Tag Archives: CULTURE/PHILOSOPHY

Future Bodies: Discipline, Control, the Yoga of Resistance

Posted on by
Reply


Michel Foucault

When the task of disciple is simultaneously intended to improve its utility for production, here are some riffs on Foucault’s: Discipline & Punish. Historical context is primary and Foucault’s archaeological method helps uncover the rupture within the Enlightenment whose legacy still haunts us, as Deleuze observes, because they have now morphed into technologies of control.

In the European tradition Foucault traces the disciplining of the body back to medieval Monastic exercises, which were intended to facilitate renunciation of the world. These exercises were transformed when adopted by the socio-political regimes of the 17th & 18th century, (especially military, pedagogical, and industrial) into a method for maintaining control over the actions of the bodies it governed through disciplining processes. These disciplining practices have co-evolved with technology and are in fact technologies in themselves albeit inner technologies) to become ever more omnipresent as tools of surveillance and control.  Going forward it will be the omnipresence of ubiquitous technologies (bio-technical/computational/networked) that will largely determine the environmental parameters in which our future bodies must structurally couple.

Resistance to the virus of docility, to the infection of the gaze, to the insertion of disciplining technologies is often the unintended consequences of the mechanisms of control themselves but, as William Gibson says, “the street finds its own use for things”. The future is a random other; what we know as the internet today has evolved from technology first designed for survival after a nuclear holocaust.

Activism whose interests lie in discovering alternative, non coercive paths to human development would be well served to find patterns created by resistances to, and ruptures from, the paradigms of control and technological will organizing the human resources of the planet. Such an activism proceeds by both locating those ruptures in the paradigms of organizational control and cultivating resistance practices to them in ones own life and community. One such practice to resist the disciplining machinery of global socio-economic power exchanges is yoga. Although the aim of yoga is to achieve a frictionless flow between individual and cosmos, the many and the one, a yoga such as Sri Aurobindo’s integral yoga whose concern is not merely a transcendental urge but an immanent concern for the world, is a unique resistance form because its own monastic traditions of psycho/physiological practices, established well before the body was appropriated by the exercises of technoscience, allows one to leverage the silence of ones own embodiment as a method of resisting external regimes of control. Aurobindo’s yogic practice was part and parcel of his resistance to the colonialist occupation of India.
rc..


I picked up this astute comment from a new media blog:

“The focus of yogic teachings locates one’s body, emotions, thoughts, and the mind in constant interrelated state. The ultimate goal of yoga, therefore, is self-discipline of one’s own body in order to control one’s own mind, and eventually in harnessing its full power within. Docility and state discipline does the exact opposite of this process, taking the body away from the individual and controlling it through an organized system. As a result, the mind is also coerced into subjugation to the same powers. In that sense, the system of “control” that Deleuze proposes is a natural progression of the system of discipline, to adapt to a more fluid society and to discipline the mind and the body on a more flexible level. New means of discipline in their contemporary fluidity, just as in Foucault’s argument, are a result of new inventions, while even further inventions come out of the resulting forms of discipline………… ”

Here is Foucault from Discipline and Punish on the intellectual and political origins of the systems which seek to control the body:

Docile bodiesThe classical age discovered the body as object and target of power. It is easy enough to find signs of the attention then paid to the body – to the body that is manipulated, shaped, trained, which obeys, responds, becomes skillful and increases its forces. The great book of Man-the-Machine was written simultaneously on two registers: the anatomico-metaphysical register, of which Descartes wrote the first pages and which the physicians and philosophers continued, and the techno-political register, which was constituted by a whole set of regulations and by empirical and calculated methods relating to the army, the school and the hospital, for controlling or correcting the operations of the body. These two registers are quite distinct, since it was a question, on the one hand, of submission and use and, on the other, of functioning and explanation: there was a useful body and an intelligible body. And yet there are points of overlap from one to the other. La Mettrie’s L’Homme-machine is both a materialist reduction of the soul and a general theory of dressage, at the center of which reigns the notion of ‘docility’, which joins the analyzed body to the manipulated body. A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved. The celebrated automata, on the other hand, were not only a way of illustrating an organism, they were also political puppets, small-scale models of power: Frederick II, the meticulous king of small machines, well-trained regiments and long exercises, was obsessed with them. …………………


And now from Spark Notes some commentary on Foucault’s notion of docile bodies which were produced by the systems of discipline originating in the 18th century:

Docile Bodies SummaryFoucault begins with the ideal of the soldier in the seventeenth century. He is easily recognizable in body and action. The classical age discovered the body as the target of power. The docile body is subjected, used, transformed and improved. Eighteenth century projects of docility represented a new scale of control. The economy of the body became important. The modality of control implies uninterrupted, constant coercion, which is exercised according to a codification that partitions time and space. These methods are the disciplines, ways of controlling the operations of the body which imposed a relation of docility-utility. The disciplines had always existed in monasteries and armies, but in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they became a general formula of domination. A policy of coercion that acts on the body was formed. The human body entered a machinery that explored and rearranged it. A political anatomy and a mechanics of power were slowly born. We cannot write the history of different disciplinary institutions, merely map a series of detailed examples.“The art of distributions.” Discipline proceeds from the distribution of individuals in space, and employs several techniques: one) Discipline sometimes requires enclosure in a protected place, e.g. a school, factory, or barracks. two) Disciplinary machinery works on the principle of partitioning space; it is always cellular. three) The rule of functional sites would gradually code a space that architecture left at the disposal of several sites. four) In discipline, the elements are interchangeable because each is identified by its place in a series. The key unit is the rank or place in a classification. Rank begins to define the distribution of individuals in educational space.“Control of activity.” One) the timetable is an old inheritance, suggested by monastic communities. The division of time in disciplinary authorities increased. two) The temporal elaboration of the act. Time penetrates the body with all the meticulous controls of power. three) The correlation of body and gesture. Disciplinary power imposes the best relation between gesture and the overall position of the body. In the correct use of the body, nothing must remain useless. four) Body-object articulation. Discipline defines each of the relationships between body and the object (e.g. a rifle) it manipulates. five) Exhaustive use. The traditional timetable forbids men to waste time. Discipline provides a positive economy, and poses the principle of ever-expanding use of time. The “natural body,” which is manipulated by authority and classified, supercedes the mechanical body.“The organization of geneses.” As the eighteenth century progressed, different arrangements of time were evident; new technology developed in the classical period for regulating time, bodies and forces. The Disciplines were machinery for adding up and capitalizing time, in four different ways: one) by dividing duration into successive and parallel segments, each of which ends with a specific time. two) By organizing these segments according to an analytical plan. three) By finalizing these temporal segments with an examination to decide if a subject has reached the required level. four) By drawing up a series of series, and subdividing each series again. Dividing activities into series makes detailed control and intervention possible.Disciplinary methods reveal a linear, evolutive time. But at the same time a social time of a serial cumulative type existed, giving an idea of evolution in terms of “genesis”. The two great discoveries of the eighteenth century were the progress of society and the genesis of individuals linked to new technologies of power. At the center of the seriation of time was the procedure of exercise, a technology by which one imposes a repetitive or difficult task on the body. Exercise has a long history: it is found in military, religious, and universal practice as ritual or ceremony. Exercises became tasks of increasing complexity that marked the acquisition of knowledge and good behavior. Exercise was initially a way of organizing time towards salvation, but it became part of a political technology of the body.“The Composition of forces.” The military unit became a machine of many parts; there was a need to create smaller units out of a mass. This was similar to the idea of creating a productive force that was greater than its elements. Discipline became the art of composing forces to obtain an efficient machine. This demands explanation: one) the individual body becomes an element that is placed, moved and articulated. The soldier or body is inserted into a larger machine. two) The time of the individual unit is adjusted to the time of others. three) A carefully measured combination of forces requires a precise command of forces. The leader needs to signal in various ways to his charges.Discipline creates individuality out of the bodies that it controls. It is cellular, organic and genetic. It has four techniques: it draws up tables, it prescribes movements, it imposes exercises and arranges tactics. The highest form of disciplinary practice is war as strategy. Strategy makes it possible to understand warfare as a way of conducting politics between states. The classical age sees the birth of strategy between states, but also the creation of a strategy by which bodies within states were controlled. This was a military dream of society, which referred not to a contract or the state of nature but to the cogs of a machine. While jurists and philosophers looked to the contract to explain the creation of society, the technicians of discipline created procedures for the individual and collective coercion of bodies.AnalysisAgain, the body is the subject of attention. Now, however, the body is not subject to torture but to forces of discipline and control. Foucault analyzes various technologies that control and affect the body.Docility is achieved through the actions of discipline. Discipline is different from force or violence because it is a way of controlling the operations and positions of the body. The link to the idea of academic “disciplines” such as the human sciences is intended, and becomes important later. The fact that Foucault finds the roots of discipline in monasteries and armies is important. Monastic rules, which regulate the behavior of monks, and drill exercises in the army both emphasize self-control and obedience to rules, but from differing starting points. When Foucault talks of their extension over time, he does not suggest that everyone eventually became monks or soldiers. Instead, he argues that institutions like prisons, schools and hospitals acted like machines for transforming and controlling people in this period. To do this, they fixed individuals in time and space. Foucault thinks of these institutions in terms of machines and living organisms, hence the reference to political anatomy.The organization of individuals in space works according to certain rules. The whole process works within a larger space, such as the prison, which is divided into parts or cells. Discipline depends on the idea of a series, such as a line of pupils, or a rank of soldiers.The control of time is equally important. Foucault again traces the regulation of time back to monastic life. The idea that people are held in a series is preserved, only this time they are controlled by a timetable like that discussed at the beginning of section one. Foucault’s idea of a “positive economy” is hard to grasp. It essentially means that modern timetables aim to cram more and more activity into a day.Time also has broader effects. These effects are related to the technology of time that includes both machines like clocks and the political technology that regulates the individual’s time. The disciplines are not machines for calculating time in the same way as clocks, but rather ways of regulating time as the individual experiences it. Time is divided up like space. The convict’s day is divided into one-hour segments, for example, according to a detailed plan. The control of space and time is essential to Foucault’s disciplinary system because they are the most basic elements of human life. Regulating them affects the way in which people act and think; it is a particularly deep and effective strategy.Foucault begins with time and space as the individual experiences them, but he places this time within a large context. He argues that a wider type of time existed, in which everyone moved; he also argues that the eighteenth century invented the idea of the progress of society. Foucault is talking about the Enlightenment, an eighteenth century philosophical movement that was concerned with reason and human progress. He is unusual in that he links this movement, represented by writers such as Voltaire, Rousseau, and Kant, to the development of prisons, timetables and other technologies. However, it is important to Foucault that philosophical texts and timetables are part of the same structures of power.Like the timetable, exercise derives from the practices of monasteries, and is yet another way of regulating the body through activity. Prayer, which was aimed at salvation, and military drills are examples of this original form of exercise. The key shift came when the purpose of exercise changed from the benefit of the individual to control. Unlike silent prayer, the “exercise yard” of a prison does not necessarily benefit the prisoners, Foucault would argue.The final element that Foucault analyzes is the idea of the body as part of a machine. This is a development of the division of space and time. Now, however, the body becomes a cog in a machine. Foucault does not argue that groups of people never existed before the classical period, but that the idea of arranging and controlling them was new. The power that arranges people, however, makes them into individual units. It seems like a contradiction in terms, but for Foucault the “individual” could exist only when massive groups were created. The group was not created from individuals, but vice versa. The idea of creating the individual as an object of knowledge becomes important later. Creating the individual out of the group contradicts the common philosophical view about the creation of society. This view argued that society came from a contract or agreement between men. Foucault reveals his opinion of modern society here: that you cannot choose to enter it through a contract, and that it controls you absolutely through technology and power.

Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies III by Debashish Banerji

Posted on by
6

Following up on my earlier posts here on Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies (I and II), here are my concluding reflections on the subject.

To ask ourselves the question where we are headed in these civilizational end-times, this eschatological hour of the realized hubris of techno-capitalism and to pose the question in terms of godhood – omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence – is to foreground the issue of post-human destinies. Are we to remain what we are or is something else taking shape in us, an alien life-form being born imperceptibly in the spectral interstices of our already blurred humanity? And what is the nature of this life-form – is it Heidegger’s “god (who will) save us,” Derrida’s unnamable l’avenir, Nietzsche’s superman or Sri Aurobindo’s? Or is it Kafka’s metamorphosed cockroach or William Burrough’s ventriloquist whose anal speech-trick ran uncontrollably out of hand and took over his body and brain?

Let us consider the godhood of our contemporary post-Enlightenment hour of global power and control. What kind of omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence do we have here? Techno-capitalism is a regime of international globalized flows leveling all differences into universal exchangeable measures – a flow of technology as capital and of capital as technology – the two imperceptibly intertwined like Mercurius’ caduceus or the Ida and Pingala occult streams of internal circulation. But that does not mean they are one – their sources of origin are separate and though they work as one within the universal body of the psycho-sphere, it may be possible to unbraid them if we know the why and how.

What then is our present Omniscience and Omnipresence? Our omniscience and Omnipresence are those of anonymous instrumentation and its master, anonymous Rationality, of the extension and refinement of sense organs turned upon the material world and probing it for its universal secrets, and ultimately for its intrinsic singular rationality, for this is how the Enlightenment has defined “the human” to itself – the secret possessor of the Logos of God who by collective effort of/as history will distil and release this objectified universal Logos, the Immortal Static Infinite Intelligent Word of God which is the hidden operative rationality of Matter and Life and the conscious instrumental rationality of the human. But whereas individual human beings are finite and mortal, the “human race” is potentially immortal (for such is the rationality of Nature) and its collective historical reach is infinite. This is how its effort can produce an Age of Universal Enlightenment which belongs to no single person but is made available for the use of humanity as a whole. But this statement has to be understood in its fullness – not merely in the utopic ring of its idealism. For if it cannot belong to any single person, this is not because no single person can come into control and possession of it, but because no single person can be equal to it in consciousness. This is one of the two fundamental dualities of the regime of instrumentation as technology – that it produces a globalized objectified Rationality as instrumentation, which is far beyond the capacity of any individual to equal, which therefore dwarfs and obliterates that same individuality which it produces as the subject of its own production, splitting the individual from all past and present systems of identity/belonging, producing in him the conscience of prized individuality and anonymizing him.  This individual anonymous “member of the human race”, producer of the universal rationality of the age of enlightenment objectified as the regime of globalized instrumentation must then perforce become a continuing producer, user and consumer of its Omniscience and Omnipresence through the mediation of technological instrumentation. And this mediation determines through its totalitarian McLuhanesque extra-human far-from-neutral neurality the conditioned responses of human agents, responses more proper to a silicon-based life-form, which reduces the human to a ticking (pun intended) part of its machinery.

Which leads to the second duality at the heart of this Omniscience/Omnipresence – that between the essence of technology and the essence of the human. For Technology as the product of the Enlightenment remains objectified Rationality but humanity if reduced to the rational, loses its essence as an undefinable life-form in transition, seeking to create in itself its own godhood. This second duality is a realized godhood as human creation which slays the essence of the godhood of human creativity, its own sources of self-transcendence. This then is the Omniscience and Omnipresence beckoning us as the fulfilled end of Technology, an end which is largely unquestioned and avalanches towards its fulfillment, taking “the human race” to its own post-human destiny as cannibalized machinery.

