which the counterculture had become
inextricably intertwined with the culture industry, with thousands of young people
flooding into San Francisco after seeing it on television. Around the same time,
Hollywood itself was in the process of being taken over by the “movie brat” generation
of filmmakers, who replaced the old-fashioned styles and working practices of the studio
system with the sensibilities and values of the counterculture; and, as Thomas Frank
described in The Conquest of Cool (1997), the same trend was happening within the
12
business cultures of Madison Avenue advertising agencies. Similarly, as several recent
histories have begun to explore, many of the pioneers of the modern computing
revolution were themselves graduates of the sixties counterculture. John Markoff’s What
the Dormouse Said (2006), for example, describes how the development of the personal
computer industry in the 1960s and 1970s was shaped by the countercultural activities
going on in the Bay Area at the time; and Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to
Cyberculture (2006) uses Stewart Brand and his Whole Earth Network as a lens for
examining the influence of the sixties on contemporary discourses about digital culture.
In other words, the counterculture’s relationship to the technocracy was one of deep
ambivalence and contradiction: at once rejecting and embracing modern technologies and
technocultures; and continually redefining the terms of the relationship as social, cultural,
and technological formations have transformed over time.
This ambivalence towards technology was especially pronounced within the psychedelic
culture of the 1960s, not least because visual technologies were so central to the
movement’s explorations of new ways of seeing. Even when the discourses of the
psychedelic movement were not explicitly addressing visual media technologies — or
were advocating an outright rejection of them —we can still detect technological
metaphors for perception underpinning and structuring the theories of vision that were
espoused. As we shall see, even such popular catchphrases as “far out,” “expanded
consciousness,” “acid trip,” and “psychedelic” itself, had roots in metaphors for
perception that were built upon analogies to visual technologies.
13
Chapter One of this dissertation will explore these issues by investigating the variety of
ways that different visual technologies informed the metaphors for perception in the
foundational discourses and manifestos of the psychedelic movement. In particular, it
will focus on case studies of the visual–technological metaphors that underlie the central
concepts of four of the most significant figures of the psychedelic movement:
• Aldous Huxley’s “The Doors of Perception”
• Ken Kesey’s “The Movie Screen of Our Perceptions”
• Timothy Leary’s “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out”
• John C. Lilly’s “The Human Biocomputer”
Combined, this group of researchers and activists laid the groundwork for a great many
of the cultural and theoretical pathways of the psychedelic movement in the 1960s. Their
writings also helped to position visual imaging technologies —the camera obscura,
cinema, television, computers — at the core of the psychedelic movement’s explorations
of the philosophical, political and cultural dimensions of sensory perception. By
examining the central metaphors of each of these theorists in the context of the
technological and cultural formations of the era, Chapter One will show how the
discourses of the psychedelic movement were far from uniform or homogeneous in how
correlations between vision and technology were theorized. Indeed, what we see
happening was more akin to a series of struggles over the ideological implications of
different technologies and scopic regimes; and it was through the cross-pollination of
ideas between these different theorists that reconfigurations of ideas about vision and
technology began to occur within the psychedelic movement.
14
Chapter One will also be centrally concerned with how we might position the psychedelic
movement’s employment of technological metaphors within the context of a broader
history of vision. For instance, what kinds of connections to (or rejections of) earlier
scopic regimes can we identify in the psychedelic movement’s theories of vision? And
how might these theories of vision be relevant to contemporary discourses about visual
culture and technology? Did the psychedelic movement’s explorations of perception and
consciousness, for example, contribute to a cultural turn in how correlations between
vision and image-making devices have been theorized and debated? To investigate the
psychedelic movement’s place within this broader history of ideas about vision and
visuality, this section of the dissertation will utilize methodological and historiographical
approaches that have been developed in the field of visual culture studies; and it will seek
to situate psychedelic theories of perception in relation to the histories of vision and
technology that have been put forward by such historians of visual culture as Jonathan
Crary and Anne Friedberg. At the same time, however, the relationship between the
psychedelic movement and the visual culture studies movement will be examined, with
both being considered as utterances in an ongoing set of discourses about vision,
technology, and culture. After all, if the psychedelic movement did indeed have a cultural
impact on how vision and technology have been thought about, one should probably
assume that visual culture studies was itself affected. It is this set of historical and
theoretical concerns that will be addressed first; attention will then be turned to the
individual case studies of Huxley, Kesey, Leary, and Lilly.
15
Mapping the History of Vision and Technology:
Visual Culture Studies and the Psychedelic Movement
In approaching the topic of the historicizing of vision, one question immediately must be
raised: can we even speak of a history of vision? In the context of this study, we are
obviously not referring to the history of how physiological operations in the eye or brain
have evolved over time, but rather a history of ideas about vision and visuality, and an
exploration of how we might map the ways that visual concerns have informed different
fields of inquiry and activity. We are concerned with how different visual imaging
technologies have, at different times, been mobilized in the context of trying to
understand human sensory perception; and we are concerned with the cultural impact of
those choices on how we see both our technology and ourselves.
Cultural studies and media studies have, of course, been engaged in this historiographic
project since their inceptions: both fields have been deeply concerned with images,
spectatorship, visuality, media apparatuses, and institutions. However, as Jessica Evans
and Stuart Hall have pointed out, visual concerns have emerged in these disciplines in a
peculiarly bifurcated manner, marked by a combination of ubiquity and neglect:
Certain themes imbued with visual metaphors and terminologies of
looking and seeing have become the staple diet of cultural and media
studies: the society of the spectacle and the simulacrum; the politics of
representation; the male gaze and the possibility of a female gaze; the
“mirror stage”; fetishism and voyeurism; the reproduction of the image;
the “other” as the projection of racialized discourse. It may thus appear
contentious to claim, as we do, that “visual culture” has been somewhat
overlooked in the rapid expansion of cultural and media studies
throughout the last decade and a half. Contentious because, after all, the
work of Barthes, Benjamin, Lacan and Foucault, with their clearly visual
concerns – not to mention a host of others — forms the canonical
16
foundations upon which much cultural and media studies rest. (Evans &
Hall, 2002, p. 1)
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the field of visual culture studies emerged in an effort
to redress this perceived imbalance. The beginnings of visual culture studies, of course,
date back much further — Evans and Hall credit Svetlana Alpers with coining the term
“visual culture” in 1972 (Evans & Hall, 2002, p. 5), while W.J.T. Mitchell argues its
origins can be traced back to Erwin Panofsky’s 1924 essay, “Perspective as Symbolic
System” (Mitchell, 1994, p. 17) — but it is only in these last two decades that it has
really been recognized as a field.
For Mitchell, the emergence of visual culture studies has been part of a shift from “the
linguistic turn” to “the pictorial turn” within Western culture. The linguistic turn is a
theoretical concept that was developed by Richard Rorty to describe the move in
twentieth century thought towards a concern with words and textuality, evident in the
centrality of linguistics, semiotics, and rhetoric as models for critical reflection. Under
the linguistic turn, “Society is a text. Nature and its scientific representations are
‘discourses’. Even the unconscious is structured like a language” (Mitchell, 1994, p. 11).
The histories of cultural and media studies are, likewise, indelibly marked by the
linguistic turn. When we speak of “film grammar” or “screen language” or “reading” an
image, for example, we are implicitly making visuality subservient to the conventions of
the word — which goes some way towards explaining the simultaneous ubiquity and
neglect of visual concerns that Evans and Hall identified in these fields of study. In
contrast, Mitchell defined the pictorial turn as:
17
a postlinguistic, postsemiotic rediscovery of the picture as a complex
interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, bodies and figurality. It
is the realization that spectatorship (the look, the gaze, the glance, the
practices of observation, surveillance, and visual pleasure) may be as deep
a problem as various forms of reading (decipherment, decoding,
interpretation, etc.) and that visual experience or “visual literacy” might
not be fully explicable on the model of textuality. Most important, it is the
realization that while the problem of pictorial representation has always
been with us, it presses inescapably now, and with unprecedented force,
on every level of culture, from the most refined philosophical speculations
to the most vulgar productions of mass media. (Mitchell, 1994, p. 16)
In other words, one of the major drives of visual culture studies has been to situate vision
and visuality as concerns that extend far beyond the textual models of the linguistic turn.
Alpers’ pioneering analysis of Dutch painting, for example, exemplified the complex
interplays that Mitchell described: “It was to focus on notions about vision (the
mechanism of the eye), on image-making devices (the microscope, the camera obscura),
and on visual skills (map making, but also experimenting) as cultural resources related to
the practice of painting” (Evans & Hall, 2002, p. 5). Other seminal works of visual
culture studies, such as Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer (1999a) and
Suspensions of Perception (1999b), Anne Friedberg’s Window Shopping (1993) and The
Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (2006), Marita Sturken’s Tangled Memories
(1997), and Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes (1993), have expanded this methodology in their
investigations into different moments in the history of vision. In Techniques of the
Observer, for example, Crary investigated the emergence of the modern observer in the
nineteenth century, but he rejected the narratives of modernist vision that have been
provided by art history. Dismissing the popular notion that art traditions are the most
compelling record of the history of perception, he insisted, “on the contrary, a history of
vision (if such is even possible) depends on far more than an account of shifts in
18
representational practices” (Crary, 1990/1999a, p. 5). Crary instead proposed a new
narrative of modernist vision by examining how ideas about the observer were
constructed and transformed in a variety of fields, ranging from insights about the central
nervous system in physiology to the development of optical devices like the thaumatrope
and stereoscope.
When we view the psychedelic movement of the 1960s from the perspective of visual
culture studies and Mitchell’s pictorial turn, many points of correlation begin to emerge.
Although it predated the growth of visual culture studies as a discipline by decades, the
psychedelic movement shared so many of the same methods and concerns that it would
be fair to consider its theories of vision as early utterances in the field of visual culture
studies. The psychedelic movement exemplified the pictorial turn by viewing linguistic
models with great suspicion, prioritizing visual experience over textual meaning and
embracing postlinguistic, postsemiotic states of awareness. Psychedelic art, for example,
was generally designed to privilege performative, spontaneous experiences of sensory
stimulation and visual pleasure; rarely was it created merely as a text to be read and
interpreted. When textual models were employed, words frequently took on an intense
visuality that blurred the line between the linguistic and the pictorial, as seen in the
swirling, almost illegible lettering of psychedelic rock posters, or the avant-garde
typography and page layouts of Timothy Leary’s books and the newspapers of the
underground press.
Like visual culture studies, the psychedelic movement was also founded upon the
investigation of the “complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, bodies
19
and figurality” that Mitchell described. The movement framed its explorations of
perception and consciousness in terms of a network of interconnectivity between
psychedelic drugs, the central nervous system, media technologies, art and social
movements, traditions of spirituality, cultural theory, and the institutions of capitalism,
among other things. Timothy Leary, for example, called for a “molecular revolution”
(Leary, 1968/1998b, p. 112), arguing that social and political revolution must begin with
a revolution in how people take in the world through their sense organs. In making this
call, Leary positioned vision and visuality as the central concern of every level of culture,
and he explicitly connected the harnessing of control over one’s central nervous system
to the harnessing of control over the reigns of socio-political forms of power/knowledge.
Political consciousness, in other words, would derive from sensory consciousness.
By expressing these complex interplays through the use of technological metaphors for
perception, the psychedelic movement also shared visual culture studies’ understanding
that “the sensibilities of modern societies are shaped through cultural technologies —
such as modern penal architecture and the camera — which reinvent the relations
between seeing and knowing as mutually constitutive” (Evans & Hall, 2002, p. 3). What
we see in the cultural and intellectual works of the psychedelic movement was the desire
to intervene in these social processes of regulating vision. The psychedelic movement
interrogated the cultural, ideological, and phenomenological dimensions of visual
technologies in an effort to transform the connections between seeing and knowing that
had come to dominate Western society in the twentieth century.
20
The psychedelic movement, of course, felt that it was ushering in a brand new era of
visuality that would overthrow old, stale, culturally institutionalized configurations of
perception and consciousness. To position sixties psychedelia within a broader history of
vision, therefore, the critical historiographer must ask whether the psychedelic movement
did indeed change the course of ideas about vision and visuality in Western culture. The
psychedelicists certainly placed vision at the center of cultural debates for a number of
years in the mid- and late-1960s, but was their revolutionary rhetoric tied to genuine
change? Or, was it merely utilizing over-inflated utopianism to recycle and recirculate
ideas about vision that were, in fact, far from new?
The psychedelic movement was obviously not the first group in history to associate drug-
induced visions with new modes of seeing and knowing. Antecedents can, of course, be
traced back centuries in the histories of art and literature, in such works as Thomas de
Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822/2006), Charles Baudelaire’s Les
paradis artificiels (1860/2005), Walter Benjamin’s writings on hashish in the 1920s and
1930s (Benjamin, 2006), and the cultural productions of the surrealists and the beatniks.
Similarly, the psychedelic movement was not the first group in history to combine drug
use with cultural and intellectual productions to critique the dominant ways of seeing in a
depersonalized, technocratic society. As Marcus Boon notes:
The words “drugs” and “literature” in their modern senses emerge around
the same time (circa 1800, with the Romantics). Both are concerned with
the full manifestation of the power of the human imagination, with
consciousness in its expanded sense, at a time of increasingly relentless
utilitarianism. And both become conceptual garbage dumps where the
apparently dangerous excesses of the imagination are shunted for disposal.
(Boon, 2006, p. 7)
21
There have been a number of studies from literary and art historical perspectives that
have addressed the psychedelic movement in this light. For example, Boon’s own book,
The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs (2002), explores how different
classes of drugs (narcotics, anesthetics, cannabis, stimulants, psychedelics) influenced the
personal lives and literary styles of such authors as Coleridge, Baudelaire, Freud, Huxley,
Burroughs, and Kerouac; while Mike Jay’s Artificial Paradises: A Drugs Reader (1999)
offers up an expansive anthology of drug literature that goes some way towards defining
a canon of such works. These studies have provided important accounts of the impact of
drug use on the history of art and literature; however, if, as Jonathan Crary argues, the
history of vision depends on far more than just accounts of shifts in representational
practices, the psychedelic movement’s theories of vision also need to be examined more
thoroughly in the context of those complex interplays between visuality, apparatus,
institutions, bodies, and figurality associated visual culture studies. It is not enough to just
provide a history of how psychedelic experiences have been visually represented in
different media, as that is only one piece in the larger puzzle of psychedelia’s impact on
the history of vision. In this regard, the work of Jonathan Crary is worth exploring in
some detail, as it is extremely useful for helping us better understand the historical
antecedents of psychedelic observer, and for teasing out the often conflicting and
ambivalent uses of technological metaphors that were put forward by Huxley, Kesey,
Leary, and Lilly. Crary’s work derives from a school of visual culture studies that
foregrounds how vision and visuality were understood in the nineteenth century, a school
that also includes contributions from such historians as Anne Friedberg (2006, 1993),
22
Vanessa Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski (2004), Rosalind Krauss (1988), and John
Tagg (1988),
In Techniques of the Observer, Crary argues that the concept of “the observer” was
transformed in the mid-1800s, leading to the emergence of a modern understanding of
vision. He defines the observer not simply as “someone who looks,” but rather as a
construction made out of a wide array of different social–cultural–ideological–historical
conditions. The observer is someone who “sees within a prescribed set of possibilities,
one who is embedded in a system of conventions and limitations” (Crary, 1990/1999a, p.
6). In other words, Crary’s work examines how ideas about vision and visuality have
been wrapped up in complex interplays of power/knowledge, and he demonstrates how
technological metaphors for vision have played a large role in managing and legitimizing
these various systems of conventions and limitations. As such, Techniques of the
Observer is structured around an understanding that there is always more to technological
metaphors for vision than the simple “fact” of optical or mechanical similarities between
imaging devices and human sensory apparatuses.
Crary further describes how the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were dominated by
understandings of vision that proposed a conceptual similarity between the eye and the
camera obscura. At the most basic level, this perceived likeness emphasized how light
entering into the physical structure of the eye was analogous to the optical geometrics of
the camera obscura. Descartes’ La dioptrique (1637), for example, offered a description
of the camera obscura in which “the room represents the eye; the hole the pupil; the lens
the crystalline humour” (Crary, 1990/1999a, p. 47). Elsewhere, Crary cites the presence
23
of similar analogies in Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding (1690) and Newton’s
Opticks (1704), as well as in such paintings as Vermeer’s The Astronomer (1668) and
The Geographer (1668).
These classical conceptualizations of vision led to a privileging of the eye as the locus of
visual perception, as the camera obscura metaphor had no use for any sensory evidence
that the rest of the observer’s body might provide: the inside of the device is an empty,
darkened room, not a mess of blood, organs, and nerve tissues. The architectural design
of the camera obscura also served to legitimize the relations between seeing and knowing
upon which the Age of Reason had been founded:
First of all the camera obscura performs an operation of individuation; that
is, it necessarily defines an observer as isolated, enclosed, and autonomous
within its dark confines. It impels a kind of askesis, or withdrawal from
the world, in order to regulate and purify one’s relation to the manifold
contents of the now “exterior” world. Thus, the camera obscura is
inseparable from a certain metaphysics of interiority. […] At the same
time, another related and equally decisive function of the camera was to
sunder the act of seeing from the physical body of the observer, to
decorporealize vision. The monadic viewpoint of the individual is
authenticated and legitimized by the camera obscura, but the observer’s
physical and sensory experience is supplanted by the relations between a
mechanical apparatus and a pre-given world of objective truth. (Crary,
1990/1999a, p. 39-40)
In other words, “the camera obscura allows the subject to guarantee and police the
correspondence between exterior world and interior representation and to exclude
anything unruly” (Crary, 1990/1999a, p. 43). As such, the fixed, rectilinear, monocular
visuality of the camera obscura contributed to an ideal of visual knowledge as rational,
orderly, autonomous, and objective. Nowhere was this idea more lucidly expressed than
in Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding:
24
External and internal sensations are the only passages that I can find of
knowledge to the understanding. These alone, as far as I can discover, are
the windows by which light is let into this dark room. For methinks, the
understanding is not much unlike a closet wholly shut from light, with
only some little opening left … to let in external visible resemblances, or
some idea of things without; would the pictures coming into such a dark
room but stay there and lie so orderly as to be found upon occasion it
would very much resemble the understanding of a man. (as cited in Crary,
1990/1999a, p. 41-2)
By the early nineteenth century, Crary argues, this model of the observer had already
begun to be replaced, in fields as broad ranging as art, literature, philosophy, science, and
technology, by far more “subjective” understandings of vision. This new, modern
observer was mobile, productive, and binocular in character, and increasing emphasis
was placed on the corporeal body’s role in perception. Crary cites Goethe’s studies of
color and retinal afterimages in the 1810s as key turning points in this transition,
revealing how irregularities and imperfections in the eye contributed to distortions of
vision; but the physiological research of Johannes Müller (beginning in 1833) and the
subsequent, widely disseminated work of Hermann von Helmholtz are positioned as the
most significant breakthroughs in theories of subjective vision.
Müller’s “doctrine of specific nerve energies,” in particular, presented the discovery of
how perception was mediated by the anatomical structure of the body and its nervous
system. Müller demonstrated how a number of different stimuli could produce the same
effects on the retina and optic nerve as light, including: electricity; mechanical influences,
such as pressure or a blow; chemical agents, such as narcotics; even the body’s
circulation of blood. Müller also argued that the central nervous system could potentially
be rewired so that one could hear colors or see sounds. This work was further advanced
25
in Helmholtz’s Optics, which replaced classical notions of transparency in vision (light
passing unimpeded through a pinhole) with a model founded upon carnal density and
varying degrees of efficiency and aptitude in the eye, nervous system, and brain. As
Crary remarks, this new model of subjective vision produced “an account of a body with
an innate capacity, one might even say a transcendental faculty, to misperceive — of an
eye that renders differences equivalent” (Crary, 1990/1999a, p. 90).
Under this new, modern, scopic regime, Crary argues, there was little use for the camera
obscura as a tool for understanding or policing vision. The modern observer was no
longer associated with traits of rationality, asceticism, or truth-in-vision; and the camera
obscura’s clean separation of interior and exterior space was not commensurate with the
new knowledge that was being generated about how visual sensations can be produced
entirely through the internal mechanisms of the body, independent of any external
stimulus. Crary describes how the camera obscura was, as a result, symbolically replaced
in the nineteenth century by a range of new optical devices that included the stereoscope,
thaumatrope, phenakistiscope, kaleidoscope, and zoetrope. He positions the stereoscope,
in particular, as the quintessential visual technology of the modern observer. The design
of the device was based upon creating the subjective illusion of three-dimensional space
by exploiting the binocular disparity of the observer. By selling different views from
around the world, the stereoscope also functioned as an instrument within emergent
economies of visual consumption: it addressed the observer as a tourist and called for a
similar kind of “virtual” and “mobilized” gaze that Anne Friedberg (1993) has ascribed to
other nineteenth century inventions like the diorama and the cinema. The camera obscura,
in contrast, was only capable of producing fixed, monocular images of the world that
26
were indexically grounded in the device’s immediate geographical surroundings. As
such, stereoscopes proposed a very different kind of mediation between the observer and
the external world: “Even though they provide access to ‘the real,’ they make no claim
that the real is anything other than a mechanical reproduction. The optical experiences
they manufacture are clearly disjunct from the images used in the device” (Crary,
1990/1999a, p. 132).
In Crary’s description of trends within nineteenth century discourses about perception,
we can identify a core set of central concerns underlying his definition of the modern
observer. These concerns primarily include:
• Corporeality: The observer’s body contributes to and produces visual
experiences. Its messy, unreliable contributions to perception can no longer be
ignored or policed through the implementation of logic and rationality.
• Subjectivity: A new metaphysics of interiority emerges. Objectivity is called
into question, and the inner world of the observer becomes a central subject
for research and philosophical debate.
• A loss of the Real: If our sense organs are inherently unreliable, how can we
be sure of any knowledge claims about the external world?
• Mobility: The observer is liberated from the fixed, ascetic, monocular gaze of
the camera obscura and classical perspectivalism. The subjective, corporeal
body does not withdraw from the world, but moves through it to occupy a
plurality of viewing positions.
27
• Economies of visual consumption: Modernist visuality is shaped by the
structures and formations of capitalism. The corporeal, subjective, mobile,
modern observer enters into new systems of conventions and limitations tied
to emergent economies of visual consumption, such as advertising and the
tourism industry.
• Emergent visual technologies: New media devices are positioned as
dominant tools and metaphors for understanding and shaping the modern
observer; older technological metaphors recede.
In other words, the shift from the camera obscura to the stereoscope that Crary describes
was enmeshed in the interplays between these central issues. The techniques of the
modern observer, we could say, were defined by how these core concerns were
configured within different arenas of vision and visuality.
It is no accident that these issues should appear at the forefront of Crary’s description of
the modern observer, as they were also the central concerns of the scholars who provided
visual culture studies with its theoretical foundations, such as Benjamin, Nietzsche,
Barthes, Foucault, and Lacan. Crary’s portrait of the modern observer as a mobile subject
consuming visual facsimiles of the world is, for example, deeply rooted in the roaming
flâneurs of Benjamin and Baudelaire, as well as such theories as Benjamin’s “work of art
in the age of mechanical reproduction” (1955/1968) and Guy Debord’s “society of the
spectacle” (1967/1994). Likewise, when Crary argues that nineteenth century visual
paradigms produced accounts of a body with an innate capacity to misperceive, his
28
remarks closely resemble how Nietzsche addressed sensory evidence and the Real in his
own writings from the 1870s:
The pride connected with knowing and sensing lies like a blinding fog
over the eyes and senses of men, thus deceiving them concerning the value
of existence. […] They are deeply immersed in illusions and in dream
images; their eyes merely glide over the surface of things and see “forms.”
Their senses lead nowhere to truth; on the contrary, they are content to
receive stimuli and, as it were, to engage in a groping game on the back of
things. (Nietzsche, 1873/1999a, p. 80)
As such, we could say it has been a goal of Crary and his compatriots in visual culture
studies to position visuality at the center of the history of modernity. By defining the
modern observer around the same core concerns of Benjamin, Nietzsche, et al., Crary
was seeking to place the visual concerns of these scholars in the foreground, exposing the
extent to which their foundational discourses of modernity were inextricable from
contemporaneous transformations in discourses of vision. Indeed, Crary even implies that
a degree of causality should be recognized: that Western culture’s entry into modernity
was in no small part due to the understandings about vision that were pioneered by the
likes of Goethe, Müller, and Helmholtz. Furthermore, by examining how visual
technologies were a core component in this paradigm shift, Crary also lays out a template
for reading the replacement of the camera obscura by the stereoscope as an integral part
of the conceptual transition from Locke/Descartes to Benjamin/Nietzsche.
The central concerns that Crary attaches to the modern observer were, however, not just
confined to the nineteenth century and early modern era. As Mitchell (1994) remarked,
the pictorial turn presses with unprecedented force on every level of contemporary
culture, and the visual concerns of the 1990s and 2000s have been as equally focused on
29
those core issues of corporeality, subjectivity, a loss of the Real, mobility, economies of
visual consumption, and emergent visual technologies. For example, digital image
manipulation technologies and experiments in virtual and augmented realities have
brought philosophical concerns about the waning of the Real directly into mainstream
popular consciousness: Baudrillard made over as The Matrix. The interactive flows of
information in cyberspace and the proliferation of handheld media devices have
contributed to new configurations of the mobile observer within economies of visual
consumption. As Microsoft once asked: “Where do you want to go today?” And such
fields as cybernetics, technology studies, and gender studies have all been centrally
concerned with exploring how issues of subjectivity and corporeality inform our
relationships with technological devices — see Brooks (2002), Warwick (2002), Balsamo
(1996), and Hayles (1999). The focus of visual culture studies on these core concerns is
also very much symptomatic of this same trend. As Crary notes at the beginning of
Techniques of the Observer:
Although [the book] primarily addresses events and developments before
1850, it was written in the midst of a transformation in the nature of
visuality probably more profound than the break that separates medieval
imagery from Renaissance perspective. The rapid development in little
more than a decade of a vast array of computer graphics techniques is part
of a sweeping reconfiguration of relations between an observing subject
and modes of representation that effectively nullifies most of the culturally
established meanings of the terms observer and representation. (Crary,
1990/1999a, p. 1)
In other words, the emergence in the 1990s of a branch of visual culture studies that was
concerned with nineteenth century vision cannot be divorced from the concerns about
vision more generally in the last few decades. In looking back on the transformations that
occurred in nineteenth century vision, visual culture historians like Crary and Friedberg
30
have been simultaneously addressing the scopic regimes of the twenty-first century. Their
histories presuppose that studying nineteenth century vision can help us better understand
the transformations occurring in the current moment. This, of course, does not invalidate
the histories of vision that they have written — after all, history is always written from
the perspective of the present — but it does perhaps explain why Crary’s nineteenth
century observer comes across as so prototypically twenty-first century in character and
timbre.
When we examine the techniques of the psychedelic observer of the 1960s in the same
light, a recurring trend becomes apparent. The same core set of concerns about vision —
corporeality, subjectivity, the Real, mobility, economies of visual consumption, emergent
visual technologies — were all front and center in how the psychedelic movement
articulated its own transformative ways of seeing the world. Leary’s “molecular
revolution,” for example, highlighted the corporeal, subjective nature of perception by
emphasizing how the central nervous system could be manipulated to access hitherto
unseen levels of reality. In contrast to normative modes of perception, Leary and his
brethren also idealized psychedelic vision as a burst of freedom and mobility that called
into question the rigid and repressive conceptions of reality and consciousness that they
identified within mainstream Western culture. Indeed, if the subjective, modern observer
of the nineteenth century represented a break from the rational, orderly, objective
observer of previous centuries, the psychedelic observer was conceived in a parallel
manner as a break from the rational, conformist logic of a technocratic society and a
rejection of “the IBM syndrome.”
31
In other words, in all three of these historical moments — the 1800s, the 1960s, and the
present — we can see the same core set of concerns at the center of the activities and
discourses of visual culture. This is not to say, of course, that the exact same questions
keep getting raised again and again without variation. The nineteenth century was quite
different from the nineteen sixties, which in turn was quite different from today. The
psychedelic movement, for instance, had access to a whole host of technologies, cultural
formations, and fields of study that were not present during the era of Müller and
Helmholtz: cinema, television, computational devices, cybernetics, genetics,
neurophysiology, LSD, multinational capitalism, the hippie counterculture. Needless to
say, the devil is in the detail of how these different factors shaped the psychedelic
movement’s reinterpretation of the modern observer.
The psychedelic movement of the 1960s, of course, articulated its embrace of subjective
vision in the language of revolution and radical change: the salvation of Western society
was seen to lie in the overthrowing of institutionalized ways of seeing, and psychedelic
vision was positioned as nothing less than a new phase of human evolution. The
psychedelic movement, however, was not alone in its talk of radical change. The
discourses of vision and visuality in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries have been
no less associated with such rhetoric — the modernist revolution and the digital
revolution, respectively. As such, the continued and repeated framing of the modern
observer in terms of change and revolution impels us to question the legitimacy of this
rhetoric. If Crary identifies the nineteenth century as the period of “sweeping
transformation” (Crary, 1990/1999a, p. 7) in how vision was understood, and if Leary
likewise positioned the nineteen sixties as the period of a remarkably similar set of
32
sweeping transformations, which account is the most reliable? Does the fact that the
psychedelic movement could so potently market itself as revolutionary call into question
Crary’s assertion that the revolution had occurred a century earlier? Conversely, does
Crary’s account of sweeping transformations in the nineteenth century expose a fallacy in
the psychedelic movement’s revolutionary rhetoric, revealing it to be merely a re-
energizing of debates about modernist perception that in fact stretched back more than a
hundred years? These are questions that address the economies of revolutionary
discourses within cultural histories, and the ways that they can obscure connections to the
past. As Thomas Frank has noted, “we understand ‘the sixties’ almost instinctively as the
decade of the big change, the birthplace of our own culture, the homeland of hip” (Frank,
1997, p. 1). And, indeed, an entire economy has been built around selling this image of
the sixties as a time when the times they were a-changin’ — leading to rupture and
revolution becoming dominant modes of emplotment and explanation in historiographies
of the period. A closer examination suggests that the truth of the matter is most likely
somewhere in the middle: that neither period of revolution was quite as sweeping as
Crary and Leary infer, and that the history of vision is filled with contradictions,
reversals, mixed-metaphors, and competing paradigms. At any given moment, multiple
scopic regimes battle for dominance, residues of ostensibly antiquated regimes
stubbornly persist, and the core set of issues surrounding the modern observer gets
reenergized in different configurations. As we shall see, the psychedelic movement’s
theories of vision and visuality were deeply interwoven in the ideas that emerged in the
nineteenth century, but the path from the nineteenth century to the nineteen sixties could
hardly be considered straight or linear.
33
The “ghost” of the camera obscura was certainly still present in the psychedelic
movement’s theories of perception. It was not simply “obliterated” in the nineteenth
century with the emergence of new visual technologies or new discoveries in physiology
or new discourses of philosophy. Indeed, significant residues of the camera obscura have
remained in visual discourses up to the present day. As Susan Sontag put it, “Humankind
lingers unregenerately in Plato's cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of
the truth” (Sontag, 1989, p. 3). In other words, it is not simply the case that technological
metaphors are consistent with the ideas that they are being employed to express. In the
history of vision, mixed metaphors abound, and antiquated scopic regimes often have a
stubbornness that keeps them in circulation long after their sell-by-date. Tom Gunning,
for example, notes:
In 1870 a certain Dr. Vernois, a member of the Society for Legal Medicine
of Paris, published his theory of the optogramme. Surgically removing the
retinas of murder victims and scrutinizing them under a microscope,
Doctors Vernois and Bourion claimed to have discovered the imprint of
the victims’ last sight — and image of their murderers. (Gunning, 1995, p.
37)
The theory of the optigramme was quickly disproved, but that did not stop it from
becoming a popular device in detective fiction for a number of decades, conveying an
idea of the corpse as the ultimate camera. Karl Marx even alluded to the stubbornness of
antiquated scopic regimes in his remarks about how commodity fetishism reinforces the
primacy of objectivity over subjectivity, despite evidence to the contrary, “In the same
way the light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our
optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself” (as cited in
Evans & Hall, 2002, p. 18).
34
It is therefore important to note that, in order to strengthen his own narrative of the
modern observer, Crary is somewhat guilty of overinflating the demise of the camera
obscura as a model of vision. He performs a number of historiographic manipulations to
further his argument. The greatest of these manipulations involves photography and
cinema, which were easily the most significant and dominant visual technologies to
emerge from the nineteenth century, but which occupy only a secondary place in Crary’s
narrative. He performs a sleight-of-hand to downplay the deep connections that cinema
and photography have to the camera obscura, emphasizing instead the ways in which they
were technologies of modernity. He stresses, for example, how photography and cinema
were products of modern, industrialized economies of exchange, mobility, and
mechanical reproduction. He also takes issue with the teleological narratives of film
history that view cinema’s connection to nineteenth century optical devices (such as the
thaumatrope and zoetrope) in terms of a movement towards greater and greater realism
and verisimilitude. The more significant connection between cinema and those earlier
devices, Crary argues, rests in the subjective vision of the modern observer: specifically,
how the use of persistence-of-vision to create the illusion of movement was built upon
the new understandings about vision that came from the likes of Geothe, Müller, and
Helmholtz.
While these maneuvers by Crary do possess some legitimacy, they are also
historiographically problematic in several ways. First, he creates an imbalance by
ahistorically arguing that the stereoscope had a greater significance in the nineteenth
century than photography or cinema. If the camera obscura can be said to have possessed
a hegemonic position in seventeenth and eighteenth century ideas of vision, the same
35
could hardly be considered true of the stereoscope in the nineteenth century — there were
far too many competing technologies of vision to distract the modern observer. Second,
Crary does not place enough emphasis on the many ways that photography and cinema
continued to reinforce the ideas of vision and visuality that he associates with the camera
obscura and the Age of Reason. For example, the camera–eye metaphor remained a
dominant model of perception throughout much of the twentieth century, invariably
describing vision in terms of a disembodied, monocular eye, rather than a carnal density
of tissues, fluids and fibers. Similarly, the mode of cinematic exhibition, in which
audiences withdraw from the outside world to watch a screen in a darkened room,
continues the architectural configurations of the camera obscura. Furthermore, beyond
just cinema, there have also been many other ways in which “older” or “classical” models
of perception have remained at the center of ideas about vision — the continued
dominance of religious worldviews, for example.
As such, we need to adopt a much more nuanced understanding of vision in the twentieth
century than Crary’s notion of a “sweeping transformation” allows: an understanding that
examines competing scopic regimes battling for dominance within specific cultural and
technological formations. As Crary himself points out, the entry into modernity for the
observer was a double-edged sword. He argues that the collapse of the camera obscura
model and the emergence of a modern, subjective observer were profoundly entangled in
new configurations of power/knowledge that arose from the era’s new understandings of
vision. These new configurations were both liberating and regulatory. On the one hand,
the modernizing of vision unshackled the observer: “In the absence of the juridical model
of the camera obscura, there is a freeing up of vision, a falling away of the rigid
36
structures that had shaped it and constituted its objects” (Crary, 1990/1999a, p. 24).
Evidence of this liberation can, of course, be found in the various movements of
modernist art and philosophy that challenged the authority of classical, culturally
hegemonic ways of seeing and knowing. On the other hand, new systems of discipline
were developed to control and make docile the newly corporealized observer:
[A]lmost simultaneous with this final dissolution of a transcendent
foundation for vision emerges a plurality of means to recode the activity of
the eye, to regiment it, to heighten its productivity and to prevent its
distraction. Thus, the imperatives of capitalist modernization, while
demolishing the field of classical vision, generated techniques for
imposing visual attentiveness, rationalizing sensation, and managing
perception. (Crary, 1990/1999a, p. 24)
In Suspensions of Perception, for example, Crary describes how visual attention became
an important subject of investigation in the early modern era. Capitalist institutions
studied workers to determine the point at which bodily fatigue caused a detrimental
decline in attentiveness. This knowledge was then used to regulate and discipline
workers’ bodies, to make more efficient use of their labor and to maximize productivity
(Crary, 1999b). Likewise, the liberated, mobile observer became embedded within
emergent economies of vision, such as the flâneur of the nineteenth century Parisian
arcades (Benjamin, 1999) or the “mobilized virtual gaze” of attendees at dioramas, movie
houses, and shopping malls (Friedberg, 1993). As Crary notes, devices like the
stereoscope “involved arrangements of bodies in space, regulations of activity, and the
deployment of individual bodies, which codified and normalized the observer within
rigidly defined systems of visual consumption” (Crary, 1990/1999a, p. 18).
37
A tension between the liberation and the regimentation of the observer was similarly at
the center of how the psychedelic movement spoke of a revolution in perception. In the
work of each of the psychedelic theorists that I discuss later in this chapter, a dichotomy
is established between “everyday” and “psychedelic” modes of perception. In most cases,
everyday perception is characterized in the negative terms that Crary associates with the
regulation of the modern observer: the imposition of institutional scopic regimes; the
rationalizing of sensation; the disciplining of bodies. Psychedelic perception, in contrast,
is characterized in terms of the liberation of the observer from this prison of normative
modes of vision and consciousness. Psychedelic experience was viewed as a form of
direct intervention aimed at liberating the observer’s nervous system from its
conditioning by the institutions of modern capitalism. Indeed, in the context of a socio-
economic system built upon the disciplining of workers’ bodies to maximize efficiency
and productivity, embarking on an eight-hour LSD trip was a symbolic thumbing of the
nose at capitalist industry, making it impossible for the acid tripper to have his or her
attention focused in any reliable or standardized way. As such, we could say that the
ideals of the psychedelic movement were built around embracing the libratory
dimensions of modernity — mobility, freedom, pluralism, expanded subjectivity,
individual control — and the rejection of regimentation.
In the four case studies that follow, we will explore how these theoretical and historical
issues played out in each of the theorist’s metaphors for vision. We will examine how
Huxley, Kesey, Leary and Lilly each adopted different visual technologies for exploring
and articulating their respective theories about everyday and psychedelic perception; in
addition, we will investigate how their different metaphors were engaged in and
38
influenced by the specific cultural, ideological, and technological formations of the era.
At the most broad level, we will be using these case studies to ask whether paradigmatic
shifts were occurring in how technological metaphors for perception were being utilized
— looking to see, in particular, whether computational and cybernetic metaphors were
beginning to challenge the hegemony of photographic and cinematic metaphors for vision
in twentieth century popular culture.
Aldous Huxley: “The Doors of Perception”
Aldous Huxley was, arguably, the single most influential figure on the 1960s psychedelic
movement — even though he passed away before the movement had really taken off. His
first psychedelic experience occurred in May 1953, when he volunteered to take
mescaline as part of a research study being conducted by Dr. Humphry Osmond, a noted
psychologist whose work Huxley admired. Describing his trip as “the most extraordinary
and significant experience this side of Beatific Vision” (as cited in Lee & Shlain, 1992, p.
46), Huxley was inspired to write two book length essays that would become landmark
manifestos for the psychedelic movement: The Doors of Perception (1954/1990a) and
Heaven and Hell (1956/1990b). Before his death in November 1963, Huxley went on
serve as an advisor to Timothy Leary’s Harvard Psychedelic Research Project and was
revered as an elder statesman of the nascent psychedelic scene. By the mid-1960s,
Huxley’s observations and theories had permeated every corner of the psychedelic
movement. His phrase, “the doors of perception,” became common parlance in the
discourses of the counterculture, and even inspired the name of the seminal rock band
The Doors; Leary’s own first book on the subject of psychedelic drugs, The Psychedelic
39
Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Leary, Metzner & Alpert,
1964/1995), took its cues directly from Huxley’s investigations of Tibetan religion and
Eastern mysticism.
When Huxley first began writing about his psychedelic experiences in the 1950s, the
cultural climate was very different from what it would become a decade later. Research
into mescaline and LSD was mostly being conducted under the auspices of medical and
military–industrial institutions, which both employed the discourses of pathology to
describe the effects that psychedelic drugs had on human perception and cognition. In the
clinical trials of the 1950s, these drugs were thought to induce temporary insanity in the
user and were classified as “psychotomimetic” substances, a term that highlighted the
perceived connection between psychedelic experiences and states of psychosis or
schizophrenia. In a similar vein, the CIA established its infamous MK-ULTRA program
in April 1953 to investigate LSD as a “Potential New Agent for Unconventional
Warfare” (the title of a CIA Scientific Intelligence Memorandum from August 5, 1954).
These studies ranged from testing the drug’s effectiveness as a truth serum to war game
scenarios involving Communists spiking a city’s water supply. As Leary would later
note, the only language in American psychology at that time for describing psychedelic
experiences was based on a “hallucination–disease–victim” model (Leary, 1968/1995, p.
xxviii) — a model that psychedelic advocates intuitively knew they needed to reject.
The significance of Huxley’s work in this regard was twofold. First, he provided an
alternative framework to the psychotomimetic tradition, one that did not view LSD and
mescaline as threats to normalcy, rationality, and sanity. He spoke instead of
40
enlightenment and transcendence, describing psychedelic drugs as tools for unlocking the
potentials of human vision and imagination. Second, he was taken seriously. He was not
viewed as a space cadet who had fried his brain from one too many acid trips; rather, the
cultural capital he possessed as a renowned novelist, philosopher, and aristocrat lent
legitimacy to his alternative theories. Indeed, the classification “psychedelic” — literally
meaning “mind manifesting” — was in fact conceived by Huxley and Osmond when they
realized that they needed a new term to replace the negative connotations of the
“psychotomimetic” classification. In 1957, Huxley sent Osmond a rhyme containing his
proposal for the new classification: “To make this trivial world sublime / Take half a
Gramme of phanerothyme.” Osmond responded with his own suggestion: “To fathom
hell or soar angelic / Just take a pinch of psychedelic” (as cited in Lee & Shlain, 1992, p.
55).
At first glance, Huxley’s metaphor of “the doors of perception” had little to do with
visual media technologies or image-making devices. Huxley, in fact, rarely discussed
such technologies at all, and he explicitly drew his metaphor instead from a line in
William Blake’s poem, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “If the doors of perception
were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite” (Blake, 1793). In the
context of Huxley’s psychedelic experiences, Blake’s words encapsulated the mind-
manifesting clarity of vision that mescaline was felt to induce, whilst also suggesting that
we normally view the world as though we are looking through muddy window panes that
obscure a full picture of reality. Informed by nineteenth and twentieth century
phenomenology, Huxley argued that our brains and nervous systems ordinarily work as
“reducing valves” that screen and funnel our experience of reality:
41
Reflecting on my experience, I find myself agreeing with the eminent
Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C. D. Broad, “that we should do well to
consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do
the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory
and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and
nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not
productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all
that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is
happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and
nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by
this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most
of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and
leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be
practically useful.” (Huxley, 1954/1990a, p. 22-23)
Psychedelic drugs, Huxley argued, help us bypass the reducing valves of our sensory
apparatuses, opening up the doors of perception and freeing our minds to catch glimpses
of the infinite in all of its transcendent glory. “This,” he remarked, “is how one ought to
see” (Huxley, 1954/1990a, p. 34).
Through the use of this metaphor of the doors of perception, Huxley reversed the
paradigms about psychedelics that had dominated the clinical and military research of the
1950s. Not only did he reject the idea of psychedelic experience as a form of temporary
insanity, aligning it instead with quasi-religious states of pure vision and pure knowledge,
he also proposed an antithetical view of mundane, everyday perception. Rather than
approving of the rational, scientific worldview, Huxley instead characterized post-
Enlightenment ways of seeing as forms of reduced awareness that have, in fact, closed us
off from the world. He argued that systems of language have created prisoners of us all:
“Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is
consecrated as real by the local language” (Huxley, 1954/1990a, p. 24). In other words,
human perceptual apparatuses screen out large portions of reality, so as not to be
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overwhelmed by an excess of sensory information; then language systems condition the
observer to think that this reduced awareness is the only awareness. This, Huxley argued,
“bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his
words for actual things” (Huxley, 1954/1990a, p. 23).
Huxley’s metaphor was, therefore, built around a dichotomy of “everyday” and
“psychedelic” perception in which the former was aligned with muddied vision,
regimentation, imprisonment, and false consciousness, while the latter was characterized
in terms of cleansing, mobility, expanded awareness, and liberation from the world of
symbols:
To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few
timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an
animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words
and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by
Mind at Large — this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone
and especially the intellectual. (Huxley, 1954/1990a, p. 73)
In the context of visual culture studies’ histories of vision, Huxley’s observer emerges as
a curious mix of both the modern and the classical. Huxley explicitly positioned his work
within a historical lineage of ideas about perception that included such modernist thinkers
as Goethe, Bergson, and Broad. By describing the brain and nervous system as reducing
valves that regulate the observer’s perception of the world, he stressed the carnal density
of vision and highlighted the incomplete, unreliable nature our sensory systems.
Similarly, through his discussion of language as a system of signs that inhibit our
perception of reality, Huxley drew upon understandings from semiotics and
phenomenology, and tapped into the concerns about subjectivity and a loss of the Real
that have been at the core of definitions of the modern observer. In saying that we are all
43
too apt to take concepts for data and words for actual things, Huxley explored the idea
that the Real has been supplanted by the Sign — building on the linguistics of Ferdinand
de Saussure and C. S. Peirce, and anticipating the subsequent expansion of this notion in
postmodernism, poststructuralism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis.
There are many ways, however, in which Huxley simultaneously exhibited more of a
classical point-of-view, demonstrating that the emergence of the modern observer in the
nineteenth century did not simply result in a clean break from older ways of seeing and
knowing. At its most extreme, the focus on the body’s innate capacity to misperceive by
Müller and Nietzsche called into question the very concept of an external world. If our
sensory apparatuses are inherently deceptive and unreliable, we have no way of making
verifiable knowledge claims about anything that we perceive. Huxley’s work, however,
retained a strong grounding in a classical, Platonic belief that the external world is indeed
perceivable, accessible, and knowable — a belief that derives in large part from the
religious and mystical influences on his writing. It is not without significance that Huxley
adopted a Bergsonian understanding of the body’s capacity to misperceive — in which
human sensory apparatuses were viewed as “eliminative and not productive” — as
Huxley’s position was not that our sensory apparatuses produce their own reality, but
rather that they reduce our awareness of a pre-given reality. In this sense, Huxley’s view
of the psychedelic experience as pure vision, uncorrupted by the corporeal body’s
distortions, is not that far removed from classical aspirations towards truth-in-vision. We
could say that mescaline provided Huxley a means by which to “re-decorporealize”
perception, restoring to the subjective observer a union with the external world that had
been overturned by the discourses of modernity.
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Nowhere is Huxley’s negotiation between classical and modern understandings of vision
more pronounced than in his central metaphor of the doors of perception. Viewed in the
context of visual culture studies, the doors of perception begin to bear an uncanny,
unmistakable resemblance to the camera obscura. Just as light enters into a camera
obscura through a pinhole in a wall, Huxley’s metaphor described vision in terms of
exterior light entering an interior room through a door in the wall. In other words,
Huxley’s metaphor continued the camera obscura’s model of linear, monocular vision,
conceiving of visual perception in spatial and geometrical terms as light rays entering
into a dark, interior chamber from a distinct and separate exterior world. Despite
Huxley’s knowledge of modern discourses about vision and the body, the metaphor also
conceptualized visual perception in predominantly decorporealized terms. For example,
when Huxley characterized the brain and nervous system as “reducing valves” he was
drawing on a knowledge of the carnal density of vision (how our networks of nerves and
synapses process sensory data) and the social and linguistic conditioning of perception
(how language systems shape awareness and cognition). Yet his method of illustrating
these ideas with the image of the doors of perception fell back on a purely optical
metaphor — light being funneled through a window — which in turn reinforced the idea
of the eye being the sole locus of visual perception.
This is not to say, however, that Huxley simply appropriated the camera obscura model
whole cloth. On the contrary, his metaphor was carefully and strategically designed to
describe the differences between “everyday” and “psychedelic” perception in terms of
their relative similarities to — and deviations from — the camera obscura model of
vision. While everyday perception was very closely aligned by Huxley with the structural
45
design of the camera obscura, psychedelic perception was conversely positioned as a
mode of seeing that subverted the architecture of the device in a number of significant
ways. It is through its various departures from the camera obscura that we can pinpoint
the ways in which Huxley’s model of the psychedelic observer mobilized and
transformed the device as a technological metaphor for vision.
First, the vocabulary that Huxley employed frequently drew upon fluid-based analogies
that subtly transformed the notion of unmediated transparency in the camera obscura
metaphor. For example, Huxley argued, “To make biological survival possible, Mind at
Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system.
What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle” (Huxley, 1954/1990a, p. 23).
Elsewhere, he similarly refers to perception in terms of the knowledge that “oozes past
the reducing valve of the brain and ego” (Huxley, 1954/1990a, p. 33), and he describes
visionary experience as occurring when the “Mind at Large seeps past the no longer
watertight valve [and] all kinds of biologically useless things start to happen” (Huxley,
1954/1990a, p. 26). Quite apart from the pure, geometric transmission of light within the
camera obscura, Huxley’s use of this vocabulary emphasized a sense of the observer’s
body as gooey and corporeal, implying that the medium of transmission was much more
tangible and dense than rays of light. Indeed, Huxley’s notion that the brain and the
nervous system ordinarily function like watertight reducing valves suggests that a
pressure differential exists between the observer and the external world, as though our
perceptual apparatuses are the equivalent of dams holding back a raging river of sensory
information.
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In a second departure from the camera obscura model, Huxley characterized the passage
of light through the door in the wall in terms of blockage and reduced awareness. For the
classicists, the transmission of light through the pinhole in the wall of the camera obscura
was associated with unimpeded transparency, and the wall that separates the interior
chamber of the device from the exterior world was a prerequisite for the policing of a
clear, rational, juridical mode of observation. In Huxley’s reinterpretation of the camera
obscura, however, the pinhole/door became a symbol of reduced and compromised
vision: it was a regulating valve that funnels reality and limits our ability to let all of the
outside light in. Ordinary vision, he argued, is incomplete and “muddy” (Huxley,
1954/1990a, p. 39), and the doors of perception need to be “cleansed” in order for us to
see the world as it really is. Moreover, Huxley did not view the wall that separates
internal and external space as a necessity for seeing the world more clearly; rather, he
saw it as a symbolic barrier that imprisons us inside, disconnecting and dislocating us
from an experience of the pure light of the external world.
This inversion of the camera obscura’s metaphysics of interiority was consistent with,
and can be traced back to, the ways that the device was evoked by nineteenth century
thinkers like Blake and Nietzsche. For example, the passage that Huxley quotes from
Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell — “If the doors of perception were cleansed
every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite” — was followed in the original poem
by the line: “For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of
his cavern.” Blake, of course, was himself conjuring up an unfavorable image of the
camera obscura, one that was highly critical of the observer who locks himself up in a
cavern, using only the slivers of light that come through the cracks in the wall as
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evidence of the outside world. In his essay, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,”
Nietzsche evoked the camera obscura in a similar manner when he puzzled over the truth
drive in man:
Does nature not conceal most things from him — even concerning his own
body — in order to confine and lock him within a proud, deceptive
consciousness, aloof from the coils of the bowels, the rapid flow of the
bloodstream, and the intricate quivering of the fibers! She threw away the
key. And woe to that fatal curiosity which might one day have the power
to peer out and down through a crack in the chamber of consciousness and
then suspect that man is sustained in the indifference of his ignorance by
that which is pitiless, greedy, insatiable, and murderous — as if hanging in
dreams on the back of a tiger. Given this situation, where in the world
could the drive for truth have come from? (Nietzsche, 1873/1999a, p. 80)
Once again, allusions to captivity and incarceration abound, with Nietzsche
characterizing everyday perception as a proud prison of false awareness in which we are
oblivious to even the blood, shit, and sinew of our own bodies. Nietzsche was, of course,
mounting an attack on the decorporealized notions of truth-in-vision that had flourished
in previous centuries; and, appropriately enough, he characterized escape from this prison
in terms of peering out and through a “crack in the chamber of consciousness,” as if one
were sticking one’s head out through the pinhole of a camera obscura, violating the
separation of interior and exterior spaces. In other words, in Blake, in Nietzsche, and in
Huxley, a decorporeal withdrawal from the world into a dark, interior chamber was
associated with confinement, concealment, and impaired vision, not with the attainment
of truth. Expanded or visionary consciousness, in contrast, was described by these writers
in terms of a prizing apart of the narrow chinks in the cavern, a peering out through the
crack in the chamber, and ultimately an escaping from the prison altogether.
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In this regard, it is particularly significant that Huxley chose to reinterpret the pinhole in
the wall of the camera obscura as a door in a wall. In this act of translation, he could, for
instance, have employed a metaphor of light streaming through a window into a dark
room, which was how the philosophy of the camera obscura had been more commonly
visualized in classical art. For example, in Rembrandt’s Méditation du Philosophe (1632)
— which was one of the paintings discussed by Huxley in Heaven and Hell — the mind
of a philosopher is depicted in this manner by placing him in a darkened chamber next to
a large window that provides the primary illumination for the scene. To the right of the
philosopher is a large, spiral staircase that leads up into unknown recesses of darkness.
The architecture of the philosopher’s chamber and Rembrandt’s play of light and shadow
not only recall the camera obscura, they also symbolize the human mind: the golden light
coming through the window representing the eyes; the spiral staircase representing the
brain; and, from a distance, the room even resembles the shape of a human skull. As
such, the painting echoes Locke’s conceptualization of knowledge in terms of the
“windows by which light is let into this dark room.”
Immediately behind Rembrandt’s meditating philosopher is a small door, the apparent
entryway into his chamber. In his discussion of the painting, Huxley did not mention this
door; but it is emblematic of Huxley’s theories of vision that he fused the visionary
illumination of the window with the passageway of the door. The primary functions of
the philosopher’s window and the pinhole of the camera obscura were to allow light to
pass inwardly from the outside world. They were not designed so that the observer could
pass through them, and, as such, they helped to maintain a separation of interior and
exterior spaces. A door, on the other hand, is a portal. It is a device that can be opened
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and closed, and it allows for the observer to move back and forth between spaces. The
doors of perception, in other words, permit the psychedelic visionary to transgress the
boundaries of the chambers of consciousness, and journey outward into the light.
This symbolic mobility of the psychedelic observer was paramount in Huxley’s theories
of perception. Remaining inside the dark chamber was unacceptable to Huxley, and the
language of travel and transportation saturated his writings about his psychedelic
experiences. In The Doors of Perception, the figurative trip of his mescaline experience
was mirrored in a literal trip outside, when Huxley left a poorly illuminated room in his
house to go on an expedition to the World’s Biggest Drug Store. In Heaven and Hell,
allusions to the psychedelic experience as a form of travel were even further amplified.
Frequent references were made to the “transporting, other-worldly” nature of visionary
experience (Huxley, 1956/1990b, p. 108), and to the idea of going on a journey to the
“terra incognita” (Huxley, 1956/1990b, p. 86) of the “mind’s antipodes” (Huxley,
1956/1990b, p. 89). The vernacular of exploration was so rife in Huxley’s prose that he
remarked:
If I have made use of geographical and zoological metaphors, it is not
wantonly, out of a mere addiction to picturesque language. It is because
such metaphors express very forcibly the essential otherness of the mind’s
far continents, the complete autonomy and self-sufficiency of their
inhabitants. A man consists of what I may call an Old World of personal
consciousness and, beyond a dividing sea, a series of New Worlds — the
not too distant Virginias and Carolinas of the personal subconscious and
the vegetative soul; the Far West of the collective unconscious, with its
flora of symbols, its tribes of aboriginal archetypes; and, across another,
vaster ocean, at the antipodes of everyday consciousness, the world of
Visionary Experience. (Huxley, 1956/1990b, pp. 84-5)
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Through these allusions to travel and discovery, Huxley’s model of visionary perception
positioned the psychedelic observer as the spiritual cousin of the colonial adventurer or
Western frontiersman, attributing to psychedelic vision a sense of mobility akin to
Crary’s modern observer of the nineteenth century. When we say “far out” or refer to
someone going on an acid “trip,” the terminology stems largely from these allusions to
travel and mobility in Huxley’s work. Indeed, in the 1960s, at the end of the age of
earthly colonization, where else could one go except on cosmic journeys into inner and
outer space, replete with mystical symbols and tribal archetypes?
Given that Huxley was not describing any actual, physical movement, his notion of
journeying out through the doors of perception implied a sense of visuality and
corporeality that is not unlike the mobilized virtual gaze of Anne Friedberg’s postmodern
observer. In Window Shopping, for example, Friedberg writes: “as a mobilized gaze
becomes more and more virtual, the physical body becomes a more and more fluid site;
in this ‘virtual mobility’ the actual body […] becomes a veritable depot for departure and
return” (Friedberg, 1993, p. 110). These words would be equally well suited to the
description of Huxley’s psychedelic observer. Indeed, Huxley was particularly concerned
with the impact that these departures and returns through the doors of perception might
have on everyday modes of seeing: “the man who comes back through the Door in the
Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out” (Huxley, 1954/1990a, p. 79).
In this regard, Huxley’s choice of the door metaphor carried another set of associations
that further distinguish it from the pinhole of the camera obscura: namely, the centrality
of portals in the literature of the fantastic, where they often serve as gateways between
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worlds. Huxley’s frequent references to mescaline as a “Door in the Wall” were, in fact,
derived explicitly from an H. G. Wells short story of the same name, which told the tale
of a politician who had discovered a secret door to an enchanted garden when he was a
boy (Wells, 1906). As in many of Wells’s stories, the central theme of the narrative was
the tension between rational science and artistic imagination: the politician’s childhood
encounters could have been real or merely hallucinatory; and, although the politician
eventually kills himself trying to recreate his memories of the Door in the Wall, the
story’s narrator remains in awe of this tremendous power of the human imagination. It
was precisely this tension between rationality and imagination — and the dichotomy
between a familiar, ordinary world and an unknown, extraordinary world — that attracted
Huxley to Wells’s notion of the Door in the Wall. As Tzvetan Todorov has argued, all
fantastic literature takes as its subject the questioning of the limit between the real and the
unreal:
In the first case, we were uncertain not that the events occurred, but that
our understanding of them was correct. In the second case, we wonder if
what we believe we perceive is not in fact a product of the imagination.
(Todorov, 1970/1995, p. 36)
In other words, the occurrence of an apparently fantastic event calls into question the
laws that we have applied to the everyday world: either the event really took place, and
our world is not what we thought it was; or the event was just a figment of the mind, and
it is our misperception of the world that is to blame. As such, the literature of the fantastic
disrupts the familiar subject-object relations of rational perception, highlighting the
inherent ambiguities in how we see and know the external world:
[W]orks that are linked to this thematic network constantly emphasize the
problematic nature of perception, and especially that of the fundamental
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sense, sight (“the five senses, which are merely one sense — the faculty of
seeing,” as Louis Lambert put it): to the point where we might designate
all of these themes as “themes of vision.” (Todorov, 1970/1995, p. 120)
For both Todorov and Huxley, correlations existed between fantastic literature,
psychosis, and psychedelic experience, in that all three disrupt normative modes of
perception. The Door in the Wall, in this sense, represented for Huxley the threshold
between normative vision and these different, alternative ways of seeing. It also
represented Huxley’s attempt at managing the relations between the fantastic, psychosis,
and psychedelics as non-normative, non-rational modes of perception. As Todorov notes,
and as Huxley was acutely aware, clinical and psychoanalytic frameworks had replaced
the literature of the fantastic by the mid-twentieth century: “the themes of fantastic
literature have become, literally, the very themes of the psychological investigations of
the last fifty years” (Todorov, 1970/1995, p. 161). In other words, if the literature of the
fantastic had been the “bad conscience” of the nineteenth century’s metaphysics of the
real and the imaginary (Todorov, 1970/1995, p. 168) — the “conceptual garbage dumps
where the apparently dangerous excesses of the imagination are shunted for disposal”
(Boon, 2006, p. 7) — then, by the time of Huxley’s encounters with mescaline in the
1950s, the fantastic had been usurped by the psychotic–schizophrenic paradigms of
modern psychology. In evoking the Door in the Wall so explicitly, Huxley was seeking to
resurrect the terminology of the fantastic, framing psychedelic perception as a “theme of
vision” closer to Wells and Blake than to the psychotomimetic paradigms of the medical–
military establishment.
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It is through this allegiance with Wells and Blake that we can see a final deviation in
Huxley’s metaphor from the visual models of the camera obscura. By suggesting that
psychedelics allow us to see the world as it really is — infinite — Huxley did not shy
away from a fundamental belief in truth-in-vision: his symbolic journey through the Door
in the Wall was, after all, described as an entry into a state of pure perception. The truth
that Huxley sought, however, was not the rational, juridical truth of the camera obscura.
Rather, it was more akin to a “fantastic” or “ecstatic” truth. In other words, the rational,
analytical truths of science and the linguistic turn were, for Huxley, truths that imprison
us within epistemological frameworks that dupe us into accepting reduced awareness as
the only awareness. His journey into the “Clear Light” on the other side of the doors of
perception was understood, in contrast, as a voyage beyond language and conceptual
paradigms into a postlinguistic, postsemiotic mode of awareness. Throughout his
writings, light represented for Huxley not the rational light of reason, but the sublime
light of the cosmos. His notion of entering into the Clear Light, for example, derived
from The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which described how departed souls must confront
the Pure Light of the Void. It symbolized for Huxley the jettisoning of all of the mortal
concerns that shape how we visually perceive the world; and it was a theme that Huxley
saw as being central to the representation of ecstatic illumination in the visionary arts:
Light and color tend to take on a preternatural quality when seen in the
midst of environing darkness. Fra Angelico’s “Crucifixion” at the Louvre
has a black background. So have the frescoes of the Passion painted by
Andrea del Castagno for the nuns of Sant’ Appollonia at Florence. Hence
the visionary intensity, the strange transporting power of these
extraordinary works. (Huxley, 1956/1990b, p. 117)
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In other words, Huxley was arguing that the experience of psychedelic drugs and the
experience of visionary works of art both infuse the darkness with an ecstatic light that
was quite apart from the rational configurations of light and dark in the camera obscura.
The darkness did not serve to make the psychedelic observer’s interpretation of the light
more precise or objective; rather, it served to heighten the transcendent, transporting
qualities of the illumination. Huxley’s own interpretation of Rembrandt’s Méditation du
Philosophe was emblematic of this shift. He did not view the painting at all in Lockean
terms, nor did he explicitly discuss its connection to the tradition of the camera obscura;
rather, he focused on it as a representation of visionary illumination:
[W]e see, concretely illustrated, the impossible paradox and supreme truth
— that perception is (or least can be, ought to be) the same as Revelation,
that Reality shines out of every appearance, that the One is totally,
infinitely present in all particulars. (Huxley, 1956/1990b, p. 119)
If the modernizing of vision in the nineteenth century dealt a blow to classical notions of
truth-in-vision, replacing them with a subjective and unreliable observer, Huxley’s
theories of vision offered something else again. Through his conceptualization of
everyday, normative modes of perception as muddied and incomplete, and through his
desire to escape the confines of the chambers of consciousness, Huxley was very much in
keeping with Crary’s description of the modern observer. Yet, through conceptualization
of psychedelic perception as pure vision, Huxley also reinforced a belief in truth-in-
vision — only on very different terms than those of the rational classicists who had
withdrawn themselves into the bellies of their cameras obscura. As such, the ecstatic
visuality of Huxley’s metaphor differed in kind from both the subjective vision of the
nineteenth century and the objective, rational vision of the seventeenth and eighteenth
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centuries. His metaphor may have subverted the architecture and philosophy of the
camera obscura, but the device still remained central to the metaphor’s structural
foundations — suggesting that Huxley was not able to completely abandon it as a model
of understanding vision. Indeed, for Huxley, the man who goes through the Door in the
Wall must also return: he may have been changed by his experiences, but he must also
resume his place back in the chamber of consciousness once the trip is complete.
Ken Kesey: “The Movie Screen of our Perceptions”
Like Aldous Huxley before him, Ken Kesey acquired his celebrity as a writer, publishing
two highly acclaimed novels before he reached the age of thirty: One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) and Sometimes a Great Notion (1964). During the period that he
was writing these books, Kesey started to develop a strong interest in the potentials of
psychedelic drugs for unlocking new modes of awareness, communication, and artistic
expression. His curiosity was first piqued as a graduate student at Stanford University in
the late-1950s and early-1960s, with Kesey volunteering to be a test subject in the clinical
trials of psychedelics at the Veteran’s Hospital in Menlo Park. This interest in altered
states of consciousness gained more and more momentum as his literary fame increased;
and, following the completion of his second novel, Kesey shocked the publishing world
by abandoning his burgeoning literary career in favor of a full-time investigation of
psychedelic modes of perception and expression.
A ribald group of artists, eccentrics, and acid freaks — dubbed “The Merry Pranksters”
— assembled around Kesey’s lead. Together, they engaged in an experimental, drug-
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fueled lifestyle of hedonism and living theater that would set the template for the West
Coast psychedelic scene of the 1960s. Kesey made headlines in June 1964, when he and
the Pranksters undertook a journey across the United States in a gaudy, psychedelic
school bus. For most people in the heartlands and on the East Coast, it was the first time
that they would encounter psychedelic style. As Paul Krassner would later note, “I think
that they were the most colorful and visible countercultural leaders — and I mean
literally colorful and literally visible — because the bus was hard to miss when it came
through your town” (Perry, 1996, p. xx). The following year, Kesey began hosting a
series of psychedelic, mixed-media happenings throughout California. These “Acid
Tests” peaked in January 1966 with the Trips Festival in San Francisco — an enormously
successful event that would prove to be a major catalyst in the explosion of hippie culture
that would transform Haight-Ashbury in the ensuing months. These and other Prankster
exploits were then immortalized in what remains the most widely read chronicle of
California psychedelic scene, Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968/1999).
