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Monday, December 1
Amitav Ghosh: Sea of Poppies interview Radio Open Sorce/ review TimesOnline
by
Rich
on December 1, 2008 08:20PM (PST)
“One of my countrymen has put the matter very simply,” as Burnham says in the novel. “‘Jesus Christ is Free Trade and Free Trade is Jesus Christ.’ Truer words, I believe, were never spoken. If it is God’s will that opium be used as an instrument to open China to his teachings, then so be it. For myself, I confess I can see no reason why any Englishman should abet the Manchu tyrant in depriving the people of China of this miraculous substance.”
Popular will, democracy, representative government have as little to do with the action of Ghosh’s novel as Congress did with the war in Iraq. “Parliament?” Ben Burnham scoffs to a disbelieving Indian raja. “Parliament,” Burnham laughs, “will not know of the war until it is over. Be assured, sir, that if such matters were left to Parliament there would be no Empire.”
Our free-ranging conversation touches on, among other things,Niall Ferguson's apology for empire; the narrowing discourse in American media; Afghanistan and Pakistan today; the polyglot world of sailing ships; the anthropological eye; and the history of Asian words in English.
It is not his project as a novelist and an Indian, Amitav Ghosh remarks, to break the “imperial gaze” of British writers from Kipling to Conrad. Rather he would love to recapture the cosmopolitan vision of the American, Herman Melville — the real precursor, he says, of Barack Obama..... radio open source. more »
Friday, November 21
Explanation of my Stand wrt The Lives of Sri Aurobindo
by
Debashish
on November 21, 2008 12:19AM (PST)
Since some of my friends at the Sri Aurobindo ashram have expressed puzzlement at my stand against the "Brahmins of Pondicherry" in the matter of the book The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, I am copying here a letter written by me to a senior and respected member of the ashram.
That the views expressed here are not "popular" is well known. But I am wondering how many others who have read the book share any of these views. I would encourage them to express themselves in the comments following this posting. more »
Tuesday, November 11
Competing Visions of History in Internal Islamic Discourse and Islamic-Western Dialogue - ABDULLAHI A. AN-NA'IM
by
Debashish
on November 11, 2008 04:31PM (PST)
Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law at Emory University School of Law. Originally from Sudan, An-Na'im is a disciple of nationalist leader and Islamic reformer and Sufi, Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, who was executed in 1985 by the regime of President Gaafar Nimeiry. Taha's pronouncement of his first political incarceration by the British is reminiscent of Sri Aurobindo's: "When I settled in prison I began to realize that I was brought there by my Lord and thence I started my Khalwah with Him."
An-Na'im's specialties include human rights in Islam and cross-cultural issues in human rights. He is the director of the Religion and Human Rights Program at Emory. He also participates in Emory's Center for the Study of Law and Religion. An-Naim was formerly the Executive Director of the African bureau of Human Rights Watch. He argues for a synergy and interdependence between human rights, religion, critical thought and secularism, instead of a dichotomy and incompatibility between them. more »
Saturday, November 8
American Transcendentalism: A History by Philip F. Gura Reviewed by Laura Miller
by
Debashish
on November 8, 2008 08:15PM (PST)
"What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us, is Idealism. As thinkers, mankind have ever divided into two sects, the Materialists and the Idealists; the first class beginning on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final, and say, the senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot tell." (Ralph Waldo Emerson in a lecture at the Masonic Temple in Boston in 1842.)
Philip F. Gura's history of American Transcendentalism was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction in 2008. In this work, Gura brings us into close contact with some of the deeper aspirations underlying American idealism. At once universalist, intuitional and critical, the contextual and social development of Transcendentalism in mid-19th c. America, drawing on mystic Christianity, Vedanta, German Romanticism, Enlightenment Philosophy and other sources, continues to flow like an invisible river under the surface of American capitalism, inspiring a vision of the future convergent with that held up by Sri Aurobindo. A luminous moment in American history, this movement and its founders are discussed in this work as struggling with its complexities with a prophetic intuition but without adequate internal or external resources. In today's America and today's world, the legacy of the Transcendentalists opens once more a chapter of hope and an invitation to further its projects with renewed understanding and care. more »
Cornel West: Hope on a Tight Rope (AfroToronto)
by
Rich
on November 8, 2008 04:26PM (PST)
Dr. Cornel West is one of the most eloquent scholars on Race Matters in America. In his new book " Hope on a Tightrope, West indirectly challenges Obama to prove that the “Audacity of Hope” is more than a campaign slogan “ asking, “What price are you willing to pay?” And the author goes on to warn that “American politics has a way of grinding the best out of a person” and that “it reduces their prudent judgment into opportunistic behavior.” more »
Thursday, November 6
Representing Swami Vivekananda: Some Issues and Debates By Makarand Paranjape
by
Debashish
on November 6, 2008 09:15PM (PST)
Controversy surrounding the representation of a "nationalized" Indian mystic comes late to Sri Aurobindo. Pre-dating the latter in personal chronology as in nationalism and the modern articulation of a global Vedantic spirituality, Vivekananda precedes also in the matter of contemporary debates on representation.
