the wherewithal

Have just come across these irresistable 19th century reflections on the over confidence in reality that accompanies some altered states of mind. By pragmatist philosopher William James, in his essay ‘The Perception of Reality‘:

One of the charms of drunkenness unquestionably lies in the deepening of the sense of reality and truth which is gained therein. In whatever light things may then appear to us, they seem more utterly what they are, more ‘utterly utter’ than when we are sober. This goes to a fully unutterable extreme in the nitrous oxide intoxication, in which a man’s very soul will sweat with conviction, and he be all the while unable to tell what he is convinced of at all.

Putting the simple pleasure of coming across this in what you expect to be a perhaps dry essay on perception and reality, William James’ essay is fascinating. (I must admit to only just finding out about James’ extensive personal experimentation with nitrous oxide).

The problem with trying to get to the bottom of ‘what it is’ to believe in reality, as far as James sees it, is that - as in the case of the overconfident drunk - belief on its own does not go very far to telling you about how real something is or isn’t. In fact a state of total skepticism as to the reality of the world (for James, not a hypothetical state - giving as an example those afflicted with what he refers to as ‘questioning mania’) is not a radically different state of mind, but, to put it simply, just the flip side of the same coin.

For James, you won’t really get very far in just trying to get to the bottom of a particular belief, in its own terms. The more interesting question is ‘Under what circumstances do we think things real?’ (his italics).

It’s an essay that also seems to have fascinated Erving Goffman. He quotes the same central question at the beginning of his sociological classic, Frame Analysis, commenting that

[t]he important thing about reality, [James] implied, is our sense of its realness in contrast to our feeling that some things lack this quality. One can then ask under what conditions such a feeling is generated, and this question speaks to a small, manageable problem having to do with the camera and not what it is the camera takes pictures of. ¹

What Goffman admired about James was his attention to the organisation of experience, not its its inner nature. Or, to continue his metaphor, an attention to the camera, its history, how it came to be facing a particular slice of the world in a particular way, held by a particular person, with a particular set of photographic skills.

But what Goffman perhaps misses is perhaps an attention to the transformative capacities of camera itself. This attention has been provided in sociological thinking by the loose collection of work that goes under the rubric of Actor Network Theory (a quite horrible term), which make central to their work an examination of the transformative role played by a full range of material entities (including, but certainly not limited to cameras) which continually, and in a quite practical sense, ‘make’ the world. These writers are happy to give agency not only to people, but to a huge range of things non-human.

That also perhaps makes them closer, here, to James than Goffman. After all, James is, in both his writing, and his personal experimentation, making explicit the transformative power of particular combinations of (non human) chemicals on the (human) body. Which in turn reminds me of a classic early Actor Network Theory paper by Gomart and Hennion, in their study of drug users and music lovers. Like James, they are interested in the ways a particular world is composed, rather than hunting for its inner cores. Or, as they put it, an attention to the ways that ‘the subject can emerge as she actively submits herself to a collection of constraints’ (whether by taking a drug, or entering a musical reverie).² The question is not, therefore, whether or not it’s ‘the drink talking’, but the ways in which ‘utter reality’ of drunkenness emerge.