As with most other participants in the psychedelic movement, Huxley’s shadow loomed
large over the philosophies and activities of Kesey and the Pranksters. Kesey’s decision
to turn his back on literature as a form of artistic expression extended Huxley’s argument
that symbol-based language systems are inadequate tools for representing or
comprehending the world. He shared Huxley’s belief that the linguistic turn has
imprisoned humanity, closing us off from the world by making reality subservient to the
structures and conventions of language systems. Explaining his reasons for giving up
writing, Kesey remarked: “Writers are trapped by artificial rules. We are trapped in
syntax. We are ruled by an imaginary teacher with a red ball-point pen who will brand us
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with an A-minus for the slightest infraction of the rules” (Wolfe, 1968/1999, p. 153). In
place of the written word, Kesey and the Pranksters sought a different set of tools for
seeing and knowing the world. As Steven Tanner’s biography recounts, after he had
given up being a novelist, Kesey “showed up at a creative writing class at Stanford and
told the students that he wanted to move beyond writing into more ‘electrical forms’”
(Tanner, 1983, p. 93).
In addition to psychedelic drugs, these new forms involved experimentation with a wide
variety of different visual, aural, and kinetic technologies, ranging from strobe lights and
Day-Glo paint to elaborate rigs of microphones and loud speakers. The most significant
and ubiquitous technology for exploring psychedelic perception, however, was cinema.
Film projectors and 16mm cameras were an omnipresent part of Prankster life: the Acid
Tests were saturated with such apparatuses; the famous bus trip doubled as a movie
shoot; and barely a page goes by in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test without references to
or discussions about cinema. It was through this combination of cinema and psychedelic
drugs that Kesey developed his own metaphor — “the movie screen of our perceptions”
— a concept that built upon and transformed Huxley’s doors of perception, while
explicitly bringing visual media technologies into the psychedelic movement’s debates
about perception.
In simple terms, Kesey’s metaphor was built around the idea that we all see the world as
though we are watching a movie: “Everybody, everybody everywhere, has his own movie
going, his own scenario, and everybody is acting his movie out like mad” (Wolfe,
1968/1999, p. 145). The Pranksters referred to each individual’s subjective perception of
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reality as his or her Movie. Combined, everyone was participating in The Big Movie. The
problem, Kesey felt, was that most people, most of the time, are deceived by the reality-
effect of their Movies: they are tricked into believing that they are seeing the world as it
actually is, and they are really just “trapped” in their own “little script” (Wolfe,
1968/1999, p. 145). His goal with psychedelic perception was to find liberation from this
false consciousness.
Kesey arrived at these filmic theories of vision out of a specific concern with the
temporal phenomenology of perception and a feeling of being out-of-sync with the
present moment. Most significantly, the foundation of his cinematic metaphor for vision
was built upon a conceptual analogy that he saw between the perceptual “lag” in our
sensory organs and the act of watching a movie on a screen:
A person has all sorts of lags built into him, Kesey is saying. One, the
most basic, is the sensory lag, the lag between the time your senses receive
something and you are able to react. One-thirtieth of a second is the time it
takes, if you’re the most alert person alive, and most people are a lot
slower than that. […] We are all of us doomed to spend our lives watching
a movie of our lives — we are always acting on what has just finished
happening. It happened at least 1/30
th
of a second ago. We think we are in
the present, but we aren’t. The present we know is only a movie of the
past, and we will really never be able to control the present through
ordinary means. That lag has to be overcome some other way, through
some kind of total breakthrough. (Wolfe, 1968/1999, p. 144)
In other words, in a similar manner to Huxley’s metaphor, Kesey’s notion of the movie
screen of our perceptions was used to describe differences between “everyday” and
“psychedelic” modes of perception. The normative, everyday observer was depicted as a
passive moviegoer, duped by the reality-effect of their own Movie into thinking that they
are in the present moment, when they are really only watching a movie of the past. The
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psychedelic observer, in contrast, was portrayed as more active, more in control, and
more self-aware; and psychedelic perception is put forward as a potential path towards
synchronicity with the present moment by breaking through “the 1/30th of a second
movie-screen barrier of our senses” (Wolfe, 1968/1999, p. 146).
By conceptualizing the movie screen of our perceptions as a barrier in this manner,
Kesey’s metaphor argued that an obstruction normally exists in everyday vision between
external reality and internal perception. The metaphor conjures up the image of a movie
screen somewhere behind the eyes of the observer: a screen that provides only a mediated
picture of the world, as though the everyday observer’s experience of reality was
commensurate with that of a moviegoer in a dark auditorium watching an image of the
world on a screen. As such, even though Kesey’s concerns were largely with the
temporality of perception, and with our disconnection from the present moment, his
metaphor articulated these concerns in a predominantly spatial manner — and it did so in
a way that strongly recalled the spatial architecture of Huxley’s doors of perception.
As we saw in the previous section, Huxley’s metaphor derived from (and subverted) the
spatial configurations of vision associated with the camera obscura. For Huxley, the door
in the wall created a barrier for the everyday observer between the dark, inner chambers
of consciousness and the Clear Light of the bright, exterior world. The door also provided
the potential for liberation, with Huxley advocating a transgression of the chamber
boundaries by passing through the door and stepping out into the Clear Light. In Kesey’s
metaphor, we can see a continuation of this subversion of the spatial architecture of the
camera obscura. For example, when Kesey referred to “the movie screen of our
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perceptions that closes us out from our own reality” (Wolfe, 1968/1999, p. 146), the
language closely resembled the criticisms of withdrawal and enclosure that permeated
allusions to the camera obscura in the writings of Blake, Nietzsche, and Huxley — such
as Blake’s notion that “man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow
chinks of his cavern.” Likewise, when Kesey conceptualized expanded awareness in
terms of breaking through the “movie-screen barrier of our senses,” he was drawing on a
similar notion of escape from the imprisoning chambers of consciousness as had been
advocated by Blake, Nietzsche, and Huxley. Indeed, if Huxley’s unlocking of the doors
of perception represented an escape from the fixed, eliminative, rational, monocular gaze
of the camera obscura, Kesey’s embrace of cinema and psychedelics was wrapped up in
an analogous drive towards a similar kind of postlinguistic, multiperspectival, visual
epistemology:
I’ve found psychedelics to be keys to worlds that have always existed, that
have to be talked about. The kaleidoscopic pictures, the geometrics of
humanity, that one experiences under, say, mescaline, aren't concealed in
the white crystals inside the gelatin capsule. They are always in the mind.
In the world. Already. The chemical allows the pictures to be seen. To
know the world you need to see as many sides of it as possible. And this
sometimes means using microscopes, telescopes, spectroscopes, even
kaleidoscopes. (Kesey, as cited in Tanner, 1983, p. 98)
At the same time, however, a movie screen is not a door. Even though they both create
barriers between different spaces, they are not barriers of the same nature, and the
differences between a door and a movie screen point to something quite dissimilar about
the visual epistemologies that Huxley and Kesey were promoting through their respective
metaphors for perception. A door is a device that can be opened and closed, allowing
passage in and out to anyone who is able to open it. In Huxley’s metaphor, everyday
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perception was akin to being trapped behind a locked door, catching only glimpses of the
outside world through the door’s dirty windowpanes, whereas psychedelic perception
was likened to having the key to unlock the door, allowing the observer to exit through
the portal and experience the outside world in a direct, unfiltered fashion. For Huxley,
this outward journey through the door in the wall represented an escape from the world of
signs, concepts, and rationality, and it symbolized an immersion in pure perception and
an ecstatic union with cosmos. In other words, Huxley used this metaphor of actual,
physical movement between spaces to argue that psychedelic drugs make it possible for
the observer to uncover an unmediated access to the phenomenological essence of things
— an ecstatic truth. As such, Huxley’s metaphor described psychedelic perception in
terms akin to the philosophical notion of being-in-itself, described by Heidegger as: “to
let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself
from itself” — or, more simply, “To the things themselves!” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 58)
A movie screen, in contrast, forms a different kind of barrier and functions as a different
kind of portal. Unless you are Buster Keaton in Sherlock Jr. (1924) or Jeff Daniels in The
Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), there is no way to physically pass through a movie screen
to enter into the world of the film. It forever remains a closed barrier: the movie spectator
stays in the darkness, physically passive in their seat, and the only kind of portal that the
screen provides is a portal for the imagination. Moreover, the world on a screen is not of
the same order as the world on the other side of a windowpane. The light from a movie
screen is not a pure, present tense, illumination of being-in-itself; rather, it is a
simulacrum comprised of images of the past that have no more tangibility than that of
chemicals on celluloid or light on the screen. In Kesey’s metaphor for perception, the
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everyday observer is duped by the reality-effect of the movie screen, sutured into the
action in much the same way as how Huxley’s everyday observer confused concepts for
data and words for actual things. But what should we make of Kesey’s psychedelic
observer? What does breaking through the “movie-screen barrier of our senses” actually
mean? And how does it compare to Huxley’s notion of breaking through the doors of
perception?
In Huxley’s case, as we have already seen, passing through the doors of perception
symbolized a movement out and away from the chamber of the camera obscura: a
movement beyond language and rational concepts, into a state of pure perception. By
transforming Huxley’s doors into a movie screen, Kesey’s metaphor implied instead that
the external world is no more than a simulation. The goal of breaking through the movie
screen barrier of our senses was indeed conceived as a symbolic, Sherlock Jr.-style leap
into the world of the movie — a crossing over into the simulacrum — and much of the
Pranksters’ explorations of cinema and psychedelics revolved around their efforts at
turning the world into a movie. In other words, unlike Huxley, Kesey did not seek the
removal of mediation and language structures from perception so much as he did the
forging of new, postmodern forms of engagement with those structures. Put differently,
Kesey’s focus was less on accessing pure perception and being-in-itself than on
reconfiguring cinematic regimes of vision: the creation of an irreverent atmosphere of
play and pastiche that would subvert the regimentation of vision by traditional,
institutionalized, cinematic models of perception.
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One of the key affordances of cinema in this regard was the transformative effect that
filmic apparatuses can have on our perception of reality. The Pranksters’ famous 1964
bus trip across the United States, for example, was also conceived as a movie shoot for a
film to be entitled Intrepid Traveler and His Merry Pranksters Leave in Search of a Cool
Place. The bus was wired for sound and the group brought three 16mm film cameras to
film their various experiences and escapades. Over 45 hours of film was exposed during
the course of the journey, with the beginning of the film shoot coinciding with the first
acid trip of the voyage. The Pranksters all assumed character names for their parts in The
Big Movie —Neil Cassady was Speed Limit, Mike Hagen was Mal Function, Ken Babbs
was Intrepid Traveler, Kesey was Swashbuckler — and “Hagen filmed it all like this was
some crazed adventure in cinema verité” (Wolfe, 1968/1999, p. 89). As they blazed their
way across the country, the Pranksters also took to what they referred to as “tootling” the
multitudes, which involved climbing up on top of the bus and playing music to create a
movie soundtrack for the passersby: “One way or another they were drawing the whole
freaking town into their movie, and Hagen got it all on film” (Wolfe, 1968/1999, p. 101).
In Wolfe’s descriptions of the journey in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the sense of
synergy between cinema and the Pranksters’ visions of America was palpable: “the U.S.
nation streamed across the windshield like one of those goddamned Cinemascope
landscape cameras that winds up your optic nerves like the rubber band in a toy airplane”
(Wolfe, 1968/1999, p. 103); “Then he looks back into the mirror — and flames shoot up
again, soaring, corn and lespedeza turning brown like burning color film when the
projector is too hot and bursting into flame.” (Wolfe, 1968/1999, p. 110).
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A similar use of filmic apparatuses to transform our perception of reality was also
commonplace at Kesey’s residences in Perry Lane and La Honda (where the earliest
Prankster happenings occurred) and, later, at the Acid Tests that Kesey staged throughout
California in 1965 and 1966. Like the Prankster’s school bus, Kesey’s homes were wired
for sound, movie cameras and projectors were ever-present, and all things (including the
trees outside) were liable to be decorated with splashes of Day-Glo paint. As Wolfe
noted, “[Kesey] wasn’t that crazy about unspoilt Nature. It was more like he had a vision
of the forest as a fantastic stage setting . . . in which every day would be a happening, an
art form” (Wolfe, 1968/1999, p. 58). This sense of blurring the boundary between reality
and art/media space was then explored to an even greater degree in the Acid Tests, in
which wild experiments with cinematic projection and psychedelic drugs worked towards
that total breakthrough of the movie screen barrier of our senses. As Wolfe described
them:
[T]he Acid Tests turned out, in fact to be an art form foreseen in that
strange book, Childhood’s End, a form called “total identification”: “The
history of the cinema gave the clue to their actions. First, sound, then
color, then stereoscopy, then Cinerama, had made the old ‘moving
pictures’ more and more like reality itself. Where was the end of the story?
Surely, the final stage would be reached when the audience forgot it was
an audience, and became part of the action. To achieve this would involve
stimulation of all the senses, and perhaps hypnosis as well . . . When the
goal was attained, there would be an enormous enrichment of human
experience. A man could become — for a while, at least, — any other
person, and could take part in any conceivable adventure, real or
imaginary . . . And when the ‘program’ was over, he would have acquired
a memory as vivid as any experience in his actual life — indeed,
indistinguishable from reality itself.” (Wolfe, 1968/1999, p. 233-4)
In other words, Kesey’s rejection of the typewriter and his embrace of cinema was about
more than just the finding of a new medium for artistic expression. He was using
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cinematic apparatuses to create profilmic events and media happenings that would
smudge the line between where “reality” ends and “simulation” begins. In doing so,
Kesey felt that cinema and psychedelics helped to sharpen his sense of perception,
providing the new “scopes” he was looking for to allow the “pictures” of the world to be
seen. Kesey himself framed it in these terms:
Like my dad used to say, “You have to take your fishing pole into the
woods, otherwise people think you’re crazy walking up and down the
creek.” Those tape recorders and cameras have gone a long way toward
making us more responsible. Able to respond. Able to see. […] When I do
this — record what’s going on without making a judgment out of it —
something happens to me. I get back to being myself. I feel like I’m
working on all cylinders again. (Perry, 1996, p. 102-5)
By transforming the world into a profilmic event, the movie apparatus created a
carnivalesque performance space for the Pranksters in which everyday ways of seeing
could be turned on their heads. In other words, cinema encouraged different kinds of
gazes and spectator protocols than the natural world, and Kesey wanted to use these
differences to defamiliarize everyday modes of perception. In his seminal film studies
book, Film as Film, V.F. Perkins described these differences as follows:
The crucial difference between “the natural event and its appearance on
the screen” is not physical but psychological. The film medium can never
become “too lifelike” to offer a valid fictional form so long as we retain
our awareness of the distinction between film and reality; that is, so long
as we remain spectators rather than participants. […] We can watch. We
can listen. All the rest is in the mind. We cannot cross the screen to
investigate the film’s world for ourselves. We are more or less impotent in
relation to the image because it presents actions already achieved and
recorded; it gives us no influence and allows no possibility of intervention
or effective protest.
But since it is not possible to affect the course of events, it is not necessary
either. If we are without power, we are without responsibility. Our
exclusion from the world so vividly represented frees us from the need to
consider what we see in terms of an active response. We can observe the
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progress of a fire with that much more attention when it can be neither our
business to put it out nor our concern to escape. (Perkins, 1972/1991, p.
71)
In his cinematic metaphor, Kesey was essentially arguing that the everyday observer has
lost awareness of the distinction between film and reality that Perkins described in the
first paragraph above: the everyday observer confuses the natural event with its
appearance as an image on the movie screen of their perceptions, thus rendering them an
impotent spectator rather than an active participant. Kesey, however, did not
conceptualize the psychedelic observer in terms of the removal of the movie screen
barrier; psychedelic perception was not characterized as a state of unmediated access to
the natural world. Rather, Kesey conceptualized psychedelic perception in terms of an
embrace of the affordances of the movie screen: a celebration of the lack of responsibility
that Perkins attributed to the filmic gaze. Cinematic vision, in other words, afforded
Kesey a kind of playfulness, irreverence, and unaccountability that he felt was analogous
to psychedelic vision.
By embracing the cinematic gaze in this way, Kesey’s theories of perception were both
building upon and diverging from Huxley. In The Doors of Perception, Huxley explicitly
argued that the reducing valve derives from our survival instincts as a species: that we
need to reduce and codify the sensory information entering our brains in order to be able
to pay sufficient attention to those things that might be harmful or useful. Psychedelic
perception, for Huxley, was a freeing of the mind from these utilitarian processes of
reduction and codification — which, as we saw, was articulated by Huxley in terms of a
symbolic escape from the confines of the camera obscura. Kesey’s metaphor was very
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much built upon the same foundations, and he shared Huxley’s view of everyday
perception as eliminative; however, Kesey’s notion of how to escape from the
regimentation of normal vision was quite different, and was more akin to Perkins’s
observation that “We can observe the progress of a fire with that much more attention
when it can be neither our business to put it out nor our concern to escape.” One of the
key affordances of the cinematic gaze for Kesey was that it is not bound to the survival
instincts that condition everyday perception. The film spectator is free to observe events
from a place of safety and security: “The screen which limits us protects us as well”
(Perkins, 1972/1991, p. 72). As such, Kesey saw cinema alongside psychedelic drugs as a
potential tool for enhancing the attentiveness with which one perceives the world — the
medium providing a “scope” for seeing “pictures” of the world unseen by the natural eye
alone.
In other words, Kesey was calling on psychedelic observers to take control over their
own Movies, in an embrace of the phantasmagoric, transformative, escapist, performative
dimensions of cinema. The act of turning the world into a movie was designed to disrupt
everyday perception and everyday social routines: the “safety” of the cinematic gaze
allowing the psychedelic observer to perceive the world with that much more attention.
The breakthrough in perception that Kesey and the Pranksters worked towards was,
therefore, not characterized in terms of a mystical sense of spiritual illumination — the
stepping into the Clear Light — but rather in more secular and cultural terms. Quite apart
from Huxley’s serene, aristocratic search for illumination, the Pranksters celebrated the
prank. They reveled in irreverent forms of play and living theater, crafting a proto-
postmodern conception of the world as a simulacrum. Their goal was not so much an
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ecstatic truth as it was an absurdist illumination: a postmodern, accelerated version of the
Real, as filtered through the cinematic sensibility of the Marx Brothers.
These cultural resonances of the film as an art form and a visual technology were a major
driving force behind Kesey’s choice of cinema as a metaphor in the first place. Most of
the Pranksters’ activities and philosophies were fueled by a love of popular culture, and
the transformation of Huxley’s doors into Kesey’s movie screen cannot be separated from
the cultural formations surrounding cinema in the 1960s. Huxley’s perspective of his
psychedelic experiences was, in contrast, much more that of the highbrow intellectual; his
references were not to contemporary pop culture, but rather to William Blake and C.D.
Broad, to Vermeer and Rembrandt, to stained-glass windows and gemstones, and to
narratives of colonial expansion and discovery.
Perhaps the best example of this difference between Huxley and Kesey can be found in
the accounts of a key moment during each man’s first psychedelic trip: the moment when
each first felt a sense of being-in-itself, a sense of oneness with the present. In Huxley’s
trip, as described in The Doors of Perception, this moment occurred during an excursion
to the World’s Biggest Drug Store and revolved around Huxley becoming transfixed with
the “is-ness” of folded drapery:
Poring over Judith’s skirts, there in the World’s Biggest Drug Store, I
knew that Botticelli — and not Botticelli alone, but many others too —
had looked at draperies with the same transfigured and transfiguring eyes
as had been mine that morning. They had seen the Istigkeit, the Allness
and Infinity of folded cloth and had done their best to render it in paint or
stone. Necessarily, of course, without success. For the glory and the
wonder of pure existence belong to another order, beyond the power of
even the highest art to express. But in Judith’s skirt I could clearly see
what, if I had been a painter of genius, I might have made of my old gray
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flannels. Not much, heaven knows, in comparison with the reality, but
enough to delight generation after generation of beholders, enough to
make them understand at least a little of the true significance of what, in
our pathetic imbecility, we call “mere things” and disregard in favor of
television. (Huxley, 1954/1990a, p. 34)
For Kesey, this revelatory moment of “is-ness” with his surroundings occurred during his
first trip as a research subject at the Veteran’s Hospital in Menlo Park. As described in
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Kesey looked up at the ceiling of the room and the
shapes appeared to him as “lines like spines on crests of waves of desert movie sand each
one with MGM shadow” (Wolfe, 1968/1999, pp. 40-1). As Kesey’s feelings of
transcendence intensified, the allusions to cinema and popular culture continued:
Suddenly he is like a ping-pong ball in a flood of sensory stimuli, heart
beating, blood coursing, breath suspiring, teeth grating, hand moving over
the percale sheet over those thousands of minute warfy woofings like a
brush fire, sun glow and the highlight on a stainless-steel rod, quite a little
movie you have going on in that highlight there, Hondo, Technicolors,
pick each one out like fishing for neon gumballs with steam shovel in the
Funtime Arcade, a ping-pong ball in a flood of sensory stimuli, all quite
ordinary, but … revealing themselves for the first time and happening …
Now … as if for the first time he has entered a moment of his life and
known exactly what is happening to his senses now, at this moment, and
with each new discovery it is as if he has entered into all of it himself, is
one with it, the movie white desert of the ceiling becomes something rich,
personal, his, beautiful beyond description, like an orgasm behind the
eyeballs. (Wolfe, 1968/1999, p. 41)
The differences between these two accounts are quite striking. In Huxley’s description of
his experience, the feeling of Allness and Infinity is documented with a sense of
meditation and serenity. Huxley is in no mood to rush the moment, and he equates his
manner of looking at the folded cloth with the contemplative gaze of a painter or sculptor.
His allusions are to Botticelli and to classical art forms that fix the moment in time and
endow it with a visionary significance that has been lost in the imbecility of the television
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era. Kesey’s account, in contrast, revels in its references to cinema and popular culture.
Wolfe’s prose conveys the feeling of a rush of sensations: a rapid montage of scenes that
his punctuation can barely keep apace with. It is not the calm contemplation of Huxley’s
revelations. Furthermore, whereas even the highest art was considered by Huxley as
ultimately unsuccessful in rendering the feeling of the sublime, and television was
viewed as far more degraded than that, Kesey’s account shows no hesitation in
expressing these feelings of revelation through the “low” culture of Hollywood and
Funtime Arcades — as though seeing the world as it is, at this moment, was inseparable
from seeing the world as a movie.
These differences not only reflected the personality differences between the aristocratic,
contemplative Huxley and the roughneck, irreverent Kesey, they also reflected the
increased role that popular culture was beginning to play in the psychedelic during the
1960s. When Huxley first took mescaline in the 1950s, the psychedelic movement was
by-and-large confined to research institutes and elite social circles. The most prominent
advocates of psychedelic drugs during that period included such figures as Huxley, Henry
Luce, Alan Watts, and Cary Grant. With the explosion of psychedelic drugs on college
campuses in the 1960s, a generational shift occurred in the demographics of the
psychedelic movement. On many different fronts — from film and rock music to civil
rights and the war in Vietnam — Kesey and his fellow 1960s psychedelicists expressed a
much greater concern with contemporary culture than the acidheads of Huxley’s
generation. Huxley had embarked on a symbolic trip to a mythical mind’s antipodes, but
Kesey and the Pranksters took a literal trip across the United States in their bus, directly
engaging with the culture around them. And Kesey’s transformation of Huxley’s doors
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into a movie screen reflected this engagement with contemporary culture: alongside the
comic books of Captain Marvel and The Flash, and the rock ’n’ roll of the Grateful Dead
and the Beatles, cinema had been a key component in the emergence of teen culture and
the youth movement: James Dean, rock ’n’ roll movies, hot rod films, sci-fi flicks, drive-
in theaters. Cinema had colonized the subconscious desires of a generation and had
profoundly impacted Kesey’s own ideas about life-as-a-movie. As Wolfe put it: “The
Life — that feeling — The Life — the late 1940s early 1950s American Teenage Drive-
In Life was precisely what it was all about” (Wolfe, 1968/1999, p. 38).
By the time that Kesey was becoming seriously involved in psychedelics in the early
1960s, the most significant cultural formations around cinema to influence him pertained
to the emergence of New Wave movements around the globe: the French Nouvelle
Vague, the Brazilian Cinema Novo, British kitchen sink films, and New Hollywood.
Broadly speaking, these New Wave movements marked an energizing of (post)modernist
sensibilities in cinema. By taking the cameras out of the studio sound stages and onto the
streets, by using non-professional actors and non-traditional screenplays, and by
deliberately violating the codes and conventions of classical cinema, the New Wave
movements of the 1960s argued for new ways of seeing the world through film. Kesey
was looking to tap into this renewed cultural enthusiasm about cinema’s power to
transform perception, which he referred to as being part of a “Neon Renaissance”:
What this is I cannot say exactly, except that it’s a need to find a new way
to look at the world, an attempt to locate a better reality, now that the old
reality is riddled with radioactive poison. I think a lot of people are
working in a lot of different ways to locate this reality — Ornette Coleman
in jazz, Ann Halprin in dance, the New Wave in movies, Lenny Bruce in
comedy, Wally Hendrix in art, Heller, Burroughs, Rechy, Gunter Grass in
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writing, and all those thousands of others whose names would be
meaningless. (as cited in Perry, 1996, p. 37)
As a novelist, Kesey had begun to explore these new ways of looking at the world
through experimentation with literary conventions. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, for
example, was narrated by a schizophrenic, creating a fluid and unreliable point-of-view
that questioned normative, institutionally sanctioned modes of perception. Sometimes a
Great Notion was even more radical in its attempts at stretching the possibilities of the
written word, employing complex grammatical and syntactical structures that moved
disjointedly between different tenses and subject positions. Kesey felt, however, that
cinema — and New Wave cinema in particular — was much better suited to locating “a
better reality.” The Pranksters’ film, Intrepid Traveler and His Merry Pranksters Leave
in Search of a Cool Place, was conceived in these terms as a New Wave film that would
cross all sorts of traditional boundaries and categories:
It was the world’s first acid film, taken under the conditions of total
spontaneity barreling through the heartlands of America, recording all
now, in the moment. The current fantasy was . . . a total breakthrough in
terms of expression . . . but also something that would amaze and delight
many multitudes, a movie that could be shown commercially as well as in
the esoteric world of the heads. (Wolfe, 1968/1999, p. 136)
This celebration of speed and spontaneity had been a defining characteristic of New
Wave cinema in the 1960s, which itself had been seen as a total breakthrough in terms of
expression. The most famous of all New Wave films embodied this spirit in its very title:
Breathless (1960). The film was a duck press of pulp American pop culture and French
existentialism — a film that understood the feeling that the “late 1940s early 1950s
American Teenage Drive-In Life was precisely what it was all about” — and its
revolutionary aesthetics aspired to induce a sense of breathlessness in the viewer through
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an array of movie references, handheld cameras, and jump cuts. There was a hip
immediacy to films like Breathless that attracted Kesey and the Pranksters; the mashup of
movie references in Kesey’s first acid trip, for example, possessed the same kind of
playful, self-reflexive, hypertextual cinéphilia that ran throughout the films of Godard,
Truffaut, and the New Hollywood. Likewise, the image of the Pranksters barreling
through the heartlands of America, recording it all now, in the moment, was coming from
much the same place as Jean-Luc Godard barreling through the streets of Paris on
Breathless. As Hunter S. Thompson remarked about Kesey: “He couldn’t laugh unless he
was going fast, and then you couldn’t hear him at all because the wind made his lips flap
like rubber” (Perry, 1996, p. viii). In describing how the Pranksters arrived at cinema as a
medium, Ken Babbs similarly remarked:
Before the bus trip we were talking about “rapping” novels out instead of
typing — because typing is so slow. We were going to take acid and stay
up all night and rap out novels and tape record them. Then, to add things,
we were going to act out parts, and then do music that went with it, and
then, finally, we started talking about getting the movie cameras and
filming it. So we were very swiftly going from a novel on a page to novels
on audio-tape to novels on film. (Perry, 1996, pp. 89-90)
This love of speed and spontaneity also derived, of course, from the Beats’ love of jazz,
improvisation, and amphetamines: the “cut up” style of William Burroughs, the
Benzedrine-fueled writing sessions of Jack Kerouac, the howl of Allen Ginsberg. The
Pranksters, in fact, were very much the bridge between the Beat culture of the 1950s and
the psychedelic culture of the 1960s, counting among their friends and members such
Beat icons as Ginsberg and Neil Cassady, who had inspired the character of Dean
Moriarty in Kerouac’s On the Road. Cassady, in particular, was idolized by the
Pranksters precisely because he was thought to be the fastest, most alert man alive:
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[I]n his movie, called Speed Limit, he is both a head whose thing is speed,
meaning amphetamines, and a unique being whose quest is Speed, faster,
goddamn it, spiraling, jerking, kicking, fibrillating tight up against the
1/30 of a second movie-screen barrier of our senses, trying to get into …
Now — (Wolfe, 1968/1999, p. 146)
The affordance of New Wave cinema for Kesey in this regard was that it allowed him to
funnel these interests and influences into a central cinematic metaphor for perception. If
we examine how Kesey’s cinematic metaphor differentiated between “everyday” and
“psychedelic” modes of perception, we see that the divisions between the two very much
reflected the divisions that were being established between New Wave cinemas and the
established culture industry. The manner in which Kesey characterized the everyday
observer was remarkably consistent with the ways in which Theodor Adorno and Max
Horkheimer had famously characterized the consumers of the American culture industry
in the 1940s: as passive, sedentary automata, possessing no spontaneity and no control
over (nor awareness of) the movie they are watching. In their manifesto against the
culture industry, Adorno and Horkheimer wrote:
The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry.
The old experience of the movie-goer, who sees the world outside as an
extension of the film he has just left (because the latter is intent upon
reproducing the world of everyday perceptions), is now the producer’s
guideline. The more intensely and flawlessly his techniques duplicate
empirical objects, the easier it is today for the illusion to prevail that the
outside world is the straightforward continuation of that presented on
screen. This purpose has been furthered by mechanical reproduction since
the lightning takeover by the sound film.
Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies. The sound film,
far surpassing the theatre of illusion, leaves no room for imagination or
reflection on the part of the audience, who are unable to respond within
the structure of the film, yet deviate from its precise detail without losing
the thread of the story; hence the film forces its victims to equate it
directly with reality. The stunting of the mass-media consumer’s powers
of imagination and spontaneity does not have to be traced back to any
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psychological mechanisms; he must ascribe the loss of those attributes to
the objective nature of the products themselves, especially to the most
characteristic of them, the sound film. […] Those who are absorbed by the
world of the movie — by its images, gestures, and words — that they are
unable to supply what really makes it a world, do not have to dwell on
particular points of its mechanics during a screening. All the other films
and products of the entertainment industry which they have seen have
taught them what to expect; they react automatically. The might of
industrial society is lodged in men’s minds. (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1999,
p. 35)
Even though Adorno and Horkheimer were writing twenty years before Kesey, this same
passage could have been applied almost verbatim to how Kesey’s metaphor used cinema
to describe everyday perception. Kesey, of course, was much more enamored with
popular culture than Adorno and Horkheimer, but a similar notion of the “dialectics of
Enlightenment” ran throughout his theories of perception: an understanding that
modernist visuality has been both libratory and oppressive; and an understanding that
cinema itself has contributed to our disconnection from the outside world. In other words,
by framing the everyday observer in relation to cinema in the way that he did, Kesey
introduced an element of critical media analysis into his metaphor that was largely absent
in Huxley’s writings. Huxley had primarily focused on how words and concepts have
imprisoned us in our chambers of consciousness; Kesey extended these arguments to
explore how cinema has been equally important in shaping how we look at the world in
both limiting and expansive ways.
In contrast to this Frankfurtian depiction of the everyday observer, Kesey’s psychedelic
observer embodied the traits of the New Wave: fast, spontaneous, unscripted, mobile,
subjective, self-aware, liberated, anti-authoritarian, in control, and in sync with the
present moment — many of the very same traits that we saw in Crary’s portrait of the
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modern observer. In other words, we could say that in Kesey’s metaphor for perception,
the psychedelic observer was to the New Wave spectator what the everyday observer was
to the culture industry consumer. For Kesey, the opening up of the mind through
psychedelics was being mirrored in the opening up of cinema by the New Wave. The two
movements were synergistically intertwined. Wolfe alluded to the union in these terms,
harkening back to Huxley:
The whole other world that LSD opened your mind to existed only in the
moment itself — Now — and any attempt to plan, compose, orchestrate,
write a script, only locked you out of the moment, back in the world of
conditioning and training where the brain was a reducing valve. (Wolfe,
1968/1999, p. 59)
If we position Kesey’s use of cinema in the context of the core themes of the modern
observer, it is not altogether unlike what we saw with Huxley. In both, we can detect a
complex set of negotiations occurring between different scopic regimes from different
eras. Kesey’s psychedelic observer was very much a modern (or postmodern) observer,
but residues of older scopic regimes still continued to influence how that observer was
constructed. Some of the characteristics of the modern observer that we saw in Huxley’s
metaphor carried over into Kesey’s work. Kesey’s metaphor, for example, continued
Huxley’s argument that normative, everyday modes of perception are fundamentally
eliminative, degraded, and illusory — leading to a loss of the Real, in which
representations of reality are mistaken for reality itself. Huxley and Kesey also both
advocated for more subjective models of the observer’s relationship to the external world;
but, by replacing Huxley’s windowpanes with a movie screen, Kesey changed the terms
of what this meant — favoring the irreverent over the ecstatic, the simulacrum over the
divine.
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Like Huxley, Kesey also characterized his psychedelic observer as a mobile observer.
The two differed, however, in what they each valued in that mobility. Huxley’s metaphor
articulated a sense of mobility based on movement through space that was measured in
terms of the distance traveled. The first, most important step was the passage through the
door in the wall; then, the more “far out” you went, the closer you got to pure, visionary
experience — eventually traveling all the way to the other side of the world, to the
mind’s antipodes. For Kesey, however, the sense of mobility was measured more
predominantly in terms of speed. More important than how far you went was how fast
you moved; and the difference between everyday and psychedelic modes of perception
was based largely upon breaking through that 1/30 of a second movie screen barrier of
the senses to get in sync with the Now.
This focus on speed, temporality, and sensory lag paralleled Crary’s conception of the
modern observer by describing the body in terms of it having varying degrees of
efficiency and aptitude. In other words, Kesey presented a very corporeal view of
perception, in which the observer’s body was depicted as forever struggling to keep up to
speed with the present moment — invariably a fraction of a second behind, responding to
mental images of events that have already transpired. In Huxley’s theories of perception,
the inefficiency he identified in the body was located primarily in the conditioned
cognitive responses of the reducing valve brain; once the observer overcame this
conditioning, access was granted to the-world-as-it-really-is. In Kesey’s theories, the
inefficiency he identified was more holistic and temporal in nature. It pertained more to
the time it takes for sensations from external stimuli to traverse the observer’s perceptual
apparatuses; and the ultimate goal of Kesey’s psychedelic observer was to speed up these
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corporeal processes of perception, increasing the efficiency of the apparatus so as to
attain synchronicity with the present moment. As we saw, Neil Cassady provided the role
model:
Cassady is right up against that 1/30
th
of a second barrier. He is going as
fast as a human can go, but even he can’t overcome it. He is a living
example of how close you can come, but it can’t be done. You can’t go
any faster than that [through ordinary means]. (Wolfe, 1968/1999, p. 144)
The manner in which Kesey used cinema to explore these theories of perception was also
closely matched to Crary’s notions of modernized vision. Kesey’s “1/30
th
of a second
movie-screen barrier” alluded to the temporality of watching a film at 24 frames per
second. Cinema runs at this frame rate to take advantage of a sensory lag in our
perceptual systems known as “persistence-of-vision” — the phenomenon of the retina
and brain retaining an image for a fraction of a second, which is why we process a second
of film not as 24 separate frames, but as a continuous flow of motion. As Crary highlights
in Techniques of the Observer, this aspect of cinema was deeply rooted in the modernist
visuality of the nineteenth century, and it speaks to the medium’s strong connection to
other visual technologies of the nineteenth century that similarly exploited lags and
peculiarities in the corporeal processes of perception, such as the stereoscope (binocular
disparity) or the zoetrope and the thaumatrope (both also persistence-of-vision). By
alluding to the corporeal temporality of cinema spectatorship in this way, Kesey’s
metaphor likened the everyday observer’s illusions of reality and “is-ness” to the reality-
effect created in cinema through persistence-of-vision; the everyday observer’s
synchronicity with the Now is lost, just as the individual frames on a piece of celluloid
are lost to the unfolding of time.
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By stressing film spectatorship in this manner, and by focusing his metaphor on the
movie screen of our perceptions, Kesey also side-stepped the camera–eye analogies that
dominated twentieth century visual metaphors, such as Dziga Vertov’s kino-eye or
Kodak’s Retina camera. In fact, Kesey did not focus on the eye very much at all as a
locus of vision, and his metaphor is not at all based upon an underlying conceptual
similarity between camera and eye. In other words, his metaphor represented a departure
from the era’s culturally dominant cinematic metaphors for vision, as well as a departure
from the various issues that get raised when the eye is compared to a camera — such as
the veridical concerns of the seventeenth and eighteenth century’s philosophies of the
camera obscura.
This is not to say, however, that the scopic regimes of the camera obscura were
completely banished from Kesey’s cinematic metaphor in favor of an entirely modern
conception of the observer. We can, in fact, still detect a number of allusions to those
older scopic regimes in the construction of Kesey’s theories of perception. Kesey’s
notion of breaking through the “1/30
th
of a second movie-screen barrier of our senses,”
for example, translated his concerns about sensory lag and the temporality of vision into a
spatial metaphor that reiterated the allusions to breaking out of the camera obscura that
we saw in Huxley, Blake and Nietzsche. Indeed, by employing cinema as a metaphor for
vision in this way, Kesey was using an optical–spatial–mechanical technology for
describing what are in actuality electrical–chemical–synaptic processes in the brain and
central nervous system. Unlike, say, analogies between a camera and an eye, which are
based upon a degree of optical–geometrical similarity between the two mechanisms, the
connections that Kesey established between the sensory lag of our bodies and the idea of
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a film spectator watching a movie were not so direct or self-evident. Kesey’s metaphor
required a sizeable conceptual leap to get from the electrical–chemical–synaptic
processes of the brain and nervous system to the articulation of those processes as being
equivalent to a moviegoer getting sutured into the illusory reality of the movie screen.
The metaphor, in other words, was not an entirely easy or snug fit for the theories,
creating a certain degree of tension between different regimes of vision and visuality: on
the one hand, exploring a modern, corporeal understanding of the brain and nervous
system’s role in perception; on the other hand, allowing residues of classical, decorporeal
models of vision to influence the form that the metaphor would take.
We could say perhaps that the tensions between classicism and modernism within the
medium of cinema carried over into Kesey’s metaphor, and were not entirely resolved.
The medium provided Kesey with many affordances in his quest to find new ways of
seeing, but the use of the movie screen as a metaphor for sensory lag required a
significant amount of conceptual translation — which probably spoke more about the
cultural dominance of cinema as a model of vision than it did about the medium’s organic
relevance to Kesey’s specific theories of vision. In other words, he fashioned the
metaphor around cinema because of the medium’s cultural and artistic resonances, not
because he saw a direct, one-to-one relationship between the movie screen and the
observer’s sensory apparatuses. There was, in fact, a certain degree of naiveté in Kesey’s
embrace of cinema — particularly in his methods at using cinema to transform reality and
attain synchronicity with the Now. Shooting film may very well have been faster than
writing, and it may very well have transformed the Pranksters’ reality into a pro-filmic
performance space, but it is equally significant that their film, Intrepid Traveler and His
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Merry Pranksters Leave in Search of a Cool Place, was never completed. Kesey and the
Pranksters spent many months and the lion’s share of their finances trying to create this
ultimate, psychedelic New Wave film, but the editing process brought all of the speed
and spontaneity to a grinding halt. The discipline and tedium of the filmmaking craft, and
its reliance on grammatical and syntactical codes for audience comprehension, did not
mesh well with the Pranksters’ desire to spontaneously break free from the script and the
world of conditioning. Snippets of raw footage were screened at Acid Tests, but Kesey
failed in his efforts at turning Intrepid Traveler and His Merry Pranksters Leave in
Search of a Cool Place into “a total breakthrough in terms of expression […] that could
be shown commercially as well as in the esoteric world of the heads” (Wolfe, 1968/1999,
p. 136). The deeply entrenched codes and conventions of the medium ultimately got the
better of him.
Timothy Leary: “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out”
Timothy Leary requires little introduction. He remains the most famous figure of the
psychedelic movement, and his slogan of “turn on, tune in, drop out” has become one of
the quintessential catchphrases of the sixties. Leary’s psychedelic odyssey commenced in
August, 1960, when he was given psilocybin mushrooms on a visit to Mexico. At that
point in time, Leary was a well-regarded professor of psychiatry at Harvard University,
and when he returned to Cambridge he began to devote all of his research efforts to
“trying to understand the revelatory potentialities of the human nervous system and to
making these insights available to others” (Leary, 1968/1998a, p. 14). In the Fall of 1960,
Leary founded the Harvard Psychedelic Research Project, which administered
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psychedelic drugs to over 400 individuals (including graduate students and prison
inmates) in an effort to gather empirical data about the psychedelic experience in the
context of psychiatric healing and spiritual enlightenment — as opposed to the
“hallucination–victim–disease” paradigms that had dominated clinical psychedelic
research up to that point. Leary published findings from this work in both academic and
popular journals, but the enormous controversy surrounding his work resulted in his
dismissal from Harvard in 1963. In response to the firing, Leary and his Harvard
colleagues founded IFIF (International Federation for Internal Freedom) and moved their
psychedelic research operation to the sprawling Millbrook estate in Connecticut.
In these early days, despite his notoriety as a maverick professor, Leary’s research was
much closer in spirit to the refined, spiritual quests of Aldous Huxley than the loud,
irreverent, All-American style of Ken Kesey. During their 1964 bus trip, the Pranksters in
fact visited Leary’s group at Millbrook. It was supposed to be a grand meeting of the East
and West Coast branches of the nascent psychedelic movement; but it turned out to be an
enormous anti-climax, when the anarchic energy of the Pranksters rudely disrupted the
contemplative atmosphere of the Millbrook estate. Leary described the difference
between the two groups in the following terms:
There is, of course, a high church psychedelic and low church. Ken
Kesey’s acid-test-rock-and-roll-on-the-floor-freak-out is low church
psychedelic, gutty, shouting, sawdust trail. Alan Watts is highest
Anglican. Precise, ceremonial, serene, aesthetic, classic, aristocratic with a
wink. The ancient rituals executed perfectly with a quiet twinkle in the
eye. My understanding of marijuana and LSD is mainly due to my
listening to and watching Alan. (Leary, 1968/1995, p. 105)
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As the psychedelic movement grew, however, Leary steadily transformed into a figure
that much more closely resembled Kesey and the Pranksters: he began to advocate acid
for the masses; he embraced pop culture and cultivated a celebrity status within the
counterculture, and he became one of the most outspoken social and political activists of
the era. It was during this period of heightened media exposure, in 1966, that Leary first
introduced Americans to the idea that they should turn on, tune in, and drop out. The
slogan became Leary’s mantra during the latter half of the 1960s and it was quickly
adopted and co-opted across the full spectrum of American popular culture — from
commune hippies to Madison Avenue advertising executives — penetrating the
discourses of the era even more than Huxley’s doors of perception. As Leary remarked in
his autobiography:
The makers of Squirt, a soft drink, broadcast a bouncy jingle urging the
public to “Turn on to flavor, tune in to sparkle, and drop out of the cola
rut.” Billy Graham announced that the theme of his European Crusade
would be “Turn on Christ, tune in to the bible, and drop out of sin.” I was
flattered. (Leary, 1990, p. 253)
Leary first used the slogan in a June 1966 keynote address at an LSD conference in San
Francisco that was sponsored by the University of California. The lecture came a month
after Leary had made a very weak appearance at a Senate subcommittee hearing, in
which he had failed to make a persuasive case for psychedelic use in the face of heated
questioning from Ted Kennedy. Leary approached the San Francisco conference as a
forum for more eloquently stating his policy positions than he had done in Washington
DC, and his lecture is worth examining in some detail because it helps to provide the
context in which “turn on, tune in, drop out” was formulated.
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The primary goal of Leary’s lecture was to position psychedelic drugs as technologies of
vision that could have a transformative role in the institutions of science and education.
His principal thesis was that new technologies of vision have historically produced new
insights that have disrupted the status quo. In this sense, he argued, psychedelic drugs are
the modern equivalent of Galileo’s telescope:
The explosion of the psychedelic age is directly symmetrical with the
multidimensional expansion of external science. Five hundred years ago,
man’s perspective of the outside world was unidimensional — the
macroscopic world of the naked eye, clearly visible or dimmed by fog or
smoke. The invention of magnifying lenses brought into focus new levels
of reality. Each new magnification structure required a new science, a new
language to deal with the new level of reality (formerly invisible to the
naked eye). Microscope, telescope, electron microscope, radio telescope.
Psychedelic chemicals perform exactly the same function for inner vision.
Each class of drug focuses consciousness on a new level of energy. Each
level of drug defines a new science and requires a new language. (Leary,
1968/1998b, p. 123)
By equating psychedelic chemicals with technologies such as the microscope and
telescope, Leary was clearly expressing something similar to Kesey’s argument that
seeing and knowing the world “sometimes means using microscopes, telescopes,
spectroscopes, even kaleidoscopes” (Tanner, 1983, p. 98). Leary went much further than
Kesey, however, by seeking to legitimize the psychedelic augmentation of vision within
accepted canons of the scientific tradition. His ultimate goal was for psychedelic drugs to
have an established place within institutions of learning and research, and he wanted the
exploration of “inner vision” to be accepted as a serious topic of study by the academy.
Moreover, by pointing out how new technologies of vision change not only how we see
the world, but also how we conceive of reality in the first place, Leary made the argument
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that the scientific tradition itself would need to change — that the psychedelic age
required new language systems and new configurations of power/knowledge.
He concluded his lecture by introducing and defining his new mantra:
My advice to people in America today is as follows: If you take the game
of life seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the
energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in and drop out. (Leary,
1968/1998b, p. 133)
Turn on: “By ‘turn on’ I mean get in touch, first of all, with your sense organs” (Leary,
1968/1998b, p. 133). Get in touch with yourself as a sensory organism. Learn how to turn
on your sense organs in a way that is self-disciplined and not determined by social games
or language systems. Tune in: “By ‘tune in’ I mean harness your internal revelations to
the external world around you” (Leary, 1968/1998b, p. 134). The experience should not
be about naval gazing. You must proactively struggle to express what you have learned
and use that knowledge to tune back into the external world, which has been hitherto lost
to social games and language systems. Drop out: “Find the wisdom within, hook it up in
a new way, but above all, detach yourself. Unhook the ambitions and the symbolic drives
and the mental connections which keep you addicted and tied to the immediate tribal
game” (Leary, 1968/1998b, p. 135). Only by detaching from and dropping out of
established social and cultural systems can you find true enlightenment.
In other words, “turn on, tune in, drop out” expressed a philosophy of liberation from
cultural, scientific, and linguistic regimentations of vision and of being. It conveyed the
argument that social conditioning and institutional systems of knowledge regulate how
we perceive, think, and behave, detaching us from both our sense organs and the external
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world around us. In this sense, Leary’s slogan was very much built upon the same basic
presuppositions as Huxley and Kesey’s metaphors: everyday perception is incomplete,
degraded, regimented, and socially constructed; psychedelic perception, in contrast, is an
emancipation from institutionalized ways of seeing and knowing. Using psychedelic
drugs to turn on and tune in was to reveal normative, everyday perception as an artificial
construct, just as Galileo’s telescope had exposed the shortcomings of established
scientific traditions to reveal a universe that had been previously hidden from view. As
such, like Huxley and Kesey, Leary saw LSD as a disruptive technology of vision that
challenged the technocracy’s dominant systems of power/knowledge:
Whenever I give a lecture and tell people to drop out, invariably I alarm
many listeners, including my friends, who say, “Now listen, Timothy, tone
it down. You can’t go around telling students to drop out of school, telling
middle-class men with mortgage payments to drop out of their jobs. That’s
just too much! You can’t do that in a technological society like this!” Of
course, this message, turn on, tune in and drop out, just happens to be the
oldest message around — the old refrain that has been passed on for
thousands of years by every person who has studied the energy process
and man’s place in it. (Leary, 1968/1998b, p. 134-5)
Leary differed considerably from Huxley and Kesey, however, in his choice of
technological metaphor. The message of “turn on, tune in, drop out” may indeed have
been the oldest message around, but the metaphor that Leary was employing to express
this message was most certainly not: it was a metaphor that was firmly rooted in the
vocabulary and culture of electronic technologies — most notably television. “Turning
on” is something we do to electronic devices, such as a television set; “tuning in” is the
method by which broadcast television channels are located in the electromagnetic
spectrum. In other words, at the core of Leary’s mantra was the notion that taking control
over your sense organs with psychedelic drugs was the equivalent of turning on the boob
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tube and adjusting the dial to find signals amidst the bandwidth noise: “LSD vision is to
normal vision as normal vision is to the picture on a badly tuned television set” (Leary,
1968/1998a, p. 125).
Even though Leary was preaching the same general message of liberation and mind-
manifestation as Huxley and Kesey, by basing his central metaphor on television, he
proposed a very different set of relationships between the observer, vision, and
technology. These differences can be identified by examining “turn on, tune in, drop out”
in the context of the core set of issues that we have been using to define the modern
observer: corporeality, subjectivity, mobility, a loss of the Real, the economies of visual
consumption, and the emergence of new visual technologies. Leary’s mantra engaged
with all of these core issues in ways that significantly distinguished his model of the
observer from the models of Huxley and Kesey, and in ways that contributed to the
increasing importance of electronic media technologies in post-1960s conceptualizations
of perception and visuality.
In terms of the corporeality and subjectivity of the observer, “turn on, tune in, drop out”
all but eschewed the paradigms of classical optics: there were very few residues of the
camera obscura in the construction of Leary’s visual metaphor. In a broad sense, the
metaphors of Huxley, Kesey, and Leary all harked back to the conceptualizations of the
modern observer that derived from Müller and Helmholtz. All three theorists focused on
the varying degrees of efficiency and aptitude in the brain and central nervous system;
and all three looked to psychedelic drugs as a means of improving how our sensory
apparatuses function. As we saw earlier, Huxley and Kesey chose to translate concerns
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about the body’s electrical–chemical–synaptic activity into metaphors deriving from the
optical–spatial–mechanical technologies of cinema and the camera obscura. Leary, in
contrast, translated these concerns about the corporeality of vision into a metaphor based
upon electronic media technologies, proposing a conceptual synergy between the
electrical circuits of a television set and the electrical circuits of the brain and nervous
system. In The Politics of Ecstasy, for example, Leary framed the transcendent
dimensions of the psychedelic movement in the following terms:
The rapid spread of this ecstatic spirit is due to the recent availability of
brain-change neurotransmitters and electronic communication appliances
accessible to individuals. When these psychedelic foods activate the brain
and when these electronic devices start gushing electronic information,
people’s minds begin opening. (Leary, 1968/1998a, p. 6)
Later in the same book, he wrote:
Technology moves energy patterns at the speed of light, and
psychochemicals accelerate and switch consciousness in exact proportions
to nuclear power and electric circuitry. Your head is the cosmic TV show,
baby. Alcohol turns off the brightness, methadrine jiggles and speeds up
the image, LSD flips on 87 channels at once, pot adds color, meditation,
mantras, prayer, mudras sharpen the focus. It’s your head, baby, and it’s 2
billion years old, and it’s got every control switch that GE and IBM ever
thought of and a million more, and it’s hooked up in direct connection to
Central Broadcasting Station WDNA, and you had better learn to treasure
it NOW, because it’s planned by the Great Cartel Monopoly Benevolent
Corporation, blueprint designer for planned obsolescence every 70 years,
and there’s no rewind and/or instant replay, baby, so turn on, tune in, drop
out NOW! (Leary, 1968/1998a, p. 162-3)
In other words, Leary’s observer was not at all conceptualized as a “chamber of
consciousness,” but rather as an electrical network of circuits and control switches. It was
a portrait of the observer that represented the corporeal body not as a dark, empty room
or a dark film auditorium, but as a complex web of wires and energy flows: “we are all
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burnished copper atoms — conductive — on the same humming wire of energy” (Leary,
1968/1995, p. 149). And psychedelic perception was not characterized by Leary as a
symbolic escape from the confines of an interior chamber, but rather as the fine-tuning of
an electrical device. As such, Leary’s mantra presupposed a very different relationship
between observer and technological device than we saw in Huxley and Kesey’s
metaphors. With “the doors of perception” and “the movie screen of our perceptions,”
Huxley and Kesey characterized the observer as a spectator inside a camera obscura or
film auditorium. The subjectivity of the everyday observer was likened to being
imprisoned inside the chamber of the device; the subjectivity of the psychedelic observer
was portrayed as the liberation of the spectator, breaking through the boundaries of the
device in one way or another. With “turn on, tune in, drop out,” the observer was
addressed quite differently: less as a spectator inside a device than as the device itself.
Psychedelic perception was described in terms of turning oneself on and tuning oneself
in, as though the human observer and the television set were, for all intents and purposes,
interchangeable: “In the beginning was the TURN ON. The flash, the illumination. The
electric trip. The sudden bolt of energy that starts the new system” (Leary, 1968/1995, p.
2).
This very different understanding of the observer’s relationship to visual technologies
reflected the influences that shaped each of these theorists’ metaphors. Huxley and Kesey
were both novelists by profession, and their metaphors were in large part derived from
literary and cultural origins. As we saw, Huxley’s notion of the doors of perception fused
elements from William Blake, H.G. Wells, and C.D. Broad; and Kesey’s cinematic
metaphor tapped into the cultural resonances of Hollywood and the New Wave, as well
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as the possibilities of the film medium for extending the novel as a mode of expression.
Their metaphors seem to have been chosen because of these literary and cultural
resonances, not because of a perceived one-to-one relationship between observer and
technology. Rather than stressing that the observer was like a camera obscura or like the
cinematic apparatus, Huxley and Leary were arguing the observer is like a spectator in a
camera obscura or a spectator in a screening room. Leary, however, was proposing a
much more direct correlation between observer and device, which likewise reflected his
influences: most notably, contemporaneous discourses in the field of cybernetics and the
new communication theories of Marshall McLuhan. (I will explore the broader
significance of cybernetics and McLuhan to the psychedelic movement in more detail in
Chapter Three; for the present moment, the discussion will be limited to a sketch of their
impact on the construction of Leary’s metaphor.)
Cybernetics emerged in the late-1940s as a field of research into the relationships
between humans/animals and machines, and was spearheaded by the work of Norbert
Wiener in such books as Cybernetics: or, the Control and Communication in the Animal
and the Machine (1948) and The Human Use of Human Beings (1950/1954). At the root
of cybernetics was the proposition that both humans and machines can be characterized
as communications systems that utilize feedback mechanisms to control and regulate
actions: i.e., both humans and machines make use of sensors to retrieve information that
is then acted upon by the system to modify its performance of actions in completing a
given task. Put simply, cybernetics was a field that, by the 1960s, had begun to
popularize the notion that a vast number of similarities exist between human beings and
mechanical–electronic–computational technologies. This popularization of cybernetics
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provided Leary with a foundation for the underlying metaphors of turn on, tune in, drop
out. Leary wrote, for example, that, “The original Love-In-Be-In (San Francisco, January
1967) was the dawning of the Psychedelic–Cybernetic Age. [...] Ecstatic Youth plus
electronics” (Leary, 1968/1998a, p. 9). It was a notion that encapsulated Leary’s
depiction of consciousness being based on “data registered on our sensory radar and
processed by our brains” (Leary, 1968/1998a, p. 31). And Leary used these allusions to
cybernetics to reinforce his call for a social revolution: “The nervous system can be
changed, integrated, recircuited, expanded in its function. These possibilities naturally
threaten every branch of the establishment” (Leary, 1968/1998a, p. 66).
Cybernetics also informed the theories about mass media communications that McLuhan
promulgated in the 1960s, which in turn informed Leary’s theories of psychedelic
perception. One of the primary focuses of McLuhan’s work in the mid-1960s was the
impact that electronic media systems were having on our sense of self, community, and
culture. In his 1967 book, The Medium is the Massage, McLuhan argued:
All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their
personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and
social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected,
unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and
cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work
as environments.
All media are extensions of some human faculty — psychic or physical.
The wheel … is an extension of the foot
the book is an extension of the eye …
clothing, an extension of the skin …
electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system.
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(McLuhan & Fiore, 1967/2001, pp. 26-40)
This last line, in particular, could indeed be taken as the central theme of “turn on, tune
in, drop out,” and throughout Leary’s writings, a McLuhanite fervor can be keenly felt. In
The Politics of Ecstasy, for example, Leary wrote:
Electronics and psychedelics have shattered the sequence of orderly linear
identification, the automatic imitation that provides racial and social
continuity. The kids today just won’t grow up to be like their parents.
They are pulsating television grids. They move consciousness around by
switching channel knobs. Tune in. Tune out. Flick on. Correct image
focus. Adjust brightness. (Leary, 1968/1998a, p. 162)
In other words, the technological determinism that ran rife through McLuhan’s accounts
of emergent communication technologies transforming society was equally present in
Leary’s arguments about the dawning of the Psychedelic–Cybernetic Age; and, for both
McLuhan and Leary, electronic media technologies were having a profound impact on
Western society’s concepts of space, time, consciousness, and visuality. For Leary, the
observer was a node in a global, circuited, communication network, and psychedelic
drugs were essential tools for connecting the observer’s brain and nervous system into
that network to produce a “mind-blowing electronic experience” (Leary, 1968/1998a, p.
169).
Central to these new configurations of corporeality and subjectivity in Leary’s theories of
the observer was a fundamentally different model of visuality than we saw in the optical
metaphors of Huxley and Kesey. At its core, “turn on, tune in, drop out” conceptualized
vision in terms of tuning into the electromagnetic spectrum and connecting the observer’s
sensory organs to global electronic networks. As such, it was an idea of vision and
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visuality that was located not in the optics of the eye, but rather the flows of electrical
energy in the circuits of the central nervous system and, by extension, electronic media
technologies. It was a model of visuality that moved away from the linear, geometrical
optics of the camera obscura, and away from the eye as the primary locus of vision. With
characteristic hyperbole, Leary went so far as to express this shift in terms of an entire
evolution of humankind:
Human beings born after the year 1943 belong to a different species from
their progenitors. Three new energies, exactly symmetrical and
complementary — atomics, electronics, and psychedelics — have
produced an evolutionary mutation. The release of atomic energy placed
the mysterious basic power of the universe in man’s hands. The frailty of
the visible. The power of the invisible. Electronic impulses link the globe
in an instantaneous communication network. The circuited unity of man.
Psychedelic drugs release internal energy and speed consciousness in the
same exponential proportions as nuclear and electronic space–time
expansions. (Leary, 1968/1998a, p. 169)
Leary was arguing that twentieth century developments in atomics, electronics, and
psychedelics had produced new paradigms for how we see and know the world. Atomics,
electronics, and psychedelics all offered ways of seeing that were more akin to
Einsteinium physics than Newtonian optics, calling for models of vision rooted in the
vibrations of atoms and waves, in cellular networks, and in electro–chemical–synaptic
activity. The naked eye, Leary was arguing, could no longer be relied upon to accurately
perceive the world because new atomic–electronic–psychedelic technologies of
perception had revealed entirely new views of the universe that the human eye could not
itself detect — visible light being a mere sliver of the full electromagnetic spectrum. The
model of light entering the eye was, for Leary, an inherently impoverished
conceptualization of vision and visuality. His argument was that atomics, electronics, and
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psychedelics represented a movement away from the macroscopic models of classical
optics and the equation of visuality with light that is visible to the eye, and a movement
towards models of vision that also encompassed full-spectrum, subatomic views of the
world that were previously unseen to the naked eye. Or, as Leary himself framed it, “The
frailty of the visible. The power of the invisible.”
When the visible becomes frail, and power is ceded to the invisible, a very different
paradigm of vision is being proposed. It is not a paradigm of vision that is
overwhelmingly concerned with light entering the eye, because it is understood from the
start that the naked eye is severely limited in its scopic capabilities. Instead, it is a
paradigm of vision more concerned with the making visible of the unseen: the flows of
waves, electrons, and sensory data that constitute the full dynamic range of visual
experience. It is a paradigm of vision that locates the visual in these “unseen” networks of
energy and information: “mescaline and LSD take you beyond the senses into a world of
cellular awareness. [...] During an LSD session, enormous clusters of these cells are
turned on, and consciousness whirls into eerie panoramas for which we have no words or
concepts” (Leary, 1968/1998a, pp. 136-7). In other words, for Leary, “the frailty of the
visible” and “the power of the invisible” expressed a model of vision in which visual
perception was understood primarily as a form of sensory data processing: “Light comes
in waves of particles hurtling against retinal beaches. High tide, see. Low tide, no see.
The neural dot-dashes along the nerve fibers. Light-dark. Light-dark” (Leary,
1968/1998a, p. 40). It was a model of vision-as-information:
Everything that a man knows is mediated by the human nervous system.
[…] All our beliefs and convictions about the existence of an outside
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world, the only thread we have that connects our lonely solipsism to other
forms of life and energy and consciousness “out there” are based on data
registered on our sensory radar and processed by our brains. (Leary,
1968/1998a, p. 31)
In his San Francisco lecture, we can see this paradigm informing how Leary plotted his
history of vision and technology. He remarked that, five hundred years ago, prior to the
expansion of the sciences, “man’s perspective of the outside world was unidimensional
— the macroscopic world of the naked eye, clearly visible or dimmed by fog or smoke”
(Leary, 1968/1998b, p. 123). In other words, he was describing this era as a period in
which vision was situated in the visible, and the clarity of vision was measured by the
degree to which light could pass into the eye without obfuscation. In contrast, when
Leary argued that “LSD vision is to normal vision as normal vision is to the picture on a
badly tuned television set” (Leary, 1968/1998a, p. 125), profoundly different notions of
clarity and obfuscation were in play. He was characterizing degraded forms of vision not
in terms of a fog or a smoke that is dimming the visible world, but rather in terms of the
static noise of the electromagnetic spectrum on a badly tuned electronic device. Similarly,
clarity of vision was not characterized in terms of revealing the visible world so that it
can be seen by the eye in an unobstructed manner, but rather in terms of tuning into the
electromagnetic spectrum, of seeing and decoding the flows of electrons and information
that constitute visual experience.
What this meant for Leary was that we must drop out of our old conceptual minds and
develop new levels of cellular awareness: “One of the ecstatic horrors of the LSD
experience is the sudden confrontation with your own body, the shattering resurrection of
your body. You are catapulted into the matrix of quadrillions of cells and somatic
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communication systems. Cellular flow” (Leary, 1968/1998a, p. 30). The technology of
television provided him with a metaphor for expressing this, one that allowed Leary to
thread a line between the complex interplays of visuality, apparatus, institutions, bodies,
and figurality. In The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of
the Dead, for example, Leary described a frequent psychedelic vision in the following
terms:
It comes about this way. The subject’s awareness is suddenly invaded by
an outside stimulus. His attention is captured, but his old conceptual mind
is not functioning. But other sensitivities are engaged. He experiences
direct sensation. The raw “is-ness.” He sees, not objects, but patterns of
light waves. He hears, not “music” or “meaningful” sound, but acoustic
waves. He is struck with the sudden revelation that all sensation and
perception are based on wave vibrations. That the world around him which
hitherto had an illusory solidity, is nothing more than a play of physical
waves. That he is involved in a cosmic television show which has no more
substantiality than the images on his TV picture tube. (Leary et al.,
1964/1995, p. 61)
In describing another vision, he similarly remarked:
The fact of the matter is that all apparent forms of matter and body are
momentary clusters of energy. We are little more than flickers on a
multidimensional television screen. [...] Nothing is fixed, no form solid.
Everything you can experience is “nothing but” electrical waves. (Leary et
al., 1964/1995, p. 66)
By mobilizing television as a metaphor in this manner, Leary was addressing many of the
same phenomenological concerns as Huxley and Kesey’s theories of perception. He was
arguing that psychedelic experience shattered the illusory reality of everyday perception,
facilitating a direct access to the “raw is-ness” of life. For Leary, however, this “raw is-
ness” was comprised entirely of clusters of electrical energy that were conceptually
indistinct from the electrical flickers in a cathode ray tube. In other words, what Leary
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did was to combine the feelings of cellular awareness he had experienced during
psychedelic sessions with a set of understandings that were being developed about
electronic media apparatuses and atomic physics. He saw atomics, electronics, and
psychedelics as all contributing to the dissolving away of the apparent solidity of the
external world, turning it into a kind of simulation with no more materiality than the
images on a television set. This was a notion of pure perception that moved on in
significant ways from Huxley’s embrace of the Clear Light of the Void, translating the
historical associations of white light with ecstasy and transcendence into a vocabulary
that connected to the television era. Leary remarked, for example, that, “Buddhism
attempts to transcend life and cellular manifestations and to strive toward the white light
of the void, the unitary atomic-electronic flash beyond form” (Leary, 1968/1998a, p. 46).
