Science, Culture, Integral Yoga

Excellent presentation by Alexander Galloway on Deleuze who along with Eugene Thacker wrote an interesting theory of networks: the exploit . About minute 21 he talks about the importance of the term integral in Deleuze which is the process of actualization of the virtual around minute 38 he addresses the ever mysterious “superfold” (or is that the “overfold”)

Although he brilliantly contrasts the Digital (homogonous/transcendent) and the Analog (heterogeneous/immanent) ultimately its about periodization, the break or rupture or the doubling of the “fold,”. Galloway traces the refolding of power as it has been exploited by the feudal Sovereign, in industrial Disciplinary Societies and most recently in cybernetic Societies of Control. Galloway believes Deleuze post-script on the Societies of Control (a postscript to Foucault’s disciplinary society) maybe his most relevant one today. To understand why Galloway explores some other obscure texts of Deleuze, including his book on the artist Francis Bacon, an interview with Antonio Negri, and especially some enigmatic passages from his appendix in his book on Foucault. Deleuze asks the question, what form the future will take after man’s disappearance; when the subject is refolded under the sign of the Nietzschean superman, when Language supersedes its signifier and turns on itself, when Life is refolded in the double helix of recombiant DNA and Labor becomes the servomechanism for cybernetic machines and networks:

“What is the superman? It is the formal compound of the forces within man and these new forces. It is the form that results from a relation between forces. Man tends to free life, labour and language within himself. The superman in accordance with Rimbaud’s formula is the man who is even in charge of the animals (;1 code that can capture fragments from other codes, as in the new schemata oflateral or retrograde). It is man in charge of the very rocks, or inorganic matter (the domain of silicon). It is man in charge of the being of language (that formless, ‘mute, unsignifying region where language can find its freedom’ even from whatever it has to say).18 As Foucault would say, the superman is much less than the disappearance of living men, and much more than a changeof concept: it is the advent of a new form that is neither God nor man and which, it is hoped, will not prove worse than its two previous forms”(Deleuze)

Transhumanism for me is like a relationship with an obsessive and very neurotic lover. Knowing it is deeply flawed, I have tried several times to break off my engagement, but each time it manages to creep in through the back door of my mind. In How We Became Posthuman,1 I identified an undergirding assumption that makes possible such predictions as Hans Moravec’s transhumanist fantasy that we will soon be able to upload our consciousness into computers and leave our bodies behind. I argued that this scenario depends on a decontextualized and disembodied construction of information. The disembodied information Claude Shannon formalized as a probability function, useful for specific purposes, has been expanded far beyond its original context and inappropriately applied to such phenomena as consciousness.2 With this argument, I naively thought that I had dismissed transhumanism once and for all, exposing its misapprehensions to my satisfaction and delivering a decisive blow to its aspirations. But I was wrong. Transhumanism has exponentially more adherents today than it did a decade ago when I made this argument, and its influence is clearly growing rather than diminishing, as this workshop itself testifies.

There are, of course, many versions of transhumanism, and they do not all depend on the assumption I critiqued. But all of them, I will argue, perform decontextualizing moves that over-simplify the situation and carry into the new millennium some of the most questionable aspects of capitalist ideology. Why then is transhumanism appealing, despite its problems? Most versions share the assumption that technology is involved in a spiraling dynamic of co-evolution with human development. This assumption, known as technogenesis, seems to me compelling and indeed virtually irrefutable, applying not only to contemporary humans but to Homo sapiens across the eons, shaping the species biologically, psychologically, socially and economically. While I have serious disagreements with most transhumanist rhetoric, the transhumanist community is one that is fervently involved in trying to figure out where technogenesis is headed in the contemporary era and what it implies about our human future. This is its positive contribution, and from my point of view, why it is worth worrying about.

Few literary critics achieve or maintain the kind of cultural visibility that Harold Bloom, Marjorie Garber, Marjorie Perloff, and Helen Vendler have sustained for decades. Bloom has taught for most of his career at Yale, Garber and Vendler at Harvard, and Perloff at Stanford; each publishes with a major commercial or university press. All make claims for the potency and primacy of the literary, if often in radically different ways. Bloom and Vendler champion the poetic tradition approached through close textual analysis, though Bloom prefers grand narratives and Vendler taxonomy. Like Bloom and Vendler, Garber values the tradition, but for her, literature offers problems not just for interpretation, but for public policy. Bloom and Perloff are enthralled by genius and the importance of artistic legacies, though Bloom’s veneration of classic literary works seems at odds with Perloff’s preference for the latest forms of innovation. These publications function as summations of these influential critics’ careers; the inadvertent cluster they form also provides a snapshot of our tenuous moment in the history of literature….

