Psychotropes: Models of Authorship, Psychopathology, and Molecular Politics in Aldous Huxley and Philip K. Dick

Abstract

Among the so-called “anti-psychiatrists” of the 1960s and ‘70s, it was Félix Guattari who first identified that psychiatry had undergone a “molecular revolution.” It was in fact in a book titled Molecular Revolutions, published in 1984, that Guattari proposed that psychotherapy had become, in the de¬cades following the Second World War, far less personal and increasingly alienating. The newly “molecular” practices of psychiatry, Guattari mourned, had served only to fundamentally distance both patients and practitioners from their own minds; they had largely restricted our access, he suggested, to human subjectivity and consciousness. This thesis resumes Guattari’s work on the “molecular” model of the subject. Extending on Guattari’s various “schizoanalytic metamodels” of hu¬man consciousness and ontology, it rigorously meditates on a simple ques¬tion: Should we now accept the likely finding that there is no neat, singular, reductive, utilitarian, or unifying “model” for thinking about the human subject, and more specifically the human “author”? Part 1 of this thesis carefully examines a range of psychoanalytic, psychi¬atric, philosophical, and biomedical models of the human. It studies and re¬formulates each of them in turn and, all the while, returns to a fundamental position: that no single model, nor combination of them, will suffice. What part 1 seeks to demonstrate, then, is that envisioning these models as differ¬ent attempts to “know” the human is fruitless—a futile game. Instead, these models should be understood in much the same way as literary critics treat literary commonplaces or topoi; they are akin, I argue, to what Deleuze and Guattari called “images of thought.” In my terminology, they are “psycho¬tropes”: images with their own particular symbolic and mythical functions. Having thus developed a range of theoretical footholds in part 1, part 2 of the thesis—beginning in chapter 4—will put into practice the work of this first part. It will do so by examining various representations of authorship by two authors in particular: Aldous Huxley and Philip K. Dick. This part will thus demonstrate how these author figures function as “psychoactive scriv¬eners”: they are fictionalising philosophers who both produce and quarrel with an array of paradigmatic psychotropes, disputing those of others and inventing their own to substitute for them. More than this, however, the second part offers a range of detailed and original readings of these authors’s psychobiographies; it argues that even individual authors such as Huxley and Dick can be seen as “psychotropic.” It offers, that is, a series of broad-ranging and speculative explanations for the ideas and themes that appear in their works—explanations rooted in the theoretical work of the first part. Finally, this thesis concludes by reaffirming the importance of these authors’s narcoliteratures—both for present-day and future literary studies, and beyond. For while Huxley and Dick allow us to countenance afresh the range of failures in the history and philosophy of science, they also prom¬ise to instruct us—and instruct science—about the ways in which we might move beyond our received mimetic models of the human