PsycheTropics: Rhetoric and Altered Consciousness

Professor Richard Doyle

mobius@psu.edu

Once one has control over modelling the universe inside one's self, and is able to vary the parameters satisfactorily, one's self may reflect this ability by changing appropriately to match the new property.... John Lilly

This seminar will offer an evolutionary model for the emergence and practice of rhetoric in human and non human ecologies. Rhetoric, in this view, is a biological attribute of human culture, a collection of techniques for altering consciousness: curing, persuading, seducing, communicating or otherwise transforming with information. Here the capacity for self reference, the "awareness of awareness" that seems to define human consciousness, is understood as an evolutionary trait no more or less astonishing than bioluminescence, the firefly's tactic for differential reproductive success. As a practicum in the rhetoric of science, the seminar will focus on a period in Cold War technoscience when the alteration of consciousness - through "brainwashing", drugs, and feedback - itself became an object of scientific study. This period of "psychedelic science", with its continual re-discovery of the self referential character of human observers, is ironically fundamental to understanding the contemporary reductionist, materialist biochemical model of mind. Literary authors such as Burroughs, Huxley and Michaux were often pioneers in this scientific investigation, so we will also think through the role of aesthetic production in scientific practice.

Students will be free to participate in the experimental alteration of consciousness through the use of a sensory deprivation tank as part of their course work, and will be encouraged to use tools of multimedia composition, many of which are themselves effects of psychedelic science.