Walter Benjamin and the "dialectic of awakening"

Benjamin’s writing flashes between poles of revolution and revelation. A scholar of threshold experiences, states of intoxication, and failed philosophies, he is brilliant on the subject of drugs: "The most passionate examination of the hashish trance will not teach us half as much about thinking (which is eminently narcotic), as the profane illumination of thinking about the hashish trance," he wrote. "The reader, the thinker, the flaneur, are types of illuminati just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic. … Not to mention that most terrible drug — ourselves — which we take in solitude."

He saw thinking as a form of intoxication. He recognized that drug-exploration, the pursuit of visionary experience, could be an extension of a rational and intellectual quest: "The dialectics of intoxication are indeed curious," he wrote. "Is not perhaps all ecstasy in one world humiliating sobriety in that complementary to it?"

Writing in the 1920s and ‘30s, Benjamin smoked hash, tried mescaline, and enjoyed his own trips: "I thought with intense pride of sitting here in Marseilles in a hashish trance; of who else might be sharing my intoxication this evening, how few." Thinking under the influence of hashish was like unrolling a ball of thread through a maze: "We go forward; but in so doing we not only discover the twists and turns of the cave, but also enjoy the pleasure of this discovery against the background of the other, rhythmical bliss of unwinding the thread."

On hashish, he saw the elaborate furnishings of the 19th-century bourgeois interior concentrating "to satanic contentment, satanic knowing, satanic calm … To live in these interiors was to have woven a dense fabric about oneself, to have secluded oneself within a spider’s web, in whose toils world events hang loosely suspended like so many insect bodies sucked dry. From the cavern, one does not like to stir." The narcotic trance revealed an occult and sinister undercurrent to the bourgeois love of comfort and exotic décor.

For the society as well as the individual, Benjamin realized "the importance of intoxication for perception, of fiction for thinking." The new consumer culture of the 19th Century induced a wide-spread trance in the public, as capitalism breathed supernatural power into its products. The World Exhibits, the Belle Epoque’s celebrations of global commerce, "open up a phantasmagoria that people enter to be amused. The entertainment industry facilitates this by elevating people to the status of commodities. They submit to being manipulated while enjoying their alienation from themselves and others." The euphoria induced by these spectacles was like a drug that robbed the masses of their will, that taught them how to enjoy being transformed into objects of exchange. Intoxicated, entranced, by the new world of commodities, the West lost its contact with the communal "ecstatic trance," those archaic Dionysian festivals and annual Mysteries celebrating the transformation of primordial chaos into order. The loss of rituals that compelled "ecstatic contact with the cosmos" posed a threat to humanity: "It is the dangerous error of modern men to regard this experience as unimportant and avoidable … it is not; its hour strikes again and again, and then neither nations nor generations can escape it." Humanity needed such periodic rites of regeneration – to avoid hypnotic episodes of feverish destruction, which served the same purpose at a much greater cost.

For Benjamin, this was the real significance of the First World War, "an attempt at a new and unprecedented commingling with the cosmic powers." He worried that mankind’s alienation from itself was deepening "to such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order."

Benjamin’s fusion of sociological, psychoanalytic, and mystical levels of insight reminded me of the integrated vision of my self that I took back from the iboga trip. He saw that no revolution could succeed unless it transformed the inner realm of thought – the meaning of perception, the relationship of the senses to the physical world – as well as economic relations. In his work, he was always on the look-out for the secret core of primitive ritual and magical belief hidden within the seemingly "rational" processes of modernity.

He called his great uncompleted work The Arcades Project "an experiment in the technique of awakening." On the personal level, awakening is, of course, something we do every morning without a thought. We suddenly emerge into ourselves, arriving in our beds from the evanescent dream dimensions. Occasionally we remember vivid narratives and scenes from our unconscious meanderings. At other times, we can reconstruct the stories with an effort, searching inside of our minds for clues to patterns that quickly fizzle out and disappear if we don’t pursue them – if we don’t make the effort to retrace our steps through the labyrinth. Most often, we don’t remember anything at all, and we are happier for it.

Benjamin describes awakening as an historical and generational process as well as an individual one. History is the effort made by each age to bring the "not-yet conscious knowledge of what has been" into awareness. Waking is a "dialectical moment" suspended between the dream-world of the past and the transformative energy locked within the present. For Benjamin, history advances in sudden flashes and leaps. It is a series of awakenings into deeper and more profound levels of awareness, or falterings into deeper states of hypnosis and trance. This "dialectic of awakening" has no end point.

Just as the individual slips between sleep and waking, reaching different intensities of awareness during the day, generations and epochs also fluctuate between levels of consciousness and unconsciousness. Advertisements, popular entertainment, public architecture are natural expressions of the unconscious desires of the "dreaming collective." Unseduced by the ideology of modernist progress, he described Capitalism as "a natural phenomenon with which a new dream-filled sleep came over Europe, and, through it, a reactivation of mythic forces." Those reactivated mythic forces ended up destroying him: He committed suicide in 1939, while trying to flee the Nazis.

He died before he could begin a projected book on drugs. It would have perfectly fit his intention: "To cultivate fields where, until now, only madness has reigned." Paradoxically, Benjamin’s work suggests that only intoxication – ecstasy that is also "humiliating sobriety," an apt description of tripping – can awaken the individual by snapping them out of the monotonous trance of modern life.