Science, Culture and Integral Yoga

Reinventing the Sacred by Stuart Kauffman (preface)

Rich — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 21:00:37 -0700

Second of two articles on a new science whose principles are that of emergence rather than reduction. The idea of reinventing the sacred is an interesting one since emergence rekindles a wonder in a Mystery that is irreducible. Interesting also is the fact that even as Jaron Lanier, Staurt Kaufmann, and others concerned with the science of complexity steadfastly avoid mapping a specific metaphysical narrative on to their descriptions of reality, in the end they wind up with a view which shares much with Advaita or Buddhist constructions of the world.

Although the new science of emergence attempts to speak to human agency and the role of the observer, the phenomenological and social spheres of experience seem a bit lacking in its calculations for achieving what could be called an integral view, but the attempt is valuable nontheless rc...

Reductionism has led to very powerful science. One has only to think of Einstein’s gen- eral relativity and the current standard model in quantum physics, the twin pillars of twentieth century physics. Molecular biology is a product of reductionism, as is the Human Genome Project.

But Laplace’s particles in motion allow only happenings. There are no meanings, no values, no doings. The reductionist worldview led the existentialists in the mid- twentieth century to try to find value in an absurd, meaningless universe, in our hu- man choices. But to the reductionist, the existentialists’ arguments are as void as the spacetime in which their particles move. Our human choices, made by ourselves as human agents, are still, when the full science shall have been done, mere happenings, ultimately to be explained by physics.

In this book I will demonstrate the inadequacy of reductionism. Even major physicists now doubt its full legitimacy. I shall show that biology and its evolution cannot be re- duced to physics alone but stand in their own right. Life, and with it agency, came na- turally to exist in the universe. With agency came values, meaning, and doing, all of which are as real in the universe as particles in motion. “Real” here has a particular meaning: while life, agency, value, and doing presumably have physical explanations in any specific organism, the evolutionary emergence of these cannot be derived from or reduced to physics alone. Thus, life, agency, value, and doing are real in the universe. This stance is called emergence. Weinberg notwithstanding, there are explanatory ar- rows in the universe that do not point downward. A couple in love walking along the banks of the Seine are, in real fact, a couple in love walking along the banks of the Seine, not mere particles in motion. More, all this came to exist without our need to call upon a Creator God.....

Avatars in the Living Room: 2nd Life in Augmented Reality

Rich — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 17:09:26 -0700

This demo shows the use of Second Life as a platform for Augmented Reality. With our modified Second Life client, avatars and other Second Life graphicss can be superimposed perspectively correct on a live video stream and in real-time.

Welcome to Augmented Reality

Rich — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 09:25:02 -0700

Augmented reality combines features of a virtual environment with the real world. Most often, the augmentation is visual, with a user sporting an eyepiece connected to a wearable computer and positioning equipment. By tracking where the user’s head is and what he is seeing, the computer is able to overlay graphics and/or text onto his vision.

Obama Makes History

Rich — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 10:42:53 -0700

Barack Obama has made history. Here are some well considered meditations on the historic events and news coverage of the past week courtesy of Jon Stewart.

Beyond Reductionism: by Jaron Lanier (Edge)

Rich — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 09:39:09 -0700

First of two articles on a new science whose principles are that of emergence rather than reduction. The idea of reinventing the sacred is an interesting one since emergence rekindles a wonder in an irreducible Mystery. Interesting also is the fact that even as Lanier, Kaufmann, and other complexity scientist steadfastly avoid mapping a specific metaphysical narrative on to their descriptions of reality, in the end wind up with a view which shares much with Advaita or Buddhist constructions of the world. However, although the new science of emergence attempts to speak to human agency and observation, the phenomenological and social spheres of experience seem lacking in their calculations for achieving what could be called an integral view rc...

I would like to begin a discussion about the first glimmerings of a new scientific world view — beyond reductionism to emergence and radical creativity in the biosphere and human world. This emerging view finds a natural scientific place for value and ethics, and places us as co-creators of the enormous web of emerging complexity that is the evolving biosphere and human economics and culture. In this scientific world view, we can ask: Is it more astonishing that a God created all that exists in six days, or that the natural processes of the creative universe have yielded galaxies, chemistry, life, agency, meaning, value, consciousness, culture without a Creator. In my mind and heart, the overwhelming answer is that the truth as best we know it, that all arose with no Creator agent, all on its wondrous own, is so awesome and stunning that it is God enough for me and I hope much of humankind.

Thus, beyond the new science that glimmers a new world view, we have a new view of God, not as transcendent, not as an agent, but as the very creativity of the universe itself. This God brings with it a sense of oneness, unity, with all of life, and our planet — it expands our consciousness and naturally seems to lead to an enhanced potential global ethic of wonder, awe, responsibility within the bounded limits of our capacity, for all of life and its home, the Earth, and beyond as we explore the Solar System....

Cogito in the Matrix by Erik Davis

Rich — Sun, 25 May 2008 18:01:15 -0700

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. ....

James Joyce and the pre-history of Cyberspace by Donald Theall (Hypermedia Joyce Studies)

Rich — Sun, 25 May 2008 14:54:46 -0700

Donald Theall, Marshall McLuhan's first graduate student recently past away. Theall like McLuhan was also a brilliant Joyce scholar and saw much of what we now know as cyberspace prefigured in his works. - rc

The Gutenberg Galaxy, a book which redirected the way that artists, critics, scholars and communicators viewed the role of technological mediation in communication and expression, had its origin in Marshall McLuhan's desire to write a book called "The Road to _Finnegans Wake_." It has not been widely recognized just how important James Joyce's major writings were to McLuhan, or to other major figures (such as Jorge Luis Borges, John Cage, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, and Jacques Lacan) who have written about aspects of communication involving technological mediation, speech, writing, and electronics.

While all of these connections should be explored, the most enthusiastic Joycean of them all, McLuhan, provides the most specific bridge linking the work of Joyce and his modernist contemporaries to the development of electric communication and to the prehistory of cyberspace and virtual reality. McLuhan's scouting of "the Road to _Finnegans Wake_" established him as the first major disseminator of those Joycean insights which have become the unacknowledged basis for our thinking about technoculture, just as the pervasive McLuhanesque vocabulary has become a part, often an unconscious one, of our verbal heritage. In the mid-80s, William Gibson first identified the emergence of cyberspace as the most recent moment in the development of electromechanical communications, telematics and virtual reality. Cyberspace, as Gibson saw it, is the simultaneous experience of time, space, and the flow of multi-dimensional, pan-sensory data: ...

Manufacturing a Food Crisis (The Nation)

Rich — Thu, 22 May 2008 12:48:27 -0700

Nigerian child waits for food (AP photo)

This is not simply the erosion of national food self-sufficiency or food security but what Africanist Deborah Bryceson of Oxford calls "de-peasantization"--the phasing out of a mode of production to make the countryside a more congenial site for intensive capital accumulation. This transformation is a traumatic one for hundreds of millions of people, since peasant production is not simply an economic activity. It is an ancient way of life, a culture, which is one reason displaced or marginalized peasants in India have taken to committing suicide. In the state of Andhra Pradesh, farmer suicides rose from 233 in 1998 to 2,600 in 2002; in Maharashtra, suicides more than tripled, from 1,083 in 1995 to 3,926 in 2005. One estimate is that some 150,000 Indian farmers have taken their lives. Collapse of prices from trade liberalization and loss of control over seeds to biotech firms is part of a comprehensive problem, says global justice activist Vandana Shiva: "Under globalization, the farmer is losing her/his social, cultural, economic identity as a producer. A farmer is now a 'consumer' of costly seeds and costly chemicals sold by powerful global corporations through powerful landlords and money lenders locally...."

