Transmissions
from
Terence McKenna-Land
Item: Terence McKenna's Postmodern
Pleroma
Cyber-Gnosticism and the Alien
Good
by David M. Larsen
"Right here and now, one
quanta away, there is raging a universe
of active intelligence that is
trans-human, hyper-dimensional, and
extremely alien... What is driving
religious feeling [today] is a wish for
contact [with that] Other."
-
Terence McKenna
"The knowledge who we were, what we
have become; where we were, wherein we
have been thrown; whereto we speed,
wherefrom we are redeemed; what is
birth, and what rebirth"
- Gnostic Text (Exc. Theod. 78:2)
Terence McKenna,
self-proclaimed shamanologist and
ethno-pharmacologist of spiritual
transformation had for the last decade
or so (of his life) peddled his baroque
ontologies and epistemologies on the
international new age lecture circuit.
He spoke of a "resacralization" of the
world, of hallucinogenic gnosis, strange
teleological attractors at the end of
time, a Mayan calendar eschatology at
2012, alien worlds of the "Other"
populated by self-transforming machine
elves, and Jungian fleets of B-Grade
UFO's haunting the collective
unconscious of a globalized humanity.
This discourse has
engendered a profitable audience cult
and, with the death of Timothy Leary,
propelled McKenna onto the throne of
high priest of psychedelia and guru to
the wired denizens of Cyberia.
In
this essay I will explore a number of
issues raised by the emergence of a
discourse such as McKenna's in post-modernity. Firstly, the base fact of
an spiritual discourse positing a
specific "ontic Logos", and existing in
the affluent, modernized and apparently
"de-traditionalized" West. In doing so I
will attempt to place McKenna in his
relation to other Western discourses of
"self-exploration", most notably that of
Jean Jacques Rousseau, and describe how
McKenna's psychedelia departs radically
from Rousseau in its anti-materialist,
Gnostic strains. Secondly, I will
explore the sheer eclecticism of
McKenna's universe, placing it in its
social context of late capitalist "re-enchantment".
I will suggest that its emphasis on
specularity relates to its globalizing
epistemology of sameness, and
demonstrate how its metaphysical
subterfuges deify immanent, materially
constructed subjectivities.
The Alien
Logos and the Ontic Good
The moral and spiritual orientation of
the citizens of Western nation-states of
late modernity have, according to the
conventional narrative spun by social
theorists, been freed from the bonds of
embedded tradition and outer "sources of
the Good". Paul Heelas writes that "de-traditionalisation
involves a shift of authority: from
"without" to "within". It entails the
decline of the belief in pre-given or
natural order of things." What is
described as the radical thesis situates
this de-traditionalisation in a "past to
present/future" dynamic, whereby the
individual is "freed" from the
embeddedness and closure of tradition
into a dis-embedded, reflexive selfhood
that draws upon its own internal Good
for satisfaction. Charles Taylor,
describes this change (or rise) in
subjectivity in Sources of the Self. He
charts a historical shift from the ontic,
external Logos (in its Platonic sense),
where the source of the Good is found
external to the Self and where moral
action consists in turning towards this
"outer" source, to an emergence in the
18th century of "alternative moral
sources."
These newer sources discarded the notion
of an outer, transcendent Good and
instead repositioned it within the Self:
hence Kant's doctrine on the inherent
dignity of the (universalised
rational-moral) human self, and the
Rousseauian notion of the inherent
Goodness of nature, as experienced
"within", accesible in the welling up of
one's own nature, desires, sentiments
and feelings. One effect of this "detraditionalization",
according to radical Enlightenment
thinkers such as Holbach and Helvetius,
was to liberate the individual from "the
false systems which our imagination has
spawned...[the specifically
hyper-Augustinian] ....demands of a
false transcendance of nature". This
rejection of a transcendent outer Good
claimed to free man from the damaging
efforts to imitate and appease the
Divine, and also liberated him to be
more affirmative of the experiential,
sensual aspects of physical existence.
Hence, Holbach's "Voice of Nature"
cries...
"In vain, o superstitious one! do you
seek your well-being beyond the limits
of the universe where my hand has placed
you. In vain do you ask it of these
inexorable fantoms which your
imagination wishes to establish on my
eternal throne.....in vain do you trust
in these capricious deities whose
beneficence sends you into ecstasy;
while they fill your sojourn with dread,
with wailing, with illusions."
