Re: [-empyre-] third texts, third bodies, third minds

["tobias c. van Veen" <tobias@techno.ca>]

>>>> Quite different from the drugs experience.
>> 
>> how so?
> 
> I guess that's obvious. If you take drugs together
> you may have a common experience, if you go
> out for a walk, or watch the same film, but you're
> not creating a third entity. The drugs experience
> happens in one's body and mind. Unless you want
> to change the topic, of course, and talk about the
> collaborating under the influence of drugs (which
> never turned me on because a collaboration, to me,
> is already intense enough, if it is going well).

[/speculative]:

How would collectively organised rave culture, 'urban primitives' (to use an
early '90s term), fit into this idea of the 'third entity'?

Under certain conditions (and not always, but for this point), here we have
the production of an event tailored to the reception of certain bodyminds
under collective chemical induction (usually MDMA). The same could be said
of certain organised Happenings for LSD. I'm thinking here too of the
research put forward by MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic
Studies) which deals with 'entheogenic' collective experience (the use of
chemical change to catalyse 'religious' experience of the 'divine'). Please
note I am not arguing for the interpretation of 'drugs' as 'entheogenic',
rather it seems the production of a 'third entity' via collective,
cooperative chemical catalysts is archaic to humanity. This is the basis,
legally and experientially, of contemporary shamanic religion among legal
peyote use in the United States, for example.

http://www.maps.org/

It seems that the event itself is the third entity--whether that event is
materialised and localised as ritual, either religiously or via the
determination of a local, temporary zone or space, or in the ascension (one
might say 'mystification' or 'hierarchization') of this event to the
absolute other of a divine entity or god. In the broader sense the
production of collective hallucination, although at the level of the
molecular only in the 'body' and 'mind', is power.

The idea of the artist producing the event as the work, interpreted from
Deleuze and Guattari, and thus changing the role of the 'artist' to that of
'producer' is also found in the collective work of La Société Anonyme (LSA
47- ' Redefinition of Artistic Practices in the Twenty-First Century ' --
see Parachute 109, http://www.parachute.ca
http://aleph-arts.org/lsa/lsa47/eng/manifesto.html ).


Collectivity and cooperation have much to do with ritual ..

In any case I am ruminating here and any tangents/thoughts are most welcome.

best,

    tV


tobias c. van Veen -----------
http://www.quadrantcrossing.org
http://www.thisistheonlyart.com
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