Remembering Dr.L.M. Singhvi by Aryadeep

Rich — Thu, 22 May 2008 10:28:17 -0700

Dr. L. M. Singhvi, an eminent Indian citizen and jurist who served India's cultural, literary, legislative and public life in numerous ways, including as Indian High Commissioner to U.K.; as Chairman of Jnana Pith Pravara Parishad, as Chairman of High Level Committee on Indian Diaspora passed away on 6th October 2007 at the age 76. Here, an Aurovilian remembers his association with Auroville and his service to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother....

Virtual Panopticon: China's Surveillance Society and American Corporations by Naomi Klein (Rolling Stone)

Rich — Tue, 20 May 2008 12:50:36 -0700

China's All-Seeing Eye
With the help of U.S. defense contractors, China is building the prototype for a high-tech police state. It is ready for export.

In all of these cases, U.S. multinationals have offered the same defense: Cooperating with draconian demands to turn in customers and censor material is, unfortunately, the price of doing business in China. Some, like Google, have argued that despite having to limit access to the Internet, they are contributing to an overall increase of freedom in China. It's a story that glosses over the much larger scandal of what is actually taking place: Western investors stampeding into the country, possibly in violation of the law, with the sole purpose of helping the Communist Party spend billions of dollars building Police State 2.0. This isn't an unfortunate cost of doing business in China: It's the goal of doing business in China. "Come help us spy!" the Chinese government has said to the world. And the world's leading technology companies are eagerly answering the call.

As The New York Times recently reported, aiding and abetting Beijing has become an investment boom for U.S. companies. Honeywell is working with Chinese police to "set up an elaborate computer monitoring system to analyze feeds from indoor and outdoor cameras in one of Beijing's most populated districts." General Electric is providing Beijing police with a security system that controls "thousands of video cameras simultaneously, and automatically alerts them to suspicious or fast-moving objects, like people running." IBM, meanwhile, is installing its "Smart Surveillance System" in the capital, another system for linking video cameras and scanning for trouble, while United Technologies is in Guangzhou, helping to customize a "2,000-camera network in a single large neighborhood, the first step toward a citywide network of 250,000 cameras to be installed before the Asian Games in 2010." By next year, the Chinese internal-security market will be worth an estimated $33 billion — around the same amount Congress has allocated for reconstructing Iraq...

Future Bodies: Human Animal Hybrid Embryo ok'd in U.K. (Washington Post)

Rich — Mon, 19 May 2008 21:32:33 -0700

human/cow embryonic stem cells
Photo courtesy University of Wisconsin Board of Regents

Although some have concerns about the crossing of human and ape species, the possible creation of a hybrid Hanuman or other entities previously thought to belong only to myth :

"In April 2005, the National Academies -- chartered by Congress to advise the nation on matters of science -- released a report affirming that scientists should be allowed to create such entities if the experiments were approved by special review boards. The advisers came down against the creation of human-monkey or human-ape embryos, as well as experiments in which a human-like brain might develop in a non-human animal" wp.

The UK has just approved research for the crossing the boarders of human bovine species limits to harvest stem cells:

"The bill would allow scientists to continue injecting human DNA into cows' eggs that have had virtually all their genetic material removed, as well as other hybrid embryo processes for stem cell research. Scientists say the embryos would not be allowed to develop for more than 14 days. "wp

In England apparently there has been a long reasoned debate on the issue, one has to wonder however what is going on with embryo research in emerging nations where the market for experimentation may be seen in only the context of its exchange value. Whatever the case it appears our future bodies will in some way or other cohabit, or draw upon a physical (subtle physical) world shared with other species

What follows is a report from the Washington Post on recent events in England along with some further context of chimeras from the Center on Bioethics and Public Policy. rc...

Inter-species hybrids and chimera are entities created from the mixing of two or more different species. Hybrids are organisms whose genetic make up has been created by mixing the genes of two or more species; typically the gametes of two species are fused to create a single zygote. Chimera are organisms consisting of two or more different populations of genetically distinct cells; for example two fertilised eggs or early embryos may be fused together and develop as a single organism....

Zizek's My Space Page

Rich — Sun, 18 May 2008 09:41:56 -0700

A link will take you to Zizek's my space page, there you can meet some of his friends, Nietzsche, Freud, Jameson, Marx (Groucho) . The wild and crazy guy of critical theory does My Space. As a bonus included is also an article on the symbolic and real in cyberspace:

Are the pessimistic cultural criticists (from Jean Baudrillard to Paul Virilio) justified in their claim that cyberspace ultimately generates a kind of proto-psychotic immersion into an imaginary universe of hallucinations, unconstrained by any symbolic Law or by any impossibility of some Real? If not, how are we to detect in cyberspace the contours of the other two dimensions of the Lacanian triad ISR, the Symbolic and the Real?....

George Bush and Progress (Bill Moyers and John Stewart in conversation)

Rich — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 21:33:34 -0800

As I have stated elsewhere progress is a feature of the consciousness of the observer viewing the world. And George Bush certainly lives in a world of his own.

Time and Temporality in the Network Society edited by Robert Hassan and Ronald E. Purser

Rich — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 09:11:09 -0700

For better or worse, the information and communication revolution has transformed our economic, cultural, and political world. On an individual scale, many of the traditional social, political, and cultural habits of mind and ways of being that evolved under the regime of the clock are changing rapidly, including the way individuals save, spend, and optimize time. At the organizational level, the pacing of innovation, levels of production, and new product development, are no longer temporally fixed due to the effects of living in a networked society and in the networked economy. 24/7 brings together leading thinkers from a variety of disciplines to analyze the differing relationships to time in an accelerated society. Offering much-needed insight and perspective into new issues and problems, this unique volume is the first to offer a wide range of cutting-edge thought on the new economic, cultural, and political world of the networked society. The book includes contributions from the leading scholars in this area, such as Barbara Adam, Mike Crang, Thomas Hylland Erikson, and Geert Lovink. ...

Noam Chomsky on India-Pakistan relations

Rich — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 09:33:10 -0700

Michael Shank: Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmood Kasuri cites a sea change in India-Pakistan relations, agreements have been forged requiring a pre-notification of missile testing, and both countries will soon engage in a fourth round of composite dialogues. What else needs to happen to provide a positive tipping point in Indo-Pak relations?

Noam Chomsky: There are a couple of major problems that need to be dealt with. One of them, of course, is Kashmir. The question is, can they figure out a joint solution to the Kashmir conflict? ...

Political Horse Trading in Pakistan (Der Spiegel)

Rich — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 09:38:18 -0700

...Listening to former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, one might think that the much-discussed power-sharing deal between her and embattled President General Pervez Musharraf is a done deal. And surely, both sides stand to benefit from what would undoubtedly be a marriage of convenience. But with increasing pressure from upcoming elections and difficult compromises demanded by both sides, the hastily arranged union may fail before it is sealed. ...

The Record of Yoga: the issue of publication

Rich — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 08:50:25 -0700

Ok, the following is what I have come up with after researching the publication history of the Record of Yoga. After getting responses from very credible sources who have been close to the project what follows is a brief summary:

It is unlikely that Sri Aurobindo kept his diary with the idea of publishing it. If he had written it for that purpose, it would have been easier for skeptics to dismiss it. The fact that it lay around for 60 years or so before it was discovered shows that he had no such intention and enhances its credibility. Part of its value lies in the fact that he was not trying to prove anything to anyone except himself.

The Record of Yoga was found in Sri Aurobindo's notebooks among thousands of pages of writings he had not published and in many cases probably would never have published himself. If we went strictly by his stated intentions about the publication of his writings, his complete works might come to about ten volumes. For example, in 1949 he explicitly ruled out the publication of The Future Poetry, The Secret of the Veda and A Defence of Indian Culture without extensive revision which he never had time to do. So his final instructions regarding these books were that they should not be published. There is no such written statement barring the publication of the Record of Yoga. Of course the question simply didn't arise during his lifetime - or the Mother's. The actual decision to start publishing the Record was made after getting the approval of Nolini Kanta Gupta.

