Science, Culture, Integral Yoga

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis review by Dan Chiasson

Since we have been exploring the evolution of poetry after The Future Poetry was compiled and published circa 1920 it seems appropriate to investigate other literary genres such as the short story form. Lydia Davis is one of America’s finest author’s of the short story, her recent collection of stories is indicative of the state of the art in recent short story writing.

The notable aspect of her stories is their brevity and her innovative exploration of the entanglement of language is reminiscent of l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e poetry. A master of stylistically fashioning sentences, Davis couches an enormous empathy for a dizzying array of diverse characters that packs huge meanings on to a short page. Here is a sample of one story:

Honoring the Subjunctive

It invariably precedes, even if it do not altogether supersede, the determination of what is absolutely desirable and just….

From the review by Chaisson:

“Davis’s brevity is one consequence, not the only one, of some brilliant aversions. She dislikes clutter, and to her 90 percent of narrative convention is clutter. Description is clutter: Davis classifies instead. In fact she appears to reserve special scorn for the toile of grammar, the adjective: she is perfectly happy with approximates. Most of her stories happen inside her character’s heads, but she rejects the ready conventions for representing consciousness: she could have written these very same stories had Joyce and Woolf never lived. What interests her, up there inside our heads, are dilemmas of focused attention: how to translate this French verb, how to spell Nietzsche, what to make of a smudge on a note or a discrepancy in handwriting. Though she reads philosophy, all the abstract ideas in her work are lodged in secondary position. She writes not about thinking but about thinkers, weighing the social costs associated with running everything in life down such narrow channels of attention.”

The calm before the storm: Virilio’s debt to Foucault and some notes on global capitalism by Ian Robert Douglas

Ian R. Douglas is director of the power foundation, and visiting scholar at the Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University. He is currently working on a project entitled “The Birth of Biokinetic Society”, which is part of a broader project entitled “On the Genealogy of Globalism”.

In this essay he demonstrates that dromocratic society cannot be understood in the absence of an historical reading of its predecessor and co-existent: disciplinary society. Paul Virilio’s claim therefore for the elimination of the logic of ‘power/knowledge’ by that of ‘moving-power’, though important, should be approached with caution. Both exist in parallel throughout modernity, the latter being only possible upon the precondition of the former.

Ghosts of Things Dead by Richard Hartz

Richard Hartz is a member of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives. In this essay he reflects on the rising force of fundamentalism in the world in the light of Sri Aurobindo’s statements on the last stand of the “ghosts of things dead”:

As in the practice of the spiritual science and art of Yoga one has to raise up the psychological possibilities which are there in the nature and stand in the way of its spiritual perfection and fulfilment so as to eliminate them, even, it may be, the sleeping possibilities which might arise in future to break the work that has been done, so too Nature acts with the world-forces that meet her on her way, not only calling up those which will assist her but raising too, so as to finish with them, those that she knows to be the normal or even the unavoidable obstacles which cannot but start up to impede her secret will. This one has often seen in the history of mankind; one sees it exampled today with an enormous force commensurable with the magnitude of the thing that has to be done. But always these resistances turn out to have assisted by the resistance much more than they have impeded the intention of the great Creatrix and her Mover.

In the aftermath of a post-Enlightenment modernity somehow gone wrong, is it a rational secularism that must be insisted on to discipline our errant civilization. Hartz invokes Peter Berger’s text The Desecularization of the World and his anthropological insight regarding religion and its future.

The Two Types of Fear of the Burka by Slavoj Žizek

The French parliament recently adopted the law prohibiting the public wearing of burka and its Arab equivalent, the niqab, which cover the woman’s face, except for a small slit for the eyes. The curious thing that cannot but strike the eye in the public debates about this topic is the ambiguity of the critique of burka: it moves at two levels. First, it is presented as the defense of the dignity and freedom of the oppressed Muslim women…..

Faces, Interfaces, Screens: Relational Ontologies of Framing, Attention and Distraction By Ingrid Richardson

This paper considers the prevalence of screens in day-to-day life – from the televisual and cinematic to the many computer and mobile screens encountered in both domestic and public spaces – and suggests that each of these encounters has its own corporeal and interfacial modality. More specifically, the discussion will explore the relational and frontal ontologies of the face and the screen interface, focusing on the specific body-technology relations to emerge from our corporeal or somatic incorporation of television, computers and mobile screens. In particular, I will suggest that our engagement with media screens at a perceptual and corporeal level can be theorised by way of a phenomenological method that is supplemented by a critical understanding of the various ontological tropes and “body-metaphors” that are deeply embedded in our experience of screen interfaces. This focus on the perceptual and metaphorical aspects of the body-screen – and more specifically, face-screen – relation, can provide some insights into the historical and ontological affinity between faces, windows, frames and screens, and the complex ways we “turn” to them with varying degrees of attention and distraction. Finally, I aim to show how this affinity is challenged at a fundamental ontic and perceptual level by our experience of contemporary new media and mobile screens.

In its phenomenological focus, drawing from the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and post-phenomenologist Don Ihde, my approach is framed within the broad premise that every human-technology relation is also a body-tool relation, and as such every merger with technology invokes certain kinds of being-in-the-world, and particular ways of knowing and making that world. Such a perspective considers the screen interface as quite literally an aspect of our corporeal schematics; that is, through routine use screens have become part of the dynamic arrangement of our embodied experience. A corollary to this approach is the notion that our engagement with screens and interfaces is medium specific, such that each screen modality – whether televisual, computer or mobile – effects a different mode of embodiment, a different way of “having a body.”…..