Science, Culture, Integral Yoga

Flarf is Dionysus. Conceptual Writing is Apollo: An introduction to the 21st Century’s most controversial poetry movements by Kenneth Goldsmith

….uncreative writing, unoriginal genius, conceptual writing, flarf !@# this brings us nearly up to date in our future poetry series. If Sri Aurobindo begins his search for a future poetry with the rhythm of mantric utterance, today the sights and sounds of poetry on the evolutionary edge are often machinic, its mantras digital, as Kenneth Goldsmith says: “It’s been grabbed, cut, pasted, processed, machined, honed, flattened, repurposed, regurgitated, and reframed from the great mass of free-floating language out there just begging to be turned into poetry.”

“Our immersive digital environment demands new responses from writers. What does it mean to be a poet in the Internet age? These two movements, Flarf and Conceptual Writing, each formed over the past five years, are direct investigations to that end. And as different as they are, they have surprisingly come up with a set of similar solutions. Identity, for one, is up for grabs. Why use your own words when you can express yourself just as well by using someone else’s? And if your identity is not your own, then sincerity must be tossed out as well. Materiality, too, comes to the fore: the quantity of words seems to have more bearing on a poem than what they mean. Disposability, fluidity, and recycling: there’s a sense that these words aren’t meant for forever. Today they’re glued to a page but tomorrow they could re-emerge as a Facebook meme. Fusing the avant-garde impulses of the last century with the technologies of the present, these strategies propose an expanded field for twenty-first-century poetry. This new writing is not bound exclusively between pages of a book; it continually morphs from printed page to web page, from gallery space to science lab, from social spaces of poetry readings to social spaces of blogs. It is a poetics of flux, celebrating instability and uncertainty.”

Future Bodies: Discipline, Control, the Yoga of Resistance

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

Seven Quartets of Becoming: A Review by J. Kepler

J. Kepler reviews Debashish Banerji’s new book – “The Seven Quartets of Becoming”, subtitled “A Transformative Yoga Psychology Based on the Diaries of Sri Aurobindo.”

Kepler says in this review that DB focuses on a certain text Sri Aurobindo noted down around the same time called the Sapta Chatusthaya (hereafter SaptaC), translatable as the “Seven Quartets”. It is an outline of concepts and terminology that came to Sri Aurobindo during his early years of deep yogic experience and realization and was clearly a guide to his own yogic practice at that time (as documented in the Record). It also provided the underlying architecture for the Yoga of Self Perfection section in The Synthesis of Yoga.

So it’s an unusual exegetical approach DB takes to presenting Integral Yoga, one which carries a heavy burden of Sanskrit terminological explanation, and requires frequent attempts to relate to concepts and terminology Sri Aurobindo adopted in his later, more widely read texts. But DB manages this in an impressive fashion, providing lucid explanations of key terms, concepts and practices, also trying now and then to place them in some kind of context within contemporary intellectual discourse. He demonstrates a thorough knowledge of Sri Aurobindo’s writings, Integral Yoga, the Indian spiritual tradition, and European philosophy. DB also writes here in an admirably clear style, mercifully refraining from the crypto-prose idiom sometimes found in postmodern-influenced texts.

The book succeeds broadly on 2 fronts:

1) It models a style of writing about Integral Yoga, Sri Aurobindo, and the Mother, which is potentially acceptable within modern intellectual culture, i.e. not easily rejected out-of-hand as primarily a religious or mystical tract. DB consistently orients Integral Yoga as an experiential field of psychological practice, not a cluster of dogmatic beliefs. At the same time he avoids a tone-deaf, disrespectful or insensitive style discussing a subject-matter which is for many permeated with the sacred. One intensely hopes other authors writing for a similar audience take note of this example.

2) It provides an impressive explication of the complex terminology and structure of the SaptaC, perhaps especially suitable for those already familiar with Sri Aurobindo’s later writings and formulations of Integral Yoga, but interested in what this early formulation contains; for example the dual pattern of Mukti and Bhukti recurring throughout the SaptaC………..

Increasing Censorsip in India by Murali Krishnan

This is not the first time in the country that such acts of censorship have drawn the ire of intellectuals and citizens.

Protests – in some cases, even violent ones – against plays, films, books and paintings regarded as “distasteful” are known to have happened. To please constituents, the political class also has in the past proscribed books- and in some cases still does.

“It is called the terrorism of power. Banning books, denying visas, passing censure motions, opening up tax cases selectively, these are all simple acts of privilege that are available to those wielding power,” argues social commentator Santosh Desai.

“The instrument of choice is fear, and the message is for the so-called trouble makers to exercise a form of self-censorship.”

Several examples of gag orders and bans:

Just recently, US historian Peter Heehs, who has spent nearly four decades in India, faced deportation following complaints made by some of Sri Aurobindo’s followers that he had allegedly depicted a distorted picture of the freedom fighter and spiritual leader in a biography.

Murder in the Simulacrum: Bin Laden, Unbelievable Deaths and Depictions of Legal Exceptionality by Binoy Kampmark

Within a democratic context, or to be more exact, in a context where the rule of law is said to apply, doctrines of exceptionality have been carved out. [3] Legal purgatory is the site in history in which revisions, modifications and abridgments can be made to a subject’s rights to reflect the nature of that emergency and the threat. This “state of exception” is a juridical-political category where illegality and legality blur before the justification of emergency. [4] The nature of such an approach is reflected by legalistic arguments put forth by advocates of torture who have effectively enhanced its use in a discursive manner precisely because expectations in terms of security can no longer be “mapped”. [5] States can, in that sense, deal in the currency of torture, the erosion of the subject’s will [6]. The global manhunt for an exceptional terrorist, extraordinary rendition or illegal interventions are based not, as theorists M. Hardt and A. Egri explain, “on a priori framework, moral or legal, but only a posteriori, based on its results.” [7]

Bin Laden effectively became a constituted species of homo sacer, a figure who follows a trend in many societies where various offenders are privileged by labels of exceptionalism that allow for their eradication. For “here was an object called by this solemn adjective, homo sacer, which might be violated without any nefas [deadly crime]: a man whom anyone might slay with impunity.” [8] Bin Laden, like his followers, were the exceptions that had to be targeted in a global war, all of them “like ticking time bombs, set to go off without warning.” There could be no waiting before “perils” as they drew closer. [9]

Students of the evolution of that term find that “sacer” was rendered exceptional from the idea of the sacred — the sacrum — beings or entities considered to be the property of a deity. The killing with impunity of a designated homo sacer was an atavistic throwback in which such a figure is considered an object of taboo, a being to be disposed of without legal penalty. Biologically, such a subject remains human, but legally, he exists as a non-person who can be struck down and killed. Such a being is “cursed and consecrated at the same moment.” [10]