William Blake Archive

Rich — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 21:13:27 -0700

A hypermedia archive sponsored by the Library of Congress and supported by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia. With past support from the Getty Grant Program, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Preservation and Access Division of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Sun Microsystems, and Inso Corporation. ...

The Indian Spiritual Bomb - India's Mission: a fusion of religions by Dr. Ananda Reddy

Rich — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 08:29:52 -0700

...India has had the master-key to this serious problem -- the key named 'spirituality' which looks at expressions of life, religions, art, science, businesses, services - all as forms and names of the single spirit, the Divine. A spiritual person is one who has the fundamental and essential experience of whatever religion he may choose to belong, and has a catholicity of understanding, which comes essentially out of his deeper inner self, of an appreciation of all facets and expressions of life as facets of a single Reality.

Secondly, we have to bring this inner-experience into our thoughts and emotions and actions - it is the best way to lead us beyond religions, into the spirituality of the future. This adherence to a higher truth without the barriers of customs, creeds, ceremonies is the thing that is wanted in India. It may seem an ideal that is beyond the possibility of the common man. But a spiritual symbiosis is the only way of the Future. The principle of symbiosis, exemplified in the 100th monkey, can come of use here: a strong nucleus of spiritual aspirants, a small group of seekers of the adventure of consciousness, seeking and assimilating the New Consciousness is enough to start an atomic reaction which could one day explode as a spiritual-bomb engulfing all humanity in a new Light and Life. ...

Hyderabad Bombing kills at least 42 (Washington Post)

Rich — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 08:29:13 -0700

Hyderabad, a city of around 6 million, has a long history of communal violence between Muslims and Hindus. On May 18, a bombing at one of India's largest and most historically important mosques, the Mecca Masjid, killed 11 people as Friday prayers were ending.

Hyderabad has recently become a symbol of India's economic boom, an increasingly cosmopolitan center and hub of software and call-center jobs. The city has a thriving Muslim quarter and is renowned as a center of Islamic culture.

Officials said the attacks on Saturday were an attempt by "anti-social elements" to spark a wave of communal violence. There was no immediate assertion of responsibility.

The Indian Nuclear Bomb - Long in the Making by M.V. Ramana

Rich — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 08:24:32 -0700

On 11 May 1998, the Buddha's birth anniversary, India tested three nuclear devices. Two days later, two more tests were conducted. After these tests, the Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee triumphantly announced that India was now a Nuclear Weapon State. Though India's nuclear capability has been public knowledge for quite some time, the tests took the world by surprise. The decision to test was an immediate, political one; however, India's nuclear weapons program has a long history.

Understanding Meta-Media by Lev Manovich (C Theory)

Rich — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 22:15:23 -0700

This is why I refer to this type of new media as "meta-media." A meta-media object contains both language and meta-language -- both the original media structure (a film, an architectural space, a sound track) and the software tools that allow the user to generate descriptions of, and to change, this structure.

If you think that meta-media is a conservative phenomenon which 'betrays' the movement of computer culture towards developing its own unique cultural techniques -- Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, simulation, database navigation, virtual worlds, etc. -- you are wrong. Since the 1970s modern computing has been grounded in Alan Kay's concept (influenced by previous groundbreaking work in human computer interface, most importantly Sutherland's 1962 Sketchpad software) of computers as "personal expressive media." After he arrived at Xerox PARC, Kay directed the development of a word processor program, a music composition program, a paint program, and other tools that redefined the computer as a simulation machine for old media. So while the routine use of computers as media simulators was not possible until the 1980s, the paradigmatic shift was already defined by 1970. Gradually, other roles of the modern computer -- a machine for computation, real-time control, and network communication -- became less visible than its role as "simulation engine." (Of course, the development of the World Wide Web in the 1990s made the role of network communication quite visible to the public). The computer's ability to simulate other media (which means simulating their interfaces and "data formats" such as written text, image, and sound) is not an afterthought -- it is the essence of a modern post-1970's computer.

(It is possible to state this idea even more radically -- by moving the date even earlier, to the 1930s. When Alan Turing defined the computer as a general-purpose simulation machine that can simulate most other machines that have already been invented, the idea of media simulation was implicitly introduced. But it was only in the 1950s-1970s that the work of Sutherland, Engelhard, Kay, and others made this idea into a reality by allowing the computer to systematically simulate the operations of drawing, drafting, painting, photo manipulation, sound generation and editing, and so on.)

Scientists induce out of body experience through virtual reality: (The Guardian)

Rich — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 08:25:24 -0700

Scientists have induced the age-old phenomenon of out-of-body experiences in healthy volunteers for the first time. -- The technique, which uses a virtual-reality-style set up of cameras linked to a head-mounted video display, will help researchers understand how the brain assimilates sensory information to determine the position of its body.

The technique could also improve virtual reality games and remote surgery by creating the illusion that a person is somewhere other than in their own body.

Out-of-body experiences are defined as those where a person who is awake sees their own body from somewhere outside themselves. The experiences have been reported in situations where brain function has been damaged through a stroke, epilepsy or drug abuse. The most common cases occur in traumatic situations such as car accidents or on operating tables. ...

Anatomy of Criticism: (Historical Criticism) Northop Frye

Rich — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 08:18:03 -0700

In the period of romance, the poet, like the corresponding hero, has become a human being, and the god has retreated to the sky. His function now is primarily to remember. Memory, said Greek myth at the beginning of its historical period, is the mother of the Muses, who inspire the poets, but no longer in the same degree that the god inspires the oracle-though the poets clung to the connection as long as they could. In Homer, in the perhaps more primitive Hesiod, in the poets of the heroic age of the North, we can see the kind of thing the poet had to remember. Lists of kings and foreign tribes, myths and genealogies of gods, historical traditions, the proverbs of popular wisdom, taboos, lucky and unlucky days, charms, the deeds of the tribal heros, were some of the things that came out when the poet unlocked his word-hoard. The medieval minstrel with his repertory of memorized stories and the clerical poet who, like Gower or the author of the Cursor Mundi, tries to get everything he knows into one vast poem or poetic testament, belong in the same category. The encyclopedic knowledge in such poems is regarded sacramentally, as a human analogy of divine knowledge.

Anatomy of Criticism: (Archetypal Criticism) Northop Frye

Rich — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 10:42:43 -0700

The anatomy of criticism is such a gem, I would encourage everyone to also check out the links to ethical, historical and rhetorical criticism, this essay is on archetypal criticism ...rc

... Myth, then, is one extreme of literary design; naturalism is the other, and in between lies the whole area of romance, using that term to mean, not the historical mode of the first essay, but the [p. 136] tendency, noted later in the same essay, to displace myth in a human direction and yet, in contrast to "realism," to conventionalize content in an idealized direction. The central principle of displacement is that what can be metaphorically identified in a myth can only be linked in romance by some form of simile: analogy, significant association, incidental accompanying imagery, and the like. In a myth we can have a sun-god or a tree-god; in a romance we may have a person who is significantly associated with the sun or trees. In more realistic modes the association becomes less significant and more a matter of incidental, even coincidental or accidental, imagery. In the dragon-killing legend of the St. George and Perseus family, of which more hereafter, a country under an old feeble king is terrorized by a dragon who eventually demands the King's daughter, but is slain by the hero. This seems to be a romantic analogy [perhaps also, in this case, a descendant] of a myth of a waste land restored to life by a fertility god. In the myth, then, the dragon and the old king would be identified. We can in fact concentrate the myth still further into an Oedipus fantasy in which the hero is not the old king's son-in-law but his son, and the rescued damsel the hero's mother. If the story were a private dream such identifications would be made as a matter of course. But to make it a plausible, symmetrical, and morally acceptable story a good deal of displacement is necessary, and it is only after a comparative study of the story type has been made that the metaphorical structure within it begins to emerge. ...

