Henri Michaux's Mescaline Engendered Drawings (and their viral diagrammatic relevance to war) Joseph Nechvetal On the occasion of the poet/artist Henri Michaux's one hundredth birthday, the Parisian Galerie Thessa Herold has mounted a generous display of his phantasmagorical drawings; the majority of which are mescaline engendered. That the work was electrified by congesting mescaline (the active ingredient of the peyote cactus) is well known through Michaux's own books "Miserable Miracle: Mescaline" (originally published in French in 1956 and first translated into English in 1967), "Turbulent Infinity" (1957) and "Paix dans les brisements" (1959). But that the exhibition offers an opportunity for better understanding war and art today through refocusing our attention on the electrified phantasmagorical and the viral may astonish some. However, I found that Michaux does offer such an occasion for awareness if we consider only Michaux's self-transcended drawings "Dessin mescalinien" from 1956/1957 - shimmering drawings done during various phases of neurological excitement induced by mescaline (*1) - and decidedly not his far better known Chinese ink drawings titled "Sans Titre" (Untitled). Because with the "Dessin mescalinien" drawings, we see the mind/hand become cyborg, taking on the systematic (but out-of-control vibrational qualities) of the robo-seismograph. Here vibratory war-machine energy is made manifest in a succinct, diagrammatic, and viral manner (viral because, according to Robert Hunter in "The Acid Queen", the mescaline molecule resembles adrenaline. When mescaline is introduced into the body, enzymes, mistaking the mescaline molecules for adrenaline, begin to dissolve them. While the enzyme's attention is focused on the mescaline, however, the adrenaline reproduces and finds a hosting zone elsewhere in the brain - the enzymes can't handle both.) (*2) Henri Michaux's mescaline engendered drawings, particularly those he executed under the full, direct influence of mescaline - the series "Dessin mescalinien" from 1956/1957 (and less so the flash-back influenced 1963/1969 "Dessin Post-Mescalinien" drawings and the drawings "Dessin de Réagrégation" from 1962/1963) - are relevant to war and art diagrammaticly today, I think, in that I would maintain that the premise behind the art of war is the disturbance of the rhizomatic world by antirhizomatic, electronic/computerized procedures. Indeed the art of war needs to accomplish this disturbance because rhizomatic thinking/art is boundless in its branching; crossing wide chasms of mental space as the most disparate elements may be linked. In this sense rhizomatic thinking is facilitated by the boundless web and one can say that the web is rhizomatic. This opposes the art of war's hierarchical mentality. Moreover, rhizomatic thinking opposes the hierarchical displaying/representing of war information and reveals the more interesting truth that the crises in Yugoslavia - in its totality - was so dense and active and changing that it failed to communicate anything particular at all upon which we can concur except perhaps its overall incomprehensible sense of stupid delirium as the war system pulsed with higher and higher, faster and faster flows of war information to the point of near hysteria. This electrified hysteria is the basis of formulating a diagrammatic relevance between the electronic-based art of war today and Michaux's mescaline engendered drawings, as the tremendous load of imagery/sound/text information digitally produced and reproduced all round us today ultimately seems to make less, not more, conventional, hierarchical sense. If accepted, this general presupposition for inspecting the hierarchical art of war and rhizomatic art's anti-war response to it, plays into the basis of Michaux's mescaline engendered semi-abstract art, it seems to me, because Michaux elucidates for us again that art may refuse to recognize all thought as existing in the form of hierarchical representation, and that by scanning the spread of hierarchical representation art may formulate a rhizomatic understanding of the laws that provide hierarchical representation with its basis: the electronic/phantasmagoric. As a result, in my view, it is rhizomatic-based anti-war art's onus to see what unconventional, anti-hierarchical sense electronic-based anti-war art might make of the hierarchical art of war based on an appropriately eloquent reading of our electronically activated social media environment. And this is what I find potentially interesting in relating Michaux's mescaline engendered drawings to today's electronic-based art of war, as it must be remembered that electronic-based war ideology resides in a field of perception (at once seamless and fragmented) which itself is made up of electronic/phantasmagoric energies corresponding to a new, immersive, phantasmagoric perspective without horizon. Like mescaline engendered thought (*3), electronic-based war ideology, by virtue of its distinctive electron constitution and networked fluidity, floats in an extensive stratosphere of virtuality. Habitual values and expectations of solidity no longer are capable of existing ipso facto in the free-flowing art of war. Indeed, they must be reimposed if desired. Consequently, the particular constitution of an electronic-based art which addresses the war mentality is best seen, perhaps like Michaux's mescaline engendered drawings, as an osmotic membrane; a blotter of instantaneous ubiquity/proliferation/thought, and not as discrete representation. Such a summational view of electronic war activity then results in the atomization and disintegration of what once was considered coherent normality into disoriented immateriality - as this delirious disintegration/merging yields up to art's scrutiny a ghostly conceptual panorama based on circulation. Consequently, electronic-based art which addresses the art of war's ideology reflects (and works with) de-centered prior logocentric social hegemony. But it must first, when viewed as shaped by de-centered electronic overload, be understood as a viral code-field of vibratory energy; an