Science, Culture and Integral Yoga :: .. Critical Theory & Postmodernism

When Sri Aurobindo left his body the evolution of consciousness did not suddenly cease. Namely, there have been several significant mutations of discourse regimes, in response to the advent of the practice of Critical Theory. It is my view that one can view this succession of discourse in the same light as one would the development of a future poetry; it is a representation of the evolution of language.

While it would be understandable for a traditional religion to discard the advent and development of styles of discourse which follow on the death of its founder, in a spiritual practice whose organizing idea is of the evolution of consciousness, to discard the ideas, movements, cultural logic, etc that are part and parcel of this development, would be its undoing.

Peter Heehs book is a critical biography written in a contemporary academic style, that is -as all contemporary academic styles - informed by Critical Theory. It is not surprising therefore, that it treats its subject in a manner appropriate for this type of discourse. The fact that those in a yoga whose unique major metaphysical premise is of the evolution of consciousness would criticize its language and method of inquiry because it follows a discursive style that is indicative of how consciousness has evolved over the past 58 years is nothing short of ironic. It is almost as if these reactionary followers of Integral Yoga in looking back to the past to co-opt modes of expression that have now become fossilized discursive practices, as consciousness has evolved into a new millennium, have begun looking backward to the past instead of forward to the future to complete the project of integral yoga. Such a backward looking view of the yoga can be understood to have flipped the goals of the Integral Yoga in substituting devolution for evolution..... more »

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Saturday, November 1

City of Transformation: Paul Virilio in Obama's America by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker (C Theory)

by Rich on November 1, 2008 09:29AM (PDT)

In 1996 Virilio may have originally predicted a "global accident" that would occur simultaneously to the world as a whole. Only twelve years later in the last autumn days of 2008 -- exactly 40 years after the tumultuous political events of 1968 -- is it possible that Virilio's "global accident" has itself been accidented? Slowly, inexorably, one resistor at a time, one mobilization, one march, one individual dissent, one collective "no" at a time, with what Antonio Gramsci called the dynamism of the popular will, the global accident flips into a global political transformation. Signs of this at first political, and then technological, recircuiting of the popular will are everywhere. Entire empires have suddenly vanished, global social movements are everywhere on the rise, imperialisms have been checkmated, and the first tangible hints of a truly transformational politics is in the air. It's the electricity of the technological noosphere. It's the primal impulse, the desperate hope, of many progressive human hearts. more »

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The Lives of Sri Aurobindo: the aggrieved victim

by Rich on November 1, 2008 09:27AM (PDT)

Therefore, it is ironic to watch those who claim to represent Sri Aurobindo ideals ignore the democratic character of his words and replace them with a militant interpretation of Hindu nationalism. This is evident in its failure to critically assess text that are viewed as hostile to their aspiration to seize the cultural interpretations of powerful institutions. In fact, words themselves are ignored by those claiming speaking rights for Sri Aurobindo. One leader (S) of the movement to censor the The Lives of Sri Aurobindo essentially declared that there is no need to read the book, that one can in fact can judge a book by its cover, or at least a paragraph. He says:

“Some people are insisting on the idea that unless you read the full book you cannot understand the context of a single line in it. That is ridiculous. One can easily see the context from within any complete unit of thought structure -- at the very least a paragraph and at the most a section or chapter" (2008)*

When such irrationality is loosed coupled with the xenophobic nationalism of the aggrieved victim there can only be trouble ahead. more »

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Thursday, October 30

What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault's Virtue By Judith Butler

by Debashish on October 30, 2008 09:17PM (PDT)

Untitled 1

"Critique would essentially insure the desubjugation of the subject in the context of what we could call, in a word, the politics of truth." (Michel Foucault, What is Critique?)

In this article, Judith Butler, renowned feminist postmodern theorist from UC, Berkeley discusses Michel Foucault's late thoughts on critique. While it is usually thought that "truth" for Foucault is entirely socially constructed and maintained by acts of knowledge-power, Butler's creative reading of Foucault probes some of his aporias. Truth, for Foucault, is what makes itself knowable to a people in an age, thus an episteme. Such a mode of knowledge becomes manifest as a mode of being. More focused on the structures and processes by which truth maintains itself ontologically through power and its exercise, Foucault nevertheless does not assign a human origin to the appearances and disappearances of epistemes.