And what of Omnipotence, the secret urge behind every seeking for Omniscience, the human dream of making a better world than that which God has made, a world more suited to its needs and desires? Here is where Technology and Capitalism become separable, for if global Technology anonymyzes and dwarfs us as individuals and splices us into the nano-genetics of its non-dual world reality as Instrument, this same inequality between the finite mortal individual and the Infinite Immortal objectified Reason as Knowledge spawns a different valence for Power – one of the huge individual hunger to become the possessor of such a Dream Machine – a possessor not in/for consciousness but as property for enjoyment. This is the urge of global capitalism, which produces the regime of Technology as an increasingly accelerating desiring machine, machine of the production and consumption of human beings as desiring subject/objects and of universal capital as impersonal exchange property of property exchange driving the hunger and thirst of infinite possession known as the world market.

The operating logic of such a regime is that of the ecology of speed and the mythology of rupture. A mythos of perpetual progress flattens Time towards pure spatiality, where the Here is the Now, distancing itself ever more radically from “the past” through the production of History and projecting itself ever more thoroughly into “the future” through its ceaseless reinvention, a double fetish of willed obsolescence assimilated ever more rapidly into the world museum of ruins and a compulsive turnover of fleeting novelty as its “other,” two specifically modern forms of sensational pleasure. But is this mythos of “rupture” from the past the same as the discontinuity of the messianic Return, is this pure spatiality of Time the diaphaneity of the fourth dimension, is this eschatological moment the inauguration of a new time-structure of perpetual rebirth, the Aurobindonian condition for the physical immortality of one kind of post-human future?

Hardly so. This spurious supermanhood at the end of Hegelian/Enlightenment History does not yield the phenomenology of the diaphanous fourth dimension but the commodification of Subjectivity which amounts to the oblivion of memory and the erasure of Being. Its Omnipresence is not an omnitemporality which redeems or fulfills the past but betrays it by tearing from it the historicity of its presence and packaging it as alienated product of consumption or collection. Its Omnipotence does not grasp the plenitude of infinite Being as a non-dual self-possession, but marks its object with the unfulfillment, dis-ease and boredom of its own wanting finitude. Its Omniscience is not a penetration of or identification with the Intelligence of God in all things but a voluntary abdication of creative consciousness in favor of a conditioned instrumentality yielding a piecemeal fragmentary knowledge at best simulating the integral. What it is most useful for is not the global reproduction of democratic godhood but the global surveillance of the Unitary Panopticon, invisibly and anonymously mapping every point in space and moment in time for the control of whatever power or principle may manage to lay hold of its machinery. But effective though this may be in subjecting human bodies to its disciplinary regime, human consciousness persists in its incalculable presentation of something beyond instrumentation and discreteness, something which no calculus of limits or nano-resolution of binarity can capture, something which is reality itself as integral Idea, Real-Idea, escaping its hold, though deferred or pre-empted from its own post-humanity. The Godhead we have collectively produced, by forced conscription of all the energisms of the human race over 500 years of labor, toil and blood-sacrifice in the yajna of the Enlightenment is simply the hugely magnified and universalized double Ego of Mental-Vital Man, objectified as global machinery and desiring Will, Technology and the World-Market.

And today, it is not a matter of choice, not the lure of the god of the Enlightenment which attracts the adherence of our will but the avalanche of its momentum which sweeps inexorably towards the end of its projected temporality, its time-structure as world history. Does Heidegger’s alternate god, the “god that can save us” hide its footsteps behind the mask of this mental-vital fraud? We cannot say. For Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the answer is “yes,” though what is uncertain there is if we will have any part of it. The Aurobindonian superman does not need our assistance or midwifery to make its appearance. For Heidegger or Derrida, the answer is unimportant, our propriety as beings at the end of “human history” one of knowing how to awaken the sleep of unsuspecting travelers, how to indicate the margins of human possibility and how to wait. Is that all? And what are the margins of human possibility? What post-human forms loom in those margins? And what futures await us at the culmination of Enlightenment history? And is there a history beyond?

I have spoken of two dualities dividing the human individual from the God of the Enlightenment. One of these is the division between the finitude of the individual and the infinity of God. The other is the division between the essence of the human and the essence of Technology. It is both these dualities that Arthur Kroker is invoking when he refers to the lack in McLuhan’s (following Chardin’s) theological metaphysics to bring into awareness or overcome the irreducible alienation of an Enlightenment godhood. Western metaphysics as western theology (displacements of each other) and the two together as onto-theology are premised on these dualities. The essence of the human individual there is a finitude faced with an infinite God or Universe and a struggling irrationality faced with a rational God or Universe. This is the human structure or onto-theology from which it knows no escape.

The only apotheosis of the human individual here at the end of the cycle of objectified and universalized Rationality is its disappearance into Machinery. This is a post-human future which looms large as a possibility at the nearing margins of the impending end of human history – maybe first the surreptitious disappearance of man in the Machine, an embodied instrument in the world wide web of impersonal Techno-Capitalism, then an increasing nano-bionic mutation of physical substance going hand in hand with an increasing miniaturization and de-materialization of machinery and ending with the extinction of the human – the consciousness of universal human history and experience ceding its temporality and mortality to the continuance of a memory bank in astral cyberspace pulsing out its permutated algorithms of post-human desire in cyber-sensory worlds without limit.

Or may we dare to question the lack at the heart of Christian/western onto-theological duality and posit a radical post-structuralism on the one hand as the essence of the human – not a finitude but an ever creative infinity, and on the other, as the essence of God or Universe – not a rationality but a post-rational integrality? May the universalization and objectification of Rationality and Instrumentation as the end of Enlightenment history be an intermediate invitation to a non-duality where a supra-rational subjective power of consciousness in the individual measures, equates and overpasses itself? The practical phenomenology of Vedanta would seem to indicate such a possibility, not as an astrologism, but as a necessarily participative process, a process termed yoga. It is this possibility that Sri Aurobindo holds out as the post-human future of choice which can activate an evolutionary transcendence. Can the objectification of universal Rationality as non-local Instrumentation be mirrorred in identical structures of subjective consciousness? May, indeed, such an objectification facilitate such a realized equivalence of subjective consciousness, make it easier for the individual to realize its operational non-locality and universality in consciousness, so even as to eventually make the objectified machinery unnecessary and obsolete? And if such a possibility may be imagined, under what individual and social conditions could it be realized?

Sri Aurobindo has a provocative statement about the Enlightenment drive for Godhood and the end of Machinery ending the chapter on “The Materialist Denial” in The Life Divine. He says:

Science itself begins to dream of the physical conquest of death, expresses an insatiable thirst for knowledge, is working out something like a terrestrial omnipotence for humanity. Space and Time are contracting to the vanishing-point in its works, and it strives in a hundred ways to make man the master of circumstance and so lighten the fetters of causality. The idea of limit, of the impossible begins to grow a little shadowy and it appears instead that whatever man constantly wills, he must in the end be able to do; for the consciousness in the race eventually finds the means. It is not in the individual that this omnipotence expresses itself, but the collective Will of mankind that works out with the individual as a means. And yet when we look more deeply, it is not any conscious Will of the collectivity, but a superconscious Might that uses the individual as a centre and means, the collectivity as a condition and field. What is this but the God in man, the infinite Identity, the multitudinous Unity, the Omniscient, the Omnipotent, who having made man in His own image, with the ego as a centre of working, with the race, the collective Narayana, the visvamanava  as the mould and circumscription, seeks to express in them some image of the unity, omniscience, omnipotence which are the self-conception of the Divine? “That which is immortal in mortals is a God and established inwardly as an energy working out in our divine powers.”  It is this vast cosmic impulse which the modern world, without quite knowing its own aim, yet serves in all its activities and labours subconsciously to fulfil.