infected collective representation which bewilderingly continues to mutate the ideology of its own production in viral fashion. Since prevailing ideological representations of war are made up of conventional, rigid, social signs (and art typically of unconventional irresponsible signs - the mode that represents the real arbitrary nature of all signs as it subverts the socially controlled system of meaning) - electronic-based art which addresses war ideology may offer us then the opportunity for the creation of relevant, anti-social, phantasmagorical, viral signs (hence semi-abstract, ecstatic, anti-signs) which may continue to move and multiply. Like Michaux under mescaline in the mid-1950s, the art of war knows today through electronics that symbolic codes are positively phantasmagorical, so when war ideology produces them as discrete facts, and we accept them as so, it feels unrhizomically inappropriate to me (a rhizome is continually dynamic and is ceaselessly actualized by the arousal its dynamism produces and thus it is never in accord with some preestablished strategy or imposed configuration). If an electronic-based art which addresses the art of war ideology were to take the anti-sign viral track, then perhaps a digitally-based viral potentiality might be revealed. Then electronic-based art's viral potential may prove useful in questioning received notions of the art of war's ideology when viewed against assumptions of utility versus pleasure, as well as host/parasite separation. An electronic-based viral art which addresses the art of war's ideology should open up a territory of non-signification towards the creation of mongrel, decoded and deterritorialized phantasmagorical meanings. The deconstructed meaning of the art of war then advances by seeing more clearly into its underlying viral assumptions of excess, by facing up to the radical implications of those assumptions, and by purging the art of war's ideology from conventional ways of thinking. Thus, an electronic-based, rhizomatic, viral art which addresses the art of war's ideology achieves an ultimate phantasmal integration by dissolving distributed war information into its original vibrational/dynamic foundation in that the rhizome is regularly swarming itself into being as micro and macro factors attract. One cannot declare in advance what its limiting confines are or where it will or will not operate - nor what may become connected and tangled up in the rhizome's multiple dimensions, because the connections do not inevitably plait common types together. Such a dynamic sense of aesthetic/viral electronica as anti-war ideology might suggest the potential for an electronic-based anti-war art which addresses the art of war's ideology as it subsumes our previous world of simulation/representation into a phantasmagorical nexus of over-lapping linked hybrid observations of the outer warring world with precise extractions of post-human mentality. Encounters, then, with a viral electronic-based art which addresses the art of war's ideology, one may assume, might create an opportunity for social image transgression - and for a vertiginous ecstasy of thought. Surely such a hybrid electronica/phantasmal impetus can help release pent up ecstatic energies (*4) in that the more overwhelming and restrictive the social mechanism, the more exaggerated are the resulting effects - and hence excel the assumed determinism of the technological-based phenomenon inherent (supposedly) in post-industrial war. Therefore, like Michaux's mescaline engendered drawings, an anti-war viral electronic art may serve as a euphoric impulse/phenomena which prolif-erates in proportion to the technicization of war. As such, a viral electronica-ecstasy may occur as a result of the technological society's obsession with the phantasmal characteristics of electronic proliferation and speed. Actually, the longer I looked upon one of Michaux's shimmering "Dessin mescalinien" from 1956, and hypothesized an electronic anti-war art, the more I seemed to perceive Michaux calculating that the more human psychic energies are stifled and/or bypassed by certain controlling aspects of electronic war technology, the more a churlish ecstatic/fearful phenomena will increasingly break out in forms of electron-based anti-war art. Too, simulation technology (when used in the creation of electronica-based anti-war ideology/art) will, he seems to imply, promote an indispensable alienation from the socially constructed self necessary for the outburst of such viral/ecstatic experiences/acts. Inversely, Michaux seems to indicate that electronic technology will enable the contemporary artist to express anti-war viral/ecstatic reactions in ways never before possible. Thus, this anti-war virtuoso counteraction can provide a phantasmal viral defiance through transport aimed against controlling war. In Michaux's "Dessin mescalinien", phantasmal thought detaches itself from the order and authority of war (in his case W.W.II) and topples down into the realm of imagination, of fantasy, and into non-knowledge - towards imagining questions rather than pat assigned answers. Yet Michaux's fancied, aesthetic non-knowledge is certainly the most erudite, the most aware, the most conscious area of our current anti-war consistency, as it is also the phantasmal depths from which all digital representation emerges in its precarious, but glittering, existence. Henri Michaux's pre-electronic electrified art then helps us to understand that the "real world" of war is established upon phantasmal images - rank non-materiality. With this in mind, anti-war ideology/art, like Michaux's visually vibrating "Dessin mescalinien", may be capable of composing an unaccustomed, non-logocentric, rhizomatic, viral art from the broad spread of digital codes found scattered throughout the space of computer memory. Here we must remember that a rhizome's multiple dimensions instigate cross-overs between both the highest synthetic level and the slightest, most minute, discrete distinctions. The rhizome is a snarl of vicissitudes so intertwined that it must give birth to different scopes of thought and