Governmentality, the way in which social institutions wield power to form subjects and constrain the limits of their existence, knowledge and exercise of imagination and will aims always at hiding itself, becoming invisible within the ontology of its subjects. Critique, here is the ceaseless scrutiny and revelation of the hidden grounds of truth-claims within governance, in and through one's social enactments. These are the acts of self-creation, the ethics and aesthetics of subjective transformation and the basis of epistemic change.

In this reading, Judith Butler, shows how in the late Foucault, the subject, like truth, arrives at its aporia in the profound thought of Foucault - where subject encounters self and the originary aspiration of the aesthetics of self-creation. In exposing the truth-claims of governmentality, what datum of truth can the constructed subject find support in? Ultimately, this datum cannot but be the unmentionable self-evidentiary truth within the self which is ever active in probing the pretenses of the abuses of social law in the name of truth. This is the basis of critique, which humans, as truth-seeking social subjects are called upon to exercise ceaselessly.

A good read in conjunction with or after this essay, would be Sri Aurobindo's chapter from The Synthesis of Yoga: "Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom."
   more »

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Saturday, October 25

What is the Question? Slavoj Zizek: radio open source

by Rich on October 25, 2008 08:13AM (PDT)

In New York on the last day of an American tour, absorbing the demise of Yankee Stadium and maybe of Wall Street as we thought we knew it, Zizek’s talk is a blast-furnace but not a blur. The theme through all Zizek’s gags is that the financial meltdown marks a seriously dangerous moment — dangerous not least because, as in the interpretation of 9.11, the right wing is ready to impose a narrative. And the left wing is caught without a narrative or a theory. “Today is the time for theory,” he says. “Time to withdraw and think.”

Dangerous moments are coming. Dangerous moments are always also a chance to do something. But in such dangerous moments, you have to think, you have to try to understand. And today obviously all the predominant narratives — the old liberal-left welfare state narrative; the post-modern third-way left narrative; the neo-conservative narrative; and of course the old standard Marxist narrative — they don’t work. We don’t have a narrative. Where are we? Where are we going? What to do? You know, we have these stupid elementary questions: Is capitalism here to stay? Are there serious limits to capitalism? Can we imagine a popular mobilization outside democracy? How should we properly react to ecology? What does it mean, all the biogenetic stuff? How to deal with intellectual property today? Things are happening. We don’t have a proper approach. It’s not only that we don’t have the answers. We don’t even have the right question.   more »

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Wednesday, October 22

Fredric Jameson's anti anti Utopianism: Archaeologies of the Future a review by P. Fitting

by Rich on October 22, 2008 05:20AM (PDT)

If anything Sri Aurobindo's vision is its own genre of Utopian vision. In a very real a sense it is the “completion of Utopian visions” (the divinization of Earth) Anyone in fact living in a community dedicated to Sri Aurobindo's vision lives in an Utopian community, which today might be called an intentional community. Fredric Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future, is in an omni-directional interrogation of history, class, structure, wish, will, imagination, transcendence, and post-humanity of Utopias

Jameson begins his study in full recognition of the spiritual Utopian urge. He quotes here from the evolutionary Science Fiction of Olaf Stapleton :

“It must not be supposed that this strange mental community blotted out the personalities of the individual explorers. Human speech has no accurate terms to describe our particular relationship . It would be as untrue to say that we had lost our individuality , or were dissolved in a communal individuality as to say that we were all the while distinct individuals . Through the pronoun “I” now applied to us all collectively, the pronoun “we” also applied to us."

I one respect namely unity of consciousness we were a single experiencing individual , yet at the same time in a very important and delightful manner distinct from one another. Through there was only a single communal “I” there was also, so to speak, a manifold and variegated “us” an observed company of very diverse personalities , each of whom expressed creatively his own utpian contribution to the whole enterprise of cosmical exploration, while all were bound together in a tissue of subtle personal relationships.”

Along with Lyotard, Jameson is one of the two beacons of post-modern cultural history. Although Jameson is perfectly cognizant of the failures of Utopian vision and the most recent anti-Utoipianism that runs through post-modernism, he probes the issue further to uncover what he calls an anti-anti Utopianism.