Through his use of these electronic metaphors, Leary was reconfiguring modernist
visuality’s concerns about a loss of the Real by rearticulating those concerns through the
technology of television. This further differentiated his metaphor from those of Huxley
and Kesey. In both Huxley and Kesey’s theories of perception, the loss of the Real that
they associated with everyday perception was characterized in terms of being imprisoned
inside a chamber of consciousness: an ascetic withdrawal from the world that cut the
observer off from a direct experience of the Real. Psychedelic drugs, both argued,
provided a means of reconnection with the Real through a symbolic escape from the belly
of the device: for Huxley, an escape from the camera obscura into a state of pure
perception and a union with the ecstatic truth of the infinite; for Kesey, a breaking
through the movie screen into an experience of synchronicity with the present moment.
Leary’s use of television as a technological metaphor, in contrast, did not articulate the
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everyday observer’s disconnection from (and the psychedelic observer’s reconnection to)
the Real in the same terms. “Turn on, tune in, drop out” preached an escape from the
confines of everyday modes of perception, but it was not a notion of escape that was built
upon the rejection of an incarcerating camera obscura. Nor was it, for that matter, even
built upon the notion of an escape from the confines of the boob tube. Rather, “turn on,
tune in, drop out” articulated an escape from normative perception by embracing the
notion that reality has no more substance than the flickers of electrical energy on a
television screen. It was a slogan built upon a presupposition that transcending everyday
modes of perception was rooted in the observer’s skills at tuning into and processing the
flows of energy and data that constitute the Real; and it was a slogan that expressed a
philosophy of liberation built around observers taking control over their own
phenomenological television dials.
In addition to reconceptualizing the Real in these terms, Leary’s slogan also
reconceptualized modern visuality’s focus on the mobility of the observer. The emphasis
on wave vibrations and atomic energy in Leary’s model of vision suggested a quite
different set of presuppositions about space and about movement than Huxley and
Kesey’s metaphors. Both “the doors of perception” and “the movie screen of our
perceptions” were metaphors that were built in terms of physical spaces and physical
structures that contain barriers: a wall, a door, a movie screen. In everyday perception,
Huxley and Kesey characterized these barriers as objects that block access to the external
world, and the observer was portrayed as being trapped and fixed in space. Psychedelic
perception, in contrast, was alluded to in terms of the movement between spaces: for
Huxley, mobility occurred by metaphorically exiting through the door in the wall and
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venturing out into the external world; for Kesey, mobility occurred through sheer velocity
of speed. In “turn on, tune in, drop out,” a different sense of mobility was evoked. It was
not a mobility through physical space, but rather a mobility of vibrating atoms and flows
of electrical charges around circuits: “You suddenly wake up from the delusion of
separate form and hook up to the cosmic dance. Consciousness slides along the wave
matrices, silently at the speed of light” (Leary et al., 1964/1995, p. 66). In other words,
the sense of mobility at the core of Leary’s metaphor was, again, consistent with the
arguments that McLuhan was concurrently putting forth about the ways that electronic
media networks had transformed society’s experience of space and time.
Beyond these phenomenological reconfigurations of corporeality, subjectivity, the Real,
and mobility, Leary’s metaphor also directly engaged with the economies of visual
consumption associated with television. In a manner similar to Kesey’s “movie screen”
metaphor, “turn on, tune in, drop out” was deeply rooted in the cultural and ideological
dimensions of the electronic media technologies that it evoked. It was carefully chosen as
a slogan that would mobilize the discourses of television to promote Leary’s vision of a
social–political–molecular revolution: “The issue now is personal power, i.e. freedom.
And now we see that freedom depends upon who controls the technology that reaches
your brain-telephone, the editing facility, the drugs, of course, and the TV screen” (Leary,
1968/1998a, pp. 6-7).
Leary purposefully conceived “turn on, tune in, drop out” as a strategic intervention into
the dialogue that was developing in the media about psychedelic drugs. After his ill-fated
Senate appearance of May 1966, Leary expressed that he and the rest of the psychedelic
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movement were losing the culture war: “The opposition beat us to the punch. The
psychiatrists and police propagandists have already stressed the negative. […] They never
mention the 999 good experiences. They keep repeating ‘LSD: jump out a window’”
(Leary, 1990, pp. 251-2). Given that it was forged in an effort to reshape these media
debates, it was no accident or coincidence that “turn on, tune in, drop out” should mimic
the vernacular of the television medium’s primary content: advertising.
A few weeks before he introduced the slogan in his San Francisco lecture, Leary solicited
the advice of McLuhan, which he recounted in his autobiography as follows:
The lunch with Marshall McLuhan at the Plaza was informative. “Dreary
Senate hearings and courtrooms are not the platforms for your message,
Tim. You call yourself a philosopher, a reformer. Fine. But the key to your
work is advertising. You’re promoting a product. The new and improved
accelerated brain. You must use the most current tactics for arousing
consumer interest. Associate LSD with all the good things that the brain
can produce — beauty, fun, philosophical wonder, religious revelation,
increased intelligence, mystical romance. Word of mouth from satisfied
customers will help, but get your rock and roll friends to write jingles
about the brain.” He sang:
Lysergic acid hits the spot.
Forty billion neurons, that’s a lot. (Leary, 1990, p. 251)
Leary proceeded to devote “several days and one acid trip to the analysis of the slogans
which have been used to package previous American revolutions” (Leary, 1990, p. 253).
Inspired by an article in The Nation, entitled “Drugs on Campus: Turned On and Tuned
Out” (Freedman & Powelson, 1966), his new mantra was born.
This explicit modeling of “turn on, tune in, drop out” on the culture and conventions of
the advertising industry sheds some light on why the slogan was so easily co-opted by the
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ad men of the era — it spoke a familiar language — but it also highlights the awareness
that Leary possessed of the ways that the languages of television can be mobilized to
shape perception and consciousness. Just as Huxley had analyzed how linguistic systems
regiment sensory perception to bedevil the observer’s sense of reality — “so that he is all
too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things” — Leary argued much
the same thing about television. He presented an often-bleak view of the medium,
portraying it as a communication system that functioned as an ideological apparatus for
making bodies docile: a medium that “works us over completely.” Leary framed the
power of television to regiment perception in the following terms:
[T]he attentive, highly conscious person realizes that he is the almost
helpless victim of the accidental or deliberate range of light-sound-
pressure-chemical energies that impinge on his sensory nerve endings. At
one time, when we were trustfully slumbering, a selfish, insane, power-
hungry combine of exploitive conspirators suddenly moved in and
systematically censored and manipulated what was to hit our eyes, ears,
nose, mouth, skin. A well organized conspiracy to enslave our
consciousness. A science-fiction horror movie in which our captors
decided exactly which energies and sensory stimuli we could encounter.
Our 10-billion-cell nervous systems have been monopolized by these
ruthless, selfish captors. We walk around on a fake-prop television studio
set that our masters have designed — and we play the parts they assign.
[…] We have taken leave of our senses. We have been robbed blind.
Sensory conditioning has forced us to accept a “reality” which is a comic-
tragic farce illusion. We can never rid ourselves of the insanities deeply
imprinted during infancy and childhood on our delicate, vulnerable
nervous systems. (Leary, 1968/1998a, p. 33)
This was a theme that recurred throughout Leary’s work of the 1960s, cropping up time
and time again in his writings, speeches, and interviews. For example, in The Psychedelic
Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Leary talked about having
the revelation on LSD that you feel a “victim of the great television producer. […] The
people around you are lifeless television robots. The world around you is a façade, a
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stage set” (Leary et al., 1964/1995, p. 66). Similarly, in High Priest, Leary argued:
“Drop-out means exactly that: drop-out. Ninety-nine percent of the activity of ninety-nine
percent of Americans goes into robot performances on the TV-studio stage. Fake.
Unnatural. Automatic” (Leary, 1968/1995, p. 330). By framing the socio-cultural
regimentation of the senses in these terms, Leary was translating Huxley’s arguments
about social and linguistic conditioning into metaphors that were culturally relevant to the
psychedelic movement of the 1960s. Television, he was arguing, has colonized the
observer’s sense organs and nervous system, in much the same way as aliens took over
the bodies of their sleeping victims in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956): the
observer’s corporeal body literally hijacked by a monopoly of ruthless, selfish captors.
The everyday observer’s perceptual prison, however, was not the dark chamber of a
camera obscura or film auditorium; rather, it was the artifice of a fake TV studio set — a
sitcom reality in which the observer was a passive victim.
As such, we can again see a Frankfurt School attitude towards the culture industry at
work: one especially suited to the era of McLuhan and cybernetics, in which everyday
observers were lifeless automata with their central nervous systems being directly
controlled by television. And, like Adorno and Horkheimer, Leary did not hold back his
disdain for the stuporous, consciousness-degrading impact that he felt television was
having on the non-tuned-in audience:
In our present primitive state we have industries devoted to the production
of the state of consciousness which I call level 6: emotional stupor. The
liquor industry manufactures the chemicals and then sponsors the
appropriate art form — TV shows which are perfectly tuned to emotional
stupor. Aggressive, competitive athletic and political spectacles comprise
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the art form for the stuporous level of consciousness. (Leary, 1968/1998b,
p. 125)
Psychedelic drugs were, of course, among the panaceas that Leary was offering for the
attainment of higher levels of consciousness. LSD, he argued, “flips you out of the TV-
studio game and harnesses you to the two-billion-year-old flow inside” (Leary,
1968/1995, p. 323). This was the essence of turning on, tuning in, and dropping out:
The turn-on is to detach yourself from the rigid addictive focus on the
fake-prop TV studio-set and to refocus on the natural energies within the
body. […] When you turn-on you shed the fake-prop TV studio and join
the holy dance of the visionaries. You leave LBJ and Bob Hope; you join
Lao Tse, Christ, Blake. (Leary, 1968/1995, p. 322)
In other words, to turn on, tune in, and drop out was to intervene in the regimentation of
sensory perception by television and the culture industry. It was to tune into an entirely
different sense of “flow” than that provided by the broadcasting stations. It was not,
however, a wholesale rejection of television. It was not a call to move beyond television,
in the way that Huxley had called for a move beyond language. Leary, after all, was still
likening the “raw is-ness” of pure perception to the flickering electrical energy of a
cathode ray tube: “all form is an illusory package of vibrations, just like your television
screen” (Leary, 1968/1995, p. 254). An astute student of McLuhan, Leary knew that you
couldn’t just turn your back on television and it would go away. It was a central
technology of modern culture, and, in the same way that Huxley’s psychedelic explorer
had to return back through the doors of perception at the end of the trip, Leary knew that
his own psychedelic observer had to return to a society of fake-prop TV studio sets:
After the revelation it is necessary to drop-back-in, return to the fake-prop
TV studio and initiate small changes which reflect the glory and meaning
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of the turn-on. You change the way you move, the way you dress; you
change your corner of the TV-studio society!
You begin to look like a happy saint! Your home slowly becomes a shrine.
Slowly, gently you start seed transformations around you. Psychedelic art.
Psychedelic style. Psychedelic music. Psychedelic dance.
The directors of the TV studio do not want you to live a religious life.
They will apply every pressure (including prison) to keep you in their
game.
Your mind, which has been corrupted and neurologically damaged by
years of education in fake-prop TV-studio games, will also keep you
trapped in the game.
A group liberation cult is required.
You must form that most ancient and sacred of human structures — the
clan. A clan or cult is a small group of human beings organized around a
religious goal. If you don’t belong to a clan, you are a computer. (Leary,
1968/1995, p. 323)
To tune in, therefore, was not to tune in to the content of television broadcasts. Rather, it
was to tune into the affordances of the medium itself. It was to tune into the global
networks and electrical energy flows that television symbolized. The medium, after all,
was the message. As such, “turn on, tune in, drop out” represented a profoundly
bifurcated view of television. On the one hand, it rejected the ideological function of
television within a technocratic society: the conspiratorial political economy of media
institutions; the drunken, emotional stupor induced in the viewer by most broadcasting
content; the artificial realities created by television cultures. On the other hand, television
was also a symbol of the atomic–electronic–psychedelic revolution, and it was a medium
of great libratory potential, if used correctly. In Leary’s schema, this liberation would
come through the youth movement: the baby-boomers who had been raised on television
to become the first “electronic generation” (Leary, 1968/1998a, p. 165). He specifically
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wrote The Politics of Ecstasy for “the enormous new wave of young people, the first
generation of the television age, who were used to ‘turning-on-tuning-in’ electronic
appliances” (Leary, 1968/1998a, p. 9), remarking:
Our children were born and have developed in a civilization as far
removed from that of their parents as Des Moines, Iowa, is from ancient
Carthage. How few parents realized when they quieted their noisy kids by
banishing them to the TV room that they were turning on the little ones to
a mind-blowing electronic experience. Kiddies flicking the TV knobs.
Switch on the news ... LBJ talking ... hard sell ... switch him off ...
Channel 9 ... cereal commercial, hard sell ... switch it off ... Channel 3 ...
Superboy ... A-OK. Movement. Change. Flashing images. Simultaneity.
Multiple choice. (Leary, 1968/1998a, p. 169)
Leary was arguing that the youth of the sixties used television in a much more dynamic
and ecstatic manner than their elders. The youth had developed skills at processing
information much more rapidly and efficiently, turning them into “pulsating television
grids” who could “move consciousness around by switching channel knobs” (Leary,
1968/1998a, p. 162). In other words, Leary was positing a synergy between young
people’s processing skills at decoding television-as-information and decoding vision-as-
information: i.e., sensory perception and consciousness were analogous skills to the
navigating of complex information networks in an electronic mediascape. With the
benefit of hindsight, it is easy to see the technological determinism and the naiveté in the
ecstasy of communication that Leary attributed to the youth culture’s engagement with
television; but, at the end of the day, it was not altogether different from the similar
portrayals of digital youth that permeate contemporary discourses about new media
cultures and technologies, in which young people are viewed as synergistically bonded
with their computers.
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John C. Lilly: “The Human Biocomputer”
John C. Lilly was a scientific researcher who worked in a variety of fields, including
biophysics, neurophysiology, neuroanatomy, and electronics. He is best remembered for
two (sometimes overlapping) areas of research. The first was the work that Lilly did on
human–dolphin relationships, published in such books as Man and Dolphin (1961) and
The Mind of the Dolphin (1967) — and loosely adapted by Hollywood for the film The
Day of the Dolphin (1973). The second area of research was the exploratory work on
sensory perception and consciousness that Lilly did using isolation tanks and psychedelic
drugs, published in such books as Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human
Biocomputer (1968/1972) and The Center of the Cyclone (1973). This work would also
inspire a fictionalized Hollywood film — Altered States (1980) — but more significant
was its influence on the psychedelic movement. It led Lilly to becoming a prominent
participant in the social and institutional forums that emerged within the movement,
bringing him into contact with such figures as Leary, Ginsberg, and Ram Dass. He spent
two years as a resident and group leader at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur and eight
months participating in Oscar Ichazo’s Arica Training Group in Arica, Chile; and his
research reached a large countercultural audience when Stewart Brand, a former
Prankster, featured Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer in
his Whole Earth Catalog. (With Lilly’s permission, Brand in fact reprinted the book on
newsprint and sold it at a low cost through the Catalog.) The most direct and tangible
evidence of Lilly’s influence was the popularity that isolation tanks would subsequently
enjoy throughout the psychedelic movement.
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The research studies that led to Lilly’s Programming and Metaprogramming in the
Human Biocomputer and The Center of the Cyclone took place between 1964 and 1966,
but the development of his “human biocomputer” metaphor dated back several decades
earlier. At the University of Pennsylvania in the late-1940s and early-1950s, Lilly began
researching the physical structures of the brain. This work was contemporaneous with
(and greatly informed by) the emergence of cybernetics as a field of study. In 1949,
inspired by the computer design ideas of Britton Chance and the MIT Radiation Lab,
Lilly started to integrate the idea of the human being as a biocomputer into the
neurophysiological research he was doing on the cerebral cortex (Lilly, 1968/1972, p. v).
In 1954, he extended this line of research to include experiments involving immersion in
isolation tanks. This new research was developed in response to contemporaneous ideas
that were circulating in the field about perception, consciousness, and external stimuli:
In brief, previous neurophysiologists, including Professor Frederic Bremer
of Brussels and Dr. Horace Magoun of UCLA, had hypothesized that the
brain stayed in a waking state because of external stimulation coming
through the end organs of the body. In other words, outside stimulation
was necessary in order to maintain the brain in an awakened state. The
obvious experiment was to isolate the human from all external stimulation
insofar as this was physically possible, and to see what the resulting states
were. (Lilly, 1973, p. 39)
In the early 1960s, Lilly started to incorporate the use of LSD into his isolation tank
research to examine the resulting states of consciousness. He shared Leary’s disdain for
the disease–victim paradigms that had been applied to psychedelic drugs: “This old
tendency of medical people to attribute hallucinations only to mentally ill persons and to
put down visual displays as ‘hallucinations’ has bothered me for some years” (Lilly,
1973, p. 27). In addition, like Leary, he sought to legitimize the study of expanded
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consciousness within the scientific academy, arguing that we need “ways of thinking
which look as straight at the inner realities as at the physical–chemical–biological outer
realities” (Lilly, 1968/1972, p. xiv). Lilly, however, was much more guarded than the
headstrong Leary, and he was not prone to kind of acid evangelism that had made Leary
such a controversial figure. For fear of losing his research grants, he was cautious and
incremental in the release his findings — a fear that was borne out in 1968, when his
funding was indeed withdrawn after the initial circulation of notes from his LSD
research.
As with Leary’s use of televisual metaphors, Lilly’s idea of the human biocomputer
conceptualized the observer as a technological device. Lilly proposed his thesis in the
following terms:
All human beings, all persons who reach adulthood in the world today are
programmed biocomputers. No one of us can escape our own nature as
programmable entities. Literally, each of us may be our programs, nothing
more, nothing less. (Lilly, 1968/1972, p. i)
The stated goal of his research was to investigate, as objectively as possible, the
operational links in the biocomputer between mental subjectivity, neuronal circuitry,
biochemistry, and observable behavioral variables (Lilly, 1968/1972, p. 3). Profoundly
interdisciplinary in nature, this research bridged the fields of biology, logic,
neuropsychopharmacology, brain and mind models, psychoanalysis, psychology,
psychiatry, hypnosis, communication, electronics, and computing.
Quoting directly from the work of cybernetician W. Ross Ashby, Lilly characterized the
human being as a general-purpose computer:
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The general (purpose) computer is… a machine in which the operator can
prescribe, for any internal state of the machine and for any given condition
affecting it, what state it shall go to next… All behaviors are at the
operator’s disposal. A program… with the machine forms a mechanism
that will show (any thinkable) behavior. (Lilly, 1968/1972, p. 2; ellipses in
original)
Lilly (1968/1972) employed the vernacular of computing to describe the human being as
a combination of hardware and software. The brain was conceived as an immense
processor that was far more powerful than any nonbiological computer that had ever been
constructed, containing large amounts of memory storage that it accessed continuously in
the coordination of inputs and outputs. Some of the programs that the human
biocomputer runs, Lilly argued, are built-in and are extremely difficult to modify:
feeding, sex, avoidance and approach programs, certain kinds of fears and pains. Other
programs are acquired throughout life, and can be more easily modified or erased by the
operator.
Lilly argued that, as a general-purpose computer, the human biocomputer is capable of
programming any conceivable model of the universe inside of itself. The observer’s
perception of external reality, therefore, was nothing more or less than a “consciousness
program” comprised of thousands of commands and operations running in parallel (Lilly,
1968/1972, p. 17). As such, both “everyday” and “psychedelic” modes of perception
were, for Lilly, consciousness programs. Each involved the accessing of different stored
memories and the triggering of different operations in the biocomputer’s operating
system; executing each of these consciousness programs required large amounts of the
biocomputer’s processing power:
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Various special uses of the human biocomputer entail the principle of the
competing use of a limited amount of total available apparatus. To hold
and to display the accepted view of reality in all of its detail and at the
same time program another state of consciousness is difficult; there just
isn’t enough brain circuitry to do both jobs in detail perfectly. (Lilly,
1968/1972, p. 15)
In this regard, Lilly’s interest in psychedelic modes of perception corresponded to his
desire to push the human biocomputer to it processing limits. Like Huxley, Kesey, and
Leary, Lilly equated psychedelic perception with the observer’s sensory apparatuses
working at a more advanced level of functionality than in everyday modes of
consciousness, and he hypothesized that psychedelic drugs could help human
biocomputers run consciousness programs at the peak of their processing power. In
describing the differences between “everyday” and “psychedelic” consciousness
programs, Lilly’s theories very much continued Huxley’s argument that everyday
perception involves the filtering of vast amounts of data coming in through the sense
organs, so that the information most important to survival and social interactions is
prioritized. Lilly, however, framed this viewpoint more explicitly in the language of
computing, noting: “As the size and complexity of the nervous system and its bodily
carrier increased, new levels of programmability appeared, not tied to immediate survival
and eventual reproduction” (Lilly, 1968/1972, p. ix). These new levels of
programmability, he argued, have been intensely regimented and regulated within the
normative practices of everyday perception:
Using the principle of the competitive use of portions of the available
brain it is important to understand why, for example, a large amount of
hallucinating would not be permissible in our present society. If a person
is actively projecting visual images in three dimensions from his stored
programs, he may not have enough of his brain functioning in ordinary
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modes to take care of him with regard to say, gravity, automobiles, and
similar hazards. (Lilly, 1968/1972, p. 16)
In other words, all four of the theorists that we have examined shared an underlying
belief that psychedelic modes of perception accessed important surplus levels of
awareness that have been strictly disciplined within everyday consciousness. By
exploring the realm of psychedelic perception, all four argued that the observer could
demystify the visual regimentation of everyday life. While Huxley articulated this notion
in terms of an escape through the doors of perception, Lilly expressed it in terms of
human biocomputers choosing to execute new consciousness programs within their
operating systems.
By framing consciousness as a reality program, however, Lilly’s biocomputer metaphor
also differed substantially from the models of perception put forward by Huxley, Kesey,
and Leary. Even though their metaphors each suggested different sets of relationships
between human sensory apparatuses and visual technologies, Huxley, Kesey, and Leary
all presupposed the existence of an external reality. All three of their metaphors were
constructed around the notion of a pre-given universe “out there”: everyday perception
being characterized as incomplete, degraded, false, illusory, or out-of-sync with the
external reality; psychedelic perception being portrayed as an unlocking of the senses so
that a complete vision of the universe can be experienced in a “pure” state of
consciousness. In other words, Huxley, Kesey, and Leary were all in one way or another
seeking a state of being-in-itself: Huxley traveling into the Clear Light of ecstatic truth;
Kesey speeding towards synchronicity with the Now; Leary floating down a stream of
vibrating atoms and energy flows. For Huxley and Leary, in particular, this psychedelic
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union with the Real was a form of enlightenment akin to the illumination found in
different mystical and religious traditions.
Lilly’s viewpoint about external reality was quite different. A foundational
presupposition of his research was that the biocomputer itself generates all of the
phenomena that it experiences. This was not to rule out the presence of an external
reality; rather, it reflected a scientific methodology which took “the ontological and
epistemological position that one cannot know […] whether or not the phenomena are
explicable only by nonbiocomputer interventions or only by happenings within the
computer itself, or both” (Lilly, 1968/1972, p. 51). In other words, Lilly’s research did
not want to make any assumptions about the external world as it pertains to either
everyday or psychedelic modes of perception. He regarded with equal suspicion the
epistemological bases of both psychiatric and mystical interpretations of psychedelic
perception: the former for presuming a connection between hallucinations and mental
illness, the latter for its euphoric declarations of Ultimate Truth. The presuppositions of
psychiatry and mysticism, he argued, have overdetermined each field’s psychedelic
paradigms:
The quality of one's model of the universe is measured by how well it
matches the real universe. There is no guarantee that one's current model
does match the reality, no matter how certain one feels about the high
quality of the match. Feelings of awe, reverence, sacredness, and certainty
are also adaptable metaprograms, attachable to any model, not just the best
fitting one. (Lilly, 1968/1972, p. xii)
By adopting the ontological/epistemological position that we cannot know whether
experienced phenomena are the product of external or internal happenings, or a
combination of both, Lilly’s phenomenological position was in many ways the most
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“modern” of the four theorists we have examined. He took the most rigid position with
regards to evidence of the outside world that comes to us through our sense organs,
arguing that we cannot assume anything from this evidence about an external reality. It
was a position that was the closest in spirit of the four theorists to the postulations of
(post)modern phenomenologists such as Nietzsche and Heidegger: “From the very
beginning, we see the visual images only within ourselves; we hear sound only within
ourselves. It is a big step from this to the postulation of an external world” (Nietzsche,
1872/1999b, p. 49; emphases in original).
Unlike Huxley, Kesey, and Leary, Lilly did not characterize everyday perception in
pejorative terms as flawed, degraded, or illusory, and he did not express the belief that
psychedelic perception was somehow more “pure” than everyday perception. He did not
equate psychedelic perception with the unveiling of hidden truths about the cosmos, but
rather saw both everyday and psychedelic modes of awareness as merely different sets of
programs within the biocomputer’s systems. For Lilly, neither everyday nor psychedelic
perception provided any more irrefutable evidence about the Real than the other; and his
interest in psychedelic drugs was specifically geared instead towards their usefulness in
better understanding the design of the human biocomputer’s programming and
metaprogramming systems. Lilly’s concern with the external world was not with
attaining Ultimate Truth, but rather with examining the ways that stimuli from the
external environment affect the operations of the biocomputer’s perceptual and cognitive
apparatuses. He argued: “The human biocomputer is constantly being programmed,
continually, simply and naturally, below its levels of awareness, by the surrounding
environment” (Lilly, 1973, p. 67). In other words, consciousness programs continually
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take in information through the sense organs and modify the biocomputer’s operations by
processing the received data in conjunction with the stored memories of past operations.
Lilly described this process as “interlock” —a concept that he derived from the theory of
“feedback” in cybernetics.
In The Human Use of Human Beings, Norbert Wiener defined feedback as “the property
of being able to adjust conduct by past performance” (Wiener, 1950/1954, p. 33). He
described the comparable use of feedback in both humans and machines as follows:
It is my thesis that the physical functioning of the living individual and the
operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely
parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback.
Both of them have sensory receptors as one stage in their cycle of
operation: that is, in both of them there exists a special apparatus for
collecting information from the outer world at low energy levels, and for
making it available in the operation of the individual or of the machine. In
both cases these external messages are not taken neat, but through the
internal transforming powers of the apparatus, whether it will be alive or
dead. The information is then turned into a new form available for the
further stages of the performance. In both the animal and the machine this
performance is made to be effective on the outer world. In both of them,
their performed action on the outer world, and not merely their intended
action, is reported back to the central regulatory apparatus. This complex
behavior is ignored by the average man, and in particular does not play the
role that it should in our habitual analysis of society; for just as individual
physical responses may be seen from this point of view, so may the
organic responses of society itself. (Wiener, 1950/1954, pp. 26-7)
Lilly argued that it is through this process of feedback/interlock with environment and
society that we arrive at our perception of everyday reality: that our experience of
everyday consciousness is built upon and shaped by the complex array of programs that
regulate the collecting and processing of information from the outer world. His use of
isolation tanks for studying the human biocomputer’s consciousness programs was
developed in response to this understanding of feedback/interlock:
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If we can free ourselves from the effects on our thinking machine of
storage of material from the external world, if we can free ourselves up
from the effects of storage of metaprograms which direct our thinking,
programs devised by others and fed to us during our learning years, we
may be able to see the outline and the essential variables which are
genetically determined. (Lilly, 1968/1972, p. xxvii)
Lilly’s goal with the isolation tanks was to create a “zero level external reality” (Lilly,
1968/1972, p. 26). He used salt water to keep the body suspended away from wall and
floor contacts and to counter gravitational forces; zero light and sound levels were
maintained; and temperatures were closely monitored to remain consistent with body
temperature levels. His rationale was that the isolation tank allowed the biocomputer’s
circuitry to be freed up from most of its external reality programs. Unchained from
environmental/social interlock, the biocomputer could be studied in isolation and more of
its processing power could be devoted to the production and analysis of internal,
subjective realities:
Given a single body and a single mind physically isolated and confined in
a completely physically controlled environment in true solitude, by our
present sciences can we satisfactorily account for all inputs and all outputs
to and from this mind-biocomputer (i.e., can we truly isolate and confine
it?)? Given the properties of the softwaremind of this biocomputer
outlined above, is it probable that we can find, discover, or invent inputs-
outputs not yet in our consensus science? Does this center of
consciousness receive-transmit information by at present unknown modes
of communication? Does this center of consciousness stay in the isolated
confined biocomputer? (Lilly, 1968/1972, p. xiv)
Lilly’s experiments found that the isolation tank did not, as one might expect, produce a
perception of nothingness. The tank was not perceived as quiet, dark, and empty; rather,
the “noise” of the biocomputer filled the emptiness as if sensory excitation was still
coming from outside. Lilly in fact rejected the term “sensory deprivation tanks” because
he did not feel that the sense organs were being deprived in a state of zero level external
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reality. He found that the biocomputer in isolation was still actively functioning,
replacing absent external sensory inputs with stored memories from past consciousness
programs — thus disproving Bremer and Magoun’s theses that the mind required external
stimuli to remain in an alert state of consciousness.
For many of Lilly’s research subjects, this experience of the isolation tank was at first
disturbing, threatening, and chaotic, leading to what Lilly called “evasions” — programs
of avoidance that drew upon stored memories to override the system and compensate for
the absence of incoming sensory information. As Lilly and his research subjects
continued their experiments, however, they became more confident and comfortable in
zero level external reality, and LSD was introduced as a means of “metaprogramming”
the biocomputer. He defined metaprogramming as “an operation in which a central
control system controls hundreds of thousands of programs operating in parallel
simultaneously” (Lilly, 1968/1972, p. v). In other words, Lilly was arguing that we have
the potential for consciously controlling the various programs that our biocomputers run,
and in doing so we have the potential for creating new modes of perception and new
states of consciousness. For Lilly, the combination of isolation tanks and LSD allowed
the human biocomputer’s processing power to be freed from external interlock and be
focused instead on testing the outer limits of its processing capabilities. He hypothesized:
In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or
becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and
experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the
mind, there are no limits. […] In the province of connected minds, what
the network believes to be true, either is true or becomes true within
certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits
are further beliefs to be transcended. In the network's mind there are no
limits. (Lilly, 1968/1972, p. xiii-xiv)
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In other words, LSD was seen as software for reprogramming the human biocomputer. It
was not looked upon by Lilly as a pathway to ecstasy or Ultimate Truth, but rather as a
tool for modifying how perceptual data is processed by the sense organs, nervous system,
and brain. As such, Lilly’s metaphor shared with Leary’s “turn on, tune in, drop out” a
notion of vision-as-information. For Leary, psychedelic experience was understood as a
“rewiring of the nervous system” (Leary, 1968/1995, p. 192), the emphasis of the
metaphor being placed on the flows of information around electronic circuits; for Lilly,
psychedelic experience was understood in terms of “reprogramming the perceptual field”
(Lilly, 1973, p. 71), the emphasis of his metaphor being placed on the computational
parsing of information by a central control mechanism. In both cases, the underlying
model of vision-as-information posited a departure from an idea of the disembodied eye
as the locus of visual perception, viewing the eye as just one, expendable point in a much
larger system of information reception and transmission.
This meant that Lilly’s model of the observer incorporated many of the facets that Müller
and Helmholtz had identified a century earlier. Lilly, however, had computers,
cybernetics, and more advanced neuroscientific models at his disposal; and it was
through this interplay of new technology and institutional knowledge that Lilly’s work
presented to the psychedelic movement yet more reconfigurations of the central themes
of the modern observer.
Lilly’s use of LSD and isolation tank technologies placed a concentrated focus on issues
of subjectivity and the corporeal body. By removing all external sensory stimuli, Lilly
sought to provide an objective account of where subjective consciousness resides. Was it
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to be found, self-contained, within the internal programs and metaprograms of the body?
Or, was subjective consciousness intrinsically a product of interlock between the body
and external, environmental/social systems, as existing scientific discourses had posited?
In other words, Lilly’s research was centrally concerned with the role played by the
corporeal body in the shaping of subjectivity and the development of consciousness of
the external world, and his findings presented a model of the observer in which the
corporeal body was indeed exceptionally active and productive — a body that required
no external stimuli to be intensely occupied with the processing of sensory data. Lilly’s
models of subjectivity and corporeality were, in this sense, complete inversions of the
models that been dominant in the era of the camera obscura. As Crary describes, the
camera obscura provided a model of vision in which a pre-given external world was
guaranteed by the architecture of the device, so that the corporeal body of the observer
could be effectively eliminated from the equation. Lilly’s experiments, in contrast, sought
to eliminate the external world — because no pre-given guarantees could be made about
it — so that focus could be placed instead on the productive role played in perception by
the observer’s corporeal body. Both models aspired to rational, objective ways of seeing;
but, methodologically, Lilly’s position represented a polar flip in terms of what it meant
to be objective when studying perception. Objectivity, for Lilly, had nothing whatsoever
to do with a juridical device compensating for the messiness of corporeality and
subjectivity so that the external world can be viewed more accurately, and everything to
do with examining and understanding the nature of that inner messiness.
In this regard, if we place the camera obscura, Huxley’s doors of perception, and Lilly’s
human biocomputer in a continuum of ideas about the observer, an interesting pattern of
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shifts and reconfigurations begins to become apparent. The camera obscura described a
model of vision in which the observer withdrew into a dark, interior chamber, physically
separated from a bright, exterior world. The pinhole in the wall allowed light to enter into
the chamber so that the observer could rationally study the image that was produced of
the outside world. As we saw, Huxley’s metaphor subverted the architecture of the
camera obscura by criticizing its asceticism and its valorization of rationality, and by
suggesting that the observer should escape from the confines of the chamber. His
metaphor described a movement from dark interior to bright exterior, which correlated
with a movement from rationality to ecstasy, and a movement from degraded vision to
pure perception. The most enduring image of Lilly’s metaphor — the human
biocomputer floating in the black void of the isolation tank — created a third iteration of
this architecturalization of vision. Even more than the observer in the belly of the camera
obscura, the image of Lilly in the isolation tank represented an ultimate act of ascetic
withdrawal from the world into a dark chamber. But the isolation tank did not represent
for Lilly a “chamber of consciousness” in the traditional sense. It did not symbolize the
inside of the observer’s head. Rather, it represented the wholesale rejection of the
external world. The external world was not positioned as a bright and illuminating space
beyond the boundaries of the chamber, and no pinhole existed in the wall to let outside
light in. Instead, the external world for the occupant of the tank was the tank itself: a dark
abyss, devoid of light or any other kind of sensory stimulus. The “exterior world” of the
tank was one of absence, not presence, transparency, or visibility. The “interior world” of
the biocomputer in the tank was, likewise, characterized as the camera obscura’s
opposite: no longer conceived as a dark space, but rather an active computational
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machine, buzzing with light and energy from the thousands of programs it was running.
Architecturally, Lilly’s model was no longer about light flowing into a dark chamber
from a bright exterior world, but rather about a bright interior that “projected” out into a
dark exterior. The external world was not the source of vision; the observer was.
As such, Lilly’s model of the psychedelic observer was not founded upon the allusions to
escape and travel that had informed the metaphors of Huxley, Kesey, and (to some
extent) Leary. Lilly, in fact, advocated quite the opposite: he willingly withdrew from the
external world and encased himself within the confines of a darkened chamber. It was an
act of self-imprisonment and self-regimentation; and LSD was in no way characterized as
a “key” that could “unlock” the chamber door. It is not insignificant that one of the
central studies that Lilly described at length in Programming and Metaprogramming in
the Human Biocomputer revolved around a set of keys that one of his research subjects
had been carrying around for years. In the isolation tank, the subject realized that he had
many locks in his life, and that this seemed to epitomize his external reality programs of
modern civilization: “to have doors, to have locks on those doors, and have privileged
persons who possessed the keys to open those doors” (Lilly, 1968/1972, p. 55). Through
a series of LSD sessions in the tank, the subject started to apply this understanding to his
inner life: “He visualized his own antithetical metaprograms as existing in rooms
separated by doors which had locks on them. He was searching for the keys to open the
doors” (Lilly, 1968/1972, p. 55). As the subject progressed, “he saw that the defined
boundaries (the doors, the walls, ceilings, the floors, and the locks themselves and their
keys) were a convenient metaprogram dividing up his knowledge in and his control
mechanisms into compartments in an artificial personal fashion” (Lilly, 1968/1972, pp.
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55-6); and he began to work on having the walls in his mind melt away so that his mind
became “open spaces with information freely available without the former walls between
arbitrary rooms of categories” (Lilly, 1968/1972, p. 56). In other words, the subject
realized that the keys were not keys to unlocking the mind, but were rather symbols that
allowed rigid structures to exist in the mind that compartmentalized consciousness.
Lilly did not directly connect his discussion of this research subject to Huxley’s doors of
perception, but the correlation was certainly implicit. In Huxley’s metaphor, the door and
the walls of the chamber remained as architectural structures, maintaining the notion of a
separation of internal and external spaces; and psychedelic experience was not
characterized in terms of the walls melting away, but rather a symbolic movement of the
observer between those internal and external spaces. For Huxley, the chamber of
consciousness never disappeared, and the psychedelic traveler would always have to
return to it when the trip was over. Lilly’s study, in contrast, worked towards a complete
elimination of physical space and architectural structures: “This computer within itself
ideally recognizes no locks, no forbidden transactions, no areas in which data cannot be
freely moved from one zone to another” (Lilly, 1968/1972, p. 61). In other words, the
mobility that Lilly ascribed to his observer was not a movement through physical space,
but a movement of information around the microcircuits of the computer. The body in the
tank, after all, was suspended in a state of physical stasis within a dark void that marked
an absence of physical space; all of the movement and activity in Lilly’s metaphor was
occurring internally. As such, the sense of mobility in Lilly’s model of the observer
shared Leary’s focus on the virtual mobility of information, as opposed to the physical
movement through space that informed the metaphors of Huxley and Kesey.
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Conclusion
Between these four theorists, we have seen a diverse set of technological metaphors for
vision. Huxley and Kesey both employed models deriving from optical devices: the
camera obscura and the cinematic apparatus. Leary and Lilly, on the other hand, turned to
the electronic/digital technologies of television and computing for their metaphors. In all
four cases, these different technologies were mobilized to explore some notion of “pure”
or “visionary” perception — that mystical state of expanded consciousness that came
from their experimentation with psychedelic drugs. In this regard they each developed
visual metaphors that that challenged how the technologies in question had been used by
dominant cultural institutions as apparatuses for the regulation and regimentation of
vision. The rationality of the camera obscura, the illusory reality of Hollywood cinema,
the stupefying artificiality of television sitcoms, and the military-industrial associations
of the computer all existed as counterpoints to the psychedelic reconfiguration of these
technologies as ecstatic, visionary apparatuses.
While all four theorists were similarly in search of a mode of vision and visuality that
shakes us out of the ruts of ordinary perception, the choice of technological metaphor that
each one made had significant a impact on how that quest was formulated and expressed.
Huxley tapped into a tradition of visionary experience that was characterized in terms of
an escape from the camera obscura into the Clear Light. It was a journey outside
portrayed in colonialist terms, replete with the discovery in the New World of tribes of
aboriginal archetypes and a flora of mystical symbols. Kesey drew upon Huxley, but re-
imagined the escape from the chamber of consciousness as a transdiegetic leap through
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the movie screen. Visionary experience, for Kesey, was framed as an expanding of
cinema: a hyperkinetic, irrational, irreverent, postmodern simulation of a cinematic
reality. Leary and Lilly, meanwhile, expressed visionary experience through
technological metaphors that were increasingly about vision-as-information. They both
posited a kind of nonvisual visuality: a “post-ocular” way of seeing that was focused
more on the vibration of electrons and the processing of visual data than on the
geometrical optics of light entering the eye.
The chronological sequencing of these theorists suggests perhaps a shift away from
“cinematic” models of perception and a shift towards “cybernetic” ones within the
psychedelic movement: Huxley’s ideas come from the mid-1950s; Kesey’s emerged in
the early-1960s; Leary first instructed people to turn on, tune in, and drop out in 1966;
and Lilly’s work began to circulate around the counterculture at the very end of the
decade. While I believe there is some truth to this assertion, we should also be careful not
to view the interplays of these scopic regimes too neatly or linearly. The psychedelic
movement’s ways of seeing were much too messy, irrational, and heterogeneous. These
different scopic regimes and technological metaphors often overlapped or conflicted in
ways that were not always consistent or coherent. We are dealing with theories of vision,
after all, that were crafted by people who were often stoned out of their gourds; people
who were ecstatically trying to convince others to join them in their fantastic new ways
of seeing. Leary is a particularly difficult character to pin down in this regard. His “turn
on, tune in, drop out” mantra is certainly his most famous and influential metaphor, but
throughout his writings he embraces a wide range of different technologies of vision to
articulate his psychedelic theories. Like Kesey, for example, Leary frequently draws upon
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cinematic models and vocabularies in his writing. In High Priest, he describes an acid trip
in terms of how he “shot reels of retinal film” (Leary, 1968/1995, p. 223). In The
Psychedelic Experience, he similarly talks about how he has “kinescoped” his own
consciousness (Leary et al., 1964/1995, p. 63), remarking at the end of the trip that “Each
person has shot his own film” (Leary et al., 1964/1995, p. 112). Sometimes these
metaphors get quite mixed or convoluted in the context of the discourses of vision
described throughout this chapter. In High Priest, for instance, he refers to the
“Electronic hum of the neural film projector” (Leary, 1968/1995, p. 325). And in Turn
On, Tune In, Drop Out, he crafts the following interpretation of the central nervous
system, jumbling up all sorts of optical and electronic metaphors:
From the genetic point of view, your nervous system and my nervous
system is a hinge, a curious cellular hinge on which all of evolutionary
history pivots. The cosmic Fox Movietone newsreel camera. Turn your
nervous system on and focus it outside and you’re tuning in on all sorts of
messages and energy constellations that are out there, here and now.
(Leary, 1968/1998b, pp. 136-7)
Kesey’s technological metaphors could sometimes be equally difficult to parse. From a
contemporary perspective, his fascination with electricity, liveness, and the Now seem
more in tune with the discourses of television and computing (McPherson, 2002) than
with cinema per se. Kesey, indeed, kept returning to “electrical forms” throughout his
career: he was obsessed with Captain Marvel and The Flash, two superheroes who wore
lightning bolts on their chests; the first issue of his literary magazine, Spit in the Ocean
(1974), featured a jester with flashes of electricity bursting out of his fingers; and, as we
will discuss further in Chapter Three, his mixed-media happenings in the mid-1960s were
billed as electronic experiences. Throughout his discussions of cinema, in fact, it often
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sounds like he could also be talking about television; the line between the two
technologies isn’t always clear. We could say that he perhaps turned to cinema as a tool
and metaphor for exploring vision because it was a more available technology, or because
of the excitement about cinema that was brewing among the New Wave movements; but
we could equally argue that it reflected the fact these different technologies did not have
the same associations attached to them as they do today. This is to say that the discourses
of vision and technology in the psychedelic era represented a contested and shifting
terrain. Through their various theories of perception, the different psychedelic theorists
discussed in this chapter were engaged in a process of working out the cultural meanings
of these different technologies.
In the two chapters that follow, we will continue to explore how these assorted discourses
of vision and technology were disseminated and built upon throughout the broader
psychedelic landscape of the 1960s. We will begin with a further exploration of cinematic
models of perception in Chapter Two; and we will conclude with an investigation of
cybernetics and electronic/digital media in Chapter Three.

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CHAPTER TWO: EXPANDING CINEMA
Since the birth of motion pictures, cinema and drugs have been frequent bedfellows: the
camp hysteria of classical exploitation films like Narcotic (1933) and Reefer Madness
(1936); Frank Sinatra shooting smack in The Man With the Golden Arm (1955); the pot
humor of Cheech and Chong, Harold and Kumar, and The Dude; Al Pacino sinking his
head into a mountain of cocaine at the end of Scarface (1983); Johnny Depp and Benicio
Del Toro imbibing a full cocktail bar of chemicals in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
(1998). It is, therefore, no surprise that Kesey and Leary were far from alone in making
connections between cinema and the psychedelic experience. References to film were,
indeed, rife throughout the body of psychedelic drug literature: the medium frequently
being employed as a form of shorthand to describe the fantastic visions of an acid trip.
Allusions to cinema can be traced back to the very origins of LSD. The psychoactive
properties of the compound were first discovered in 1943 when Albert Hofmann, a Swiss
chemist, accidentally absorbed a microscopic amount through his fingertips. In what
would become the first-ever written account of an acid trip, Hofmann implicitly evoked
cinema as a means of communicating to his colleagues what he had experienced:
Last Friday, April 16,1943, I was forced to interrupt my work in the
laboratory in the middle of the afternoon and proceed home, being
affected by a remarkable restlessness, combined with a slight dizziness. At
home I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxicated-like condition,
characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination. In a dreamlike
state, with eyes closed (I found the daylight to be unpleasantly glaring), I
perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary
shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours
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this condition faded away. (Hoffman, 1980, section 1.4, para. 4; emphasis
added)
Dr. Sidney Cohen, the pioneering LSD researcher who helped administer the drug to
Huxley on his deathbed, similarly used cinema as a metaphor to describe closed-eye
visual experiences during an acid trip. In his 1964 book, LSD: The Beyond Within, Cohen
wrote: “Now the movies are really starting. Some wonderful geometric patterns, brilliant
fireworks, too […] as erratic as some of those futuristic motion pictures they
experimented with some years ago” (Cohen, 1964, pp. 71-3). The psychedelic movement
would itself follow Cohen’s lead by dubbing this phenomenon “eyelid movies.”
Likewise, in Robert Masters and Jean Houston’s The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience
from 1966 — a clinical study of drug use that became a widely disseminated bestseller —
numerous research subjects employed cinematic vocabularies to describe the experiences
of their drug trips. One subject, for instance, articulated an experience of constantly
shifting patterns that were reminiscent of Fantasia (1940): “a play of light and color, a
‘technicolor’ of the mind’s eye” (Masters & Houston, 1966/2000, p. 158). Another
subject described at length the Disney-esque quality of one trip that involved fairy-tale
characters and an enchanted forest (Masters & Houston, 1966/2000, p. 240). In their
analysis of these research subjects, Masters and Houston incorporated cinematic
metaphors of their own, such as in the following passage about the experience of eidetic
images during trips:
In general, whatever the subject knows about, has seen or is able to
imagine may, as eidetic image, appear to him somewhat as these might be
seen in Technicolor still photographs or motion pictures. […] The eidetic
images may appear as a sequence of related or unrelated single “pictures,”
or they may unfold as a continuous movie-like drama in which the subject
may or may not play a part. The images may enter into consciousness as
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meaningless and so have only “entertainment value”; or they may be
supremely meaningful, illuminating the most important areas of the
subject’s life. (Masters & Houston, 1966/2000, p. 156)
Given this strongly perceived conceptual bond between the experience of cinema and the
experience of psychedelics, it is also not surprising that the cultural and artistic
productions of the era explored this union too. Filmmakers were drawn to LSD just as
much as the psychedelic movement was drawn to cinema as a creative tool. This cultural
fusion of cinema and psychedelics in the 1960s was by no means an accidental or chance
alliance: the pioneers of the psychedelic movement actively endeavored to enlist the
artistic and intellectual establishment, in the hope that acid would trickle down from the
top. Allen Ginsberg, for example, had a scheme to turn the whole world on by starting
with the Manhattan elites, which Leary described as follows:
And so Allen spun out the cosmic campaign. He was to line up influentials
and each weekend I would come down to New York and we’d run
mushroom sessions. This fit our Harvard research plans perfectly. Our aim
there was to learn how people reacted, to test the limits of the drug, to get
creative and thoughtful people to take them and tell us what they saw and
what we should do with the mushrooms. Allen’s political plan was
appealing, too. […] And then too, the big-name bit was intriguing.
Meeting and sharing visions with the famous. (Leary, 1968/1995, p. 128)
Between the free-for-alls of Kesey’s Acid Tests and the elite, $500-per-trip sessions
being offered by the International Foundation for Advanced Study, a similar turning-on
of the artistic community was occurring on the West Coast as well. The New Hollywood
crowd, who were steadily replacing the old Hollywood studio system in the 1960s,
defined themselves in terms of being aligned with the lifestyles and values of the
counterculture, so drug use was a natural part of that scene. Underground filmmakers had
developed an aesthetic well suited to lysergic sensibilities; so many of them became
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involved in the burgeoning scene of psychedelic mixed-media happenings. And even
some of Hollywood’s old guard, like Cary Grant and Otto Preminger, sang the praises of
LSD from the rooftops in an effort to convert their peers.
Throughout Chapter Two, I will be exploring this connection between cinema and
psychedelics in more detail, examining how cinematic models of vision were tested,
explored, and transformed by the psychedelic cultural productions of the 1960s. First, I
will focus on the explosion of psychedelic feature films that occurred in the latter half of
the decade. I will examine how this body of “head films” used the cinematic apparatus to
represent psychedelic experience; and I will assess the terms on which they framed
psychedelic perception as a new way of seeing. In other words, I will be analyzing how
feature filmmakers contributed to discourses about vision and technology by putting the
cinematic apparatus to work in the production of psychedelic experiences. In the second
part of the chapter, I will continue this investigation of psychedelic–cinematic vision by
examining the central role that cinema played in the psychedelic mixed-media
happenings of the era. Throughout the chapter, I will argue that the cultural productions
of the psychedelic era presupposed a connection between “expanded consciousness” and
“expanded cinema”; and I will aim to unpack the implications of this connection within
the context of the histories of vision and technology established in Chapter One.
Hollywood Heads and the Psychedelic Feature Film
During the 1960s, especially during the second half of the decade, the influence of
psychedelia could be felt across the full spectrum of film production in the United States
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and beyond: from casual, fleeting references to the drug culture to intense, immersive,
psychedelic odysseys. A survey of different branches of the film industry reveals how
deeply psychedelic culture permeated the cinematic landscape of the sixties. For the
purposes of space, and the purposes of keeping the discussion focused on the cultural
traditions of vision and visuality established in Chapter One, I will limit my analysis in
this chapter for the most part to feature films made in the United States and Great Britain.
The first representation of an LSD trip in film was in William Castle’s The Tingler
(1959), a low-budget horror movie about a shrimp-like creature that purportedly lives
inside every human being, feeding on the host’s sense of terror. The film stars Vincent
Price as a scientist studying the effects of fear on the human body who self-administers
LSD in an effort to confront the titular creature, resulting in a horrific hallucination
involving a deaf–mute woman and a bathtub full of blood. The Tingler, of course,
predated the Summer of Love by almost a decade. It anticipated some of the structural
and stylistic devices of later psychedelic feature films, but the context of LSD use within
the narrative was purely clinical and scientific. By the time psychedelic cinema exploded
in the United States and Great Britain, circa 1966, this positioning of LSD would be quite
different: the integration of psychedelic drugs took many forms, but in almost all cases
the inclusion of psychedelic visuals was deeply associated with the contemporaneous
counterculture and youth movement. In other words, paramount to the integration of
psychedelics into commercial feature films of the late-sixties was the topicality of LSD.
In countless movies from the era, this topicality surfaced as a background texture in films
that were otherwise not about the psychedelic movement. In other words, psychedelic
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culture was so fashionable and ubiquitous that it became a primary signifier of topicality
for films depicting the contemporary society. Petulia (1968), for example, is a modernist
romance set in San Francisco that features musical performances by the Grateful Dead
and Janis Joplin. The film is mostly concerned with the impact of automation on
interpersonal relationships within capitalist society, and the Haight-Ashbury psychedelic
community in the movie mostly serves as a background counterpoint to the lives of the
upper-middle class leading characters. Likewise, in movies such as Point Blank (1967),
The President’s Analyst (1967), Coogan’s Bluff (1968), and Midnight Cowboy (1969),
discrete scenes involving psychedelic happenings appear as part of the depiction of the
social milieu in which the films are set — and they mostly serve to emphasize the male
protagonist’s difference from that culture.
Many other feature films from the period seized on the topicality of psychedelics by
using LSD as a narrative device to spice up old genre formulas. Jigsaw (1968) and The
Big Cube (1969), for example, both attempted to give dusty murder-mystery plots a fresh
sheen by introducing LSD into the proceedings. The former is a remake of an amnesia-
themed Gregory Peck picture entitled Mirage (1965), and stars Bradford Dillman as a
man who fears he may have killed a woman during an acid trip. The latter stars George
Chakiris as a malevolent golddigger who covertly sends Lana Turner on several acid trips
in an effort to get at her money. Elsewhere, the screwball comedy formula of the 1930s
was updated to the San Francisco of the 1960s in I Love You, Alice B. Toklas (1968),
which stars Peter Sellers as a buttoned-down lawyer who falls in with Venice Beach
hippies after he eats some pot-laced brownies. Gangster movie conventions were spoofed
by Skidoo (1968), which stars Jackie Gleason as an imprisoned Mob hit man who gets
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turned-on by accidentally licking LSD-laced postage stamps. Casino Royale (1967) put a
satirical spin on Bond movie conventions by featuring a torture technique involving LSD
vapor. And even the Wild West was dressed up in psychedelic garb in Zachariah (1971),
a film that was dubbed “the first electric western.”
Meanwhile, just as bootlegging, marijuana, rock ‘n’ roll, and juvenile delinquency had
been presented as cultural ills in films from decades past, LSD became the controversy
du jour for social problem films of the sixties. In Riot on Sunset Strip (1967), good-girl
Mimsy Farmer hangs out with the wrong crowd and ends up experiencing an intense,
slow-motion freak out after dropping acid at a house party. Both Hallucination
Generation (1966) and The Love-Ins (1967) feature corrupt, Leary-esque gurus who
attempt to lure young people into wayward lives of anti-social hedonism. Electric Shades
of Grey (1970) charts a priest’s melodramatic decline into psychedelic drug use. And
Wild in the Streets (1968) satirizes social problem film conventions with a cautionary tale
of youth empowerment about a rock star who becomes the President and puts everyone
over 30 into LSD concentration camps. That hysterical offshoot of the social problem
genre — the classroom scare film — was not to be left by the wayside either when it
came to the demonizing of psychedelic drugs. The production of propagandist, anti-drug
films for use in high schools became a thriving business in the late-1960s, and studies
such as LSD: Insight or Insanity? (1967), LSD: Trip or Trap? (1967), and LSD: A Trip to
Where? (1968), all featured preposterous acid trip sequences that never failed to link
psychedelic drug use to mental breakdowns or premature death.
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The fantastic, otherworldly qualities of acid trips also found expression in the era’s
science fiction and fantasy films, which were given license to mobilize psychedelic
imagery without explicit reference to actual drug use. In both Barbarella (1968) and
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), traveling through space is visually represented as a
psychedelic experience — the latter famously turning into an extended light show
sequence as Dave (Keir Dullea) passes through the Stargate Corridor. In low-budget fare
like Something Weird (1967) and Psyched by the 4-D Witch (1971), ESP powers are
represented in the form of psychedelic hallucinations. And a number of fantasy films
aimed at children gave sly winks to the psychedelic crowd, such as The Phantom
Tollbooth (1969), Pufnstuf (1970), and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)
— not to mention the profitable re-releases of Disney’s Fantasia (1940) and Alice in
Wonderland (1951) that occurred in the early-1970s to capitalize on the popularity of the
films among countercultural audiences.
At the seedier end of the cinematic spectrum, psychedelic themes also became a common
feature of “adults only” entertainments. Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
(1970) was the mostly widely distributed — it was produced by 20
th
Century Fox as part
of the studio’s brief flirtation with X-rated movies — and was filled with outrageous,
psychedelic-fueled parties in its satirical portrait of a female rock band trying to make it
big in Los Angeles. Alice in Acidland (1968) was a T&A movie masquerading as a
documentary, in which Alice is transformed from the wholesome girl-next-door into a
mentally unstable lesbian after an erotically charged LSD experience. Mantis in Lace
(1968) tells the story of Lila, an erotic dancer who drops acid and murders men during
intercourse. The Acid Eaters (1968) focuses on a group of weekend bikers who ride out
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into the Mojave for a psychedelic orgy in a mystical white pyramid. The Weird World of
LSD (1967) applied LSD trip sequences to an episodic, burlesque format. Wanda the
Sadistic Hypnotist (1967) mixed LSD with sado-masochistic erotica. And Behind the
Green Door (1972), one of the key films of the early-seventies boom in hardcore
pornography, climaxed with an extended sequence of solarized sex footage.
Underground psychedelic cinema, of course, was not limited to just the sleaze pits of the
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nd
Street grindhouses. The sixties marked the emergence of a new generation of
experimental, avant-garde filmmakers in the United States — dubbed the New American
Cinema — and many were directly involved in the psychedelic movement. Filmmakers
such as Ronald Nameth, Ben Van Meter, Jonas Mekas, and Stan Vanderbeek all
participated in producing (and documenting) psychedelic mixed-media happenings.
Several underground filmmakers also made significant feature-length films with
psychedelic themes: Conrad Rooks’ semi-autobiographical Chappaqua (1966) depicted
his battles with a wide assortment drug addictions, and featured such countercultural
luminaries as Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Ravi Shankar, and Moondog; Ciao!
Manhattan (1972) was a wild, psychedelic collage of the last five years in the life of Edie
Sedgwick. The New American Cinema’s fervent interest in abstract films also helped to
create a template for the psychedelic style of the 1960s — even if many of those abstract
filmmakers were themselves several degrees removed from the psychedelic movement.
Oscar Fischinger’s animated musical films of the 1930s and his color organs of the
1950s, for example, influenced how psychedelic filmmakers approached audio-visual
synesthesia; the abstract cosmic cinema of Jordon Belson provided a model for
integrating Eastern spiritual themes into non-representational modes of film production,
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and Stan Brakhage’s proto-psychedelic cinema challenged filmgoers to see the world
through untutored eyes, even though he himself was adamantly opposed to drug use and
spent most of the sixties holed up in a Colorado mountain cabin. All of these antecedents
can be seen in a sixties underground movie like Storm De Hirsch’s Peyote Queen (1965),
a short abstract film that did directly address psychedelic drugs, as well as in the mixed-
media shows of the psychedelic era, which would be unimaginable without this backbone
of experimental avant-garde cinema.
The more commercially oriented filmmakers of the New Hollywood movement also
turned to psychedelic subject matter as an expression of their affiliation with the
counterculture, producing some of the most iconic and enduring LSD films of the era. In
the grandfather of all acid movies, The Trip (1967), Peter Fonda’s character searches for
meaning in his empty life and is guided by Bruce Dern and Dennis Hopper through his
first LSD experience. Fonda and Hopper would team up again two years later in the
enormously influential Easy Rider (1969), which plunges into a bad acid trip in a New
Orleans cemetery towards the end of the duo’s cross-country motorcycle journey. In Paul
Mazursky’s Alex in Wonderland (1970) — a riff on Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963) —
Donald Sutherland plays a self-absorbed film director who drops acid in his search for
creative inspiration. And Jack Nicholson, who wrote The Trip and co-starred in Easy
Rider, also made a name for himself with several other psychedelic feature films from the
late-1960s: he co-starred in Psych-Out (1968) as a Haight-Ashbury musician whose acid
rock band plays alongside the Strawberry Alarm Clock on the psychedelic ballroom
circuit, and he co-wrote Head (1968), a lysergically-enhanced movie spin-off from the
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Monkees’ television series that cynically skewers the entertainment industry and exposes
the band as empty, corporate phonies.
The strong connection to rock music in many of these New Hollywood films was a core
component of numerous other films of the psychedelic era. The Beatles took a page out
the Merry Pranksters’ book and embarked on a psychedelic road trip around England in
Magical Mystery Tour (1967). Meanwhile, the group’s animated alter egos took a trippy
voyage from Liverpool to Pepperland in Yellow Submarine (1968). George Harrison went
solo to produce and score Wonderwall (1968), a comic fable about a lonely professor
who spies on the swinging happenings in the apartment of the fashion model who lives
next door. Frank Zappa directed 200 Motels (1971), a phantasmagoric representation of
how life on the road drives musicians crazy. Mick Jagger played a drugged-out rock star
trading identities with an East End gangster in Performance (1970). Jagger’s girlfriend at
the time, Marianne Faithfull, was “naked under leather” as she rode through the
psychedelic landscapes of The Girl on a Motorcycle (1968). Sun Ra took a cosmic ride
through inner and outer space in his sci-fi/blaxploitation/jazz epic, Space is the Place
(1974). And director Ken Russell joined forces with The Who for the psychedelic rock
operas Tommy (1975) and Lisztomania (1975).
Psychedelic rock musicians in performance were also the centerpieces of a number of
documentary concert films, including Monterey Pop (1968), Woodstock (1970), and
Rainbow Bridge (1972). Elsewhere in the world of documentary filmmaking, Peter
Whitehouse’s Tonite Let’s Make Love in London (1967) and Pink Floyd London ’66-’67
(1967) focused on the music scene of swinging London, particularly the “14 Hour
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Technicolor Dream” concert at Alexander Palace in April 1967; and various facets of the
Californian psychedelic scene were explored in such documentaries as Mondo Mod
(1966), The Hippie Revolt (1967), Like It Is (1968), and Revolution (1968).
Outside of the United States and Great Britain, many of the same patterns of psychedelic
cinema were evident. European art cinema of the 1960s saw a number of auteur directors
touching on psychedelic themes: the colorful flights of fantasy in Federico Fellini’s Juliet
of the Spirits (1965) and Satyricon (1969) were influenced by the director’s experiences
with LSD; Barbet Schroeder examined the darker side of drug addiction in the Pink
Floyd-scored More (1969); Claude Chabrol concluded La Rupture (1970) with an acid
trip sequence that rounded out the film’s critique of the bourgeoisie; and Michelangelo
Antonioni explored swinging London and the California counterculture in Blowup (1966)
and Zabriskie Point (1970). Popular European cinema also frequently turned lysergic:
LSD: Flesh of the Devil (1967) was an Italian spy film about a plot to take over the world
by dosing the global population with LSD; A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971) was an
Italian giallo thriller that featured LSD as a plot device in a hallucinatory murder
mystery; Fantastic Planet (1973) was a trippy, animated, sci-fi movie from France; and
the prolific Jess Franco made a mind-boggling series of “sexadelic” erotic-horror movies
like Succubus (1968), Venus in Furs (1969), She Killed in Ecstasy (1971), and Vampyros
Lesbos (1971). In Asia, psychedelic style saturated Shuji Terayama’s Throw Away Your
Books, Rally in the Streets (1971), Shunya Ito’s Female Convict Scorpion films (1972-
1973), Kinji Fukasaku’s baroque Black Lizard (1968), and the pop yakuza spectacles of
Seijan Suzuki. And in Latin America, Argentine director Emilio Vieyra employed mod
styles and psychedelic visuals in such horror films as The Blood of the Virgins (1967) and
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The Curious Dr. Humpp (1967); Brazilian director José Mojica Marins delivered a mind-
bending treatise on LSD and the Cinema Novo with Awakening of the Beast (1969); and,
in Mexico, Alejandro Jodorowsky directed El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain
(1973), two seminal head films that enjoyed enormous success as midnight movies in the
United States — thanks to financial support and an endorsement from John Lennon.
As this far-from-comprehensive survey shows, psychedelic culture appeared in feature
films of the late-1960s and early-1970s in an enormously broad range of ways. Some
films sought to represent the subjective experience of an acid trip; others documented the
cultural sights and sounds of the psychedelic movement; others still merely alluded to
psychedelic experience through the use of trippy visuals or fantasy narratives. Some films
promoted psychedelic drug use; others warned of its dangers to health and sanity. Some
films closely aligned their psychedelic concerns with the values and discourses of the
counterculture; others drew upon psychedelic themes in a much more casual, faddish, or
exploitative manner. In other words, this was an extremely varied, heterogeneous body of
films representing a wide array of different attitudes towards drug use and the
psychedelic movement. As Harry Benshoff notes, LSD films gained popularity with
audiences in the late-1960s because of their iconographic or semantic appeal —
principally, the use of the cinematic apparatus to approximate the sensations of an acid
trip — but the syntactical meanings of the films were often quite muddled: i.e., they
never came together with a consistent or coherent message about psychedelic experiences
or psychedelic culture (Benshoff, 2001, p. 29).
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In Benshoff’s assessment, this lack of a stable syntax was a key reason why the
psychedelic cinema of the late-1960s was such a short-lived genre: it never managed to
take root around a codified set of myths or narrative conventions like more established
genres; and, as the counterculture splintered and dissolved in the 1970s, psychedelic films
started to lose the topical capital that had sustained them throughout the previous decade.
It would be a mistake, however, to simply dismiss this body of films on these grounds, as
though their lack of longevity or failure to congeal into a coherent canon were symptoms
of their cultural insignificance. On the contrary, it is precisely in this heterogeneity of
attitudes and opinions that this body of films acquires its historical significance. These
movies represented a primary site in which battles were being waged over cinema as a
scopic regime in the context of the psychedelic movement. Put differently, cinema was
still a dominant metaphor for perception in the 1960s, and the diversity in how LSD films
used the cinematic apparatus to address psychedelic vision was reflective of the diversity
in how cinematic ways of seeing were being challenged or defended by filmmakers from
different constituencies.
In order to tackle this sprawling group of films, and as a means of continuing the themes
of the discussion from Chapter One, my analysis of these movies will prioritize those
films that were: (1) explicitly concerned with themes of vision and visuality; (2) aligned
with or embraced by the psychedelic movement; and (3) widely distributed or deemed of
cultural importance, such that they had a significant role in the evolution of psychedelic
discourses of vision. In other words, the discussion in this chapter will focus primarily on
the commercial feature films that led the charge and framed the debates about cinema in
the psychedelic era, films that continued and expanded the discourses of Huxley, Kesey,
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Leary, and Lilly. The movies that most closely fit this sampling criteria include such
seminal head films as The Trip, Head, Wonderwall, Psych-Out, Easy Rider, Yellow
Submarine, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. This subset of films will be used as a gateway
into any broader analysis that includes films that mobilized psychedelic themes or
psychedelic style in a more casual, exploitative, or critical manner.