In the present 2005 piece by Makarand Paranjape, some of the recent histories of representation and the all too familiar stakes are rehearsed and can be instructive to our consideration of the present controversy raging around "The Lives of Sri Aurobindo." Who gets to authorize the representation? What are the relative uses of hagiographny and biography? Are not both of these varieties of fiction? What purposes do they serve? Where does cultural tradition come in? What is the place of hermeneutics in all this?
Paranjape's reflections and call for a balanced realism is much needed for us to heed and reflect on in these times of myth-making and madness. more »
Monday, November 3
The Phenomenon: The Audacity of Hope (a review by M. Tomasky)
by
Rich
on November 3, 2008 08:47PM (PST)
I first posted this article here in Nov 2006 before Barack Obama declared his intention to run for president. Since then his historic candidacy has changed the political landscape of the United States, or at least that is the promise should he be elected.
This article is a review of Obama's book: The Audacity of Hope
by Michael Tomasky, an especially astute political journalist.
The article is an interesting read now fast forwarded two years into the future.
The word "phenomenon"—from the Greek word phainesthai, "to appear," and related to another Greek word that is the root of the English word "fantasy"—possesses a unique potency in our culture. While scientists may use it to mean anything observable, it is popularly applied to rock stars, movie stars, top athletes, and the like. Even today, in our hype-drenched society, it is not used promiscuously. It is reserved for that special minority of people who seem to have singular talent and potential; for those with the ability, that is, to fulfill our collective fantasies. more »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
Monday, October 20
Corrections to textual excerpts of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs
by
Rich
on October 20, 2008 07:28PM (PDT)
There is a movement of folks in Pondicherry who are so upset by the biography that Peter Heehs has written entitled The Lives of Sri Aurobindo that they have instigated a movement to discredit the author. Some people have even become so embolden as to try and have him ejected from the Ashram itself. The folks who have spurred this on have in the course of their attacks on Mr. Heehs openly distorted his text by decontextualizing portions of it or by a series of selective omissions to make it suit their own interpretation of events that facilitate their own story they wish to tell.
Because of this movement I have decided to post all the portions of the text that have been decontextualized or omitted and reprint them with corrections to demonstrate how the text from the book actually reads in its entire context. The portions of the text that have been lifted to suit the purposes of those with an agenda against the author of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo are in black, the missing portions of the text that are needed to give the entire context of the narrative are in red. As everyone will see there is a lot of red in the text.:
more »
Thursday, October 16
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside - an Introduction by Diane Christine
by
Debashish
on October 16, 2008 11:15PM (PDT)
Doris Lessing, 2007 Nobel awardee for Literature, gave a set of lectures in 1986, which were published under the name "Prisons We Choose to Live Inside." In this book, the author draws upon the lessons of history to show how easily the primitive instincts of human beings can and have been aroused and how manipulable we have shown ourselves to be under the pressure of rhetoric particularly by political, religious, ideological and commercial interests.
But the lessons of the past seem to leave little trace on our subjective progress. Are we helplessly doomed to ever repeat the patterns of the unconscious group mind or can we emerge as a race to a level of freedom and choice? A good part of Sri Aurobindo's work also deals with these questions - and answers them from a much deeper place of realization. But what must we do to embody this?