Northrop Frye: Anatomy of Criticism intro.

Rich — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 10:31:41 -0700

...The subject-matter of literary criticism is an art, and criticism is evidently something of an art too. This sounds as though criticism were a parasitic form of literary expression, an art based on pre-existing art, a second-hand imitation of creative power. On this theory critics are intellectuals who have a taste for art but lack both the power to produce it and the money to patronize it, and thus form a class of cultural middlemen, distributing culture to society at a profit to themselves while exploiting the artist and increasing the strain on his public. The conception of the critic as a parasite or artist manqué is still very popular, especially among artists. It is sometimes reinforced by a dubious analogy between the creative and the procreative functions, so that we hear about the "impotence" and "dryness" of the critic, of his hatred for genuinely creative people, and so on. The golden age of anticritical criticism was the latter part of the nineteenth century, but some of its prejudices are still around. [p. 3]

However, the fate of art that tries to do without criticism is [p. 3] instructive. The attempt to reach the public directly through "popular" art assumes that criticism is artificial and public taste natural. Behind this is a further assumption about natural taste which goes back through Tolstoy to Romantic theories of a spontaneously creative "folk." These theories have had a fair trial; they have not stood up very well to the facts of literary history and experience, and it is perhaps time to move beyond them. An extreme reaction against the primitive view, at one time associated with the "art for art's sake" catchword, thinks of art in precisely the opposite terms, as a mystery, an initiation into an esoterically civilized community. Here criticism is restricted to ritual Masonic gestures, to raised eyebrows and cryptic comments and other signs of an understanding too occult for syntax. The fallacy common to both attitudes is that of a rough correlation between the merit of art and the degree of public response to it, though the correlation assumed is direct in one case and inverse in the other. [p. 4]

One can find examples which appear to support both these views; but it is clearly the simple truth that there is no real correlation either way between the merits of art and its public reception. Shakespeare was more popular than Webster, but not because he was a greater dramatist; Keats was less popular than Montgomery, but not because he was a better poet. Consequently there is no way of preventing the critic from being, for better or worse, the pioneer of education and the shaper of cultural tradition. Whatever popularity Shakespeare and Keats have now is equally the result of the publicity of criticism. A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory. Art for art's sake is a retreat from criticism which ends in an impoverishment of civilized life itself. The only way to forestall the work of criticism is through censorship, which has the same relation to criticism that lynching has to justice.

There is another reason why criticism has to exist. Criticism can talk, and all the arts are dumb. In painting, sculpture, or music it is easy enough to see that the art shows forth, but cannot say anything. And, whatever it sounds like to call the poet inarticulate or speechless, there is a most important sense in which poems are as silent as statues. ...

Max Roach a founder of Modern Jazz dies at 83: NY Times

Rich — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 12:07:43 -0700

He found himself in historic situations from the beginning of his career. He was still in his teens when he played drums with the alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, a pioneer of modern jazz, at a Harlem after-hours club in 1942. Within a few years, Mr. Roach was himself recognized as a pioneer in the development of the sophisticated new form of jazz that came to be known as bebop ...

DJ Spooky on Deleuze and Guattari

Rich — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 09:08:13 -0700

Basically I look at Deleuze/Guattari as two figures who act as translators of European philosophy and aesthetics into some kind of exit for people who are concerned with humanism. Think: Frantz Fanon wrote about this as a kind of update on Existentialism - the "gaze" that defines the world today is "brown" - but it is contained in a strange cadence. It's a visual rhythm that extended the idea of philosophy into spectrums that have yet to be mapped out. European philosophy has usually been totally eurocentric for the last several centuries, and Deleuze and Guattari are the two philosophers who have taken the idea of philosophy past the limits of previous thinkers. Aristotle created the idea of taxonomy for the West several thousand years ago. Deleuze and Guattari have taught us to move beyond the categories he defined, and have helped create tools for analyzing how complex out mediated lives have become. I think of their concepts like the "Abstract machine," the "body without organs," and the "immanent plane" of action/realization as almost beyond the categories of European philosophy. They are humanists who look for meaning beyond the norms. That's where my music and their thoughts intersect. ...

DJ Spooky: the subliminal kid aka Paul D. Miller

Rich — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 08:55:19 -0700

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky is one of the brightest lights in contemporary cultural and media studies. He first surfaced as the master of the re-mix aka DJ Spooky in N Y City in the 1980s. Although this was initially a prank his fame as a DJ spread thereafter and he has gone on to publish widely on everything from Deleuze and Guattari to the art of the Mix. A download of a seminar he gave at Arthur Kroker's Pacific Center for Technology and Culture in Victoria BC in which among other things he reconsiders McLuhan and Derrida can be downloaded here. What follows are links to his web site. His latest book Rhythm Science was published by MIT Press. - rc

The state of the Panopticon and/or The Democrats Roll Over Again by Jeremy Bentham and Helen Thomas

Rich — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 09:12:17 -0700

Another contextual posting here. 1) The Panopticon as envisioned by Jeremy Bentham and re-envisioned by Michel Foucault and 2) An editorial by Helen Thomas one of the most respected US journalist who has been a White House Press reporter for more than 57 years.

The story line speaks for itself, democrats in the States are still having problems evolving a spinal chord... thats why their talking heads seem to flip, flop so badly.... among the new bunch of presidential contenders the only one so far I heard who even is able to stand up straight is Kucinich... but the issue here is the sacrifice of individual privacy rights versus the intrusive desire of the State and Corporate interest to extract as much information possible from the targeted population (in this case the whole world) . Its also a testament to how fear turns back to feed on itself, or as the title of a Fassbinder film reminds us: Angst isst Seele auf or Fear eats the Soul. At any rate Rudolph Giuliani the Republican presidential hopeful thinks thats pretty good campaign strategy.

Of course to the extent that new information and monitoring technologies can increase the expansive gaze of the Panopticon it is most troubling. - rc

International Journal of Zizek Studies

Rich — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 13:46:13 -0700

Launched in January 2007, IJŽS is a peer-reviewed, open access academic journal. As its title unambiguously proclaims, it is devoted to the work of Slavoj Žižek, a Slovenian philosopher/cultural theorist. Despite such predictably caricatured media portrayals as "the Elvis of cultural theory" and "the Marx brother", Žižek has attracted enormous international interest through his application of otherwise esoteric scholarship to contemporary mass culture and politics.

With a desire to avoid "how many Žižeks can dance on the head of a pin?" types of debate, and mere hagiography, IJŽS aims to provide a valuable resource for those interested in his inimitable brand of critical thought. Just one small indication of Žižek's wide appeal is apparent from the diverse nature of IJŽS’s Editorial Board and the Journal will be devoted to engaging with the substantive and provocative implications Žižek’s work has for a range of academic disciplines. ...

'Esalen: America and the religion of no religion,' by Jeffrey Kripal

Rich — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 13:39:57 -0700

Esalen has always been on the edge. Famous for its natural hot springs and stunning locale on the face of the Pacific coastline, the institute has long been a world leader in alternative and experiential education. Such luminaries as Henry Miller, Joseph Campbell, Aldous Huxley, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Hunter S. Thompson, and others have gathered there to develop their revolutionary ideas, transformative spiritual practices, and innovative art forms. ...

Extreme weather breaks records in 2007: Reuters

Rich — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 12:20:48 -0700

The world experienced a series of record-breaking weather events in early 2007, from flooding in Asia to heatwaves in Europe and snowfall in South Africa, the United Nations weather agency said on Tuesday.

