High Culture: Drugs, Mysticism, and the Pursuit of Transcendence in the Modern World, by Christopher Partridge
Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: The ambiguity of "high" in High Culture: Drugs, Mysticism, and the Pursuit of Transcendence in the Modern World aptly captures the subject matter of Christopher Partridge's historical study.On the one hand, High Culture deals with the cultural history of "getting high"; it looks at how individuals have taken psychoactive substances and combined their experiences with esoteric, mystical, and metaphysical concerns.On the other hand, High Culture is about Hochkultur; it is an exploration of cultures of drug use among the literary, artistic, and academic intelligentsia.In terms of method, Partridge aims to illustrate the 'development of psychedelic mystical thought primarily through an analysis of the accounts of individuals' (7).By orchestrating a multiplicity of voices, Partridge skilfully narrates the history of drug use in its relation to mysticism and related topics from the early-nineteenth to the late-twentieth century.While it is at times difficult to distinguish his voice from those of his subjects, in the final analysis Partridge succeeds in maintaining critical distance while also being generous in providing considerable space for first-hand accounts.However, it should be mentioned that these accounts are limited to the Western world.As Scott Lowe has already pointed out in his own review of the book (2019), readers of High Culture will find an informative overview of mainly Anglo-American and French actors, their drug-related experiences and metaphysical worldviews, but should not expect a global survey of mind-altering substance use in religious or spiritual settings.High Culture is divided into eight chapters along a roughly chronological trajectory, beginning around 1800.In the first chapter, Partridge presents some methodological considerations.Most importantly, he elaborates on his understanding of the concept of "transcendence"; drawing on Michel Foucault's notion of "technologies of the self", Partridge understands psychoactive substances to be 'able to expose technologies of domination' (11), allowing individuals to break through their social and cultural conditioning into novel ways of being in the world.In this sense, the use of the term "transcendence" in High Culture does not represent a metaphysical as much as an anthropological category, aimed to identify the ways in which individuals have tried to overcome internalised boundaries-religious, sexual, moral-through the use of drugs.This inclusive understanding of transcendence is beneficial to Partridge's study in that it evades the monotheistic bias often implicit in the term, and proves to be sufficiently open to account for a diversity of practices and ideas, some of which may or may not be metaphysical.On the other hand, Partridge's intro-
Source: Aries
Author: Misha Kakabadze
Institution: University of Amsterdam
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W3180793214