But there is always a limit and an encumbrance,—the limit of the material field in the Knowledge, the encumbrance of the material machinery in the Power. But here also the latest trend is highly significant of a freer future. As the outposts of scientific Knowledge come more and more to be set on the borders that divide the material from the immaterial, so also the highest achievements of practical Science are those which tend to simplify and reduce to the vanishing-point the machinery by which the greatest effects are produced. Wireless telegraphy is Nature’s exterior sign and pretext for a new orientation. The sensible physical means for the intermediate transmission of the physical force is removed; it is only preserved at the points of impulsion and reception. Eventually even these must disappear; for when the laws and forces of the supraphysical are studied with the right starting-point, the means will infallibly be found for Mind directly to seize on the physical energy and speed it accurately upon its errand. There, once we bring ourselves to recognise it, lie the gates that open upon the enormous vistas of the future.

Yet even if we had full knowledge and control of the worlds immediately above Matter, there would still be a limitation and still a beyond. The last knot of our bondage is at that point where the external draws into oneness with the internal, the machinery of ego itself becomes subtilised to the vanishing-point and the law of our action is at last unity embracing and possessing multiplicity and no longer, as now, multiplicity struggling towards some figure of unity. There is the central throne of cosmic Knowledge looking out on her widest dominion; there the empire of oneself with the empire of one’s world; there the life in the eternally consummate Being and the realisation of His divine nature in our human existence.

This Neo-Vedantic appropriation and supercession of the Enlightenment furthers an alternate teleology of the Subjective which travels to a non-dual post-human future prioritizing Consciousness. It also indicates an alternate Science of the Subjective, a collective phenomenology of experience and the development of subjective technologies of consciousness. Are we up to such developments? Are we permitted the time within the hyper-temporality of Techno-Capitalism’s ecology of rupture and insistent objectification of commodified space-time? Are we permitted the choice within the totalitarian globalized regime of the ever-tightening ubiquity of the world wide web, the economic barbarism of its tinsel-town neo-liberal techno-optimism, its Panopticon of terrestrial surveillance?

Without the growth of collective awareness in the imperative of this alternative, its teleology, even if admitted, may well bypass the human. But to awaken to a more than personal responsibility does not come easy to humankind. This too is an ironical aspect of the dwarfing of human consciousness in the regime of Techno-Capitalism, where the individual is expected to be global but all this amounts to in terms of responsibility is an uniformitarian adherence to multinational consumption. Apathy is the badge of its regime, aspiration merely its lip service to an ideal for which it seeks deified substitutes for its own insufficiency. And yet, without the growing awareness in humanity of the urgent need for a change in direction, the hope in a “God who can save us” will remain an impotent and impractical faith, the prospect of the God who came and went and remained unrecognized, an eventuality far more pathetic than that of the God who earned men’s hate and martyrdom. Intentional groups which can make the collective choice to refuse the imperative of global capitalism and persist in economies and ecologies determined by the alternate imperative of developing the accumulated phenomenologies of the Subjective and technologies of Consciousness in engagement with the regime of post-Enlightenment Modernity may alone have a chance at this transition. Every attempted experiment in this direction is a possible evolutionary bifurcation, a possibility of socio-personal mutation whose success or failure or dimensions are completely unknown at this time, but which urgently demands our participation. What is primary for this initiation is individual awakening to the images of the post-human futures driving the present, the trajectories of Techno-Capitalism and their power, the urgent imperative for alternate post-human futures which lead to non-dual identities of Consciousness in being and power and a heroic aspiration and global responsibility flaming up within as a result of these contemplations. Without these understandings, these contemplations and these aspirations one is not ready for the transition, either as an individual or a collective, and social experiments even based on teachings such as those of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, are blighted from the outset. With these requirements, do we have a better chance? And can the experiments of miniscule collectives, even if lucky enough to survive, mean anything to globalized humanity? Without the attempt we will never know. A post-human future of non-dual consciousness which glorifies and transcends the human is least likely to arrive without human participation. And perhaps if we can overcome the pressure of inertia and apathy endemic to the regime of Techno-Capitalism and wake to the necessary post-human aspiration, the Mother’s message may become meaningful in a new and active way: “Blessed are those who take a leap towards the future.”

Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies – II

Posted on by
9

 

 

Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies – II

by Debashish Banerji

To continue with our reflections on the regime of technology or what I have called the universal desiring machine of techno-capital (Techo-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies I), let us dwell for a moment also on the “traditional” understanding of Marx, one which Postone is at pains to distinguish himself from, since this version also meshes in its own way with the goals of the Enlightenment and may debatably show itself to be be identical with the techno-utopia of Hegel/Teilhard/McLuhan, and pushing in its own ingenuity, the self-same mythology with the same structural order of frozen time (teleology).

Among Marx’s own internal narratives, this could very well be one of his spectral alternates, since Hegel was more than an influence in his thinking. The “traditional” version then is that products are produced by concrete labor and “originally” for their concrete and (subjectively) specific use-value(s) in the self-consumptions of communities. But the process of marketization is one of the necessary birth of history, of the journey of capital as abstract use value of commodity translating labor now also abstracted for the universalization/globalization of human exchange. This process of the materialization and terrestrialization of human labor is mediated for competitive self-advantage by a “middle” class, the bourgeois, a mediation that accumulates capital privately and fuels the processes of the production and consumption of unbounded increasing surplus – the exploitation of labor and of nature, the production of technology, the production of knowledge and the production of desire. But the internal contradiction in this system between the use and abstract value of the product and the subjective concreteness and objectified abstraction of labor (these two sets of contradictions mapping into one another as necessary translations, since it is labor which translates into the value of  product) drives the dialectic of inexorable necessity towards the “justice” of pure unmediated translations, a global order which achieves the end of history in the completed identity of abstract/concrete exchange/use producer/consumer as the self-representation  of collective humanity in the form of the international union of labor through the political organ of the World State.

The traditional view of Marxist revolution is that of human intervention in accelerating the inherent rationalization of this process by the overcoming of the mediation of the bourgeois and his competitive privatization of capital through a collective organization of the proletariat and its direct ownership of the means of production and the products and control over their consumption, distribution and exchange through nation-states and eventually, the world-state. The mythology of this narrative should not be lost on us. This is the Sacrifice of the originary Unified Body of collective Man in the Symbol, pure communities of the Symbolic Age of humanity, Satya Yuga, consuming their own production, but now driven to the reconstitution of the dis-membered body through acts of exchange, leading logically (since the hidden Subject of this leading is the Logos, who makes Himself visible only through His adjectival quality, logic) to the terrestrialization of Universal Value (which is Universal Justice) in the reintegrated Body-Politic of International Labor as the unmediated self-determining producers/consumers of their own labor/produce of use/exchange (each of these opposition-pairs being now realized identities in consciousness). Marxists, of course, will shudder at this mythologization, since they will say it is exactly the Geist, Spirit of Hegel which Marx rejected in materializing his dialectic in the collective human body and its material processes of  production and consumption, with the proletariat as its real Subject. But be that as it may, why the process of history should take this logical form, of a loss of “innocence” through private selfishness and the transformation of individual selfishness to universal justice and finally of the revelation in universal justice of Universal Love, were it not for the immanence of the Logos, the Word of God made flesh hidden in the heart of human history, whatever may be its manifest actors and their motivated/material acts, is difficult to comprehend. The subsumption of the Chrisian mythos in the Hegelian vision of the Enlightenment undergoes a second level of secularization in the “traditional” narrative of Marx, but cannot divorce itself from the source of its necessity in its Origin.

