"We need the power of modern critical theories of how meanings and bodies get made, not in order to deny meaning and bodies, but in order to live in meanings and bodies that have a chance for a future." - Donna Haraway

I was staggering slightly as I left the bathroom stall. I could feel my perception of time and space being altered by the ketamine. As I approached the dance floor, the music gradually penetrated my veins, making them pulsate in a shared rhythm. I started dancing as if I were being carried by an external force that was guiding my every movement. Everything was in perfect harmony and order.

As my body moved, I dove deep into my mind until I reached its core.

"Ok, now it’s just you and me", I said to myself. "You can trust me, you don’t have to be afraid. Tell me, what’s the real reason? Why can't you write?"

A child’s voice answered from afar:

"The words."

The words. I was afraid of words. I realized at that moment that I believed words contained inextricable meanings. I believed that words created reality. Writing was such a painful activity because I was granting way too much power to words. I thought that life was nothing but text, and once the text was finished, that was it. 

"Do you really think there’s nothing beyond words? Is that why you’ve always been obsessed with learning more and more, until learning itself became a source of pain? More encyclopedia entries, more vocabulary, more languages. You see yourself as a blank page that needs to be filled with as much knowledge as possible. You believe every language contains a different way of perceiving reality, but all languages stem from the same breath.

Listen to me.

There’s nothing that has ever been or ever will be written that is not already inside you.

No books can ever teach you anything that is not already there. 

Forget solitude, translation is possible. Writing is possible, but only if you don’t take words too seriously." 

My movements grew faster and wider as the dialogue continued. The little boy replied:

"But in the beginning was the Word..."

I started repeating this sentence, like a chant – "… In the beginning was the Word, in the beginning was the Word, in the beginning was the Word…" – until it lost all meaning. I could see letters melting around me, dissociating themselves from the sounds they were supposed to represent, reduced to drawings and scribbles.

The little boy started crying.

"Where will it all go? When there is no one left to read, no one left to write, where will all this love I have in me go?"

"Wait... is this all this is about? Your fear of dying? Little boy, you’re so silly! Do you really think that death is the end? Death is the end of language, the stabilization of the chaos of signs. But the movement... feel it. The movement is infinite." 

In that moment, I ceased to be me. My existence was decomposed, deconstructed into the innumerable ancestors who were merged within me, into the surviving traces of those erased by the Empire of Words. Living matter, movement. And as the boundaries between myself and those around me disappeared, I finally felt it: infinitude.

Instantly, all my anxiety, this burden I had been carrying all my life, unwrapped my heart and flew away.

"It isn’t about what you write and what it will 'mean to humanity'. It’s about the movement you put into it."

My fingers started moving as if I were typing.

"Writing is dancing. Just follow the movement."

I took a deep breath and danced for a long time. 

When I came back to my senses, I tried to explain to a friend what I had just been through. He simply answered:

"Great, you just killed your ego."

***

The experience described above took place in a somewhat underground party in Berlin, on January 6 2018.

A few days later, my attempts at articulating this experience into language led me to resort to the ideas of a philosopher who never actually appealed to me. However, the similarities between my ketamine- and techno-induced epiphany and the ideas of Jacques Derrida seemed too conspicuous to be ignored.

I will share some of the questions I have been asking myself since what I have called my "epiphany" on the dance floor, and I’ll embarrass myself in the process.

First question: are ketamine, techno music and Derrida precursors of a “future world” that we still cannot imagine?

Of course, the use of psychotropics, music and dancing as a form of meditation, a means to reach different levels of consciousness, is as old as time. There seems to be something special about that specific combination, though, something oddly appropriate.

A set of historical coincidences makes it even more appropriate: ketamine was first tested on humans in 1964; in 1967, Derrida published Of Grammatology; in 1969, Kraftwerk was formed, marking the beginning of the electronic music scene in Germany. The NPL network, which set the ground for the Internet, was developed in 1965. 

So my second question, which is in fact a continuation of the first is: in a world of growing anxieties regarding the explosion of narratives enabled by unprecedented technological development, could it be that language has reached a saturation point and the tools to overcome it are already with us? Moreover, given that ketamine and techno music are themselves byproducts of the same technological development that resulted in such linguistic saturation, could it be that the antidote to this semiotic angst gnawing at us comes from the same source as the poison?

***

Ketamine is a N-Methyl-D-aspartate receptor antagonist, known to induce dissociative anesthesia. "Dissociative" is indeed a good way to describe its effects, although a better word would be "deconstructive." Its effects differ greatly depending on several factors, including dosage and interaction with other substances. If taken in the right dose, ketamine may fragment one’s field of vision into geometric shapes. The signifier is dissociated from the signified, and sound is separated from the meaning. 

