20/CHRONICLESndefinition of art as a high-risk enterprise whose naturalnenemy is the risk-wary censor.nAt the Boston trial even some of Burrough’s defendersnhad to concede that his novel was structurally deficient, thenconcession having to be understood with reference tontraditional expectations of formal clarity. So far as the artistnis the intrepid hero of experience, this is an easily forgivenndefect and may, in fact, be a sign of authenticity, as it is fornmany who admire the fiction of Dreiser and Kerouac, thenfilms of John Cassavetes, or the music of John Cage—andnwho perhaps remember fondly the incoherence of undergroundnnewspapers. It is possible to concede that Ginsberg’snpoetry has little literary value, as Bruce Bawer has observednin The New Criterion, and yet place great value on it as ancourageous and messianic experience. Huxley, most likely,nwould not have enjoyed Ginsberg’s poetry, yet he helps tonexplain why others do enjoy it. “What the rest of us see onlynunder the influence of mescaline,” he writes in The Doorsnof Perception, “the artist is congenitally equipped to see allnthe time.” From this the susceptible reader easily concludesnthat mescaline (or LSD or cocaine or marijuana) raises onento the artist’s level, which is the “structurally deficient”nleel of the experience of a drug.nSuch a conclusion is comfortably self-validahng. Thenmore incoherent the experience is—according to a theorynof imagination that assumes the creative cooperation of thenconscious intellect—the more authentic that experience isnlikely to be, with the possible implication that the mostnauthentic experiences of all happen outside the prison ofnlanguage and are therefore unutterable. Rationality thusnbecomes associated with the dehumanization of society, asnit did for Artaud. If, as Bawer contends, Ginsberg “is largelynresponsible for making drug-use. fashionable among thencountry’s educated young,” he has only shown them thatnthe true poetic frontiers of experience are instantly a’ailablento those stoned cowboys who have the courage to put theirnbourgeois settlements behind them. The act itself elevatesnthem into the artist class.nIn this perspecti-e the quintessential bourgeois act isncensorship, the opposite of which is generally believed to benthe absolutely untrammeled flow of information. But if wenthink of censorship as the conditioning of information forncontrol, it is possible to see that the opposite of censorship isnno information whatever. For all forms of life, informationndepends on selection, which involves rejection, from thenbuzzing confusion of available sense data. This means thatnthe human inhabitants of complex systems depend on thenselections and rejections of censorship to identify themselvesnand survive, if only as specialists or fanatics. It alsonmeans that the relationshp between information and thenrejecdon of sense data is as paradoxical as the relationnbetween remembering and forgetting: in order to remembernwhat promises to be meaningful, one must forget a greatndeal—that is, censor it out of memory. Whether thenconsequence is personal growth or co-optation by othersnwho have the power to determine the way we conditionninformation depends notonly on genetic good luck but onnthe kind of society in which we live.nHuxley is right when he speaks of the human brain andnnervous system as functioning like a censor that decidesnwhich doors of perception should be open and whichnnnclosed. But he is simply being fanciful when he says thatnmescaline makes it possible to see things as they are, asnAdam saw them on the first day of creation. Surely,nwhatever Adam saw was conditioned by the censoringnnature of his powers of perception, however pristine theynwere. He saw something, which means that he did not seensomething else; for instance, he did not see what the lionsnand elephants saw, and surely the information availablenthrough their censoring systems was then as now part of thenway things are. He was still Adam, not God, who, we mustnassume, has no need of censorship to organize the buzzingnconfusion, and who (perhaps it is a definition of Deity) doesnnot have to forget anything in order to remember everything.nTo assume that the view through the door opened bynmescaline is the ultimate view, the standard according tonwhich the perception through other doors can be measured,nis to take the experience of the drug at its own e aluationnand therefore beyond undesirable tradeoff. It is the Utopiannassumption that helps to make human beings so addictionpronenand Kaflca’s paradox so offensive.nIf we lived in the kind of Utopian societies imagined bynsuch bourgeois-baiters as Marx and Rousseau, the conditioningnof information would be so effective that we wouldnnot be aware of it at all. Rousseau, in fact, was so certainnthat information in the good society had to be carefullynconditioned by its supervisors that he rejected his friendnd’Alembert’s proposal for a dramatic theater in Genea (itnwould undermine “the simple and modestirtues that makengood citizens”) and advised a policy of public watchfulnessnfor Poland (things should be so arranged “that every citizennwill feel himself to be constantiy under the public eye”).nThe results would be censorship objectively speaking, but itnwould be in the interest of control by public irtue, as wasnthe case in Robespierre’s Republic of Virtue. The goodnsociety uses censorship to protect itself from the psychologicalnexperience of censorship. The defining burden ofndemocracy, on the other hand, is its unremitting nervousnessnabout censorship, and its defining weakness is itsnsusceptibility to the promises of that artificial paradise, thentotalitarian state, in which censorship, thanks to the opiumnof ideology, has ceased to be a problem.nThe drug experience too protects its reputation as annopposer of censorship by closing the doors—in totalitariannfashion—through which information hostile to its promisesnmight come. It protects itself also by passing itself off as antrue nonbourgeois communal experience in which thenderacinated and lonely modern ego is put in touch withnhigher unities and made whole again—the consequencenArtaud expected from his theater of cruelty no less thannfrom the peyote rituals he once experienced in Mexico. Thendrug ecstasy, according to its advocates, makes it possible tonachieve transcendence without alienation. An ecstasy withoutnits substantial side-effects is the quality Huxley attributednto his mo^s/ia-medicine and Shakespeare’s Caliban tonwine, the “celestial liquor” that in The Tempest opens tonhim the dealienating doors of perception wide enough to letnhim see two drunken sailors as gods. And the protectivencensorship of the drug experience is made easier in a societynwilling to believe in the absoluteness of the disjunctionnbetween conscious and unconscious, rational and irrational,nnature and nurture, bourgeois and artist.n