Where Postone questions this version is in the centrality of its “original sin,” since this will determine also the totality of its apotheosis in the “end of history.” According to Postone, for the later Marx this is not an act of selfishness but one of self-alienation. The decision to produce not for self-consumption but for exchange produces not merely the mediation of economic and more fundamentally, social relations (the transformation of the habitus) by the layer of the “middle class” but by another layer of immanent mediation, which becomes more and more manifest through the historic process as the “true subject” and beneficiary of this history – the layer of alienation itself materializing and universalizing itself as Technology - Technology as Logos or Logos as Technology, which no revolution of the proletariat or overcoming of the bourgeois can displace, produced out of the dismembered body of the sacrifice of collective Unity in the Symbolic Age of Innocence, the shining Bio-Robotic Cow of Universal Plenty, its mechanical udders vibrating with the fatal fascination of alterity, cannibalizing its producers into its own alienated Substance. Marx’s mature view of the “end of history” then for Postone is not the apotheosis of labor and the utopia of Universal Love but the totalitarianism of Technology as the regime of alienation, his revolution not a revolution of the proletariat against the bourgeois but an immanent revolution of human production and consumption against technicity, the technologized consciousness-structures of the alienated social habitus, of commodified social relations. In this version, Marx visioned Hegelian Universal Enlightenment as a mistake and his own narrative is a historical explanation and critique of Hegel. In this view, Hegel mistook a non-human Universal Spirit (Geist) as the progressively materializing and rationalizing Subject of History because he himself was embedded within the structural temporality of modernity, which was already marked by its endemic alienation. This ojectified alienation, rationalizing itself materially as Technology is what Hegel mistook as Spirit.

But granted that this is a possibility, can Hegel/Teilhard/McLuhan be dismissed so easily? Can the Enlightenment and the fascination of its mythos be  negativized unequivocally? After all, the Aurobindonian narrative sounds surprisingly similar to some ears as the Hegelian one; many there are who read the regime of globalization as the materialization of the Brahman, even of that specially mystifying Aurobindonian term, the Supermind. And Postone’s Marx and his attribution of self-alienation at the “origin” of modern history – how does this history realize itself universally – I mean how did it even get this far, what processes of chance or necessity or combination of the two took local phenomena of exchange and turned it into the globalizing world-market, whose ontology (hauntology, as Derrida will tell us in his Specters of Marx) is technicity? Was it perhaps the Hegelian Zeitgeist, Time-Spirit, the Heideggerean disclosure of Being in the horizon of modern Time, the Foucauldian inexplicable epistemic change? And what does it portend for the future destiny of the human at the end of its history? Or can its history be aborted and transformed through immanent revolution, as Postone suggests (but never makes practically concrete) in his text?

What are the dimensions of the Enlightenment narrative and where does Sri Aurobindo fit into it or where does it fit into Sri Aurobindo, if we are to be more audacious or is there a radical misfit between the two? Where is the inadequacy in “Catholicism” which Arthur Kroker invokes to explain McLuhan’s failure or is it some other kind of inadequacy, in the heart of the Enlightenment ideal and that of its proponents who see subsumed and hidden in it the track or trace, footsteps of the Holy Spirit of archaic ages?

What indeed, is the Enlightenment ideal and where do we stand in its realization today? Put simply, the onto-theological ideal of the Enlightenment is the universalization of Divine Reason, the Rationality or Intelligence of the Universe as the common property of Humanity on earth – not the property of any one person but of Humanity as a whole, for its access and use. Enlightenment brings liberation, this was the belief, and a universalized Enlightenment will bring universal liberation through the terrestrialization of the properties of Divinity (or as Divine Reason equated with Divinity) being accessible to all humans. The prime properties of such a realized divinity would be the Omnisicience, Omnipotence and Omnipresence of the Divine Reason within unversal access. Today, the virtual universalization of satellite technology, telecommunications and intercontinental travel have effectively non-localized our experience of the world, we can almost be “present” at any point on the earth at any time. Is this not Omnipresence? The proliferation of electronic archives and incredible information density of storage systems are making all the history of textual and multimedia expression and discursivity of the earth available to the access of all human beings at the push of a button. Is this not Omniscience? And Technology today makes it possible to give life and take life universally – we are on the verge of being able to overcome every natural deterrent to food production and to regenerate human organs and we can blow out the world at the push of a button. Is this not Omnipotence? So where did we go wrong or did we? And is there anything else that Sri Aurobindo can give us here – or is this indeed also the Aurobindonian mythos, the terrestrialization and universalization of Supermind as the Vedic Cow of Human Plenty?

These are questions worth reflecting on and bringing into alignment with the Neo-Vedantic teleology (if it can be called that) of Sri Aurobindo.

Sri Aurobindo’s Vision and the 20th Century by Rod Hemsell

Posted on by
Reply
Sri Aurobindo’s Vision and the 20th Century

Physics and the Philosophy of Evolution

Nature’s Dialectic

Few among humanity have yet undertaken the challenge, availed the opportunity, transcended their conventional mental formulas, and achieved the clarity of intention necessary to see the vision of Sri Aurobindo. Fewer have gone so far as to integrate his vision into their thought and life, and so to understand it fully, to grasp its historical significance, and to realize its force, its evolutionary potential. Therefore it can truly be said that Sri Aurobindo belongs to the future.1 And yet his vision, and the thought forms and literary expressions that he created to embody it, are vibrant within the epoch of human achievement known as the 20th Century – that moment in time and the history of civilization that can be understood as the culmination of the rational cycle of human development and the beginning of a suprarational, integral cycle – like a subtle ether flowing through everything.

Abundant are the signs of that evolutionary transition of which he was the harbinger, indications of the integral and supramental structures of consciousness that he said would emerge. But the emergence of creative thought formations, and of new evolutionary forms, takes time. And very little is known about this process of emergence in any case. It is not common knowledge, and it is not the way we have been conditioned to understand how evolution happens. The signs, nevertheless, are most evident in the subtler, more spiritual thought of the century, but clearly perceptible also in the arts and literature, and in the human sciences – philosophy, psychology, sociology. They are progressively apparent in the startling theoretical discoveries of the natural sciences, in physics, evolutionary biology, ecology. But there, in the mental disciplines, the fundamental aporias and enigmas of thought that permeate the epoch are still, as always, the questions of man, of consciousness, of our ability, or inability, to know and conquer our human limitations. The new has not yet emerged, but its emergence is presaged by new perspectives, flashes, intensities, forebodings, and irrepressible facts, and by the failure and breakdown of old structures.

In an epoch of incomparable human cruelty, depravity and destruction, paired with almost miraculous advances in the products and processes of global technological civilization, when the human has become godlike in its mastery of nature, humanity is being forced, at last perhaps, to seek hope shrouded in its most desperate moment of deficient self-revelations, and the self-realization of its shadow identity as creator of the culture of nihilism and extinction.^2  It is perhaps inevitable, then, that we rewrite Sri Aurobindo, that we revision and rethink his vision as the background of  this passing age of scientific and technological hubris, and that we narrate the necessary emergence of the trans-human. For, as he saw and wrote in the first few pages of his massive literary life-work, early in the century:

“…today we see a humanity satiated but not satisfied by victorious analysis of the externalities of Nature preparing to return to its primeval longings. …to convert our twilit or obscure physical mentality into the plenary supramental illumination, to build peace and a self-existent bliss where there is only a stress of transitory satisfactions besieged by pain and emotional suffering, to establish infinite freedom in a world which presents itself as a group of mechanical necessities…
“… all Nature seeks a harmony, life and matter in their own sphere as much as mind in the arrangement of its perceptions. The greater the apparent disorder of the materials offered or the apparent disparateness, even to irreconcilable opposition, of the elements that have to be utilized, the stronger is the spur, and it drives towards a more subtle and puissant order than can normally be the result of a less difficult endeavour.^3

But the dialectic of progress that evolutionary Nature utilizes to achieve her ends is a difficult lesson for us; it is one that we would in fact prefer to ignore. Or, perhaps it is because of our ignorance and unwillingness to learn, that she chooses to use this method. However that may be, it is by negation that she affirms and by destruction that she creates, as Sri Aurobindo stated unequivocally in those first pages, in 1914:

In our world error is continually the handmaid and pathfinder of Truth; for error is  really a half-truth that stumbles because of its limitations; often it is Truth that wears a disguise in order to arrive unobserved near to its goal.^4
The world today presents the aspect of a huge cauldron of Medea in which all things are being cast, shredded into pieces, experimented on, combined and recombined either to perish and provide the scattered material of new forms or to emerge rejuvenated and changed for a fresh term of existence. …For the march of Nature is not drilled to a regular and mechanical forward stepping. She reaches constantly beyond herself even at the cost of subsequent deplorable retreats. …And these self-exceedings are the revelation of that in her which is most divine or else most diabolical, but in either case the most puissant to bring her rapidly forward towards her goal.^5

The First World War was then upon us, soon to be followed by the Holocaust and Hiroshima. These were followed, in turn, by the liberation of many new nations formerly subjugated by Colonialism, and the ascendancy of the civilization of affluence, with Germany and Japan, ironically, near the top. It appears that the will to power evolved rapidly in these cases, from a lower, infrahuman and destructive form into a form of creativity, efficiency and excellence. Perhaps a reverse paradox might be represented historically by the invention and widespread use of antibiotics during and after World War II, followed by the exponential increase of the human population from 2.5 billion in 1950 to over 6 billion in 2000. (It had already almost doubled from 1.6 billion at the turn of the century, largely in response to the spread of mechanized agriculture.) If, as a result of the population explosion, pollution, global warming, and the depletion of natural resources this “progress” were to bring an end, or a rapid decline, to our species, we might see a parallel with the end of the age of the dinosaurs, which apparently made room for the rise of primates just a few million years later. This pattern of reversals would apparently illustrate and be the justification for what Sri Aurobindo terms, poetically, Nature’s harsh economy, and yet the indication of a process of change that is neither random nor arbitrary, but is rather characterized by order and purpose.  It is one in which Nature sets up the oppositions necessary to create the circumstances, structures, conditions for the emergence of that next stage of development, without which her processes could not continue to evolve. Therefore it might be said, to reaffirm the theoretical insights of critical thought with Sri Aurobindo’s more holistic, spiritual vision: if the apparent oppositions are terms of Nature’s intentional process, there are in fact no oppositions.

Could it perhaps then be said, that the extraordinary developments of scientific thought, knowledge, and technology in the 20th Century have set the stage for the further evolution of consciousness, not so much by what they have accomplished for humanity and the Earth, but rather by having created the possibility of such catastrophic circumstances that survival can only be achieved by overcoming and transcending this “intelligent human” with his righteous violence? Such speculation is at least not out of place in the context of the English literary traditions of Blake and Huxley to which Sri Aurobindo’s prophetic writing might also be said to belong.

Uncertainty and Complementarity

In 1914, Sri Aurobindo wrote, in the context of his speculations about the development of scientific thought, “It will be evident that essential Matter is a thing non-existent to the senses and only… a conceptual form of substance; and in fact the point is increasingly reached where only an arbitrary distinction in thought divides form of substance from form of energy.”^6 He was making a comparison between the truths of the ancient Vedic knowledge and the new discoveries of modern science, for the purpose of illustrating a possible trend of the latter towards “a Monism which is consistent with multiplicity, towards the Vedic idea of the one essence with its many becomings.”^7 And then, within a few short paragraphs, he formulated the integral knowledge, towards which science only  now, at the beginning of the next century, tentatively begins to move: “Life…begins to reveal itself as an obscure energy of sensibility imprisoned in its material formulation; and when the dividing ignorance is cured which gives us the sense of a gulf between Life and Matter, it is difficult to suppose that Mind, Life and Matter will be found to be anything else than one Energy triply formulated, the triple world of the Vedic seers. Nor will the conception then be able to endure of a brute material Force as the mother of Mind.”^8 As we shall see, this understanding is still a step before which scientific thought hesitates. And the one beyond, the final destined leap, it does not yet dare to think: “The Energy that creates the world can be nothing else than a Will, and Will is only consciousness applying itself to a work and a result.”^9

Einstein had published the special theory of relativity in 1905 and then developed the general theory of relativity in 1915, definitively altering the traditional conceptions of Space and Time. Commenting on the subsequent development of quantum theory in the 1920s, Capra (1982) says, as if to confirm Sri Aurobindo’s prediction, “The most important consequence of the new relativistic framework has been the realization that mass is nothing but a form of energy.”^10 And the Nobel physicist, Ilya Prigogine (1984), currently at the forefront of cosmic evolutionary theory, writes: “Quantum mechanics teaches us that… on all levels reality implies an essential element of conceptualization.”^11

The seminal discoveries of quantum mechanics in that theoretical “golden age” of physics in the 1920s, made by Einstein, Bohr, Planck, Heisenberg, Dirac, Shrodinger, etc., have been described by Hawking (2001) as “a new picture of reality” in which, “No longer did any particles have a definite position and speed. Instead, the more accurately one determined a particle’s position, the less accurately could one determine its speed, and vice versa.”^12 Thus it became uncertain whether matter is something stable and solid or something fluid and in motion. And this “uncertainty principle,” as formulated by Werner Heisenberg, has become perhaps the most often cited, because the most profoundly disturbing, discovery of scientific thought in the Twentieth Century. Let us therefore ask why this should be so, and how it happens to be especially significant in the context of Sri Aurobindo’s evolutionary vision.

The theory of relativity presented a conception of the universe in which Space was not a boundless container lasting through an eternal Time, in which material objects move and change in predictable ways. Rather it replaced this static view of the physical universe, which had been held by scientific and philosophical thought at least since Plato and Aristotle, with the view that space and time are relative dimensions of a universe in which everything is in motion. As Capra puts it: “In such a framework space and time are intimately and inseparably connected and form a four-dimensional continuum called “space-time”. … Physicists have now lived with relativity theory for many years and have become thoroughly familiar with its mathematical formalism. Nevertheless, this has not helped our intuition very much. We have no direct sensory experience of the four-dimensional space-time…”^13

Moreover, with the development of quantum mechanics, which presents a picture that Capra says “clashes with our deepest intuition of reality,” subatomic particles, or quanta of matter-energy, do not really appear to exist except insofar as they are defined by observers. Matter is a conceptual form of energy as Sri Aurobindo said. And according to quantum physics, the behavior of this matter-energy is determined by non-local events, as if the “particle” were spread throughout great expanses of space as a “wave” and the existence and behavior of this energy – of which everything is made – is known only through a mathematics of probability. Thus, the principle of uncertainty, which defines a dynamic world that appears to be, as Heisenberg said, “a complicated tissue of events, in which connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole.”^14 Contrary to the conventional, analytical, and mechanistic paradigm, the part is determined by the whole, rather than the other, common sense, way around.

Hawking, who helped to prove, in the late 60s, that space-time had a beginning with the Big Bang and that the universe is continually expanding and evolving, says that Einstein himself refused to accept these bounded implications of his theory, preferring the classical view of a static, essentially unchanging and eternal universe. And of the implications of quantum theory, Einstein reportedly said, “It was as if the ground had been pulled out from under one, with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere, upon which one could build.”^15

And so, the universe at bottom is not mechanical and not made up of well defined building blocks (atoms, quarks, etc.), with cause and effect relationships that determine the whole in predictable ways, but is rather a whole which determines its parts through an interconnected web of vast energy fields, and this whole appears to be somehow self-determining, and unpredictable by our way of understanding. Several troublesome implications seem to follow. One is that, if the universe is not deterministic and predictable, it must be ultimately random, chaotic, irrational; another is that, if we can neither know nor determine the structures and processes of Nature with certainty, then  we haven’t much reason for hope. It would seem that we are led necessarily to a position of existential nihilism. And in fact, the 20th Century has often been characterized as such an irrational age of nihilism.