In this work rather than just applying post-structuralist scholarship as a solvent for exposing the ideologemes of Utopian fantasies, or simply deconstructing the “doxa” couched within the discursive formations of social, economic, and psychic, Utopian dimensions, his aim is also to reconstruct - and like Zizek whose wish it is to redeem the history of failed totalizing Utopian visions - he seems to wish to recover a vision of a new imaginative totality, while suggesting ways to remain mindful of the reification involved in collapsing the Utopian vision into any one of its dimensions

Utopian communities and Ashrams that aspire to something exceeding their humanity would do well to heed Jameson's warning below. If the intentional community one resides in fails to be mindful of how its multi-dimensional values and vision can collapse into class, cultural, ethnic, or personal battles its evolution will not end in the Superman, but rather as Nietzsche phrase it the contemptible Last Man.

" In addition we have been plagued by the perpetual reversion of difference and otherness into the same, and the discovery that our most energetic imaginative leaps into radical alternatives were little more than the projections of our own social moment and historical or subjective situation: the post-human thereby seeming more distant and impossible than ever"

The review of a portion of Jameson book is insightful even though its author Peter Fitting self-revealingly discloses he does not completely have his hands around it. (rc)   more »

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Monday, October 20

MAYAN SYNERGY, by Alehandra Libelula

by ronjon on October 20, 2008 11:11AM (PDT)

This article is a change of pace from the rather scholarly nature of many of SCIY's articles. It's a true report by a Mexican friend of mine named Alehandra of an unusually detailed dream that turns out to be remarkable synchronistic with events in her life. If it seems a bit too far out, I suggest viewing it as an interesting case study of the cultural imbededness of experiences that seem objectively real. - I can personally attest to the unpretentious honesty of the author.   more »

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Tuesday, October 7

Panoptic to Cyberoptics by Alexander Ried

by Rich on October 7, 2008 07:14PM (PDT)

In his 'Postscript on Control Societies,' Deleuze marks our emergence from the disciplinary, panoptic societies Foucault studies. He describes a movement from a society 'equipped with thermodynamic machinces presenting the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage' to a society functioning 'with information technology and computers, where the passive danger is noise and the active, piracy and viral contamination' (Deleuze, 1995: 180). Deleuze's observations suggest more than a shift in the metaphors by which we understand society; they indicate a shift in the material relationship between humans and machines. Deleuze and Guattari's work has extensively explored this relationship, from molecular proto-machines of desire to the molar assemblages of the state. Their work operates, in part, on the shifting boundaries between aesthetic and technological paradigms. Science Fiction has also worked upon this boundary. Though the generic term 'Science Fiction' only hints at the multiple possibilities for communication (and contamination) between the two, Deleuze and Guattari recognize its potential, noting that the genre 'has gone through a whole evolution taking it from animal, vegatable and mineral becomings to becomings of bacteria, viruses, molecules, and things impreceptible' (1987: 248).    more »

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Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies III

by Debashish on October 7, 2008 07:05PM (PDT)

The concluding section on Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies by Debashish Banerji continues its second installment's reflections on the Omniscience, Omnipotence and Omnipresence presented to us as the emerging destiny of post-Enlightenment Modernity and compares this destination with its appropriation and supercession in the Neo-Vedantic teleology of Sri Aurobindo. What are the differences, dangers and promises of these destinies and what are the conditions for achieving an alternate destination? ...   more »

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Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies - II

by Debashish on October 7, 2008 07:04PM (PDT)

This is a fragment constituting a continuation of Debashish Banerji's reflections on Techno-Capitalism as the epistemic regime of modernity and posible post-human futures at the eschatological cusp of history. Here the alignment of Marx and Hegel with the Enlightenment vision/teleology is contemplated and questions asked regarding a comparative alignment with the Neo-Vedantic teleology (if it can be called that) of Sri Aurobindo.   more »

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Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies - I

by Debashish on October 7, 2008 07:03PM (PDT)

Some relections on the continuing issue of techno-capitalism and post-human futures by Debashish Banerji. This is a first fragment highlighting Moishe Postone's commentaries on the late writings of Marx.   more »

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Saturday, October 4

Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers N. Katherine Hayles

by Rich on October 4, 2008 08:40PM (PDT)

