In her recent monograph, Pathologies of Motion, Kevis Goodman examines how eighteenth-century European medical discourses developed a holistic study of pathology, understood as the network of social, cultural, and material factors converging to influence the health of a given subject. Thus, Goodman demonstrates that medicine was interwoven with the study of aesthetics, which included the affective impact of literature and culture on the nervous system. Goodman’s project unexpectedly, but fruitfully, provides a pre-history to the psychedelic renaissance, a recent scientific project to use hallucinogenic substances to disrupt habituated patterns of thought and behavior, with the aim of promoting individual and social flourishing. As philosopher Christopher Letheby explains, these salubrious effects can only occur under conditions that allow the user to interpret their experience with others.

Precisely because of the importance of meaning-making to the positive outcomes of psychedelic experiences, the participants in this panel argue that literary and cultural studies scholars should play a central role in shaping the psychedelic renaissance. We underscore that the scientific and cultural study of the psychedelic experience allows us to return with greater insight to the longest standing problem of both literary analysis and (as Goodman reminds us) modern medical discourse: namely, better understanding the material consequences of aesthetic experiences on human cognition, imagination, and health. The panelists explore how writers, artists, and filmmakers have sought to formally capture the variety of visceral effects that psychedelic experience can have on the body, often attempting to elicit those same effects in the reader or viewer to alter their perceptual reality. While the psychedelic renaissance has focused on medical hopes of using psychedelics to “cure” human immiseration, we ask how the central aspects of psychedelic experience–including heightened affective intensity, a sense of cosmic interconnection with the universe, the dissolution of ego, and the radical variability of the experience itself–might be better understood as a framework for critical thought oriented toward embracing the world’s fundamental contingency and human plurality, both urgently necessary in an increasing precarious and xenophobic world.

In her paper, Neşe Devenot tracks the range of literary devices and rhetorical strategies deployed by the Peruvian writer César Calvo with the goal of affectively transmitting lessons received from a sentient plant intelligence. In The Three Halves of Ino Moxo: Teachings of the Wizard of the Upper Amazon (1981), Calvo describes his journeys in the Amazon during the 1970s in search of Ino Moxo, a "green sorcerer" who combines psychedelic plant medicine use with chanted “icaros" that heal listeners through vibrational songs of poetry. Calvo’s literary narrative replicates the icaro's performative function to disrupt the reader's habitual perspective with an aesthetic that enacts the very experiences (and worldview) it represents. Calvo’s novel reveals how literary aesthetics can render legible the networks of environmental circumstances that “concatenate” as transformative psychedelic experiences.

Turning to North American indigenous perspectives on psychedelic experience, Lana Cook examines the psychedelic aesthetics of Keewaydinoquay Peschel, an Ahnishinaubeg ethnobotanist, who wrote about psilocybin throughout the 1970s, alongside contemporary ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (2015). Weaving together tribal history, science, memoir, myth, and poetry, both advance an ecological ethics vital for the healing of global ecosystems. Their texts evoke psychedelic reading experiences that estrange normative ways of understanding human relationships to flora and fauna; consequently, they forward a distinctly psychedelic subjectivity, which understands the self as multifaceted, yet relational and integrated, and encourages the cultivation of skills like deep inquiry, systems awareness, and the ability to hold ambiguity and paradox, which are necessary for human and environmental survival.

Finally, Ramzi Fawaz explores how US-American popular culture has become the site of a new psychedelic aesthetic attuned to human plurality. He analyzes the animated film, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018), which uses the titular superhero’s signature “webbing” as a formal figure of attachment across infinite differences. Visually rendering the psychedelic experience of ego dissolution, Spider-Verse imagines what would happen if a traditionally white straight male version of Spider-Man (Peter Parker) were to have his consciousness fragmented across multiple universes, thus proliferating countless “Spider-people” of many genders, races, animated genres, and super-powers. The film figures the "multi-verse" and Spider-Man’s webbing as psychedelic aesthetic forms that multiply and interconnect traditionally bounded selves across space and time, producing unexpected forms of alliance in a xenophobic world.

Collectively, these papers seek to inaugurate a psychedelic mode of literary and cultural theorizing better equipped to grasp aesthetic life’s multiplicious, embodied, and transformative impact on the self and the social world.