Much has been said about techno music and its cultural and symbolic significance, but what interests me is its de-signification. Techno, I would argue, is not a different form of language, but rather a form of post-language music, a mockery of language even. When you’re on ketamine dancing to techno, you sometimes have the impression the music is talking to you, that the beats are saying something, usually one word or a small sentence. When you realize it was actually your mind playing tricks, you have this strange realization that language is just an illusion. 

***

I don’t know if Jacques Derrida ever danced to techno while on ketamine, but his book Of Grammatology sure reminds me of a k-trip. I had always considered Derrida too metaphysical for a materialist like me. Even though linguistics and philosophy of language had always been relevant topics of interest to me, I never bothered delving too deeply into the works of those who didn’t believe in the existence of meaning. That seemed too useless, too nihilist.

But Derrida will only seem like a nihilist to those who don’t see the possibility of going beyond language, or at least logocentric language. Denying the existence of meaning is only insulting to those who are too attached to the logos to fathom any other possible source of "meaning."

My dance floor epiphany changed my perspective entirely. Two main concepts related to Derrida could be used to explain the content of this epiphany: deconstructing logocentrism and egicide.

Logocentrism, or the logocentric tradition, is a philosophical tradition that stresses the primacy of the spoken word, seeing writing as nothing but the representation of speech. A logocentric view will tend to assume that words enclose reality and real experiences - ideas, objects, emotions, etc.

Derrida challenges logocentrism by conceiving writing as separate from speech. In phonetic writing, we are tricked into believing that a letter corresponds perfectly to a sound, and that written words are perfect depictions of the spoken word, and, thus, of the ideas they express.

Meaning, according to Derrida, only emerges from the contrast between words. This relational emergence of meaning is designated by the neologism "différance", a noun created from the active participle of the French verb différer, which means both "to differ" and "to defer." So in the beginning, instead of the Word, there is différance, this movement that creates meaning.

It is as if words were on the dance floor of an obscure party in Berlin, their senses and boundaries decomposed by the darkness, the drugs and the techno music. The only thing separating them from others is dancing. 

Dancing is différance.

On the other hand, egicide, or the death of the ego, is not exactly a Derridian concept, although Derrida’s deconstruction of the Cartesian individual could be interpreted as the destitution of the ego, or at least of a certain ego.

Derrida’s notion of being is being-with-others. Just as words only derive their meaning through their contrast with other words, humans only have an identity in relation to others. That might sound obvious, but one doesn’t realize how convinced we all are of our existence as modern individuals until one feels this sense of communion on the dance floor, a community without a community.

Most of all, Derrida calls for the advent of a non-teleological human being. The teleological narrative has dominated "Western" philosophy for a long time, shaping the life of individuals as a path leading towards an end (heaven, prosperity, the revolution, etc.).  

We are currently lost between the shattering of teleological narratives and our failure to produce other narratives by which to continue living. We are still grieving the death of the logocentric God as our only source of truth. By "we", I mean humanity as a (k-)whole, for the logocentric regime has expanded all around the globe through colonial epistemology and the implementation of modern nation states as the sole viable and recognized form of political organization. The modern teleological narrative tried to replace the logocentric God with Reason, but, in times of "alternative facts" and "post-truth," the limits of Reason may never have seemed so clear.   

While some take advantage of the dissolution of the Truth for the gratification of their narcissistic egos - with the current narrative as the only possible form of happiness - others seek a means by which to bring the logocentric God back to life. But what if there were more possibilities than devoting one’s life to the sole gratification of the ego, or yearning to revive ontologies that could not resist the hegemony of modern epistemology?   

***

Drugs and music have always helped humans access different dimensions of consciousness. Paying attention to the kind of drugs and music that are being used for this purpose and their effects might give us a hint of what we are looking for, and what kind of future we want to build.

The emergence of ketamine and techno suggest that we are in desperate need of possibilities. The possibility of conceiving new possibilities. The possibility of going outside language - and back again. The possibility of being with others again. The possibility of deconstructing and reconstructing.

I am dancing on the ruins of the logos, awaiting a bright new future in which I will finally cease to be haunted by the specters that I am obsessed with and be able to fully embrace otherness. A future in which I will always prefer life and constantly affirm survival.

Gabriel Semerene – PhD candidate, translator and writer. His interests span a variety of fields, from political anthropology to literature, in a quest for different forms of inhabiting the world and inhabiting bodies, through and beyond language.