The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said global land surface temperatures in January and April were likely the warmest since records began in 1880, at more than 1 degree Celsius higher than average for those months. ...

personalized and/or ethnic medicine in India

Rich — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 08:28:55 -0700

I believe that in India there is a whole hearted embrace of targeting ethnic drugs, however the Marketing name for the pharmaceutical industry is "personalized" medicine. This appears to be a press release for the pharmacos in India rc...

Researchers believe that there can be a more focused, personalised and customised way of treatment wherein variations can be used to understand the genetic predisposition of ethnic groups to diseases and predict how a particular patient responds to a specific drug and prescribed accordingly.

...... A consortium of Indian scientists recently completed a genetic database and TCG Life Sciences is likely to become the first private player to use the database. "We have created a genetic database of 2,014 healthy individuals drawn from 55 populations of India covering over 800 million people. It will be helpful in deciding population based characterisation of good and poor effect of drugs," says Prof Samir K Brahmachari, Director, Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB). The use of this database is expected to have large implications on both affordable public healthcare system as well as successful launch of a drug in specific region of India by pharmacos in India. ...

A Question of Genetics (ethnic medicine and ethics): BBC News

Rich — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 08:07:18 -0700

Bio-technology is making it increasingly possible to target populations for pharmaceuticals by ethnicity, making the bio-ethics of it rather complex

rc "Any GP worth their salt will assess a patient and try them on drugs they think will work with their genetic make-up." But he said the problem with BiDil is that it "looks like a racialised drug and that raises all sorts of concern". "Race is the lazy man's way to get a genetic marker. Genetic markers are not necessarily easily reflected as a visible marker "But the concept of different treatment for different people is not new. After all, men and women are treated differently as are children in comparison to adults."

Out of Their League by David Meggyesy

Rich — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 10:36:13 -0700

There are not sports heroes whose legacy ends when they leave the game, there are others however whose legacy begins at precisely that moment.

In 1969, when St Louis Cardinal's linebacker Dave Meggysey left professional football he said: "The Mitchell-Agnew-Nixon mentality is what football is all about. Politics and pro football are the most grotesque extremes in the theatric of a dying empire. It's no accident that the most repressive political regime in the history of this country is ruled by a football freak."

In the late 1960's David also began attending Esalen Institute and in addition to his studies in social justice he began exploring esoteric literature, including the works of Sri Aurobindo. While still in the NFL he read Sri Aurobindo's compilation: The Mind of Light. And it is perhaps no coincidence that I met him at a Sri Aurbobindo conference. rc....

“Meggyesy’s book, almost as much as his person, is a most moving instance of a man’s search to be honest and to find a decent alternative for this way of life.”—New York Review of Books

“Dave Meggyesy had been an outside linebacker with the St. Louis Cardinals for seven years when he quit at the height of his career to tell about the dehumanizing side of the game—about the fraud and the payoffs, the racism, drug abuse, and incredible violence. The original publication of Out of Their League shocked readers and provoked the outraged response that rocked the sports world in the 1970s. But his memoir is also a moving description of a man who struggled for social justice and personal liberation. Meggyesy has continued this journey and remains an active champion for players’ rights through his work with the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA)

Fierce Monsoons in India , Bangaladesh, Nepal: a sign of changing clmate?: N.Y. Times

Rich — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 21:38:15 -0700

Freak rains, which scientists describe as a hallmark of climate change, seemed to be responsible. The devastation was all the more severe because flimsy dams and embankments collapsed under the weight of floodwaters. The mud houses of the poor were the first to wash away.

Weather scientists have said South Asia is likely to get much more unpredictable rain in the coming decades, bringing greater challenges for its governments to prepare and cope with nature’s fury. I

The disappearance of nature: Declne in visits to National Parks corresponds to increase of Telematic Technology: The Nature Conservancy

Rich — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 21:15:09 -0700

I didn't become a conservationist when I started working at The Nature Conservancy. I became a conservationist growing up in California, crawling all over the grassy knolls and in the oak forests that we called 'the jungle,' "said McCormick. "It was from this immersion in what seemed like a sacred place that I became so deeply committed to conservation. I'm worried about what children will lose by staying cooped up inside -- and I'm worried about losing the next generation of conservationists, too."

In the study, researchers pointed out that outdoor play and nature experience have proven beneficial for cognitive functioning, reduction in symptoms of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), and an increase in self-discipline and emotional well being at all developmental stages. But American children, on average, are spending only 30 minutes of unstructured time outdoors each week. ...

As the death toll mounts in Iraq: For my brother reported missing in action by Thomas Merton

Rich — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 14:22:09 -0700

and as the death toll in Iraq mounts:

FOR MY BROTHER: REPORTED MISSING IN ACTION, 1943 from Selected Poems of Thomas Merton

Sweet brother, if I do not sleep My eyes are flowers for your tomb; And if I cannot eat my bread, My fasts shall live like willows where you died. If in the heat I find no water for my thirst, My thirst shall turn to springs for you, poor traveller.

Scholarly Articles on Sri Aurobinod and Mother compiled by Wolfgang Schmidt-Reinecke

Rich — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 14:11:38 -0700

Wolfgang Schmidt Reinecke has done an excellent job compiling scholarly articles on Sri Aurobindo and Auroville. Here are the articles and the link

Bill Walsh dead at 75... NFL News

Rich — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 18:07:39 -0700

Even before Bill Walsh uttered a single word, you knew something intelligent would flow from his mouth.

And flow is the appropriate verb. Walsh didn't bark. He didn't bellow. He didn't do a lot of the things one commonly expects from someone who makes his living in the hard-bitten world of football coaching, yet he had uncommon results. Walsh's San Francisco 49ers became an NFL dynasty in 1980s, setting a championship standard that most other teams could only dream of achieving.

Richard Rorty 1931 -2007 : The Hindu

Rich — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 09:48:24 -0700

For him philosophy was a democratic pursuit of reflection and exchange, an activity with deep repercussions on the cultural and social milieu of our times.

Great philosophers and political thinkers in recent years have been dying of cancer: Franz Fanon, Edward Said, Jacques Derrida and now Richard Rorty, the foremost pragmatist thinker and a diehard opponent of analytical philosophy.

He died recently in Palo Alto, California, of pancreatic cancer at the age of 75. His daughter often joked with him that this could only come from reading too much of Heidegger. ...

Ingmar Bergman's death marks the end of an era: The Guardian

Rich — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 09:42:33 -0700

This newspaper recently reprinted what it published when Henrik Ibsen died, just over 100 years ago: "Isolated as he seemed, his mind was yet in more vital touch than that of anyone else in Europe with the mind of this generation." That certainly applies to the great Swedish film director and dramatist Ingmar Bergman, who has died, at the age of 89 - or certainly, and literally, the part about isolation applies. Since the 60s, Bergman lived mostly on the Island of Faro: secluded, like Shakespeare's Prospero, yet without having broken his staff. In his late eighties, he gave us a rewarding, and uncompromisingly emotional and difficult movie for TV, Saraband. His great masterpiece The Seventh Seal - much discussed, much adored, much spoofed - was re-released last week in a new print and it looks as fresh as a daisy, its power if anything increased. ...

Evolutionary Metaphysics: Esalen CTR Conference Series

Rich — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 09:30:23 -0700

It must, for example, reconcile the recognition of a world-transcendent and eternal consciousness—reported by men and women around the world since the dawn of human history—with the emergent energy and matter of this evolving universe as these are progressively revealed by contemporary science. It must also account for the immense range of human potentials revealed by many fields of research, including the supernormal human attributes witnessed to by the shamanic and scriptural traditions, modern psychical research, cultural anthropology, and the comparative study of religion. Do such areas of inquiry point to a greater life that is emerging in us? Such a philosophical vision must also embrace fundamental issues raised by the contemporary study of post-mortem survival, including questions about when individuating souls began to participate in our world's advance. Did our souls exist in some form before the Big Bang?

