Narcotic Plants of the Old World, Used in Rituals & Everyday ... by Hedwig Schleiffer

In the mid- and late- nineteenth century, when they learned that certain North and South American plants could induce hallucinations in those who consumed them, British, German, and U.S. Though they have long languished in the shadow of their twentieth-century legacies, Victorian experiments with peyote and mescaline form one of the more obscure areas in which new visual experiences began to contour modern subjectivities. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer N observer … takes shape in other, grayer practices and discourses…. Although not numerous, hallucinogenic writings should be considered part of the culture of visual modernity that helped shape subjectivities at the turn of the century. They also connected with similar fin-de-siècle practices of consumption, including Aesthetic delight in the refinement of visual experience and in the collection of obscure global artifacts, and the passive consumption of media entertainment such as kaleidoscopes, phantasmagoria, and cinema. These fantasies tacitly promoted the imperial, raced, classed, and gendered power of the elite hallucinogenic subject. Appealing primarily to vision, which was commonly understood to be the most intellectual of the senses, and generating sensations of omniscience and self-reflexivity, these drugs became the occasion for their writers’ fantasies of intellectual transcendence and concomitant disembodiment. Nineteenth-century British, U.S., and European writings about the hallucinogenic drugs peyote and mescaline in anthropological, medical, and general interest journals appropriated the drugs from the context of Native American rituals.

Narcotic Plants of the Old World, Used in Rituals & Everyday ... by Hedwig Schleiffer