Talyor claims that this new exultation
of the sensual can been seen as a
philosophical expression of the
celebration of ordinary life in the 18th
century; the rise of the notion that
"sensual fulfillment" can be a
legitimate and satisfying way to orient
an individual life towards the Good. The
later rise of consumer capitalism could
not have occurred without it; and the
Rousseaian romanticism of the 1960's
counter-culture - and its notion of the
psychedelic experience as being a
legitimate experience of the Good - can
be seen as a recent re-affirmation of
this change in Western cultural
attitudes.
Terence McKenna's discourse, however,
sits uncomfortably within this
tradition. There is an unbridgeable
chasm between the mescaline induced
sensuality and immanent experiential
affirm-ation of an Aldous Huxley in The
Doors of Perception and the
transcendental sci-fi narrative of a
final triumph of spirit over matter as
preached by Esalen's favourite
ethnopharmacologist of spiritual
transformation. McKenna inherits the
affirmative experientialism of Rousseau
and the radical Enlightenment, yet
undermines its "physicality" via the
anti-materialism of classic Gnosticism.
On one hand he can claim that "the
spiritual quest, becomes one of
empowering the felt presence of
experience, both psychedelic experience
and the normal day-to-day experience
living." Yet this felt-experience sits
within a gnostic evolutionary schema of
spiritual "higher levels" and body-hate.
"Matter and the human body is the
placenta of the soul and it is certainly
true that the earth is the cradle of the
human race, but no infant remains in the
cradle forever." Holbach's Voice of
Nature, indeed even McKenna's own
beloved "Gaia", is silenced.
Aspects of Rousseau are more strongly
displayed in McKenna's doctrine of the
alien, cancerous nature of our
psilocybin-free "ego's". Hence, in the
grand Rousseauian tradition, an almost
axiomatic body of thought in today's
culture of "authenticity" and
prerequisite for any serious New Age
epistemology, McKenna demonizes the
misleading wiles of the "ego". McKenna
bemoans,
"I really believe that the reason we
have language and notions like
community, altruism, loyalty,
brotherhood, hope - the reason we have
these qualities, which are the qualities
which we embrace and which are most
enobling to us, is because for a period
of roughly a hundred thousand years we
self-medicated ourselves and suppressed
the poisonous presence of the calcareous
tumour of ego. Ego is the psychological
structure which is propelling us to hell
in a handbasket"
This is of course the grand Rousseauian
Fall, the sensibility which Edward Shils
refers to as "the metaphysical dread of
being encumbered by something alien to
oneself". McKenna claims that "the whole
fall into history, the whole rise of
male dominance and patriarchy really can
be traced to a broken connection with
the living world of the Gaian mind."
Rousseau writes that "God makes all
things good; man meddles with them and
they become evil". The epravity, the
messiness, the alienation is blamed on
Culture, "the dense web of opinion woven
between us in society". The individuas
orientation to the Good is effected only
by a reconnection with the intuitive
voice within, the voice of Nature.
Rousseau writes, "Conscience!
Conscience! divine instinct, immortal
voice from heaven; sure guide for a
creature ignorant and finite indeed, yet
intelligent and free; infallible judge
of good and evil, making man like to
God!". In listening to his inner
conscience, the individual transcends
petty differences and realigns himself
with the "common good", and the "general
will" is reaffirmed if all are attuned
to this inner voice. Taylor points out
that all modern philosophies of
"self-exploration" begin with Rousseau,
and McKenna's eclectic psychedelia is
assuredly within this tradition - for
example, drawing heavily on Jungian
notions in its talk of the Unconscious
"Other" and its depth pyschology
aesthetic. Yet McKenna departs from
Rousseau in the strains of cyber-gnosticism
that he weaves into his weltanshauung.
McKenna's brand of gnostic
anti-materialism, deified humanity and
Wagnerian space operatics is
unreconcilable with the simple Stoical
paganism of the Rousseau who writes,
"Oh man! live your own life and you will
no longer be wretched. Keep to your
appointed place in the order of nature
and nothing can tear you from it..Your
freedom and your power extend as far and
no further than your natural strength;
anything more is slavery, deciet, and
trickery."