Although it has not been recognized as a lineage of thought, nor has it been given a widely accepted name, the seed-form of a vision that can do all these things has been growing haphazardly, we believe, since about 1800, heralded by such seminal visionaries as Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Bergson, Whitehead, Gebser, Aurobindo, and Teilhard de Chardin.

Irreducible Mind : Toward a Psychology of the 21st century (from the Esalen Bookstore)

Rich — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 19:19:35 -0700

Does human personality survive bodily death, as the wisdom traditions teach, or is it generated by the brain and extinguished at death, as materialist science aggressively maintains? Irreducible Mind, developed under the auspices of Esalen's Center for Theory and Research's (CTR) Survival of Bodily Death Invitational Conference Series, fundamentally alters this debate by demonstrating empirically that the mainstream scientific "production" model of mind-brain relations is false. The authors present evidence for a wide variety of phenomena resistant to conventional explanations, including phenomena of extreme psychophysical influence, psychological automatisms such as trance mediumship and multiple personality, powerful near-death experiences occurring under general anesthesia and cardiac arrest, genius-level creativity, the worldwide phenomenon of unitive mystical experience, paranormal phenomena including direct evidence for survival, and central, unexplained properties of all human thinking, memory and volition.

The Rebirth of the Author by Nicholas Rombes: C Theory

Rich — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 20:43:02 -0700

Roland Barthes's famous prediction about the death of the author has come to pass, but not because the author is nowhere, but rather because she is everywhere.

Indeed, the author has grown and multiplied in direct proportion to academic dismissals and denunciations of her presence; the more roundly and confidently the author has been dismissed as a myth, a construction, an act of bad faith, the more strongly she has emerged. The recent surge in personal websites and blogs -- rather than diluting the author concept -- has helped to create a tyrannical authorship presence, where the elevation of the personal and private to the public level has only compounded the cult of the author. We are all authors today. We are all auteurs. We are all writers. We are all filmmakers. And we are all theorists, because what we make theorizes itself.

Preschool curriculum in Waldorf School (social skills and imagination versus mental programming)

Rich — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 09:31:29 -0700

One of the aims of [our Waldorf method] pre-school is to teach social skills by means of example, experience and activity using imaginative language, stories, and “natural justice”.

Remembering that the 4-year-old child is at the very beginning of the journey towards becoming a social being, we consistently repeat and reinforce appropriate social behaviour. Sometimes it helps to put things into perspective by asking ourselves if we are doing all the things we are expecting of our 4, 5 and 6 years olds! ...

Einstein never used Flash Cards

Rich — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 09:09:40 -0700

Researchers in child psychology spend countless hours studying how infants and preschoolers develop and really learn. This does not happen by filling children’s heads with facts or by encouraging babies to passively watch videos or to answer questions from demanding toys. To view children as empty vessels who need to be rushed towards adulthood under our educational supervision is tiring and demanding for well-meaning parents. Children are being taught that there is only one right answer, a track sure to breed conformity rather than ingenuity. We are raising a generation of children who have no idea what to do when they are not being entertained.

Mounds of evidence suggest that children learn through active play not through passive feeding. They learn math when they play “chef,” and set the table for four. They learn physics when they build a fort and carefully balance the cushion atop the roof. They learn language by talking with excited friends when they jump through the leaves or build an igloo. Research on young children has shown time and again, PLAY = LEARNING!! The world is a virtual classroom filled with opportunities to stimulate the brain and to encourage intellectual and social growth. In this Google generation, our children will have plenty of time to look up facts. To succeed in the global marketplace of tomorrow, they need to be creative problem solvers not robots equipped with prewired answers to yesterday’s questions. ...

The Center for Genetics and Society

Rich — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 10:37:30 -0700

The new human genetic technologies present a threshold challenge for humanity. If used properly they hold great promise for treating disease and alleviating suffering. If abused they could open the door to a powerful new eugenics that would objectify human life and undermine the foundations of human society.

The rapid development of these technologies has created a civil society deficit. Policy makers have not had time to understand and assess their implications. There are few broadly-based popular institutions seeking to articulate and argue for human genetics policies based on human rights, social justice and global inclusion.

In recent years advocates of a new eugenic future for humanity have become increasingly vocal and explicit. It is imperative that concerned leaders and others repudiate this vision, in no uncertain terms.

'Wrong and White and Red all Over,' by Ted Rall

Rich — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 09:17:11 -0700

It’s a Back to the Future moment: back in 2002, polls found most Americans opposed to war with Iraq at roughly the same two-to-one ration as they do now. What changed Americans’ minds between 2002 and 2003, supplemented by Bush Administration lies about fictional WMDs and liberation flowers, were millions of words published in major national magazines and regurgitated on television news programs by serious-looking, soft-spoken men boasting impressive journalistic and academic credentials. Pretend experts wove fantastic tales of wonderful geopolitical benefits that would derive from taking out Saddam. Invading Iraq was going to democratize the Middle East, force the Palestinians to sign a peace deal with Israel, and bring Elvis back to life. ...

Link to Michael Moore's : Sicko -feature length movie-

Rich — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 15:28:09 -0700

Michael Moore's latest on the ailing US Health system Free, full length feature available for viewing online.
,
http://www.jonhs.net/freemovies/sicko.htm

Sri Aurobindo on Speech: Godavararisha Mishra (review in The Hindu)

Rich — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 18:39:41 -0700

The author critically assesses the views of contemporary thinkers. There is little doubt that the book would come in handy for those interested in linguistic studies, Sri Aurobindo and comparative language. That he was a multifaceted thinker whose holistic thinking embraced many disciplines is reasserted in this book.

The Third Eye and Two Ways of (Un)knowing: Gnosis, Alternative Modernities, and Postcolonial Futures: Makarand Paranjape,Professor of English, JNU, New Delhi

Rich — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 20:19:40 -0700

Although this new Renaissance spoken at the end of this essay may have more of a hybrid form than the authors imagine, the insights and critical analysis seem to resonate with some of the authors here rc

Science's Dirty Little Secret?

Rich — Mon, 28 May 2007 07:57:33 -0700

Since we have been considering what a fact is, the following article casts doubts on uncritically accepting what Scientific Research tells us about are "Facts", the reference from Seed magazine , a popular monthly journal on Science, indicates that the study is being taken quite seriously among the scientific community although it was always was somewhat tacitly feared

There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false. The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance. Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias. In this essay, I discuss the implications of these problems for the conduct and interpretation of research.

Published research findings are sometimes refuted by subsequent evidence, with ensuing confusion and disappointment. Refutation and controversy is seen across the range of research designs, from clinical trials and traditional epidemiological studies [1–3] to the most modern molecular research [4,5]. There is increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims [6–8]. However, this should not be surprising. It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false. Here I will examine the key factors that influence this problem and some corollaries thereof. ...

Gilles Deleuze

Rich — Tue, 22 May 2007 10:29:56 -0700

Gilles Deleuze, an important figure in post-war French philosophy, began his career with a number of idiosyncratic yet rigorous historical studies of figures outside of the continental tradition in vogue at the time, before writing some of the more infamous texts of the period, in particular, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. These texts collaborative works with radical psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. Deleuze is a key figure in what is known as 'postmodern' thought. Considering himself an empiricist and a vitalist, his body of work, which rests upon concepts such as multiplicity, constructivism, difference and desire, stands at a substantial remove from the main traditions of 20th century Continental thought. His thought locates him as an influential figure in present-day considerations of society, creativity and subjectivity. Deleuze also published widely on literature, psychoanalysis and art.

U.S.A . as state supporter of terrorism (the record remains intact)

Rich — Wed, 09 May 2007 21:37:48 -0700

A US lawmaker on Wednesday called on President George W. Bush to detain the Cuban anti-Castro militant Luis Posada Carriles, after a US judge freed the alleged airplane bomber.