However, our mathematical understanding of the physical universe has also led to a very impressive sort of control, extraordinarily effective within certain limits, and we are able to construct quite an orderly “picture” or “concept” of this uncertain “reality.” As Hawking says, the quantum laws of physics have been “the basis of modern developments in chemistry, molecular biology, and electronics, and the foundations for the technology that has transformed the world in the last fifty years,”^16 referring of course primarily to digital computer and laser technologies. In addition, the visionary inclinations of many physicists has tended more and more toward the conclusion that the universe is not only orderly and self-determining, but it evolves in ways that tend to produce consciousness. It would seem that Niels Bohr, in formulating the principle of complementarity as a corollary to the uncertainty principle, had given a nod to the idea with which we began: that the contrariness of Nature is quite meaningful in its results. Bohr’s principle suggests that both terms of any empirical duality, such as particle/wave, position/velocity, space/time, structure/process, order/chaos, stability/change should be recognized, measured, and considered holistically as aspects of a unity. Thus the uncertainty principle leads in fact to a more complete and complex grasp of reality.

Evolution and Consciousness

Many scientists, including especially Capra, Prigogine, Penrose and others who have applied the principles of uncertainty and complementarity, analogically and metaphorically as well as computationally perhaps, in the domains of chemistry and biology, have been led to the proposition that apparently stable structures in nature are the product of processes of constant energy transformations at all levels: subatomic, molecular, and biological. According to Prigogine’s theory of dissipative structures, all physical systems, from electromagnetic fields to molecules, weather systems to amino acids, cells and organs to organisms, are self organizing and self replicating as a result of energy flowing through their systems. The structures of physical systems reproduce their own stable forms through constant structural interactions with their environment. Such self-making, self-sustaining structural transformations are on-going within and between organisms, according to this theory, exhibiting patterns of deliberate response and reaction, memory and choice, which are thought to be parallel to and indicative of mental processes, or intelligent behavior.  The ability of organisms to co-exist and co-evolve, through processes of non-local energy field causation, whether at the quantum, biological or mental levels, and at moments of extreme disequilibrium to diversify or evolve new structures and processes of ever greater complexity and viability, are leading some scientists to conclude that the organization of life itself is in fact a kind of mental process.

As Capra puts it in The Web of Life – A new scientific understanding of living systems (1996):

To understand the nature of life from a systemic point of view means to identify a set of criteria by which we can make a clear distinction between living and nonliving systems. …the recent formulations of models of self-organization and the mathematics of complexity indicate that it is now possible to identify such criteria. The key idea of my synthesis is to express those criteria in terms of the three conceptual dimensions, pattern, structure, and process. …I propose to understand autopoiesis, as defined by Maturana and Varela, as the pattern of life; …dissipative structure, as defined by Prigogine, as the structure of living systems; …and cognition, as defined by Gregory Bateson and more fully by Maturana and Varela, as the process of life. …Autopoiesis (self-making) and cognition (process of perceiving and knowing) are two different aspects of the same phenomenon of life. In the new theory all living systems are cognitive systems, and cognition always implies the existence of an autopoietic network.(p.160)

Although these theories are still based on observable physical, chemical, and biological processes, and as such remain materialistic and structural theories, it is clear that the wave-fluctuations of this line of thought, from Heisenberg and Bohr to Capra, Prigogine, and Penrose, approach that knowledge of which Sri Aurobindo spoke, and perhaps herald a time when, as he said, scientific knowledge would reach conclusions similar to those of the Vedas. It seems that matter, life, and mind are in fact beginning to be understood as different formulations of one unknown Energy. But a strong reductionist bias is still evident, even in Capra’s attempts to formulate a synthetic, unified theory of life and mind, and even more so in Hawking’s positivist version of anthropomorphism.^17 Maturana and Varela, two scientists of consciousness whose work forms a substantial part of Capra’s synthetic point of view, state the bias unequivocally: “as scientists we can only deal with unities that are structurally determined.”^18 And in their interpretation of apparently conscious linguistic behavior, they state the qualifying paradigm “to operate in languages is to operate in a domain of congruent, co-ontogenic structural coupling.”^19 What this means is that what the observer perceives and interprets as linguistic behavior in animals is accompanied by a parallel but dissimilar underlying set of nervous and muscular system behaviors characterized as “structural coupling.”  For these scientists, there is ultimately no difference between structural coupling and conscious behavior or “cognition;” the latter is reduced to the former.

The next step that Sri Aurobindo predicted, “at which stage of development the conception of material Force as the mother of Mind would not be able to endure,” has obviously not occurred. If it had, instead of reducing consciousness to structural coupling or an emergent quantum event, there would be the realization that Consciousness was the first principle, from which the structures and processes of the universe proceed, rather than being the penultimate outcome of those physical processes. This next step would make it evident that the reason why stable structures appear to evolve in matter by means of self-determining processes, and why patterns or forms persist without change even though everything of which they are composed is constantly changing, is that there is a Will in them, infinitely diverse and omnipresent, a will of self-manifestation and self-being, and not a merely physical evolutionary dynamism, whether inherently one of chance/necessity or of chaos/order.

This is a form of understanding that is of course more characteristic of philosophy than of science, especially if we look back to the time, in ancient Greece, and perhaps as early as Vedic India, when the distinction between these modes of thought was not yet clearly defined. Aristotle’s works are burdened throughout with the attempt to understand the relationship between form, which is apparently unchanging, and matter, energy, motion, which are the elements of change from potential to actual form. And at that time the distinction was also not being made between form as such, and form as concept derived from perceptions and observations of the material world; the idea that the material world is separate from mind, or consciousness, had not yet intervened in the history of knowledge. For Aristotle, who was a biologist, mind was a form of nature whose activity was to know and understand other forms like itself.  And especially important to the history of knowledge, the idea had also not yet intervened that our measurements of matter, energy, motion – and on a macro level, patterns, structures, processes – tell us what “reality” is. For the ancient thinkers, the world of stable forms and values that we experience, and that the invisible physical micro-world of change upholds, was the reality. This inversion of the known and unknown, and the reduction of form to mechanical forces or subatomic measurements and mathematical probabilities has been precisely the work of modern scientific thinking.

It would be ironic indeed, if as Hawking and others seem to half-seriously suggest, the universe has evolved from an invisible world of Platonic forms to a world of Platonic solids, through the vast infinitude of the forms of cosmic life and mind, just so that physicists could reduce everything to mathematical probabilities, parallel universes, and imaginary dimensions of time. But Hawking’s colleague, Roger Penrose, seems to have reached a considerably more serious point of departure, and one quite pertinent to our present concerns. In his book Shadows of the Mind – A search for the missing science of consciousness (1994), Penrose states:

If Einstein’s general relativity has shown how our very notions of the nature of space and time have had to shift, and become more mysterious and mathematical, then it is quantum mechanics that has shown, to an even greater extent, how our concept of matter has suffered a similar fate.  Not just matter, but our very notions of actuality have become profoundly disturbed. How is it that the mere counterfactual possibility of something happening – a thing which does not actually happen – can have a decisive influence on what actually does happen? There is something in the mystery of the way that quantum mechanics operates that at least seems much closer than is classical physics, to the kind of mystery needed to accommodate mentality within the world of physical reality. I have no doubt myself that when deeper theories are at hand, then the place of mind in relation to physical theory will not seem so incongruous as it does today. (p.419)

Penrose argues in this book that consciousness – which he defines as awareness, understanding, and will or intention – will be explainable when physical science itself evolves its own theories and methods beyond their present limitations, because consciousness is beyond any possibility of computational understanding. And yet he believes that the ground of consciousness will ultimately be found at the interface between the world of quantum effects and the world of biological structures. While still adhering to the reductionism and structuralism characteristic of the scientific paradigm, he is able to foresee the possibility of an entirely knew understanding yet to come: “For physics to be able to accommodate something that is as foreign to our current physical picture as is the phenomenon of consciousness, we must expect a profound change – one that alters the very underpinnings of our philosophical viewpoint as to the nature of reality.”^20