Cinematic Acid Trips: An Inventory of Effects
A consistent theme at the core of all of the films under discussion in this chapter — even
the more casual or exploitative ones — was the promise of expanded consciousness
through cinematic means. If just one thread had to be chosen to tie this whole body of
films together, it would be the notion that the film medium can alter perceptions in a way
that is analogous to psychedelic drugs: that LSD and the cinematic apparatus are both
technologies for manipulating perception and producing fantastic visions.
This promise of expanded consciousness played a central role in the advertising
campaigns for psychedelic films, encouraging a certain set of reading protocols from
audiences. Posters for Psych-Out, for example, described the film as “The Ultimate Head
Trip.” 2001: A Space Odyssey was similarly advertised as “The Ultimate Trip,” and a
social practice developed around the film in which turned-on audience members would
drop acid and lie on the floor in front of the screen to experience the full psychedelic
impact of the Stargate Corridor sequence. When Disney re-released Fantasia and Alice in
Wonderland, the films were given new advertising campaigns that followed in the
tradition of the psychedelic posters used to advertise acid rock concerts and be-ins.
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Fantasia was itself dubbed “The Ultimate Experience” — continuing the “Ultimate”
meme from Psych-Out and 2001: A Space Odyssey, while also capitalizing on the
connotations of the word “experience,” such as Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic
Experience or the Jimi Hendrix Experience. The titles given to The Trip and Head left no
ambiguities about how to read the films. The poster of the former featured the tagline “A
Lovely Sort of Death” and proclaimed that the movie was shot “in Psychedelic Color,”
radio spots for the latter featured swirling cacophonies of sound textures that evoked the
sonic disorientation of an acid trip. Meanwhile, advertisements for Yellow Submarine ran
with a statement from George Harrison that “It’s all in the mind y’know!” and were filled
with quotes from reviewers that described the film as “mind-blowing” and a “wild trip.”
Some even utilized Ken Kesey’s remark that “They say it looks better when you're
stoned.”
This promise of expanded consciousness through cinematic means was also frequently
integrated at a narrative level by presenting stories of protagonists experiencing
psychedelic trips for the first time. Commonly, the protagonist of an LSD film starts off
as a naïve outsider, and during the course of the film s/he enters into and learns about the
world of psychedelic drugs — thus serving as a surrogate for the film’s audience. In the
first scene of The Trip, we are introduced to Paul Groves (Peter Fonda), a director of
glossy television commercials whose marriage is on the rocks. He has never taken a
psychedelic trip before, but he believes it might help him sort out his personal problems.
Psych-Out opens with a Midwestern woman, Jenny (Susan Strasberg), entering the
Haight-Ashbury district on a Greyhound bus. She falls in with a group of rock musicians
at a coffee shop and ends the movie by taking a horrifying STP trip. In I Love You, Alice
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B. Toklas, Peter Sellers plays a straight-laced lawyer whose brother is a Venice Beach
hippie; after eating some pot-laced brownies, Sellers leaves his bride at the alter and
dives headlong into the psychedelic cultural scene. In Skidoo, an old-fashioned mobster
has his life turned upside down by the psychedelic counterculture: first by the group of
hippies that his daughter is hanging out with; then by a prison cellmate, who accidentally
sends him on his first acid trip. And in The Love-Ins, a university professor (Richard
Todd) quits his job in support of the students’ free press association; he moves into a
communal house in Haight-Ashbury and begins to build power and influence as a
psychedelic guru.
In each of these movies, the protagonist (and, by extension, the film’s audience) goes
through a process of education about the psychedelic experience. In The Trip, for
example, John (Bruce Dern) is introduced as Paul’s psychedelic guide and teacher. As
they prepare for the trip, John explains the procedure to Paul, advises him about what he
can expect from the experience, and talks about the different aids they might use to make
the trip more pleasant. During the trip, John continues to direct Paul by making
suggestions and by putting his psychedelic experiences into an appropriate context.
Through this process of education, the narratives of these films chart the protagonist’s
movement away from the normative, everyday modes of perception associated with the
straight world and towards the psychedelic modes of awareness associated with LSD and
the counterculture — which the films depict through a variety of visual and aural
techniques that allow the audience to experience first hand the protagonist’s new
psychedelic encounters.
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This promise of expanded consciousness through cinematic means gave psychedelic
feature films a dual function. On the one hand, they set out to simulate the sensations of
a psychedelic experience. In other words, they mobilized cinematic techniques that would
approximate the feeling of being on a trip, to provide “an-acid-trip-without-acid.”
Sometimes this was an explicit representation of a character’s psychedelic trip, as in the
films just mentioned; sometimes it was more implicit or metaphorical, as in Alice’s trip
through Wonderland or the Beatles’ journey to Pepperland. On the other hand, the films
also set out to stimulate the sensations of a psychedelic experience. In other words, they
mobilized cinematic techniques that would serve to enhance the psychedelic states of an
already turned-on audience. In this sense, the representational accuracy of a film’s
portrayal of an acid trip was secondary to the impact that the employed cinematic
techniques would have on the subjectivity of the psychedelicized observer.
This dual function of simulation and stimulation was at the core of how psychedelic
feature films attempted to “expand” cinema. In both cases, new modes of cinematic
representation and spectatorship were developed to complement the new ways of seeing
associated with psychedelic drug experiences. In films that were aligned with or
sympathetic to the drug counterculture, the simulation of psychedelic experiences was
framed as an expansion of the possibilities of film grammar: the representation of
psychedelic modes of perception being seen as a significant future direction of cinematic
aesthetics and storytelling. The stimulation of the psychedelic observer was positioned as
an opening up of new sets of relationships between spectator and text, which demanded a
different array of reading protocols and a different mode of participation from audience
members. Even in films that were less than sympathetic to the psychedelic movement, or
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in films that were not originally conceived as psychedelic, these reconfigurations of
representation and spectatorship were no less significant — since the intent of the
filmmakers did not necessarily dictate the reception of the films. The production of
Fantasia, for example, pre-dated the discovery of LSD by several years, but that did not
stop turned-on spectators from using its synthesis of animation and music as a potent
psychedelic stimulus. Similarly, anti-drug films that feature inaccurate or poorly-rendered
representations of acid trips have time and again found popularity among the pro-drug
counterculture, who have read the films against the grain and embraced them for their
kitsch value — suggesting that even ineffective simulations might find success as
effective stimulations.
In most existing studies of drug films — such as Michael Starks’s Cocaine Fiends and
Reefer Madness (1982), Jack Stevenson’s Addicted: The Myth and Menace of Drugs in
Film (2000), and Benshoff’s “The Short-Lived Life of the Hollywood LSD Film” (2001)
— a particular emphasis has been placed on the accuracy or authenticity of these films’
simulations of psychedelic experience. The issue of verisimilitude, for example, forms
the basis of Stark’s critical methodology and serves as his primary evaluative criterion:
The Trip is described as “a reasonably successful attempt to depict the LSD experience”
(Starks, 1982, p. 141), but The Love-Ins is dismissed because “the whole thing just is not
convincing” (Starks, 1982, p. 143). I would argue, however, that dwelling too much on
the accuracy or “realism” of a filmic acid trip is somewhat of a fool’s errand. Cinematic
technology is, after all, fundamentally limited in the extent to which it can faithfully or
comprehensively replicate a psychedelic experience: movies can only engage two of the
five senses, and almost all of the feature films discussed in this chapter remain bound to a
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sequential temporality of 24 frames-per-second and to a spatial confinement of a two-
dimensional, rectangular frame. To deep-end on the verisimilitude of filmic acid trips is
to risk overlooking how the dual goals of simulation and stimulation generated a complex
set of interplays between apparatus, representation, and spectatorship. In other words,
what concerns me here is not the development of criteria for evaluating how well
different films use the cinematic apparatus to represent the psychedelic experience.
Rather, I am more interested in examining how the cinematic apparatus was being put to
use (and redefined) within the context of the discourses of vision and technology that
were permeating the psychedelic movement during the 1960s. If cinema was one of the
dominant technological metaphors for visual perception throughout the twentieth century,
and if cinema and LSD possessed a special bond within the discourses of the psychedelic
movement, how exactly did the psychedelic feature films of the late-1960s and early-
1970s contribute to these histories of vision and visual culture?
As is the case with other drug-influenced cinemas, attempts at simulation and stimulation
within psychedelic movies tested the affordances of the medium relative to the
experiential effects of the drug in question. Some cinematic techniques became common
because they resembled psychedelic states of perception; others were popular because of
the impact they had on stoned members of the audience. As Benshoff notes:
How the cinematic apparatus is used to re-create or suggest the effects of
an LSD trip, for both diegetic characters as well as spectators, is a point
that must be explored further. As different drugs work in different ways on
the human nervous system, so will the cinematic devices used to depict
them necessarily vary a great deal. The experiential effects of marijuana,
for example, often include a free-floating mild euphoria and the feeling
that time is moving more slowly. These states are frequently suggested in
film by floating, slow motion steadicam shots. Conversely, cocaine and
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other central nervous system stimulants are readily simulated onscreen
through faster motion, jittery camera work, and choppy editing: Martin
Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990) approximates this effect with striking
verisimilitude. (Benshoff, 2001, p. 32)
The perceived enrichment of sensory information experienced by LSD users is one of the
mainstays of psychedelic feature films, with almost all of the psychedelic movies of the
late-1960s using an intensification of the visual register to signify psychedelic vision.
Beginning with The Tingler, and continuing through such films as Hallucination
Generation, Alice in Acidland, Chappaqua, and Movie Star, American Style; or LSD, I
Hate You! (1966), a large number of films represent this sensory expansion by switching
from black-and-white to color film stock during acid trip sequences. Films that are shot in
color throughout use similar techniques to get the same effect. In 2001: A Space Odyssey,
the austere blacks and whites of outer space are transformed into a colorful light show
during the Stargate Corridor sequence. In Wonderwall, the dark, drab world of the
professor’s apartment is established in stark contrast to the bright, colorful world of his
swinging neighbor. In Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the chocolate factory is a
fantastic, colorful escape from the bleak, monochromatic palette of Charlie’s life on the
outside. And in Yellow Submarine, the city of Liverpool is likewise represented in dreary,
desaturated hues, while the psychedelic Pepperland is imagined as a mythical world of
vibrant, primary colors — a world that is under threat from the Blue Meanies, who want
to turn everything there into a dull shade of blue. At a phenomenological level, the effect
of suddenly oversaturating the color palette creates a visual pop that both mimics the
intensification of color under LSD and provides ample eye candy for the film viewer.
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Another technique in the arsenal of psychedelic style to intensify color was that of
solarization, a photographic printing technique that inverts (in whole or in part) the tonal
or chromatic values of the image: e.g., blacks might become red, whites might become
blue. Near the beginning of Head, for example, there is a musical sequence in which
Mickey Dolenz is seen swimming underwater with a group of mermaids. Solarization
techniques are employed to turn the images into a series of saturated, contrasting color
combinations: in some shots, dark, background tones are rendered hot pink and highlights
appear neon green; in other shots, blacks are printed as electric blues and whites are
transformed into florescent yellows. These solarization effects carry with them a feeling
of seeing a fantastic display of colors that are ordinarily invisible to the naked eye, as
though psychedelic perception has opened up a whole new bandwidth of the visual
spectrum.
Psychedelic visual intensification was also frequently conveyed through a strategy of
visual excess, wherein too much visual information is displayed on screen for it to be
logically or rationally processed. Superimposition, for example, was a common technique
used by psychedelic filmmakers to double, triple, or quadruple the image. Often, optical
superimpositions took the form of kaleidoscopic displays, with the same image multiplied
or reflected a number of times within the film frame. The projection of images and
patterns into the profilmic space of a scene was also commonly used to create a sense of
layering and visual confusion. The sex scenes that Paul imagines in The Trip, for
example, were shot with kaleidoscopic images and Op Art patterns projected onto the
actors, so that their bodies blend in with (and are hard to distinguish from) the
projections. It is a technique that borrowed from the similar use of projected light in rock
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concerts and mixed-media happenings, whilst also transforming the profilmic space into
something otherworldly and baroque, far removed from the conventions of classical
realism and linear perspective. Elsewhere in The Trip, a nightclub scene combines all of
these different methods for multiplying and layering images: moiré patterns and strobe
lights are projected onto the bodies of the band and the go-go dancers on stage; the
performers are then shot through prisms to kaleidoscopically multiply them within the
frame; and these images are then superimposed of top of other such images to further
layer them in the printing process.
Frantic montage sequences were also frequently employed to correspond to the intense
surges of visual phenomena that often accompany an LSD trip. Paul’s visit to the Sunset
Strip in The Trip, for example, is represented as a frenzied collage of images that are
edited together at such a rapid pace that some shots appear for just a single frame: close-
ups of Paul’s face, shots of illuminated billboards and marquees, out-of-focus lights and
abstract light patterns, documentary footage of a be-in at a park, moments of split-screen
with the frame divided into quadrants, heavily tinted shots of Paul that are step-printed to
create stuttered movement — all set to a driving acid jazz score.
Other phenomena associated with psychedelic experiences called for different cinematic
techniques. Spatial disorientation was achieved through a variety of means, ranging from
the use of fisheye lenses to distort depth perception during the Easy Rider acid trip
sequence to the use of oversized props to defamiliarize scale in Head (when the Monkees
are sucked up into a vacuum cleaner) and Wonderwall (when the professor and his rival
fight each other with seven-foot-tall cigarettes and lipstick dispensers). The cinematic
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apparatus also lent itself to the varying forms of temporal disorientation that accompany
an LSD trip. The Sunset Strip sequence from The Trip and Mike Nesmith’s birthday
party in Head, for example, both convey a rapid-fire sense of time speeding up.
Conversely, Mimsy Farmer’s slow motion dancing in Riot on Sunset Strip and Mickey
Dolenz’s suspended freefall from a bridge at the start of Head both extend duration to
evoke a sensation of being in an eternal present. Strobe lighting was also used to distort
temporal perception by interfering with the smooth illusion of motion caused by
persistence-of-vision. When strobe effects are employed — such as in the scene in The
Trip when Paul finds himself trapped in a dark closet and colored strobe lights illuminate
him as he flails about in panic — movement is sliced up into bursts of frames that are
perceived as discrete still images. The temporal psychedelic phenomenon of “flashing”
also found a place in the catalogue of cinematic techniques used by LSD films. Flashing
refers to a moment of temporal disjunction during an acid trip when the subject
experiences a sudden reigniting of an earlier perception: a momentary flashback, to use
the vocabulary of cinema. In The Trip, the phenomenon is explicitly referenced when
Paul “flashes” on a woman he met near the beginning of the film; his subjective
experience of flashing is visually represented in the film by a sudden, almost subliminal
cutaway to the woman in question.
The phenomenon of “eyelid movies” was another feature of the psychedelic experience
that filmmakers sought to represent in their movies. In The Trip, for example, Paul begins
his psychedelic odyssey by putting on an eye mask. As he covers his eyes, the film
assumes a first-person point-of-view shot in which the blindfold slides down over the
camera lens to leave a black screen. In the darkness, abstract patterns of colored light
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appear, signifying that the trip has begun, and we (as spectator–participants) are treated to
about 75 seconds of ethereal psychedelic imagery.
Synesthesia, the blurring of sensory inputs so that one might hear colors or smell sounds,
was also a characteristic of psychedelic experiences that filmmakers sought to translate to
cinema. The poster for Psych-Out, for example, called on patrons to “Listen to the Sound
of Green.” Given that feature films are, for the most part, limited in their inventory of
effects to audio and visual registers, the senses of taste, smell, and touch were not
generally explored as modes of synesthetic experience in psychedelic movies — although
William Castle, director of The Tingler, did attempt something of this nature by
infamously rigging cinema seats with joy buzzers to deliver small shocks to unsuspecting
audience members. As such, most feature films could only tap into synesthetic modes of
perception by combining image and sound, most often by creating trance-like sequences
of “visual music” in which the images function as a corollary of a psychedelic rock or
acid jazz soundtrack. It is rare, in fact, for psychedelic sequences in these films not to be
accompanied by a hypnotic soundtrack. In many such sequences, films literally shift
gears and become visual interpretations of a song: both Head and Yellow Submarine are
structured around a series of songs, each receiving a different visual treatment, and in
films like Psych-Out, The Trip, and 200 Motels, onstage performances by The Strawberry
Alarm Clock, The Electric Flag, and The Mothers of Invention, respectively, form the
basis of psychedelic musical interludes.
If this catalogue of psychedelic techniques represents a variety of ways that the cinematic
apparatus was used to simulate/stimulate the subjective, phenomenological experiences
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of an acid trip, we should also note that many of these films also used the medium to
create psychedelic effects by documenting the cultural sights and sounds of the
psychedelic movement. In the films that explicitly depict the social scene of the
counterculture, taking cameras out into the streets and the nightclubs was a primary
strategy for creating psychedelic visuals: it both exploited a topical curiosity about the
counterculture and provided readymade psychedelic materials on the cheap. Reportage
footage of Haight-Ashbury, for example, plays a central role in films like Psych-Out, The
Love-Ins, and The Hippie Revolt; the Sunset Strip is documented in films like The Trip,
Mondo Mod, and Riot on Sunset Strip; and a tour of the Venice Beach hippie culture is
provided by I Love You, Alice B. Toklas. In other words, in addition to the creation of
psychedelic effects from scratch, leaving the studio soundstages to shoot real-life light
shows, happenings, fashions, and decors was a means by which filmmakers could use the
cinematic apparatus to engage with the psychedelic visual culture of the era.
In examining this inventory of psychedelic visual style, it is clear that the cinematic
apparatus was thought to possess a range of audio-visual affordances for simulating
and/or stimulating psychedelic experiences. What sense, therefore, can we make of this
psychedelic–cinematic style in the context of the histories of vision being addressed in
this study? What do these films say about cinema’s role in the psychedelic movement’s
discourses of vision and technology? What do these films say about the psychedelic
movement’s role in the directions that cinema took in the 1960s?
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Psychedelic Style as an Interrogation of Cinematic Models of
Vision
A key to unpacking these questions lies in the historical and institutional contexts in
which these movies were made. Psychedelic feature films were, of course, not made in a
vacuum: they were products of and participants in a broader set of developments within
the film industry during the 1960s. The psychedelic style and psychedelic themes in these
films, therefore, must be considered in relation to not only the emergence of a new social
counterculture, but also to the emergence of a new set of practices and philosophies
within the film industry itself.
In the United States, the sixties was a decade of crisis and transition for the old
Hollywood studio system: a younger generation of filmmakers was beginning to replace
the old guard, and the major studios’ traditional models of production, distribution, and
exhibition were failing to bring in the guaranteed revenues that they once did. Ever since
the 1948 Supreme Court decision of “United States vs. Paramount Pictures, Inc.” —
which ruled that the Hollywood majors were in violation of antitrust laws that prohibited
the kind of vertically integrated oligopoly that they had created — the studio system had
been on shaky economic ground. By the mid-fifties, in accordance with the Paramount
decision, the studios had divested themselves of their theater chains, which meant that
they now had to (in theory) compete with independent producers for exhibition spaces. At
the same time, audiences were beginning to dwindle from their postwar high, a result of
such factors as the emergence of television and the birth of the suburbs. By the time the
sixties rolled around, the confidence and stability of the Hollywood system was in tatters.
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As Mark Harris points out in Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the
New Hollywood:
In the early 1960s, the American studio film had bottomed out: Even
many of its own manufacturers and purveyors felt they had dragged the
medium to a creative low point in the sound era. “It wasn't just that we
were sick of the system,” recalls the director Arthur Penn. “At that point,
the system was sick of itself.” And with good reason: Though a handful of
movies, as ever, either transcended convention or executed it with
exhilarating skill, what Hollywood was primarily invested in turning out
in 1963 were dozens of war movies and westerns (generally with aging
stars and increasingly threadbare and recycled plots), biblical spectaculars
of great scale and diminishing returns, musicals with an ever more strident
sense of nostalgia, tinny, sexually repressive romantic comedies, and
huge, unseaworthy battleships like Cleopatra, The Longest Day, and the
remake of Mutiny on the Bounty. Many of these films would draw
audiences, and every year, at least a couple of them would get Academy
Award nominations for Best Picture, in stoic recognition of their bloat and
expenditure. But nobody, not even their makers, was particularly inclined
to defend them as creative enterprises. (Harris & James, 2008)
Some of those unseaworthy battleships, indeed, nearly sunk the studios that had made
them. MGM, which had recently been rocked by the death of its founder and head, Louis
B. Mayer, was plunged deep into the red by the costly Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)
remake. In the wake of Cleopatra (1963), 20
th
Century Fox was even temporarily shut
down as a drastic cost-cutting measure. Elsewhere, Universal Studios had substantially
scaled down its movie slate and was primarily becoming associated with television
production. And in 1967, Jack Warner, the last remaining studio head of the Golden Era,
ceded control of Warner Bros. to a Canadian corporation, Seven Arts — the first step in
the company’s transformation from an autonomous Hollywood studio to a subsidiary of
an immense, multinational, transmedia conglomerate.
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Concurrent with this precipitous decline of the old Hollywood system, alternative
filmmaking models began to flourish. The underground films of the New America
Cinema movement found audiences in “makeshift East Village theaters and fusty 16mm
cinematheques” (Kloman, 1968, D15). There was a global explosion of New Wave
movements and festival-oriented auteur cinemas, which was complemented in the United
States by a sudden upsurge in the art house theater business that had been steadily
growing since the end of World War II (Wilinsky, 2001). Breakthrough European films
such as Godard’s A bout de souffle (1960), Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960), and
Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960) held engagements for several years in the early-1960s at
big city art house theaters in the United States, each becoming central texts for discussion
and debate among the chattering class. Meanwhile, drive-in movie theaters, which had
also been flourishing since the late-1940s, had by the 1960s become the locus for a
thriving industry of youth-oriented exploitation pictures (Clark, 1995). Throughout the
1950s and 1960s, drive-ins theaters were being denied first-run films by the Hollywood
majors and — despite the Paramount decision — independent producers were still being
muscled out of the prestige picture palaces. A set of independent companies, most
notably American International Pictures (AIP), stepped in to fill the void, providing
drive-in theaters with low-cost, first-run films that were explicitly marketed to young
people by exploiting hip, topical subject material: rock ‘n’ roll movies, hot rod films,
alien invasion pictures, beach movies, biker flicks, and so on. It was under the tutelage of
Roger Corman, AIP’s premier filmmaker and the director of The Trip, that a large
number of the New Hollywood filmmakers learned their craft: Francis Ford Coppola,
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Martin Scorsese, Jack Nicholson, Peter Bogdanovich, Monte Hellman, Richard Rush,
Robert Towne, and many more.
Broadly speaking, all of these new cinema movements could be considered part of
Kesey’s Neon Renaissance. Each movement, in its own way, was searching for fresh
filmmaking models that challenged the established Hollywood tradition; and each
flourished by offering cinematic visions that could not be found in the pictures of the
studio system, where one eye was always on the Production Code and the other was on
the bottom line. Art houses buzzed from the political oomph of The Battle of Algiers
(1966) and from the exposed flesh of Brigitte Bardot in Contempt (1963); drive-ins and
grindhouse theaters served up the raunchy fantasies of Russ Meyer alongside the gore-
drenched horror epics of Herschell Gordon Lewis; cinematheques and art galleries
screened everything from a three minute film composed of thousands of moth wings to an
eight hour, real-time document of somebody sleeping. A serious-minded Hollywood
picture like Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker (1964), meanwhile, was held up for over a
year by the Production Code while its producers battled over five seconds of non-
titillating, dramatically-essential nudity.
It was out of these alternative filmmaking traditions that most of the psychedelic feature
films of the 1960s emerged — in large part because of the practical restrictions of the
Hollywood film industry in the 1960s. Before the introduction of the MPAA ratings
system in 1968, industry censorship tightly regulated the explicit depiction of drug use in
Hollywood movies. American filmmakers who wanted to explore psychedelic drug
themes head-on, therefore, were forced into making movies for venues that didn’t require
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a seal of approval from the Production Code or the Catholic Legion of Decency, such as
the art house or drive-in circuits. Most of the youth-oriented LSD movies were tailor-
made for drive-in theaters, with AIP itself being responsible for the financing and
distribution of such films as The Trip, Psych-Out, Riot on Sunset Strip, and Wild in the
Streets, and the formal experimentation of psychedelic movies was built on the shoulders
of art house and underground cinema. Such connections were not lost on the critics of the
era and were much remarked upon in movie reviews and magazine articles. Take, for
instance, the critical assessments of The Trip: Bosley Crowther’s review in the New York
Times likened the film’s psychedelic techniques to the phantasmagoric effects in Fellini’s
Juliet of the Spirits (Crowther, 1967, p. 43). Variety likewise remarked that Corman
“dabbles in Bergman and Fellini symbols and techniques” (Dool, 1967). The Los Angeles
Times called it “the most unabashed art film ever to come out of Hollywood […]
Marienbad for the masses, Ingmar Bergman for the teenyboppers, Dali for the drive-ins”
(Thomas, 1967, p. 93). The Los Angeles Free Press compared Corman’s techniques in
the film to those of Stan Brakhage and Ed Emshwiller (Youngblood, 1967, p. 13). And
the March 1968 issue of American Cinematographer ran a cover story by Bob Beck on
the visual effects in The Trip, in which he described how he came to work on the film
after Roger Corman sought out the help of San Francisco light show artists (Beck, 1968).
As we saw in Chapter One, in Kesey’s embrace of New Wave cinema, a fraternal bond of
sorts developed between the psychedelic counterculture and the emergent filmmaking
movements. It is no accident that the standard-bearer of the New Hollywood revolution
— Easy Rider — was a film that explored psychedelic and countercultural themes.
Indeed, in the wake of Easy Rider’s success, the joke in Hollywood was that anyone
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could get their film made if they wore long hair and love beads. One of the most
significant things about the psychedelic movies of the 1960s, therefore, was that they
stood at a nexus point between the psychedelic movement and New Wave cinemas. The
films occupied a space of convergence between the visual concerns of the psychedelic
movement and the scopic regimes of emergent filmmaking traditions: a space in which
cinema was being used as a tool for exploring psychedelic experience, and psychedelic
experience was being used as a tool for exploring cinema. A film like The Trip, for
example, use psychedelic techniques to push the envelope of what was possible in
commercial cinema — it was at once avant-garde and Hollywood, art house and
grindhouse — and it provided the psychedelic counterculture with a potent new set of
cinematic models for understanding its own investigations into perception and
consciousness.
What the psychedelic movement and the New Wave cinemas of the 1960s most shared in
common was ambivalence towards hegemonic, institutionalized ways of seeing —
particularly towards the regimenting of vision that had been perfected by the Hollywood
studio system. To reiterate Kesey from Chapter One, both movements were founded upon
“a need to find a new way to look at the world, an attempt to locate a better reality, now
that the old reality is riddled with radioactive poison” (Perry, 1996, p. 37). In the work of
Kesey, Huxley, and Leary, we saw these tensions manifesting in a set of dichotomies
between “everyday” and “psychedelic” modes of perception. In the body of psychedelic
movies from the late-1960s, these dichotomies played out very explicitly at a narrative
level within the films. Very few feature films were 100% psychedelic in nature; most
were built around a division between “straight” and “psychedelic” vision. As noted
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earlier, the narratives of most LSD movies focused on a straight-laced protagonist going
on a journey into the psychedelic lifestyle. Our narrative entry point in these films,
therefore, is the straight, everyday mode of perception associated with the protagonist: it
is the ground from which psychedelic visions take flight.
Since cinema is a visual medium, filmmakers needed to find ways to visually represent
this movement from “straight” to “psychedelic” modes of perception. The cinematic
codes that they used to visually differentiate between straight and psychedelic perception
spoke volumes about the filmmakers’ own scopic agendas. As outlined above,
psychedelic vision was depicted using avant-garde techniques developed by light show
artists and underground filmmakers. No less significant, however, was the vocabulary
used to represent straight, everyday perception: namely, the codes of cinematic realism
found in documentary and classical Hollywood cinema. It is important that we
underscore this dichotomy between experimental abstraction and classical realism and in
the visual structures of psychedelic movies because it is easy to overlook the
“transparency” of the latter by focusing on the attention-grabbing visuality of the former.
The realist style of classical Hollywood cinema may have presented itself as “seamless”
and “unmarked,” but it was no less a construction than the psychedelic style: it was no
less a regimentation of vision, it was no less a “way of seeing.”
In a number of psychedelic movies from the 1960s, straight perception was explicitly
aligned with the documentary style. Mondo Mod and The Hippie Revolt are both
examples of legitimate documentaries about the counterculture. For much of their
running time, they adhere to the familiar, objective codes of documentary filmmaking:
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both films functioning as exposés of different subsections of the hippie lifestyle, ranging
from the Sunset Strip of Mondo Mod to the San Francisco be-ins and communes of The
Hippie Revolt. We see real people and real situations throughout both films; but we also
see extended, trancelike, psychedelic sequences when the cameras go inside the
nightclubs and ballrooms. The Hippie Revolt, for example, features a lengthy segment on
a go-go dancer at a psychedelic club. The sequence lasts for several minutes as the dancer
gyrates to the music, visually engulfed in the colored lights, strobes, and moiré patterns
of a light show presentation, and it seems to exist in the film purely to get some mileage
out of the trippy eroticism of the performance. The film never completely jettisons its
documentary realism — we are left to assume that this is a real dancer at a real club —
but it allows the psychedelic trappings of the performance to take hold of the movie for
an extended stretch of the running time. It allows the viewer to drift away from the
illusion of objective reality into something different, something more oceanic and
otherworldly.
A number of other psychedelic films took a pseudo-documentary approach to the
representation of straight, everyday perception. The Weird World of LSD, for example, is
an episodic faux documentary about the effects of LSD on different groups of people.
The zero-budget film constructs its quotidian reality from stock footage of mundane folks
doing mundane things, presided over by a voice-of-authority narrator; it then careens into
subjective representations of the acid trips, such as one woman who hallucinates about
being an exotic striptease dancer. Alice in Acidland follows a similar strategy. It begins
with another voice-of-authority narrator (a psychiatrist) talking us through a docudrama
exposé of suburban teen life. The focus of the presented case study is Alice, a good kid
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who falls in with the wrong crowd and indulges in sex and pot parties. The film
constructs Alice’s everyday reality using a detached, black-and-white, fly-on-the-wall
style; but when Alice drops acid towards the end of the story, the film embarks on a
radical stylistic U-turn as it dives into a subjective psychedelic trip sequence. Alice enters
into a nonrepresentational black void, the film stock switches to color, and a range of
trippy, formalist techniques are utilized: superimpositions, flashing colored lights, out-of-
focus shots, abstract patterns projected onto bodies, strange electronic sound effects.
When she returns to everyday reality at the end of the film, Alice has lost her mind and is
confined in a straitjacket at a psychiatric hospital.
In most LSD films from the 1960s, however, straight perception is represented using the
codes and conventions of classical Hollywood realism: a style that used systems of
narrative causality and spatial/temporal continuity to the “suturing” of the viewer into a
diegetic story world (Bordwell, 1985). It is often described as a “transparent” style
because it masks the marks of the film’s own production, discouraging the viewer from
paying attention to how the story world is visually constructed by the cinematic
apparatus. We can see this approach at work in the representation of straight, everyday
reality in such films as The Trip, Psych-Out, Wonderwall, Riot on Sunset Strip, The Love-
Ins, Skidoo, and Easy Rider. In these films, the stylistic shifts towards psychedelic modes
of vision function as disruption of the regulated, reified codes of classical Hollywood
realism: an interruption of a familiar cinematic vocabulary by plunging the viewer into an
eye-opening, untraditional visual register.
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The Trip was perhaps the most groundbreaking and emblematic psychedelic film in this
regard. Corman’s movie is often described as a feature-length acid trip, but this is far
from accurate. The movie certainly begins with Paul deciding to take LSD, and it ends
when his trip ends, but not everything in between is from Paul’s subjective perspective.
Throughout the film, Corman in fact, builds a back-and-forth rhythm between Paul’s
psychedelic visions and the sober, everyday perspective of John (Paul’s guide). The Trip,
in other words, alternates between “subjective” sequences that take place inside the
fantastical world of Paul’s mind and “objective” sequences that take place in the
quotidian world of John’s house. To structure these alternations visually, Corman uses
the codes of classical Hollywood realism to establish the external, everyday reality. He
then willfully disrupts those codes for the internal, psychedelic passages.
Take, for example, the following sequence, which occurs near the beginning of Paul’s
trip, just after his initial experiences with abstract eyelid movies. As Paul removes his eye
mask, Corman signals a shift back to everyday reality by cutting from a montage of
abstract shapes and dream images to a neutral, third-person medium shot of Paul sitting
up. The shot lasts for about 13 seconds and the lighting is naturalistic, motivated by the
sun coming through the windows of John’s house. There is nothing jarring, abstract, or
experimental about the shot. As Paul begins a conversation with John, Corman cuts to a
matching reverse shot of John sitting in a chair, watching over Paul. As we cut back-and-
forth, temporal continuity is maintained by having Paul’s voice carry over from one shot
to the next. Spatial continuity is also maintained through a strict observation of the 180°
rule and eye-line matches. When Paul stands up and walks around the room, the camera
follows him; its motion is seamlessly motivated by Paul’s movements and by John’s
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gaze. Picking up an orange, Paul begins to rapturously describe his subjective experience
of the life energy of the fruit flowing into his hands, but Corman chooses not to visualize
what Paul is seeing: we remain in the everyday, objective space of John’s world.
Paul then decides to head outside onto the balcony. As he opens the patio doors and exits
the interior space, we cut to a shot of John following him outside. Through a match cut
and a consistency of screen direction (from left to right), Corman continues to maintain
spatial and temporal continuity across shots. The scene on the balcony takes place in a
single two-shot of Paul and John that lasts for a little over 30 seconds. Through the
duration of the long, uninterrupted take, the scene again stresses codes of cinematic
realism. Furthermore, the framing of the shot has John positioning himself between Paul
and the edge of the balcony, so that Paul will not fall over the edge and plummet to his
death down the steep cliff below. It is a gesture by John, we could say, that recognizes the
serious consequences of spatial continuity in the everyday world — a gesture that also
tips its hat, of course, to the rampant media narratives of the period about acidheads
jumping to their deaths because they thought they could fly.
John manages to coax Paul back inside, and they exit screen left as they return through
the patio doors. Rather than utilizing a match cut to bring us back into the interior space,
however, Corman suddenly thrusts us back into the psychedelic headspace of Paul’s trip.
The action of entering and exiting through a portal is matched — we cut from Paul going
through John’s patio doors to Paul leaving a cave on the side of a cliff — but Corman
also introduces a number of elements of spatial and temporal discontinuity to make the
transition a jarring one. The location is obviously very different, as are Paul’s clothes.
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Corman also disrupts the flow of movement within the frame: we are expecting a shot
that matches the action of the preceding shot (movement from right-to-left, parallel to the
picture plane), but Paul’s exit from the cave creates a very different line of motion
(movement towards the camera on the z-axis, perpendicular to the picture frame).
Throughout the psychedelic sequence that follows, Corman very systematically violates
almost every rule of classical Hollywood realism. As Paul leaves the cave, high above the
ocean, he looks towards the upper-right corner of the frame. We then cut to a swish pan
that follows the direction of Paul’s gaze; but the pan ends in a medium two-shot of Paul
sitting next to a blonde woman on the cliff side, as if he was just looking at himself. In
this two-shot, Paul and the blonde woman are shown looking off to the left of frame.
Corman matches their eye-line by cutting to a medium shot of Paul’s wife, the dark-
haired Sally (Susan Strasberg). The eye-line match, however, is a very deliberate
subversion of spatial continuity: Paul was high up on the cliff in the first shot, but Sally is
way down on the beach in the second shot. The characters’ matching eye-lines, in other
words, connect together these two otherwise spatially discontinuous shots. The sense of
spatial confusion is amplified further in the next shot: an extreme wide shot of the beach,
which shows Paul now sitting across from Sally. Paul has again been resituated between
shots and the blonde woman has suddenly vanished, disturbing our expectations about
spatial geography and blocking in ways that would ordinarily be read as continuity errors.
Corman then cuts to a nighttime, interior scene in a medieval bedroom. As Sally climbs
into bed with Paul, a sudden, unnatural shift in the lighting scheme occurs as moiré
patterns and psychedelic designs begin to be projected on the actors and the scenery. As
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Paul and Sally begin to make love on the bed, Corman’s camera begins an unmotivated
tracking movement across the length of the room and back. At the end of this tracking
shot, the blonde woman is revealed to have suddenly materialized in the bed — another
instance of her miraculously appearing or disappearing with no sense of rational logic or
continuity. As the psychedelic music and visuals intensify, a lovemaking montage takes
place in which the two women become interchangeable between shots. Corman builds the
scene to a climax, but then returns us to everyday reality by cutting back to Paul in John’s
house. The spatial and temporal codes of classical Hollywood realism are immediately all
restored: the traditional use of the 180° line and eye-line matches, consistency in screen
direction, match cuts, motivated lighting and camera movements, etc. As the rest of The
Trip plays out, Corman very methodically continues this alternation between straight and
psychedelic perspectives, varying the cinematic codes as the mode of perception shifts. In
each instance, the visualization of Paul’s acid trip disrupts the realist conventions that are
maintained throughout the non-psychedelic sequences of the film.
This kind of visual structuring was evident in most other LSD movies from the period. In
films like Psych-Out, Skidoo, and The Love-Ins, for example, the psychedelic sequences
are always clear and distinct from the scenes that represent everyday, quotidian life. In
each case, the difference is reinforced visually by grounding everyday perception in the
codes and conventions of classical Hollywood realism. In other words, throughout this
body of movies, the dichotomy between “everyday” and “psychedelic” perception is
played out visually in terms of film grammar; and if we take a step back to view these
visual strategies in the context of the broader history of visual culture, we can see that
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these films were in many ways a continuation of the same debates about vision and
technology that we explored in Chapter One.
The codes of classical Hollywood realism were built around models of visuality that were
very much akin to those of the classical observer described in Crary’s study. At the most
rudimentary level, of course, the cinematic apparatus derived from the camera obscura, as
did the physical architecture of the movie theater. Like the eighteenth century observer in
a camera obscura, the classical Hollywood spectator was asked to withdraw from the
outside world to view images on a screen inside a darkened chamber. The position of the
film viewer’s gaze is fixed in space as s/he sits immobile in the movie theater seat. The
codes of classical Hollywood realism then reinforced this classical model visuality. Eye-
line matches, the 180° line, and match cuts, for example, are designed to create a sense of
spatial and temporal continuity that masks the marks of the film’s production. Formal
techniques are motivated by the action within the diegetic world of the film; the film
viewer is not encouraged to pay attention to the camera or the lighting or the music or the
editing. We are sutured into the film world and we forget that the camera is doing the
looking. The camera and our eye effectively become one as we voyeuristically observe
the characters and incidents on screen.
As such, the codes of classical Hollywood realism reproduced many of the scopic
regimes that Crary associates with the camera obscura. The classical Hollywood text
favored a model of visuality that was to be received as objective, unmediated, and
transparent. The corporeal body of the spectator in the theatre seat was not explicitly
engaged and the gaze was that of a disembodied, monocular camera–eye. In other words,
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the codes of classical Hollywood realism continued to reinforce the scopic regimes of the
camera obscura long after the emergence of a so-called modern observer in the nineteenth
century. As Crary himself argued at the conclusion of one of his first essays on modernist
vision:
Inseparable from the technologies of domination and of the spectacle in
the later nineteenth and twentieth century were of course film and
photography. Paradoxically, the increasing hegemony of these two
techniques helped recreate myths that vision was incorporeal, veridical,
and “realistic.” But if cinema and photography seemed to reincarnate the
camera obscura, it was only as a mirage of a transparent set of relations
that modernity had already overthrown. (Crary, 1988, p. 43)
In other words, the opacity and the carnal density of the modern observer “loomed so
suddenly into view that its full consequences and effects could not be immediately
realized” (Crary, 1988, p. 43) — and what cinema and photography represented was an
illusory residue of the already overturned scopic regime of the camera obscura. Crary
does not state it explicitly in his notion of cinema recreating myths of vision as
incorporeal, veridical, and realistic, but he was clearly invoking the visual strategies of
the classical Hollywood style. In this regard, I would have to disagree with his
assumption that these visual strategies were merely a mirage of an earlier scopic regime.
The classical Hollywood style was far too hegemonic in the construction of twentieth
century visuality to be brushed off so easily; and to downplay its dominance in the
regimenting of the vision is to risk oversimplifying the history of cinematic models of
perception. It is clear, after all, that not all cinema from the twentieth century conformed
to the visual codes of Hollywood realism. The ways of seeing that Hollywood promoted
may have been dominant within popular culture, but they were frequently challenged: by
the Parisian surrealists and the Soviet formalists of the 1920s and 1930s; by the New
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Wave movements and underground cinematheques of the 1950s and 1960s; and by the
psychedelic movement itself. The history of cinematic visuality, therefore, must be
viewed not as a monolithic phenomenon, but rather as a history of battles between
different scopic regimes in which some traditions favored incorporeal–veridical–realistic
models of vision, and some traditions did not.
This heterogeneous visual history of cinema is particularly significant to the psychedelic
movement’s engagement with the medium. As we saw in Chapter One, the likes of
Huxley, Kesey, and Leary viewed incorporeal–veridical–realistic models of everyday
vision with great suspicion — with Kesey, in particular, framing his theories of vision
around a set of cinematic models. In other words, the scopic regimes of classical
Hollywood realism were largely antithetical to those of the psychedelic movement: they
were too closely allied with psychedelic culture’s discourses of everyday perception and
reduced awareness. Moreover, given the cultural hegemony of Hollywood as a regulator
of vision and visuality, the codes of classical Hollywood cinema were viewed by the
psychedelic movement as a primary source of the problem. Hollywood and the culture
industry were representatives of the Establishment; they stood as apparatuses of
institutionalized ways of seeing. It is not surprising, therefore, that the psychedelic
movement targeted classical Hollywood realism in the way that it did, aligning it with the
impoverished visuality of normative, everyday perception. In contrast, the psychedelic
movement embraced emergent, New Wave and underground film movements as
modernist cinematic analogues of the psychedelic experience — ways of seeing that were
similarly characterized by such traits as subjectivity, mobility, corporeality, and a striving
towards expanded consciousness.
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When we look at how psychedelic movies of the 1960s used film grammar to construct
the dichotomy between straight and psychedelic, we can therefore see an implicit
argument being formulated about cinematic ways of seeing. In films that issued warnings
about the dangers of psychedelic drugs and the counterculture, such as some of the social
problem pictures and classroom scare films, the dichotomy between straight and
psychedelic perception played out in ways that reinforced the scopic regimes of classical
Hollywood realism. The excesses of psychedelic style are usually pathologized through
narrative condemnations of drug use in which the protagonist ends up dead or in the
crazy house; and the normativity of realist cinematic codes are, in turn, associated with
the films’ voices of social and moral authority, such as the psychiatrist in Alice in
Acidland or the policeman–father in Riot on Sunset Strip. The majority of the psychedelic
movies of the 1960s, however, presented viewpoints that were sympathetic to the
psychedelic movement. (The filmmakers, after all, were actively seeking patronage from
the turned-on audiences of the youth movement, as well as cinemagoers from the non-
Establishment, underground, art house, and grindhouse crowds.) In films that supported
the psychedelic movement, a reverse set of associations was invariably in place: the
classical Hollywood style was aligned with the ways of seeing favored by the
Establishment, and it was condemned for this alliance; the New Wave visuality of
psychedelia was, in turn, not pathologized, but rather celebrated as a mode of escape
from institutionalized regimentations of vision.
In a number of these psychedelic films, this engagement with discourses of vision and
technology was quite explicit. In films such as Blowup, Wonderwall, The Trip, and Head,
for example, there is a remarkable amount self-reflexivity about photography and cinema
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as models of visual perception. Antonioni’s Blowup, one of the most influential films of
the 1960s, is an existential mystery-thriller that focuses on the story of Thomas (David
Hemmings), a photographer who thinks he might have accidentally taken a picture of a
murder in a local park. Throughout the film, Antonioni questions and challenges the
reliability of visual perception, especially when mediated through an imaging technology
like a camera; and one of the central themes to emerge is an interrogation of the
contextual nature of visual meaning.
In his time wandering around the park, Thomas takes a number of photographs of his
surroundings, including shots of a man and a woman together. He doesn’t see any
evidence of foul play with his own eyes, and his suspicions about the scene are only
raised when the woman (Vanessa Redgrave) anxiously endeavors to get his camera
negatives. Back in his lab, Thomas begins to analyze the photographs in the hope of
finding out what it is that the woman is so worried about. No individual photograph
seems to provide him with an answer. He then starts to arrange the photographs into a
sequence, so that the shots can provide additional context for one another. He hangs the
prints on his wall in a narrative progression that visually resembles the storyboard of a
motion picture. He looks for cause-and-effect chains between the shots, and even
examines the eye-lines of the characters to establish spatial continuity in the scene. In
other words, Thomas is beginning to use the conventions of narrative filmmaking to
make sense of the photographs; he is shaping visual meaning by organizing the shots in
the same way that realist cinematic codes shape and organize vision. By using this
method, he is able to follow the woman’s eye-line to a shot of what appears to be a
person holding a gun in the bushes.
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At first, Thomas interprets the narrative that he has just constructed as one in which he
had inadvertently averted a murder. As he probes further into the photographs, however,
this initial interpretation starts to unravel. In one of the shots, he detects what appears to
be a dead body behind a tree. The image is somewhat murky and ambiguous, so Thomas
begins a process of blowing up the photograph in the hope of teasing out more visual
details. The more and more he blows it up, however, the grainier and grainier it gets — to
the point where it begins to resemble his friend Bill’s abstract expressionist paintings.
Antonioni, in other words, is emphasizing the limits of cinematic meaning: what we are
willing to accept as concrete and “real” through the codes of narrative realism crumble
away into abstraction when they are interrogated too closely. The photograph becomes
just a collection of dots, and it only exists as evidence of reality within the context of the
other photographs and the visual codes that Thomas has employed to structure them into
something meaningful. This becomes particularly apparent when somebody steals the
photographs from the lab, leaving behind only the most abstract, blown-up print of the
dead body. Thomas tries to convince his friends that the shot is evidence of a murder; but,
stripped of its context, the fuzzy print carries no inherent meaning and merely “looks like
one of Bill's paintings.” It no longer offers up any proof of reality.
The relevance of this mystery narrative to the psychedelic movement comes from the
setting of Blowup in swinging sixties London. Throughout the film, Antonioni establishes
a series of scopic dichotomies that mirror those we have seen in psychedelic discourses.
As a photographer, Thomas is himself split between two modes of photographic vision.
On the one hand, he is a fashion photographer who specializes in hip, mod designs: a
superficial commodification of countercultural style. On the other hand, he aspires
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towards the tradition of documentary realism, and is working on a serious photographic
book about the London slums. Antonioni treats these two different photographic careers
almost like a rift in Thomas’s psyche; and the obsession Thomas develops over the
photos from the park clearly stems from his desire to use the camera to penetrate beneath
the surface of reality — a desire that Antonioni ultimately reveals as unattainable.
A second dichotomy of scopic regimes is established between Thomas’s photographic
gaze and the anarchic visuality of a Prankster-esque mime troupe. The troupe is first seen
careening around London in the back of a truck at the start of the film — a crazy rush of
absurdist energy akin to Kesey and his gang hightailing it across the United States in their
school bus — and Thomas eventually crosses paths with them at the end of the film when
he watches them play a game of tennis with an imaginary ball. From their look and their
behavior, the troupe is clearly a product of the sixties counterculture; but they also take
on a more symbolic value within the film. They represent an ecstatic irrationality of
vision: a way of seeing that does not limit itself to the everyday reality of the naked eye
or the film camera. Much like the Merry Pranksters that they resemble, the mime troupe
turns “reality” into a performance space. In this space, they give the invisible as much
weight as the visible, creating a socially constructed, subjective mode of perception that
does not demand objective, visual proof of reality. Thomas, in contrast, has spent most of
the film trying to locate veridical evidence of the Real through his camera lens. In his
mind, the murder did not happen if he is unable to verifiably prove it through his
photographs. By the end of the film, however, we see Thomas giving up on those
assumptions. When he is watching the mimes play tennis, he starts to buy into their
irrational scopic regime. So too does Antonioni’s own camera as it begins to follow the
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imaginary ball back-and-forth over the fence. Antonioni is, in a sense, freeing the
cinematic apparatus from its slavish devotion to visible reality.
Wonderwall is another film set in swinging sixties London. It tells the story of Professor
Collins (Jack MacGowran), a bumbling scientist who very much resembles Albert
Einstein in appearance. At the beginning of the film, Collins is a lifeless, passionless
automaton who focuses only on his research. He is married to his microscope and lives an
ascetic existence in a dark apartment filled with books, papers, diagrams, scientific
equipment, and specimen cases. He is the epitome of the rational man, closed off from
the world; and much of the film is about him emerging from his cocoon as he gets
involved in the life of his next-door neighbor, Penny, a swinging fashion model played by
Jane Birkin. What makes Wonderwall particularly interesting to the current study is that it
represents Collins’ evolution as a character through a progression of different scopic
regimes that mirror the historical evolution of vision outlined by Crary.
At the start of the film, Collins’ gaze is directed almost entirely at the cells in his
microscope. The first seeds of something new occur when he begins to hear Eastern-
themed sitar music from the apartment next door. The music gives a psychedelic
inflection to the movement of the cells in the microscope, causing them to resemble the
liquid designs of light show projections. As the scene progresses, shots of the
microscopic cells are tinted different colors to intensify their psychedelic quality. Getting
increasingly frustrated, Collins throws an alarm clock at the neighbor’s wall, producing a
small hole in the brickwork. A circular spotlight suddenly appears on a poster behind
Collins; in the light is the upside-down silhouette of a woman dancing. Collins
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immediately recognizes what he has created, muttering to himself: “Camera obscura.
Aaaahh!” The black walls of his monastic apartment, in other words, have become
reconfigured as the dark, interior chamber of a camera obscura; and the bright, colorful
space of Penny’s apartment has become coded as the luminescent external world outside
the device.
Collins quickly becomes intrigued with the world on the other side of the wall. He climbs
over to the hole in the wall and peeps through, just like Nietzsche’s observer trying to
peer out and through a crack in the chamber of consciousness. Dissatisfied with the
measly trickle of light coming in through the hole, and already falling in love with the
image of Penny, Collins begins to make more and more holes in the wall. In one scene,
after Collins has chiseled numerous holes into the wall, his neighbor returns home and
Collins quickly shuts of the lights in his own apartment. A range of colored lights stream
through the tapestry of holes, as if the visible spectrum was being refracted through a
prism and separated into different hues — the hole in the wall no longer being a
monocular, juridical guarantee of objectivity, but rather something more fantastic. Collins
himself is no longer the rational man of science; he is more like a love-struck schoolboy
living in a fantastic world of the imagination.
The new holes that Collins produces in Penny’s wall also invoke an evolution of visual
technologies. Each of the holes creates a new viewing perspective of the apartment next
door; and as Penny moves around her apartment, Collins is forced to run from hole to
hole to keep up with her. The shots from his point-of-view all present Penny and her
various guests in frontal, tableau compositions that resemble the “primitive mode of
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representation” (Burch, 1990) in early cinema. The feeling of watching a silent movie is
further emphasized by an absence of sync sound: we see lips moving, but hear no
dialogue. The impression created is one of Collins progressing from the fixed,
monocular, ascetic visuality of the camera obscura to a mode of perception resembling
that of early cinema.
As the narrative moves forward, Collins embarks on a series of psychedelic fantasy
sequences in which he tries to escape from his dark chamber. In one sequence, the entire
wall is metamorphosed into a transparent pane of glass, removing all visual barriers
between Collins and his neighbor’s apartment, but still keeping him trapped in his room.
In another sequence, silent movie music and jerky, speeded-up motion is explicitly
utilized. Eventually, Collins literally enters the apartment next door by climbing in
through Penny’s roof. When he finds the reverse side of the wall to his apartment, he sees
that it is decorated with a psychedelic mural that features two colorful characters, astral
images of stars and planets, and a burst of light coming from an ecstatically illustrated
eye. The holes that Collins had created match up exactly with the stars, the planets, and
the eye, causing them to blend in seamlessly with the design. As Collins leans over to
peer through the hole in the ecstatic eye of the mural, we see a point-of-view shot into his
apartment. In other words, he has both literally and figuratively escaped from the
confines of his room and is now staring back into the dark chamber from the bright,
cosmic external world: a complete inversion of the rational model of vision that the
camera obscura epitomized.
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The film ends with Collins becoming a minor local celebrity when he saves his neighbor
from a suicide attempt. In the final scene, he returns to his place of work and to his
microscope; but instead of seeing microbial cells, he sees Penny floating off into the
stars, becoming one with the universe. Collins has, in essence, discovered the cosmic
vision of expanded consciousness. He has moved from the microscopic to the
macroscopic, from the rational to the ecstatic, from the insular to the worldly; and his
evolution was charted through an escape from the scopic regimes of the camera obscura
— much as Huxley himself did in The Doors of Perception.
In The Trip, Paul also undertakes a transformative journey that is self-reflexively
explored through an interrogation of visual media cultures. He is, as we will recall, a
director of filmed commercials whose marriage is on the rocks. He feels a fundamental
emptiness in this life and is persuaded to try LSD as a therapeutic tool for finding a new
perspective. From the opening scene of the movie, it is clear that his profession in the
culture industry has something to do with the malaise that he is experiencing. The
opening shot presents a bride and groom in medium shot against a blue sky. It appears to
be an image of love and happiness. The bride, however, directly addresses the camera
and we realize we are merely watching a perfume commercial. The shot zooms out to
reveal the couple “walking on water” and then swish pans to Paul behind a camera,
directing the commercial. On a number of levels, the commercial is presented as a
bastardization of the sacred. It is a phony vision of ecstasy used to flog mass-produced
cosmetic goods, a blasphemous commodification of the messianic image of Christ
walking on water, and an insincere simulation of marital bliss. The voiceover for the
commercial has a similar effect. It begins with a seductive reading of the words
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“Anything is possible” — leading us to think that the movie is about to open with an
ecstatic LSD vision. After a beat, however, the voiceover continues with the words
“When you use ‘April in Paris’ perfume” — deflating the marvelous promise of the
opening words, and redirecting them towards the packaged products of consumer
capitalism. The spiritual bankruptcy of the commercial is immediately apparent when
Paul walks away from the camera and is confronted by Sally and their failed marriage —
a reality for the two characters that is far away from the glossy, idealized images of
marriage that Paul has been creating for his work.
The implication in this opening scene is that Paul’s emptiness is a result of his profession:
that he has spent his life producing facile images of reality for the culture industry, and
that it has eaten away at his soul. Throughout the rest of the film, Paul is repeatedly
confronted with this aspect of his life, and it becomes a central source of dramatic tension
in the narrative. When he is preparing for his trip, for example, he gets preoccupied with
checking the TV for one of his commercial spots that advertises a product called “Psyche
Soap.” When we see the spot, it is a total cooptation of counterculture: “Psyche Soap is
the only soap that makes you clean inside. Clean up or flip out!” In other words, Paul had
taken the philosophy and the parlance of the psychedelic movement and had once again
re-channeled them into the language of corporate advertising. In the context of the scene,
his distraction over the imminent airing of the commercial is established as another
indication of his mental unrest: he is not appropriately attentive to or mindful of the
preparations for his trip. And as the scene progresses, Paul’s association with the
cinematic apparatus continues to be emphasized as a source of tension. When Paul and
John are looking over the things that Paul has brought over for his trip, one of the items is
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a movie camera. John, however, exhibits some concern about the camera, and tries to
shoot down the idea of Paul using it: “It’s just with the pictures here, I'm not sure that
that’s really what you’ll get into, you know.” Paul agrees with him, but decides to keep
the camera handy just in case.
During the acid trip that follows, the most significant scene in the film dealing Paul’s role
in the culture industry is a hallucination sequence in which he is put on trial by Max
(Dennis Hopper). The trial takes place in a carnivalesque setting, filled with smoke,
mirrors, and a merry-go-round; Paul himself is strapped to an electric chair as Max
questions him. The mise-en-scène is saturated with allusions to various forms of visual
culture: Paul is positioned next to an old television set; images from Paul’s life and from
his commercials are projected onto a pull-down movie screen in the background; other
images from slide carousels are flashed onto the walls; and even the large merry-go-
round is shot in a manner that makes it appear like a zoetrope. The trial begins with Paul
being tested about the culture he lives in. Max instructs him to look around the room, and
he sees projected slide images of Malcolm X, Uncle Sam, Sophia Loren, Timothy Leary,
and Jesus; on the movie screen he then sees a montage of a crucifix, a love heart, dollar
bills, Lyndon Johnson, the U.S. flag, babies, an old man.
PAUL: Everything’s familiar, but I feel separate.
MAX: These are traditional slides. These are messengers. Do you see
anything?
PAUL: Blank. Absolutely blank.
The movie screen then shows footage of Paul behind the camera, directing. Max picks up
a reel of film and starts to unspool it as Paul’s glossy commercials for consumer goods
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are projected above: advertisements for pressure cookers, toothpaste, cigarettes, beer. The
inquest continues:
MAX: What's the first word that comes into your mind about TV
commercials?
A WOMAN’S VOICE: (O.S.) Lies!!!
MAX: Any comment?
PAUL: Well, it works.
MAX: Oh yeah, sure it works.
PAUL: It's a living. Well, everybody's got to make a living. What choice
do I have? What else is there that I can do that's any better?
MAX: Don't you know?
Max then proceeds to pass judgment on Paul. He finds him guilty of possessing “no real
love and total self-involvement.” The whole trial, of course, is a figment of Paul’s
imagination as he trips on acid, so the judgment is really one that he is passing on
himself. It is a judgment in which he is confronted with the falsity and the superficiality
of the media images that he has been producing. In other words, a dialectical structure is
established in the film in which the hollow, vapid images of the culture industry are
presented as the antithesis of the inner truths that can be gleaned from psychedelic
visions. By taking LSD, Paul in effect finds a new technology of vision to replace his
self-involvement in the movie camera.
The Trip ends with Paul waking up in the morning, having emerged from his acid trip. On
the soundtrack, we hear him having a conversation with a woman in which he claims to
have found the enlightenment he was seeking; he remains unsure, however, about what
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tomorrow will bring. He walks onto his balcony, and as he stares out at the ocean, the
image freezes and optically zooms into a close-up of Paul. Suddenly, the film frame
fractures like a broken pane of glass and the movie ends with a cracked representation of
Paul’s face. On one level, the shattering effect is a gesture that attempts to manage and
contain the transgressions of the rest of the film. The optical effect of the cracks was
added by AIP after the film was first screened. Its intent was to deflect criticisms that the
film was simply an advertisement for LSD: the crack serving as a final punctuation mark
to imply that Paul’s sanity has been shattered by the experience. This cautionary
sentiment, however, runs counter to the narrative themes that run throughout much of the
rest of the film, where the psychedelic experience is presented as providing Paul with a
richer set of perceptions than he had managed to accomplish through his film camera. As
such, the final fracturing of the image exists in the film as a site of syntactical discord: a
moment in which the narrative meanings of the film break down irresolvably. On another
level, however, the cracking of the screen could be interpreted as a breaking down of the
cinematic apparatus itself, as if the camera lens or the film frames were themselves
shattering into fragments. This alternate reading might, indeed, be a more fitting end to
the film’s discourses on cinematic vision: just as Paul has had his perceptions rocked by
the acid trip, so too has Corman’s own cinematic apparatus. It is almost as if, after having
stretched the possibilities of narrative filmmaking as far as it could with its explorations
of psychedelic vision, The Trip has nowhere to go at the end other than to implode on
itself: the apparatus having been broken by the experience.
As much as The Trip is a critique of the culture industry’s ways of seeing, it is nothing
compared to the densely layered, unremitting savagery of Bob Rafelson’s Head. Rafelson
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had been one of the founders of the Monkees in the mid-1960s and had developed the
group’s self-titled television show, which ran on NBC from 1965 to 1968. By the time it
came to making a feature film spin-off in 1968, Rafelson had become sick of the band
and the teenybopper phenomenon that had grown around them, and he looked upon Head
as an opportunity to destroy the Frankenstein monster that he had created. Rafelson
viewed the group with such contempt, in fact, that he reportedly taunted them on set by
blasting Neil Young music and proclaiming it to be real rock ‘n’ roll.
Through a series of songs and skits, Head sabotages the image of the Monkees,
portraying them as the epitome of the corporate culture industry: dumb, vacuous, insipid,
greedy, petty, pre-fabricated, phony, plastic. Rafelson’s desire to kill the group off is
abundantly clear from the get go when the film opens with a scene of Mickey Dolenz
committing suicide by jumping from a bridge. In one scene, the band is forced to suffer
the indignity of portraying dandruff in a spoof TV commercial. In another scene, any
shred of legitimacy that the Monkees had hoped to possess is wiped away when Frank
Zappa (a genuine psychedelic godhead) offers a crushingly deadpan critique of one of
Davy Jones’ musical performances:
ZAPPA: That song was pretty white.
JONES: Well, so am I. What can I tell you?
ZAPPA: You’ve been working on your dancing though.
JONES: Oh, yeah, yeah, well I’ve been rehearsing it. Glad you noticed.
ZAPPA: Yeah, doesn’t leave much time for your music. You should spend
more time on it because the youth of America depends on you to show the
way.
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Rafelson even denies viewers of Head the pleasure of hearing the popular theme tune
from the group’s television show. In its place, the Monkees perform a twisted new theme
song that emphasizes their fundamental emptiness as icons of corporate pop culture:
Hey, hey, we are the Monkees!
You know we love to please!
A manufactured image
With no philosophies.

We hope you like our story
Although there isn’t one.
That is to say there’s many,
That way there is more fun.

You told us you like action
And games of many kinds,
You like to dance, we like to sing,
So let’s all lose our minds!

We know it doesn’t matter,
Cause what you came to see
Is what we’d love to give you,
And give it one, two, three!

But there may come three, two, one, two,
Or jump from nine to five,
And when you see the end in sight
The beginning may arrive.

For those who look for meaning
And form as they do facts,
We might tell you one thing
But we’d only take it back.

Not back like in a box back,
Not back like in a race,
Not back so we can keep it,
But back in time and space!

You say we’re manufactured,
To that we all agree,
So make your choice and we'll rejoice
In never being free!

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Hey, hey, we are the Monkees!
We’ve said it all before:
The money’s in, we’re made of tin,
We're here to give you more!

The money’s in, we’re made of tin,
We're here to give you more!
As this new theme song plays out, a visual collage is constructed out of a 5x4 grid of
inset images from the movie that is about to take place. In other words, in addition to the
spatial and temporal discontinuity promised by the song lyrics, the visuals are literally
showing us the whole movie before we see it — a Brechtian device to reinforce the idea
that narrative causality and diegetic suturing are not on the film’s agenda. Head, indeed,
will turn out to be a free form, virtually plotless affair that spends much of its time
deconstructing the codes and conventions of classical Hollywood cinema.
Throughout the film, in different skits, the Monkees lampoon different Hollywood film
genres, from the war film to the Western to the Southern melodramas of Tennessee
Williams. In each instance, either through deadpan pastiches of generic codes or through
a deliberate breaching of the fourth wall, the classical realist style is undermined and is
revealed to be a phony, artificial representation of reality. In one sketch, for example, the
Monkees are depicted acting out a cowboys and Indians scene. Dolenz, however, gets
bored of the charade, breaks character, and starts ranting about the scene: “Hey, lady,
come on, get up, stop acting. Hey, come on. Stop playing. It’s all over. It’s inapt. Get up.
Oh, I don't wanna do this any more, man!” As arrows fly in from off-screen and hit him
in the chest, his tirade continues: “Aw, these fake arrows and this junk and the fake trees
— Bob, I'm through. It all stinks, man!” With this, Dolenz proceeds to rip through the
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painted Western backdrop and storms off the set. As he makes his way through the studio
back lot, he disrupts the shooting of another scene in which Davy Jones is playing the
violin on the steps of a Southern townhouse — a scene that will later be played “straight”
in a subsequent sketch. As Dolenz barges through the set, the shot pulls back to reveal the
camera, boom microphone, lights, and crew of the film-within-the-film.
A similar rupturing of the film’s diegesis occurs in a later scene at a diner. Peter Tork
punches the head waitress (revealing her to be a man in drag) and the film suddenly pops
out of the story world, entering into a long, documentary-style, handheld take in which
Tork starts to whine to Rafelson about his character. As the studio set and the crew are
again revealed, we also see screenwriter Jack Nicholson with his script, as well as Dennis
Hopper, who has no formal role in the production and appears to be just hanging out. In
other words, with a nod and a wink, the phony reality of the Monkees’ fictional sketch is
put into sharp contrast with the hip “reality” of the in-crowd of turned-on New
Hollywood filmmakers. As Tork frets over the motivations of his character, Rafelson
exhibits a cool, ironic detachment, mollycoddling Tork with an air of deadpan
condescension. Tork is clearly not in on the joke, remaining earnestly serious about the
scene he is working on. The stance that Rafelson establishes is one in which Nicholson,
Hopper, and himself are representatives of the cinematic New Wave in Hollywood —
hip, edgy, nonconformist, countercultural — and the Monkees, in contrast, exemplify the
bankruptcy of the culture industry’s traditional codes and conventions. Put differently,
the reality of the Monkees is repeatedly revealed throughout Head to be fake and
artificial; and by revealing it to be fake and artificial, Rafelson repeatedly positions
himself as the purveyor of a new set of cinematic codes and scopic regimes.