‘The world will conclude that this administration has a double standard when it comes to fighting terrorism unless President (George W.) Bush takes swift action to detain Posada,’ said House Democrat Bill Delahunt. Venezuela and Cuba want to try Posada in the 1976 downing of a Cuban airliner, which killed all 73 civilians aboard.

Savitri, Surrender and the Void by Rod Hemsell

Rich — Wed, 02 May 2007 09:19:51 -0700

There is a line of Savitri that occurs at the end of the first section of Book 1, Canto 5, which has extraordinary mantric value. It reads, “In the Void he saw throned the Omniscience Supreme,” and just opposite that line on the facing page, Sri Aurobindo says: “The Immortal’s pride refused the doom to live/ A miser of the scanty bargain made/ Between our littleness and bounded hopes/ And the compassionate Infinitudes.” Here, near the beginning of the compendium of yogic wisdom that is Savitri, we have an emphatic statement of what Sri Aurobindo has elsewhere called “the refusal of the ascetic,” proclaimed to be the law of spiritual life. “His height repelled the lowness of earth’s state.”

Remembering Kurt Vonnegut

Rich — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 13:41:59 -0700

If no one's said it yet, I will: Kurt Vonnegut was American literature's finest satirist since Mark Twain. (Whom the mustachioed, frizzy-haired Vonnegut increasingly came to resemble in later years.) Like Twain, he had a merciless eye for those aspects of American life (and human nature) that we're quickest to bury under layers of politeness, particularly our quickness to resort to violence. Like Twain, he progressed from laugh-out-loud funny to ruefully bitter as he aged. By the end of his 84 years, Vonnegut was hoping for a spectacular, suicidal death, like a plane crash into Mt. Kilimanjaro. But death came to him in more mundane fashion yesterday, as he succumbed to brain injuries suffered in a recent fall at his Manhattan home. Vonnegut would have been the first to appreciate the irony; he probably would have greeted it with a sigh: "So it goes."

Satprem passes

Rich — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 11:09:21 -0700

This is to inform the community that Satprem, who worked closely with the Mother on various books and later compiled the Mother's Agenda, has passed away at the age of 84 on Monday, April 9th of this year.

One million species cataloged (Seattle P.I.)

Rich — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 19:01:41 -0700

Six years into the program the total has reached 1,009,000, researchers report. They hope to complete the listing by 2011, reaching an expected total of about 1.75 million species.

Thomas M. Orrell, a biologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, said the finished catalog will include all known living organisms, from plants and animals to fungi and microorganisms such as bacteria, protozoa and viruses.

Beat Poetry (the critical poet)

Rich — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 13:56:59 -0700

The term "the beat generation" was first used by John Clellon Holmes in a 1952 article, This Is The Beat Generation, about the young people of his time for the New York Times Magazine. Recalling a conversation with Jack Kerouac in 1948, Holmes had asked Kerouac to think of a way to describe the unique qualities of his generation; Kerouac came up with the term 'Beat Generation' on the spot. The term "beat" bears connotations of down-beat, worn out, down-and-out, drop-out and beatitude.

The Beats are particularly associated with San Francisco, especially North Beach, and their generally accepted father-figures were the poet Kenneth Rexroth ("Godfather of the Beats"), Henry Miller and William Burroughs. Other poetic influences include Walt Whitman, Arthur Rimbaud, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams.

AntiMatters (ulrich)

Rich — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 10:39:08 -0700

Pondicherry, India, March 31, 2007 --(PR.com)-- AntiMatters (http://anti-matters.org) is a new online journal addressing issues in science and the humanities from non-materialistic perspectives. Starting March 29, 2007, it accepts original submissions in line with the Journal's Focus and Scope.

Poetic Modernism (the critical poet)

Rich — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 17:11:40 -0700

The term "modernism" refers to a movement which began to get under way in the closing years of the 19th century, coalesced immediately following World War I, and was influential past World War II into the late 1940s, when postmodernism began to take hold. The modernist movement affected poetry, fiction, drama, painting, music and architecture. As with any movement, the evolution and decline of influence is gradual and hard to pin down to specific dates; still, the true birth of modernism in poetry is often dated to the publication of T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in 1917.

East Coker by T.S Eliot (the 2nd of 4 quartets)

Rich — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 17:08:33 -0700

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto. ...

Charles Baudelaire (the critical poet)

Rich — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 21:25:56 -0700

One of the greatest french poets of the 19th century, Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) was a precursor to french symbolism, and one of the earliest members of the Decadent Movement. His influence spans from the french symbolists, to the english decadents (Swinburne, Wilde), to the American and English Modernists (Yeats, Pound and Eliot). Baudelaire was also a translator and critic of Edgar Allan Poe.

He strove, not to make poetic statements, but to actualize experience in metaphors and symbols. His subjects were those of the bohemian city: streetwalkers, beggars, drunkards, and the wretched poor. From their ill-fortune, squalor and evil, he wanted to extract real beauty.

French Symbolist Poets (the critical poet)

Rich — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 12:19:52 -0700

The symbolists believed that the inner eternal reality could only be suggested: "to name is to destroy, to suggest is to create" (Mallarmé). The resulting poetry of this philosophy was intense and complex, full of condensed syntax and symbolic imagery. Their poetry also emphasized the importance of the sound of the verse, creating music through words.

The New Bandit Queen of Indian Politics

Rich — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 12:02:39 -0700

Phoolan Devi may have been murdered but there are other murderers to take her place as the new bandit queen of Indian Politics. For a nation growing a gdp at 8% and emerging as a new economic "super power" things at the political level seems entirely disconnected. For example: rc

Her announcement came days after alleged top mafia don Babloo Srivastava, who is in jail on dozens of charges ranging from murder to extortion, said he would seek election to the Uttar Pradesh assembly as an independent candidate. More than 200 of the 403 members of Uttar Pradesh’s assembly have criminal charges pending, with at least 93 facing charges of murder or kidnapping.

Parihar, who was kidnapped from the dacoit-infested Etawah district when she was just 13, said she wanted a clean break from the past. “That was the darkest phase of my life and I want to forget those days for ever,” she said of her past. Parihar starred in a recently released movie Wounded about her life that she described as “an emotional catharsis”.

The mix of crime and politics is not uncommon in national-level politics. A 2004 study by an independent watchdog found that nearly one quarter of the more than 540 representatives in the lower house of parliament had faced criminal charges, including murder and rape.

'Data Trash: The Theory of the Virtual Class' (Weinstein and Kroker 1994)

Rich — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 22:27:21 -0700

>Wired intends to profit from the Internet. And so do a lot of others. "People are going to have to realize that the Net is another medium, and it has to be sponsored commercially and it has to play by the rules of the marketplace," says John Battelle, Wired's 28-year old managing editor. "You're still going to have sponsorship, advertising, the rules of the game, because it's just necessary to make commerce work." "I think that a lot of what some of the original Net god-utopians were thinking," continued Battelle, "is that there was just going to be this sort of huge anarchist, utopian, bliss medium, where there are no rules and everything is just sort of open. That's a great thought, but it's not going to work. And when the Time Warners get on the Net in a hard fashion it's going to be the people who first create the commerce and the environment, like Wired, that will be the market leaders."
-Andrew Leonard, "Hot-Wired"
The Bay Guardian

The twentieth-century ends with the growth of cyber-authoritarianism, a stridently pro-technotopia movement, particularly in the mass media, typified by an obsession to the point of hysteria with emergent technologies, and with a consistent and very deliberate attempt to shut down, silence, and exclude any perspectives critical of technotopia. Not a wired culture, but a virtual culture that is wired shut: compulsively fixated on digital technology as a source of salvation from the reality of a lonely culture and radical social disconnection from everyday life, and determined to exclude from public debate any perspective that is not a cheerleader for the coming-to-be of the fully realized technological society. The virtual class is populated by would-be astronauts who never got the chance to go to the moon, and they do not easily accept criticism of this new Apollo project for the body telematic. ...