perception and art. Such an aesthetic anti-war cyber theory based on Michaux's rhizomatizing experiments with his consciousness might provide a fundamental antithesis to the authoritarian, mechanical, simulated rigidities of the warring world. Like in "Dessin mescalinien", anti-war rhizomatizing ideology/art might develop vibrating articulations which consist of phantasmal digital elements now grouped into spreading systems which possess viral host/parasite characteristics which the eye can scan and identify only because they have a structure that is, in a way, the chimerical, concave, inner-side of war - the excitedly vibratory. The conditions of this excitement reside outside of war's representations however, and inside of phantasmal/viral knowledge (beyond the art of war's immediate visibility) in a sort of behind-the-scenes chimerical world of code, deep and dense enough that representation finds itself digitally joined together in the rhizomatizing viral suppossitious. The art of a viral anti-war ideology can perhaps then help direct us towards that rhizomatizing zone, that necessary but always inaccessible virulent arena, which dives down, beyond our gaze, towards the delicate heart of consciousness (when it comes to war). Indeed it is the viral quivering conducted between the host and the parasite that maintains the sovereign but secret sway over each and every war which I find interestingly beyond reductive abstraction or glib representation (thus into an excessive, hybrid, semi-abstraction) when scrutinizing the potential for a viral art in general as it concerns the art of war and its miasmic ideology. Such a viral anti-war art should, in my opinion, not reify the phantasmal qualities of war's tenets, but rather further atomized the ideology of war into byte phantasmality where only its occult, chimerical, viral tendencies become useful in constructing anti-warring formations. Thereby, anti-war ideology/art becomes a vibratory inventiveness which is, in its theoretical radically, opposed to the tabular space laid out by classical war. May I just say that this phantasmal flee from the play of war's current representational givens has the most urgent political/social ramifications in our media saturated society. This, I think, well-founded but ambiguous viral model for an electronic anti-war art indicates the capacity for electronic art's worth as it provides the explication of the phantasmal codes that abet electronic communications by expressing the laws of shimmering reproduction that rule it. Such an electronic viral art can be, in a sense, the undoing of all war ideology then when it is seen to symbolically undermine the field of electronic quantity which non-utilitarian viral ideology attempts to scrutinize in accordance with a non-discursive method which now appears as an anti-war virus. This places art, in relationship to war, well outside of the mechanics of uniform dogmatism. So, Michaux's "Dessin mescalinien" suggests an inventing of a viral anti-war art in which what matters is no longer identities, or logos, or distinctive characters but rather dense, hidden, phantasmagorical, viral forces developed on the basis of host entitlement - where war is represented only from the depths of this viral energy - withdrawn into itself, perhaps adumbrated and darkened by its obscurity, but bound tightly together and inescapably grouped by the vigor that is hidden down below in its programmed depth. Such dynamic, viral forms of anti-war ideology/art (with their rhizomatizing connections) and the non-blank space that never isolates them but rather surrounds their outline with viral excess - all these might be presented to our gaze in an anti-war viral matrix where only an already energetic, virulent state of the parasitic is insinuated. Paris jnech@hotmail.com Henri Michaux (1899-1984): "le regard des autres" May 5th - July 10th, 1999 Galerie Thessa Herold 7, Rue de Thorigny Paris 75003 Catalogue available Published by Thessa Herold, Paris notes: (*1) For more on the neurological excitement induced by mescaline as it may effect the creative artist see Aldous Huxley's 1954 publication "The Doors of Perception" (a well-known account Huxley wrote after taking mescaline under the guidance of the Canadian psychiatrist and researcher Humphrey Osmond in 1953), Stanley Krippner's essay "Mescaline, Psilocybin, and Creative Artists" in the 1969 publication "Altered States of Consciousness", edited by Charles T. Tart and "The Psychedelic State", a 1992 essay by the Fluxus-related artist/non-artist/philosopher Henry Flynt. Flynt's 1961 text "Concept Art", first published in book form in La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low's 1963 publication "An Anthology of Chance Operations", outlined the genre which later became known as Conceptual Art. According to Flynt, Conceptual Art is "an art of which the material is 'concepts'". The dried heads of the peyote cactus, whose chief active ingredient is mescaline, were used by the Aztecs at least as early as 300 BC and are currently being employed by over fifty thousand Indians of the Native American Church as a vital part of their religious ceremonies. The peyote cactus has long been used by the Indians of the Southwest and Mexico as a means of communion with the divine world, and today the eating of the dried buttons of the plant is the principal sacrament of the Native American Church of the United States. (*2) Robert Hunter, Chapter 7 of "The Storming of the Mind", 1971, McClelland and Stewart Ltd. (*3) Simone de Beauvoir reports in "The Prime of Life", pp. 169-170, that Jean-Paul Sartre (master of French phenomenological philosophy and subsequently awarded the Nobel Prize) had a medically supervised mescaline injection in 1935 along with an intern. Sartre reported seeing lobsters, orangutans, and houses gnashing their jaws - and the intern reported virtually romping through a meadow full of nymphs. Also see: Heinrich Klver's "Mescal and Mechanisms of Hallucinations" for examples, originally published in 1928. (*4) See, for example: Alan Watts's 1962 book "The Joyous Cosmology", New York: Pantheon Books