Simeon Wade

Heather Dundas

Editors Note: Michel Foucault (born Paul-Michel Foucault in 1926) was one of the central thinkers of the
latter half of the twentieth century. Neither a traditional philosopher nor a trained historian, Foucault
examined the intersection of truth and history through the specific historical dynamics of power.

In France, Foucault was a major figure in structuralist thinking of the 1960s and in the years that followed.
However in the United States, especially in popular culture, Foucault is often thought of as an inciter of
the French theory movement that swept through American universities in the 1970s and 1980s. Often
controversial, Foucaults analyses of the uses of power in society, as well as his concerns with sexuality,
bodies, and norms have been pivotal in the development of contemporary feminist and queer theory.

One early follower of Foucaults thinking was Simeon Wade, assistant professor of history at Claremont
Graduate School. A native of Texas, Wade moved to California in 1972 after earning his Ph.D. in the
intellectual history of Western civilization from Harvard in 1970. In 1975, Foucault was invited to California
to teach a seminar at the University of California, Berkeley. Following a lecture, Wade and his partner,
musician Michael Stoneman, invited Foucault to accompany them on a road trip to Death Valley. After
some persuasion, Foucault agreed. The memorable trip occurred two weeks later. This interview was
conducted by Heather Dundas on 27 May 2017, and has been edited for length, clarity, and historical
accuracy.

Foucault and Michael Stoneman in Death

Valley.

Boom: What can you tell us about the above photo?

Simeon Wade: I snapped the above photo with my Leica camera, June 1975. The photograph features
the Panamint Mountains, the salt flats of Death Valley, and the frozen dunes at Zabriskie Point. In the
foreground, two figures: Michel Foucault, in the white turtleneck, his priestly attire, and Michael
Stoneman, who was my life partner.

Boom: How did you end up in Death Valley with Michel Foucault?

Simeon Wade: I was performing an experiment. I wanted to see [how] one of the greatest minds in
history would be affected by an experience he had never had before: imbibing a suitable dose of clinical
LSD in a desert setting of great magnificence, and then adding to that various kinds of entertainment. We
were in Death Valley for two days and one night. And this is one of the spots we visited during this trip.

Boom: What can you say about this photograph? Were Foucault and Stoneman already tripping when it
was taken? And wasnt it incredibly hot, Death Valley in June?

Wade: Yes. We rose to the occasion, as it were, in an area called Artists Palette. And yes, it was very
hot. But in the evening, it cooled off, and you can see Foucault in his turtleneck in the cool air. We went to
Zabriskie Point to see Venus appear. Michael placed speakers all around us, as no one else was there,
and we listened to Elisabeth Schwarzkopf sing Richard Strausss, Four Last Songs. I saw tears in
Foucaults eyes. We went into one of the hollows and laid on our backs, like James Turrells volcano,
[1] and watched Venus come forth and the stars come out later. We stayed at Zabriskie Point for about
ten hours. Michael also played Charles Ivess, Three Places in New England, and
Stockhausens Kontakte, along with some Chopin. Foucault had a deep appreciation of music; one of
his friends from college was Pierre Boulez.[2]

Boom: Thats quite a playlist. But why LSD?

Wade: The revelation of St. John on the Isle of Patmos is said by some to have been inspired by the
Amanita muscaria mushroom. LSD is a chemical equivalent to the hallucinogenic potency of these
mushrooms. So many great inventions that made civilization possible took place in societies that used
magic mushrooms in their religious rituals.[3] So I thought, if this is true, if the chemical compound has
such power, then what is this going to do to the great mind of Foucault?

Foucault and Michael Stoneman, Death

Valley.

Boom: But why go so far for this experience? Why drive five hours from Claremont to Death Valley?

Wade: The major reason was that Michael and I had had so many wonderful trips in the desert. Death
Valley, many times, and also Mojave, Joshua Tree. If you take clinical LSD and youre in a place like
Death Valley, you can hear harmonic progressions just like in Chopin; it is the most glorious music youve
ever heard, and it teaches you that theres more.

Boom: Until recently the very 1970s idea of, as you put it in your manuscript,[4] a magic elixir to
expand consciousness, was so out of fashion as to be ludicrous. But current research has called this
quick dismissal of the psychedelic experience into question.[5]

Wade: And about time! [During these trips] I saw the firmament as it truly is, in all of its glorious colors
and forms, and I also heard the echoes from the big bang, which sounds like a chorus of angels, which is
what the ancients thought it was.