De-ontologizing the Brain by Charles Wolfe (CTheory)

Rich — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 15:55:39 -0700

The article is from a bit more of a materialist position then I am comfortable with, and some of the arguments may falter along these lines, the questions the author raises however, about the brains ability to co-create the real, of phantom limb syndrome, and the brain as mediator for technological prostheses are fascinating. rc

Given the degree of openness of the central nervous system, and on the 'personal' level, our ability to identify with non-biological extensions of our body, the 'artificialist' perspective, in which body and prosthesis, indeed, body and tool, merge, is not so far off. Just as the 'fictional self' is the outcome of the deflation of the ontological unity of self, the social, evolving, 'cultured'[50] brain deflates the ontological uniqueness and isolation of the brain. Instead of opposing subjectivity to the natural world, or the body to the tool, we have arrived at a vision of the "productive potential" of the agent as inseparable from a "set of prostheses,"[51] in a process of what Félix Guattari would have called the "production of subjectivity." In Negri's terms,

The tool... has entirely changed. We no longer need tools in order to transform nature... or to establish a relation with the historical world..., we only need language. Language is the tool. Better yet, the brain is the tool, inasmuch as it is common.[52]

Is The Universe made of Information? by James Gleick (Wired Magazine)

Rich — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 17:46:34 -0700

Since my post of late have been concerned with the differences between viewing humans as essentially composed of information or as embodied entities the following is a posting from one of the most well known popular science writers who concludes on a note which considers the question as a fundamental issue of ontology.

The quantum pioneer John Archibald Wheeler, perhaps the last surviving collaborator of both Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, poses this conundrum in oracular monosyllables: “It from bit.” For Wheeler, it is both an unanswered question and a working hypothesis, the idea that information gives rise, as he writes, to “every it - every particle, every field of force, even the spacetime continuum itself.” This is another way of fathoming the role of the observer, the quantum discovery that the outcome of an experiment is affected, or even determined, when it is observed. “What we call reality,” Wheeler writes coyly, “arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions.” He adds, “All things physical are information-theoretic in origin, and this is a participatory universe.”

Big Brother State or the state of the Panopticon

Rich — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 10:11:11 -0700

For the state of the Panopticon Click on link or go to the following video at www.bigbrotherstate.com/

Jimmy Carter and Apartheid by Joseph Lelyveld (NYRB)

Rich — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 11:02:56 -0700

The branding of Israel as an "apartheid state" was one of the themes of resolutions presented at the World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa, under United Nations auspices in 2001 (and one of the reasons Secretary of State Colin Powell cited for calling the American delegation home). Yet at about the same time, the term "apartheid" began to surface in discussions in what might broadly be called the Israeli peace camp as a plausible if somewhat contentious way of characterizing the occupation of the territories or the prospects of the Jewish settlements there; as a benchmark, a description of what the occupation already was or might become. Five years ago, writing in Haaretz, Israel's most respected newspaper, Michael Ben Yair used the A-word in describing the occupation that he said began on "the seventh day" of the Six-Day War. Ben Yair, the attorney general in the governments of Yitzak Rabin and Shimon Peres in the 1990s, is no fringe figure. "Passionately desiring to keep the occupied territories," he wrote,

"we developed two judicial systems: one—progressive, liberal—in Israel; and the other—cruel, injurious—in the occupied territories. In effect, we established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories immediately following their capture."

Two years later, the political commentator and former deputy mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti used the word prospectively. Ariel Sharon's plan to disengage from Gaza and build a security wall along—and beyond—the eastern frontier of the West Bank was tantamount, he argued, to making Israel "a binational state based on apartheid." It meant, he said, "the imprisonment of some 3 million Palestinians in bantustans." ...

In Memorium Jean Baudrillard 1929-2007 by Arthur Kroker

Rich — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 08:56:21 -0800

Like his intellectual predecessors -- Nietzsche, Artaud, and Bataille -- Jean Baudrillard was that rarity of a cultural philosopher, a thinker whose reflections, refusing to be simply culturally mimetic, actually became a complex sign of the social reality of the postmodern century. In his thought there was always something simultaneously futuristic and ancient: futuristic because his theorization of the culture of simulation ran parallel to the great scientific discoveries of our time, specifically the radical transformation of culture and society under the impact of the speed of light-time and light-space; and ancient because Baudrillard was haunted by the enigma of pataphysics, namely the magical ascent of the reality-principle itself into the language of artifice, seduction and terror.

Review of How we Became Post Human by Erik Davis

Rich — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 20:56:48 -0800

Long one of the most sensible voices in cybertheoryland, Hayles, who teaches English at UCLA, spent much of the 1990s tracing the history, philosophy, and literary permutations of cybernetics, an interdisciplinary science of control and communication first articulated by Norbert Wiener in the dawn of the Cold War. How We Became Posthuman is the result of her archeaology, and though Hayles devotes too many pages to lit crit, she has written a deeply insightful and significant book, one that skips the usual leather-clad cyborg postures in order to bring some historical gravity and ethical intelligence to the table of postmodern science. The game, I remind you, is no joke. "Increasingly the question is not whether we will become posthuman, for posthumanity is already here. Rather, the question is what kind of posthumans we will be."

One of the central threads in Hayles' story is how information lost its body -- that is, how information came to be seen as an abstract, almost transcendental stuff that could "circulate unchanged among different material substrates." Once we begin to believe that information is more essential than material forms, we vacate the old cosmos defined by presence and absence, entering a world characterized by the binary feedback of pattern and randomness, signal and noise. We leave the clearing and enter the screen.

How We Became PostHuman By N.Katherine Hayles (prologue)

Rich — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 20:51:48 -0800

You are alone in the room, except for two computer terminals flickering in the dim light. You use the terminals to communicate with two entities in another room, whom you cannot see. Relying solely on their responses to your questions, you must decide which is the man, which the woman. Or, in another version of the famous "imitation game" proposed by Alan Turing in his classic 1950 paper "Computer Machinery and Intelligence," you use the responses to decide which is the human, which the machine.1 One of the entities wants to help you guess correctly. His/her/its best strategy, Turing suggested, may be to answer your questions truthfully. The other entity wants to mislead you. He/she/it will try to reproduce through the words that appear on your terminal the characteristics of the other entity. Your job is to pose questions that can distinguish verbal performance from embodied reality. If you cannot tell the intelligent machine from the intelligent human, your failure proves, Turing argued, that machines can think.

....... What embodiment secures is not the distinction between male and female or between humans who can think and machines which cannot. Rather, embodiment makes clear that thought is a much broader cognitive function depending for its specificities on the embodied form enacting it. This realization, with all its exfoliating implications, is so broad in its effects and so deep in its consequences that it is transforming the liberal subject, regarded as the model of the human since the Enlightenment, into the posthuman. ...

The Surge by Peter Galbraith (NYRB)

Rich — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 13:53:46 -0800

President Bush's plan has no chance of actually working. At this late stage, 21,500 additional troops cannot make a difference. US troops are ill prepared to do the policing that is needed to secure Baghdad. They lack police training, knowledge of the city, and requisite Arabic skills. The Iraqi troops meant to assist the effort are primarily Kurdish peshmerga from two brigades nominally part of the Iraqi army. These troops will have the same problems as the Americans, including an inability to communicate in Arabic.

Bush's strategy assumes that Iraq's Shiite-led government can become a force for national unity and that Iraqi security forces can, once trained, be neutral guarantors of public safety. There is no convincing basis for either proposition. The Bush administration's inability to grasp the realities of Iraq is, in no small measure, owing to its unwillingness to acknowledge that Iraq is in the middle of a civil war.