To Poet Our Future Selves: Self-Transformation & Suffering in Nietzsche, Foucault & Sri Aurobindo by R.Carlson

To Poet Our Future Selves: Self-Transformation, Suffering, in Nietzsche, Foucault & Sri Aurobindo

by

Richard Carslon

When we wrote our Manifesto for this web site we envisioned exploring themes off the beaten trail of Theory, to tease out alternative futures that we refer to broadly as post-human.

The article “The Aesthetic and Ascetic Dimensions of an Ethics of Self-Fashioning by Milchman and Rosenberg compliments our manifesto and several articles already posted here. In particular however, it fits well with the articles concerning the work of Bernard Steigler who also raises the specter of Foucauldian inner technologies of self-care as relevant for reclaiming attention in the current era of technicity.

At a time when the collective dynamics of global markets serve to network and disperse attention into a ubiquitous world-wide cloud of computation, it is particularly important to explore the implications for fashioning the inner world of the 21st century subject.   If as Marshall McLuhan says that every technological extension is a biological or self- amputation what happens to imagination and memory when they are exteriorized by technology?

When imagination is increasingly fixed in virtual worlds and the archive of human memory is uploaded and stored by terabytes in clusters of servers around the globe it become more necessary than ever to recover and sustain the eidetic modes of consciousness that have historically been available to human learning and understanding.  Since Plato wrote Phaedrus (1) we have known that when writing displaces oral communication we loose memory but what happens to the witness when computational power virtualizes memory?

To pay attention is an act of will toward the world. It follows that as attention is dispersed in a global apparatus of information flows that the will also becomes tethered to the mobility of the computing cloud subjecting it to those desiring forces of hyper-capitalism that empower the regime of computation.

One co-efficient of late Capitalism in its seamless but flawed global superstructure is to constitute a subject that can be distributed at light speeds for circulation throughout its  telematic collective being.  In this virtual circulation of planetary data identities form and self-referentially disperse (email, facebook, blogs, chat rooms) The 21st century subject is also constituted as a data stream meant for distribution through the fractal networks of telematic representation in media environments saturated with images to facilitate desire and consumption.

In repayment for the blessing communications technology may bring to us we find ourselves subject to the harvesting of our attention.  Everyday we receive countless messages hurled at us at photonic speeds accelerating through telecommunication mediums bearing the inscriptions of multi-national corporations (Google, CNN, Microsoft) who all compete for attention. In just a few seconds of surfing on the world wide web there are opportunities for countless hyper-linked divergences that shape-shift attention into perverse forms of advertisement. Bernard Steigler points to the dramatic rise in the diagnosis of attention deficit disorders in the United States and Europe in both children and adults since the 1990s and widespread prevalence of the illness today as perhaps symptomatic of the disorientation of society within an ecology of speed.

In the early 21st century if we do not live on less than one or two dollars a days as do billions in the world or are not already religious fundamentalist, nativist cult members or tea party millennialist  (or perhaps especially so)  the choices that confront us in matters of both personal and civil polity are defined largely by the global telematic systems of multi-national corporations, (as are perhaps also the lack of choices by the impoverished billions)

In most of the world and especially America choices are expertly controlled so that they are only allowed along narrowly defined trajectories  (Democrats or Republican,  Coke or Pepsi).   There seems to be an inverse law of sociology that declares the more external control that can be exercised over choice the less the internal ability to interrogate the ordering systems of the control society that exhausts our faculties of critical intelligence. In any event the more our attention is focused upon discreet objects of desire the less conscious we are attuned of our natural environment.

The instruments of discipline and control deployed by institutions be they Church, State or Corporation are effective because over time they are internalized by the subject as programs of self-control. The monastic discipling systems of the medieval Church and today’s control systems of hyper-Capitalism that channel attention through an almost infinite expanse of commercial networks maybe different but, they are similar in that both demand surrender of ones will to either ideology, authority, or consumptive desire. In either case however, I would argue that we are in danger of being transformed into various manifestations of docile subjects. Subjects whose identities are formed through adopting techniques of self-governance in which the will is surrendered to either the ideology of the priest, the state or the corporation.