I understand "human" and "posthuman" to be historically specific constructions that emerge from different configurations of embodiment, technology, and culture. A convenient point of reference for the human is the picture constructed by nineteenth-century U.S. and British anthropologists of "man" as a tool-user.(15) Using tools may shape the body (some anthropologists made this argument), but the tool nevertheless is envisioned as an object, apart from the body, that can be picked up and put down at will. When the claim could not be sustained that man's unique nature was defined by tool use (because other animals were shown also to use tools), the focus shifted during the early twentieth century to man the tool-maker. Typical is Kenneth P. Oakley's 1949 Man the Tool-Maker, a magisterial work with the authority of the British Museum behind it.(16) Oakley, in charge of the Anthropological Section of the museum's Natural History division, wrote in his introduction, "Employment of tools appears to be [man's] chief biological characteristic, for considered functionally they are detachable extensions of the forelimb" [p. 1]. The kind of tool he envisioned was mechanical rather than informational; it goes with the hand, not on the head. Significantly, he imagined the tool to be at once "detachable" and an "extension," separate from yet partaking of the hand. If the placement and kind of tool marks his affinity with the epoch of the human, its construction as a prosthesis points forward to the posthuman. Similar ambiguities informed the Macy Conference discussions taking place during the same period (1946-53), as participants wavered between a vision of man as a homeostatic self-regulating mechanism whose boundaries were clearly delineated from the environment,(17) and a more threatening, reflexive vision of a man spliced into an informational circuit that could change him in unpredictable ways. By the 1960s, the consensus within cybernetics had shifted dramatically toward reflexivity. By the 1980s, the inertial pull of homeostasis as a constitutive concept had largely given way to theories of self-organization that implied radical changes were possible within certain kinds of complex systems.(18) Through these discussions, the "posthuman" future of "humanity" began increasingly to be evoked. Examples range from Hans Moravec's invocation of a "postbiological" future in which human consciousness is downloaded into a computer, to the more sedate (and in part already realized) prospect of a symbiotic union between human and intelligent machine that Howard Rheingold calls "intelligence augmentation."(19) Although these visions differ in the degree and kind of interfaces they imagine, they concur that the posthuman implies a coupling so intense and multifaceted that it is no longer possible to distinguish meaningfully between the biological organism and the informational circuits in which it is enmeshed. Accompanying this change, I have argued, is a corresponding shift in how signification is understood and corporeally experienced. In contrast to Lacanian psycholinguistics, derived from the generative coupling of linguistics and sexuality, flickering signification is the progeny of the fascinating and troubling coupling of language and machine.   more »

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Sunday, September 21

Beyond Postmodernism?:Paul Virilio's Hypermodern Cultural Theory by John Armitage (C Theory)

by Rich on September 21, 2008 03:30PM (PDT)

Paul Virilio is one of the most significant French cultural theorists writing today.1 Increasingly hailed as the inventor of concepts such as 'dromology' (the 'science' of speed), Virilio is renowned for his declaration that the logic of acceleration lies at the heart of the organization and transformation of the modern world. However, Virilio's thought remains much misunderstood by many postmodern cultural theorists. In this article, and supporting the ground-breaking work of Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, I shall evaluate the contribution of Virilio's writings by suggesting that they exist beyond the terms of postmodernism and that they should be conceived of as a contribution to the emerging debate over 'hypermodernism'. Consequently, the article details Virilio's biography and the theoretical context of his work before outlining the essential contributions Virilio has made to contemporary cultural theory. In later sections an appraisal of Virilio's hypermodernism, together with a short evaluation of the controversies surrounding Virilio's work, will be provided before the conclusion.    more »

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Trajectories of the Catastrophic

by Rich on September 21, 2008 03:25PM (PDT)

To invent something is to invent an accident. To invent the ship is to invent the shipwreck; the space shuttle, the explosion. And to invent the electronic superhighway or the Internet is to invent a major risk which is not easily spotted because it does not produce fatalities like a shipwreck or a mid-air explosion. The information accident is, sadly, not very visible. It is immaterial like the waves that carry information.