The Inner Voice, the golden logos that
must be listened to if humanity is to
discard it calcerous ego driven
differance, in short - the device that
will effect a communion of globalized
humanity, is that voice alchemically
purified by the psychedelic. McKenna
claims that "Culture is other people's
trash, you know, the detritus of
thousands of years of mistakes, that's
what culture is", and the psychedelic
substance "dissolves boundaries, they
erase differences, they introduce you to
the notion that reality is, in the
wonderful phrase of Gregory Bateson, "A
seamless web", that we are not atomic
entities forever imprisoned in our own
private Idaho's". "The psychedelics
[function] to dissolve boundaries
between people. I mean, if you look at
25 thousand psychedelic experiences, the
impression that you will have is this
experience is one which dissolves
peoples boundaries - it doesn't matter
whether they're Hassidic Jew, a
communist party apparatchik, a
rainforest shaman...". Again this is the
spectre of Shils "metaphysical dread":
of the substantiality of a deeper Self
divorced from its "ego", the notion that
Culture is alien to oneself, that a more
real self exists below "social
conditioning".
Like Rousseau, McKenna, and much other
New Age discourse, argues for a
homogenous sameness over the chattering,
semiotic difference of culture - a
transcendental logos that rises
phoenix-like above the disorientated
postmodern Babel. "This is a problem of
language. All codes have relative code
qualities, except the Logos. The Logos
is perfect and, therefore, partakes of
no quality other than itself...As long
as one maps with something other than
the Logos, there will be problems of
code quality". McKenna, similar to
classical theorists of Enlightenment and
Modernity (such as Kant & Rousseau),
advocates a detraditionalization in
exchange for a transcendent God-Good of
sorts, the phantom of a language or mode
of discourse that can trace the "Real"
transparently. For all his railing
against the patriarchy, McKenna reframes
one of its greatest weapons - the myth
of a language of presence, a
language-logos which once and for all
will fix the signified-signifier
relationship in an ahistorical
concreteness. This logocentric humanism
is ofcourse anathema to postmodern
theorists such as Derrida, who writes,
"The name of man being the name of that
being who, throughout the history of
metaphysics or of ontotheology - in
other words, throughout his entire
history - has dreamed of full presence,
the reassuring foundation, the origin
and the end of play."
A New Age discourse such as McKenna's,
however much a creature of late
capitalism and hyperreal specularity, is
not postmodern in the "no more
meta-narratives" sense. In "dissolving
difference", McKenna's mushroom logos
erects a fascistic and illusory
objectivity. The Truth (with a capital
T) is out there. "Under the influence of
psilocybin there is an experience of
contact with a speaking entity - an
interior voice that I call the Logos.
The Logos spoke the Truth - an
incontrovertible Truth." "I take very
seriously the idea that the Logos is
real, that there is a guiding Mind - an
Oversoul - that inhabits the biome of
the planet, and that human balance,
dignity, and religiousity depend on
having direct contact with this realm."
The connections between this organicism
and its embedded-ness in the historical
fact of globalized information cultures
will be explored below, yet here I wish
to highlight its essential similarities
with all the great meta-narratives of
Western metaphysics. The tradition of
inwardness, of a turning within to align
oneself with the Good, flows through the
mainstream rivers of Western thought:
via Augustine, Descartes, and Locke, and
finding its exemplary expressions in
Kant and Rousseau. McKenna presents his
own version of this tradition, cribbing
from the depth psychology of Jung, and
present's the psychedelic experience as
the great leveller, the obliterator of
embedded difference and the activator of
a globalized community and a language of
objectivity.
McKenna offers a psychedelic take on the
Pauline model of a new community, a
detraditionalization of ethnicity and
gender reconstituted in Christ as the
New Israel (Galatians 3:28). This notion
of communion was furthered by the early
Church father Augustine. "In Augustine,
the separate individuals are to be
reconstructed, through the mysterium
(mystery) of the sacrament of the Mass,
into the unity of the body of Christ, so
that each single one participates by
overcoming his isolation in the single
communion body." McKenna rephrases this:
in the body of the mushroom, we all are
one. The hallucinogenic sacrament
activates a going inward, a jettisoning
of tradition, ethnos, gender, a
discovery of the Good in the Alien
gnosis, and a drastic recommunalization.
