To describe mediation as the strategic and local invention of a code which can be used about two distinct phenomena does not imply any obligation for the same message to be transmitted in the two cases; to put it another way, one cannot enumerate the differences between things except against the background of some more general identity.
— Fredric Jameson (1934 – 2024)
It’s fun to smoke weed and think about stuff. This is because smoking weed removes your thinking’s autonomy. Once you’re sure your thinking’s overdetermined, it’s time for self-observation: you think your thoughts at the same time you’re conscious they’re high thoughts; the process of thinking is foregrounded. This self-consciousness is not unique to smoking weed, since if you have any reason to think you are not fully responsible for your thoughts, you have reason to think about your thinking this way. You could run the same experiment with any psychoactive substance and many other thought-changing things besides: mental illness, God, the Freudian unconscious, Society. These things are very different, but they are all occasions to consider the provenance of your thoughts, in turn the occasion to interpret your thinking as you would a fictional character’s – thinking that is always already overdetermined: there is what the character thinks, and then there’s the way those thoughts tie into some greater purpose, the authorial design. Authorial designs don’t need to be explicit, but they do let us create narratives. Whether this is a comfort or a disaster is decidedly situational; for example, let’s say you got high and went to the grocery store, where it is bright, full of colors, and narrative-dense. Unfortunately, these narratives aren’t guaranteed to be pleasant, and judging by the way you’re vibrating in the chip aisle, they weren’t: you tried tying together a few global supply chains and ended up experiencing the totality of capitalist social relations; the mental road to climate apocalypse was short. Now things suddenly feel alive in a way they didn’t before, which might have something to do with a surplus of meaning, precisely that which is incapable of being put into words, things that make meaning; it may also have something to do with the fact that you’re high, which, like a powerful surplus of meaning, can free your thinking from its ossification and allow you to experience thoughts as if for the first time. You’re not wrong to think these things, but you are paranoid. You’re also in public, which suggests that calming down could be the move. One way to do so is to practice mindfulness: breathe in, breathe out, and, through sheer force of will, render the world absurd: remove all those meaning-generating narratives and simply experience the world as it exists. Voluntary absurdity can be nice, sometimes, but most of us don’t choose denarrativization; things are reified for us; their stories are eclipsed; their history and future disappear; all we’re left with is a present. Normally, this might introduce some barriers to your thinking, but luckily, you’re high, and being kind of fucked up, it’s not hard to imagine everything else could be too – just like that, society is totally restructured: exploitation – gone; climate crisis – resolved; Prometheus – unbound; our material concerns evaporate; our creativity suffuses; Utopia – achieved. We are finally free to focus on what is truly human in this life: interpersonal relationships, figuring out why everyone is looking at you like that. You smile weakly at the cashier; you need to go home.
This was kind of a strange choice, you think, as you look around your home, seeing as there’s so much other stuff you could be doing: if not chores, then surely societal restructuring, work, activity, anything besides contemplation, or whatever it is you’re doing now. It’s nice to feel like you’re doing things, which smoking weed sometimes helps with – at least, the feeling like you’re doing things, the same sort-of-doing-things, sort-of-not-doing-things feeling you’ve come to associate with the experience of reading a powerful novel, powerful novels being things that take real-world contradictions and resolve them in the world of fiction, the same place smoking weed takes your ideas. You can, of course, always treat your thinking like a narrative object; weed just forces you to. But you’re pretty sure that narrativizing your thought is neither good nor bad and more sort of just depends on what you do with the narratives, something you’re also pretty sure is true of smoking weed, although you do have some fun imagining a world where everyone is conscripted into this mode of thinking, meaning that, once again, Utopia has reared its beautiful head, and, once again, you’re tempted to think you’ve done something when really you’ve just been sitting here, alone; here, alone, is where you become Hyde, that strange version of yourself that has the peculiar quality of being both you and not you. This is one way to make your thinking Other to itself, but not the only way, as there are many other psychoactive substances and, as has been said, even other thought-changing things besides – the world affords so many opportunities to be dialectical, being dialectical sort of being the doing-things of thinking but not really a thing that counts as a thing that is being done, at least by itself, you’re pretty sure. You could try writing it up and hope that it helps coordinate some new ways of doing things, but admittedly, you’re busy thinking about smoking weed, which – both the smoking-weed and the thinking about the smoking-weed – has you feeling like part of a storied human tradition: people have been self-reflexively smoking weed for a long time, but always in kind of different ways, depending on their historical situation, since historical situations can change our thoughts and the way we experience sensations and even the way our thoughts get changed, even what happens when we get high, meaning that smoking weed has its own story, like most everything else, and if things like reification and narrativization and dialectical thinking all now find themselves to be a part of it, it’s probably because they can be found everywhere thinking is done in our current historical situation, as our current historical situation is one of those thought-changing things, which lets us think like this pretty much always, if we want to – and who wouldn’t? It’s fun to smoke weed and think about stuff.