- Yet you call yourself an "adept of technologies". I am an art critic of technologies, a fan worried about the propagandistic and sudden nature of the new technologies. When machines begin to be idolized, social catastrophe is never far behind.   more »

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Friday, August 8

Sri Aurobindo and the Future of Humanity

by Debashish on August 8, 2008 07:36PM (PDT)

This article attempts to sketch out Sri Aurobindo's contribution to the future of humanity as carried in his major texts. In doing so, it also tries to underline the cross-cultural nature of these texts and the disciplinary redefinitions implicit in them.   more »

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Tuesday, August 5

Frank Visser's Integral World: ideological genealogies

by Rich on August 5, 2008 08:53AM (PDT)

There is an extended essay on Integral World on a topic which began as a short article here on SCIY. The article was on ideological orientations of theories and practices which claim the title integral. The article on integral world goes into much greater depth exploring the genealogies of ideological orientations. The link is here:
http://www.integralworld.net/carlson.html

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Monday, June 30

Speech versus Writing in Derrida and Bhartrhari (Arche-writing vs. Sabdatattva) by Harold Coward: U. Hawaii Press

by Rich on June 30, 2008 08:21AM (PDT)

Rooted within language, even in its most holistic form, is the pregnant push towards sequencing, sparing, punctuation -- differentiation in time and space. In the Vākyapadīya, the Śabdatattva, symbolized by the seed sound AUM, [48] is sequenced by the power of time into the various recentions of the Veda and all spoken words. [49] For Derrida the image is one of the sign, as the linguistic whole, being differentiated by spacing (on the page) and interval or pause (in speaking) into articulated meaning and sound-image. It is the actualizing of this inherent force for differentiation that enables language to function. But it is, at the same time, the limit of language. As Derrida puts it, since a sign (the unity of signified and signifier) cannot be produced within the plentitude of absolute presence, there is, therefore, no full speech, no absolute truth or full meaning. [50] In the words of Lao Tzu, "The tao that can be spoken is not the eternal tao" [51] Or as Hegel once put it, "When speaks the soul, alas, the soul no longer speaks." [52] But whereas Lao Tzu and Hegel are mourning the inability of manifested language to make present the soul or the tao, Derrida and Bhartṛhari emphasize the positive contribution of articulated speech. The sphoṭa and the sign (Derrida's whole) are manifested, and in the dynamic tension of that manifestation lies truth.

Rather than arriving at a skepticism of language, namely, that it is devoid of any truth content (the conclusion of the Buddhists and many modern skeptical critics of language), truth is seen to be contained in the very dynamics of language itself. Thus Derrida's thesis that there is no referent outside of the text is not as nihilistic as it at first sounds, and Bhartṛhari's sphoṭa is not as artificial an entity as much Indian philosophy has assumed.

In Vākyapadīya I:5, there are two terms which Bhartṛhari uses to describe the Veda: it is the prāptyupāya or the means for the attainment of Brahman; and it is the anukāra or symbolization of Brahman. For now let us confine our attention to the term anukāra, which comes from the root kṛ, "to do" or "to make" and suggests the dynamic activity of the Word-Principle. The Vṛtti elucidates the verse by stating that the activity of the Vedic seers in speaking the mantras is the criterion case of word-making activity. The term mantra, notes Aurobindo, signifies a "crossing over" through thought (root man, "to think," and tṛ, "to cross over") from the Absolute or Unmanifested to the human experience of manifested language. [53] As pure Sanskrit language, the mantras are conjunctions of certain powerful seed syllables which induce a particular rhythm or vibration in the psychosomatic structure of consciousness and arouse a corresponding psychic state. Such seed sounds can be differentiated in a great variety of ways producing an immense progeny of language. The evocative power is at its height before the mantras become too locked into particular forms of articulation. Poetry is at its peak before language becomes too fully elaborated. Then it must be deconstructed or evolved backwards to recover its original power for signification. Articulation is necessary, but the further it goes the greater the loss of freedom and power within language.

This also seems to be what Derrida means when he refers to the prose book as a corpse of language which must be exited from or transcended [54] -- the delimiting of the multisignificant roots has been pursued to its logical conclusion, and the power of the word has been exhausted. The aim of the project of deconstruction, says Derrida, agreeing with Aurobindo, is to get back to metaphoric, poetic language, where the power for signification has not yet been used up. [55] Bhartṛhari also reminds us that as language divides and separates, this necessary process in the end can become a source of confusion. The process of difference, pushed to its logical conclusion, produces such a plethora of speaking accents that communication of knowledge is obstructed. [56] Unlike Derrida and Aurobindo, Bhartṛhari's solution is not to deconstruct or reverse the process of differentiation, but to control it by the imposition of strict grammatical rules (the science of the Grammarians) by which the power of the root mantras to convey knowledge and action will not be obfuscated. [57] Bhartṛhari, along with the other Grammarians, claims to have uncovered the pure forms of the correct unfolding of the patterns of differentiation inherent in the Śabdatattva and symbolized (anukāra) in criterion form in the initial speaking of the Vedas... [58]   more »

