Interesting piece, particularly the reference to having to undergo a “de-semiotization” rehab. I’ve touched on some of these issues in our pages a few times previously. Encountering continental theory was certainly heady and empowering for my generation, but it often turned out that there was “no there there”: the jargon wasn’t employed systematically, it just functioned as that period’s format for the sort of quick-witted intellectual bully who inhabits every era, talking rings around “lesser” minds and twisting everything they say to his own benefit. Of course I was never guilty of too much of that myself.
As far as my own rehab goes, perhaps nothing was so important as being fortunate enough to have been exposed to the work of Roman Jakobson. He wasn’t the sort of “pop star” that someone like Barthes became, and you can study plenty of Semiotics without running into his name, but he served me as a model of scholarly responsibility, and provided an unexpected path through the intellectual terrain of the 20th century, linking disparate themes and generations.
His work covered a huge range, from the flamboyant modernism of Mayakovsky to medieval epic poetry; from literary criticism to clinical science, as in his use of the pathology of aphasia as an insight into linguistics. His use of dialectic and binary opposition was a critical influence on Levi-Strauss, and led to the nexus of disciplines that are called Structuralism, of which Semiotics was perhaps the most glamorous in its heyday.
What is less well known was the role he played in the psychedelic revolution. Traveling in upper-echelon social circles, he met the banker Gordon Wasson, who, with his Russian wife Valentina, was in the process of opening up the field of ethnomycology, which grew out of the couple’s dialectical encounter with mushrooms. Their work related to structural anthropology on the one hand, and European mythology and historical linguistics on the other, fields that Jakobson was involved with. He supplied criticism and leads from his vast range of knowledge, as well as encouragement and a level of academic legitimacy that was invaluable to the pair of amateurs who’s work began as a sort of hobby.
The Wasson’s work ultimately led into unexpected realms of shamanism and mystical intoxication. They became the first white people to participate in a magic mushroom ceremony in Mexico. An account of this “adventure”, published in Life magazine, was Timothy Leary’s introduction to the psychological possibilities of psychedelics, creating an important academic vector into the hippie counterculture of the 1960s.
Growing up, I got the hippies more than I got the academics. Besotted with 60s values in my adolescence, (mostly via rock music,) my college encounter with hard-ass academia in the form of Semiotics was a rite of passage, purging hippy-dippy romanticism in favor of intellectually respectable, but no less “subversive”, modes of thought. The funny thing is, these turned out to be surprisingly similar, at least in the ultimate benefit they could deliver to the disciple.
The Structualist disciplines threatened and offended the mainstream, most significantly in the critique of the self. The quasi-mystical understanding of the innate and unique self had been the West’s point of compromise between religion and science, but now it was shown to be a mere construct of linguistic conventionality; a fiction. Some considered this notion a degradation, but to me it showed a way to get beyond neurosis, revealing that one’s psychological pathologies were not necessarily your defining characteristics, but merely adopted narratives that could be shed once you had gained the power (via Semiotics) to see through them: a kind of liberation.
And this worked, up to a point, anyway. Of course problems remain, with life, and with Structuralism, as I indicated above. For me the circle came together when I went through my own version of the “rehab” discussed by the Brownies. Significantly, this occurred in conjunction with a general re-evaluation of 60s culture that occurred in the 90s, partly as a generational thing, and partly as a reaction to the repression of the Reagan era. I began by studying the hippie 60s as an historical and nostalgic artifact, but, like the Wassons, I ended up directly involved with ecstatic realities, because how else are you really going to understand the thing you’re studying? First hand involvement may collapse “objective” distance, but that distance is also a fiction.
What I learned was that the liberation of “ego death” that Leary taught in the 60s was equivalent to the liberation from cultural neurosis that I had found in Structuralism. Leary’s terms might seem laughable, borrowing from ancient Eastern philosophies, but the effects of surrendering to the ecstasies of music, dance, or drugs, could be very real. And, as with the continental disciplines, the empowering result was that, although the “ego” might “die”, or the “self” might be “deconstructed”, one did not therefore cease to exist, rather you gained a new and palliative insight into what it means to be a human being.