Today control processes are increasingly effective because our desires can be exploited at light speeds.  The promise to us by global free market capitalism is instantaneous gratification for every pleasure within the split second of a Visa transaction. Indulgence of any desire instantaneously, once a provence of the gods,  now constitutes the fetish fantasies of everyday life. The fact that pornography is one of the most profitable internet businesses attest to this. It seems as the gods depart so to our attention dissipates into the desiring machines of hyper-capitalism.

If we are turned into subjects disciplined by systems of control that harvest attention and will through preying upon our desires,  Milchman and Rosenberg in their article suggest that the work of Nietzsche and Foucault may offer ways to reclaim our selves through systems of self-fashioning or askesis that serve to transform desire and suffering in the cause of self-fashioning. A reading of both Nietzsche and Foucault it seems not only gives us a critical perspectives on society but foremost a critical perspective of the self as the subject of society. Additionally, they also provide suggestions for existential practices or ways to enact soul in the world by encouraging us to cultivate the tension that desire and suffering induce through a transformative process that leads to self-knowledge. If we assume a cross-cultural perspective and consider non-European systems of askesis then in Sanskrit the phenomena of the transformation of desire is called: Tapas.

The word tapas is derived form tapasya literally means “heat”, and refers to a personal endeavor of discipline, undertaken to achieve a goal, accompanying suffering and pain. Earliest reference of this word is to be found in the Rgveda-8.82.7, where its is used in the sense ‘pain, suffering’.

If we penetrate the meaning of the word “tapas” in the work of the yogi/sage Sri Aurobindo we find that it’s usage is derived from the sublimations of desire (esp. sexual) that first turns  into heat (tapas) which stimulates the “whole system” of the practitioner. But the term is also used in a much broader context in that he remarks: “it is for this reason that all forms of self-control and austerity are called tapas or tapasya, because they generate the heat or stimulus which is a source of powerful action and success.”

Through the cultivation of tapas and sublimation of desire we undertake the processes of sadhana or self-transformation. In Sri Aurobindo’s work the process of sadhana is unique in that it leads to a transformative potential for self- overcoming with implications for the entire species. On closer examination Sri Aurobindo offers us a process for self-over-coming whose intent is similar to Nietzsche’s constitution of the ubermensch, a being who through assimilation of the discipline of suffering, over-comes its mere humanity.

“The discipline of suffering, of great suffering – do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far? That tension of the soul in unhappiness which cultivates its strength, its shudders face to face with great ruin, its inventiveness and courage in enduring, persevering, interpreting, and exploiting suffering, and whatever has been granted to it of profundity, secret, mask, spirit, cunning, greatness — was it not granted to it through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?” (Milchman and Rosenberg 2007)

Milchman and Rosenberg in their article on self-fashioning in Nietzsche and Foucault make clear that Nietzsche -as does Sri Aurobindo in his reading of the Bhagavad Gita- draws a clear distinction between enduring the discipline of suffering and the renunciation of life in the face of suffering:

“It would be a mistake to suppose that Nietzsche opposes ascetic practices completely, since the kind of greatness that he esteems requires sacrifice and self-discipline. What he is opposed to are practices of self-denial which devalue earthly, sensual life.”103 Nietzsche’s usage here is very close to Foucault’s understanding of how the Greeks understood ascesis, and how he wishes to use this concept in his own ethics of self-fashioning: “In a word, we can say that the theme of an askêsis, as a practical training that was indispensable in order for an individual to form himself as a moral subject, was important – emphasized even – in classical Greek thought, especially in the tradition issuing from Socrates.” (Milchman and Rosenberg 2007)

After a close reading of Nietzsche, Michel Foucault’s interest lay in how the construction of self has evolved through different historical regimes (epistemes) of knowledge/power. Having witnessed the abuses of Church and State power in the 20th century, in his study of history he returned to ancient Greece and Rome to recover systems of self fashioning that could help facilitate the autonomy of the self from the disciplines imposed by Society:

“Foucault, in a series of texts, had elucidated the bases for understanding how the subject was constituted in and through a dispositif that included technologies of domination. But what sent him on his journey to Greece was the conviction that a model for an alternative to such modes of subjectivity, the possibility for the constitution of a subject in autonomous fashion, through practices of freedom, might be found in the history of our own culture, in the Ancient world; that the Graeco- Roman world provided another modality for the ethical subject. The examples he gives of several potential liberatory inner technologies of self-fashioning come from the Stoic, Cynics, Epicureans, all of who innovated techniques for the control of and transformation of desire.” (Milchman and Rosenberg 207)

These inner technologies provide sharp blades to hew a path to reveals our inner selves but, the deeper they penetrate into our psyche they more the danger that they can assume the form of the double edged sword.  Although these inner technologies provide tools for self-liberation, when wielded as an instrument of church and state, corporation they transvalue discipline and reverse it so that it need not be imposed by force from outside but, after the surrender of the will to authority can be exerted through the subjects own practice of self-governance. This practice of self-governance enables the subject to be fashioned through a process of objectification in which having internalized the desires of its sovereign, forms a self that is the imaged object of the governing knowledge/power regime

The dangers couched in these inner technologies that harvest desire for self-transformation (tapas) or self-governance (control) are delineated by Foucault in his definition as the “objectification” and “subjectivation” of truth discourse:

“At the heart of the Foucauldian distinction between objectification and subjectivation of true discourse, is that in the case of the former one accepts a truth whose authority is purportedly beyond question, while in the case of the latter the enunciation of the truth arises from the subject’s own practices of freedom, from a choice.” (Milchman and Rosenberg 2007)

If we simply adopt inner technologies for self-transformation or follow imposed systems of sadhana in which we blindly surrender our will to authority (ex. the traditional Indian system of yoga) we do not escape from docility but rather shift the forms our docility takes. In any case we shift responsibility for ourselves away from us and to the will of another. As I understand Foucault’s process of objectification the subject merely transfers its servitude from an external to an internal platform, exchanging outer authority for internal self-governance.

It is only through surrendering to the authority of ones own inner self or inner master in accordance with free choice that one begins to follow the process of self-fashioning that Foucault calls subjectivation.

While Sri Aurobindo’s yoga has suffered reification by Institutions whose devotees and protsylitizers advocate an authoritarian style of self-discipline that follows the traditional devotional forms of organized Hinduism in fact, Sri Aurobindo actually discouraged such religious practices by encouraging the surrender of self and will only to the “guru” that resides in ones own heart. His yoga renounces renunciation and rather embraces life in a most Nietzschean way.

Sri Aurobindo’s integral yoga embraces the world down to its cellular dimensions, it cares for the physical world and does  this in a manner unlike most other systems of yoga, because he offers few prescriptions on specific inner technologies that one need adopt to cultivate self-transformation.  If he does offer a prescription it is that the self follow its own swadharma, or unique way of being in the world. In Sri Aurobindo’s yoga the over-coming of ones own nature requires not blind allegiance to a metaphysical system but, relies on the cultivation of tapas and the following of ones individual dharma.

Although attempts to institutionalize his yoga today by Hindu neo-fascist and New Age neo-liberalist threaten to turn his yoga into a process of objectivication and its sadhana into a system of institutional control,  a reading of Sri Aurobindo’s original text opens one to processes akin to Foucauldian subjectivication and Nietzchean self-fashioning. In fact, a close reading of his text offers up new possibilities for human freedom then are found in either Nietzsche and Foucault.