In the "depths" of the human psyche, the
"Other" is discovered, an unconscious
"elf hive, a colony of
self-transforming, hyperdimensional
machine creatures who are squealing and
squeaking in a visible glossolalia that
falls like rain on the interior
landscape". The gnosis is presented to
the ego-transcending Self. McKenna's
version of the new communion has a
cybergnostic slant,
"We [humanity] are like an enormous
collective organism with our data banks,
our forecasting agencies, and our
computer networks, and the many levels
at which we are connected into the
universe...I take the flying saucer to
be an image of the future state of
humanity. It is a kind of millenarian
transformation of the human where the
soul is exteriorized as the apotheosis
of technology. It is the eschatological
event that is casting enormous shadows
backward through time over the
historical landscape. That is the siren
singing at the end of time, calling all
humanity across the last hundred
millennia toward it. Calling us out of
the trees and into history, and through
this series of multilevelled cultural
transitions to the point that the thing
within the monkeys - the creature of
pure language and pure imagination whose
aspirations are entirely titanic in
terms of self-transformation - that
thing is now emerging, and it will
emerge as humanity leaves the planet.
(Italics mine)"
"In the twentieth century all this knits
together into some kind of global
organism...We are moving toward the most
profound event a planetary ecology can
encounter. We are about to witness the
freeing of life from the chrysalis of
matter. This is what our privilege and
our destiny is, is to be the final
generation of people with one foot in
the material realm of the battered
primate and one foot on the ladder to
godhood."
"Essentially, we are going to shed the
monkey, the linguistic creature that is
symbiotic with these monkeys is about to
disentangle itself from physis and
realise some kind of angelic
transformation."
McKenna's re-engineering of the
Christian community involves a gnostic
"return to source", the freeing of the
trapped sparks of Spirit from sinister
matter and the obliteration of
difference in the reformation of the
fallen, splintered Godhead. McKenna, in
classic Gnostic style, claims "we are
completely alientated, so alienated from
ourselves are we that when we encounter
our own souls in the psychedelic
dimension, we mistake it for a UFO. This
is serious alienations folks, I think we
have to get back into the inner jeweled
realm and make ourselves at home there."
Hans Jonas points out that the gnostic
rhetoric of anti-materialism, its
extreme rejection of the world was the
reflection of the mood of the early
Christian centuries: "a deeply agitated
state of mind, a great tension of the
soul, a disposition towards radicalism,
hyperbolic expectations, total
solutions".
The gnostic strains in McKenna perhaps
reflect a similar tension in the
postmodern mind of the West; plagued by
the moral malaise of intrumental reason
and the "culture of narcissism",
alienated by environmental despoilation,
radical subjectivism and the fall of
public life, the nuclear threat and the
capitalist exploitation of the third
world. The moral failure of the
Enlightenment project, the vulgarity of
late capitalist culture, all these
"contemporary malaises" could be seen to
generate a physis rejecting,
anti-materialist spiritual discourse
such as McKenna's. His traditional
gnostic doctrine of a fall into matter
and a future reconstitution in the
Godhead may act as a narcissistic
panacea for those who feel an
existential alienation from their
environment: the anomie of
disembeddedment. The dangers of
McKenna's discourse is that they merely
replay the dualistic dichotomies that
fostered the malaise; and worse, they
detract from more prosaic, yet
infinitely more important, localised
political action. Priestly in the worst
possible sense, McKenna discards
reflexive thinking in favour of a naive
"sacralising" of such historically
immanent phenomena as information
technology, the Internet, the capitalist
"time-space compressions" of modernity
and postmodernity. I will explore this
aspect more fully below.
Late
Capitalist Eclecticism & Spiritualized
Specularities
In executing his "archaic revival"
McKenna eclectically draws on the
Western metaphysical tradition of
ahistorical "hyperreal" realms, Gnostic
teleologies of a fall into matter and
the promise of a final human communion -
the "strange attractor at the end of
time", and dualistic dichotomies between
the body-soul; with an extreme bias
towards the latter - crafting an almost
cariactured "meta-narrative" of the
final triumph of spirit over matter.