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Head is not a film that explicitly depicts the use of LSD or any other psychedelic drug.
None of the psychedelic sequences in the movie are motivated by characters imbibing
mind-altering chemicals; and the sole reference to drug use in the film is the sight gag of
a giant marijuana joint when the Monkees have been miniaturized and sucked up into a
vacuum cleaner. The psychedelic passages of the movie, however, function in a similarly
self-reflexive manner as those in Wonderwall and The Trip. As in these other films, the
psychedelic sequences in Head are positioned in contrast to realist modes of
representation, creating a set of scopic tensions between different modes of cinematic
visuality. The solarized footage of Dolenz swimming underwater with mermaids near the
start of the film, for example, takes the viewer from what had been a fairly traditional,
realist mode of representation into something much more fantastic and subjective. For the
acidheads in the audience, it is clearly a sequence that is designed to simulate/stimulate
the expanded perceptions of the psychedelic state — immediately signaling that this film
has been made more for the enjoyment of the drug-fueled counterculture than the clean-
cut teenyboppers who enjoyed the TV show.
During the performance of the song “Circle Sky,” Rafelson develops the film’s
dichotomy of realist and psychedelic codes in a different direction. The sequence is
constructed around a powerful collision montage between the Monkees in concert with
actuality footage of the war in Vietnam. The concert material employs virtually all of the
major visual tropes of the psychedelic style: colorful, swirling lights, kaleidoscopic
patterns, strobes, flash cuts, and multiple exposures. The Vietnam material, in
counterpoint, is comprised of stark, black-and-white, documentary footage. In the concert
footage, pubescent teenyboppers scream in delight at the Monkees; in the documentary
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footage, Vietnamese women and children scream in terror. On stage, Mike Nesmith is
positioned to appear like an angry protest singer, playing up his folk music roots, but the
lyrics that he sings are apolitical, nonsensical babble. At the end of the number, the crowd
rushes the stage to tear the clothes off their idols, and the Monkees are revealed to be
nothing more than department store mannequins.
In this sequence, therefore, the recurring tension we have seen between psychedelic and
realist cinematic codes is configured somewhat differently. Rafelson uses the Vietnam
footage in an agit-prop manner to attack the superficiality of the Monkees and their
teenybopper fans. Unlike the various, fictional, genre skits throughout the film, Rafelson
doesn’t appear to question the veracity of the documentary images of the war. The
sequence never deconstructs these images to reveal them as fake or artificial. They carry
a weight of indexical reality. Rather, by crosscutting between this grim reality and the
flashy, psychedelic, concert footage, Rafelson underscores the fundamental emptiness
and meaninglessness of the Monkees. He stresses the absurdity of the teenage fans going
crazy over a bunch of imitation Beatles while whole populations are being butchered
overseas. And he links the psychedelic style of the concert footage not to expanded
perception and spiritual enlightenment, but rather to the commodification and cooptation
of countercultural codes by the culture industry. The Monkees are merely a cadre of
department store dummies, selling pre-fabricated psychedelia to the masses while the
world burns. Much like Paul in The Trip, they are guilty of transforming the ecstatic
connotations of psychedelic perception into a fetishized consumer good. In other words,
throughout the “Circle Sky” number, Rafelson demonstrates how the apparatuses of the
culture industry can consume the codes of the counterculture: the psychedelic aesthetic of
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the sequence has nothing whatsoever to do with an expanding of consciousness or an
expanding of cinematic models of vision; rather, it serves to express how psychedelic
modes of perception can be stripped of their countercultural contexts, repackaged, and
sold to suburban kids for a quick buck.
Like Paul in The Trip, the Monkees are also presented in the film as a group of characters
trying to escape their own emptiness. Throughout Head, the members of the band embark
on various psychedelic journeys of discovery, but they always, unwittingly end up back
in the grip of the culture industry. During the musical sequence for the song “As We Go
Along,” for example, the Monkees are shown wandering through idyllic landscapes, as if
they were heading back to nature in search of some kind of spiritual harmony. The soft,
lilting psychedelia of the song is visualized with slow dissolves, gentle focus racks to
explore the scenery, and shimmering natural light. Towards the end of the song, however,
billboards and commercial advertising start to intrude on the natural scenery. The tempo
of the music increases as the song begins to transform into a mechanical marching sound.
As more and more billboards flash through the frame, the camera movements and picture
editing rhythms become faster and more jarring. Eventually the rapid montage of
advertising images takes over entirely, and the soundtrack becomes completely
machinelike. The next thing we know, the Monkees find themselves transported into an
industrial factory space, far from the snowy hillsides, tranquil beaches, and peaceful
fields from the beginning of the song. Mindlessly, they follow a guide who leads them
into a dark chamber where they are imprisoned. The progression of the sequence, in other
words, is one in which the natural world is taken over by capitalist industry, light is
transformed into darkness, and idyllic freedom of movement is replaced with enclosure
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and confinement. The Monkees, however, are represented as being too dimwitted to put
two and two together, and they never experience any of the revelations about their
relationship to the culture industry that Paul managed in The Trip.
The dark chamber — a big box with black walls — becomes a recurring motif throughout
the rest of Head. Whenever the Monkees stray too far from their corporate masters, they
find themselves trapped back in the box. It becomes a symbol of their inability to break
free from the culture industry that spawned them, but it also presents an image of an
enclosure that continues the camera obscura themes of The Doors of Perception and
Wonderwall. Like Huxley and Professor Collins, The Monkees also want to escape from
the dark belly of the device. They too want to venture out beyond the door in the wall to
experience fantastic, psychedelic visions. But every time they break free, it is not long
before their corporate guardians incarcerate them again. They are doomed to eternally
return. As such, the big black box in Head performs the same function as the dimly-lit
room of Huxley’s mind or Professor Collins’s gloomy apartment: it evokes the dark,
enclosed chamber of the camera obscura as a conceptual antithesis to the bright, colorful
visuality of psychedelic experience.
Towards the end of the film, Peter Tork explicitly begins to connect these dots between
the big black box, media technologies, theories of perception, and the discourses of the
psychedelic movement. Having visited an Indian swami, Tork takes on an aura of
enlightenment that he wants to pass onto his fellow band members. He feels he now has
the answers, proclaiming: “You've got to listen to me guys, or you'll end up back in the
box!” The band chooses to ignore him and, predictably, they all end up being obliviously
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escorted back into the box. Once again imprisoned in the dark chamber, with nowhere
else to go, the group reluctantly listens to Tork’s soulful recitation of the swami’s lessons,
in the faint hope that he might hold the key to their escape.
TORK: We were talking with the master about the nature of conceptual
reality. Psychologically speaking, the human mind, or brain, or whatever,
is almost incapable of distinguishing between the real and the vividly
imagined experience: sound and film, of music and radio. Even these
manipulated experiences are received more or less directly and
uninterpreted by the mind. They are catalogued and recorded and either
acted upon directly or stored in the memory, or both. Now, this process,
unless we pay it tremendous attention, begins to separate us from the
reality of the Now. Am I being clear? For we must allow the reality of the
Now to just happen, as it happens. Observe, and act with clarity. For
where there is clarity, there is no choice; and where there is choice, there
is misery. But then, why should I speak, since I know nothing?
The theories that Tork articulates in this sequence are much the same as the ideas we
have seen espoused by the likes of Huxley, Kesey and Leary. He is putting forward the
argument that we mistake mediated images of reality for reality itself, that our brains
have trouble telling the difference between the two, and that this process results in a
phenomenological alienation from the present moment. The cinematic apparatus itself is
directly implicated: it is a creator of those manipulated experiences that cloud our
perceptions of reality. In other words, through this speech, Tork sets out a framework for
understanding the big black box as a metaphor for this separation from the reality of the
Now. Much like the dark chamber of the camera obscura, it is an enclosed space that
separates the observer from the external world. In giving his lesson to the other Monkees,
Tork hopes they will better comprehend why they keep ending up in the box. He hopes
that their understanding of perception and consciousness will evolve, in a manner
consistent with the goals expressed earlier by Huxley, Kesey, and Leary: a movement
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beyond the camera obscura, a movement beyond cinema and the regimenting of vision by
the culture industry, a movement beyond the fake TV props of everyday American life.
Ever the cool, ironic hipster, Rafelson leaves it somewhat ambiguous about how much
we should buy into Tork’s teachings. Given the postmodern, Chinese box structure of the
film, we could take the remarks at face value, or we could read them as yet another
example of Rafelson deriding the Monkees for co-opting psychedelic culture. In either
case, though, the sequence highlights the extent to which the psychedelic movement’s
discourses of cinematic perception had penetrated popular culture by 1968 — so much so
that its language and metaphors had become fodder for satire. One thing remains clear
however by the end of Head, and that is the call for a new kind of cinema. Through its
mad, non-narrative collage of skits and songs, the movie nihilistically explodes every
code in the classical Hollywood playbook, revealing conventional cinematic modes of
vision to be as fake and as artificial as Kesey’s movie screen or the flickering dots on
Leary’s television set. Appropriately enough, when the Columbia Pictures logo appears at
the end of Head, it gets caught in the gate of the projector and the celluloid burns to a
cinder in the heat of the light.
The Psychedelic Cinema of Attractions
If there were a single through-line between these different head films from the 1960s, it
would be this call for a new kind of cinematic vision. Through their narratives, they all
associate the scopic regimes of classical Hollywood realism with the closed off, rational
visual orders of normative, everyday perception. The acid trip sequences, in contrast,
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seem very much like an intervention. They interrupt the apparent transparency and
naturalness of established Hollywood modes of representation with an ecstatic
irrationality of vision: the emergence of a new cinematic way of seeing that is more in
tune with the scopic regimes of both the psychedelic movement and the broader Neon
Renaissance. If it is clear that the psychedelic feature films of the 1960s were critical of
Hollywood cinema’s systems of regimenting and regulating perception, what can we say,
however, about the new ways of seeing that these films were promoting? Was it truly a
revolution in how cinema was used as a technology of vision? Were psychedelic films
really steering the cinematic apparatus into new and uncharted territories?
Through their approaches to simulating and stimulating psychedelic experiences, we can
certainly make the case that these films employed a set of strategies to encourage a
different range of reading protocols than the narrative and voyeuristic models of classical
Hollywood realism. These unconventional reading protocols resonated with audiences of
the era because they fit hand-in-glove with the psychedelic movement’s own emergent
discourses of perception. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that such strategies
were unprecedented or that they were inherently progressive. The history of cinema is, in
fact, littered with countless examples of filmmakers exploring alternative scopic regimes
to that of classical Hollywood realism, dating back to the inception of the medium in the
late nineteenth century. One filmmaking tradition that is particularly significant as an
antecedent to the psychedelic movies of the 1960s is what Tom Gunning has called the
“cinema of attractions.” Gunning argues that during the first decade of the motion
picture, before the codes of classical narrative realism took root in the Hollywood
filmmaking system, the dominant mode of cinematic expression exhibited a very
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different set of scopic tendencies. Paraphrasing the writings of Fernard Léger on early
cinema, Gunning notes:
The potential of the new art did not lie in “imitating the movements of
nature” or in “the mistaken path” of its resemblance to theatre. Its unique
power was a “matter of making images seen”. It is precisely this
harnessing of visibility, this act of showing and exhibiting, which I feel
cinema before 1906 displays most intensely. […] What precisely is the
cinema of attractions? First, it is a cinema that bases itself on the quality
that Léger celebrated: its ability to show something. Contrasted to the
voyeuristic aspect of narrative cinema analyzed by Christian Metz, this is
an exhibitionist cinema […] this is a cinema that displays its visibility,
willing to rupture a self-enclosed fictional world for a chance to solicit the
attention of the spectator. (Gunning, 1986/1990, pp. 56-7)
In other words, the cinema of attractions was not a cinema built upon a seamless,
transparency of vision; it was not a cinema that sought to mask the marks of its own
production and suture the spectator into an illusory reality. Rather, it was a cinema that
flaunted its own apparatus. The apparatus, in fact, was the attraction — like that of a ride
at an amusement park. Spectators came to the theater for the novelty of the technology
itself, for its power in making images seen.
In many respects, the psychedelic movies of the 1960s followed in the same tradition.
The attraction of LSD movies lay not in the narratives that they told, but in the novelty of
the cinematic apparatus being used to reproduce the effects of an acid trip. The attraction
was the ability of cinema to make the images of a psychedelic experience seen. It was the
promise the cinematic apparatus being used to simulate and stimulate psychedelic
experiences that made movies like The Trip and Head appealing to acidheads. When
audience members got high and sprawled out in front of the screen for 2001: A Space
Odyssey, it wasn’t for the film’s narrative so much as it was the exhibitionist spectacle of
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the Stargate Corridor. It provided a fairground rollercoaster ride, and, like the early
cinema of attractions, it incited visual curiosity by emphasizing not diegetic absorption,
but rather direct stimulations of perceptual awe. As such, we could say that the oscillation
in the head films of the 1960s between “straight” and “psychedelic” modes of perception
was also an oscillation between classical narrative realism and the cinema of attractions.
In other words, if the psychedelic sequences represented a challenge to the scopic
regimes of classical Hollywood realism, they did so by resurrecting the exhibitionist
visual modalities of the cinema of attractions; the integration of the cinema of attractions
into the films functioned as a disruption of the voyeuristic codes of narrative realism.
The cinema of attractions, of course, never fully disappeared from film culture. It may
have been usurped by classical narrative realism in the 1910s, but the cinema of
attractions still persisted as a filmmaking tradition throughout the twentieth century. As
Gunning notes, it “goes underground, both in certain avant-garde practices and as a
component of narrative films, more evident in some genres (e.g., the musical) than in
others” (Gunning, 1989, p. 36). The cinema of attractions, therefore, could be viewed as
an alternative model of cinematic visuality that continued to occupy the margins of film
culture throughout movie history. In addition to the aforementioned influence of avant-
garde practices on psychedelic style, two particular manifestations of the cinema of
attractions — the exploitation film and the Hollywood musical — seem particularly
pertinent to the formation of the head films of the 1960s.
Throughout the twentieth century, exploitation cinema was a consistent presence on the
fringes of Hollywood filmmaking. Independently produced and exhibited, usually
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without a seal of approval from the Production Code, it offered film audiences the kinds
of forbidden spectacle that Hollywood could or would not show: taboos like dope fiends,
burlesque strippers, shock footage of exotic rituals, nudity, vice, venereal disease. As
noted earlier, many of the psychedelic movies of the 1960s were products of these
institutions of exploitation filmmaking. They were produced for the grindhouse and
drive-in circuits by independent outlets like American International Pictures; and the
strategies they employed to exploit the taboo of LSD use owed a lot to the drug films of
the classical exploitation era, such as Narcotic (1933), Marijuana (1936), Reefer
Madness (1936), and Assassin of Youth (1937).
In his book, “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!”: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-
1959, Eric Schaefer contends that the exhibitionist tendencies of the cinema of attractions
were at the heart of the classical exploitation film. This was particularly evident, he
argues, in the films’ emphasis on spectacle:
[T]he centrality of spectacle in exploitation films tended to disrupt or
override the traditional cause-and-effect chain in narrative, while it also
permitted filmmakers to be slack with classical devices like continuity
editing. […] Whereas the classical Hollywood film invited the viewer to
move into voyeuristic relation with the represented events through its
creation of a seamless world signaled by the shift of narration from a self-
conscious to an unself-conscious mode, the exploitation film was
essentially an exhibitionist form that encouraged a different type of
engagement on the part of the viewer. Classical exploitation consistently
reminded the viewer that he or she was watching a film, either through the
display of spectacle or because of the crumbling continuity. (Schaefer,
1999, p. 80)
The story or topic of an exploitation film, Schaefer argues, was merely a vehicle for the
exhibitionist spectacle of nudity, vice, or drug use; and the integration of this spectacle
created so many fissures and fractures in the codes of classical Hollywood realism that
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the experience of exploitation cinema could only be characterized as delirious (Schaefer,
1999, p. 94). A similar sense of delirium is clearly present in the experience of the head
films of the 1960s: as they feverishly shatter the visual and narrative codes of realist
cinema, the organizational logics of the trip scenes rarely appeal to rationality or logic.
We could argue, therefore, that the psychedelic sequences in these films had as much to
do with the scopic regimes of the classical exploitation film as they did with the New
Wave sensibilities of the Neon Renaissance. In other words, as much as they were calling
for a new kind of cinematic visuality, movies like The Trip and Psych-Out were also
using psychedelic techniques in ways that continued the tradition of exploitation
filmmaking: making a buck by exploiting the attraction of forbidden spectacle.
Exploitation films, for example, were frequently exhibited as carnivalesque events in
which staged activities at the theater were given as much weight as the film itself. Actors
dressed as doctors and nurses gave lectures and sold pamphlets at sex hygiene films like
The Birth of a Baby (1938) and Mom and Dad (1944); a giant skeleton descended from
above the screen and floated over the audience at the end of House on Haunted Hill
(1959); and masked theater employees ran up and down the aisles wielding axes for The
Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies
(1964). William Castle was the king of these gimmicks, and the joy buzzers he employed
during screenings of The Tingler immediately established LSD movies as following in
this same tradition. By encouraging audience members to get stoned, later psychedelic
movies of the 1960s produced a similar kind of carnivalesque atmosphere: a mode of
address that placed as much emphasis on the experience of being in the theatre as it did
being sutured into the narrative of the movie on the screen. The fracturing of classical
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realist codes, in this regard, had less to do with challenging the culture industry’s
regimentation of vision per se than with following in the footsteps of how exploitation
filmmakers served up taboo spectacle as a cinematic attraction.
The psychedelic movies of the 1960s also drew heavily on the conventions of the
classical Hollywood musical. The presence of rock musicians in many of these movies
resulted in psychedelic sequences that were frequently built around songs. In Head, for
example, “The Porpoise Song” and “Do We Have To Do It All Over Again” provide two
of the film’s most psychedelic sequences. The former accompanies the solarized montage
of Mickey Dolenz swimming underwater with mermaids. The latter plays over rapidly
edited images of a psychedelic mixed-media happening — with the film at one point even
integrating vintage stock footage of a 1920s dance hall troupe, “The Music Hall
Rockettes,” as if to explicitly tip its hat to its musical antecedents. Rock songs also
provide the foundations for the psychedelic visuals in films such as The Beatles’ Yellow
Submarine and Magical Mystery Tour, Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels, Mick Jagger’s
Performance, and The Who’s Tommy, and in Psych-Out, Stoney (Jack Nicholson) is the
leader of an acid rock band that performs at psychedelic mixed-media concerts. In a
number of other instances, psychedelic sequences explicitly imitated the look and feel of
Hollywood musicals. In The Love-Ins, for example, Patricia (Susan Oliver) ends up
dropping acid at a psychedelic happening. As the LSD begins to take effect, the
kaleidoscopic visuals of the happening give way to a fantasy ballet sequence that could
have been lifted directly from a Vincente Minnelli musical of the 1940s. Similarly, when
the entire prison population gets dosed with LSD towards the end of Skidoo, the inmates
perform a grandly choreographed, psychedelic dance routine involving garbage cans.
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And even in movies that do not overtly present themselves as musicals, the acid trip
sequences are invariably set to a throbbing psychedelic soundtrack to create a feeling of
audio-visual synesthesia: the trancelike sex scenes in The Trip, for example, or the slow-
motion, Pink Floyd-scored finale to Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point.
The movement back-and-forth in these films between narrative passages and psychedelic
musical passages perfectly fit the mould established by the Hollywood musical. As
Gunning noted, the musical was one Hollywood genre in which the cinema of attractions
kept a strong foothold: such films were usually built around an oscillation between
voyeuristic, narrative sequences and exhibitionist, musical sequences. In Minnelli’s
Yolanda and the Thief (1945), for example, when the fantastical musical numbers begin,
the plot is put on hold and our attention is directed instead toward the ostentatious visual
design of the art direction and dynamic vitality of Fred Astaire’s dance moves. The
cinematic codes of the musical numbers, in other words, embraced a different kind of
visuality than that of the narrative-driven portions of the films: a visuality that was firmly
rooted in the cinema of attractions; a visuality that did not try to convince us that we were
transparent observers of a fictional reality. The same could be said of the psychedelic
films of the 1960s: the vitality of movement and color during the trip sequences exists for
its own sake, and for our own pleasure, independent of its context within the framing
narrative. Like in the Hollywood musical, the framing narrative is really just the ground
from which to launch the main attraction. As such, we could argue that the balance of
scopic regimes within psychedelic movies — vis-à-vis their shifts between everyday and
psychedelic modes of vision — was really not all that different from the classical
Hollywood musical. The focus on movement, color, subjectivity, corporeality, and the
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visual pleasure of being in the Now was, after all, as much a character of Hollywood
musical numbers as it was the acid trip sequences of head films.
One of the implications of this is that the audiences of the 1960s were already very well
versed at parsing out the different scopic registers of Hollywood musicals. The change to
an exhibitionist mode during the musical numbers did not cause the voyeuristic, narrative
component of the film to collapse; spectators were able to quickly and automatically
adjust their reading protocols accordingly. Given how closely the psychedelic movies of
the 1960s follow the form of the Hollywood musical, it is not unlikely that spectators
performed the same readjustments of their reading protocols during the shifts between
everyday and psychedelic sequences. The familiarity of the Hollywood musical, in other
words, made the psychedelic sequences potentially less threatening to the codes of
classical narrative realism, cushioning their blow.
An even more significant implication of the similarity between head films and musicals is
suggested by Richard Dyer’s (1977/1999) seminal essay, “Entertainment and Utopia.”
Dyer’s concern is with making sense of the nonrepresentational aspects of Hollywood
musicals. It is, after all, the vibrancy and vitality of musical numbers that makes them so
entertaining and appealing to audiences. Through his analysis, Dyer makes the argument
that the nonrepresentational components of musicals function in a way that provides
utopian solutions to real needs or inadequacies created by society. He identifies five
primary examples of such tensions/solutions in Hollywood musicals (see Table 1).
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Table 1: Entertainment and Utopia: The Hollywood Musical
Description: Five examples of utopian solutions to real needs (Dyer, 1977/1999, p. 376).
A musical like Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), for example, is structured around providing
utopian solutions to the very real social tensions of the Great Depression. As Dyer points
out, the narrative aspects of the film adopt a social-realist orientation to address these
problems: emphasizing the pressures of urban life, prostitution, poverty, and the quest for
capital. The musical numbers, however, mark a shift from realism to fantasy. They open
out the cinematic gaze, almost to the point of abstraction, with elaborately choreographed
SOCIAL TENSION/
INADEQUACY/ ABSENCE
UTOPIAN SOLUTION
Scarcity
(actual poverty in the society, poverty
observable in the surrounding
societies, unequal distribution of
wealth)
Abundance
(elimination of poverty for self and
others, equal distribution of wealth)
Exhaustion
(work as a grind, alienated labor,
pressures of urban life)
Energy
(work and play synonymous)
Dreariness
(monotony, predictability,
instrumentality of the daily round)
Intensity
(excitement, drama, affectivity of living)
Manipulation
(advertising, bourgeois democracy,
sex roles)
Transparency
(open, spontaneous, honest
communications and relationships)
Fragmentation
(job mobility, rehousing and
development, high rise flats,
legislation against collective action)
Community
(all together in one place, communal
interests, collective action)
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stage performances. These musical numbers are conspicuous in their display of an
abundance of wealth, energy, and intensity; they represent a space in which people come
together spontaneously as a community as they “put on a show.” The feeling of utopia
that this provides is nowhere more powerfully evoked than in Busby Berkeley’s
celebrated overhead shots of synchronized dancers: shots that are in no way bound to the
spatial or temporal rules of narrative realism, expanding the theatrical stage on which
they are performed into an ecstatic, exhibitionist display of movement and shape.
If we apply Dyer’s schema to the psychedelic culture of the 1960s, we can see a
remarkably similar set of operations in play. The psychedelic movement very much
positioned itself as a utopian solution to a real set of social tensions, inadequacies, and
absences. Scarcity, exhaustion, dreariness, manipulation, and fragmentation were all
problems of mainstream life that the psychedelic community explicitly challenged. They
felt American culture was being dehumanized by the dreary monotony and alienated
labor of the “IBM syndrome.” They fought against the manipulation of TV advertising
and bourgeois, capitalist democracy. They agreed with Buckminster Fuller that society
needed to trend towards big-picture Comprehensive Designers and away from the
increased fragmentation and specialization of modern life. Most of all, they saw that
these social tensions and inadequacies were also a question of vision and visuality: as we
saw in the writings of Huxley, Kesey, and Leary, the socio-political revolution would be
born from a revolution in perception and consciousness. Psychedelic ways of seeing, in
other words, provided the utopian solution to an institutional regimentation of vision that
was characterized by scarcity, exhaustion, dreariness, manipulation, and fragmentation.
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The psychedelic experience, after all, was one that was marked by feelings of abundance,
energy, intensity, transparency, and community.
These tensions/solutions play out in the psychedelic films of the 1960s in much the same
way as they did in the Hollywood musicals that Dyer discusses. The straight/narrative
sequences employ a realist approach to documenting the problems of the day; the
psychedelic sequences, in contrast, offer solutions by evoking a euphoric sensation of
ecstatic visuality. Intensity, abundance, and energy are created in acid trip sequences
from the use of saturated colors, solarization, superimpositions, liquid projections,
kaleidoscopic images, moiré patterns, strobes, and rapid montages. Like Huxley’s
journey through the doors of perception, films like Wonderwall and The Trip frame
psychedelic vision as possessing a certain kind of phenomenological transparency:
spontaneous, open, and honest; seeing the world as it really is, infinite. The protagonists’
journeys into psychedelic experience are also very much framed as restorations of
community: a movement away from solitary, individualistic perspectives of the world
and towards a socially constructed set of perceptions that are communally shared by the
counterculture at large.
Given the intense focus on themes of vision in psychedelic discourses and psychedelic
movies, the utopian sensations provided by the acid trip sequences of these films are
perhaps even more potent and direct than those of Dyer’s musicals. Utopia for the
psychedelic movement, after all, was rooted in a new way of seeing. It called for a new
set of scopic regimes. Through their display of visual abundance, energy, intensity,
transparency, and community, the psychedelic sequences of head films were putting the
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medium of cinema to work in the attainment of that utopia by directly connecting with
the sensory apparatuses of the spectator. In other words, they sought to offer more than
just a feeling of utopia or escape; they aimed to use cinema as a tool for expanding
perception, transforming it into a technology of enlightenment.
Dyer’s analysis of the Hollywood musical, however, also exposes the limits of any such
utopianism. He argues that while entertainment is responding with utopian solutions to
needs that are very real, it is at the same time also defining and delimiting what
constitutes the legitimate needs of people in society:
Class, race and sexual caste are denied validity as problems by the
dominant (bourgeois, white, male) ideology of society. We should not
expect show business to be markedly different. However, there is one
further turn of the screw, and that is that, with the exception perhaps of
community (the most directly working class in source), the ideals of
entertainment imply wants that capitalism itself promises to meet. Thus
abundance becomes consumerism, energy and intensity personal freedom
and individualism, and transparency freedom of speech. In other
(Marcuse’s) words, it is a partially ‘one-dimensional’ situation. The
categories of the sensibility point to gaps or inadequacies in capitalism,
but only to gaps or inadequacies that capitalism proposes itself to deal
with. At our worst sense of it, entertainment provides alternatives to
capitalism which will be provided by capitalism. (Dyer, 1977/1999, p.
377)
All of the films from this chapter must, at the end of the day, be viewed as part of this
capitalist system. All of the films’ producers had to deal with balancing the checkbook
and finding an audience, even the ones who were most deeply committed to the anti-
capitalist wing of the counterculture. As we saw in our earlier discussion of exploitation
cinema, for example, the forbidden spectacle of an acid trip experience was one of the
primary attractions of psychedelic movies, and their marketing strategies made sure that
this taboo was put front-and-center in the ad campaigns to drum up business. Indeed,
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within Dyer’s framework, we could say that psychedelic movies pointed to gaps or
inadequacies in capitalism’s regimentation of vision, but only to those gaps or
inadequacies that the culture industry itself could offer solutions to through the use of the
cinematic apparatus to simulate and stimulate alternate modes of perception. Because
cinema possessed a perceived special bond with the psychedelic experience, it could be
used by the culture industry to peddle cinematic trips for a few bucks a pop under the
guise of providing solutions to the same culture industry’s own entrenched
regimentations of vision.
The visual affordances of the cinematic apparatus, in other words, determined to some
extent the way in which the needs/solutions of the psychedelic movement were
addressed. But Dyer’s analysis also points to something else as well: it highlights how
social needs and utopian solutions within entertainment tend to favor the concerns of the
society’s dominant ideology: i.e., bourgeois, white, male. Consistent with Dyer’s
arguments, if we look at how the psychedelic movies of the 1960s constructed a new,
utopian way of seeing, we can indeed see an absence of discourse about race, class,
gender, or sexuality. The protagonists of these films are almost always straight, white
males from the middle class or above. Paul in The Trip, for example, is a successful
filmmaker and the setting for his acid trip is a beautiful house that looks over Los
Angeles from high in the Hollywood Hills. When he does venture down to street level, to
mingle with the masses of the Sunset Strip, he is clearly out of his element and
experiences various confrontations with working class characters: a waitress at a
nightclub who challenges him for not being able to take reality straight; a weary woman
at a Laundromat who gets freaked out by his strange behavior. In films like Blowup,
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Wonderwall, Head, Skidoo, The Love-Ins, Chappaqua, Alex in Wonderland, and Easy
Rider, the focus is likewise on the adventures of protagonists who are white, male, and
affluent. Even in films with female leads, like Alice in Acidland and Riot on Sunset Strip,
the point-of-view in the narrative is usually that of white, male authority figures: the
function of the female characters being mostly to feminize (and thus delegitimize) the
hippie movement. Psych-Out is perhaps the only significant exception to this trend,
focusing as it does on the concerns of a deaf–mute woman. Jenny’s disabilities in the film
— a literal diminution of the senses — are portrayed as being the result of trauma she
suffered at the hands of an abusive mother. Matriarchal oppression, in other words, is
specifically cited as a cause of the reduced awareness; and Jenny’s hearing only returns at
the end of the film after she comes out on the other side of an intense psychedelic trip.
Even in Psych-Out, however, the narrative structure dilutes this emphasis on Jenny’s
sensory perceptions by also devoting a great deal of screen time to the male characters
that she befriends in San Francisco.
If we look more closely at how these films represented the expansion of vision during
their psychedelic sequences, we can see that they tended to frame it very much from a
straight, white, male perspective. For example, the intensification of vision associated
with psychedelic experiences is often coded in terms of an eroticization of perception.
Indeed, the head films of the 1960s habitually mobilized sex as a key tool in their arsenal
for turning up the visual intensity, abundance, and energy of the psychedelic sequences.
As such, the expansion of perception in these films is often communicated through an
amplification of the male gaze. The perceptual awakening of Professor Collins in
Wonderwall, for example, comes as a result of him spying on the young woman next
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door, with the psychedelic sequences in the film serving as a way of representing his
erotic arousal. The psychedelic expansion of his perceptions is, in effect, articulated in
terms of him learning to look at girls instead of microbes. The expansion of Paul’s
perceptions in The Trip is similarly expressed as an intensification of the male gaze: his
hallucinations involve numerous psychedelic sex scenes with different women, as well as
an extended nightclub scene in which his attention is focused on the erotic gyrations of
body-painted go-go dancers. And throughout the canon of 1960s head films, there are
countless other examples where the psychedelic expansion of cinematic vision functions
as an excuse to aim the camera at exposed female flesh: the kaleidoscopic sex scene
between Jenny and Stoney in Psych-Out; the erotic dances in The Hippie Revolt, The Big
Cube, and The Weird World of LSD; the cosmic strip tease that opens Barbarella; the
desert love-in of Zabriskie Point. For this reason, it is not at all surprising that “adults
only” filmmakers also took to psychedelia like fish to water, producing a slew of turned-
on erotica throughout the late-1960s and early-1970s in which the psychedelic style acts
like a catalyst for presentation of nudity and sex — exploiting the notion of LSD as a
rapturous aphrodisiac that was famously articulated by Leary in a 1966 interview with
Playboy magazine (Leary, 1968/1998a, p. 127).
All of this is to say that the promised expansion of cinematic vision in the head films of
the 1960s was, in a variety of ways, somewhat curtailed and incomplete. The films
ultimately remained bound to the codes of narrative cinema as a way of making sense of
the psychedelic sequences; The Trip, for example, is unimaginable as a commercial
venture without its frequent returns to “straight” perception to frame Paul’s inner visions.
These films may have called for new kinds of cinematic ways of seeing, but they did so
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in ways that were arguably not that far removed from the existing paradigms of the
exploitation movies and Hollywood musicals from which they drew, i.e., the new ways of
seeing were really just continuations of the cinema of attractions, and the scopic utopias
they offered were very much rooted in the ideologies of the dominant culture (e.g., the
male gaze). Moreover, these films still remained bound to the traditional, rectilinear, two-
dimensional, single-screen model of cinematic vision, as well as to the conventional
spatial configurations of spectator and screen that movie theaters provide. In other words,
the opening up of cinematic vision that head films achieved must be tempered by an
acknowledgement of how these films still played by many of the rules of the Hollywood
visuality that they often criticized.
Reconfiguring Cinematic Vision at Psychedelic Happenings
For alternative models of psychedelic–cinematic vision, we must turn elsewhere:
principally, to the use of cinema within the light show and mixed-media happenings that
were prevalent throughout the psychedelic cultures of the era. Through their mobilization
and transformation of the filmic apparatus, these psychedelic happenings represented a
key strand of the emergent “expanded cinema” movement of the 1960s. Alternately
called “mixed-media,” “intermedia,” and “multimedia,” they were cultural events that
sought to open out cinema beyond its traditional modes of representation and exhibition,
incorporating such things as abstract aesthetics, multi-screen projections, and the merging
of different art forms to create a total experience. As filmmaker and critic Jonas Mekas
wrote: “There is no other way of breaking the frozen cinematic ground than through a
complete derangement of the official cinematic senses” (Mekas, 1972, p. 199).
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With no small measure of help from Mekas’ writings in The Village Voice, the term
“expanded cinema” began to gain currency in the mid-1960s —coincident with the
explosion of psychedelic culture across the United States. Of particular significance in
the popularizing of the concept was the New Cinema Festival at the New York City Film-
Makers’ Cinematheque in November 1965, a exhibition that brought together work by
such expanded cinema artists as Jackie Cassen, Ken Dewey, Ed Emshwiller, Piero
Heliczer, Dick Higgins, Ken Jacobs, Jack Smith, Don Snyder, Gerd Stern, Elaine
Summers, Aldo Tambellini, John Vacarro, and Stan Vanderbeek. Snyder, for example,
created a show entitled Epiphany of Light that combined two slide projectors and a movie
projector to create a symphonic collage of images. Vanderbeek, meanwhile, created three
shows for the festival that Mekas described as the most dazzling pieces of expanded
cinema in the true sense of the term:
Movie-Movies (a choreography for projectors — four movie projectors,
three slide projectors, and a flashlight were used; projectionists walked on
stage in a ballet of hand-held projectors); Pastorale: et al (a film and slide
study for dancers, with Elaine Summers); and Feedback No. 1: a Movie
Mural. In the latter piece, the theatre became a huge movie mural, with a
battery of five projectors — a sound and image experience so unusual and
so full of motion and visual impact that we all suddenly said, “Yes, it
works! It works!” (meaning the multiple projection cinema). The movie-
mural was followed by one of those applauses which, in the newspapers,
usually are called “half-hour applauses” — there was so much excitement.
The feeling was that we had witnessed something very new, and very
beautiful, something that could neither be described nor explained.
(Mekas, 1972, p. 213)
Sheldon Renan was also instrumental in the desemination of the idea of expanded
cinema, devoting a full chapter to it in his influential book, An Introduction to the
American Underground Film (1967). He defined the concept in the following terms:
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Expanded cinema is not the name of a particular style of film-making. It is
the name for a spirit of inquiry that is leading in many different directions.
It is cinema expanded to include many different projectors in the showing
of one work. It is cinema expanded to include computer-generated images
and the electronic manipulation of images on television. It is cinema
expanded to the point at which the effect of film may be produced without
the use of film at all. (Renan, 1967, p. 227)
Renan argued that even most avant-garde and underground films should not be considered
part of expanded cinema because they are “(1) conceived, (2) directed and photographed,
(3) edited into more or less permanent form, and (4) projected for an audience from one
projector onto one screen” (Renan, 1967, p. 227). In other words, like the aforementioned
head films, most avant-garde cinema was thought to still operate within many of the same
modes of cinematic visuality as traditional, Hollywood moviemaking. Mekas articulated
the same sentiment in a December 1965 article for The Village Voice (Mekas, 1972, p.
217), demonstrating the extent to which the New American Cinema movement had
evolved its paradigms of cinematic vision by the mid-1960s.
Gene Youngblood was another critic who contributed greatly to the era’s understandings
of expanded cinema, through a series of articles published in the Los Angeles Free Press
in the late-1960s. These writings formed the basis of his seminal book on the subject,
Expanded Cinema (1970) — a book that was first introduced to countercultural readers
through the pages of the Whole Earth Catalog (Brand, 1970, p. 81). Youngblood stressed
that expanded cinema and psychedelic vision “mean approximately the same thing”
(Youngblood, 1970, p. 81), and the framework he employed to define expanded cinema
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drew heavily upon the discourses of perception that had been developed by the
psychedelic movement:
We’re beginning to understand that ‘what is significant in human
experience’ for contemporary man is the awareness of consciousness, the
recognition of the process of perception. [Through expanded cinema] man
attempts to express a total phenomenon — his consciousness.
(Youngblood, 1970, p. 76)
The psychedelic subculture of the 1960s produced a seemingly endless number of mixed-
media groups that probed the realm of expanded cinema. Perhaps not surprisingly, Kesey
and Leary were among the pioneers of the form. As we saw in Chapter One, Kesey
started to experiment with cinematic production and exhibition at his residence in La
Honda in the early-1960s; and, in November 1965, Kesey and his Pranksters began
staging a series of “Acid Tests” throughout the Bay Area and Los Angeles. Participants
would be encouraged to take LSD and immerse themselves in mixed-media environments
that incorporated film, slide, and light show projection, closed-circuit video cameras, live
performance art, and an acid rock soundtrack. Channeling the spirit of the Hollywood
musical once more, Prankster Lee Quarnstrom remarked at the end of the first Acid Test,
“It was like a Mickey Rooney movie where we suddenly said, ‘Hey, I know — we can
put on a show!’” (Jackson, 2000, p. 86)
The Acid Tests quickly grew in popularity throughout the end of 1965 and the beginning
of 1966, peaking with a three-day mixed-media extravaganza called the “Trips Festival.”
Taking place at the San Francisco Longshoremen’s Hall on January 21st–23rd, 1966, the
Trips Festival represented the moment when the Acid Tests emerged from the
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underground; and by the time the festival was over, mixed-media shows were instantly a
core fixture of the San Francisco psychedelic scene. As Tom Wolfe remarked:
The Acid Tests were the epoch of the psychedelic style and practically
everything that has gone into it. I don’t mean merely that the Pranksters
did it first but, rather, that it all came straight out of the Acid Tests in a
direct line leading to the Trips Festival of January 1966. That brought the
whole thing full out in the open. “Mixed-media” entertainment — this
came straight out of the Acid Tests’ combination of light and movie
projections, strobes, tapes, rock ’n’ roll, black light. “Acid rock” – the
sound of the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper album and the high-vibrato
electronic sounds of the Jefferson Airplane, the Mothers of Invention and
many other groups — the mothers of it all were the Grateful Dead at the
Acid Tests. […] Even details like psychedelic poster art, the quasi-art
nouveau swirls of lettering, design and vibrating colors, electro-pastels
and spectral Day-Glo, came out of the Acid Tests. (Wolfe, 1968/1999, pp.
250-1)
Meanwhile on the East Coast, Leary was holding “Psychedelic Explorations” at theatres
around New York City. Mekas describes the following items in the program of Leary’s
show at the New Theatre on July 12th, 1965: Jackie Cassen’s projections of polarized
“light sculptures”; Don Snyder's acrylic and aniline projections; Richard Aldcroft's
automatic analog projections; polarized glasses and prisms; slides that fade in and out and
dissolve into each other; color filters; moving polarized sculptures superimposed over the
slides; vague organic and inorganic forms glide across the screen; slowly shimmering
mosaics; Leary reading ancient Chinese scriptures; Edith Stephen dancing in strobe light;
a box, a compound of prisms, with colors blinking on and off; the Woodstock group
(Gerd Stern) projecting random movies and highway footage; two movie projectors; three
or four slide projectors; a collage soundtrack of radio, music, voices, nonsense speeches
(Mekas, 1972, p. 196). Leary’s goal was to bring the ideas of his research and writings
into an experiential, theatrical realm. As such, his shows exhibited more of a mystical
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leaning than Kesey’s rock ‘n’ roll Acid Tests, with Leary himself acting as the spiritual
guide.
Andy Warhol also contributed to the scene with his “Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” a
mixed-media extravaganza starring the Velvet Underground that toured the United States
throughout 1966. The Exploding Plastic Inevitable began life as a performance entitled
“Andy Warhol’s Up-Tight” on January 13th, 1966. “Up-Tight” began with the projection
of a film; then, when the band came out, Jonas Mekas and Barbara Rubin appeared and
made guerilla assaults on the audience with cameras and spotlights, hurling out
inappropriate questions about sex in an effort to make them feel like unwilling and
uncomfortable participants. As this strategy of assaulting the audience was developed, it
transformed into the aggressively immersive environments of the Exploding Plastic
Inevitable, which incorporated a large inventory of different media: 3-5 film projectors;
3-5 movable slide projectors; 4 variable speed strobe lights; 3 moving spotlights; an
assortment of lighting gels; several pistol lights; mirror balls from ceiling and floor; 3
loudspeakers blasting different songs; dancers with lighting to project shadows; and one
or two sets by the Velvet Underground. As Brandon W. Joseph notes, “The cumulative
effect was one of disruptive multiplicity and layering, as the Velvet Underground, Nico,
and other Warhol superstars appeared amidst the barrage of sounds, lights, images, and
performance.” (Joseph, 2005, p. 240) In other words, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable
was somewhat less about the ecstasy of LSD, and more about the use of psychedelic
mixed-media to challenge and confront the audience. Warhol, for instance, did not
include any colorful liquid projections (light shone through colored oils) in his shows: for
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him, they connoted the love culture of San Francisco too much, and he preferred to focus
instead on film clips, crisp Op Art projections, and harsh, white, strobe lights.
Elsewhere throughout the psychedelic music scene, from the ballrooms of San Francisco
to the underground nightclubs of London, a cottage industry of mixed-media performers
and light show artists emerged in the 1960s. One particularly influential group was
USCO, a mixed-media art tribe founded in 1963 by Gerd Stern, Steve Durkee, and
Michael Callahan (future Prankster Stewart Brand was also a frequent collaborator). The
members of USCO — short for “The Us Company” — were pioneers of tribal, collective
living who steeped themselves in rituals involving drugs, mysticism, and multimedia
technologies. Fred Turner notes:
Like Cage and Rauschenberg, the members of USCO created art intended
to transform the audience’s consciousness. They also drew on many
diverse electronic technologies to achieve their effects. Strobe lights, light
projectors, tape decks, stereo speakers, slide sorters — for USCO, the
products of technocratic industry served as handy tools for transforming
their viewers’ collective mind-set. So did psychedelic drugs. Marijuana
and peyote and, later, LSD, offered members of USCO, including Brand, a
chance to engage in a mystical experience of togetherness. (Turner, 2006,
p. 49)
Gerd Stern, the leader of the ostensibly anonymous group, was “a former public relations
man from San Francisco, who was ‘turned on’ to the possibilities of media by reading a
Marshall McLuhan report while laid up in a hospital.” (Renan, 1967, p. 235) By the mid-
1960s, USCO was providing mixed-media backdrops for McLuhan’s public lectures, as
well as performances for some of Leary’s experiments in psychedelic theater. Their
show, Hubbub, was featured in Renan’s survey of expanded cinema (Renan, 1967, pp.
233-5); and one of their be-ins, Shrine, was featured on the cover of Life as part of an
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article that brought awareness of psychedelic art to the mainstream masses of middle
America (“Psychedelic art,” 1966).
Bill Ham (with his group Light Sound Dimension) was an especially noteworthy figure in
the development of the San Francisco light show scene. Ham had been an abstract
expressionist painter before the emergence of the psychedelic movement, and was
interested in developing methods for doing dynamic action painting with kinetic light
projections. In the mid-1960s, at the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City, Nevada, Ham
began creating light shows for a rock group called The Charlatans. As described in the
documentary Rockin’ at the Red Dog (1996), Ham’s shows were built around a custom-
made “light box” that responded to the sound waveforms in a manner not dissimilar to
the music visualization tools of software programs like iTunes. The box contained three
rotating color wheels, and the different hues were triggered by different tonal frequencies
from the band’s instruments: low tones produced red light, medium tones generated
yellow, and high tones were rendered blue. These colored lights were then projected on a
screen behind the band to produce a spectrum of swirling colors as the lights hypnotically
moved and overlapped. News of these light shows spread quickly to the Bay Area — the
Pranksters even paid a visit to the Red Dog Saloon — and, beginning in October 1965,
Ham’s systems were being used at the “Family Dog” concerts in San Francisco for such
bands as the Jefferson Airplane, the Great Society, and the Lovin’ Spoonful.
Other notable light show artists and mixed-media groups from the 1960s included Glenn
McKay (with his group Head Lights), who became the official light show producer for
the Jefferson Airplane. McKay’s work involved a range of media, including film loops,
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slides, and color wheels, but he is most renowned for his pioneering use of liquid
projections: oil and dye-based light shows created using an overhead projector. The
Brotherhood of Light was another major West Coast group who performed shows at the
Winterland and Fillmore ballrooms for bands such as The Doors, Traffic, The Who,
Santana, The Grateful Dead, The Byrds, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. The
Brotherhood of Light contributed as much as McKay did to the popularization of liquid
projections in San Francisco, and in their heyday they used up to 18 slide projectors, six
overhead projectors, and three 16mm movie projectors — for which they made their own
experimental film loops (“Brotherhood,” n.d.). The Single Wing Turquoise Bird was a
group from Los Angeles who were famous for their widescreen light shows at the Shrine
in the late-1960s, performing for such acts as the Velvet Underground, Big Brother and
The Holding Company, The Steve Miller Band, The Grateful Dead, and The Quicksilver
Messenger Service. Rol Murrow describes the group’s set-up as follows:
I recall one of our later standard equipment configurations had 36
projectors of every kind imaginable, including a giant xenon-arc film
projector that I modified with asynchronous color and strobe wheels and
variable speed motors for everything. Other troupe members provided 4 x
5 and 35mm slide projectors, overhead projectors for fluids and stacked
media, and a myriad of other machines to paint light with, modified
beyond all recognition. It took about fifteen or more people, including
those we drafted as runners and assistants (some literally bottle-washers),
to do a big show. (Murrow, 2003, para. 11)
In New York City, The Joshua Light Show was the house group at the Fillmore East
auditorium. Founded by Joshua White, a USC film school graduate, the troupe employed
many of the stock light show techniques, but it placed a particular emphasis on
integrating slides and film clips: showing Bugs Bunny and Road Runner cartoons during
breaks between bands, or, during one Jefferson Airplane show, projecting a movie of a
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plane taking off from the runway that was followed by a model plane flying out over the
audience’s heads and across the auditorium (Pouncey, 2005, p. 172). Meanwhile, in the
UK, Five Acre Lights provided shows alongside Pink Floyd at the UFO club on
Tottenham Court Road in London. Across town, the Electric Garden Lightshow was the
resident group at the Electric Garden club. They were a large outfit that used a 20-
channel dimmer board, 23 spotlights, 12 slide projectors, two liquid slide projectors, two
overhead projectors, and three 16mm movie projectors (“Electric,” n.d.).
Some factions of the expanded cinema movement did not always look favorably on the
activities of these psychedelic groups, treating them with a certain degree of
condescension. In an interview with Youngblood, for example, John Whitney remarked,
“The light show people are doing something like an infant pounding on the keys of a
piano. Sometimes it can be very creative and terribly exciting. But in the long run,
looking at it as an adult, it’s just banging away at the piano without training”
(Youngblood, 1970, p. 214). As a result of such taste distinctions, the psychedelic wing
of the expanded cinema has tended to have been somewhat underrepresented in historical
accounts. Psychedelic mixed-media happenings were, however, among the most visible
proponents of expanded cinema in sixties culture; and their experimentation with the
filmic apparatus contributed significantly to how discourses of cinematic visuality
evolved within the broader psychedelic movement.
A focus on cinema as a technology of vision and consciousness was a central component
of all of these psychedelic mixed-media events. The term “expanded cinema,” after all,
carried deliberate connotations to the term “expanded consciousness” — the implication
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being that traditional models of cinema represented a “reduced” form of awareness akin
to how everyday, normative modes of perception were conceived within psychedelic
discourses. Huxley’s “reducing valve” metaphor might, indeed, be a perfect analogy for
describing the attitude of the expended cinema movement towards conventional
applications of the cinematic apparatus: i.e., that the model of cinematic vision
exemplified by Hollywood filmmaking represents the funneling down of perception to a
measly trickle. By expanding cinema, we could say that the psychedelic movement hoped
to open up the apparatus’ doors of perception, freeing it from the confined screen in the
dark chamber of a movie theater. The psychedelic movement was, in a sense, trying to
bring a new level of reality to cinema: not a reality expressed through the codes and
conventions of narrative realism, but rather an ecstatic reality akin to Huxley’s notion of
seeing the world as it really is. Whereas André Bazin spoke of the myth of total cinema
— “a total and complete representation of reality [...] a recreation of the world in its own
image, an image unburdened by the freedom of interpretation of the artist or the
irreversibility of time” (Bazin, 1967, pp. 20-1) — the psychedelic movement tried to take
their engagement with the medium a step further. To reiterate Wolfe from Chapter One:
[T]he Acid Tests turned out, in fact to be an art form foreseen in that
strange book, Childhood’s End, a form called “total identification”: “The
history of the cinema gave the clue to their actions. First, sound, then
color, then stereoscopy, then Cinerama, had made the old ‘moving
pictures’ more and more like reality itself. Where was the end of the story?
Surely, the final stage would be reached when the audience forgot it was
an audience, and became part of the action. To achieve this would involve
stimulation of all the senses, and perhaps hypnosis as well . . . When the
goal was attained, there would be an enormous enrichment of human
experience. A man could become — for a while, at least, — any other
person, and could take part in any conceivable adventure, real or
imaginary . . . And when the ‘program’ was over, he would have acquired
a memory as vivid as any experience in his actual life — indeed,
indistinguishable from reality itself.” (Wolfe, 1968/1999, pp. 233-4)
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If we take a closer look at how the cinematic apparatus was reconfigured within the
psychedelic mixed-media happenings of the 1960s, we can see that there were a number
of different ways in which cinematic visuality was transformed according to these goals
of “total identification.”
One of the most significant of these transformations was the movement away from a
rectangular, two-dimensional, single-screen model of cinematic visuality. The cinematic
apparatus was instead utilized to create multi-projector, multi-screen, three-dimensional
environments. In a very literal sense, this opened up and expanded the “reducing valve”
of traditional modes of film exhibition. This is not to say, of course, that psychedelic
happenings were the first art form to ever do such a thing. Throughout movie history,
there are numerous examples of filmmakers who tried to transcend the rectangular, two-
dimensional, single-screen format — Abel Gance’s three-screen Napoléon (1927) and the
3-D movie craze of the early-1950s being among cinema’s most famous examples of
such experiments. Two antecedents of psychedelia’s three-dimensional, multi-screen
cinematic environments seem particularly noteworthy: the multiple projection works of
Charles and Ray Eames; and the Vortex Concerts of Jordan Belson and Henry Jacobs.
In the late-1950s and early-1960s, the Eameses were commissioned by the U.S. State
Department and by IBM to produce a series of multi-screen exhibitions for various
world’s fairs and expositions. For the 1959 Moscow World’s Fair, for example, they
created Glimpses of the USA, an exhibit involving seven 20x30 foot screens that were
housed within a geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller. Several years later, for
the 1964 New York World’s Fair, they produced an exhibit for the IBM Pavilion entitled
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Think that doubled the number of screens to fourteen. Ideologically, this work was often
far removed from the beliefs of the psychedelic movement. As Anne Friedberg notes, the
sheer number of images presented in Glimpses of the USA (2200 in total) served,
somewhat propagandistically, to display to the Soviets the abundance of life in capitalist
America: a plentitude of automobiles, lawnmowers, washing machines, televisions, and
other consumer durables, all multiplied across a large quantity of screens (Friedberg,
2006, p. 205). The visual excess and the staging of the multi-screen environments,
however, had a clear influence on the dispersed visuality and the architectural space of
psychedelic mixed-media performances. Fuller’s geodesic dome designs, in particular,
were very popular throughout the sixties counterculture and provided a template for a
number of psychedelic happenings. Stan Vanderbeek, for example, built a geodesic dome
theater in the backwoods of Stony Point, New York: a mixed-media space that he dubbed
“The Movie Drome.”
Belson and Jacobs’s Vortex Concerts, meanwhile, were a series of events that ran
between 1957 and 1960 at the Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco’s Golden Gate
Park. The concerts featured electronic music and sonic experiments by Jacobs, to which
Belson choreographed kinetic, live visuals across the dome of the planetarium. Belson,
himself, is perhaps best known as an abstract filmmaker, responsible for such seminal
works as Allures (1961), Re-Entry (1964), and Samadhi (1967) — films that had a sizable
impact on the psychedelic style, due to their spiritual themes and cosmic imagery.
(Compare, for example, Re-Entry with the eyelid movies in The Trip.) In the mid-1950s,
Belson began to experiment with peyote and other hallucinogens; and throughout his
career he has been deeply committed to Mahayana Buddhism and Western astrophysics.
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The Vortex Concerts allowed him to take these various explorations of inner and outer
space and manifest them across the 60-foot planetarium dome through a combination of
abstract film loops and other light projections. The effect was one of engulfing the
audience with proto-psychedelic imagery and sounds, expanding cinematic vision beyond
its usual confines in a movie theater:
We experimented with projecting images that had no motion-picture frame
lines; we masked and filtered the light, and used images that didn’t touch
the frame lines. It had an uncanny effect: not only was the image free of
the frame, but free of space somehow. It just hung there three-
dimensionally because there was no frame of reference. I used films — Hy
Hirsh’s oscilloscope films, some images James Whitney was working on
for Yantra, and some things which later went into Allures — plus strobes,
star projectors, rotational sky projectors, kaleidoscope projectors, and four
special dome-projectors for interference patterns. We were able to project
images over the entire dome, so that things would come pouring down
from the center, sliding along the walls. At times the whole place would
seem to reel. (Belson, quoted in Youngblood, 1970, p. 389)
A number of other noteworthy explorations of three-dimensional or multi-screen
cinematic systems were produced concurrent to the psychedelic light shows and mixed-
media happenings of the 1960s. Following in the tradition of the Eameses, world’s fairs
and expositions throughout the decade were a breeding ground for such investigations.
Expo 67 (the 1967 Montreal World’s Fair) is particularly notable for the sheer number of
multi-screen, mixed-media environments that it produced. The Czech Pavilion, for
example, featured the Diapolyceran Screen exhibit: a 32x20-foot display comprised of
112 cubes, each containing a rear-projection slide carousel system. The Canadian
Pavilion, meanwhile, featured an exhibit entitled We Are Young: a six-screen
arrangement that measured a total of almost 3000-square-feet. The late-1960s and early-
1970s also bore witness to the Postminimalist movement within the art world: a
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movement perhaps best characterized as a hybridization of the “black box” of the movie
theater with the “white cube” of the art gallery (Iles, 2001, p. 31). Anthony McCall’s Line
Describing a Cone (1973), for example, is built around the projection of a slowly
evolving film animation of a thin white curve against a black background. McCall,
however, does not employ a movie screen in his piece. Rather, the gallery space is
darkened and filled with smoke so that the beams of light from the projector are made
visible. The effect transforms the thin white lines on the film frames into a “sculpture” in
the gallery space: a participatory field of crisp, tangible shafts of light that observers can
walk through, scrutinize from any angle, or interact with by disrupting the beams. As
Chrissie Iles notes, through their fusion of cinematic and gallery modalities of vision,
Postminimalist installations such as McCall’s represented a shift away from the frontality
of the camera obscura, producing a decentering of the viewing subject:
The darkened gallery’s space invites participation, movement, the sharing
of multiple viewpoints, the dismantling of the single frontal screen, and an
analytical, distanced form of viewing. The spectator’s attention turns from
the illusion on the screen to the surrounding space, and to the physical
mechanisms and properties of the moving image: the projector beam as
sculptural form, the transparency and illusionism of the cinema screen, the
internal structure of the film frame, the camera as an extension of the
body’s own mental and ocular recording system, the seriality of the slide
sequence, and the interlocking structure of multiple video images. (Iles,
2001, p. 31)
The three-dimensional, multi-screen environments of psychedelic mixed-media shows
continued many of these reconfigurations of the cinematic apparatus. Any surface was
fair game for cinematic projections at psychedelic happenings: odd-shaped screens, walls,
ceilings, floors, people. Multiple projectors were employed so that the images from one
projector overlapped with and blended into images from other projectors. Following in
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the footsteps of Belson at the Vortex Concerts, the edges of individual projections were
frequently blurred with other projections to erase the frame line. Ben Van Meter, for
example, blended liquid projections into the edges of the film footage that he had shot at
previous events. By violating the traditional frame line of the movie screen in this way,
psychedelic mixed-media shows transformed the cinematic gaze in a manner akin to the
Postminimalist art installations of the era: decentering the viewing subject and denying a
visual resting place for the observer. As David James put it: “light shows offered a three-
dimensional visual field, matrixed neither spatially nor temporally, which dispersed
rather than unified subjectivity” (James, 1988, p. 134).
Like the Postminimalist art installations of the era, these extensions beyond the
rectangular, two-dimensional surface of the movie screen also overturned the frontality of
the camera obscura. We have seen, however, that the psychedelic movement developed
its own set of discourses about vision and technology that included the camera obscura as
a central point of reference. The reconfiguration of the camera obscura in psychedelic
mixed-media spaces, therefore, carried some very specific and unique connotations. As a
metaphor for perception within historical discourses of vision, the structure of the camera
obscura was conceptualized as an analogue of the human sensorium: the dark chamber of
the device serving as an architectural reproduction of the observer’s own, interior
chamber of consciousness. Psychedelic mixed-media shows, in many respects, mirrored
this core perceptual metaphor of the camera obscura. The space of the happening was
likewise thought to be a macrocosm of the human sensorium: a three-dimensional
manifestation of the inner chamber of consciousness of the acid tripper. As James notes,
mixed-media shows were a “circumambient theater of light and sound that strove never
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to be distinct or distinguishable from the interior projection of hallucination” (James,
1988, p. 134). A crucial difference, of course, was that mixed-media shows transformed
the black box of the camera obscura into a space of brightness, saturation, and sensory
overstimulation. In other words, psychedelic happenings reproduced the principles of
microcosm/macrocosm in the architecture of the camera obscura, but they inverted the
scopic regimes associated with those principles. The darkness of the inner chamber of the
camera obscura guaranteed a certain kind of rational, veridical, juridical perception of the
bright, external world. Psychedelic happenings, in contrast, conceived of the human
sensorium and the chamber of the theater as instead both being spaces of ecstatic
brightness and illumination. The rational, ascetic withdrawal from the bright, external
world, in other words, was replaced with an experience of frenzied, subjective immersion
into inner vision. Indeed, the world beyond the edges of the chamber of the mixed-media
ballroom or dome was somewhat irrelevant: there was no pinhole in the wall to let the
outside light in. The world inside was a complete experience in and of itself; and,
consistent with Kesey’s own efforts to break through the movie screen of our perceptions,
it was a world that was constructed almost entirely from media images. Rather than
providing an escape from an interior chamber into an unmediated natural world,
psychedelic happenings refurbished the chamber as a saturated mediaverse: an ecstatic
sensory environment of play and spontaneity; a simulacrum of reality befitting the society
of the spectacle. As Youngblood argues:
It’s the idea that man is conditioned by his environment and that
“environment” for contemporary man is the intermedia network. We are
conditioned more by cinema and television than by nature. [...] The
cinema isn’t just something inside the environment; the intermedia
network of cinema, television, radio, magazines, books, and newspapers is
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our environment, a service environment that carries the messages of the
social organism. (Youngblood, 1970, p. 54)
This brings us to another way in which these mixed-media shows sought to transform
cinematic visuality: by emphasizing the materiality of the projected images. Multiple
projectors and multiple media formats (cinema, slides, oils, lights, etc.) were employed to
create densely textured collages within the environment of a happening. Glenn McKay,
for example, used film clips as part of his light shows, but the layers of superimposition
were so thick that the clips were often unrecognizable as representational images beneath
the abstract patterns of his slides and liquid projections. For critics like Youngblood, this
technique of superimposition represented “the pure art of cinema” (Youngblood, 1970, p.
87). It was seen as a restructuring of cinematic vocabulary to meet the expanded levels of
consciousness of the psychedelic era: “It has taken more than seventy years for global
man to come to terms with the cinematic medium, to liberate it from theatre and
literature. We had to wait until our consciousness caught up with our technology”
(Youngblood, 1970, p. 75).
Expanded cinema, in this regard, represented “the end of drama” — the final jettisoning
of the cinematic codes that had been developed decades earlier by Griffith, Lumiére, and
Méliès. The cinematic apparatus was no longer being put to use to produce a transparent
illusion of a diegetic world. The viewer of a light show was not sutured into story world,
but was rather encouraged to receive the images as spontaneous retinal stimulations in the
reality of the Now. The light show observer, in other words, was not asked to
voyeuristically “look through” the images onto an illusory reality, but rather to enjoy
them as “opaque” and “concrete” presences in the environment of the happening.
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By emphasizing the materiality of the images in this manner, these reconfigurations of
cinematic projection also sought to overturn the regimentation of vision implicit in the
classical realist style. Channeling Buckminster Fuller, Youngblood argued:
It has been demonstrated that all species of life on earth that have become
extinct were doomed through overspecialization, whether anatomical,
biological, or geological. Therefore conventional narrative cinema, in
which the filmmaker plays policeman guiding our eyes here and there in
the picture plane might be described as “specialized vision,” which tends
to decay our ability to comprehend the more complex and diffuse visual
field of living reality. (Youngblood, 1970, p. 84)
The densely textured abstractions of mixed-media shows, in contrast, were “open” works.
They did not seek to police the eye; the psychedelic observer was liberated, free to
perceive the images in any manner that they pleased. In other words, we could say that
the plotless, formless, three-dimensionality of mixed-media happenings expanded
cinematic vision far beyond what was achieved in the psychedelic feature films of the
period. Movies like The Trip and 2001: A Space Odyssey, after all, did work to contain
their psychedelic sequences within narrative frameworks that conditioned the viewer to
make sense of the trippy visuals in specific, specialized ways. The psychedelic visuals in
The Trip, for example, are always comprehended as representations of Paul’s inner
visions. As a result, no matter how abstract or densely layered they become, our
engagement with those images is always controlled and regulated by our understandings
of narrative, character, and theme. Similarly, the light show sequence in 2001: A Space
Odyssey is overloaded with cryptic meanings within the context of the film, and we
ultimately return to the authority of Stanley Kubrick for answers to our questions. For
example, we are asked to read the kinetic, visual rapture of the Stargate Corridor in terms
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of a set of thematic and intellectual contrasts to the looming, black void of the Monolith
and the strict, mathematical ordering of cinematic vision throughout the rest of the film.
Youngblood, for one, did not feel that New Hollywood qualified as a form of truly
expanded cinema. He felt it was, at its core, a profit-motivated commercial cinema that
destroys the audience’s ability to appreciate and participate in the creative process:
The current generation is engaged in an unprecedented questioning of all
that has been held essential. We question traditional concepts of authority,
ownership, justice, love, sex, freedom, politics, even tradition itself. But
it’s significant that that we don’t question our entertainment. The
disenfranchised young man who dropped out of college, burned his draft
card, braids his hair, smokes pot, and digs Dylan is standing in line with
his girl, who takes the pill, waiting to see The Graduate or Bonnie and
Clyde or Easy Rider — and they’re reacting to the same formulas of
conditioned response that lulled their parents to sleep in the 1930s.
(Youngblood, 1970, p. 59)
The multi-layered imagery of mixed-media shows disrupted those conditioned responses
to cinema by flaunting its own complex, diffuse materiality. As Matthieu Poirier argues:
“These intransitive works appeal directly to the senses and are subsequently stripped of
all symbolism and any cross-reference to external style other than their own
phenomenological reality” (Poirier, 2005, p. 283). This implied not only an entirely new
framework for making meaning, but also an entirely new temporality of cinematic vision.
Psychedelic happenings were designed to produce a rich experience of the
phenomenological Now, not the illusory experience of a present tense as constructed by
the photo-effect of narrative filmmaking. They sought to redefine the temporality of
cinema in a manner that reflected Kesey’s own need for speed. As Mekas noted in a
discussion of superimpositions: “One-image cinema has become too slow for the quick
eyes of the new film-makers. Brakhage has done his work” (Mekas, 1972, p. 157).