(In Perloff’s case) the new book revisits the terrain of Perloff’s earlier Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media(1990), which she wrote before the advent of the internet. Twenty years later, it is possible to study writing produced “in an environment of hyperinformation, an environment, moreover where we are all authors.” This is a world in which the mechanisms that reinforce ideas of original authorship are often lacking:

There is usually no editor, no peer review, no critique for which one might be held accountable by anyone outside one’s particular community. In this climate, what Hart Crane called the poet’s “cognate word” begins to take a back seat to what can be done with other people’s words.

Unoriginal Genius’s introduction identifies two ways of thinking about poetry embedded in the writing of T.S. Eliot. There is, of course, the lyricism and “originality” of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and the Four Quartets. The irrefutable beauty and meditative splendor of the latter’s “Burnt Norton” comes to mind:

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.

Yet Perloff emphasizes the treasure trove of early negative reviews of The Waste Land, finding in their objections to the poem the parameters of a modernist style characterized by a maddening collision of overhead, borrowed, or quoted speech, dense literary allusion, and the use of many languages, as in passages like this:

London Bridge is falling down falling down
Poi s’accuse nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon — O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Acquitaine à la tour abolie

When the task of disciple is simultaneously intended to improve its utility for production, here are some riffs on Foucaults: Discipline & Punish. Historical context is primary and Foucault s archaeological method helps uncover the rupture within the Enlightenment whose legacy still haunts us, as Deleuze observes, because they have now morphed into technologies of control.

In the European tradition Foucault traces the disciplining of the body back to medieval Monastic exercises, which were intended to facilitate renunciation of the world. These exercises were transformed when adopted by the socio-political regimes of the 17th & 18th century, (especially military, pedagogical, and industrial) into a method for maintaining control over the actions of the bodies it governed through disciplining processes. These disciplining practices have co-evolved with technology (and are in fact technologies in themselves albeit inner technologies) to become ever more omnipresent as tools of surveillance and control. Going forward it will be the omnipresence of ubiquitous technologies (bio-technical/computational/networked) that will largely determine the environmental parameters in which our future bodies must structurally couple.

Resistance to the virus of docility, to the infection of the gaze, to the insertion of discipling technologies is often the unintended consequences of the mechanisms of control themselves but, as William Gibson says, “the street finds its own use for things”. The future is a random other; what we know as the internet today has evolved from technology first designed for survival after a nuclear holocaust.

Activism whose interests lie in discovering alternative, non coercive paths to human development would be well served to find patterns created by resistances to, and ruptures from, the paradigms of control and technological will organizing the human resources of the planet. Such an activism proceeds by both locating those ruptures in the paradigms of organizational control and cultivating resistance practices to them in ones own life and community. One such practice to resist the disciplining machinery of global socio-economic power exchanges is yoga. Although the aim of yoga is to achieve a frictionless flow between individual and cosmos, the many and the one, a yoga such as integral yoga whose concern is not merely a transcendental urge but an immanent concern for the world, is a unique resistance form because its own monastic traditions of psycho/physiological practices, established well before the body was appropriated by the exercises of technicity, allows one to leverage the silence of ones own embodiment as a method of resisting external regimes of control. Aurobindo’s yogic practice was part and parcel of his resistance to the colonialist occupation of India

In this article, Peter Heehs compares the politics of independence of Gandhi and Sri Aurobindo. In his wide-ranging consideration, he also brings in Subash Chandra Bose and Nelson Mandela. What would Mandela say to the differences of approach of Gandhi and Sri Aurobindo. Heehs concludes:

Mandela’s admiration for Gandhi is boundless: “There are those who believe he was divinely inspired,” he wrote, “and it is difficult not to believe with them.” But Mandela may have had a better grasp on human nature than the Mahatma. “The people’s patience is not endless,” he once said. “The time comes in the life of any nation when there remain only two choices: submit or fight.” In this, his attitude was closer to that of Aurobindo and other Indian revolutionaries than to the excessively principled attitude of Gandhi. To lead a successful political movement, some amount of flexibility is needed. This means being open to the most effective methods, whatever they might be. As Mandela himself said, “Violence and nonviolence are not mutually exclusive; it is the predominance of the one or the other that labels a struggle.”