Reframing this traditional rhetoric is a
science fiction aesthetic that
"appropriates" the above elements out of
their traditional settings and remolds
them via a cyberpunk semiotic of nano
and information technology. Hence, the
globalized, holistic humm of an
electrically illumed Gaian "world-soul",
a Burroughsian insectoid sensibility of
the chattering "Other", and a 2001: A
Space Odyssey feeling for the grande
historical. In good New Age style,
although here McKenna would prefer to
refer to it as an "archaic revival",
indigenous shamanic cosmologies and
techniques are also co-opted from "premodern"
cultures and added to this ontological
soup. The axial point around which this
meta-narrative of presence revolves is
the hallucinogenic psilocybin: the
sacred "food of the Gods", communicator
of the secret Gnosis, and, according to
McKenna, the substance single handedly
responsible for the divine sparks of
human intelligence. The historical lack
of a symbiotic relationship with the
mushroom has ejected Western man from
the Dionysian, orgiastic, "partnership"
culture, the original "Garden of Eden",
and into the terrible "fall" of history:
ie a Gaian hustling ruse run by a mob of
nomadic Indo-European arch-patriarchs.
Hans Jonas presents the eclecticism of
the early gnostics, their derivative,
cavalier and impious use of tradition,
as a product of its historical period.
The early Christian centuries are
described as "late" (post-classical),
distinctly literate, and thoroughly
syncretistic. Jonas writes of "the
freefloating availability of traditions
that [were] no longer binding, but
pregnant with redefinable meaning". A
parallel can be drawn between the
conscious construction of gnostic
allegory, its knowing subversion of and
resituation of Jewish and Platonic
semiotic, and the postmodern eclecticism
of McKenna. In a time of "detrad-itionalization",
yet also a time of the waning of
post-Enlightenment ireligiousity where
many are calling for a "reenchantment"
of the life world, the New Age can
engage in a impious, post-colonial
plundering of any and all religious
traditions. Hybridised in the blender of
late capitalist media technologies,
forced to appease the demand for novelty
in the check-out lines of the "spiritual
supermarkets", the New Age discourses
construct eclectic artifice on order.
New Agers literally "create their own
reality", and it is no coincidence that
McKenna is fascinated by the
possibilities of capitalist virtual
reality technologies.
David Harvey describes the last two
decades of the twentieth century as
having undergone intense "time-space
compression". Citing the transition from
Fordism to "flexible accumulation" style
capitalism as one causative factor, he
observes that this shift has entailed
the encroachment of capitalism into the
marketing of "life-styles and recreation
activities". This change in capitalism
has engendered a new consumer
subjectivity. Mike Featherstone writes,
"It is common in depictions of
postmodern experiences to find
references to: the disorientating melee
of signs and images, stylistic
eclecticism, sign-play, the mixing of
codes, depthlessness, pastiche,
simulations, hyperreal-ity, immediacy, a
melange of fiction and strange values,
intense affect-charged experiences, the
collapse of the boundaries between art
and everyday life, an emphasis upon
images over words, the playful immersion
in unconscious processes as opposed to
detached conscious appreciation, the
loss of a sense of the reality of
history and tradition; the de-centering
of the subject"
The hyperreal, specular aspects of
McKenna's discourse - the emphasis on
visuality and sci-fi spectacle - could
be argued to court cogently the "society
of the spectacle", an aspect of the
postmodern "emphasis of images over
words". The cinematic, hallucinatory
qualities of the psychedelic experience
are constantly posited as a spiritual
Truth. The reduction of a supposed
religiousity to mere bedazzlement by the
bizarrely optical could be seen -
similar to the Impressionist's modernist
fascination with evanescence and
flickering optical phenomena - as a
flattening of content before the great
leveller of opticality, complicit with
"a world where use-value has been
banished and exchange value - which
posits the universal equality of things
- enshrined instead". Eschewing cultural
difference, the (self-proclaimed)
detradition-alized, globalized McKenna
speaks of "a commitment to a return to
the atavistic through the direct
tranformation of experience...This is
not an ideology, there is no dogma,
there are no rules, this is not a menu
of moral prescription, this is something
that happens between you and this
transcendental reality."
The eclectic and specular aspects of
McKenna's discourse are also haunted by
another definer of the "Real" in
postmodernity - the spectre of the
television set, and, more recently, the
World Wide Web. The combination of
satellite communications, installed in
the 1970s, with mass television
ownership means that it is now "possible
to experience a rush of images from
different spaces almost simultaneously,
collapsing the world's spaces into a
series of images on a screen". The rise
of mass television ownership and
mediated spectacle in the 1960s
coincided with the use of
hallucinogenics by counter culturalists,
and a spiritual discourse that downplays
specific moral or ethical orientations
in favour of a celebration of the sense
of "oneness" engendered by
hallucin-ogenic opticality sits
suspiciously close to the sense of
global sameness and unity inspired by
television, that other great optical
leveller.