It is hoped that this short introduction by Diane Christine will whet our appetites to read the book and ponder its problems in our own lives. more »
Thursday, October 9
'Reflections on Machine Consciousness,' by William Irwin Thompson
by
ronjon
on October 9, 2008 08:57PM (PDT)
I've taken the liberty of typing in all of Chapter 4 of my copy of this important book, because it powerfully addresses one of the main themes of SCIY, the manifold relationships between science, culture, and consciousness. (ron)
"It is a paradox of the work of Artificial Intelligence that in order to grant consciousness to machines, the engineers first labor to subtract it from humans, as they work to foist upon philosophers a caricature of consciousness in the digital switches of weights and gates in neural nets. As the caricature goes into public circulation with the help of the media, it becomes an acceptable counterfeit currency, and the humanistic philosopher of mind soon finds himself replaced by the robotics scientist. ...
"Both the mechanists and the mystics say that we are now at a great bifurcation in human evolution. The mechanists like Ray Kurzweil, Danny Hillis, and Hans Moravec prophesy that we are at the end of the human era, and that 'nanobots' are about to be embedded in our bodies until our antique organs of flesh are entirely surrounded by a new silicon noosphere of networked computers. Like ancient mitochondria or chloroplasts surrounded by the gigantic eukaryotic cells, we are about to be engulfed in the next evolutionary stage. So the mechanists see noetic technologies surrounding human culture and consciousness and compressing it into an endosymbiont in a larger and swifter and more elegant evolutionary vehicle. ...
"Mystics flip this literalism over to see technology as a system of externalized metaphors that derive from pre-existing ontological modes at play and at large in the universe... For the mystic — be she Cabbalist or Sufi — an angel is a 'Celestial Intelligence' — a form of cosmic noetic organization that does not require a detour through animal evolution. So when Kurzweil claims that by 2030 implanted nanobots in the bloodstream will enable humans to turn off to the outside world to attune to a virtual reality, the mystic would recognize a literalist rendering of the process of meditation. Kurzweil's vision of the world in 2030 reminds me of Borges's 'Library of Babel'. 'I suspect that the human species — the unique species — is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, useless, incorruptible, secret'. [2] And here we need to be sensitive to the full force of Borges's use of the word 'Babel'. ... " more »
Tuesday, October 7
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 »
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 »
Saturday, September 27
Proust was a Neuroscientist: N.Y. Times Review
by
Rich
on September 27, 2008 10:34PM (PDT)
Since the subject of memory, interpretation and the possibility of the truth telling of history has been raised it seems like good time for a supporting reference both from the arts and sciences
Not only this but Lehrer's book, which I just finished is also heartening in that it opens a possibility of a 4th culture.
If C.P. Snow in 1959 proposed a 3rd culture enjoining the arts and sciences to date this 3rd culture has been dominated by scientist examining the arts with causality still being reduced to
physical processes.
Third cultural writings are considered those by such authors as
Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, Oliver Sacks, V.S. Ramachandran,
Steve Weinberg, Mitchio Kaku. E.O. Wilson et al. Although certainly thought provocative and entertaining the works of the above authors fail to achieve a harmonizing of artistic and scientific cultures because they ultimately privilege science. Lehrer who is equally skilled in science attempts to rebalance the situation in which the Arts are
equally as important to the narration of what we call reality.
Proust’s goal in “Remembrance of Things Past” is to anatomize memory. His literary examinations teach him that smell and taste are the most intense of remembered sensations. “When from a long distant past nothing subsists,” he writes, “after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone ... bear unflinchingly ... the vast structure of recollection.” Fast forward some 90 years to 2002, when Rachel Herz, a psychologist at Brown, shows that smell and taste are indeed uniquely potent evokers of memory. This power, she speculates, lies in the direct connection the gustatory and olfactory nerves have to the hippocampus, which Lehrer calls “the center of the brain’s long-term memory. more »
Tuesday, July 1
Democratic Congress signs off on Funding Major Escalation of Iranian Covert Operations, Seymour Hersh (Alternet)
by
Rich
on July 1, 2008 10:14AM (PDT)
Well just when you thought the Bush War Machine was winding down, news comes out of the ramp up for covert military/intelligence operations in Iran. What makes the matter so much more disgusting is that the Democratic Leadership has signed off on the funding for their project. The following interview with Seymour Hersh - the Pulitzer Prize winning dissident journalist - details the story which he just broke in the New Yorker Magazine.... more »
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