{"id":188,"date":"2012-12-25T22:03:36","date_gmt":"2012-12-25T22:03:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/?p=188"},"modified":"2016-03-30T17:25:40","modified_gmt":"2016-03-30T17:25:40","slug":"sean-leneghan-the-varieties-of-ecstasy-experience-an-exploration-of-person-mind-and-body-in-sydney-s-club-culture-saarbruecken-lambert-academic-publishing-2011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/08-1\/c51-book-review\/sean-leneghan-the-varieties-of-ecstasy-experience-an-exploration-of-person-mind-and-body-in-sydney-s-club-culture-saarbruecken-lambert-academic-publishing-2011\/","title":{"rendered":"Sean Leneghan, The Varieties of Ecstasy Experience: An Exploration of Person, Mind and Body in Sydney\u2019s Club Culture (Saarbr\u00fccken: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2011)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\t
\n\n\t\t<\/i><\/span> <\/a>\n\n\t<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n

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Lambert Academic Publishing (LAP) is a subsidiary of VDM Verlag, a German publisher with an opaque relation to Amazon.\u00a0 I periodically look up my own dissertation topic on Google Books, and a few years ago one search in particular returned twice the number of titles than I had previously ever received.\u00a0 I found that the new titles were Wikipedia articles \u201cpublished\u201d by an imprint of VDM; VDM will send you a copy of Wikipedia entries in print for a fee.\u00a0 There is nothing illegal about this, but it is perplexing.\u00a0 When doing literature reviews, na\u00efve researchers will order from VDM to be thorough, not realizing that the \u201cbooks\u201d are available for free online and may be of negligible academic worth.\u00a0 VDM specializes in cannibalizing the academic publishing process, and LAP is a manifestation of a strategy intended to exploit a weakness of this process.<\/span><\/p>\n

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LAP will send a recent B.A., M.A. or Ph.D. recipient an email saying that the company is interested in publishing his or her work, a dream come true for a novice academic.\u00a0 The resulting \u201cbook\u201d is published on-demand, meaning that a copy is created and shipped only on request.\u00a0 LAP receives the publishing rights to the book without the upfront costs, and the aspiring academic, presumably on the job market or looking at graduate school, gets a precious book publication line on his or her C.V.\u00a0 If someone orders the book\u2014and the fact that the title gets an ISBN and will therefore appear in literature review searches ensures that there will be at least a few orders\u2014LAP prints a copy and collects a fee, and the author gets a royalty cheque.\u00a0 Everyone is happy.\u00a0 The problem is that LAP neither reviews nor edits its titles, and publishes regardless of quality.\u00a0 The result is that the assurances that once came with publication collapse, and the academic book market becomes flooded with all sorts of texts.\u00a0 Apart from it being an integral part of an academic\u2019s r\u00e9sum\u00e9, publishing could become meaningless.<\/span><\/p>\n

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LAP, VDM and publishers with similar business models defend themselves by saying that they provide a valuable archiving service.\u00a0 Wikipedia articles are fluid things, which are thermometers of the contemporary understanding of a topic.\u00a0 If a researcher wants to know what was thought about a topic, let\u2019s say George W. Bush, at a particular time, let\u2019s say between 911 and the invasion of Iraq, then VDM\u2019s articles would be useful.\u00a0 And with LAP, their titles have been approved by thesis advisory committees, which were ostensibly to have ensured that the work constituted a genuine contribution to an academic field and that the writing met high standards.\u00a0 LAP saves these contributions from being lost forever.\u00a0 If the thesis is not worth publishing, then why was it approved? \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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While LAP offers a clever dare to academia (admit that you pass garbage, and we\u2019ll admit that we publish it), and while what they do is legal, their business model is questionable.\u00a0 At bottom they are vanity press looking to profit by taking advantage of the na\u00efve and desperate.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

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The reason I looked at LAP while preparing to review of The Varieties of Ecstasy Experience is that my initial reaction to the book was concern that it was able to earn its author a doctorate, let alone to be published by an \u201cacademic\u201d press.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

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The methodological claim of the author is that those who reduce ecstasy to a chemical and the effects it has on the brain miss an essential aspect of the drug, which is the experience of those who use it.\u00a0 The experience is an intentional object constituted by a group, so only interviews with a variety of users could convey a sense of the drug\u2019s meaning.\u00a0 Unfortunately, this is where methodology ends.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

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The interviews are almost exclusively conducted with the author\u2019s fellow graduate students and friends, and rather than a rigorous account of the ecstasy experience, what is given is weekend partying stories loosely organized into a narrative running from entry to the rave scene to exit owing to boredom.\u00a0 On the back sleeve, this is called a \u201cprocessual morphology.\u201d\u00a0 The conclusion is that ecstasy use in Sydney, Australia is about \u201cnarcissistic hedonism\u201d (215).\u00a0 In other words, the author and his mates went to raves and got \u201cfucked\u201d (a definition of \u201cfucked\u201d is kindly provided in the book\u2019s glossary) on ecstasy on weekends to get their rocks off.\u00a0 Eventually they became bored with it and stopped.\u00a0 Here\u2019s an excerpt to give a sense of the typical interview:<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u00a0<\/span>I know that when the feeling does come on, it is an instant reaction; like if anyone has ever spewed off pills, like you don\u2019t go \u201cOh, I think I\u2019m going to spewarrr\u2026\u201d-it just comes out. Pills are more like projectile vomit.\u00a0 It\u2019s like ARRRGRR.\u00a0 A tiny little bit of spew as well, it\u2019s frothy and disgusting.\u00a0 Like I always plan for it and I never ever, spew on fucking anyone or, or I don\u2019t spew in fucking sinks, or on the dance floor. (126) [I checked and \u00a0 there are no glossary entries for \u201cspewarrr\u201d and \u201cARRRGRR\u201d.]<\/span><\/p>\n

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It\u2019s true that there is more to drug use than chemical effects on brains and that a serious phenomenological study of the ecstasy experience is needed, but I recommend sticking with physicalist accounts if you\u2019re after an understanding of ecstasy use, rather than pay $112 for 200 pages of that.\u00a0 Frankly, no amount of phenomenology jargon could make the six-degrees-of-separation association made by Leneghan with his work and Husserl\u2019s (31) anything but delusional.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

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The backdoor to a Ph.D. is wide-open somewhere in Sydney, which is an unfortunate situation that \u201cinnovative\u201d publishing companies like LAP now exist to exploit.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Most of what\u2019s interesting about this book has to do with its publication, so let me start there and then discuss its contents.<\/span><\/p>\n

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