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This brings us to yet another way in which psychedelic happenings sought to reconfigure
the cinematic apparatus: by transforming it into a live medium. Most movies are pre-
programmed works of mechanical reproduction: as the celluloid runs through the
projector, they follow a linear, sequential order that is basically unchanged from showing
to showing and from theatre to theatre. The screenwriter, director, and editor have already
decided the sequence in which the images will be seen. Moreover, most movies occupy a
kind of past tense: they are comprised of photographic images of events from some earlier
time. The vitality of movement on screen might give the impression of liveness, and the
codes of narrative realism might try to convince us of its liveness, but the only thing live
about cinematic vision is the passage of light through the gate of the projector. The mixed-
media happenings of the psychedelic era tried to seize on this issue by replacing
mechanically reproduced, linear, sequential orderliness of cinematic visuality with
improvisation, spontaneity, and interactivity.
Reconfiguring the role of the movie projector became a central component of this
strategy. Projectors were no longer hidden behind the audience in a booth; they became
active tools in the environment. Operators could walk around the space with them, as in
Vanderbeek’s Movie-Movies, or turn them on and off at will. At Kesey’s Acid Tests, for
example, a system of multiple film projectors was rigged up so that people could “play”
them like instruments, mixing and overlapping different images like a DJ mixing samples
and sound loops. Wolfe described the scene at one Acid Test as follows:
… and Page is working […] with the projectors, the film projectors and
the slide projectors, and he sets up a really kind of gorgeous collage,
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moving projections on top of still projections … and the Pranksters sit
amazed and delighted and he makes slow changes, abstract patterns and
projections from the slides and … it all fits together … everything …
(Wolfe, 1968/1999, p. 281)
It was an art form, therefore, that tried to push the cinematic apparatus in a direction
away from mechanical reproduction. Each happening was a one-time-only affair. Traces
of some of the key mixed-media shows remain in several film documents, most notably
Ronald Nameth’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966) and Ben Van Meter’s S.F. Trips
Festival, An Opening (1966). Both of these short films employ a barrage of psychedelic
visual techniques to convey a feeling of the event; but they ultimately fall short of being
able to reproduce the sense of three-dimensional, spontaneous interactivity — precisely
because they are themselves confined by the limitations of two-dimensional, sequential,
mechanically reproduced films. Mekas perhaps best tapped into the expanded cinema
movement’s feelings about this transformation of the medium in a journal entry from
June 1966. He described how the Cannes Film Festival had asked him if he could ship
some new American films to show in the critic’s section. His response:
No — I wrote to them — your thinking is all wrong: You are still thinking
that all that’s good and new and exciting in cinema can be wrapped up,
canned, and shipped to you for “previewing”: those days are come and
gone. Some of us are making “film evenings,” not “films,” and you have
to take to Cannes not only the “film” but the film-maker and the
equipment and, perhaps, technicians. I suggested to them a few programs
to take which would shake up Cannes. My suggestions were, naturally,
ignored, and Cannes had another of their “worst” years. (Mekas, 1972, p.
250)
The sense of spontaneity and interactivity was, of course, also created by the participation
of the audience at psychedelic happenings. Audience members were considered to be
“producers” of the shows — as much so as any of the filmmakers, artists, or technicians
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themselves. The term “be-in” spoke to this idea: it connoted not just attendance, but also
a proactive engagement in the proceedings. On a flyer for the Trips Festival, for example,
a description of the final day read:
the general tone of things has moved on from the self-conscious
happening to a more JUBILANT occasion where the audience
PARTICIPATES because it’s more fun to do so than not. maybe this is
the ROCK REVOLUTION. audience dancing is an assumed part of all
the shows, & the audience is invited to wear ECSTATIC DRESS & bring
their own GADGETS (a.c. outlets will be provided). (Wilson, 1966, n.p.)
The audience was also included in these events by being included in the projected
movies. Not unlike the attractions provided by the traveling picture show men of the
early days of cinema — who toured small towns, filming the locals and then projecting
the images back to them — psychedelic filmmakers self-reflexively incorporated footage
of the community into their shows. The Acid Tests, for example, were about the only
place where footage from Kesey’s cross-country movie saw the light of a projector. Ben
Van Meter, similarly, would film people dancing, utilizing double- or triple-exposures to
create layered superimpositions of the performers, and the footage would then be
included in the following week’s show, mixed in with liquid displays, colored slides of
faces, flowers, seashells, and so forth. This strategy not only allowed the audience
members to enter into the production of the movies as performers — something denied
by Hollywood’s industrialized models of production — it also reinforced the sense of the
cinematic apparatus being put to use in the manufacture of a culture. As David James
argues, psychedelic happenings “were not merely occasions when images of hippies were
returned to them, though the self representation of the alternative culture remained
centrally important; they were also occasions when the terms of that culture were
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discovered, practiced, and elaborated, the means by which it constituted itself” (James,
1988, p. 134).
The transformation of traditional cinematic models of spectatorship was equally central
to this process. In opposition to the lack of physical movement or circulation in a
conventional movie theater, mixed-media shows provided a perambulatory space for
audience members that reinforced the importance of mobility for the modern observer.
The shows also pivoted around the corporeality of the observer. Demanding the
engagement of more than just the eyes and ears, they were “conceived as the vectors of
an aesthetic experience that involves the participation and full physical and sensorial
involvement of the viewer” (Poirier, 2005, p. 282). Needless to say, for those audience
members who attended these happenings on LSD, one can only assume that this sense of
participation was turned up to eleven. The goal was to create a unique and different
experience for every participant, shattering the conditioned responses encouraged by the
mechanically reproduced artifacts of the Hollywood culture industry. The Merry
Pranksters perhaps understood this better than anyone else. The slogan for their events —
“Can You Pass the Acid Test?” — suggested not only the active involvement of the
audience, but also a rite-of-passage: an idea that the sensory assault of mixed-media,
drugs, and performativity could shake a person out of their normal, habituated ways of
seeing. Kesey summed it up best when he argued: “The purpose of psychedelics is to
learn the conditioned response of people and to prank them. That’s the only way to get
people to ask questions, and until they ask questions they are going to remain robots”
(Grunenberg, 2005, p. 15).
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Finally, the cinematic apparatus also transformed at mixed-media performances by the
very act of it being mixed with other media. Many light show artists borrowed clips from
feature films; but rather than treating them as texts to be screened whole and unadorned,
they turned them into raw materials that were cut up and remixed into other projections.
The Joshua Light Show, for example, utilized the last seven or eight minutes of King
Kong (1933) to introduce the Jefferson Airplane, ending with the line “It wasn’t the
airplanes, it was beauty killed the beast” as the band took to the stage (Pouncey, 2005, p.
172). The Crystalleum Lightshow group, meanwhile, employed footage from The Girl on
a Motorcycle that they solarized and blended in with light projections through oil, slides,
and color wheels (“Crystalleum,” n.d.). The effect was a form of media convergence in
which cinematic visuality was boiled down to its essence as a medium of projected light.
Cinema was arguably still the most hegemonic technology of vision in the 1960s, but by
blending it with other forms of media it lost much of its institutionalized autonomy: it
was put on the same level as overhead projectors, colored spotlights, strobes, slide
carrousels, and closed circuit video.
At the same time, however, this sense of convergence also facilitated new economies of
visual consumption that took advantage of the changing mediascape of the 1960s. As
Christoph Grunenberg notes:
The borders between artistic techniques became amorphous and the most
pertinent ideas emerged from the productive cross-pollination between
disciplines, genres, media and cultures. Contemporary artists ventured into
music, light-shows, film, fashion, design and architecture, establishing a
close affinity with the ephemeral yet highly compelling manifestations of
the fast-moving popular and commercial culture. (Grunenberg, 2005, p. 7)
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In other words, the mixing of cinema with other visual technologies at psychedelic
happenings occurred at — and contributed to — a key turning point in the history of
Western visual culture. It was a moment when the postmodern blending of media
forms/technologies/industries began to emerge as a dominant organizing logic; a moment
when media convergence was starting to reconfigure the scopic regimes of popular
culture. As this study sets out to demonstrate, the psychedelic movement’s involvement
in these transformations was not insignificant. Indeed, it must be noted that psychedelic
mixed-media shows set the stage in this regard for many of the dominant scopic regimes
that have emerged within new media cultures over the past few decades. If we look at the
various transformations of the cinematic apparatus outlined above, we can see that they
provided prototypes for a wide range of tendencies in contemporary digital culture:
Virtual Reality, immersive and augmented media environments, interactivity, remix and
participatory culture, technological convergence, the blurring of the line between
producer and consumer, etc. The next chapter will delve into these connections in more
detail.
Conclusion
To conclude, all of these different reconfigurations of the cinematic apparatus at
psychedelic happenings can be read as attempts at pushing the medium in a direction
towards those traits of the modern observer identified in Chapter One: subjectivity,
corporeality, mobility, a questioning of the Real, an exploration of emergent technologies
of vision, and a development of new economies of visual consumption. In this regard, the
mixed-media environments of psychedelic happenings pushed those traits further and
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harder than was possible in the psychedelic feature films of the era — films that were still
bound to some degree to commercial cinema’s systems of regimenting vision.
Psychedelic happenings tried to disperse vision rather than focus it; they tried to engage
the body as much as the eye; they tried to individualize visual experience rather than
homogenize it; they tried to produce spontaneous mixed-media environments rather than
prepackaged single-media texts. This is not to say, of course, that psychedelic happenings
existed entirely outside of cinema’s traditional regimes of commodification and control.
Indeed, when Popular Science is teaching people how to “turn things on at home” with
DIY light show systems (Bacon & Shatavsky, 1969), or when an amateur filmmaker is
getting ejected from Leary’s Psychedelic Theatre because a big movie company is
coming to make a real movie (Mekas, 1972, p. 198), one might say that psychedelic
happenings have entered into institutionalized economies of exchange and regulation,
too. In its reconfiguring of the cinematic apparatus, psychedelic mixed-media was,
therefore, in a sense, engaged in the kind of deterritorializing and reterritorializing of
perception that Crary identifies as being integral to the scopic regimes of capitalism:
more “open” and “modern” in its conceptualization of the observer, perhaps, but not
necessarily or inherently any less controlling or regimenting in its techniques.
What, therefore, does all this tell us about the role of cinema as a technology of vision in
the cultural productions of the psychedelic movement? In their calls for a new kind of
cinema, both the psychedelic feature films and the psychedelic mixed-media shows of the
1960s were articulating the end of an era for cinema in a certain way. In the discourses
that emerged around these cultural practices, this theme was often expressed quite
explicitly. In a December 1965 article, for example, Mekas proclaimed: “The ground is
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shaking and the cinema we knew is collapsing, the screen, the projector, the camera, and
all” (Mekas, 1972, p. 217). He foresaw cinema becoming just one, and not the largest,
part of motion/light/image art — a sentiment that was certainly being acted out at
psychedelic mixed-media happenings. Youngblood voiced a similar outlook when he
wrote:
We are tragically in need of new vision: expanded cinema is the beginning
of that vision. We shall be released. We will bring down the wall. We’ll be
reunited with our reflection. I’m writing at the end of the era of cinema as
we’ve known it, the beginning of an era of image-exchange between man
and man. (Youngblood, 1970, p. 49)
The hope, in other words, was that a new cinema might rise like a phoenix from the
ashes: one freed from the economies of regimentation and exchange that dominated the
medium during its first seventy years. At one level, of course, these various
proclamations about the death of cinema were greatly exaggerated. The Hollywood
system may have been going through difficult times during the 1960s, but in the grand
scheme of things, its ailments were more akin to the common cold than pneumonia. The
culture industry was so massive and hegemonic, only the most blindly utopian wing of
the psychedelic movement could have truly believed that Hollywood was really going to
collapse entirely in the foreseeable future. As such, when they were talking about the end
of cinema as it had been known, what they were really trying to articulate was the end of
a certain kind of cinematic visuality.
The hope of the psychedelic and expanded cinema communities was that the filmic
apparatus would take on a new set of functions as a technology of vision — functions that
served the new concepts of expanded consciousness and expanded perception that the
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counterculture was developing. This was what Renan was getting at when he spoke of
“cinema expanded to the point at which the effect of film may be produced without film
at all” (Renan, 1967, p. 227). Youngblood reiterated the same notion when he argued that
expanded cinema “is not filmed so much as experienced onto film or videotape. As an
extension of the citizen’s nervous system, it can’t be judged by the same canons that
traditionally have represented art. It’s simply the first utterance of human beings who’ve
found a new language” (Youngblood, 1970, p. 133). What the psychedelic and expanded
cinema communities were articulating, in other words, was a desire to transcend the very
apparatus of cinema itself. This is what they meant by “the end of the era of cinema as
we’ve known it, the beginning of an era of image-exchange between man and man.” It
was a desire to retain certain affordances of the medium as a technology of vision:
namely, its ability to ecstatically harness those utopian properties of abundance, energy,
intensity, transparency, and community. But it was also a desire to jettison those aspects
of the cinematic apparatus that were rooted in older, unfavorable models of vision: its
technological and philosophical ties to the camera obscura; its function as an ideological
apparatus for the institutionalized regimentation of perception; its production, in the
hands of the culture industry, of a set of scopic regimes that did nothing to alleviate
scarcity, exhaustion, dreariness, manipulation, and fragmentation. It was precisely this
desire to transcend the filmic apparatus that was at the core of all of the reconfigurations
of cinematic visuality that we saw in the psychedelic feature films and psychedelic
mixed-media happenings of the 1960s.
Expressed in this, however, was more than just the collapse of a certain model of
cinematic visuality for the psychedelic movement; it also spoke to something about the
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human eye as a locus of visual perception. After all, as we have seen in discourses of the
camera–eye, the cinematic apparatus and the eye have historically shared a special bond.
The end of a particular way of cinematic seeing, therefore, would by implication also
suggest the end of a particular way of seeing associated with the eye itself. In a February
1964 article, for example, Mekas asked: “Is our eye dying? Or do we just not know how
to look and see any longer?” (Mekas, 1972, p. 118) Like the psychedelic movement itself,
he was concerned about the limitations and the inhibitions of the eye in the modern
world: the regimentation of vision by the mass media; the tutoring of the eye by
manmade laws and established systems of “knowledge”; the psychological blocks that
prevent us from ever really seeing things directly. For Mekas, the liberating tendencies of
expanded cinema would be instrumental in the liberation of the eye itself: it would be a
retutoring of the eye to bring about that new era of image-exchange between man and
man. “A new cinema needs new eyes to see it,” he argued, “That’s what it’s all about”
(Mekas, 1972, p. 120).
In some respects, though, Mekas was putting rather too much stock in the perceived
special bond between cinema and the eye. He wasn’t entirely sure what the future of
vision would look like, but he was sure that it would be one that was still built around a
model of perception that privileged cinema and the eye. As the sixties continued,
however, and as the psychedelic movement further developed its investigations of
different technologies of vision, we can see that the camera–eye started to lose some of
its footholds on the mountaintop of technological metaphors for perception. As we saw in
our discussions of Leary and Lilly in Chapter One, and as we will see in our
investigations of cybernetic models of perception in Chapter Three, the new era of image-
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exchange in many respects would be focused less on cinema and the eye, and more on the
post-cinematic, post-ocular circulations of visual data epitomized by electronic and
digital technologies of vision.
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CHAPTER THREE: GOING ELECTRIC
In 1984, William Gibson popularized the term “cyberspace” in his seminal science fiction
novel Neuromancer. Within the context of a cyberpunk narrative about drug addiction
and brain–computer interfacing, the definition that Gibson gave to cyberspace was
couched in the kind of vocabulary that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in Timothy
Leary’s writings about psychedelic drug experiences:
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of
legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught
mathematical concepts… A graphical representation of data abstracted
from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable
complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non-space of the mind, clusters
and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding… (Gibson, 1984, p.
51)
A few years later, when Virtual Reality began to receive a lot of attention in the late-
1980s and early-1990s, similar connections between cyberculture and psychedelics
continued to be emphasized. For a while “cyberdelic” became the buzzword du jour
among cyberpunk hipsters, ravers, and techno freaks. In January 1990, The Wall Street
Journal ran a front-page article on Virtual Reality in which Jaron Lanier described the
new technology as a kind of “electronic LSD” (Zachary, 1990, p. A1) — a meme that
would stick to VR for a number of years. In Mondo 2000, John Perry Barlow similarly
observed that “The closest analog to Virtual Reality in my experience is psychedelic, and,
in fact, cyberspace is already crawling with delighted acid heads” (as cited in Chesher,
1994, para. 43). The “electronic LSD” meme was so pervasive, in fact, that numerous
stories appeared in the mainstream press warning of the dangers of addiction to VR
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experiences, and many VR developers who saw serious uses for the technology had to
fight to steer media discourses away from such drug allusions (Chesher, 1994, para. 47).
John Perry Barlow had himself once been a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, and he was not
the only alumnus of the psychedelic movement to step forward and promote cyberculture
in this manner. Most notably, Timothy Leary established a renewed cultural significance
for himself in the 1980s and 1990s when he reinvented himself as a kind of cyberguru.
He was an early, enthusiastic advocate of VR technologies — appearing in a promotional
film for Autodesk in 1989, acting as the master of ceremonies for a Mondo 2000
cyberpunk night at CyberArts International in 1991 — and he published widely about
cyberculture in the decade before his death in 1996. During this period, Leary saw new
digital technologies (and the cultural formations developing around them) as being
inextricably tied to the projects of the 1960s psychedelic movement. In 1994, he wrote: “I
know now that our research with psychedelic drugs and, in fact, the drug culture itself
was a forecast of, or preparation for, the personal computer age” (Leary, 1994, p. 42). In
other words, in Leary’s schema, cyberculture was picking up where LSD had left off:
accelerating our brains, opening up new ways of seeing, creating new realities, and
facilitating nothing less than a species mutation.
These examples represent just a small sample of the numerous times that psychedelics
and cyberculture have become intertwined over the four decades since the Summer of
Love. In the last few years, a number of cultural historians have begun the task of trying
to unpack these long-standing connections between the counterculture of the sixties and
the digital culture of the present. In From Counterculture to Cyberculture, for example,
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Fred Turner examines the role that onetime Prankster Stewart Brand has played since the
1960s in shaping discourses about digital culture, most notably by creating network
forums that have brought together major players from both the counterculture and
cyberculture — such as the Trips Festival, the Whole Earth Catalog, the Hackers
Conference, the WELL, and Wired magazine. By following Brand’s personal story,
Turner chronicles the ways that the technorati of the 1980s and the 1990s mobilized the
countercultural discourses of the 1960s to legitimize their activities and imbue
cyberculture with a radical, hip sensibility (Turner, 2006). John Markoff’s What the
Dormouse Said (2006) explores a parallel social history by focusing on the birth of the
personal computing industry in the Silicon Valley of the 1960s and 1970s. By following
such computing pioneers as Douglas Engelbart, John McCarthy, Hew Crane, Myron
Stolaroff, and Fred Moore, Markoff details how the personal computer industry and the
California counterculture were emergent at the same time, in the same place, with many
of the same participants. The close proximity of the two movements, he argues, had a
significant impact on how personal computing would come to be conceptualized:
“Personal computers that were designed for and belonged to single individuals would
emerge initially in concert with a counterculture that rejected authority and believed the
human spirit would triumph over corporate technology, not be subject to it” (Markoff,
2006, p. xv).
As these studies show, the connections between the counterculture of the 1960s and the
nascent cyberculture of the same period carry a great deal of historical and cultural
significance. This chapter aims to shed more light on these connections — particularly
with respect to issues of vision and technology. The social and historical overlaps
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between the counterculture and cyberculture in the 1960s were, after all, integral to the
development of the cybernetic theories of perception that were put forth by Leary, Lilly,
and others in the psychedelic movement. The cybernetic theories of Norbert Wiener and
the electronic evangelism of Marshall McLuhan, in particular, were redefining
relationships between humans and machines in ways that fed directly into the psychedelic
movement’s own beliefs about vision, technology, and society. Ideas also flowed in the
other direction too, with many figures from the world of cybernetics taking an interest in
the oceanic realms of psychedelic consciousness — creating a rich climate of exchange
between counter- and cybercultures.
Throughout this chapter, I seek to understand how these transactions contributed to
cybernetic models of perception within the popular cultures and discourses of the
psychedelic movement. I also question how the psychedelic movement positioned
cybernetics in relation to the cinematic models of vision discussed in Chapter Two.
Emergent electronic and digital media, after all, offered up new technologies of vision for
the psychedelic culture to explore, both in theoretical discourses and creative production.
First, I examine these interactions between psychedelics and cybernetics within the
framework of an intellectual history of ideas. I situate the psychedelic movement’s
interpretations of cybernetics in the context of a broader popularization of cybernetic
discourses within mainstream sixties’ culture. From this analysis, I argue that the
psychedelic movement proposed very different paradigms of human/machine relations
and cybernetic ways of seeing than most of the mainstream cultural discourses of the
period. I then examine how these psychedelic–cybernetic discourses were influenced by
Marshall McLuhan’s grand theories about electronic communications technologies. The
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psychedelic movement and McLuhan, I argue, came together through a mutually
beneficial system of legitimacy exchange to promote shared models of ecstatic,
cybernetic perception. In the second half of the chapter, I investigate how psychedelic
media productions of the 1960s engaged with these cybernetic ideas of perception. I
analyze how electronic and digital technologies (television, video, computers) were put to
use by artists and media producers in the creation of psychedelic visual culture. I also
argue that, regardless of the technologies used to produce them, the signature visual traits
of psychedelic style were, in fact, deeply rooted in these emergent cybernetic models of
vision and visuality. In other words, the strobe lights, swirling patterns, and vibrating
colors of the psychedelic aesthetic were, in their essence, a visual expression of
cybernetic theories of perception.
Defining Cybernetics in the Popular Discourses of the Sixties
In Chapter One, we examined two examples of the cross-pollination of ideas that took
place between psychedelics and cybernetics. Leary’s “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out”
engaged with a McLuhanesque view of electronic media as an extension of the central
nervous system, promoting a post-ocular notion of perception in which vision was
conceptualized as a flow of data. Lilly’s “Human Biocomputer” similarly conceptualized
the observer as a cybernetic system of feedback and control mechanisms that could be
reprogrammed using isolation tanks and psychedelic drugs. Through these theories,
Leary, Lilly, and others in the psychedelic movement popularized the science of
cybernetics among followers of the counterculture. As Turner points out:
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Although they rejected the military-industrial complex as a whole, as well
as the political process that brought it into being, hippies from Manhattan
to Haight-Ashbury read Norbert Wiener, Buckminster Fuller, and
Marshall McLuhan. Through their writings, young Americans encountered
a cybernetic vision of the world, one in which material reality could be
imagined as an information system. To a generation that had grown up in a
world beset by massive armies and by the threat of nuclear holocaust, the
cybernetic notion of the globe as a single, interlinked pattern of
information was deeply comforting: in the invisible play of information,
many thought they could see the possibility of global harmony. (Turner,
2006, pp. 4-5)
The counterculture, however, was not alone in its popularization of cybernetics in the
1960s. Although the field of cybernetics had been around since the 1940s, and had been
gaining momentum throughout the 1950s in research institutions such as M.I.T. and
Stanford, its mainstream exposure during those years was minimal in comparison to the
explosion of interest about the subject that occurred in the popular discourses of the
1960s. In newspaper articles, popular journals, best-selling books, films, television
shows, and the public square, cybernetics emerged as one of the major hot-button issues
of the early-1960s, in large part fuelled by the impact that a massive expansion in
computing technology was having on the daily lives of citizens in developed nations. To
put it into perspective: at the beginning of the 1960s, there were approximately 10,000
computer programmers and 30,000 computer operators employed in the United States; by
the end of the decade, those numbers had skyrocketed to 350,000 full-time programmers
and an estimated 2,000,000 operators (McQuade, 1971, p. 12). In the discourses of the
national press and the mainstream media, cybernetics provided a central set of paradigms
for trying to make sense of how this influx of new electronic and digital technologies was
transforming society.
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As such, to fully understand how the psychedelic movement engaged with the ideas
coming out of cybernetics, we also need to consider the broader cultural context of how
cybernetics was being debated within mainstream discourses in the 1960s. The cybernetic
visions of Haight-Ashbury hippies were, after all, not developed in a cultural vacuum. On
the contrary, when psychedelic trendsetters like Leary, Lilly, or Brand were promoting
cybernetic ideas to the counterculture, their interpretations and applications of
cybernetics were made very much in dialogue with — and often in resistance to — the
cybernetic discourses of the mainstream media. If we compare mainstream and
psychedelic debates about cybernetics in the 1960s, we see that distinctly different sets of
understandings were in play in each arena — differences that reveal significant conflicts
over the meaning of cybernetics and its implications for the future of Western society.
When I refer to “mainstream” discourses, I am basing my findings on an analysis of all of
the instances between the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s that cybernetics appeared as a
topic of discussion in a range of major newspapers (The New York Times, The Los
Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Christian Science
Monitor) and a range of popular journals (Life, Esquire, Time, Popular Science), as well
as the presence of cybernetics in best-selling books, in films and television shows, and at
public forums and symposia. Whenever cybernetics was defined in these contexts, it was
primarily understood through the lens of Norbert Wiener’s work. Wiener was invariably
name checked and the vocabulary used to describe cybernetics was often taken directly
from his writings. In a 1961 article for The Christian Science Monitor, for example, Nate
White copied Wiener almost verbatim when he wrote: “Cybernetics as understood today
is the science of control and communication by means of electronic machines either in
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combination with other machines or in combination with human beings or with other
animals” (White, 1961, p. 9). In a Washington Post article from 1963, George Dixon
remarked: “‘Cybernetics’ is actually the property, so to speak, of Norbert Wiener, the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology genius who adopted the word 15 years ago to
indicate the new science of control mechanisms” (Dixon, 1963, p. A17). And in a 1966
article for The Los Angeles Times, Max Rafferty turned to his dictionary for a definition
of cybernetics and learned that it was: “the science which treats of the principles
underlying the common elements in the functioning of automatic machines and of the
human nervous system” (Rafferty, 1966, p. B5).
In other words, cybernetics was primarily understood in the mainstream media at that
time in Wienerian terms as the science of human/machine relationships, and a common
focus in discourses about cybernetics was the categorizing of computer intelligence in
relation to human intelligence. A 1961 article in Life magazine, for example, noted: “Ten
years ago, when the first computers had just been invented, it was considered naïve to
refer to them as electronic brains. Today they are performing such crafty feats of ‘human
thinking’ that their designers and users compare them more and more often to real brains”
(Young, 1961, p. 109). Noting that computers are “fast-working but slow-witted” and
“brilliant because they are basically stupid” (p. 117), the article concluded that it was still
up in the air whether machine intelligence could ever match the quick-witted human
brain: “People who know something about computers disagree as to how ‘human’ or
‘intelligent’ they will ultimately become” (p. 118).
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This notion of the computer lacking the sophisticated intelligence of the human being
was a recurrent theme throughout mainstream discourses on cybernetics in the 1960s, and
a great deal of attention was paid to the ways in which sentient humans are unique and
beyond the realm of duplication by machine. In a Los Angeles Times article from 1965,
for example, a public address given by Warren White (the data processing supervisor for
Ernst & Ernst) on the differences being humans and data processing machines was
summarized as follows:
“Man is brilliant and the computer is stupid,” [White] said. “The computer
is an extremely fast, accurate moron. It has to be taught everything and
everything has to be written down. Man has a sensitivity to your business;
the computer does not. Man can improvise; the computer cannot. It has to
be told precisely what to do.” (Rossman, 1965, p. B7-B9)
In an extensive article on computer intelligence for Life magazine in 1967, Robert
Campbell similarly described computers as “painfully literal-minded” (Campbell, 1967,
p. 72). It was upon this quality in particular that Campbell defined the fundamental
difference between computers and humans:
The very simple mindedness of the computer plays a significant part in its
highly symbolic relationship with humans. It is everything we are not.
Human beings are imaginative, intuitive, sensitive to values and
occasionally capricious. A computer is none of these things. It can pay
undivided attention to details that would drive the mortal right out of his
mind. It can be told to do something and won’t forget it until told to do so.
It never gets in a huffy. It will work on the most boring problem forever
without getting overheated. It will not laugh outright at human error and
will work prodigiously at any problems put to it, no matter how trivial.
(Campbell, 1967, p. 72)
Of all human faculties, the brain was most central in these comparisons to the computer.
A recurrent theme in discussions from the period was that the brain possessed a unique
character, over and above any other human organs, and was ultimately irreplaceable by
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computer. In a 1965 New York Times article, for example, John Pfeiffer remarked: “If we
are ever to transform ourselves into high-grade cyborgs, something will have to be done
about the most complex organ of all. The ultimate in implantable organs would be a
miniature computer capable of doing what nature does with the 10 billion nerve cells of
the brain. But that will not come, if ever, until long after the mass production of other
organs” (Pfeiffer, 1965b, p. 16). In a 1965 article for The Los Angeles Times, E. Nelson
Hayes likewise asserted: “Indeed, within a century or less it may be possible to replace
any part of the human body except the brain, with an artificial device” (Hayes, 1965, p.
30). And Howard Simons, a science writer for The Washington Post, stressed the
following distinction between computer and human brain in a 1964 piece covering a
cybernetics symposium at Georgetown University:
In [Ulric] Neisser’s view, although man is becoming more like machine
and machine more like man, there is a difference. The fundamental
difference, especially where computers are concerned, is that the central
storage of the human brain cannot be erased, nor can it be loaded with
arbitrary programs.
Each person, he said, is unique because he is the irreversible product of a
very particular history. Moreover, Neisser noted, no man “can be
manipulated without limit, nor can anything once done to a person be
entirely undone, as a machine can be cleared and reset.” (Simons, 1964c,
p. A2)
A precedent for such discussions of cybernetics certainly existed in Wiener’s own
writings. In The Human Use of Human Beings, for instance, Wiener engaged in similar
speculation about computers taking human form: “Theoretically, if we could build a
machine whose mechanical structure duplicated human physiology, then we could have a
machine whose intellectual capacities would duplicate those of human beings” (Wiener,
1954, p. 57). The scope of his work was much broader than this, though. Wiener’s theory
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of cybernetics had sought to identify how humans and machines adhered to the same
mathematical principles as systems of communication, control, and feedback. In this
sense, he was as much concerned with thinking about humans as communication
machines as he was with thinking about machines developing humanlike faculties. The
vast majority of mainstream discourses about cybernetics in the 1960s, however, heavily
emphasized just one side of Wiener’s equation: the implications of machines (computers)
becoming more like humans. Far fewer column inches were devoted to the reverse
proposition. Howard Simons, in a 1964 article for the Washington Post, was emblematic
of this bias when he remarked of cybernetics: “the word is becoming a catchall for any
effort to devise machines for duplicating human activities — mental or physical”
(Simons, 1964b, p. A2). Moreover, in consistently stressing the unique, nonreplicable
qualities of the human being over the computer, most mainstream discourses were
implicitly challenging (or misunderstanding) Wiener’s theories of human/machine
convergence: the nuance, spontaneity, and sophistication of human systems of
communication and control being seen in the popular press as a difference in kind (not a
difference in degree) from those of the computer. Put differently, a clear separation of
human and computer was generally advocated, such as Robert R. Kirsch’s remark in a
Los Angeles Times article from 1964: “If we should render unto the computer that which
is the computer’s, we must never render it anything which is man’s” (Kirsch, 1964, p.
C6).
This position towards human/machine convergence in the mainstream media was in part
existential in character: the blurring of distinctions between human and machine resulting
in a cultural need to reinforce human identity in the face of intelligent machines.
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Existential concerns about human identity, however, ran a distant second in the
mainstream press coverage to socio-economic concerns. For most columnists, cybernetics
was synonymous with automation — the terms were often used interchangeably or
conflated into the term “cybernation” — and the majority of news articles that discussed
cybernetics did so in the context of computers replacing human labor in the work place.
In other words, cybernetics was very much tied in mainstream discourses to a fear of
human obsolescence, and discussions about computers acquiring human skills were
probed primarily in relation to the impact that these technological advances might have
on the capitalist foundations of an American society that was at the height of a Cold War
with the Soviet Union.
A 1964 Los Angeles Times article described the situation in the following terms:
The “moment of truth” in automation and cybernetics is upcoming “a lot
sooner that a lot of people realize,” and Americans are almost totally
unprepared for it, a consulting economist warned here Thursday evening.
“It is already clear that nobody has any solutions for the problem of
automation,” said Robert Theobald. “There are no master plans at work
either in government offices or in union or industrial headquarters.
“As a result there will be a great deal of anguish and dislocation as
emergency adjustments are made, crash programs are improvised.”
(Sederberg, 1964, p. B14)
Later in the same piece, Sederberg cited Richard Bellman (the inventor of dynamic
programming) who predicted that “‘in the discernible future’ 2% of the population will
be able to produce all the goods and services necessary for everyone” (p. B14).
Unemployment would already have been much worse, Bellman continued, except for the
fact that industries were holding back, at a sacrifice to profits, to avoid increasing the
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severity of the problem. In a 1963 Washington Post article, Senator Jennings Randolph
(D–WV) was cited expressing similar concern about cybernetics, noting that computers
had replaced 4100 people with less than 100 at the Internal Revenue Service in
Martinsburg, WV, that 50 statisticians now did the work of 4000 in the Census Bureau,
and that the nation’s farms were losing 200,000 persons per year to cybernation (Dixon,
1963, p. A17).
Elsewhere, a 1961 Life article entitled “The Machines Are Taking Over: Computers
Outdo Man At His Work Now – And Soon May Outthink Him” featured a cartoon that
depicted a computer strangling a worker with a pair of mechanical arms (Young, 1961, p.
120). A 1967 piece for The Los Angeles Times had Max Lerner taking a satirical swipe at
the phenomenon: “As a result of reading the spate of literature on cybernetics I am
thinking of automating myself. It is the only response I can think of making to an
environment where everything is being done by computer […] and where nevertheless I
am swamped in unfinished work and seem to be bogging down worse and worse in
nonautomated mud” (Lerner, 1967, p. A5). And in The Wall Street Journal, Jean Conder
Soule penned a poem entitled “A Psalm of Strife” that began:
Tell me not in mournful numbers,
I’m becoming obsolete! —
With each code that now encumbers,
My anonymity’s complete.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
Computation’s not its goal;
To my dying day I’ll spurnest,
Cybernetics for my soul.
(Conder Soule, 1969, p. 10)
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Wiener had himself been concerned about the potential dangers of automation, long
before it became a hot-button issue in the 1960s. In 1948, Wiener argued that cybernetics
would likely produce a second industrial revolution that would make modern-day John
Henrys of us all:
The first industrial revolution, the revolution of “the dark satanic mills,”
was the devaluation of the human arm by the competition of machinery.
There is no rate of pay at which a United States pick-and-shovel laborer
can live which is low enough to compete with the work of a steam shovel
as an excavator. The modern industrial revolution is similarly bound to
devalue the human brain at least in its simpler and routine decisions. Of
course, just as the skilled carpenter, the skilled mechanic, the skilled
dressmaker have in some degree survived the first industrial revolution, so
the skilled scientist and the skilled administrator may survive the second.
However, taking the second revolution as accomplished, the average
human being of mediocre attainments or less has nothing to sell that is
worth anyone’s money to buy. (Wiener, 1948, pp. 27-8)
In 1946, Wiener even (unsuccessfully) met with trade union officials from the Committee
of Industrial Organization during their postwar contract negotiations, hoping to convince
them of the need to create a society based on human values other than buying and selling
(Pfeiffer, 1965a, p. 25). Wiener’s prescience in this regard was highlighted in his obituary
in the Washington Post:
When his thoughts on cybernetics — which were brilliantly outlined in his
book, The Human Use of Human Beings — first appeared, there was a
tendency to dismiss his speculation as the frothy fantasy of a secluded
academic. We know better today; we are grappling with the hard, practical
problems first foreseen by this remarkable man who saw both the promise,
and the peril, of an automated society. (“Norbert Wiener,” 1964, p. A18)
Analysis of these promises and perils of cybernetics coalesced in mainstream discourses
of the 1960s around two key issues. The first was a concern about the “leisure problem,”
which reflected a widespread belief at the time that mass unemployment would transform
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the United States from a labor-driven economy to a leisure-based society. As Glenn
Seaborg (chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission) put it at a 1967 address to
Howard University: “Advancing computer technology will cause the distinction between
work and leisure to almost vanish” (Nabrit Jr., 1967, p. A4). The second issue was a
concern about dehumanization, which reflected not only worries about human
obsolescence, but also a perceived threat of totalitarianism associated with the use of
cybernetics by the Soviet Union.
In newspaper articles, conferences, and hearings throughout the 1960s, the topic of how
to approach the “leisure problem” was debated furiously. In November 1964, a public
forum on “Cybernetics and Religion” was held at the Washington Cathedral
(“Cathedral,” 1964, p. E5), and another symposium on “Cybernetics and Society” was
held at Georgetown University (“G.U. symposium,” 1964, p. D10). Other public events
about cybernetics and the society that received national attention included a debate before
the United States Chamber of Commerce in December 1966 (Porter, 1966, p. D6), a
three-day congressional panel on the “Post-Industrial Society” convened by the House
Committee on Science and Astronautics in January 1970 (Wilford, 1970, p. 23), and
numerous debates at conferences and on college campuses across the country (Dewer,
1965; Clippinger, 1966; Nabrit Jr., 1967).
A few figures in the public spotlight tried to advance the argument that this imminent,
radical transformation of the United States into a leisure society could have positive,
utopian potential, if planned for appropriately. At the annual conference of the Health and
Welfare Council in May 1965, for example, a Presbyterian minister named Rev. Phillip
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R. Newell, Jr. argued that the Calvinist concept of rewarding man for productive work
has been rendered irrelevant by automation and cybernetics, and that “We should not be
afraid to pay people just to sit on their doorsteps or be responsible heads of families if
this helps rekindle a sense of community and fellowship” (Dewar, 1965, p. B11). Similar
notions of a “negative income tax” were also put forward by a number of noted
economists, including Milton Friedman (University of Chicago) and James Tobin (Yale).
Perhaps the most vocal proponent of such a system for handling the socio-economic fall
out of cybernetics and mass unemployment was the British economist Robert Theobald,
who became a leading public intellectual on the subject as he crisscrossed the United
States throughout the 1960s, issuing dire warnings of a potential crisis while advocating
his concept of a “guaranteed income” system to fix the problem. Theobald appeared in
many newspaper columns and at many of the aforementioned public forums, often in
debate with other public figures that held opposing views (Hendrick, 1963; Simons,
1964b; Sederberg, 1964; Clippinger, 1966; Porter, 1966; Theobald, 1969). In a
Washington Post article about a debate before the United States Chamber of Commerce
in December 1966, at which Theobald was a participant, Frank C. Porter best
summarized the contours of the arguments as follows:
Theobald’s thesis has been that the link between income and work should
be broken, that cybernetics is so shrinking job opportunities that all the
goods and services mankind will need will soon be furnished by a handful
of its number.
He would thus have the Government grant an entitlement of, say, $1000 a
year to each adult and $600 for each child — the sums to be increased as
the system became more efficient to permit every individual to live in
dignity and adequacy.
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At the opposite end of the spectrum was Henry Hazlitt, the longtime
economic columnist, who described Theobald’s dream as “an absolutely
immoral proposition.”
The recipients of this largesse, Hazlitt argued with some feeling, “are to be
given ‘sufficient to live in dignity,’ and it is apparently to be of no
business of the taxpayers if the recipient chooses nonetheless to live
without dignity, and to devote his guaranteed leisure to gambling,
dissipation, drunkenness, debauchery, dope addiction, or a life of crime.”
(Porter, 1966, p. D6)
In other words, in addition to the necessary financial reconfigurations that would be
required to sustain a cybernated economy, debates about the predicted leisure society also
focused on the moral implications of paying people not to work. For a society that took
pride in the Protestant work ethic — and demonized the unemployed as lazy drunkards
and criminals — the idea that cybernetics would make 98% of the population
unemployed was a threatening proposition. Theobald’s belief, however, was that the
United States was heading towards a “Toynbeean crisis” if it did not recognize that its
“institutional structure and values are unsuitable to the world in which we live”
(Theobald, 1969, p. F7).
The fear of cybernetics resulting in dehumanization sat alongside these economic and
moral concerns about human obsolescence in the work place. At the 1964 Georgetown
University symposium on “Cybernetics and Society,” for example, William F. Moran Jr.
described cybernetics as “a genie of awesome power in our midst and [we] will have to
learn to cope with it or be ruled by it.” (Simons, 1964b, p. A2) At the same event,
Theobald himself argued “some form of dehumanizing, impersonal world is inevitable in
the next 20 years unless we make major changes in our socio-economic system” (Simons,
1964b, p. A2). Elsewhere, in a manner that echoed Wiener’s pleas to the CIO twenty
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years earlier, Theobald spoke of the dangers of allowing cybernetics to force upon us
“machine rights” faster than we are asserting “human rights” (Hendrick, 1963, p. 10). In a
article for The New York Times, Zbigniew Brzezinski similarly argued: “it will be
essential to put much higher emphasis on human values lest personal existence become
increasingly depersonalized. There is the real danger that human conduct will become
less spontaneous and less mysterious: more predetermined and subject to deliberate
‘programming’” (Brzezinski, 1969, p. 147). In a Washington Post article, Alan Barth
articulated much the same set of themes: “It seems to me that all the aspects of
contemporary life are tending to produce a homogenization of society. International
tension makes dissent seem dangerous. Automation and cybernetics and technology seem
almost to eliminate individuality” (Barth, 1964, p. E6). And a panic-stricken letter to the
editor of The Wall Street Journal read:
Have we gone so mad in our craze over automation, cybernetics and
mechanization that we must lose sight of people as people? Is it worth it to
gain efficiency and lose personality, to call a man by his number and lose
his name? (Fitch, 1963, p. 12)
Films and television shows from the era that touched upon cybernetics and automation
articulated a similar set of concerns about depersonalization. Richard Lester’s Petulia
(1968), for example, presents a dystopic view of modern society in which automated
machines are steadily replacing everyday face-to-face communication, to the extent that
the central characters can no longer experience any sense of personal intimacy with one
another. Several episodes of the original Star Trek television series addressed similar
themes by presenting narratives about thinking computers. In “The Return of the
Archons” (1967), the crew of the Enterprise discover a planet where the population acts
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like dehumanized zombies, obeying the will of their unseen ruler — which turns out to be
a computer that has enslaved the people as a means of achieving lasting peace. In “The
Ultimate Computer” (1968), a thinking computer is installed to run the Enterprise and
threatens to make the crew obsolete; its survival programs, however, inadvertently result
in the deaths of hundreds of people during a war games exercise. (In both episodes, Kirk
uses his own superior logic to convince each of the computers of their errors of judgment,
causing both machines to self-destruct in atonement.) An episode of The Twilight Zone,
entitled “The Brain Center at Whipple’s” (1964), explored similar themes of
depersonalization and human obsolescence when an employer replaces his staff with a
computer so that there will be “no more coffee breaks, no more sick leave, no more petty
inconveniences like maternity.” In the end, a depressed Mr. Whipple winds up joining his
old employees at a bar, having been laid off himself by the new computer. And in the
most deliriously enigmatic television show of the era, The Prisoner (1967), Patrick
McGoohan plays an imprisoned secret agent who is out to prove that he’s a man, not a
number.
In the context of these discourses about cybernetic depersonalization, the specter of the
Communist totalitarianism — and the fear that “Soviet scientists are toying with the
human brain” (White, 1961, p. 9) — was never far away. The sixties, after all,
represented peak years of Cold War paranoia, and there was a widely held belief that
human manipulation would soon become the trademark of the post-industrial, cybernetic
man. As Richard Buffum wrote in an article for The Los Angeles Times: “New
manipulative devices now appear in many forms capable of expanding our totalitarian
potentials by several orders of magnitude beyond the primitive terroristic devices
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employed by Hitler and Stalin” (Buffum, 1970, p. B2). A close eye, therefore, was kept
on Soviet endeavors in cybernetics.
As part of a series of reports in The Christian Science Monitor on the socio-political
dimensions of the U.S.S.R., Nate White devoted an article to the Soviet use of
cybernetics for the “guidance and control of human thinking” (White, 1961, p. 9). For
White, the Soviet approach to cybernetics was inextricably wrapped up in the nefarious
project of Communism:
[I]t is clear from what is known in the West about the Soviet
developments in cybernetics, that the U.S.S.R.’s toughest, most
sophisticated, most dedicated mathematicians work day and night in
advancing the nation’s progress. The elite of this science are thus utilized
for the state’s objectives.
The U.S.S.R. today allocates a major research budget, a primary political
and economic focus to the rapid development of proficiency in this new
wonder world of control science.
With cybernetics, the U.S.S.R. and its associated power, Communist
China, hope to leap the centuries and conquer the world. (White, 1961, p.
9)
In an in-depth piece on Soviet cybernetics for The New York Times, Albert Parry echoed
the same sentiments, asserting that the Russians had a “near-mystic obsession” with
cybernetics (Parry, 1966, p. 25). In an effort to emphasize American superiority — and
quell readers’ fears about an imminent Communist takeover — Parry stressed however
that Soviet cybernetics was still trailing the West. He noted that the Soviets were late
starters due to Stalin’s oppression of cybernetic research, that they let party doctrine get
in the way of progress, and that they were working with antiquated computers and
electro-mechanical engineering knowledge. In reassuring (but vigilant) tones that
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reinforced a confidence in the American market economy, Parry estimated that the
Soviets were 10-20 years behind the West: “The main reason for the lag? Lack of
competition between various computer firms, of course” (Parry, 1966, p. 96).
Secrecy behind the Iron Curtain resulted in a lot of conjecture in the Western media about
how the Soviets were actuality putting cybernetics to use, ranging from paranoid
whispers about cybernetics being used in telepathy research (Browning, 1963, p. A1) to
rumors about the Russians building a secret city of elite cybernetics scientists (“Russ
build utopia,” 1967, p. A6). One thing that remained clear in mainstream discourses,
however, was that cybernetics and Communism were a particularly lethal combination:
that the Soviet Union did not possess the same kind of moral or religious scruples as the
West in terms of how cybernetics could be used to automate and regiment a population.
In The Washington Post, for example, Robert Bicknell wrote that the politico-economic
structure of the Soviet Union was ideally suited for cybernetic control systems:
I fear that some of our greatest thinkers have been unable to grasp the
central fact that the Soviet Union has advanced because its rulers have
learned how to apply the art — the science — of communication and
control of the minds and actions of its 226,000,000 people.
This monolithic society seems to induce intellectual paralysis amongst our
own thinkers rather than to stimulate innovations that will ensure our own
superiority consistent with the freedoms upon which we insist. (Bicknell,
1964, p. A16)
In The Washington Post, Howard Simons provided the most significant news article on
the subject with a piece entitled “Cybernetics: Soviet Union Is Using Computer
Technology To Automate Not Only Industry But People” — for which he was the
recipient of the 1964 Journalism Award by the American Association for the
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Advancement of Science. Noting that the U.S.S.R. was using cybernetics to create “a new
Soviet man,” Simons reported that:
Some American experts view the Soviet excursion into cybernetics as
representing the single greatest potential threat to the free world’s well-
being. […] Essentially, what the Soviets have in mind when they speak of
cybernetics is the study of behavior and the ways in which behavior can be
regulated and controlled to meet some state-prescribed purpose. […] With
such knowledge, the Kremlin will not only be in a position to control its
own society better but also to subvert other societies more effectively and
efficiently. (Simons, 1964a, p. E5)
Simons expressed particular concern about a developing Soviet schooling system of
“educational incubators” in which children are “spoon-fed present values” according to
cybernetic principles. Known as “Internats,” these schools represented for Simons the
pinnacle of the Soviet Union’s methods of using cybernetics to indoctrinate Communist
ideology and automate its people:
The operating theory at the “Internats” is that the nervous system is the
bearer of cultural inheritance, just and the genes are bearers of biological
inheritance. If information put into the nervous system can be controlled,
then the cultural pattern of the individual can be controlled.
In short, the Soviets hold that a child growing up in a family and attending
conventional day schools will inherit the cultural past. But the child
growing up in the special boarding school — away from family and
friends and subject to cybernetic teaching methods — will inherit the
cultural future. This future not only will be determined by the state, but
will permit the Soviet man to live harmoniously in a society fashioned by
cybernetics. (Simons, 1964a, p. E5)
Throughout these assorted discussions of cybernetics in the mainstream media, the
various debates about thinking computers, human obsolescence, the leisure society, and
depersonalization were fundamentally leveled at a macro-social view of cybernetics: one
that emphasized the cultural implications of computers acquiring (and surpassing) human
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capabilities of communication and control. In other words, as noted earlier, popular
accounts of cybernetics tended to stress the side of Wiener’s work concerned with
computers becoming more humanlike. The reverse proposition — humans being seen as
computers — was much less commonly articulated. Indeed, in the majority of the
aforementioned articles, the humanness of humans went largely unquestioned: the human
was positioned as a stable constant against which to measure the variable intelligence of
computers. When notions of human-as-machines were addressed, it was usually only in a
metaphorical manner that did not delve too deeply into the specific principles that Wiener
had laid out. Concerns about people losing their individuality to the computer, or
speculations about the Soviets turning their population into a legion of automata, were
conceptual analogies that tapped into long-standing fears about human/machine hybrids;
they were not analogies that probed the particular questions of communication and
control that Wiener had raised in his own analysis of humans and machines. Put
differently, such analogies in popular discourses did not incorporate in any meaningful or
detailed way the understandings of humans as systems of communication and control that
had been developed in the field of cybernetics; rather, these analogies merely reiterated a
more general, pre-cybernetic set of cultural anxieties about the blurring of the human and
the machine — anxieties that had previously been stirred up by the likes of Edison’s Eve
or the Golem of Jewish folklore.
Two exceptions to this trend within 1960s popular discourse are worthy of brief mention
in the context of the current study: the birth of the cyborg as a theoretical construct; and
the emergence of Psycho-Cybernetics as a self-help craze. The term “cyborg” was first
introduced in a 1960 Astronautics article (Clynes & Kline, 1960), as well as tie-in pieces
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for The New York Times (“Spaceman,” 1960) and Life (“Man remade,” 1960). D. S.
Halacy further popularized the concept in his 1965 book, Cyborg: Evolution of the
Superman. The historical significance of the term is that it was the first time that a
human/machine hybrid had been specifically derived from the principles of cybernetics.
The concept of the cyborg at that time, however, was a far cry from that of Blade Runner
(1982) or The Terminator (1984). Rather, it was presented as a means of advancing the
project of space travel. Building on Wienerian principles of feedback, the 1960s’ idea of
the cyborg referred specifically to the use exogenous technologies to self-regulate an
astronaut’s chemical and physical processes in ways that would automatically respond to
the environmental changes of outer space. In other words, the cyborg was conceived as a
means of adapting astronauts to their environment, rather than having the environment
adapt to fit human biological needs:
A cyborg is essentially a man-machine system in which the control
mechanisms of the human portion are modified externally by drugs or
regulatory devices so that the being can live in an environment different
from the normal one. […] For example, a solar battery powered “lung”
might be rigged to his arteries for replacing the carbon dioxide in his
blood with oxygen. This would make breathing unnecessary.
(“Spaceman,” 1960, p. 31).
The figure of the cyborg in the 1960s, in other words, popularized ideas from the field of
cybernetics about the human body as a system of communication and control that could
be modulated by external machine technologies. It was a concept, however, that left just a
minor footprint in the popular culture of the 1960s. Only through later iterations of the
idea in the decades since would the cyborg gain substantial cultural currency.
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Psycho-Cybernetics, on the other hand, received considerable attention in 1960s popular
culture, and is viewed today as one of the foundational traditions of the self-help industry.
It was a phenomenon created by Maxwell Maltz, a former plastic surgeon, who
introduced the concept in his 1960 best seller Psycho-Cybernetics: A New Way to Get
More Living Out of Life — a book that sold more than 600,000 copies in its first three
editions (Coles, 1967, p. 8). In short, Psycho-Cybernetics used Wiener’s models of
communication and control to provide a framework for positive thinking. Followers of
Psycho-Cybernetics worked on pre-visualizing situations in order to achieve a positive
outcome: the idea being that if one has already processed different potential scenarios,
when it comes to performing the task in question, the mind and body will be more
attuned to the different types of feedback being received, and will be better positioned to
respond with optimal levels of performance. Psycho-Cybernetics, in other words, drew
from cybernetics a set of principles for strengthening connections between mind and
body — making communication and control systems in humans more efficient and
effective.
In summary, several key themes ran across this body of mainstream discourses about
cybernetics in the 1960s, themes that revolved primarily around the impact of cybernetics
and automation on the socio-economic structures of Western capitalism. With the
computer being viewed as a machine that was becoming so efficient and accurate that it
was likely to usurp human skills and create mass unemployment, these discussions
reflected a national anxiety over how to integrate cybernetics into a capitalist market
economy. At the root of this anxiety were questions about how to regiment the body.
Discussions about the “leisure problem” spoke to the moral and economic implications of
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suddenly having a population of unregulated bodies — bodies that had theretofore been
regimented by institutional structures of labor. (Divorcing personal income from labor,
after all, tasted too much like socialism for many in the United States to swallow.) On the
other side of the equation, automation and a computerized society also presented the risk
of bodies becoming over-regimented in soulless and totalitarian ways. Such discourses
took on a definite nationalistic character when attention was directed towards the Soviet
Union: if the Russians had no religious or moral scruples about regimenting the bodies of
its people towards totalitarian ends, would this give them an unholy edge in the world? In
other words, how could Western capitalist systems put cybernetics to use in a manner that
was commensurate with its stated values of freedom and equality? And would adherence
to those values put the United States at a relative disadvantage to Communist Russia?
With such emphasis being placed on pressing, socio-economic questions about mass
unemployment and the Cold War, much less attention was given in these discourses to
what might have been seen as more abstract notions about humans themselves as systems
of communication and control that process information. Indeed, for the most part, popular
discussions of cybernetics were so focused on computers replacing human labor that the
human being was essentially removed from the information loop entirely. Humans, after
all, were going to have a hard time competing against computers in terms of information
processing, and would therefore need to find a new vocation. Some at the time even
predicted that the job of the computer programmer would soon become obsolete, with
IBM even announcing a computer that repairs itself (Youngblood, 1970, p. 51). Even
when human beings were examined as cybernetic systems — as in the case of the cyborg
and Psycho-Cybernetics — the emphasis of the discussions still hinged on the larger
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socio-economic and nationalist discourses. For example, the context in which the cyborg
was discussed — advancing space travel — cannot be divorced from the climate of the
space race with the Russians, which was at its peak in the early 1960s. The cyborg, in
other words, represented a Western application of cybernetics into astronautics that could
yield nationalist returns if successful. Psycho-Cybernetics, meanwhile, represented an
application of cybernetics to the human individual in ways that countered the suspected
totalitarian application of cybernetics by the Soviets. The focus of Psycho-Cybernetics,
after all, was on making the individual more efficient and effective within the project of
market capitalism. Maltz’s book, for example, became a textbook that was “favored by a
number of large corporations, whose heads recommend it — and even distribute it — to
their employees” (Coles, 1967, p. 10). Its marketing campaigns and press releases also
stressed its use by successful, All-American sports heroes, like Mike Garrett of the
Kansas City Chiefs (Maher, 1969, p. D2) and the entirety of the New York Yankees
(Durso, 1968, p. 37). As one scathing review of Psycho-Cybernetics at the time put it:
“This book is a primer on greed, on how to want more, covet everything, get almost
anything, and as a result feel not ‘happy’ but ready for that final lust — the pursuit of
immortality.” (Coles, 1967, p. 10)
If we turn our attention back to how cybernetics was approached by the psychedelic
movement in the 1960s, we see a quite contrasting set of discourses emerging. The
psychedelic theorists who engaged with cybernetic ideas did so in ways that emphasized
very different components of Wiener’s work than the mainstream media. In particular,
rather than concentrating on the impact that automation might have at the “macro” level
on Western socio-economic systems, there was a much greater focus in psychedelic
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discourses on how cybernetics was redefining the human being on a “micro” level. In
other words, theories of cybernetic feedback and information processing had much more
to do with transformations of perception and consciousness for the psychedelic
movement than they did for the cultural critics of the popular press.
Given the psychedelic movement’s intense interest in inner vision and internal states of
consciousness, this focus on cybernetics’ reconfiguration of the individual is not
altogether surprising; but these differences also had a lot to do with the fact that the
psychedelic movement did not share the same socio-economic and ideological concerns
as the mainstream media. The psychedelic movement, for instance, generally did not
express much worry about the threat of Communism or the protection of American
nationalist interests. Discussions of the Cold War, or speculations about what the Soviets
might be working on, were entirely absent from psychedelic discourses about
cybernetics. And with the Vietnam War raging, the counterculture was very much
predisposed towards opposing American imperialist endeavors. Likewise, the psychedelic
movement was not particularly concerned about saving the current socio-economic
system of the United States. Quite the contrary: many in the psychedelic community
believed that the entire capitalist system needed to be overhauled. Indeed, for a
counterculture that promoted dropping out of the system, mass unemployment was not
such a bad thing. Likewise, the psychedelic community did not view leisure as a
“problem”; rather, they saw it as a utopian goal.
As such, the mainstream media and the psychedelic movement approached the issue of
cybernetics from quite different perspectives. The two communities, for example, both
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shared concerns about the dehumanizing implications of a computer-driven society, but
they approached those concerns from entirely different coordinates. In the mainstream
media, automation represented a potential threat to the current socio-economic system
and it was feared that humans would just become numbers if computers took over
entirely — totalitarian Russia representing the worst-case scenario of such a trend.
Among the psychedelic community, however, the current socio-economic system in the
United States itself was viewed as already dehumanizing. Psychedelic theorists did not
need a Soviet Other to act as a dystopian counterpoint; the “IBM syndrome” of the
technocratic Establishment already served that function. For affiliates of the psychedelic
movement, the increase of computers and automation in the 1960s did not represent a
radical transformation of American society so much as it did an acceleration of trends
that had already been in place for quite some time: trends of rationalization and
regimentation that had been structuring Western technocratic societies long before the
first worker had ever been laid off as a result of cybernation. In other words, the overly
rational, overly regulated, depersonalized, computerized world that was depicted with
anxiety in mainstream discourses of cybernetics was very much how the psychedelic
community viewed the mainstream society in the first place. This was precisely what
Leary was addressing when he contended: “Ninety-nine percent of the activity of ninety-
nine percent of Americans goes into robot performances on the TV-studio stage. Fake.
Unnatural. Automatic” (Leary, 1968/1995, p. 330). He was not arguing that television
and automation were the cause of people becoming like robots, but rather that these new
technologies were the latest manifestations of a much deeper-rooted problem of
rationalization and regimentation in American culture: a conditioning by social
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institutions, language systems, and media industries alike that stunts our senses,
constrains our consciousnesses, and detaches us from the infinity of the cosmos. Robert
Masters and Jean Houston put it similarly in their 1968 book, Psychedelic Art:
A brain still geared to a primitive world delimits our reality and impedes
many kinds of mental functioning. Now psycho-chemistry may be in the
process of shaping a new, more desirable brain–world balance. What is
most important is that we thus may alter an evolutionary course that
seemed headed toward production of an almost exclusively logical,
rational, neo-cortical man, lacking in imagination and other necessities of
artistic creation, and ever more a robot or glorified ant at the mercy of his
computer-like brain and its mathematical precision. (Masters & Houston,
1968, pp. 127-8)
What remains perhaps most striking, therefore, about the psychedelic movement’s
approach to cybernetics in this regard is that it was largely, and often glowingly, positive.
Columnist Richard Buffum in The Los Angeles Times was emblematic of the mainstream
media’s feelings about cybernetics when he wrote, “In the early fifties I remember
reading a prophetic book by the father of cybernetics, Norbert Weiner, a mathematician. I
didn’t understand very much of it, but it frightened me. It still frightens me” (Buffum,
1970, p. B2). This kind of trepidation and bewilderment was not, however, a character of
psychedelic engagements with cybernetics. In large part, this was because cybernetics did
not connote the same kinds of things for the psychedelic movement as it did the
mainstream media. The most significant difference was that, unlike the mainstream press,
the psychedelic community did not treat cybernetics as being synonymous with
automation. This was the root of much of the fear of cybernetics in the mainstream media
of the 1960s, and it accounted for why coverage of cybernetics in the popular press
tended to emphasize the sections of Wiener’s work that dealt with thinking computers
and the social implications of automation. Cybernetics, in other words, was a buzzword
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in the mainstream media for expressing anxieties about such things as sentient machines,
mass unemployment, moral degradation, and totalitarianism. For the psychedelic
movement, in contrast, cybernetics did not connote automation as much as it did new
systems for understanding human perception and consciousness. Cybernetics provided
the psychedelic community with a model for understanding the body and its sense organs
as a site of information processing. It also provided a model for expressing euphoric
feelings of cosmic interconnectivity in terms of networks of data flow and a “latticework
shuttling of energy patterns” (Leary, 1968/1995, p. 253). The psychedelic movement
believed, after all, that if you can change the prevailing modes of perception and
consciousness, you can change the world; and a psychedelic–cybernetic view of the body
as a system of communication and control played a large role in how the “molecular
revolution” was conceptualized. The psychedelic movement, therefore, embraced
cybernetics as a liberating set of theories and principles.
By focusing on the body of the observer in this manner, psychedelic theorists drew upon
very different aspects of Wiener’s arguments than the mainstream media. To put it in
Foucauldian terms, mainstream discourses about cybernetics centered on the disciplining
of bodies: one of the key threats that cybernetics represented to the established order was
that it had the potential of disrupting capitalist systems of regimenting bodies through
labor. The individual human body, therefore, was approached primarily from an external
and social perspective, as a material resource that was potentially on the verge of
obsolescence. As such, there was a very static quality to how the human body was
represented in mainstream discourses: computer technologies were seen to be advancing
at accelerated rates, but the human body was viewed to be a finite and limited set of
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faculties that were not expected to radically change or evolve in the foreseeable future.
The perceived challenge, in other words, was in finding a place for the static, immutable
human body within a dynamic, changing, cybernetic world. The discourses of the body in
psychedelic literature, however, were quite the opposite. As we saw in Chapter One,
figures like Huxley, Kesey, Leary, and Lilly viewed the body as a much more mutable
and dynamic site of departures and returns; and psychedelic drugs were seen as keys to
unlocking the body from the prisons created for it by society’s regimentation of
perception and consciousness. The body of the psychedelic observer was depicted as a
“whirling dance of pure energy, where nothing existed except whirring vibrations”
(Leary, 1968/1995, p. 253), and as “cellular structure or patterns of energy rather than as
a person” (Ram Dass, 1971, p. xi). In psychedelic discourses, it was only the regimented
body of the everyday observer that was described as steadfast and “plastic.” Leary, for
example, remarked that “The rest of the human race is doomed to three-D-headmill
plastic repetition” (Leary, 1968/1995, p. 326). Elsewhere, in an account of his very first
LSD trip, Leary described his return to everyday perception in the following terms:
The effects of the drug began to wear off by dawn. I was still higher than I
had ever been before, but at least some structure was coming back. The
flow of vibrations had stopped, and I felt myself freezing into a mold of
plastic. There was a terrible sense of loss, of nostalgia, for the long hours,
eons really, when one was at the heart of meaning and the radiant core of
the energy process. (Leary 1995, p. 254; emphasis added)
Similar ideas about the body, while not remarked upon in mainstream accounts of
cybernetics, had in fact been a significant presence in Wiener’s writings as well. In The
Human Use of Human Beings, for example, Wiener argued: “We are but whirlpools in a
river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate
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themselves” (Wiener, 1954, p. 96). What he meant by this was that the biological body of
an organism should be defined more in terms of fluidity and process than steadfastness
and material matter: “The individuality of the body is that of a flame rather than that of a
stone, of a form rather than of a bit of substance” (Wiener, 1954, p. 102). In other words,
for Wiener, as for Leary, the body was a site of cellular information processing that
remained perpetually in flux. We are all transmitters of “human information” (Wiener,
1954, p. 104). Wiener even went so far to suggest that the idea of breaking apart a human
body and telegraphing it across space was “highly plausible” (Wiener, 1954, p. 104) —
an idea that was, not surprisingly, absent from mainstream applications of cybernetic
theory. This notion of the body as a nothing more than data streams, Wiener argued,
“takes us very deeply into the question of human individuality” (Wiener, 1954, p. 98).
For Leary and others in the psychedelic community, these ideas about the body in
Wiener’s work provided a conceptual framework for articulating the sensations of
embodiment and disembodiment that were experienced under LSD. When Leary spoke of
the dawning of the “Psychedelic–Cybernetic Age” (Leary, 1968/1998a, p. 9), it was to
this affinity between psychedelic experience and cybernetic theory that he was referring.
Wiener’s description of human beings as “whirlpools” and “flames,” after all, would not
have seemed out of place alongside psychedelic descriptions of the body as a whirling
dance of pure energy. In this sense, both psychedelic and cybernetic theory
conceptualized a kind of disintegration of the body at a molecular level, viewing it not as
“stuff that abides” but rather as cellular systems of information transmission. The body of
the psychedelic–cybernetic observer was, thus, defined less in terms of a carnal density of
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sinews and tissues (a corporeal thickness of perception) than as an extensible
communication network for the control and exchange of sensory data.
Through this kinship, we could say that psychedelics and cybernetics both represented
disruptions to everyday, regulated experiences of the body. At their most fanciful, both
Wiener and Leary imagined the observer’s body in ecstatic terms as a whirring, vibrating
information system that could be liberated from the structures of regulation and
regimentation characteristic of Western capitalism. The mainstream media’s
interpretations of cybernetics, in contrast, presented a picture of an automated society in
which the human body was in danger of becoming increasingly redundant as an engine of
information processing. In other words, far from connoting the dystopian fears about
accelerated computer intelligence and human obsolescence that ran rampant throughout
the popular press in the 1960s, Wienerian cybernetics served as a source of validation
within the psychedelic movement for its reconfiguring of the observer’s body as a site of
information exchanges.
