Mateo Sanchez Petrement- Historicizing Psychedelics: C'culture, Renaissance & the Neoliberal Matrix

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Historicising Psychedelics: Counterculture, Renaissance, and the Neoliberal Matrix.

In this presentation I would like to suggest that the historical transition of psychedelics from an association with counterculture to becoming part of the mainstream is related to the rise of what late cultural theorist Mark Fisher termed “capitalist realism” – the notion that there is no alternative form of social organisation and, as such, capitalism simply is reality. For Fisher, whose hint at psychedelics in the title of his unfinished book introduction Acid Communism has begun to draw attention within the psychedelic community, the economic and political project of neoliberalism was the main agent behind this re-instauration of capitalist hegemony after its de-stabilisation by the convergence of several radical forces at the end of the 1960s and early ‘70s, of which psychedelic “consciousness-expansion” was one.

Thus, historicising psychedelics within the shifts in political economy and culture associated with the “collective set and setting” of neoliberalism can serve both to understand the current shape and operations of the psychedelic “renaissance” as well as help us retrieve these substance’s lost social potential. Concretely, following the insistence on the political “pluripotentiality” and radical contextuality of psychedelics, I argue that such potential was not inherent to psychedelics but embedded in the political economy of the New Deal order, which supported both the formation of discourses, demands, and hopes based on “the social” and, relatedly, the idea that “the personal is political”.

BIOGRAPHY
Mateo is a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam, where his research focuses on historicising the psychedelic renaissance within changes in political economy related to neoliberalism and recuperating the social potential of psychedelics in three domains - that of mental health epidemics, ecological breakdown, and social inequality. In each of these domains, psychedelics serve not only as powerful experiential tools but as as interesting objects that bring together different historical, cultural, social, political, epistemological, and economic forces - and thus are a site at which to twist these forces towards different ends. His background is in philosophy - notably posthumanism, phenomenology, and critical theory. The first focuses on the ethics and ontology of relationality and interdependence (including psychedelic interconnectedness) beyond the exclusionary logics of the "Human" in Western Modernity, the second on the study of the embodied and embedded structure of "experience" (including that of a psychedelic kind), and the third on the historical and material context of political economy.