A Chemical Love Story: Considering Microdosing as Somatechnic Individuation Vis-à-Vis the Philosophy of Simondon

Abstract

Research shows that due to rapidly changing higher education contexts, large numbers of academics are overworked, stressed, and dispirited. This is exacerbated by the fact that most academics do not view academia simply as work, but as a vocation. To deal with these conditions, the use of cognitive modification and enhancement drugs have become far more prevalent than used to be the case. In this article, I look at the phenomenon of microdosing as a somatechnics of knowledge production to think about how meanings of ‘development’ are changing and to what extent they are still related to narratives of progress, themselves deeply embedded in colonial, State, and capitalist apparatuses that blind us to the rich entanglements spread across multiple temporal and neuronal rhythms. I also ask how we can think philosophically about microdosing as a somatechnics of knowledge production vis-à-vis the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon (1924–1989). Especially of interest to me is his theorisation of ontogenesis in which beings and other aspects of life, including technicity, emerge/individ uate as dimensions of the entirety of being/life without affording primacy to human individ uality. I thus bring to light the value of Simondon's work to somatechnics and use it to critically examine the role of cognitive modification and enhancement methods in higher education, especially as pertains to microdosing.