I equate this insight with the traditional rebirth experience of initiation, and I’ve come to believe that it is a necessary component of spiritual life, and that a spiritual dimension is necessary to human life as such. It seems important to me that I could learn this from Structuralism, which has often been criticized for its unyielding materialism, but it is typical of our mysterious path that a great Structuralist scholar like Jakobson (who referred to his work a “scientific”) should provide for the tangent of materialist self-criticism that flowered in the 60s, and without which the full implications of this train of thought would never have been revealed to me. Of course this is just one strand in an expansive tapestry, but it’s the one I followed, like Theseus through the Labyrinth, and as we learn on the web, each of us can only follow so many threads…
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As far as my own rehab goes, perhaps nothing was so important as being fortunate enough to have been exposed to the work of Roman Jakobson. He wasn’t the sort of “pop star” that someone like Barthes became, and you can study plenty of Semiotics without running into his name, but he served me as a model of scholarly responsibility, and provided an unexpected path through the intellectual terrain of the 20th century, linking disparate themes and generations.
His work covered a huge range, from the flamboyant modernism of Mayakovsky to medieval epic poetry; from literary criticism to clinical science, as in his use of the pathology of aphasia as an insight into linguistics. His use of dialectic and binary opposition was a critical influence on Levi-Strauss, and led to the nexus of disciplines that are called Structuralism, of which Semiotics was perhaps the most glamorous in its heyday.
What is less well known was the role he played in the psychedelic revolution. Traveling in upper-echelon social circles, he met the banker Gordon Wasson, who, with his Russian wife Valentina, was in the process of opening up the field of ethnomycology, which grew out of the couple’s dialectical encounter with mushrooms. Their work related to structural anthropology on the one hand, and European mythology and historical linguistics on the other, fields that Jakobson was involved with. He supplied criticism and leads from his vast range of knowledge, as well as encouragement and a level of academic legitimacy that was invaluable to the pair of amateurs who’s work began as a sort of hobby.
The Wasson’s work ultimately led into unexpected realms of shamanism and mystical intoxication. They became the first white people to participate in a magic mushroom ceremony in Mexico. An account of this “adventure”, published in Life magazine, was Timothy Leary’s introduction to the psychological possibilities of psychedelics, creating an important academic vector into the hippie counterculture of the 1960s.
Growing up, I got the hippies more than I got the academics. Besotted with 60s values in my adolescence, (mostly via rock music,) my college encounter with hard-ass academia in the form of Semiotics was a rite of passage, purging hippy-dippy romanticism in favor of intellectually respectable, but no less “subversive”, modes of thought. The funny thing is, these turned out to be surprisingly similar, at least in the ultimate benefit they could deliver to the disciple.
The Structualist disciplines threatened and offended the mainstream, most significantly in the critique of the self. The quasi-mystical understanding of the innate and unique self had been the West’s point of compromise between religion and science, but now it was shown to be a mere construct of linguistic conventionality; a fiction. Some considered this notion a degradation, but to me it showed a way to get beyond neurosis, revealing that one’s psychological pathologies were not necessarily your defining characteristics, but merely adopted narratives that could be shed once you had gained the power (via Semiotics) to see through them: a kind of liberation.
And this worked, up to a point, anyway. Of course problems remain, with life, and with Structuralism, as I indicated above. For me the circle came together when I went through my own version of the “rehab” discussed by the Brownies. Significantly, this occurred in conjunction with a general re-evaluation of 60s culture that occurred in the 90s, partly as a generational thing, and partly as a reaction to the repression of the Reagan era. I began by studying the hippie 60s as an historical and nostalgic artifact, but, like the Wassons, I ended up directly involved with ecstatic realities, because how else are you really going to understand the thing you’re studying? First hand involvement may collapse “objective” distance, but that distance is also a fiction.
What I learned was that the liberation of “ego death” that Leary taught in the 60s was equivalent to the liberation from cultural neurosis that I had found in Structuralism. Leary’s terms might seem laughable, borrowing from ancient Eastern philosophies, but the effects of surrendering to the ecstasies of music, dance, or drugs, could be very real. And, as with the continental disciplines, the empowering result was that, although the “ego” might “die”, or the “self” might be “deconstructed”, one did not therefore cease to exist, rather you gained a new and palliative insight into what it means to be a human being.
I equate this insight with the traditional rebirth experience of initiation, and I’ve come to believe that it is a necessary component of spiritual life, and that a spiritual dimension is necessary to human life as such. It seems important to me that I could learn this from Structuralism, which has often been criticized for its unyielding materialism, but it is typical of our mysterious path that a great Structuralist scholar like Jakobson (who referred to his work a “scientific”) should provide for the tangent of materialist self-criticism that flowered in the 60s, and without which the full implications of this train of thought would never have been revealed to me. Of course this is just one strand in an expansive tapestry, but it’s the one I followed, like Theseus through the Labyrinth, and as we learn on the web, each of us can only follow so many threads…
- alex 5-19-2004 12:02 am