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Thursday, June 19

Born Again Ideology: religion, technology and terrorism (u tube) A. Kroker

by Rich on June 19, 2008 06:53PM (PDT)

We, the inhabitants of post-Enlightenment society might have thought that the current cultural horizon was exhausted by fateful struggles between modernism, postmodernism and posthumanism, but it turns out that the past will not be denied. Out of the ashes of the Book of Revelation emerges a form of faith-based politics which is, in every political sense, the ascendant historical tendency in American public life. Here, putting on the policy garments of the "culture of life" movement, there waging bitter political combat against the heresy of "same-sex marriage," now opposed to scientific claims concerning stem cell research, allying itself actively with the crusading spirit of American imperialist adventures, dominating the media with faith-based cultural perspectives, the New Protestant Ethic easily sweeps aside secular discourses in the interests of a vision of culture, society and politics which is as cosmological in its theological sweep as it is eschatological in its historical ambitions.

Understood metaphysically, it may well be that the insurgency represented by faith-based politics is the representative politicalform of what Heidegger's Nietzsche described as the age of "completed nihilism." In this interpretation, power in its mature (nihilistic) phase -- sick of itself, possessing no definitive goal, exhausted with the historical burden of remaining an active will, always sliding inexorably towards the nothingness of the will-less will -- desperately seeks out a sustaining purpose, an inspiring goal, a historical mission. Into the ethical vacuum at the disappearing center of nihilistic power flows a strong historical monism -- the New Protestant Ethic -- that will not be suppressed. To power's empty formalism, to liberal humanism's (emotionally) ineffective proceduralist ethics, to the empire's cybernetic equations written in violence and in blood across the landscape of imperial wars, the New Protestant Ethic provides a singular historical purpose -- the crusading spirit of evangelical Christianity which is reconstructionist, resurgent, and reanimated -- backed up by the semiotic purity of the foundational texts of the Old Testament. To those who would discount faith-based politics as only the most recent instance of the politics of cultural backlash, it should be noted that this fateful, and entirely original, entwinement of (fundamentalist) religion and (imperial) war technologies in the American mind may well be in the order of a great overturning. With faith-based politics, we are witness to something entirely unexpected, and for that reason, deeply ominous -- an ethical reconciliation between religion and technology in which the apocalyptic visions of the Old Testament will be future-coded in the power languages of empire politics and networked capitalism. What is now only in its preparatory rhetorical stages as the "culture of life" movement may soon emerge full-blown as the essential life-principle of American, and by imperialist extension world, culture. Arthur Kroker   more »

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Friday, June 13

In Defense of Lost Causes by Zizek, book review by Terry Eagleton (Times Literary Supplement)

by Rich on June 13, 2008 11:29AM (PDT)

Slavoj Žižek is less a philosopher than a phenomenon. The son of Slovenian Communists, and the representative on earth (so to speak) of the late French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, Žižek has been travelling the globe like an intellectual rock star for the past twenty years, gathering as he goes an immense fan club. He is outrageous, provocative and entertaining. ”.

He has been the subject of an art installation entitled Slavoj Žižek Does Not Exist, has starred in two films (Žižek! and The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema) and appears on one of his own dust jackets lying on Sigmund Freud’s couch beneath an image of female genitalia. His forty or so books, with titles such as The Sublime Object of Ideology, The Ticklish Subject, Enjoy Your Symptom! and Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Lacan (But Were Too Afraid To Ask Hitchcock), are dishevelled collages of ideas, ranging from Kant to computer science, St Augustine to Agatha Christie. There seems to be nothing in heaven or earth that is not grist to his intellectual mill. One digression spawns another, until the author seems as unclear as the reader about what he was supposed to be arguing. Moreover, to every reviewer’s horror, Žižek’s books are growing fatter by the year. The Parallax View, almost 400 densely printed pages on everything from biopolitics and Robert Schumann to brain science and Henry James, appeared only two years ago; In Defense of Lost Causes, a book that scoops up Lenin and Heidegger, Christ and Robespierre, Mao and ecology, is an even weightier door-stopper.