Psychedelic–Cybernetic Technologies of Vision and the
Electronic Evangelism of Marshall McLuhan
Perhaps not surprisingly, a strain of technological determinism ran rife throughout these
psychedelic–cybernetic discourses of perception. This was in no small part due to the fact
that psychedelic drugs emerged on the scene of 1960s’ popular culture at around the same
time as cybernetics, video, computers, and the idea of the “television generation.” Leary,
for example, argued that the emergence of new electronic and digital technologies was
instrumental in creating the kind of environment where a psychedelic counterculture was
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even possible in the first place: “I think that all these things [were] pretty historically
inevitable, when you had modern technology producing psychedelic drugs mass-market
and then you had electronic amplification” (Perry, 1996, p. xix).
The combination of psychedelic drugs, electronic technologies, and cybernetic theory, in
other words, was perceived to be a central front in the transformation of human
consciousness. Throughout the discourses of the era, there were countless instances of
affiliates of the psychedelic movement articulating a belief that emergent electronic and
digital technologies would bring about new, dynamic, ecstatic ways of seeing.
Computers, video, and television were conceptualized as technologies that were
analogous to psychedelic drugs, capable of interfacing with the central nervous system to
produce new forms of cosmic consciousness and expanded perception in the observer.
Leary, for example, argued:
The rapid spread of this ecstatic spirit is due to the recent availability of
brain-change neurotransmitters and electronic communication appliances
accessible to individuals. When these psychedelic foods activate the brain
and when these electronic devices start gushing electronic information,
people’s minds begin opening. (Leary, 1968/1998a, p. 6)
In Psychedelic Art, Masters and Houston similarly argued:
Consciousness, as it now is evolving, is not likely to be satisfied with
static works of art. […] The main determinants of the future development
of consciousness are more likely to be chemically initiated experience,
direct and finely planned regulation of brain function (enhanced learning
and memory, accelerated thought, utilization of the eidetic image
processes), and the impact of an electronic environment inclusive of
mixed-media art forms and entertainment. (Masters & Houston, 1968, p.
125)
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Likewise, in Expanded Cinema, Youngblood stressed the need for a new kind of culture
based on a merger of psychedelics and electronics in the following terms:
Because of mankind’s inevitable symbiosis with the mind-manifesting
hallucinogens of the ecology on the one hand, and his organic partnership
with machines on the other, an increasing number of the inhabitants of this
planet live virtually in another world.
It is a world infinitely more natural and complete than that of commercial
cinema or television, which is used to confirm the existing consciousness
rather than to expand it. [...] Perhaps never before has a new model for
human behavior been needed so urgently as today. (Youngblood, 1970, p.
47)
Youngblood’s book, in fact, was saturated with testimonies from psychedelically oriented
media artists who identified ecstatic, transcendental affordances in electronic and digital
technologies of vision. Stan Vanderbeek, for example, was quoted suggesting: “We’re
just fooling around on the outer edges of our own sensibilities. The new technologies will
open higher levels of psychic communication and neurological referencing”
(Youngblood, 1970, p. 246). John Whitney, Jr., the maker of mandala-styled computer
films, likewise remarked: “I believe it’s possible that an inadvertent spin-off from
technology will transform man into a transcendental being. There isn’t much we can
conceive now that can give us a clue to how it will come about. But I suspect that vision
will play an important role” (Youngblood, 1970, p. 237). And Scott Bartlett, creator of
the seminal video art piece, Off/On (1968), was quoted as arguing: “It is now obvious that
we are entering a completely new video environment and image-exchange life-style. The
videosphere will alter the minds of men and the architecture of their dwellings”
(Youngblood, 1970, p. 264).
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Eric Siegel, creator of Psychedelevision in Color (1969), argued much the same things
about television: “I see television as bringing psychology into the cybernetic twenty-first
century. I see television as a psychic healing medium creating mass cosmic
consciousness, awakening higher levels of the mind, bringing awareness of the soul”
(Youngblood, 1970, p. 314). Aldo Tambellini similarly remarked: “Our creative
involvement with television must begin now so that the electronic energy of
communication can give birth to new visions: we will face the realities which astronauts
and scientists know to be part of life” (Youngblood, 1970, p. 308). So too did Brice
Howard, who argued:
And what is really the richest part of television, less its technology, less its
cubist nature, less its incredible colorations and shapes and motions and
excitements — it’s now, it’s capturing the damned actual with all of its
aberrations. Television will help us become more human. It will lead us
closer to ourselves. (Youngblood, 1970, p. 285)
In other words, while mainstream discussions of cybernetics remained fixated on the idea
of computers evolving at such an accelerated rate that they would soon usurp the
relatively static, unchanging human, the discourses that circulated around the psychedelic
community focused instead on the ways that new electronic and digital technologies (in
conjunction with mind-manifesting drugs) would in fact be catalysts for the evolution of
human consciousness and society. Exactly how this radical transformation would occur
was not always articulated, but it was clear to the psychedelic community that it would
have something to with a reconfiguration of vision: that television, video, computers,
cybernetics, and LSD all offered new ways of conceptualizing and regulating vision that
were in sync with the societal and generational shifts of the era.
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In contrast, it is not insignificant that issues of vision, perception, and consciousness were
entirely absent from the discussions of cybernetics in the mainstream media. As we saw
in the popular press, humans were generally perceived as being increasingly removed
from the information-processing loop; therefore, new models of cybernetic visuality
(vision-as-information-processing) tended to take a back seat to the moral, economic, and
ideological implications of human obsolescence in an automated society. When
electronic technologies of vision were linked to psychedelic modes of perception in the
mainstream media, it was invariably in a pejorative manner — with both the media
technologies and the drugs themselves being characterized not in terms of an ecstatic
processing of data streams, but rather an unproductive inactivity. S.I. Hayawaka, for
example, tapped into fears about television as a drug pusher when he remarked that both
TV and LSD “depend on turning on and passively waiting for something beautiful to
happen” (Bodroghkozy, 2001, p. 46). The voices from the counterculture, however,
provided different, more pro-active narratives. As Michael Shamberg put it:
The 1960s were a Pearl Harbor of the senses. Whole new technologies
conditioned us from birth to relate to a world which was not that of our
parents’ childhood. It came as a sneak attack because print-man,
impervious to his own bias, was unable to perceive that any time there is a
radical shift in the dominant communications medium of a culture, there’s
going to be a radical shift in that culture. (Bodroghkozy, 2001, p. 41)
No figure provided the psychedelic movement with a more influential model of new
media technologies and their transcendental impact on perception and consciousness than
Marshall McLuhan, the premier public intellectual of electronic communications
technologies in the 1960s. His presence can be felt in all of the above quotes about the
ecstatic potential of electronic and digital technologies — McLuhan, after all, was just as
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much of a technological determinist himself — and he became almost as big a celebrity
for the counterculture as Leary and Kesey. As Aniko Bodroghkozy points out:
“McLuhan’s theories, as used by some young people, suggested a link between the
psychedelic experience and television as a perception-altering technology. For some
acidheads this was an empowering way to make sense of their activities” (Bodroghkozy,
2001, p. 46).
McLuhan’s popularity among the counterculture was by no means accidental. In fact, it
was quite cultivated. As we saw in Chapter One, McLuhan was friends with Leary and
was instrumental in the development of “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out” as a psychedelic
slogan. Throughout the mid-1960s, McLuhan also collaborated with USCO, who
produced mixed-media experiences to accompany many of McLuhan’s public
appearances, giving the Canadian academic a hip appeal that would attract young
acidheads. The 1967 release of The Medium is the Massage (McLuhan & Fiore,
1967/2001) continued this approach towards marketing McLuhan as an ally of the youth
movement. The books that had put McLuhan on the map in the early-1960s — The
Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964/2002) — had been fairly
traditional academic texts in terms of their format and appearance. For The Medium is the
Massage, however, McLuhan teamed up with Quentin Fiore to repackage the key ideas
from those earlier books into a “collide-o-scopic” bricolage of images and rich text.
Consistent with McLuhan’s theses, the book announced itself as a sort of literary
intervention: a delirious disruption of the sequential, linear, rational order of print culture.
But more than this, the approach was clearly aimed at the era’s youth culture.
Photographs of Timothy Leary, Bob Dylan, and Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic
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Inevitable were all woven into the book’s visual tapestry, as were Pop Art graphics,
cartoons, quotes from Eastern philosophers, and photographs of hip fashions and
sexually-liberated nudes. In conjunction with the book, McLuhan also produced a spoken
word LP and a television special that likewise mobilized a trippy aesthetic to appeal to
countercultural audiences. The LP of The Medium is the Massage, for instance, features
McLuhan reading passages from the book amidst a psychedelic collage of music and
sound effects — an approach that had also been mobilized by Timothy Leary in his own
spoken word albums from the period, such as L.S.D. (1966), Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out
(1967), and You Can Be Anyone This Time Around (1970).
McLuhan’s aphoristic, rhetorical style was also well positioned to appeal to the
psychedelic counterculture. Just as he had encouraged Leary to devise an advertising
slogan to sell LSD, McLuhan’s own maxims about the media mimicked the catchy
linguistics rhythms of marketing jingles. He was speaking in a style that was designed to
resonate with the television generation. McLuhan’s eminently quotable maxims were also
extremely playful and open to interpretation. In interviews, he generally bristled at any
attempts to try to pin down specific meanings to his various statements about the media,
preferring instead to frame his analyses as amorphous inquiries rather than concrete
answers. With such an attitude, it was easy for the counterculture to appropriate
McLuhanite insights and use them for their own ends. For example, when McLuhan
spoke of electronic media bringing about a return of oral traditions and a new tribalism
— the “global village” — it did not require much of a leap in logic for the psychedelic
movement to meld those ideas to their own investigations into Native American cultures.
When the Human Be-In of January 1967 was dubbed “A Gathering of the Tribes,” the
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echo of McLuhan could be heard: the poster for the event even featuring several giant
bolts of electricity above an illustration of an Indian on horseback carrying an electric
guitar. The underground newspaper, The East Village Other, made this particular
connection to McLuhan’s theories explicit:
We, the electronic-age generation, have been the first to feel the impact of
the retribalizing effect of the new multi-media environment. We grew up
with television, which fed our brains with millions of black and white dots
electronically arranged and rearranged into microsecond patterns and
images. ... We are in the age of gestalt and shape. We are no longer die-
cast parts of a national mechanism. We are a tribe.
We are the new breed of American Indian who smoke grass and hash and
drop peyote as a tribal ritual. ... We are the reincarnation of oral, pre-
literate man. (as cited in Bodroghkozy, 2001, p. 40)
In many respects, McLuhan occupied a central node in the network of discourses about
cybernetic vision in the 1960s, and for the psychedelic movement, his arguments
provided a connective tissue that linked together cybernetic theory, emergent electronic
communication technologies, the central nervous system, altered states of consciousness,
and new paradigms of social interaction. In other words, what McLuhan did for the
psychedelic movement was to establish a framework for thinking about how cybernetics
and new media technologies were intertwined with the movement’s drug-fueled
explorations of the body and perception.
It might be a stretch to call McLuhan a cybernetician, but the development of his media
theories in the 1950s and 1960s were significantly influenced by cybernetic discourses.
The final chapter of Understanding Media, for example, focused on the topic of
automation, and McLuhan’s stance on the issue was much more closely aligned with that
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of Wiener and the psychedelic movement than the mainstream press. Just as Wiener had
conceptualized the individuality of the body as “that of a flame rather than that of a stone,
of a form rather than of a bit of substance” (Wiener, 1954, p. 102), McLuhan hit the same
beats when he explained the occurring transition from a mechanical to an electronic age:
“In the case of electricity, it is not corporeal substance that is stored or moved, but
perception and information” (McLuhan, 1964/2002, p. 351). In other words, when
McLuhan argued that communications media are “the extensions of man,” he did not
mean that they are rigid, physical, corporeal extensions of the body, but rather that they
extend human faculties of perception and information processing — that human beings
and electronic media can be both defined in cybernetic terms as fluid, mobile sites of data
control and communication. Echoing Wiener’s notion of human beings as whirlpools in a
river of ever-flowing water, McLuhan further argued:
Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information
pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously. As soon as information
is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information. Our
electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data
classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build
serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication
insures that all factors of the environment and of experience co-exist in a
state of active interplay. (McLuhan & Fiore, 1967/2001, p. 63)
This notion of active interplay, of course, was also built upon ideas that were coming out
of cybernetics at the time: namely, theories of information feedback. In Understanding
Media, McLuhan channeled Wiener when he observed:
Anybody who begins to examine the patterns of automation finds that
perfecting the individual machine by making it automatic involves
“feedback.” That means introducing an information loop or circuit, where
before there had been merely a one-way flow or mechanical sequence.
Feedback is the end of the lineality that came into the Western world with
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the alphabet and the continuous forms of Euclidean space. (McLuhan,
1964/2002, p. 354)
In short, McLuhan’s application of cybernetic theory was one that drew connections
between emergent, electronic communication technologies and Wiener’s feedback-
centered models of the cybernetic human. Both were seen to operate on the principle of
the information loop or the circuit, as opposed to the linear sequence; both were
conceptualized in terms of the dynamic flow of data and patterns, not the fixing of
information into regimented, static, bounded spaces. It was for this reason that McLuhan
argued that electronic media were profoundly changing human society: the electronic
circuitry of emergent communication technologies was connecting the central nervous
system of each human being into a worldwide network of feedback loops and data
transmission. In the conclusion of Understanding Media, he argued:
Men are suddenly nomadic gatherers of knowledge, nomadic as never
before, informed as never before, free from fragmentary specialism as
never before — but also involved in the total social process as never
before; since with electricity we extend our central nervous system
globally, instantly interrelating every human experience. (McLuhan,
1964/2002, p. 354)
Such visions of human mobility, unity, and interconnectedness clearly had a lot in
common with many of the discourses being generated by the psychedelic movement at
the same time. For psychedelicists who thought social revolution would begin with a
revolution in how we control our brains and nervous systems, McLuhan provided a
framework for extending those beliefs into the realm of electronic and digital media.
Indeed, McLuhan’s arguments about electronic media were equally concerned with how
we take in the world through our senses, and his master narratives about the emergence of
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electronic communication technologies were rooted in a set of debates about the social
impact of a widespread change in scopic regimes and human sensory behaviors.
Between The Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media, and The Medium is the Massage,
McLuhan’s work in the 1960s emphasized a set of shifts that he identified in the move
from a print-based culture to an electronic mediascape. The issue of sensory perception
was central to these shifts: “Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios
of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act —
the way we perceive the world. When these ratios change, men change” (McLuhan &
Fiore, 1967/2001, p. 41). For McLuhan, the development of the alphabet (and later the
printing press) produced a culture that skewed heavily towards a visual perception of the
world that was spatial, sequential, linear, uniform, and rational:
Western history was shaped for some three thousand years by the
introduction of the phonetic alphabet, a medium that depends solely on the
eye for comprehension. The alphabet is a construct of fragmented bits and
parts which have no semantic meaning in themselves, and which must be
strung together in a line, bead-like, and in a prescribed order. Its use
fostered and encouraged the habit of perceiving all environment in visual
and spatial terms — particularly in terms of a space and of a time that are
uniform,
c,o,n,t,i,n,u,o,u,s
and
c-o-n-n-e-c-t-e-d.
The line, the continuum
— this sentence is a prime example —
became the organizing principle of life. “As we begin, so shall we go.”
“Rationality” and logic came to depend on the presentation of connected
and sequential facts or concepts. (McLuhan & Fiore, 1967/2001, pp. 44-5)
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The cybernetic feedback circuits of electronic media, McLuhan argued, were returning
Western culture to the non-linear, non-sequential, irregular, irrational logic of a pre-
literate, pre-visual, pre-modern society. He likened this to living in an “acoustic” space:
i.e., that we are enveloped on all sides by simultaneously occurring sensory data, just as
the ear is omnidirectional and “everything-at-once.” The eye, in comparison, is
unidirectional and “one-thing-at-a-time.” With the high speeds of electronic
communication, McLuhan contended, “purely visual means of apprehending the world
are no longer possible; they are just too slow to be relevant or effective” (McLuhan &
Fiore, 1967/2001, p. 63). The instantaneous world of electronic information, he argued,
involves all of us, all at once. Unlike the linear, visual, perspectival world of the
Renaissance viewer (or the camera obscura), no detachment or frame can exist for the
immersive, multi-dimensional, networked, electronic observer. For McLuhan, television
was emblematic of this new way of perceiving the world:
Television completes the cycle of the human sensorium. With the
omnipresent ear and the moving eye, we have abolished writing, the
specialized acoustic-visual metaphor that established the dynamics of
Western civilization.
In television there occurs an extension of the sense of active, exploratory
touch which involves all the senses simultaneously, rather than sight
alone. You have to be “with” it. But in all electric phenomena, the visual
is only one component in a complex interplay. Since, in the age of
information, most transactions are managed electrically, the electric
technology has meant for Western man a considerable drop in the visual
component, in his experience, and a corresponding increase in the activity
of his other senses.
Television demands participation and involvement in depth of the whole
being. It will not work as a background. It engages you. […] In television,
images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around
you. You are the vanishing point. This creates a sort of inwardness, a sort
of reverse perspective which has much in common with Oriental art.
(McLuhan & Fiore, 1967/2001, p. 125)
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There are, of course, a lot of criticisms that can be (and have been) leveled at this
assessment of television and electronic media: the rampant technological determinism;
the Orientalism; the oversimplification of how people actually use television. If we put
those criticisms to one side, however, we can see that McLuhan’s theories were
expressing many of the same evolutions in the observer that we have seen throughout the
modern era. His dynamic, mobile, multi-perspectival, multi-sensory, data processing,
electronic observer is the antithesis of the fixed, ascetic, rational, classical observer in the
camera obscura. And for the psychedelic movement, McLuhan’s paradigms were
commensurate with their own experiments with omnidirectional, everything-at-once
sensory experiences, their own distrust of linear, rational, alphabetic models of reality,
and their own turn towards Eastern philosophies. In a number of articles and interviews,
McLuhan even went so far as to explicitly articulate theories in the language of the
psychedelic drug culture by aligning the experience of television with the experience of
LSD. In an April 1967 interview for The Los Angeles Times, for example, McLuhan
explained the differences he saw between cinematic and televisual perception in the
following terms:
What difference does it make whether the image is created by light
through or light on? It makes all the difference. In TV you are the screen,
in movies you are the camera. You can’t get a bigger difference than that
in human experience.
In one you go out into the world as a camera, in the other you go inside
yourself as in LSD. TV and LSD — the same thing. Inner trip. TV in other
words, is an Oriental experience. The movies were western, outside,
extroverted. (MacMinn, 1967b, p. C1)
In a January 1967 address on “Education in the Electronic Age” to the Provincial
Committee on the Aims and Objectives of Education in the Schools of Ontario, McLuhan
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articulated the same point, placing even more emphasis on a cybernetic understanding of
feedback in the process:
TV has invented the inner trip, LSD style, for the ordinary child. The TV
watcher goes on an inner trip, not an outer trip. The movie watcher went
on an outer trip; the camera took him outside into the world, extended his
eyes. TV does not. It goes inside you. […] LSD and all the TV inner trips
are more oriental than anything we are doing to westernize the East. The
world of electric circuitry feeds us back into ourselves. The whole point
about feedback is that it feeds back into you, and involves you in the
process. That is what is called communication. Communication is a
feedback to you without involvement. It is not a transmission of
information or messages. It is involvement in the process. (McLuhan,
1970, p. 2-3)
In other words, McLuhan was feeding off (and into) the same kinds of connections
between TV and LSD that we saw in Leary’s work. McLuhan was framing the cinematic
gaze and the electronic gaze as two fundamentally different ways of seeing, and he was
arguing that psychedelic vision was much more aligned with the latter. At the core of this
difference was the cybernetic feedback circuit: the notion that this new electronic way of
seeing is not about detachment, exteriority, or ascetic withdrawal from the world, but
rather connection, interiority, and participation in information flows.
In an interview with Playboy from March 1969, McLuhan explicitly discussed the drug
counterculture in a manner that not only further reinforced a connection between TV and
LSD, but that also suggested that the psychedelic movement was at the head of the curve
in this transformation of society:
The upsurge in drug taking is intimately related to the impact of the
electric media. Look at the metaphor for getting high: turning on. One
turns on his consciousness through drugs just as he opens up all his senses
to a total depth involvement by turning on the TV dial. Drug taking is
stimulated by today's pervasive environment of instant information, with
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its feedback mechanism of the inner trip. The inner trip is not the sole
prerogative of the LSD traveler; it's the universal experience of TV
watchers. LSD is a way of miming the invisible electronic world; it
releases a person from acquired verbal and visual habits and reactions, and
gives the potential of instant and total involvement, both all-at-onceness
and all-at-oneness, which are the basic needs of people translated by
electric extensions of their central nervous systems out of the old rational,
sequential value system. The attraction to hallucinogenic drugs is a means
of achieving empathy with our penetrating electric environment, an
environment that in itself is a drugless inner trip. Drug taking is also a
means of expressing rejection of the obsolescent mechanical world and
values. And drugs often stimulate a fresh interest in artistic expression,
which is primarily of the audile-tactile world. The hallucinogenic drugs, as
chemical simulations of our electric environment, thus revive senses long
atrophied by the overwhelmingly visual orientation of the mechanical
culture. (“The Playboy interview,” 1969, para. 98)
By integrating talk of LSD into his media theories in this manner, McLuhan could
certainly be accused of a degree of pandering or opportunism. He knew that referencing
psychedelic drugs would be perceived as hip and cutting edge, and that such remarks
wouldn’t hurt book sales either. It gave McLuhan the aura of being in tune with the
zeitgeist of the times. This is a charge that we must take seriously: not because it lessens
McLuhan’s theories in any way, but because it exposes a central dynamic that was at play
in his relationship with the psychedelic movement. If Timothy Leary’s ideas acquired a
greater degree of cultural authority because of McLuhan’s presence, and if young
acidheads could use McLuhan’s theories in an empowering way to make sense of their
own activities, the reverse was no less true: McLuhan’s celebrity among the
counterculture helped fuel his broader celebrity in mainstream circles. In other words, the
relationship between McLuhan and the psychedelic movement could be characterized in
terms of legitimacy exchanges in which each was lending cultural capital to the other.
And it was through these exchanges of legitimacy that a set of ideas about cybernetic
vision, electronic media, and psychedelic experience took root in sixties’ culture.
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McLuhan was certainly a highly visible figure in the media landscape of the 1960s, but if
we look at how he was received within the mainstream discourses of the era, we can see a
general sense of bemusement among columnists and cultural commentators. In the
popular press, for example, he was largely treated as a bit of an eccentric and a kook. Few
critics dismissed McLuhan’s theories entirely; but fewer still claimed to fully “get” them.
Eliot Fremont-Smith, in a May 1966 piece on McLuhan for The New York Times, was
perhaps most emblematic of this trend when wrote:
Marshall McLuhan may be the first electronically-thinking man. His style
suggests it — part Bob Hope, part professor, part trivia machine, part
analyst and oracle, spouting ideas, insights, contradictions, quotations,
eccentricities, half-truths and prophecies all at once and tonelessly. It is
baffling, and it is eerie; whether he needs some critical feedback or
whether we need to catch up fast is, rather startlingly, an open question.
[…] I am by nature leery of prophets, particularly when they come on like
stand-up comics; but this one I have not quite been able to chuckle off.
Not yet. (Fremont-Smith, 1966, p. 45)
Similar descriptions of — and hesitations about — McLuhan reverberated around the
mainstream media of the period. He was often subjected to mystical labels, like being
called an “oracle” (MacMinn, 1967a, p. D1; Gould, 1967, p. 63; Wolfe, 1968, p. J4), “a
visionary, a prophet” (Zitz, 1967, p. L12), and “the high poobah of the electric age”
(Hazlitt, 1967, p. A33). Such descriptions gave some weight to the feeling that McLuhan
might be onto something, but they also served to place him alongside astrologists and
fortune-tellers as a potential sham. Indeed, what was most troubling to mainstream
commentators was the fear that McLuhan was all style and no substance: that he was
nothing more than “our newest branch of nonsense” (Just, 1969, p. A12), a gimmick who
was posing as profound (Lask, 1967, p. 152). Tom Wolfe admonished McLuhan, telling
him that charisma is not enough and that it was time to “start proving it.” (Wolfe, 1968,
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p. J4) He remained for many “a somewhat disturbing man” that you want to brush away,
but do not quite dare do so (McGill, 1966, p. 22). Roderick Nordell perhaps summed up
these feelings best in a March 1967 article for The Christian Science Monitor:
A literary man captured by the new technology — Superscholar meets
Frankenstein! — Professor McLuhan is given more to provocative
statements than laboratory proofs. His attitude toward ideas seems a little
like the stereotype of a woman’s towards hats: He will try on anything in
the hope that This One May Be It — or at least someone may notice
something new. (Nordell, 1967, p. 11)
One of the primary reasons why McLuhan was not completely rejected or ignored by the
mainstream media was his popularity within the counterculture. By successfully
marketing himself to young people, and by speaking a language that the psychedelic
movement understood, McLuhan was able to benefit from the counterculture’s own
cultural capital in mainstream discourses. The popular press, after all, didn’t quite know
what to make of the counterculture either; but they didn’t dare brush it aside either.
In counterpoint to his newspaper coverage, McLuhan was much more wholeheartedly
embraced by the psychedelic movement. When Leary et al. made reference to him, it was
invariably in glowing terms that reinforced connections between psychedelic experiences
and McLuhan’s electronic media theories. As Bodroghkozy points out:
Of crucial importance here is the neat fit between McLuhan’s description
of the new electronic culture and the hippies’ perception of their drug-
inspired counterculture. […] The essence of an LSD trip for many
acidheads was the embrace of irrationalism, the heightening of one’s
tactile sense, the feeling of being at one with the world and one’s fellow
trippers. Drug culture heightened for young people the very cultural
attributes McLuhan believed television had ushered in. A female student
at Columbia, quoted by Newsweek, clarified the connection by explaining
that reading McLuhan was like taking LSD: “It can turn you on … LSD
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doesn’t mean anything until you consume it — likewise McLuhan.”
(Bodroghkozy, 2001, p. 41)
This strong bond between McLuhan and the psychedelic movement was not lost on
mainstream cultural commentators of the era either. McLuhan’s mixed-media lectures-
cum-happenings and his cult-like status among the psychedelic youth was often a focus
of news stories. Aleene MacMinn, for example, wrote an April 1967 piece for The Los
Angeles Times that was entitled: “Critic McLuhan Turned On to Electronic Age”
(MacMinn, 1967a, p. D1). And in a lengthy article on mixed-media happenings in The
New York Times from May 1968, McLuhan beat out Leary and was dubbed “the No. 1
prophet of the movement” (Lester, 1968, p. 67).
The process of legitimacy exchange between McLuhan and the psychedelic movement
was significant in a number of ways, and it played an important role in shaping the
cybernetic models of perception that emerged from the union. One of the most significant
aspects of this legitimacy exchange between McLuhan and the psychedelic movement
was that it helped fill in the gaps of some of the wilder assertions made by each party.
This was particularly true with respect to claims about the connections between electronic
media and the central nervous system, as well as to declarations about cosmic unity and
cybernetic ecstasies of communication.
As we have already seen, McLuhan conceptualized electronic media as an extension of
the central nervous system. The psychedelic movement also placed a great deal of focus
on a “molecular revolution” that involved controlling the central nervous system to alter
perception and consciousness. We could argue, however, that a certain amount of
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“fuzziness” lies at the core of how the central nervous system was addressed by both
McLuhan and the psychedelic movement. Neither McLuhan nor most of the psychedelic
movement were physiological scientists who did any actual, empirical research on the
central nervous system. (John C. Lilly is one of the few exceptions.) The result is that
many of the cybernetic claims about the central nervous system — especially its role in
perception and its similarities to electronic media technologies — remain largely
unsubstantiated in both McLuhan’s work and the body of psychedelic literature. Indeed,
the claims made by both parties frequently far outpaced the state of scientific research on
the central nervous system at the time. Tom Wolfe took McLuhan to task over this very
issue, and his criticisms would have been equally applicable to the psychedelic
movement’s own theories of the central nervous system:
It was not until 1962 that physiologists, using microelectrodes, discovered
how the eye transmits shapes to the brain. To move from this level to the
postulate that TV, computers, etc., are altering the neural functions of
entire peoples or even one person — this could only strike a clinician as
romanticism. […] He ignores whole areas of current work in experimental
psychology or neurology. At the same time, his literary gifts lead him into
a kind of imprecision that damages his thesis. For example, he calls
electric circuitry “an extension of the central nervous system,” sometimes
using the expression in a metaphorical way, apparently — i.e., it is
analogous to the central nervous system — and other times in a literal,
organic sense. The plain fact is that computers and the like are not
extensions of the central nervous system and are only partially analogous
to it. (Wolfe, 1968, p. J4)
As such, we could argue that McLuhan and the psychedelic movement effectively
propped one another up on these discourses of the central nervous system: each lending
the other credibility with regards to the assertions they were making. The psychedelic
movement could legitimize its cybernetic claims about the role of the central nervous
system in expanded consciousness and global unity by drawing on McLuhan’s
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aphorisms; McLuhan in turn could get away with being somewhat romantic or imprecise
by appealing to the excitement generated about the central nervous system by the
psychedelic movement. It is these kinds of cultural exchanges, after all, that drive popular
discourse: the actual states of the fields of physiology, neurology, or cybernetics being
somewhat less important to the general cultural understandings of those topics than the
ways those fields get framed in popular discourse by the likes of Leary and McLuhan.
A similar exchange of legitimacy between McLuhan and the psychedelic movement was
at work in how they both extended their cybernetic claims about the central nervous
system into the mystical realms of religion and spirituality. The psychedelic movement’s
own discourses of cosmic unity and ecstatic communication originated from the euphoric
highs of their drug experiences: “In the state of radiant unity, one senses that there is only
one network of energy in the universe and that all things and all sentient beings are
momentary manifestations of the single pattern” (Leary et al., 1964/1995, p. 65). A key
function of McLuhan’s work in this regard was that it helped to provide legitimacy to the
psychedelic movement’s own attempts to connect these feelings of spiritual ecstasy to its
theories about cybernetic communication technologies. McLuhan was himself a devout
Catholic. He became a convert in his early twenties, and spent almost his entire career
teaching at Catholic institutions. These religious beliefs were in no way peripheral to his
declarations of global electronic unity. As Tom Wolfe pointed out in a 1968 article
entitled “McLuhan: through electric circuitry to God,” McLuhan’s discourses about
electronic media were deeply rooted in longstanding Roman Catholic debates over the
nature of human evolution:
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Before Darwin, the outstanding evolutionary theorist was the geneticist
Lamarck, who had the rather cheery view that in every age, in every way,
man was evolving into a better and better species. A paleontologist and
controversial Catholic theorist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, picked up on
Lamarck’s theories and saw man heading towards what he called the
“noösphere,” a state in which mankind would attain the neo-Platonic
Christian ideal (also Hindu) of an actual union with God, in which spirit
and matter, and the I and the Not-I would no longer exist separately.
Darwinian theory undercut this idea by depicting each species evolving in
response to impersonal forces and sometimes winding up in blind alleys.
Hell was as likely an outcome of evolution as Heaven. Darwin, Darwin,
Darwin, that got to be all you could hear. McLuhan’s new theory is a
comeback in round two for the noösphere. (Wolfe, 1968, p. J4)
When McLuhan speculated on the evolutionary impact of cybernetics and electronic
communications media, the influence of these Catholic discourses was quite clear:
If a data feedback is possible through the computer, why not a feed-
forward of thought whereby a world consciousness links into a world
computer? Via the computer, we could logically proceed from translating
languages to bypassing them entirely in favor of an integral cosmic
unconsciousness somewhat similar to the collective unconscious
envisioned by Bergson. The computer thus holds out the promise of a
technologically engendered state of universal understanding and unity, a
state of absorption in the logos that could knit mankind into one family
and create a perpetuity of collective harmony and peace. This is the real
use of the computer, not to expedite marketing or solve technical problems
but to speed the process of discovery and orchestrate terrestrial — and
eventually galactic — environments and energies. Psychic communal
integration, made possible at last by the electronic media, could create the
universality of consciousness foreseen by Dante when he predicted that
men would continue as no more than broken fragments until they were
unified into an inclusive consciousness. In a Christian sense, this is merely
a new interpretation of the mystical body of Christ; and Christ, after all, is
the ultimate extension of man. (“The Playboy interview,” 1969, para. 146)
Through these Catholic discourses — evoking nothing less than a Cybernetic Christ —
McLuhan lent legitimacy to ecstatic understandings of electronic and digital media
technologies. It was not difficult for the psychedelic movement to tap into McLuhan’s
cultural capital and apply the same kind of reasoning to their own fusions of
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psychedelics, cybernetics, and spirituality. The notion of the noösphere, for example, was
common in psychedelic discourses of the era (Youngblood, 1970). Leary himself
frequently channeled McLuhan, such as when he argued that the combination of
psychedelic drugs and electronic communication networks would lead to the “circuited
unity of man” (Leary, 1968/1998a, p. 169).
Most germane to the current study, McLuhan’s electronic evangelism provided the
cybernetic branch of the psychedelic movement its own reference point for ecstatic
vision. If we recall Huxley’s metaphor from Chapter One, his ultimate counterpoint to the
closed-off, rational visuality of the camera obscura was the Clear Light of the Void.
Huxley, in other words, focused his dichotomy of mundane vs. visionary perception
around a metaphor of illumination: darkness vs. the light. In Heaven and Hell, in
particular, he devoted a great deal of space to the discussion of devices that have been
used historically to induce visionary experiences through an ecstatic display of light: gem
stones, fireworks, magic lanterns, phantasmagoria, etc. As such, Huxley’s reference point
for ecstatic vision was a classical one of ocular spectacle: the excitation of the eye by the
stimulus of bright light. McLuhan offered something different. Light still played a central
role in the visionary experiences of the psychedelic movement; Leary, for example,
argued, “TUNE IN means to bear witness to the Light, that all men might believe”
(Leary, 1968/1995, p. 3). But what McLuhan’s theories achieved was a conceptual
shifting of the locus of ecstatic experience into electronic flows of information. For the
cybernetic wing of the psychedelic movement, this meant that visionary perception was
less about the moment of light entering the eye and more about the subsequent
transmission of that light data around the cellular networks of the body. Indeed, an
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encounter with the Clear Light of the Void didn’t even require eyes: it was more a
“unitary atomic-electronic flash” (Leary, 1968/1998a, p. 46).
Electronic and Digital Media Productions in the Psychedelic–
Cybernetic Age
In this pursuit of ecstatic, post-ocular, cybernetic perception, electronic and digital media
technologies were almost as important as LSD to the psychedelic movement. Indeed,
many participants in the psychedelic culture of the 1960s believed that new media
technologies would eventually replace psychotropic drugs in society as a means of
attaining ecstatic levels of perception and consciousness. Masters and Houston, for
example, argued:
Eventually, mixed-media art may be able to activate all of the levels of
consciousness we have described. It will not give a psychedelic
experience, or trigger identical brain chemical changes, but the same
psychical levels will be responsive to it. The mixed-media will provide
intense sensory experiences, open the gates to the repressed and the
forgotten, evoke a symbolic and mythic consciousness, and finally activate
levels that in psychedelic experience are ones of profound spiritual
awareness. Mixed-media (or neurophysiological) art thus should come to
serve the needs of religion and therapy as well as those of art and
entertainment. (Masters & Houston, 1968, pp. 125-6)
John Whitney Jr. similarly remarked:
The high state we achieve through LSD or marijuana today is insightful to
the extent that it may be similar to what man will feel on a daily basis in
the future without exterior manipulation. This state has already happened
in the East — not in the Occident because it’s not part of our heritage —
but it has happened with the Yogis and so on, and it’s coming to the West
through technology. (Youngblood, 1970, p. 238)
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Even A.M. Noll of Bell Laboratories laid out a psychedelic vision of how electronic and
digital technologies could be used to create a whole new kind of cybernetic–artistic
production process:
The artist's emotional state might conceivably be determined by the
computer processing of physical and electrical signals from the artist (for
example, pulse rate and electrical activity of the brain). Then, by changing
the artist's environment through such external stimuli as sound, color and
visual patterns, the computer would seek to optimize the aesthetic effect of
all these stimuli upon the artist according to some specified criterion ... the
emotional reaction of the artist would continually change, and the
computer would react accordingly, either to stabilize the artist's emotional
state or to steer it through some pre-programmed course. One is strongly
tempted to describe these ideas as a consciousness-expanding experience
in association with a psychedelic computer ... current technological and
psychological investigations would seem to aim in such a direction.
(Youngblood, 1970, pp. 189-91)
Obviously, nobody in the 1960s was able to come close to developing the kind of
technology that Noll was imagining. Even from today’s perspective, his psychedelic
computer sounds like the work of science fiction. The sense presented in these writings
that this kind of mind-expanding union with electronic and digital technologies was
imminently possible should not cloud us to the fact that it was all largely wishful
thinking. In the same way that McLuhan and the psychedelic movement’s theories of the
central nervous system went way beyond the current findings of empirical research
studies, claims about the ecstatic affordances of electronic and digital technologies far
outpaced the actual state-of-the-art. Indeed, it is far from insignificant that most of the
psychedelic–cybernetic discourses of the sixties were situated firmly rooted in the future
tense. In all of the statements presented throughout this chapter about the utopian
expansion of consciousness through electronic or digital means, the claims are invariably
predicated on the word “will”. They were all speculative assessments about where new
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technologies might take human society in the future; none were descriptions of the
current affordances of those technologies.
In the reality of the 1960s, the use of electronic and digital media technologies in the
production of psychedelic visual culture was actually much more scarce than one might
expect. Psychedelic television, video, or computer art was dwarfed by the amount of
psychedelic visual culture that was created using more established media forms, such as
cinema, print, and theater. One of the key reasons for this was that electronic and digital
technologies were still not able to match the kind of dense, colorful, visual designs that
psychedelic artists could achieve using more traditional media forms. Even Doug
Engelbart’s “mother of all demos” at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in 1968 — an
event that rocked the computing industry with its then dynamic use of video projection —
paled in comparison to what the psychedelic movement was able to achieve through
analogue visual technologies at their happenings.
As Youngblood points out, in the 1960s there were only three types of computer output
hardware for producing visual media: the mechanical analogue plotter, the microfilm
plotter, and the cathode-ray tube (CRT) display console (Youngblood, 1970, p. 194). The
mechanical analogue plotter, however, was really only good for creating still drawings of
the kind produced by engineers, architects, and so forth. It utilized an arm-like
servomechanism to draw lines on paper, and as such remained too expensive and time-
consuming for it to be utilized by psychedelic media artists. Microfilm plotters and CRT
displays were put to use by some artists to create “computer films”; but even then they
remained dependent upon cinematic apparatuses in order to accomplish this. Microfilm
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plotters (which were designed for the compact storage of printed or pictorial information)
could print still images from a computer onto the individual frames of conventional film
stock. Most computer films produced using this method, however, were not aesthetically
motivated and were made by scientists, engineers, and educators (Youngblood, 1970, p.
196). CRT displays allowed for the production of “real-time” motion — as opposed to
the plotting of still images — but most displays were still low-resolution and black-and-
white, and the dissemination of such computer-generated visual media still relied upon
film: i.e., using a movie camera to shoot the images on cathode-ray tube. Television and
video technologies posed a similar set of challenges for psychedelic media producers.
The revolutionary Sony PortaPak, for example, could only shoot in low-resolution black-
and-white and it was extremely difficult to audio dub. Film reels were also still cheaper
and easier to exchange than videotapes, so the distribution of video art during the period
was, again, often dependent on cinematic apparatuses.
Access to these technologies was yet another hurdle for independent media producers.
During the psychedelic era, most electronic and digital media technologies were still
extremely expensive, and for the most part the means of production remained in the
hands of large corporations like IBM and CBS. Indeed, many of the examples of
electronic/digital psychedelic visual culture from the 1960s were the result of media
producers working within these institutional systems. This placed considerable
restrictions, however, on the extent to which a psychedelic agenda could be explored
using these technologies. With a few exceptions, broadcast television was mostly off
limits to the psychedelic community. Video was certainly mobilized by the sixties
counterculture, but the aforementioned technical limitations of devices like the PortaPak
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resulted in the technology finding more use as a tool for New Left and political activist
groups (like TVTV or Ant Farm) than as a medium for exploring psychedelic–cybernetic
modes of visuality.
In other words, between technical and institutional limitations, there was a significant gap
between theory and practice. We could say, therefore, that electronic and digital
technologies were much more important to the psychedelic movement for their symbolic,
cultural value within discourse than for their actual affordances as tools for the creation
and advancement of psychedelic visual culture. Indeed, computer and video technologies
still occupied only a very marginal position within the cultural industry of the 1960s —
with little of the infrastructure needed to compete with, say, the Hollywood studio system
— so the notion that such technologies could have an immediate, revolutionary impact on
society’s ways of seeing was not entirely plausible.
The cybernetic, McLuhanesque idea of these technologies as extensions of psychedelic
perception was much more potent for the psychedelic community than their actual usage
in cultural productions. Much of the emphasis of psychedelic–cybernetic discourses
about electronic and digital media, therefore, was on the framing of new media
technologies in a particular light, as part of an effort to push the development of those
technologies in directions commensurate with the goals of the psychedelic movement.
There was nothing inherent in most of the electronic and digital media technologies of the
1960s, after all, to suggest that they would inevitably transform human perception and
facilitate a visionary society. Most computers in the 1960s, for instance, still ran on
punch cards; and paper print outs were the primary means of receiving feedback from the
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machine. So part of what psychedelic–cybernetic discourses about the computer were
trying to do was frame the technology as more than just a number-crunching calculator.
Electronic and digital technologies were too potent as psychedelic–cybernetic metaphors
of perception for them to be lost to the bureaucrats and militarists of the technocracy. If
we look at how some of these technologies were actually put to use in the production of
psychedelic visual culture in the 1960s, we can see a wide range of different strategies
playing out, with varying degrees of success in the advancement of psychedelic–
cybernetic models of perception.
Network Television
The only electronic or digital medium to have a strong foothold in the culture industry of
the 1960s was television. Indeed, for theorists like McLuhan and Leary, it was television
— not computers — that most symbolized the interconnected, networked flows of
information that we today associate with the cyberspace and Internet. The members of the
psychedelic movement, however, adopted an extremely ambivalent relationship to
television as a medium. They saw it as a force that had shaped their worldviews; but they
also rejected it as a cultural apparatus of the Establishment. As Bodroghkozy points out:
This brings us to an interesting paradox. As I have tried to show, young
people aligned with the youth movement, as well as alarmed adults, used
the perceived link between television and its first generation of young
viewers to explain the current state of the TV generation. On the other
hand, this generation had by this point abandoned the medium to a
considerable extent as a major source of information and entertainment.
(Bodroghkozy, 2001, pp. 47-8)
Leary’s own bifurcated attitude towards television certainly contributed to this
ambivalence. For him, the everyday, normative reality of the average American was as
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compulsive and as pathological as the content of network television broadcasting: “We
were trapped in a time loop. Doomed forever to repeat a brief television commercial, over
and over again at the station break” (Leary, 1968/1995, p. 252). He even went so far as to
position the television industry as a key component of one of the lowest, most
unenlightened “levels” of consciousness in Western culture:
In our present primitive state we have industries devoted to the production
of the state of consciousness which I call level 6: emotional stupor. The
liquor industry manufactures the chemicals and then sponsors the
appropriate art form — TV shows which are perfectly tuned to emotional
stupor. Aggressive, competitive athletic and political spectacles comprise
the art form for the stuporous level of consciousness. (Leary, 1968/1998b,
p. 125)
In contrast, there are a number of instances in Leary’s books where he observes his own,
young children in the television room. They are represented not as being stupefied by the
TV messages, but rather as ecstatically surfing the televisual flow, taking active control
over the medium at the site of consumption:
How few parents realized when they quieted their noisy kids by banishing
them to the TV room that they were turning on the little ones to a mind-
blowing electronic experience. Kiddies flicking the TV knobs. Switch on
the news ... LBJ talking ... hard sell ... switch him off ... Channel 9 ...
cereal commercial, hard sell ... switch it off ... Channel 3 ... Superboy ...
A-OK. Movement. Change. Flashing images. Simultaneity. Multiple
choice. (Leary, 1968/1998a, p. 169)
This kind of engagement with television by the baby boomer generation, in other words,
was nothing less than a McLuhanite evolution of the species for Leary. It provided young
people with a very different social reality than that of the parent generation:
Wow! The electronic-atomic age is an IBM psychedelic trip kaleidoscopic
rocket blast multiphonic and there is no escape and no cop-out, and at age
thirteen you are confronted with the choice which the slow linear game of
the past allowed you to avoid — robot or Buddha. […] To a large
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segment, perhaps a majority, of our youth the social reality of the United
States makes little sense. They are tuned to a different electronic channel.
The reality of a middle-aged American is a fabrication of mass media. TV,
newspapers, magazines determine what Mom and Dad believe, like,
dislike, desire, value. (Leary, 1968/1998a, pp. 170-1)
In this regard, McLuhan’s notion that “the medium is the message” was particularly
relevant to how members of the new, psychedelic generation used television. If the
apparatus itself was more significant than the content it streamed, the psychedelic
movement could compartmentalize their engagements with television as a technology.
Many turned to the apparatus not as a communications technology but as a gadget for
stimulating psychedelic experiences. The East Village Other, for example, provided the
following instructions to young acidheads on how to transform a television set into a
device for LSD tripping:
In a darkened room, turn on your TV set. Find a channel. Adjust the
brightness control all the way to bright (to the right). Adjust the contrast
control (to the left). Adjust the vertical hold and vertical linearity controls
all the way to the left or right. Tune the channel selector to an empty
channel. Readjust for maximum brightness as necessary — maximum
retinal color results from maximum bombardment of the retina.
Concentrate on sending your meditations out from your ashram to mine.
Thank you. “We now return control of your TV set to you.” (as cited in
Bodroghkozy, 2001, pp. 49-50)
Television, in other words, was “emphatically a head gimmick, all the best features of
strobes and lights and hallucinations in one box” (Latimer, as cited in Bodroghkozy,
2001, p. 50). And by staring at the millions of dots in the television static, acidheads were
very literally rejecting the artificial realities presented in network broadcasting signals,
choosing instead to enter into the ecstatic, electrical vibrations of the apparatus itself.
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It is not altogether surprising, therefore, that few network shows captured the imagination
of the psychedelic movement. For the most part, the attempts by prime time television to
engage in psychedelic topics were rejected by the movement itself, either because they
were overtly critical of the drug culture or because they were viewed as “plastic” co-
optations of countercultural themes. In the former category were examples such as a
special report on CBS News called “The Hippie Temptation” (1967) and the premiere
episode of Dragnet ’67, entitled “The LSD Story” (1967). Both shows attempted to apply
“disease–victim–hallucination” paradigms to the psychedelic drug culture; and both were
riddled with false characterizations of the lifestyles they were trying to document. The
mode of address, in other words, was consistent with the kind of authoritarian tone found
in social problem pictures, such as classroom scare films or propagandistic morality plays
like Reefer Madness. Indeed, not unlike Reefer Madness, the LSD episode of Dragnet ’67
has found a place for itself in a camp canon of media drug fictions.
The narrative of the episode fictionalizes the criminalizing of LSD that had occurred for
real in October 1966, just two months prior to the show’s original broadcast date of
January 1967. It opens with Detectives Friday and Gannon arresting a young man who is
acting strangely in a Los Angeles park. The man identifies himself as “Blue Boy” — his
face is painted blue — and he is under the influence of LSD. Within the world of the
show, LSD is not yet illegal, so the man just gets a slap on the wrists for public
intoxication. As Friday’s investigation into the drug culture progresses, a bill gets passed
to outlaw LSD. This intervention by the law comes too late for Blue Boy, though, who
ends the episode dead from an overdose. The ideological stance of Dragnet ’67 was, of
course, commensurate with that of the show’s police detective protagonists. The LSD
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episode, therefore, was more focused on containing the menace of the psychedelic
movement than in using the television medium to explore psychedelic themes of
expanded perception or cosmic consciousness. The only “ways of seeing” that it
advocated were distinctly those of the criminal justice system.
A few prime time TV shows did attempt to curry favor with the youth audience by
incorporating a psychedelic visual style or by featuring appearances by psychedelic rock
musicians. This mostly took place in the context of sketch comedy and variety
programming. NBC’s Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In (1968–1973) was one such
example. The show’s title was of course a pun on the proliferation of sit-ins, be-ins, and
love-ins throughout the counterculture; and its quirky, satirical format allowed it to cash
in on (and poke gentle fun at) topical styles and trends. A prime example of this was a
regular segment entitled “The Mod Mod World” in which comedy sketches were
punctuated with footage of female go-go dancers. Using Glo-Brite body paint, the
dancers’ torsos were decorated with psychedelic patterns and countercultural
catchphrases like “Make Love Not War” — all carefully designed and monitored, of
course, so as not to violate NBC’s Standards and Practices (Erickson, 2000, p. 93).
Another staple of the show was a psychedelic “joke wall.” Cast members would open and
close doors in the wall, telling jokes as they did so. And alongside more traditional acts
like Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, and Guy Lombardo, several mainstream
musicians with a mildly psychedelic edge appeared on Laugh-In as guest performers,
including The Strawberry Alarm Clock, Sonny and Cher, and The Monkees.
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As this description suggests, however, Laugh-In was less a product of the psychedelic
movement than a parody or a co-optation of it. None of the psychedelic visuals were
designed to explore expanded consciousness or provide stimuli for drug trips, and none of
the pioneers of the psychedelic movement were ever invited to be on the show. The
program’s psychedelic style, rather, served primarily as part of a strategy to give the
show a hip edge. It was an effort to lure in the youth audience without displeasing the
network censors. As one commentator put it: “Laugh-In was for hippies what Hee Haw
was for hicks” (Halley, 2000, para. 5).
Another sixties’ television program that has come to epitomize this notion of
countercultural co-optation is, of course, The Monkees (1966–1968). Conceived several
years before Head, the Monkees’ television show was designed primarily to sell the
manufactured band as an American rival to the Beatles. The program followed a sketch
comedy format that was punctuated with musical numbers by the group, and each
Monkee was given a different personality type — a formula that had been successful for
the Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965). The Monkees on television,
however, had little of the bitter tone or the explicit politics of Head. Indeed, the contrasts
between the TV show and the motion picture were quite pronounced: if the television
program was a happy high aimed at capturing the teenybopper market, Head was a bad
trip that sought to savagely skewer the band, the industry, and the teenyboppers alike.
Head was, after all, Bob Rafelson’s attempt to kill off the Monkees: a thumbing of the
nose at the television show and at the very forces of the corporate culture industry that
had brought them such great success in the first place.
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In popular cultural memories of the 1960s it is, however, the happy-go-lucky image of
the Monkees on their television show that has remained most potent. Few people
remember Head at all these days, and the band is remembered best as “The Prefab Four”
— the ultimate signifiers of corporate plastic hippiedom and sixties’ dorkiness. We might
ask, however, how reliable these memories of the sixties are. Like any cultural histories
— this one included — such recollections impose a set of meanings and relationships
onto cultural texts that are motivated by present-day agendas. Certain cultural narratives
tend to gain momentum and then become codified as conventional wisdom. The popular
historical narrative of the Monkees continues to be that they represented a corporate
commodification of the youth movement: that they were created by marketing
committees, as opposed to being “organic” and “authentic” products of the
counterculture. There is obviously some truth to these narratives, but they also tend to
oversimplify the complexity of the relationships between television and the psychedelic
movement. They are narratives that assume a rather cut-and-dry distinction between
“organic” and “plastic.” As we saw in Head, however, the cultural transactions that were
built around the Monkees’ phenomenon were a lot more muddied and disjunctive than
the “Prefab Four” label usually suggests. Even though the episodes of the TV series were
much more contained within the ideological apparatuses of prime time television than
Head, this does not mean that they were simply nothing more than co-optations of hippie
culture. Nor does it mean that the TV series was simply rejected as “inauthentic” by the
“authentic” psychedelic movement. Indeed, The Monkees on television found an unlikely
champion in none other than the high priest of the psychedelic movement himself. In The
Politics of Ecstasy, Timothy Leary gushed:
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Hollywood executives decide to invent and market an American version of
the Beatles – the early, preprophetic, cute, yeh-yeh Beatles. Got it? They
audition a hallful of candidates and type-cast four cute kids. Hire some
songwriters. Wire up the Hooper-rating computer. What do the screaming
teeny-boppers want? Crank out the product and promote it. Feed the great
consumer monster what it thinks it wants, plastic, syrupy, tasty,
marshmallow-filled, chocolate-coated, Saran-wrapped, and sell it. No
controversy, no protest. No thinking strange, unique thoughts. No
offending Mom and Dad and the advertisers. Make it silly, sun-tanned,
grinning ABC-TV.
And what happened? The same thing that happened to the Beatles. The
four Monkees weren’t fooled for a moment. They went along with the
system but didn’t buy it. […] The Monkees’ television show, for example.
Oh, you thought that was silly teen-age entertainment? Don’t be fooled.
While it lasted, it was a classic Sufi put-on. An early-Christian electronic
satire. A mystic-magic show. A jolly Buddha laugh at hypocrisy. (Leary,
1968/1998a, pp. 173-4)
In other words, Leary viewed The Monkees as a new kind of turned-on television show
for the psychedelic, baby boomer generation. He highlighted how the parodic self-
reflexivity of the show was a central component of its address to youth audiences:
“burlesquing the very shows that glue Mom and Dad to the set during prime time”
(Leary, 1968/1998a, p. 174). The lightning pace of the show was also, for Leary, a key
element of its connection to the Psychedelic-Cybernetic Age, zipping through the
electrical circuits of the apparatus at Keseyian speeds that far surpassed the linear,
sequential comprehension of the parent generation’s minds:
And woven into the fast-moving psychedelic stream of action were the
prophetic, holy, challenging words. Mickey was rapping quickly, dropping
literary names, making scholarly references; then the sudden psychedelic
switch of the reality channel. He looked straight at the camera, right into
your living room, and up-leveled the comedy by saying: “Pretty good
talking for a long-haired weirdo, huh, Mr. and Mrs. America?” And then
— zap. Flash. Back to the innocuous comedy.
Or, in a spy drama, Mickey warned Peter: “Why, this involves the
responsibility for blowing up the entire world!”
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Peter, confidentially: “I’ll take that responsibility!”
And Mickey, with a glance at the camera, said, “Wow! With a little more
ego he’ll be ready to run for President.”
Why, it all happened so fast, LBJ, you didn’t even see it. Suddenly a
whole generation disappeared right from view. Flick. They’re gone!
(Leary, 1968/1998a, p. 174)
At the root of his discussion of The Monkees, Leary was in many respects engaging a set
of discourses about the authenticity of the culture industry. As we have seen, within most
of the discourses of the psychedelic movement, the programming content of network
television was viewed with great suspicion. Co-optations of the psychedelic lifestyle on
TV were viewed as phony and plastic, and figures in the counterculture who played the
TV game were at risk of being called “sell outs.” As such, network television
programming was positioned as being closely affiliated with the stupefied, inauthentic
culture of Mom and Dad and LBJ. Moreover, television was credited with much of the
blame for the commercialization of the counterculture. When the Diggers held their mock
funeral for “the death of the hippie, devoted son of the mass media” in October 1967, the
specific targets of their criticism were the thousands of young people who had flooded
into Haight-Ashbury after seeing it on television. The Diggers felt that these young
people were ruining the San Francisco counterculture because they were merely seeking a
commodified idea of the hippie lifestyle that had been sold to them on the boob tube. In
Leary’s account of The Monkees on television, however, we can detect a slightly different
set of negotiations at play. As we have already seen, Leary was certainly one of the
standard bearers in the counterculture’s crusade against the perceived inauthenticity of
network television’s fake, sitcom realities; but in his defense of The Monkees, he was in
fact arguing that something spiritual and profound was taking place in the show. All the
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raps and zaps and flashes and flicks, Leary argued, were providing an electronic–
psychedelic experience for young audiences. The show was operating at a frequency that
turned-on viewers could tune into. Its mode of address was too fast and too cybernetic for
Mom and Dad and LBJ to be able to decipher it. All the middle-aged folk can do in
Leary’s account is scream: “Hey, McNamara, fix this set! Ban LSD! Adjust the focus
back, call a joint meeting of Congress. McNamara, dammit, boy, fix this set! All I get are
flickering, dancing flower swirls of color, and shut off that loud rock ‘n’ roll beat.
McNamara! Westmoreland! Dammit, fix this set!” (Leary, 1968/1998a, p. 175) Leary, in
other words, felt that The Monkees was producing new ways of seeing. It was developing
a set of visual protocols and data streams that only young people knew how to decode. To
the older generation it was just informational noise.
Attempts by other members of the psychedelic movement to engage in network television
broadcasting could be characterized in similar terms as a tightrope walk between
authenticity and inauthenticity, between subverting the system and selling out. As was the
case with The Monkees, the most commonly traveled of these tightrope wires between
network television and the drug counterculture was the one walked by psychedelic rock
musicians. The Beatles, for example, stumbled considerably with their psychedelic
television special, Magical Mystery Tour (1967). During their early, mop-top years, the
group had very successfully mobilized film and television appearances in their climb to
international superstardom. Magical Mystery Tour was intended to be an extension of this
strategy, as part of a media campaign to show off the band’s new, psychedelic image.
Taking a leaf out of Kesey’s book, John, Paul, George, and Ringo traveled the length and
breadth of England in a tour bus, producing a set of surreal, comedic sketches and
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musical numbers along the way. The members of the Beatles even took writing and
directing credits on Magical Mystery Tour, as a signifier of the “authenticity” of the
work: proof that it was truly a creation of the Beatles, not a product of grey-suited
television executives. Following the broadcast of Magical Mystery Tour on December
26th, 1967, however, the Beatles received the most savage critical reviews of their
careers. The British press almost universally panned the show, and it is not hard to see
why. Just as Kesey’s attempt to film his psychedelic bus trip had not produced enough
coherent materials to make a finished film, much of Magical Mystery Tour is comprised
of drug-fuelled escapades and tired comedy routines shot with a minimum of technical
proficiency. To make matters worse for the Beatles, even their attempts to include some
colorful psychedelic images for their audience resulted in failure when the BBC
inexplicably chose to broadcast Magical Mystery Tour in black-and-white.
The most common venues for psychedelic rock musicians on television were guest spots
on musical and variety shows. For example, on December 27th, 1967 — the day after the
Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour had debuted on British television — The Doors appeared
as guests on the premiere episode of The Jonathan Winters Show, performing their songs
“Light My Fire” and “Moonlight Drive”. For both numbers, a set of visuals were
designed that hinted at psychedelic experiences without ever being explicit. During the
performance of “Light My Fire,” pink filters and extreme close-ups of a rotating light
were intermittently superimposed over the band. The set was decorated with white, web-
like strings, which were utilized to create moiré patterns when shot from certain camera
angles. And the number began and ended with an extended video ripple effect that gave
the impression of a flame, but also connoted an acid trip. The presentation of “Moonlight
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Drive” similarly used the lyrics of the song to create visuals that implicitly evoked
psychedelic experiences: specifically, shots of solar systems and swirling constellations
of out-of-focus lights that were superimposed over the band. In other words, a kind of
double entendre was at work in the presentation of the performances. On the surface, the
band was just performing their hit songs and the visuals were very literally illustrating
keywords from the lyrics; but, like a dog whistle for the drug culture, all of these audio-
visual strategies also served to signify an synesthetic, psychedelic experience.
Among the network variety shows in the United States, none were as daring in their
presentation of psychedelic rock musicians more than CBS’s The Smothers Brothers
Comedy Hour (1967-1969). As Bodroghkozy points outs, “Unlike any other product of
American network television, the Smothers Brothers’ show attracted a youth audience —
that elusive sixteen-to-twenty-four-year-old cohort that had abandoned the medium to
such a large extent” (Bodroghkozy, 2001, p. 124). This popularity had a lot to do with the
political stance of the hosts, Tom and Dick Smothers, who actively voiced their support
of the counterculture, often performing comedy sketches dealing with revolutionary
themes or inviting protest singers like Phil Ochs or Pete Seeger on the show to perform
anti-war songs. A number of seminal psychedelic rock bands and musicians were also
given guest spots on the show, including Jefferson Airplane, The Doors, The Electric
Prunes, The Byrds, The Who, Donovan, Steppenwolf, The Chambers Brothers, and The
Beatles. In many cases, the visual presentation of these musical spots was explicitly
grounded in the psychedelic style. For example, when The Who performed “I Can See
For Miles” on the episode from September 9th, 1967, the plain, white background of the
stage set was flooded with changing hues of lights made from swirling color wheels, and
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superimposed over the footage of the band were shots of light bulbs that pulsed in and out
of focus. A similar, psychedelic use of lighting effects was employed during The Doors’
performance of “Wild Child” on an episode from December 15th, 1968. On-set props
were lit with an electric cyan hue and the background was illuminated with a hot orange
light, which caused the two contrasting colors to pop and vibrate in a psychedelic fashion.
During an episode from January 5th, 1969, Steppenwolf performed “Rock Me Baby” on
a set that was filled with thousands of crystal balls and chandeliers, which created an
ecstatic excess of shimmering, white light.
Chroma-keying techniques were also put to psychedelic use for some of the performances
on the show. For example, when The Byrds performed “Mr. Spaceman” on an episode
from October 22nd, 1967, they were shot on a space-age bandstand against a blue screen,
which was replaced in the video mixer with light show imagery. A similar technique was
employed when Jefferson Airplane performed “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love”
on an episode of the show from May 7th, 1967. During “White Rabbit,” the band was
shot against a blue screen that took up every visible inch of the floor and walls, and was
filled with the band’s trademarked liquid projections by Glenn McKay. The result was an
impression of Jefferson Airplane performing in an alternate psychedelic universe,
removed from any recognizable, real world surroundings. The visuals for “Somebody to
Love” employed the same techniques, but extended the concept even further. For parts of
the performance a video effect was added to turn the group into black silhouettes against
the brightly colored psychedelic backgrounds; for other parts of the performance, this
visual effect was reversed so that the background was black and the silhouettes of band
members were keyed to make them appear psychedelic.
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In their introductions to these performances, the Smothers Brothers themselves did not
shy away from alluding to the drug associations of the music. Their preamble to the
aforementioned performance of “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane was perhaps the
most telling in this regard. Dick Smothers provided the introduction, delivering the words
with a mock hesitancy and faux coyness: “Their style features a combination of
psychedelic sound and color and, well, if you want to experience it to the fullest, we
suggest that you — um, I don’t want to offend any of you — but we suggest that you …
eat a banana while you’re watching.” Off-screen, Tom Smothers could then be heard,
quietly adding: “Or smoke a banana” — a reference to a popular myth at the time that
smoking banana skins could get you high. Dick then picked up Tom’s comment and ran
with it: “Or smoke a banana, as my brother said … but, actually, he’s, he’s pretty far out
even for me.” The joke was then reiterated later in the episode, much to the amusement of
the studio audience, when Tom began his introduction to the next Jefferson Airplane
number with the words: “Hi, banana fans.”
Through this presence of psychedelic rock musicians on network variety shows, a set of
cultural negotiations took place that in many ways mirrored Thomas Frank’s account of
the 1960s advertising industry in his book, The Conquest of Cool (1997). Frank describes
how the emergence of hip marketing campaigns during the sixties was much more that
just a simple co-optation of the counterculture. He illustrates how generational disputes
within the fashion and advertising businesses fundamentally changed the work culture of
those industries. Younger, “creative” ad-men, Frank argues, were sympathetic to the
values of the counterculture; and their embrace of a hip, youthful marketing style was
developed as a subversion of the perceived conformism of 1950s advertising — the
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Madison Avenue culture of middle-aged, Martini-drinking executives in gray-flannel
suits. The Smothers Brothers positioned themselves in a similar light as this new breed of
advertising executives. As hosts of a network TV show, they were still very much a part
of the Establishment; but they also emphasized their sympathies towards the youth
culture, often pushing the envelope of what was acceptable on prime time television. In
this regard, the Smothers Brothers themselves walked a fine line between countercultural
authenticity and co-optation: their relatively clean-cut image creating a certain visual
discord with their political leanings. This tension often bubbled just beneath the surface
of their sketches, and they occasionally faltered. When Tom Smothers told The Who how
much he identified with them, for instance, Roger Daltry laughed in his face. In response,
Tom angrily snapped at the band: an outburst that attempted to simultaneously scold
Daltry’s insolence and restore the Smothers Brothers’ hip quotient through a moment of
unscripted volatility. Enough psychedelic musicians appeared on the show, though, to
grant it a special place within the counterculture’s ambivalent relationship towards
television.
A number of things could be said to be missing, however, from these various examples of
psychedelic visual culture on prime time television. The most obvious absence was direct
reference to the drugs themselves in many of these shows. LSD was explicitly discussed
(and condemned) in social problem shows like Dragnet ’67, but Tom Smothers’ banana
reference was the closest that any of the programs featuring psychedelic musicians got to
an overt drug reference. Non-musical celebrities of the psychedelic movement — such as
Leary and Kesey — were also missing from shows like Laugh-In and The Smothers
Brothers Comedy Hour. Leary did make a few appearances on television, but only when
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contained within interview or debate formats that emphasized drug use as a social
problem. As Horowitz, Walls and Smith (1988, pp. 221-2) document, Leary’s only
scheduled television appearances throughout the sixties were in the following talk shows
and documentaries:
• An interview on The Merv Griffin Show (1966).
• An interview subject in NBC’s The Pursuit of Pleasure (1967), a television
documentary on modern sexual mores that also included appearances by Hugh
Hefner and Ralph Ginzburg.