Indeed, McKenna's juggernaut
sensibilities appear to naively
legitimate specific, historically
imbedded social transformations by
recasting their reconstruction of human
subjectivity into an non-reflexive,
spiritualized discourse. His
metaphysical subterfuges perpetuate and
deify immanent historical economic
processes involving ecological and human
exploitation. Hence, McKenna's take on
time-space compressions of modernity,
"We human beings are reacting to the
siren song of the transcendental object
at the end of time....we are on a
collision course with a temporal vortex
of some sort. It has become a cliche of
modern parlance and journalism that time
is speeding up, that history is moving
faster and faster...What is happening on
this planet is that time is speeding up
in our species, we are under the
influence of a kind of strange attractor
which is moving us through the temporal
medium at an ever-faster accelerating
rate. This is a law of the universe,
though not one recognised by science..We
are wrapping ourselves around a cosmic
endpoint of some sort...It beckons
across the dimensions, it throws an
enormous shadow over the enterprise of
human history"
More prosaically, discarding
essentialist notions of time, scientific
laws, and baroque teleologies, the
subjective experience of the
acceleration of temporality has been
described by sociologists as a specific,
immanent phenomena of capitalist
modernity. Unfortunately this insight
rails against McKenna, and his
followers, need for a metaphysics of
presence. Rather than possessing an
ahistorical essence or ontology; human
subjectivity is revealed to be
constructed by "exterior" social
mechanisms: on this occasion their sense
of accelerating temporality effected by
the mechanisms of late capitalism in the
West. David Harvey's intense "time-space
compression", rather than having
transc-endent, eschatological meaning,
is merely the subjective corollary of
the constant acceleration of consumer
commodities around the global
marketplace. Harvey also speaks of a
global vertigo where "the future
collapses into the present", of the
"annihilation of space through time",
instead citing the improved systems of
communication and information flow, and
improvements in distribution, as
important factors in this sense of
acceleration.
In
Conclusion: A Priest of Postmodernity
McKenna's discourse is somewhat of an
anomaly on the New Age circuit, in the
sense that it takes self-religiousity
and ego derision to such an extreme that
its representation of the Deep Self
becomes the gnostic "alien Other".
Whilst a descendant of Romanticism, one
of the great origins of the modern
culture of authenticity, its
presentation of the "true" Self is far
from the stoical, materialist paganism
of Rousseau, or the more conventional
New Age presentations of "self-religiousity".
In fusing Rousseauian "self-knowledge"
with the extremes of gnostic body-hate
and anti-materialism, McKenna
reengineers our deeper Self,
transforming it into the alien UFO. This
is science-fiction gnostic alienation
taken to the nth degree.
Whilst situated within the rubric of
postmodernity, partaking in late
capitalist eclecticism and "reenchantment",
and emphasising a universal specularity
over embedded tradition, McKenna's
discourse is vehemently anti-postmodern.
Its insistence on an ontology of
presence, its meta-narrative of a
transcendence of matter and the
alchemical fusion of a cyber-communion
at the End of Time, situate it clearly
within the tradition of a knowable,
objective "ontic Logos". "We, we the
people of the high-tech civilisations,
are like the prodigal son. We made a
descent into matter. We have wandered
many years in the wilderness. Now, in a
time of great planetery crisis, we must
return to the tribal fold."
McKenna's popularity, especially amongst
the citizens of the supposedly "detraditionalized"
Western State, reveals a desire for a
Logos of presence, an embedded Good,
that transcends the anomie,
discontinuties and free-play of
signifiers that characterises the
postmodern Babel. Postmodernity creates
the de-centred subject, the subject that
has "disintegrated into a flux of
euphoric intensities, fragmented and
disconnected", whereas McKenna and
cohorts construct a deeper unification
of Self; and recommunalisation with an
organic Gaian entelechy. The globalizing
rhetoric of McKenna, his insistence on
sameness, is expressed both in his
doctrine of the true Logos, and in his
insistence on the levelling effect of
psychedelic opticality. In this sense he
is in league with the great spectre
haunting recent rhetoric of global
homogeneity - the spectre of information
technology. In short, McKenna is a
priest of postmodernity (in the worst
sense of the word). His "sacralising"
discourse, rather than being an "archaic
revival", is clearly one of our times,
providing transcendental legitimations
of historically specific, capitalist
constructed subjectivities.