Sri Aurobindo own life is in fact Nietzschean in its dynamics, educated a Cambridge he became a freedom fighter who was put on trail for life on charges of sedition while resisting British rule over India.  An astute observer of society with modernist sensibilities he also maintained throughout his life a critical and often cynical view of religions, governments, corporations. Being a poet himself, I believe, Sri Aurobindo would agree with the idea of poeting our lives that the authors of the article explicate in Nietzsche:

“We are here concerned with how both thinkers sought to confront what they saw as the profound cultural crisis of their times through a rethinking of how the subject, or self “shows up” or is historically constituted, and a project of self-shaping, so that, we become, in Nietzsche’s words, “the poets of our lives.” (Milchman and Rosenberg 2007)

as he would also applaud the “spiritual objectives” that concerned Foucault:

“Ascetics [L’ascétique], that is to say the more or less coordinated set of exercises that are available, recommended, and even obligatory, and anyway utilizable by individuals in a moral, philosophical, and religious system in order to achieve a definite spiritual objective. By “spiritual objective,” I understand a certain transformation, a certain transfiguration of themselves as subjects, as subjects of action and as subjects of true knowledge. This objective of a spiritual transmutation is what ascetics, that is to say, the set of given exercises, must make it possible to achieve.106

It is precisely here, where Foucault elaborates on the technologies of the self, the specific exercises and techniques through which it may be possible to fashion oneself, to give style to one’s life, that he builds upon the basis that Nietzsche had bequeathed to him.” (Milchman and Rosenberg 2007)

Moreover, the conclusions the authors arrive at have deep implications for the yoga of Sri Aurobindo and post humanist theory:

“The ethics of self-fashioning as envisaged by Nietzsche and Foucault, with its basis in their daring visions of an art of living and a refunctioned concept of asceticism, are of more than historical interest as responses to the profound cultural crisis manifest in the death of God. That ethics and aesthetics of self-fashioning, with its vision of philosophy as a way of life, and not as theoretical knowledge, is, for us, linked to the conviction that the cultural crisis to which Nietzsche and Foucault responded shapes our world of the twenty-first century, and that the paths blazed by Nietzsche and Foucault can perhaps help us to overcome” (Milchman and Rosenberg 2007)

Sri Aurobindo’s yoga is noteworthy, while eschewing dogmatism he gives synthetic treatment to other yoga systems while embracing an integral spiritual path but, specifically it is of interest to both those interested in Theory and Practice of Self-Fashioning in that he envisioned his yoga as a praxis to help facilitate the transformation of a future humanity.  As Nietzsche envisages his Overman fashioned from a discipline that assimilates and transforms suffering, so Sri Aurobindo prescribes a yoga that begins with the transformation of self through the cultivation of tapas, that then serves as a bridge to the Superman or future human.

Today when we have begun to seriously speak of post-human possibilities of the over-coming of physical, vital, and mental limitations through the augmentations of technology, the question of human futures have become largely dependent on evolution of human ethics. The fashioning of an ethical self to correspond to the demands of the power we are exponentially acquiring would seem necessary and in the face of technologies of mass destruction, perhaps for human survival itself.

The need to evolve an ethical self to respond to crisis restates the importance of the work of Nietzsche, Foucault and Aurobindo for the fashioning of a self (inner) that in turn also fashions an ethical self (outer) capable of meeting the demands of an accelerating future.

But to simply prescribe Sri Aurobindo’s sadhana as a technique for self-transformation or as a practice to help interrupt the commercial noise saturating our mental environments would be to simultaneously discredit it by objectifying it.  It should be clear from the Milchman and Rosenberg article that there is no single way to effect self-transformation and any claims of exclusivity nullify the very validity of the practice itself. If it is through free choice that inner technologies of self-fashioning can be adopted by individuals as means of liberation.  That said there is perhaps the potential for as many different practices of self-fashioning as there are individuals in the world.

Because of its unique orientation toward a future in anticipation of an epistemic rupture integral yoga provides a unique inner technology for fashioning an ethical response to the current crisis of technology, culture and environment in the 21st century. Indeed, one finds in Sri Aurobindo’s work the same possibilities that Milchman and Rosenberg articulate are couched within Nietzsche and Foucault; namely, of one who is blazing a path toward the future

References

(2007) THE AESTHETIC AND ASCETIC DIMENSIONS OF AN ETHICS OF SELF FASHIONING by Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg  PARRHESIA NUMBER 2 • 2007 • 44–65

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(1) Socrates From Plato’s Phaedrus: At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.