Boom: So you wanted to give Foucault LSD so he could access this glorious music?

Wade: Not only that. It was 1975, of course, and The Order of Things had been published for nearly a
decade (published in 1966 in French). The Order of Thingstreats mans finitude, his inevitable death, as
well as the death of humanity, arguing that the whole humanism of the renaissance is no longer viable. To
the point of saying that the face of man has been effaced.

Boom: Theres the famous passage at the end of The Order of Things, postulating a world without the
power structures of the Enlightenment: If those arrangements were to disappear then one can
certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.[6]

Wade: I thought, if I give Foucault clinical LSD, Im sure he will realize that he is premature in obliterating
our humanity and the mind as we know it now, because hell see that there are forms of knowledge other
than science, and because of the theme of death in his thinking up to that point. The tremendous
emphasis of finitude, finitude, finitude reduces our hope.

Boom: So you took Foucault to Death Valley for a kind of rebirth, in a sense?

Wade: Exactly. It was a transcendental experience for Foucault. He wrote us a few months later that it
was the greatest experience of his life, and that it profoundly changed his life and his work.

Foucault and Stoneman, Death Valley.

Boom: At the time of this trip, Foucault had just published the first volume of his projected six-volume
work, History of Sexuality. Hed also published an outline of the rest of the work, and apparently already
had finished writing several volumes of it. So when did this post-Death Valley change become evident in
his work?

Wade: Immediately. He wrote us that he had thrown volumes two and three of his History of
Sexuality into the fire and that he had to start all over again. Whether that was just a way of speaking, I
dont know, but he did destroy at least some version of them and then wrote them again before his
premature death in 1984. The titles of these last two books are emblematic of the impact this experience
had on him: The Uses of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, with no mention of finitude. Everything after
this experience in 1975 is the new Foucault, neo-Foucault. Suddenly he was making statements that
shocked the French intelligentsia.[7]

Boom: Such as?

Wade: Statements more confidently out in the open, like that he finally realized who the real Columbus of
politics was: Jeremy Bentham. Jeremy Bentham had been up to around this time a very respected figure,
and Foucault had begun to find him an intellectual villain. And Foucault denies Marx and Engels, and
says we should just look at Marx as an excellent journalist, not a theorist. And all of the things Foucault
had been inching toward were bolstered after the Death Valley trip. Foucault from 1975 to 1984 was a
new being.[8]

Boom: Youve mentioned that some people disagreed with your experiment and thought you were
reckless with Foucaults welfare.

Wade: Many academicians were very negative on this point, saying that this was tampering with a great
persons mind. I shouldnt tamper with his mind. But Foucault was well aware of what was involved, and
we were with him the entire time.

Boom: Did you think about the repercussions this experience would have on your career?

Wade: In retrospect, I should have.[9]

Boom: Was this a one-off experience? Did you ever see Foucault again?

Wade: Yes, Foucault visited us again. Shortly after his second visit, which was two weeks after this,
where we stayed up in the mountainsit was a mountain experience.

Boom: Also with music and LSD?

Wade: No LSD, but everything else. After he left the second time, I sat down and wrote an account of the
experience, called Death Valley Trip. Its never been published. Foucault read it. We had a robust
correspondence. And then we spent a fantastic time with him again in 1981, when he was at a
conference at the University of Southern California.

Boom: Did you save Foucaults letters?

Wade: Yes, about twenty of them. The last one was written in 1984. He asked if he could come live with
us in Silverlake, as he was suffering from a terminal illness. I think he wanted to die like Huxley.[10] I
said yes, of course. Unfortunately, before he was ready to travel, the trap door of history caught him by
surprise.[11]
Simeon Wade and Foucault, Claremont,
after the Death Valley experience.

Notes

The Editor wishes to thank Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and Geography, Politics and
International Studies, University of Warwick, and author of Foucaults Last Decade and Foucault: The
Birth of Power (Polity Press) for clarifying a number of factual matters in this interview. Thanks also to
Jonathan Simon.

[1] James Turrell, Roden Crater, http://www.rodencrater.com.