Slavoj Žižek, then, is Europe’s prime example of a postmodern philosopher. He is a cross between guru and gadfly, sage and showman. In typically postmodern style, his work leaps impudently over the frontiers between high and popular culture, swerving in the course of a paragraph from Kierkegaard to Mel Gibson. Trained as a philosopher in Ljubljana and Paris, he is a film buff, psychoanalytic theorist, amateur theologian and political analyst. He is a member of the Ljubljana Lacanian circle, as improbable an association as the Huddersfield Hegelians. When it comes to politics, he is as adept at unpacking the intricacies of Rousseau or Carl Schmitt as he is at delivering instant journalistic judgements on Parisian rioting, the war on terror, or Turkey’s relations with the European Union. He was once a politician himself back home in Slovenia, and the shadow of the Yugoslavian conflict falls over his mordant commentaries on war, racism, nationalism and ethnic strife. also included a Zizek utube video on belief in Derrida and Butler rc...   more »

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Justice vs. Power aka Chomsky vs. Foucault, u tube

by Rich on June 13, 2008 11:11AM (PDT)

In 1971, American linguist/social activist Noam Chomsky squared off against French philosopher Michel Foucault on Dutch television ... the program was entitled 'Human Nature: Justice Vs. Power' and offered sharp contrasts between the more traditional view of 'human nature' and what would become a postmodernist perspective ... Chomsky, following a rationalist lineage going back to at least Plato, believes that there is a foundational 'nature' and that its positive aspects (love, creativity, recognizing and embracing justice) must be realized, while Foucault remains skeptical of any such notion... for him, the issue is not so much whether 'justice' or 'human nature' 'exists,' but how they have historically (and currently) function in society ... in regard to justice, he says (this is not included in the clips): "... the idea of justice in itself is an idea which in effect has been invented and put to work in different types of societies as an instrument of a certain political and economic power or as a weapon against that power..." The point of any political struggle, for Foucault, is to alter the 'power relations' in which we all find ourselves ...   more »

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Sunday, May 25

Cogito in the Matrix by Erik Davis

by Rich on May 25, 2008 06:01PM (PDT)

Erik Davis is one of the most talented authors writing on the subject of technology, culture, and spirituality. This article from the book prefiguring cyberculture from MIT University Press is representative of the insightful work he has done. The concern of this piece revolves around the construction of subjectivity in an epoch which can perhaps best be called posthuman.rc

Of all the lumbering giants of the Western philosophical tradition, none resembles a punching bag more than René Descartes. He gets it from all sides: cognitive scientists and phenomenologists, post-structuralists and deep ecologists, lefty science critics and New Age holists. The main beef, of course, is the stark divide that Descartes drew between mind and body, a dualism that, by its very claim of rationality, now appears even more obscene than the religious dualisms that stretch back to Zarathustra. Nearly across the board, contemporary thought calls us to defend and affirm the body that Descartes rendered a machine, a soulless automata under our spiritual thumb. It doesn't really matter that the body so affirmed is itself multiple and even contradictory: the materialist object of biology, the phenomenological bed of Being, a feminist site of anti-patriarchal critique, the New Age animal immersed in Gaia's enchanted web. Regardless of the framework, the song remains the same: we are bodyminds deeply embedded in the world. For many thinkers now, the sort of abstract, disengaged soul-pilot pictured by Descartes -- the "I" immortalized in the famous cogito ergo sum -- is not only bad thinking, but, ideologically speaking, bad news.

In many ways I share this urge to trace the networks that embed consciousness in phenomenal reality, and to insist on the extraordinary (though not exclusive) value of causal explanations rooted in the history of matter. But I am no absolutist. The fact that Descartes keeps popping up like a Jack-in-the-box suggests that a splinter of the cogito remains in our minds, some fragmentary intuition or insightful glimpse that we cannot accommodate and so wall off in order to reject. I am not interested in philosophically defending the cogito, or at least the metaphysical cogito we are familiar with: the rational and disengaged instrumentalist manipulating the empty machinery of matter. But I am interesting in probing for that splinter, which I suspect is lodged somewhere in the apparently yawning gap between self-conscious awareness and the phenomenal world -- a gap that, despite some hearty attacks from nondualists East and West, continues to inform subjectivity. ....   more »

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