There are two main areas when the struggles for liberation and emancipation regarding the previous fifty years have actually reaped success (though often restricted): from the one hand, the world of sexuality, sex politics, and intimate orientations; as well as on one other, the thing I want to phone psychedelia. Of unique importance to both certain areas may be the reference to the fact and to objecthood.
In sexuality, affirming the scripted nature of intimate relations and to be able to experience ourselves as things without fearing that individuals therefore chance becoming things in true to life (to paraphrase Adorno’s famous concept of love) is part of a expanded conception of freedom; in psychedelia, the goal is to perceive items beyond their practical and instrumental contexts, to see them where, in Jane Bennett’s terms, they cease become objects and start in order to become things.
In psychedelia, where there’s absolutely no unified discourse, the status for the item has remained pretty much stable in the last fifty years. Continue reading