Abstracts Political Science

The Politics of the Self: Psychedelic Assemblages, Psilocybin, and Subjectivity in the Anthropocene

by Joshua Falcon

This dissertation examines how psychedelic substances become drawn into particular sociohistorical and political arrangements, and how psychedelic experiences with psilocybin ‘magic mushrooms’ are used as tools of subjectivation. Guided by literatures in philosophy, critical theory, and the social sciences that focus on subjectivity, assemblage theory, and critical posthumanism, I argue that psychedelics are drawn into variegated assemblages, each of which conceptualizes the nature of psychedelics in highly specific ways that reflect implicit conceptions of the world and the self. In developing the concept of psychedelic assemblages, this research provides a window onto the politics of the self in the Anthropocene. Drawing on mixed and netnographic methods, I conducted 30 semi-structured interviews and acquired 100 experience reports from online forums, using this data to demonstrate how psychedelic mushroom experiences are used as technologies of the self, or practices that individuals engage as a means of changing their subjectivity. Among the changes in subjectivity provoked by psychedelic mushroom experiences, there are sometimes reports of changes in human-environment relations based on an enhanced connection or relationship with nature.