• An interview subject in the BBC’s The Mind Alchemists (1967), a British
television documentary on the American drug culture.
• A televised debate with fellow psychologist Jerome Lettvin in National Education
Television’s LSD: Lettvin vs. Leary (1968).
• An appearance in National Education Television’s From Pot to Psychedelics
(1968), another television documentary on the drugs in the counterculture.
In other words, with the exception of rock musicians, the pioneering members of the
psychedelic movement largely shunned (or were shunned by) prime time television
broadcasting. As a result, it is not surprising that network television’s engagement with
psychedelic culture was quite apart from the discourses about electronic media that were
circulating around the psychedelic movement at the time. In particular, none of the
aforementioned television shows could be described as explorations of cybernetic models
of perception. None interrogated the medium of television as a new way of seeing that
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extended the central nervous system of observers into an ecstatic network of molecular
vibrations and data flows. Rather, the programs merely transposed into the television
medium the kinds of cinematic and theatrical manifestations of psychedelia that were
discussed in Chapter Two. These TV shows, in other words, did not internalize the views
of television put forward by the likes of Leary and McLuhan. For the most part, in fact,
network television producers failed to capitalize on the deep, formative connections that
the psychedelic generation had with television as a technology. Even the most
counterculture-friendly shows, like The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, teetered on the
brink of textual and ideological implosion by trying to balance new ways of psychedelic
seeing with the institutionalized regimentation of vision that came with being on network
television. If the turned-on generation really believed that “Television will help us
become more human. It will lead us closer to ourselves” (Howard, as cited in
Youngblood, 1970, p. 285), then these various psychedelic network TV shows hardly
seemed to have succeeded. To find examples of electronic and digital culture that more
actively engaged in psychedelic–cybernetic discourses of perception, therefore, we must
turn our attention elsewhere.
Mixed-Media Happenings
As we saw in Chapter Two, psychedelic happenings functioned as mixed-media
environments that sought to reconfigure cinematic modes of structuring perception.
While the frenetic experiments with light and film projection certainly took center stage,
but it would be a mistake to overlook the significance of electronic and digital
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technologies at these events. In his book, The Haight-Ashbury: A History, for example,
Charles Perry’s account of the Trips Festival includes the following description:
The Fillmore was basically a huge dance floor with a balcony running
along two walls. The balcony was subdivided into dressing rooms and
offices, so the Pranksters were able to wire the place up with microphones
and speakers in unexpected places, so you might be downstairs watching
somebody make a fool of himself on the closed-circuit TV and suddenly
hear something you'd said upstairs a few minutes ago broadcast all over
the hall. The floor was littered with electronic boxes and skeins of
electrical cable. They had packed in so much electronic equipment the
whole hall had a low, dull buzzing sound. (Perry, 1984, p. 42)
Perry creates the impression of the Fillmore being transformed into a living, humming,
electronic entity, messily wired up like the central nervous system of a human being.
Wolfe’s depictions of the Pranksters’ psychedelic happenings paint the same picture of a
buzzing, ecstatic network of electronic cables and equipment. Describing one of the first
Acid Tests, Wolfe presents the image of another old building from bygone era being
transformed by the Pranksters into a pulsing, electronic creature:
The Dead had an organist called Pig Pen, who had a Hammond electric
organ, and they move the electric organ into Big Nig’s ancient house, plus
all of the Grateful Dead’s electrified guitars and basses and the Pranksters’
electrified guitars and basses and flutes and horns and the light machines
and the movie projectors and the tapes and mikes and hi-fis, all of which
pile up in insane coils of wires and gleams of stainless steel and winking
amplifier dials before Big Nig’s unbelieving eyes. His house is old and has
wiring that would hardly hold a toaster. […] Everybody’s eyes turn on
like lightbulbs, fuses blow, blackness — wowwww! — the things that
shake and vibrate and funnel and freak out in this blackness — and then
suddenly somebody slaps new fuses in and the old hulk of a house
shudders back, the wiring writhing and fragmenting like molting snakes,
the organs vibro-massage the belly again, fuses blow, minds scream, heads
explode. (Wolfe, 1968/1999, pp. 237-8)
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The impression Wolfe evokes is one in which the old house experiences as much of a
mind-blowing experience as the Acid Test participants themselves — as if the entire,
physical infrastructure of America was receiving a lightning bolt to its nervous system.
Just as Kesey and the Pranksters were having their brains re-circuited by LSD and mixed-
media, the old Victorian house was getting its fuses blown from the rush of electricity
through the insane coils of wires and cables. It was a perfect metaphor for how the
psychedelic movement was seeking to renovate what they saw as a slumbering,
outmoded American way of life. Rather than escaping from the confines of the old house,
as Huxley had done in The Doors of Perception, the Pranksters were instead trying to
plug the building into an electro-psychedelic experience.
Kesey, of course, had abandoned his writing career in the early-1960s to move into more
“electrical forms,” and events like the Acid Tests and the Trips Festival were in many
respects the end result of that quest. The use of electronic media technologies at these
events were particularly significant for the ways in which they bridged Kesey’s theories
of perception with cybernetic models of feedback. Electrical feedback was probably most
pronounced at an aural level — through the psychedelic squeals of the Grateful Dead’s
guitars as vibrations from the loudspeakers entered back into the electrical signals of
instruments — but the Pranksters also explored feedback principles using visual media
technologies. PortaPak cameras and closed circuit TV were employed during Acid Tests
to reveal the revelers back to themselves — sometimes live, sometimes with a built in
tape delay. In this manner, Kesey and the Pranksters used their audio-video systems to
introduce a certain degree of spontaneity and unpredictability into feedback loops: i.e.,
“you might be downstairs watching somebody make a fool of himself on the closed-
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circuit TV and suddenly hear something you’d said upstairs a few minutes ago broadcast
all over the hall” (Perry, 1984, p. 42). By introducing temporal delays of this sort into
their feedback loops, the Pranksters were able to build “layer upon layer of variable lags”
(Wolfe, 1968/1999, p. 243).
Viewed in the context of Kesey’s theories about “sensory lag” and the “movie screen of
our perceptions,” this use of networked, electronic media at the Acid Tests can be seen as
an exploration of those conceptual ideas. The liveness of electronic media offered a
temporal immediacy (and malleability) that Kesey’s earlier experiments with cinema did
not. The barrier created by the movie screen of our perceptions was, after all, primarily a
temporal barrier for Kesey: cinema is not a live medium; it is always a projection of
images that were captured and processed some time in the past. Video and closed circuit
television, on the other hand, possessed a sense of liveness, spontaneity, and participatory
feedback that the Pranksters could mobilize to explore different experiences of the
present tense. By varying the temporal lag of electronic feedback systems, the Pranksters
aimed to create a whirlpool of spiraling feedback loops that would send Acid Test
participants into fresh, new experiences of an interconnected Now.
The presence of video technologies at the Acid Tests, in other words, was generally not
for the production of the sort of psychedelic visual stimulation found in light shows and
movie projections. Rather, electronic media was employed to create a kind of spatial and
temporal vortex: a dislocation in space and time (through combinations of live
transmission, variable lags, and electronic feedback) that examined the temporal
phenomenology of perception. Video technologies, after all, were still incapable of
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producing the kind of rich, densely textured, visual experiences that defined psychedelic
happenings. They were, therefore, put to use more in the capacity of exploring aspects of
perception more directly tied to cybernetic models of vision-as-information. The images
and sounds recorded onto electronic devices became programs that could be randomly
accessed at any point in time and networked around the event to different screens or
loudspeakers. As participants in this process, audience members were not only
confronted with their own phenomenological experience of the present, they were also
presented with the experience of themselves becoming transmittable bits of information
within the larger, “electric” system of the happening.
The advertising for mixed-media happenings very much primed the audiences for these
kinds of psychedelic–cybernetic experiences by emphasizing the “electric” quality of the
events. The posters for psychedelic shows were famed for their use pulsing colors and
vibrating patterns, and they often featured electrical images in their designs. In addition
to the lightning bolts that appeared on advertising for the Human Be-In, posters and
handbills for the Trips Festival were built around the image of an oscilloscope engulfed
in a swirling moiré pattern. Visually, the Op Art moiré swirls resembled the rays of the
sun, as though the oscilloscope itself was the source of a bright electrical light that burns
and shimmers in the retina of the observer. The text on the reverse side of the handbills
promoted the Trips Festival in the same electrical terms:
this is the FIRST gathering of its kind anywhere. the TRIP — or electronic
performance — is a new medium of communication & entertainment. […]
since the common element of all shows is ELECTRICITY, this evening
will be programmed live from stimuli provided by a PINBALL
MACHINE. a nickel in the slot starts the evening. (Wilson, 1966, n.p.)
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While promoting the event, the Pranksters even referred to it as “a McLuhanite Global
Village/electronic art happening” (Perry, 1984, p. 46). As Fred Turner notes, a similarly
McLuhanesque attitude was expressed by USCO towards the mixed-media environments
that they were creating: “they hoped their audience would feel their own, individual
senses meld into the global nerve system of electronic media” (Turner, 2006, p. 54). We
could say, therefore, that if mixed-media happenings were conceived as magnifications of
the chamber of consciousness (as Chapter Two described), they were at the same time
also conceived as extensions of the wired circuits of the human nervous system. Indeed,
when Wolfe refers to the “intricate glistening coils” of electrical wires and cables at these
events (Wolfe, 1968/1999, p. 241), the impression he gives is one of the electronic
equipment resembling the viscera and nerve fibers of the human body. In other words,
both metaphors of perception — cinematic and cybernetic — were instrumental in how
psychedelic happenings employed technologies of vision to extend the human sensorium
into the space of the theater: the idea of the chamber of consciousness and the idea of the
circuited nervous system co-existed, side-by-side.
The sense of being engulfed in and bombarded by sensory information at psychedelic
mixed-media happenings also closely matched McLuhan’s idea of “acoustic space.”
These were not linear, sequential events, but rather “everything-all-at-once” experiences
with no fixed center of attention. (McLuhan even underscored the point himself when he
included an image of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable in The Medium is the Massage.) As
such, these psychedelic happenings can be construed as experiments in a certain kind of
information processing based on flow and multi-sensory immersion, exemplifying
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McLuhan’s notion that, “Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously”
(McLuhan & Fiore, 1967/2001, p. 63).
The Eameses had explored something similar with their own Think presentation in the
IBM pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. As Brandon W. Joseph points out, the
immersive, multi-screen environment of the Eameses’ “IBM information machine” was
designed to naturalize the newly developing, technologically mediated modes of
absorbing stimuli within an emerging information economy:
These modes of subjective assimilation were now to be claimed as
actually truer to human perception. Although “the pace of the show,” as
one observer recalled, “is so fast that a person does not have enough time
to weed out what he wants to see or not see,” the tuxedoed IBM “host”
explained that the installation actually “brings you information in much
the same way as your mind gets it — in fragments and glimpses —
sometimes relating to the same idea or incident. Like making toast in the
morning.” (Joseph, 2005, p. 252)
As such, the emergence of these sorts of immersive multimedia environments in the mid-
1960s spoke to the perceived new systems of organizing vision in the cybernetic era.
Philosophically, however, the scopic regimes of the Eameses’ installation were far
removed from those of the psychedelic mixed-media happenings. In trying to naturalize
the computer in the way that it did, Think embodied the values and perspectives of the
technocracy. It attempted make the IBM computer’s ways of seeing as ordinary as those
of everyday human vision; but it did so in a manner that exemplified the ordered,
whitebread, middle-class ideals of the Eisenhower years. The tuxedoed host resembled
someone you might meet at a swishy cocktail party; he waxed lyrical about suburban
experiences like morning toast; and he promoted the virtues of a specialized and
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compartmentalized organizing logic in which things are naturally broken up into
fragments and glimpses.
The psychedelic mixed-media shows may have bombarded the spectator with visual
information in a similar manner, but the way in which they were framed and understood
was quite different. The psychedelicists favored a much more ecstatic, irrational,
irreverent, or even dangerous model of information overload. Rather than characterizing
this multimediated experience of information processing in terms of fragments and
glimpses, there was usually much more focus on cosmic unity and interconnected flow.
Wolfe, for example, described the Acid Tests as providing a feeling of being “in perfect
synch, one brain, one energy, a single flow of intersubjectivity” (Wolfe, 1968/1999, p.
244). Turner notes a similar logic at the heart of USCO’s happenings:
USCO’s founders were also steeped in the literature of cybernetics. […] In
large part for this reason, light, electricity, and mystical “energy”
generally played a role in USCO’s work very much like the one
“information” plays in Wienerian cybernetics: they become universal
forces that, functioning as the sources and content of all “systems”
(biological, social, and mechanical), made it possible for individual
people, groups, and artifacts to be seen as mirrors of one another. (Turner,
2006, pp. 49-50)
The irreverence and sense of play — the “pranking” — at many psychedelic happenings
gave another spin to their cybernetic ways of seeing. The stream of information was not
intended to by organized or meaningful, but rather spontaneous, irrational, or absurd.
Joshua White of the Joshua Light Show group, for example, described one of his own
light show systems in the following terms:
We also had a photo lab and a guy who came in every Thursday to make
special slides of whatever was in the news that week. If something really
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important came up I could take a picture, get it into the lab and project it
on to the screen. The picture was shown against a black background so it
could be mixed in to something. I could reach over, get a slide, put it in
the projector and turn it on in a space of two seconds. So if somebody was
out there on stage talking about Nixon I could put up any number of
pictures of Nixon that were appropriate. My wall of concrete imagery was
a thousand pictures and I was the computer, I was the random access.
(Pouncey, 2005, p. 173)
This improvisational and satirical sense of information processing gave way to something
altogether more confrontational and “demonic” in Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable.
As Joseph argues, the EPI constructed an informational assault that contested the
ideological naturalizations of cybernated vision posed by the Eameses’ Think:
EPI produced a dislocating, environmental montage where different media
interfered and competed with one another, accelerating their distracting,
shock-like effects to produce the three-dimensional, multimedia equivalent
of a moiré. […] Warhol’s multimedia presentation linked contemporary,
capital-driven, technological dislocations with more volatile forms of
social and libidinal transformations, signaled in part by the “decadent”
contents of both his films and the lyrics of the Velvet Underground. This
was indeed a “demon light electric,” an ambiguous and threatening from
of deterritorialization, played out to the volume, feedback, length, and
shifting tempos of a music that failed (in extended bouts of dissonant
improvisation) to cohere comfortably within the norms of popular
spectacle. (Joseph, 2005, 258)
Through these various strategies, in other words, the psychedelic mixed-media
happenings of the 1960s represented a contested terrain of cybernetic scopic regimes that
challenged and subverted technocratic models of information processing.
Computer and Video Art
Many of the same psychedelic–cybernetic models of perception from mixed-media
happenings also informed the field of experimental computer and video art during the
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period. Alongside the New American Cinema of underground filmmakers, the mid-1960s
saw the emergence of a first generation of avant-garde computer and video artists whose
work frequently took on psychedelic characteristics. The Whitney family, for example,
were pioneers of computer-animated films that took the form of psychedelic mandala
patterns, such as James Whitney’s Lapis (1966) and John Whitney’s Permutations
(1966). Likewise, Scott Bartlett’s groundbreaking and influential video art piece, Off/On
(1968), was a work that possessed an intensely psychedelic aesthetic: a visionary fusion
of cinematic and video technologies that takes the viewer on a trance-like journey
through layers-upon-layers of vibrating colors, perceptual feedback, and image
processing. The multitalented Stan Vanderbeek was also another seminal computer and
video artist of the period, making a series of psychedelic computer-generated animations
that included his Poem Field series (1966–1967) and Symmetricks (1972).
The influence of psychedelic culture could also be felt in a number of key video art
events of the late-1960s, most notably the “TV as a Creative Medium” exhibition that
opened in New York City at the Howard Wise gallery in May 1969. Twelve video artists
(including Nam June Paik, Ira Schneider, Frank Gillette, Paul Ryan, Aldo Tambellini,
and Eric Siegel) contributed to the exhibition, many of them bringing a psychedelic
sensibility to their explorations of the medium. Eric Siegel presented Psychedelevision in
Color: a 21-minute tape of visual abstractions accompanied by classical music and the
Beatles. Thomas Tadlock exhibited his Archetron: “a studio-size console, with 46 knobs
and controls and four screens, that scrambles the signals of standard programming to
produce an endless flow of kaleidoscopic images” (“Taking,” 1969, n.p.). John Seery’s
piece, TV Time Capsule, placed a 17-inch color set on its back within a quartz-like block
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of plastic that refracted/reflected the television images into kaleidoscopic patterns. Earl
Reiback presented Three Experiments within the TV Tube in which the phosphor coatings
of the screens of three sets were manipulated to psychedelic effect.
Elsewhere in New York, an Off-Broadway “videotape theater” company entitled Channel
One purported to be “providing Heads with their own CBS” (Yalkut, 1984, Part One,
Chapter 1, p. 3). With a concentration on humor and psychedelic satire, Channel One’s
experimentation with electronic media technologies in many ways resembled Kesey’s
Acid Tests: “The interaction and selection of the TV spectator with the transmitted and
preprogrammed channels generated levels of feedback, the simultaneous realization of
one’s ability to program modulate one’s own perceptual inputs, the self-perception of the
self as perceiver, in the process of perceiving” (Yalkut, 1984, Part One, Chapter 2, p. 4).
A few instances of public television being opened up to video artists in the late-1960s
also yielded some psychedelic results, with the most notable work being produced
through the National Educational Television (NET) network and its affiliates
(Youngblood, 1970, p. 281). On March 23
rd
, 1969, NET produced a program of video art
entitled The Medium is the Medium for broadcast on WGBH in Boston. It was a thirty-
minute show that included works by Vanderbeek, Paik, Tadlock, Tambellini, Allan
Kaprow, Otto Piene, and James Seawright. KQED in San Francisco also helped bring a
number of experimental video and conceptual artists to the local airwaves, including
Robert Zagone, Loren Sears, Philip Makanna, Terry Riley, and Frank Zappa. In May
1968, for instance, Zagone directed two half-hour segments of KQED’s West Pole
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program that featured a rock concert by The Sons of Champlin. Youngblood described
the show as nothing less than a revelation:
An article in the rock newspaper Rolling Stone described the show as
“more psychedelic than underground movies.” The realization that
something so common and “public” as a television set could be the source
of virtually unprecedented visual experiences was the beginning of a new
socio-technical awareness that is now common, as are the West Pole
techniques. Colors bloomed, flared, and melted; shapes disintegrated and
intermixed; the picture-plane was demolished in a cascade of spectral
brilliance — the Bonanza fan, who new that television was capable of
something more, finally saw that potential in all of its phosphorescent
shimmering beauty. (Youngblood, 1970, p. 289)
To date, however, histories of the psychedelic movement and histories of video art have
tended to remain somewhat separate. Most histories of psychedelic visual culture have
tended to marginalize or simply ignore many of these computer and video artists,
favoring instead the group of mixed-media producers who worked with film, light shows,
and analogue projection systems. On the other side of the coin, histories of computer and
video art have not extensively probed the psychedelic dimensions of the work from the
late-1960s either. Most video art anthologies, such as Sally Jo Fifer and Doug Hall’s
Illuminating Video (1990), make little or no reference to the psychedelic contexts and
influences of the late-1960s. Even Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema, which was written
in the midst of the psychedelic era and is sympathetic to the movement’s themes of
expanded consciousness, tends to downplay some of the obvious ties of computer and
video artists to the drug counterculture. Youngblood very consciously chooses classical
or scientific euphemisms to distance himself from the faddish connotations of hipster
speak: most notably, replacing the word “psychedelic” with “synesthetic” throughout the
book (even though he admits they mean the same basically thing).
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This sense of disjuncture is particularly pronounced in discussions of the abstract,
psychedelic aesthetics of a lot of computer and video art from the late-1960s. Rather than
examining these stylistic tropes in the context of the psychedelic movement’s theories of
perception and technology, most histories of video art have sought to explain the
aesthetic in terms of a separate and autonomous set of discourses specific to the video art
movement. Jeremy Neal Culler, for example, keeps returning to the question of why first
generation video artists were so drawn to abstraction, and he concludes: “Ultimately,
abstraction was the means with which video artists of the late 1960s and early 1970s were
able to separate their work from commercial imagery — a methodology based on the
experimental exploration of the medium’s formal properties” (Culler, 2004, p. 51). The
abstraction, in other words, was less to do with an exploration of inner, visionary
experience than an investigation of the subversive affordances of computer and video
technologies vis-à-vis the political economy of commercial media industries.
The psychedelic qualities of a lot of computer and video art from the late-1960s are,
however, quite undeniable. Indeed, with respect to the exploration of psychedelic–
cybernetic perception through electronic and digital technologies, there was a
considerable amount of overlap between the psychedelic and computer/video art
movements of the late-1960s that needs to be highlighted. Three areas of convergence are
particularly noteworthy.
First, to follow on from Culler, both the psychedelic and video art communities were
engaged in a process of challenging (and expanding) traditional media forms —
particularly cinema and television. These challenges were aimed at both the aesthetic and
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the institutional dimensions of commercial cinema and television, as part of an effort at
identifying affordances in these media technologies for new ways of seeing. We have
seen already, for example, how the psychedelic movement launched Adornoesque attacks
on the culture industry and its ability to shape perception and codify a certain image of
reality; avant-garde computer/video artists of the late-1960s held many of the same
beliefs. From its inception, much of the impetus of video art was to wrestle the
technology away from mainstream, commercial producers, in order to promote alternate
modes of perception. As Roy Armes has argued, “video could only come into its own as a
medium when provisions of portable video camera and recorder units freed it from
subservience to broadcasting and the domestic video cassette system” (Armes, 1988, p.
128). In other words, the experimentation with the technology by video artists — whether
it was manipulating TV signals, feeding images through video synthesizers, or inviting
gallery attendees to participate in the re-magnetizing of phosphors and electron beams —
was deeply rooted in the same kind of ideological concerns about the hegemony of the
culture industry that we have seen in the psychedelic movement itself. John Hanhardt, for
example, has described how many video artists viewed corporate and state-run television
not as a communications medium, but as a one-way marketing channel: “a seamless
hegemonic institution” (Hanhardt, 1990, p. 71). By using techniques of dé-collage and
deconstruction, video artists like Paik and the Fluxus group sought to question and
subvert this role of television as an ideological tool:
The apparatus was scratched and disfigured, and its screen either filled
with abstract noise or patterns generated by magnets applied to the set, or
was left blank; thus stripped of TV’s traditional connotations and
associations, it no longer fulfilled the function that television usually
serves in the home. By utilizing the concept of “breaking the frame,” Paik
subverted not only what was seen on the screen, but also challenged the
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way in which television is understood as an object of daily life. (Hanhardt,
1990, p. 75)
This description, of course, closely resembles how young acidheads themselves
reconfigured the apparatus of television to be a head gimmick by futzing with the vertical
hold and zoning out on the static between stations. In both cases, the TV set was removed
from its usual place in the ideological networks of the culture industry; and the
technological affordances of the apparatus were explored in the pursuit of counter-
hegemonic ways of seeing. In both cases, of course, McLuhan’s influence could also be
keenly felt: the significance of the medium being seen to lay more in the apparatus itself
than in the content of the material screened on it.
A second significant area of overlap between the psychedelic and video art movements
was a belief that electronic media could be mobilized to achieve ecstatic, oceanic modes
of perception and consciousness. If many in the psychedelic movement thought that
electronic and digital technologies would ultimately replace drugs in the production of
expanded states of consciousness, many video artists expressed similar visions. Earlier in
this chapter, in fact, we saw Bartlett, Vanderbeek, Tambellini, Siegel, and others drawing
explicitly on the vocabulary of the psychedelic movement to articulate their beliefs that
emergent electronic and digital technologies would bring about new, dynamic, ecstatic
ways of seeing for society. Siegel, for example, also remarked:
Art is sometimes called the “transmission ecstasy”. Because TV is
transmission with ecstatic potentials ... why can’t the viewer, after a trying
day, sit down at his TV set and listen to music while watching the screen
burst with beautiful color displays? These visual fantasies would relax you
better than any tranquilizer and at the same time give your spirit a
wonderful lift. (Yalkut, 1984, Part One, Chapter 2, p. 10)
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Paik similarly argued: “We are not yet aware that telepathy is conveyed through the
resonance factors of the mind... The electromagnetic vibration of the head might lead the
way to Electronic Zen” (Yalkut, 1984, Epigraph, p. ii). In 1970, Paik even posed the
same question that had been a key subject of discussion for the members of the
psychedelic community who wanted to go “beyond acid”:
Can we transplant this strange “ontology” of drug experience to “safer”
and more “authentic” art medium, without transplanting the inherent
danger of drug overdose??? Participation TV (the one-ness of creator,
audience, and critic) is surely one probable way for this goal... and it is not
a small virtue ... not at all. (Yalkut, 1984, Part One, Chapter 6, p. 8)
A third common area of interest that bonded together the psychedelic and video art
movements was that of cybernetics. The Wienerian principles that we saw circulating
throughout psychedelic discourses about perception and electronic media were no less
prevalent among the video art communities of the 1960s. Youngblood, for example,
spoke of the new media artist as a pioneer of the Paleocybernetic Age: “a hairy, buck
skinned, barefooted atomic physicist with a brain full of mescaline and logarithms”
(Youngblood, 1970, p. 41). Ira Schneider and Frank Gillette’s Wipe Cycle installation
from the “TV as a Creative Medium” exhibition perhaps best illustrates this integration of
cybernetic ideas into the video art of the late-1960s. A nine-screen TV mural positioned
at the entrance of the gallery space, Wipe Cycle employed closed circuit cameras to
integrate spectators’ images into the display: each monitor alternating in 4-second
intervals between live transmission and tape-delayed playback, with different feeds being
exchanged between different monitors on a similar cycle. The phenomenological effect
for the spectator was one of seeing one’s own image displayed at multiple points in time,
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cyclically fluctuating between different display terminals in the mural. Ira Schneider
described this experience as follows:
The most important thing was the notion of information presentation, and
the notion of the integration of the audience into the information. One sees
oneself exiting from the elevator. If one stands there for 8 seconds, one
sees oneself entering the gallery from the elevator again. Now at the same
time one is apt to be seeing oneself standing there watching Wipe Cycle.
You can watch yourself live watching yourself 8 seconds ago, watching
yourself 16 seconds ago, eventually feeling free enough to interact with
this matrix, realizing one's own potential as an actor. (Yalkut, 1984, Part
One, Chapter 2, p. 9)
In other words, the design of Wipe Cycle drew upon Wienerian notions of feedback to
position the viewer within a cybernetic model of vision-as-information. The combination
of live transmission, tape-delay, and spectatorial performance in these feedback loops, of
course, also closely resembled the kind of psychedelic–cybernetic explorations of
perception we saw earlier at mixed-media happenings like the Acid Tests and the
Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Indeed, when speaking about Wipe Cycle, Frank Gillette
could equally have been speaking on behalf of Kesey, or Leary, or McLuhan:
Now, television is usually understood in terms of a receiver. Our idea is to
render that void. Television is something you feedback with as much as
you receive with — which is a symbiosis — which works both ways. […]
In other words, how many generations of self-feedback can you keep track
of without totally losing the sense of yourself; literally, through electronic
techniques, setting yourself up outside of your body. You don't have to
sell the Hindu trip anymore, you sell the television set. (Yalkut, 1984, Part
One, Chapter 4, p. 4)
In all of these areas of overlap — media industry critique, ecstatic vision, cybernetic
feedback — the psychedelic and video art movements of the 1960s were both marching
towards new ways of seeing through electronic media technologies. If we take a closer
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look at a few of the most psychedelic works of computer and video art from the period,
we can see these various areas of overlap coming together.
Scott Bartlett’s Off/On (1968) was one of the most influential works of late-1960s video
art, and one of the most psychedelic. The 9-minute piece was composed at a Sacramento
television station using a synthesis of electronic and cinematic technologies. As raw
materials, Bartlett culled twenty different film loops from an earlier multi-projection light
show piece and fed them through a video mixer to a CRT monitor. An in-studio light
show by Glenn McKay was shot with a television camera and was also fed through a
video mixer to the same CRT monitor as a second video source: “two images riding
between two incoming channels, each pattern competing for exhibition on the monitor,
generating a cross-circuited electronic feedback loop” (Youngblood, 1970, p. 319). A
second television camera shot the monitor, recording it to videotape. This videotape was
then fed back through Bartlett’s video mixers, re-processed, and re-displayed on the CRT
monitor, which in turn was shot with a film camera to produce the finished piece.
The melding of technologies in Off/On is such that the line between cinematic and
electronic media is irrevocably blurred; and Bartlett uses this cross-pollination of imaging
technologies to explore themes of visuality and perception. Off/On begins with a close-up
shot of an eye, accompanied by what sounds like the ambient hum of factory machinery.
The image of the eye reminds us of earlier iterations of the camera–eye in films The Man
With the Movie Camera and Un Chien Andalou, fixing the locus of vision and visuality in
the disembodied eye as it stares back at us from the screen. Quickly, however, a strange,
rhythmic, electronic buzzing fills the soundtrack, inducing the trancelike atmosphere of a
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psychedelic trip. Using video keying techniques, swirling, electromagnetic patterns
appear behind (and inside) the eye, creating an effect that visually resembles the solarized
eye from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The framing of Bartlett’s film camera then begins to
reveal the edges of the CRT monitor, making known that the eye is not just an eye, but an
eye mediated by television. The eye thus becomes both human and video, both organic
and electronic. Bartlett then zooms into the pupil of the eye as the intensity of the pulsing,
psychedelic visuals increases. The eye itself begins to break up, feed back, and oscillate
in rhythmic off/on patterns, synchronized with the electronic throbbing on the
soundtrack. After breathlessly building this first section of Off/On to a visual and aural
crescendo, Bartlett abruptly switches back to a quieter set of rhythms: returning us to a
simple film loop in which two Pop Art images of eyes alternate in time with a heartbeat
on the soundtrack. Synthesized electronic noises soon begin to invade the soundtrack
again and the film loops of the eyes are slowly taken over by circular, kaleidoscopic
patterns that resemble the shape of an iris, but pulse and flare alongside with the video
feedback that Bartlett begins to reintroduce.
Throughout the remainder of Off/On, Bartlett continues these off/on visual and aural
rhythms. The overall impression generated by the piece is one of vision becoming
engulfed by electronic technology. Whenever Bartlett displays a simple film loop, it is
not long before the throbbing, synthesized soundtrack returns and the visuals are
reprocessed into multiple layers of video feedback, creating a psychedelic–cybernetic
fusion of the cinematic and the electronic. Bartlett described this convergence of imaging
technologies as being the core of his art:
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That’s becoming a kind of aesthetic common denominator. Marrying
techniques so the techniques don’t show up separately from the whole. It’s
crossbreeding information. That’s what a computer does, too. Having
several aesthetics force each other into their separate molds and then sort
of seeing what happens. (Youngblood, 1970, p. 318)
What happens in Off/On could be described as a psychedelic–cybernetic metamorphosis
of cinematic vision in which Bartlett’s film loops are transformed into oscillating flows
of electronic feedback. The monocular, cinematic eye at the beginning of Off/On is
progressively broken apart into indeterminable swirls of electromagnetic information as
the piece continues. By the end of the film, the visual field has been transformed from the
lingering, staring eye into a rapid succession Rorschach blots — as if vision and meaning
have become entirely subjective and destabilized by the fusion of cinematic and
electronic modes of perceptions. The persistent off/on rhythm throughout the film also
reinforces this sense of ocular vision being metamorphosed into ecstatic, cybernetic tides
of electronic information: pulsing off and on like electronic signals through copper wire
or the binary code of a digital computer. Bartlett’s film, in this regard, is reminiscent of
Rosalind Krauss’s investigations into the pulsing rhythms of modernist vision: “a rhythm,
beat, or pulse — a kind of throb of on/off on/off on/off — which, in itself, acts against
the stability of visual space in a way that is destructive or devolutionary” (Krauss, 1988,
p. 51). Krauss argues that in this on/off pulse, such as the throbbing beat of the zoetrope
or the oscillating whirls of mechanical imaging devices, there is both a temporality and a
corporeality of perception. In the slow throb of the spinning discs in Marcel Duchamp’s
Precision Optics, for example, Krauss identifies a desire to:
corporealize the visual, restoring to the eye (against the disembodied
opticality of modernist painting) that eye’s condition as bodily organ,
available like any other physical zone to the force of eroticization.
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Dependent on the connection of the eye to the whole network of the
body’s tissue, this force wells up within the density and thickness of the
carnal being, as tied to the conditions of nervous life, it is by definition a
function of temporality. For the life of nervous tissue is the life of time,
the alternating pulse of stimulation and enervation, the complex feedback
relays of retension and protension. (Krauss, 1988, pp. 60-1)
The off/on pulsing of Bartlett’s film possesses much of the same erotic, corporeal
visuality as Krauss’s descriptions of Duchamp’s spinning discs, but it extends such
notions into the psychedelic–cybernetic realm. The carnal density of the nervous system,
with its complex feedback relays of retension and protension, is inextricable in Off/On
from the ecstatic, alternating pulses of electronic technology within psychedelic–
cybernetic models of perception. In other words, Bartlett’s film uses its persistent off/on
throbbing to articulate an erotic recorporealizing of vision within psychedelic–cybernetic
discourses: the pulsing feedback of electronic media being seen, after all, as an extension
of the pulsing feedback of the central nervous system itself.
Some of the same throbbing eroticization of vision can also be seen in other video art of
the period. Indeed, the alternating pulse that Krauss describes was an inherent property of
many of the video processing techniques that were popularized in the 1960s. The graphic
effect of video feedback — especially when a camera is recording a CRT monitor that is
displaying the video signal from the same camera — produces a pulsing, throbbing image
in which the temporal lag of the video processing technique enters back into the visual
field of the resultant image. Similarly, the technique of de-beaming — a deliberate
starving of electrical current to the electron beam — creates an effect of image retention
and “smearing” on the tube that video artists frequently employed to produce pulsing
images resembling the phenomenon of retinal persistence in human vision.
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In the realm of computer art, Stan Vanderbeek’s Poem Fields No.2 (1966) is a
psychedelic “study in computer graphics” that he made in collaboration with Kenneth
Knowlton of Bell Laboratories. The 6-minute film was produced using Bell’s “Beflex”
system: a Fortran-based programming language that utilized an SC-4020 microfilm
plotter to create visual compositions that resembled tapestries of mosaic patterns
(Youngblood, 1970, p. 246). Vanderbeek uses a variety of techniques to create a
psychedelic atmosphere: the computerized visuals persistently cycle through the color
spectrum to produce an intense assault on the photoreceptors of the eye; on-screen text
breaks up and dissolves into abstract patterns of light and color; and the soundtrack
consists of a trippy, avant-garde composition on strings and percussion. As the title
suggests, Poem Fields No.2 also takes the form of a visual poem, flashing a series of
words on screen throughout the course of the film that are organized into the following
sequence of lines and stanzas:
LIFE / LIFE LIKE
SIMILAR / LIKE
CLOCK / TO / TICK
WE PICK / LIFE
OUT / OR APART
SEEMING / TO SEE
SEPARATE / THINGS / TOGETHER
SO / YOU / SAY
WOULD / SEEM / LIFE… / LIKE…
THIS / LIVING
BUT….
WE / ALWAYS / SUSPECT / ....IT....
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This on-screen text, in many ways, recalls the kind of uncertainty about language that we
saw in Huxley’s writing, particularly his notion that words bedevil our sense of reality:
making us apt to mistake words for actual things; conditioning us to accept reduced
awareness as the only awareness. Like Huxley, Vanderbeek keeps picking at our
underlying suspicions about our perception of reality. Is what we see “life,” or merely
“life like”? Do we group separate things together in an effort to codify the chaos of the
cosmos? By using computer graphics to render these questions, Vanderbeek explicitly
frames the discussion in cybernetic terms. The on-screen text is displayed in a manner
that emphasizes the pixilated edges of the characters. The words are also visually
repeated to create feedback patterns that foreground their simulated, inorganic nature.
And at the end of each verse of the poem, the on-screen text explodes into atomized
mosaics of pixel noise, visually revealing it to be nothing more than bits of information.
The experience this creates for the viewer was described by Vanderbeek as very much an
expression of a cybernetic model of perception:
The mind is a computer, not railroad tracks. Human intelligence functions
on an order of a hundred-thousand decisions per second. […] The present
state of design of graphics display systems is to integrate small points of
light turned on or off at high speeds. A picture is “resolved” from the
mosaic points of light. […] The eye is a mosaic of rods and cones.
(Youngblood, 1970, pp. 246-7)
Vanderbeek was echoing oft-repeated aphorisms about the brain and the eye from Leary
and McLuhan. Leary frequently referred to the brain operating at a rate of a hundred
million decisions per second, arguing that psychedelic experience could help to maximize
this processing power (Leary et al., 1964/1995, p. 49). McLuhan, meanwhile, often
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described electronic media in terms of the eye resolving visual mosaics of data, arguing
that this was the essence of the cool, tactile experience of television and video:
The TV image is a mosaic mesh not only of horizontal lines but of
millions of tiny dots, of which the viewer is physiologically able to pick
up only 50 or 60 from which he shapes the image; thus he is constantly
filling in vague and blurry images, bringing himself into in-depth
involvement with the screen and acting out a constant creative dialog with
the iconoscope. The contours of the resultant cartoonlike image are
fleshed out within the imagination of the viewer, which necessitates great
personal involvement and participation; the viewer, in fact, becomes the
screen, whereas in film he becomes the camera. By requiring us to
constantly fill in the spaces of the mosaic mesh, the iconoscope is
tattooing its message directly on our skins. (“The Playboy interview,”
1969, para. 58)
Poem Fields No.2 in this regard was an exploration of these psychedelic–cybernetic ideas
through the computer medium. The explosion of on-screen text into intricate, mandala-
like patterns of pixel noise communicates an ecstatic dissolution of linear, sequential
language into cybernetic bursts of visual data streams — just as passing through the doors
of perception allowed Huxley to jettison linguistic order and enter into the white light of
the infinite, just as Leary saw the fake TV world around him disintegrating into a
vibrating latticework of protons and electrons. As Vanderbeek put it: “Cybernetics and
the looping-around of the man/machine synergy are what we've been after all along. Who
knows, but certainly for the last thousand years man has been inching toward that point,
and now we’re running full speed” (Youngblood, 1970, p. 351).
The computer-generated films made by the Whitney family carried many of the same
ecstatic, cybernetic connotations for audiences at the time. In his discussion of the
intricate, mandala patterns of James Whitney’s Lapis (1966), Youngblood remarks on
how “cybernetics assisted Whitney to return through the centuries to the ancient practice
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of syncretism in his search for a more total vision” (Youngblood, 1970, p. 226). The
psychedelic movement, of course, shared this search for a more total vision. For example,
of the choreographed mosaics of pixels in John Whitney’s Permutions (1966),
Youngblood argues:
Whatever they’re called, Whitney’s films are impossible to describe with
the archaic language of the phonetic alphabet. Circles, crescents,
quadrants, and multiplex forms of infinite variety and endless motion
interact serially and cosmically, until one is transported into a realm of
expanded consciousness that intuitively understands this new language.
(Youngblood, 1970, p. 215)
This cybernetic expansion of perception and consciousness, again, continues the kinds of
discourses and experiences that we have seen in the work of Huxley, Kesey, Leary, et al.
However, in describing this new language as something that is intuitively understood,
Youngblood’s account of the Whitneys’ computer films speaks perhaps less to the revival
of ancient practices than to the contemporary popularity of psychedelic–cybernetic
discourses. In other words, the presence of electronic and digital technologies in theories
of vision and visuality had become so commonplace in the 1960s — and so deeply
entwined with the psychedelic movement’s own mystical expansions of consciousness —
that it was equally commonplace for cybernetic models of perception to be “intuitively”
understood as ecstatic or revolutionary. For the psychedelic and computer/video art
communities, “ecstatic vision” and “cybernetic vision” had become all but synonymous.
Psychedelic Style as Art for Cybernated Life
It is important to reiterate, however, that video and computer technologies were still in
their infancy in the 1960s. It was still the Paleocybernetic Age. In particular, electronic
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and digital artists were still largely dependent upon the cinematic apparatus for the
production, distribution, and exhibition of their work. Off/On, for example, was
composed using video mixers and CRT displays, but the finished product was ultimately
shot and screened on celluloid. Similarly, the computer films of Vanderbeek and the
Whitneys may have been Fortran-programmed, but the final outputs were plotted on film
stock. Indeed, if one looks at the various categories that Youngblood gave to these
emergent media formats in Expanded Cinema, cinema recurs again and again as the
primary point of reference: synesthetic cinema, cosmic cinema, cybernetic cinema,
computer films, videographic cinema, holographic cinema.
The continued, practical dependence upon the filmic apparatus by many psychedelic and
video/computer artists meant that cinema remained a central part of new media
discourses in the 1960s. The emergence of psychedelic–cybernetic paradigms, in other
words, did not result in a sudden, complete break from cinematic models of perception,
but rather in a process of transformation and convergence. Youngblood himself put it in
the following terms:
We've followed the evolution of image language to its limits: the end of
fiction, drama, and realism as they have been traditionally understood.
Conventional cinema can be pushed no further. To explore new
dimensions of awareness requires new technological extensions. Just as
the term “man” is coming to mean man/plant/machine, so the definition of
cinema must be expanded to include videotronics, computer science,
atomic light. (Youngblood, 1970, p. 135)
As such, emergent definitions of cybernetic visuality in the 1960s were to a large degree
inclusive of cinematic paradigms. Indeed, for critics like Youngblood, videotronics,
computer science, atomic light, and other electronic and digital technologies of vision
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were to a large degree defined through their relation to cinema: they represented new
media forms that served to liberate cinema from its conventional uses and associations.
As we saw at the end of Chapter Two, this desire to expand cinema was in large part a
desire to transcend the cinematic apparatus itself — a transcendence in keeping with the
psychedelic movement’s own desire to forge a pure mode of ecstatic perception that was
free from the regimentations of apparatus, institution, and ideology. The same sentiment
carried over to the electronic and digital technologies that were included under the
umbrella of expanded cinema:
When we say expanded cinema we actually mean expanded
consciousness. Expanded cinema does not mean computer films, video
phosphors, atomic light, or spherical projections. Expanded cinema isn’t a
movie at all: like life it’s a process of becoming, man’s ongoing historical
drive to manifest his consciousness outside of his mind, in front of his
eyes. One can no longer specialize in a single discipline and hope
truthfully to express a clear picture of its relationships in the environment.
This is especially true in the case of the intermedia network of cinema and
television, which now functions as nothing less than the nervous system of
mankind. (Youngblood, 1970, p. 41)
In other words, at this formative moment of the emergence of a new media language, the
line between cinematic and cybernetic technologies was quite blurred. The convergence
of these technologies in intermedia networks and psychedelic happenings was viewed in
cybernetic, McLuhanesque terms as extensions of the human nervous system. As such,
all media technologies — from video and computers to painting and cinema — could be
fused into this cybernetic “process of becoming.” Paik summed it up best when he stated:
“Cybernated art is very important, but art for cybernated life is more important, and the
latter need not be cybernated” (Yalkut, 1984, Part One, Chapter 6, p. 1). In other words,
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the goal of cybernetic life more important than the tools that were used to get there; and
those tools should not just be limited to electronic and digital technologies.
The very same philosophy was at the core of the psychedelic movement’s embrace of
cybernetic models of perception. The technical, aesthetic, and institutional limitations of
electronic and digital media were such that most psychedelic visual culture was produced
using “analogue” technologies: cinema, light shows, print, paint, theatre. And it was
through these analogue technologies that most psychedelic artists explored cybernetic
paradigms of vision. As such, the most widespread explorations of cybernetic perception
during the psychedelic era were made not with emergent electronic and digital
technologies, but with “older” tools like film projectors and printing presses.
The psychedelic visual style that was developed in movies, light shows, and rock posters
was profoundly cybernetic in nature, in that it was conceived primarily to stimulate and
manipulate the observer’s brain and nervous system. The Op Art moiré patterns and
vibrating colors found throughout the psychedelic canon are, for example, visual
strategies that were designed to meddle with how the retina and the brain process
pictorial information. The swirling, black-and-white moiré patterns on the Trips Festival
poster, for instance, create interference patterns in the eye and brain that cause the
oscilloscope at the center to seemingly float and vibrate on the page. Similar phenomena
occur with the saturated blues and oranges in the artwork for albums such as the Beatles’
Magical Mystery Tour (1967), the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Axis: Bold as Love (1967),
and Pink Floyd’s More (1969). These LP covers were manufactured using conventional
printing techniques, but in each case the collision of adjacent electric blues and hot
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oranges interferes with our retina’s ability to interpret color, creating a sensation of
pulsing, vibrating borders in which the static images are given the illusion of movement.
Nowhere was this optical phenomenon exploited more than in the psychedelic poster art
of the period. Many rock posters, in fact, were intentionally designed to be viewed under
ultraviolet blacklight to heighten this phenomenological experience. The poster art of
Victor Moscoso is perhaps the most emblematic of this trend, such as his “Horns of
Plenty” poster for the Quicksilver Messenger Service at the Avalon Ballroom in July
1967 and his “Neptune’s Notion” poster for Moby Grape at the Avalon in February of the
same year. Throughout Moscoso’s body of work, the use of hot, vibrating colors was a
consistent visual scheme, and he even experimented with different printing systems to
enhance the retinal phenomenon when the posters were displayed at concerts. Walter
Medeiros describes Moscoso’s techniques as follows:
He explored complex color effects, such as building up an image through
“overprinting,” and through a series of developments this brought an
unexpected dimension to the poster art. Due to the color overprinting
technique, images had the sensational effect of turning off and on when
seen in the flashing colored lights of the dance hall, and one of these
created an illusion of movement. Moscoso’s development of this
animation technique in several later designs further transformed the rock
poster from a static, independent art form to an active, visual element of
the dance environment, an extension of the light show. (Medeiros, 1999, p.
73)
This cybernetic pulse of off/on rhythms was also central to the psychedelic movement’s
fascination with strobe lights and flicker machines. Strobes were, of course, a core
component of any mixed-media happening; and many of the psychedelic feature films of
the period used cinematic techniques to reproduce the effects of strobe lighting: in Yellow
Submarine, for example, red and green frames are rapidly alternated during “It’s Only a
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Northern Song” to create a flickering strobe effect for the film’s viewers; likewise, a
multicolored strobe light effect is produced in The Trip when Paul finds himself trapped
in a dark closet. As with the use of moiré patterns and vibrating colors, the
phenomenological experience of strobe lights was very much framed in terms of a
cybernetic manipulation of the central nervous system. For instance, in a May 1966
article for The Village Voice, Jonas Mekas started to ruminate on the meaning and effect
of strobe lights in USCO happenings and the Exploding Plastic Inevitable: “I have
noticed, very often, how suddenly, during certain surges of colors and lights, I become
electrified, my nerves become jumpy as if somewhere deep inside I were pierced with a
knife” (Mekas, 1972, p. 244). In a follow-up article from June 1966, USCO’s Steve
Durkee explained to Mekas his own, cybernetic understanding of the strobe lights:
“Strobe is the digital trip. In other words, what the strobe is basically doing, it’s turning
on and off, completely on and completely off” (Mekas, 1972, p. 245). In other words,
even though strobe lights were optical devices — producing light, on or off — they were
seen to represent the alternating, binary rhythms of electronic and digital media, and they
were seen to directly, tangibly engage the central nervous system of the observer.
The use of flicker machines to induce hallucinations, as popularized by the likes of Brion
Gysin and William Burroughs, followed a similar set of cybernetic principles. Flicker
machines were, in essence, a kind of strobe device for individual use. In Leary’s High
Priest, Allen Ginsberg describes one such device in the following terms:
Gysin has invented a great flicker machine. Dig this — cut out 10
apertures on a stovepipe hat or piece of cardboard and set it revolving on
phonograph at 33 speed.
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It flickers and is homemade strobe. I looked in it — it sets up optical fields
as religious and mandalic as the hallucinogenic drugs — literally.
... (look in with eyes closed) — it’s like being able to have jeweled
biblical designs and landscapes without taking chemicals. Amazing.
(Leary, 1968/1995, p. 130)
Gysin’s flicker device — dubbed the “Dreammachine” — was designed to let light pass
through the holes in the revolving cylinder at a controlled rate that corresponded to the
frequency of alpha waves in the brain. By viewing the Dreammachine with eyes closed,
these pulses of light stimulated the optic nerve and interfered with the electrical
oscillations in the brain to produce drug-free psychedelic experiences akin to those of
eyelid movies. It is interesting to note, incidentally, that Gysin conceived the
Dreammachine with Burroughs after reading neurophysiologist and robotician William
Grey Walter’s The Living Brain (1953) — the same book that had also greatly impacted
the cybernetic theories of the brain put forward by both Wiener and Lilly.
Light show projections at mixed-media happenings were, likewise, imbued with
cybernetic connotations for the psychedelic movement. The combination of music and
light, in particular, was designed to induce an experience of synesthesia in the viewer —
a “cross-wiring” of his or her senses. Light show artists working with liquid projection,
for example, were able to spontaneously manipulate their oils and dyes in time with the
music to produce dynamic, abstract visualizations of the sonic textures and melodies. Bill
Ham’s light box apparatus (described in Chapter Two) had a similar effect: producing
colored lighting effects that were triggered by the sound frequencies of musicians’
instruments. Being a former abstract expressionist painter, Ham even described his light
show work in terms of “experimenting with methods of plugging his painting in to the
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wall — into the electric current that musicians were doing with their guitars” (Anthony,
1980, p. 39). The phenomenological experience of these synesthetic fusions of sound and
light was one that foregrounded the central nervous system as a site of sensory
convergence: creating a feeling that the nerve receptors/transmitters for sight and sound
were interchangeable or mutually connected, with optical and auditory information often
swirling together into trance-like feedback loops in the mind of the observer.
Light show projections in this regard also further exemplified McLuhan’s notion that,
“Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously” (McLuhan & Fiore,
1967/2001, p. 63). The psychedelic style, after all, was not one that was built upon fixed,
rational meanings. It was not a style that encouraged contemplative decodings or
categorization on the part of the viewer. Rather, it was a style that was built upon
instantaneity and flow. The vibrating colors, swirling moiré patterns, strobe lights, and
bubbling liquid projections of the psychedelic scene not only excited the nervous system,
they also exemplified McLuhan’s notion that the cybernetic era “has forced us to move
from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition” (McLuhan &
Fiore, 1967/2001, p. 63). Trying to build meaning serially — block-by-block, step-by-
step — out of psychedelic light shows would be an exercise in futility; they exist instead
to be experienced in spontaneous, often irrational states of active interplay and sensorial,
informational feedback. To attach critical words to the experience would, in many
respects, undermine the entire point of it.
In other words, regardless of the technologies used to create it, the psychedelic visual
style itself was developed in large part to excite and manipulate the observer’s central
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nervous system. It was in this sense “art for cybernated life.” A central paradox of
psychedelic style, therefore, was that it was at once both hypervisual and nonvisual in its
effects. It aimed to both excite the eye with fantastic displays of ocular spectacle, but also
stimulate the invisible flows of information within the observer’s brain and body.

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CONCLUSION
In the explorations of “cinematic” and “cybernetic” scopic regimes that we have seen
throughout this study, we could argue that the psychedelic movement of the 1960s
represented a reenactment of many of the same kinds of visual discourses and practices
that Crary identified as taking place in the nineteenth century. The “end of cinema”
heralded by some in the psychedelic movement and the concurrent embrace of cybernetic
models of perception by other wings of the psychedelic community in many ways
paralleled the displacement of the camera obscura by the central nervous system in the
scopic discourses of the nineteenth century. In both eras, the cultural dominance of the
camera’s optical, geometrical, veridical modalities of vision was challenged by emergent
scopic regimes built around the transmission of sensory information in the central
nervous system and brain. Indeed, through their embrace of “trip toys” like flicker
machines, light boxes, and customized television sets, the psychedelic movement very
much mirrored the nineteenth century’s own fascination with optical devices designed to
interact with the observer’s brain and nervous system: stereoscopes, thaumatropes,
zoetropes, etc. In these regards, we could perhaps say that the “psychedelic observer” was
to the nineteen sixties what the “modern observer” was to the nineteenth century.
In both eras, we can also see the same core concerns of modernist visuality being
addressed: subjectivity, corporeality, mobility, a loss of the Real, and an emergence of
new technologies of vision and new economies of visual consumption. If we take a closer
look, however, at the ways that each these different scopic concerns were configured in
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each historical moment, we begin to see how the construction of the psychedelic observer
in the 1960s was quite different from that of the modern observer of the 1800s. As Crary
describes, the focus on the subjectivity of the observer in the nineteenth century was the
result of a newly highlighted unreliability of human perception: the sense organs could no
longer be trusted, and the observer’s inability to see objectively rendered the rational,
veridical regimes of the camera obscura archaic. The psychedelic movement was equally
critical of scopic regimes that promoted rational, veridical, objective ways of seeing; but
their embrace of “ecstatic truth” sought to transcend the phenomenological limitations of
modernist subjectivity. The psychedelic movement’s journey into inner, subjective vision
was, in other words, not configured in terms of the unreliability of the observer’s sensory
organs as much as an opening up or a transcending of those organs to produce a mystical
union with the energy flows of the cosmos.
This desire to transcend the body, in turn, resulted in a different set of configurations of
corporeality in the psychedelic observer. The modern observer of the nineteenth century
was conceived in terms of a “carnal density” of vision: a corporeal thickness that rejected
the transparent, incorporeal visuality of the camera obscura by foregrounding the role that
the observer’s central nervous system played in perception. The psychedelic movement
similarly foregrounded the observer’s central nervous system, but it also tried to
transcend that very corporeality by delving deep into the cellular flows of the body. The
physical matter of the psychedelic observer’s being was revealed to be nothing more than
electrons vibrating in a cosmic dance of information transmission. As Leary wrote: “it
becomes clear that the basic ‘particles’ that make up matter are bits of ‘information.’
Matter is frozen information” (Leary, 1994, p. 7). The corporeal body of the psychedelic
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observer, in other words, was no less a producer of vision than the body of the nineteenth
century observer; but the visceral matter of that body was understood more in terms of
the flows of atomic energy than the weight of tissues and muscle.
The concept of mobility witnessed similar reconfigurations. The psychedelic observer
certainly explored some of the same notions of physical mobility as the nineteenth
century observer — particularly the correlations that can be drawn between the
perambulatory gaze that was central to both mixed-media happenings and Benjamin’s
arcades — but the psychedelic movement also emphasized a virtual mobility of vision
that was located in the vibrations of atoms and the flows of electrical energy. The loss of
the Real was configured differently too. For the nineteenth century observer, as we saw in
the phenomenological and epistemological concerns of Müller and Nietzsche, the loss of
the Real was linked to modernist scopic discourses about the unreliability of the sense
organs. For the psychedelic movement, the loss of the Real was similarly tied to
unreliable sense organs, but it was explicitly articulated in terms of the regimentation of
those organs by the era’s social and cultural institutions of power/knowledge. The
artificial realities of movies and television shows were identified as causes of a loss of the
Real; psychedelic perception, on the other hand, was conceived as a return to the Real —
a return to a mystical union with the essence of things. In other words, the psychedelic
observer’s return to the Real was articulated as a form of “pure” or “visionary”
perception that overturned the fake, imprisoning modalities of vision constructed by
media institutions. As such, in addition to transcending the human body, the psychedelic
observer also sought to transcend the economies, realities, and apparatuses of the culture
industry: i.e., the psychedelicists wanted to expand cinema beyond its traditional forms;
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they wanted the fake TV sitcom reality to disintegrate into the vibrating electrons of the
cathode ray tube; and they wanted to strip away all of the feedback noise from the human
biocomputer to run new, visionary programs and metaprograms.
Leary’s dialectic of the “frailty of the visible” and the “power of the invisible” (Leary,
1968/1998a, p. 169) perhaps sums up these attitudes best. The “frailty of the visible” was
a very much a central aspect of how the psychedelic movement explored cinematic
modes of perception: they used the filmic apparatus to probe the limits and the infirmities
of the visual image, attempting to expand cinematic vision beyond its regimentation by
the codes and conventions of Hollywood. The “power of the invisible,” meanwhile, was
most thoroughly addressed in psychedelic movement’s explorations of cybernetic
perception: new modalities of vision being located within ordinarily imperceptible
circulations of energy and information. As we have seen throughout this study, the
psychedelic movement’s steady progress towards this kind of post-ocular, data-driven,
“invisible” model of visuality was shaped by a wide range of cultural and technological
determinants specific to the 1960s. It reflected such things as the emergence of new
electronic/digital technologies of vision, the waning of the Hollywood studio system and
the rise of New Wave cinema movements, the popularization of Wienerian cybernetics
and McLuhan’s theories of mass media, the birth of the counterculture, the influx of
Eastern mysticism, and, of course, the widespread explosion of psychedelic drug use. If
we step back and take a big-picture view, however, we could also argue that the scopic
regimes of the psychedelic movement were deeply implicated in a much more
overarching set of transformations in the global economic systems of late-capitalism.
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Over the past half-century, we have witnessed the emergence of an “information society”
in which more and more of the visible world has been taken over by the protocols of data
systems and computer networks. In a sense, the “visible” has never been so frail, nor the
“invisible” so powerful. The members of the Critical Art Ensemble provide a compelling
narrative of the political implications of these transformations when they argue:
One essential characteristic that sets late capitalism apart from other
political and economic forms is its mode of representing power: What was
once a sedentary concrete mass has now become a nomadic electronic
flow. Before computerized information management, the heart of
institutional command and control was easy to locate. In fact, the
conspicuous appearance of the halls of power was used by regimes to
maintain their hegemony. Castles, palaces, government bureaucracies,
corporate home offices, and other architectural structures stood looming in
city centers, daring malcontents and underground forces to challenge their
fortifications. These structures, bespeaking an impregnable and everlasting
solidity, could stop or demoralize contestational movements before they
started. Indeed, the prominence of this spectacle was a double-edged
sword; once the opposition became desperate enough (due to material
privation or to symbolic collapse of a given regime’s legitimacy), its
revolutionary force had no problem finding and confronting the
powerholders. If the fortifications were breached, the regime would most
likely collapse. (Critical Art Ensemble, 1995, pp. 7-8)
To frame this from a Foucauldian perspective, the Critical Art Ensemble is not arguing
that power simply permeated out from these sedentary concrete spaces, but rather that the
spectacle of these architectural structures was a conspicuous visual performance of
political and economic power. In the post-Fordist era, however, this symbolic locus of
power has disappeared from the visible world and has been dispersed into the
decentralized, “invisible” infrastructures of the information economy: code, algorithms,
databases, flash drives, wireless networks, satellites, etc.
350
As we saw in Chapter Three, the 1960s represented the historical moment when Western
society was first beginning to address the truly seismic implications of these shifts
towards a computerized information society. The psychedelic movement’s response to
these shifts differed considerably from both the mainstream media and the New Left
wing of the counterculture. The mainstream media responded to computerization with a
slew of panic narratives about human obsolescence, totalitarianism, and the moral and
economic consequences of a leisure-based society. A few mainstream figures from the
period — Maltz (1960), Halacy (1965), the Eameses (Think) — put forward less
hysterical models of human–computer synergy, but most narratives in the popular press
presented a vision of a computerized society in which human beings were becoming
increasingly removed from the information loop. The New Left, meanwhile, responded
by launching assaults against visible, sedentary, architectural structures of political and
economic power. They disrupted institutional systems of command and control by taking
over administration buildings and blocking the streets. Mario Savio’s notion that “you’ve
got to put your bodies upon the gears and wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus
and you’ve got to make it stop” (Rorabaugh, 1989, p. 31) spoke to these core principles.
It reflected a belief that economic and political power was still visible, tangible, and
concrete — that it was like a factory machine that could still be impeded physically with
one’s body. As the Critical Art Ensemble point out, however, the New Left of the 1960s
represented the last instance of this kind of civil disobedience being victorious in a
Western society (Critical Art Ensemble, 1995, p. 10); since then, the institutions of power
they sought to disrupt have migrated into those “nomadic electronic flows.”
351
The psychedelic movement’s response to these post-Fordist tendencies within late-
capitalist society was, in contrast, to turn inward. Fueled by their cosmic LSD visions, the
psychedelic movement chose altered states of perception and consciousness as their
principal sites of resistance and contestation. Through their psychedelic explorations of
new ways of seeing, they sought to unearth the ecstatic affordances of different
technologies of vision. In other words, rather than allowing cinematic, electronic, and
digital technologies to remain the apparatuses of oppression and regimentation, the
psychedelic movement sought to transform them into tools for producing more utopian
ways of seeing. In doing so, they also began to redefine what it means to be human in the
post-Fordist era. They began to craft a psychedelic–cybernetic image of the human being
as an information processor: a cosmic adventurer with a “thirteen billion cell brain
computer” and a nervous system “prepared to register and coordinate up to one thousand
million units of flashing information each second” (Leary, 1968/1995, p. 3). The cultural
and historical significance of this psychedelic re-imagining of the human being as a
powerful biocomputer should not be underestimated.
As we saw in Chapter Three, most mainstream media accounts of cybernetics and
automation in the 1960s predicted that the human being would soon become obsolete as a
processor of information. The computer was just too fast, too efficient, and too tireless in
its ability to organize and transmit data; the human being, therefore, would need to find
some other kinds of endeavors to pursue. Many in the New Left, meanwhile, associated
information systems too much with the dehumanizing tendencies of the military-
industrial complex to fully explore the utopian implications of human beings as
information processors. As Turner notes:
352
In Mario Savio’s view, the power of computers to render the embodied
lives of individual students as bits of computer-processed information
symbolized the power of the factory to turn people into corporate drones
and the power of the militarized state to turn young men into soldiers.
(Turner, 2006, p. 14)
The members of the psychedelic movement, in other words, were somewhat ahead of the
curve in their depictions of humans as information processing beings. Through their
explorations of psychedelic–cybernetic perception, they offered up an ecstatic alternative
to the IBM drone of the information society: an electronic explorer with a brain full of
mescaline, surfing down streams of data at a thousand million bits per second. This kind
of information processing was, indeed, something akin to a religious experience for the
psychedelic community: “Recite to yourself some of the traditional attributes of the word
‘spiritual’: mythic, magical, ethereal, incorporeal, intangible, nonmaterial, disembodied,
ideal, platonic. Is that not a definition of the electronic–digital?” (Leary, 1994, p. 5)
The psychedelic movement may have never fully realized its utopian fantasies of a
molecular revolution, but its scopic regimes and its theories of ecstatic information
processing have had a remarkable longevity. As the postindustrial era has moved
forward, many of the mainstream fears about automation and human obsolescence from
the 1960s have fallen by the wayside, but the psychedelic movement’s visions of human
beings as ecstatic information processors still persist. Indeed, when cyberculture
exploded onto the cultural scene in the 1980s and 1990s, the model of the psychedelic–
cybernetic observer from the 1960s became one of the primary points of reference for
thinking about the interstices of vision, technology, and culture. Cyberspace was, after
all, a consensual hallucination. Writing in the mid-1990s, Leary himself argued that there
353
was something inevitable about this path from the psychedelic sixties to the cybercultural
fusions of brains and computers in the present:
The advent of psychedelic (mind-opening) drugs (1960-80) produced a
widespread fascination with consciousness alteration, mind-exploration,
inner searching, brain-stimulation gadgets, oriental yoga — all based on
quantum principles. The advent of personal and interpersonal computers,
digital editors, and audio-video gear (1976-90) turned the average
American home into an electronic-information center. At the same time,
neurologists were publishing their discoveries about how neurotransmitter
chemicals and electrical nets move information around the brain.
The convergence of these waves of information, the inner psychedelic and
the ScreenLand cybernetic, made it possible for the first time for human
beings to understand how the brain operates.
The human brain is, by auto-definition, the most powerful control
communication unit in the known universe. A constellation of a hundred
billion cells floating in an ocean of info-gel. The brain has no muscles and
no sense organs. It is a shimmering sea swarming with microchip
molecules packaged in enormous hardware neurons, all linked by
chemical-electronic signals. We could not understand how the brain
operates until our electrical engineers had built computers. And now we
are learning how to beam our brain waves into the Cyberia of electronic
reality, to think and play and work and communicate can create at this
basic (0/1) level. […] This is the reality field that Plato described in the 4
th

Century B.C., that quantum mechanics intuited in 1900, and that we tri-
brains have begun to inhabit at the end of this Roaring 20
th
Century.
(Leary, 1994, p. 7)
As this study has aimed to show, however, there was in fact nothing natural or inevitable
about these formulations of brain–computer convergence. They emerged from a
contested set of theories about the relationships between humans and their machines.
Through their explorations of perception and consciousness in the 1960s, the psychedelic
movement established a set of ideas about vision and technology; and these ideas fought
for cultural dominance with opposing scopic regimes.
354
In the psychedelic movement’s advocacy for ecstatic, post-ocular, data-driven models of
perception, they contributed significantly to the understandings of vision and visuality
that have become central to our present moment. A final irony of all this is that the
psychedelic–cybernetic observer of the 1960s was conceived in opposition to the scopic
regimes of the capitalist technocracy. It was a model of the human being as an ecstatic
information processor that was designed both to subvert the military-industrial
connotations of the computer and to shake the observer out of the rut of ordinary
perception. As the information society has advanced, however, many of those very same
notions of ecstatic information processing have become central to the organizing logics of
post-Fordism. In other words, by the time Leary was extolling the cosmic union of the
brain and the computer in the 1990s, he was pretty much just feeding into the
technocratic, capitalist regimes of vision, culture, and technology that he had once so
adamantly opposed.

355
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