Psychedelic Spirituality and Thinking in Performance

Abstract

In this article, I seek to explore resonances between psychedelic spirituality and feminist epistemologies as a starting point for bringing psychedelic studies (and more broadly, consciousness studies) into conversation with performance. In surveying the field, I will deploy the concept of a “cosmic affect,” a term I use to refer to a sense of interconnectedness with the universe, sometimes articulated as an experience of “ego-death” (dissolution of the self). I am interested in tracing the circulation of “cosmic affect” through forms of “psychedelic” aesthetic, cultural, and knowledge production. Here, I foreground a desire for the near-impossible task of articulating or translating profound, transformative, and numinous, but often ineffable and non-discursive experiences and insights into language. I explore how “psychedelic” performance texts such as Gloria Anzaldúa’s work and Diana Reed Slattery’s Xenolinguistics: Psychedelics, Language, and the Evolution of Consciousness approach the performance of consciousness through narrative, discourse, and writing, by foregrounding its intermedial elements, as well as the alternative and multiple ways of knowing made accessible by psychedelic experiences. My curation of the collection of sources cited in this article into a psychedelic archive traces the contours of the field of psychedelic performance studies, with a focus on spirituality, and also situates performance at the interface of spirituality and neurocognitive research.