Ontological validity of subjective and psychedelic film experience
PhD diary continued with reflections on psychedelic film's challenging of the "default modes" of experience: a case for neurodiversity. + Some notes on Bielszczanie in crisis and veggie bigos.
Finally.
Today I am waking up to blue skies and the orange sunlight seeping in and reflecting in the mirrors. I have been dreaming of spring and getting excited at the sight of trees gradually growing tiny leaves, blossoms appearing in unexpected places. This is my first spring in Plymouth, so learning where the pink-flowering cherry and white apple trees grow has a sense of discovery, as does the locating of parts of the parks filled with daffodils, and different green areas with crocus.
After three months of working on my film Sun Day, I have now taken a break. It needs a period of sitting in peace in an exported form, perhaps being shown to some audiences, before I decide if I want to edit it further. So far I’ve only shown the current version to three people, as a form of research presentation during the PhD module online. It made me feel confident about the significance of the choices I made recently, reducing the chatter of multiple voice recordings to one streamlined monologue. I still want to make a project where the vocal overwhelm takes place, but it needs further testing, and perhaps it’s something I should begin with thinking about sound itself rather than with writing or images.
Yesterday was the first day in a long time when I refrained from doing anything particularly related to my research or work. Although not purposefully, I actually have given myself a much needed break, and today I don’t feel like I’ll never come up with a way to approach my project anymore.
Research Questions
Whilst I sense that my research questions will not only evolve but might change completely as I continue writing, I needed to come up with some in order to start structuring my RDC.1 Project Proposal milestone. It feels strange that it is still so far away, and that my proposal has already changed so much since I send in the application last summer. In the light of the next five or six years of the PhD, I really haven’t even scratched the surface, and yet it seems that the decisions I make now will determine what I will do in this extended timeframe of part time study. Then again, I look back to where I was five years ago - it’s so far away. I become excited about how much can change and how much I could do in this time. I keep realising my naivety with what the project and the PhD route itself entails, but I don’t think that will change until I have completed it.
The first research question is something I haven’t explicitly written about before, but which has been picked up in my introductory essay as potentially relevant, and I realised it carries a lot of significance to which I have been returning with almost political urgency:
Is it real? Ontological validity of subjective experience and the experience of psychedelic film.
McKenna used the word hallucinations to signify another, different reality, rather than something existing only in the person’s “mind”. It made me interested in the word itself, considering its usual connotation as something experienced only subjectively, and, because of that, seen as abnormal.
Drip drip
I completely distracted myself from writing by checking flights to Poland. This impulse was caused by a sudden sensory memory of my grandma’s garden in May - the flowering trees, the incredible amounts of raspberries ready to be picked. My hometown had a water emergency this week. Funnily I found out through social media and not from my family. A modernised pump failed right after it was put to work, and citizens started phoning in, reporting yellowish, smelly water coming out of the taps. It took a few days before the water company managed to flush out the undrinkable liquid, and the whole city was in a state of emergency, with fresh water cisterns and water points installed throughout the town, with firefighters carrying tanks of water to the flats of the elderly.
My grandma lives just outside the central zone of contamination. Chatting to my mum I imagined the panic, the talking, neighbour to neighbour, the badly printed communications pasted on the doors of the buildings informing of the scale of the situation and instructing to keep calm. Most of the people of Bielsko lived through the martial law and the strikes in the 1980s, and every emergency situation, like the recent pandemic, reflects the political seriousness of the common people; there is something very familiar but unspecific that I can picture that makes me see Katowice, archive footage of striking miners, and the fashion sense observed within that generation of my family whom I visited with my grandparents on every All Saints day, sheltering from the November cold of extended cemetery walks within the grey walls of the bulky blocks of flats where aunties cooked hearty dinners and uncles smoked cigarettes.
Unique interactions
Is it real? The ontological validity of subjective experience is in my opinion strongly supported by the notion of neurodiversity, a biological fact of “the infinite variation in neurocognitive functioning within our species” (Walker, 2014). Although Greenfield doesn’t mention this word in her book “Neuroscience of Identity” (2016), to her the mind is “the personalisation of the brain, made up of unique configurations of brain-cell connections, in turn driven by unique experiences in time and space which we view as our lives, our life stories”, highlighting the scientific evidence of internal individuality that can be considered responsible for the sense of self.
Neuroscience is also what leads Oliver Sacks to the claim that, in the brain’s activity, hallucinations are more similar to perception, than to imagination (2012). While imagination can be considered something usually under our control, perception is most of the time something outside one’s volition. Both are mostly defined as internal phenomena, something that takes place in the mind or in the brain, but perception can be said to be an interaction (as mentioned last week) of the sensory organs and the relevant neural pathways with the “external world”. The external stimuli are interpreted by the organism in order to create perceptions. Here, the important feature of the fact of neurodiversity is the understanding that the same stimuli can be interpreted differently by each individual (see e.g. Grandin, 2013, Silberman, 2015, Hurlburt, 2011, Lane et al., 2010, Visuri, 2020, Tellegen, 1974, Lifshitz, 2019, Greenfield, 2016).
Different ways of seeing
The notion that the ways we see, hear, and experience the world is unique and an important part of our identity, has been crucial to my work, and closely connected to the interest of the psychedelic film starting from the 1950s and spreading to the structural films of the 1960s, where the interest in perception developed into a direct experimental study of the relationships of the audiovisual and material medium of film with the spectatorial experience. Kase writes about psychedelic film as focused on “different ways of looking”, while Deleuze wrote emphasises the films of Stan Brakhage as “cinema of pure perception”, evoking the “pristine quality of infant’s vision” (in Powell, 2007). In the way of challenging the existing modes of perception, a sort of a default perspective, psychedelic films weren’t only “mimicking the effects of a psychedelic trip” (Gosse, 2022), but following the philosophical goal of “exploring previously unseen perceptual and psychic territory” (Kase, 2021).
The topics of perception and hallucination converge then in the considerations of the psychedelic experience (popularly known as a substance-induced temporary shift in consciousness), and the experience of psychedelic film, which can be seen as a change in consciousness evoked by the interaction of technology with the sensorium.
Another point which makes this question about reality of subjective experience urgent, is the patriarchal and capitalist emphasis on the superiority of the “objective world”. Investigation into the notion of neurodiversity and mind-manifestation through the medium of film is automatically political - the validity of not only the unique ways in which each person perceives and interprets the world, because of neurological differences (innate, genetic, acquired from experiences, and a mix of all), but also of the lives and stories each individual is living within these unique frameworks, is a value that requires highlighting in a protest against marginalisation and ableist approaches. Challenging the notions of the “default” or the “right way” to do (and experience!) things is a work I believe all of us need to be doing on daily basis. It is the anchor that I find whenever I ask myself why am I so persistent about the interest in the subject of psychedelic film. While films from the counterculture era have been rightly criticised for their many faults, I remain fascinated by the undeniable revolutionary approaches in psychedelic film, expanded cinema ambitions, and structural flicker film alike: the subverting of modes of perception and ways of experiencing. Challenging the notion that there is only one objective reality and one way of conscious experience, means a rebellion against the capitalist and oppressive values.
Thank you for your time. If you enjoyed reading this, please consider sharing or becoming a free subscriber :)