Perhaps what this means is that the next quantum leap in consciousness, one foreseen by Sri Aurobindo as necessary in order to resolve the dilemmas of matter and mind, will be an even more disturbing paradigm shift than the ones already brought about by the new physics of the 20th Century. In Sri Aurobindo’s interpretation of the Vedic cosmology, everything in the universe, from the physical to the mental plane, is an expression of the will-force of consciousness. Therefore it is possible that the non-computational interface between the quantum world and cellular structures theorized by Penrose, which brings about the “objective reduction” of quantum reality to the real-time world of phenomena that we know, is one level where consciousness-will can indeed be found. Penrose’s intuition is that the phenomenon of objective reduction will be related to gravity; though the phenomenon must be a Force, it is likely to be one that is as yet unknown to science. To observe this phenomenon will require a movement of consciousness toward such an understanding, which is not currently a movement characteristic of science. At the beginning of his discussion of this possibility of scientific knowledge, Sri Aurobindo said, “If modern Materialism were simply an unintelligent acquiescence in the material life, the advance might be indefinitely delayed. But since its very soul is the search for Knowledge, it will be unable to cry a halt; as it reaches the barriers of sense knowledge and of the reasoning from sense knowledge, its very rush will carry it beyond and the rapidity and sureness with which it has embraced the visible universe is only an earnest in the conquest of what lies beyond, once the stride is taken that crosses the barrier.”^21

The “stride” that Sri Aurobindo hints at here, and which he refers to in the same context as being “attainable by a supreme effort of consciousness” but also as “escaping the grasp of our thought and speech, instruments which proceed always by the sense of difference and express by the way of definition” implies another methodology than the one normally employed by science, which is always based on observation of the external world, on “sense-knowledge”, and on reasoning from that knowledge, even if it is sometimes accompanied by a more global phenomenon of inspired seeing. The proposed methodology entails a process often referred to by Sri Aurobindo as a transformation of consciousness.  Vedic knowledge apparently used that method and was of that type. But it was at the same time not “other worldly.” It was, however, “spiritual knowledge” achieved by a supra-mental consciousness which can could know the world from within. It is knowledge of the Self, which is one with everything in time and space because everything is essentially That. This is obviously a rather mystical view of things, and yet the philosophy of evolution proposed by Sri Aurobindo, in which consciousness and force, spirit and matter are complementary, non-dual polarities at each level of existence – physical, vital, mental, and spiritual – has as its foundation precisely this premise. And such a theory is in fact consistent with the underlying connectedness and evolutionary self-determination of everything in the universe, as proposed by quantum physics. What is missing from that theory is the principle that would explain the emergence of a highly ordered self-determining physical universe in the first place, and then the emergence of consciousness from such a material base. Sri Aurobindo’s basic argument for the evolution of consciousness in a material universe is that it could not happen from an inconscient base; consciousness must be a fundamental principle of the universe itself in order for it to emerge; it is “a self-involution of Consciousness in form and a self-evolution out of form.” Therefore the fundamental complementarity of consciousness-force provides an explanation at every level of the order that exists in the observable universe, and of every other complementarity that we can identify as being essential to an adequate understanding of things. In this vision of reality, the ancient and modern dualities that have always presented insoluble paradoxes, such as form and substance, stability and change, chaos and order, life and death, self and other, are finally resolved into unities rather than contraries.

Do the current limitations of our knowledge therefore indicate something essential about the limited nature of “mind,” or do they indicate an essential indeterminacy and consequent unknowability in the nature of “reality?”  Both of these questions, surprisingly, must be answered in the negative. The sense mind, the rational mind, and the inspired imagination, etc., as we know them, are limited, but the limitations are evolutionary, temporal, structural limitations; they are not essential. And the indeterminacy of processes, beyond the conservation of structural histories and patterns of adaptation, especially at the point of disequilibrium where novel forms can emerge, does not make them essentially unknowable simply because they are non-computational. Reality is infinitely complex but it is also only What Is; the evolutionary structures at every level of matter, life, and mind are only structures of consciousness, knowable by the Self through Identity. But that requires the evolutionary emergence of another potential of consciousness beyond mind, which Sri Aurobindo chose to call “supermind.” In his descriptions of its characteristics, he speaks of the necessity of realizing in oneself an extraordinary force of concentration, an absolute stillness, and a cancellation of the mind’s normal patterns of reactions and responses to external stimuli. It is a process in which the personal will merges with the universal Will, the individual mind with universal Consciousness.

So, if we ask then, Is reality Finite or Infinite? the Unchanging or Change? Being or Time? Spirit or Matter? Substance or Form?, the answer in every case is “both,” although any particular definition will depend on the point of view, just as Heisenberg said. And after a century of unparalleled advances in both scientific and spiritual knowledge, a scientific mind like Prigogine’s can therefore now think, along with the mystic philosopher:

Each great period of science has led to some model of nature. For classical science it was the clock; for nineteenth-century science, the period of the Industrial Revolution, it was an engine running down. What will be the symbol for us? …In some of the most beautiful manifestations of sculpture, be it in the dancing Shiva or in the miniature temples of Guerrero, there appears very clearly the search for a junction between stillness and motion, time arrested and time passing. We believe that this confrontation will give our period its uniqueness. ^22

During the brief period of historical time known as the 20th Century, as the discoveries of the new physics were taking place, and Sri Aurobindo’s discovery of the supermind was being formulated, in the forefront of the “human sciences” also many barriers of  consciousness were ceding: Husserl wrote The Idea of Phenomenology in 1907 and The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology in 1933. Freud published his theory of the three-fold structure of mind in 1923, Heidegger published Being and Time in 1927, Whitehead’s Process and Reality was published in 1929. And one could go on: Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception in 1945, Jean Gebser’s The Ever-Present Origin in 1949/53, Sri Aurobindo’s later works,1940-50, Heidegger’s  writings on technology and language,1950-60, to the newer physics of the 1960s, the post-structural philosophies of the 1970s, the quantum biology of the 1980s, and the super-technology of the 1990s.

As we shall perhaps see, if we explore in greater detail the explosion of ideas that characterized this epoch in the development of thought, within the context of the century’s equally dramatic “outer” developments, the arc of the entire project of human consciousness throughout may appear to have been delimited inspired by one evolutionary formula for human advancement: to reconcile Spirit and Matter. To achieve the realization of their unity; to consciously perceive the stillness and force that combined constitute the essence of the infinite energy of existence; and to know directly by a “supramental consciousness” – one with the world it perceives – that unity and diversity, identity and difference are the principles of all Being in Time, could be the outcome of the pursuit of Knowledge, as Sri Aurobindo indicated. But for it to be so, he said, the human mind “must traverse the degrees which our inner consciousness imposes on us and, whether by objective method of analysis applied to Life and Mind as to Matter or by subjective synthesis and illumination, arrive at the repose of the ultimate unity without denying the energy of the expressive multiplicity.”^23   A study of the 20th Century in relation to the vision of Sri Aurobindo should reveal the progress made along this arc of potential human development, and also give us a clear indication of the distance still to be traversed if we are to complete the journey.

Physics and the Philosophy of Evolution

Bibliography

1. The Mother, “Sri Aurobindo does not belong to the past nor to history. Sri Aurobindo is the Future advancing towards its realization…” (April 2, 1967)
2. See Arthur Kroker (2004), The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism and Frederic Bender (2003), The Culture of Extinction: Toward a Philosophy of Deep Ecology
3. Sri Aurobindo (1970ed.), The Life Divine, pp.1-5
4. Ibid., p.12
5. Sri Aurobindo (1970ed.), The Synthesis of Yoga, p.1,6
6. Sri Aurobindo, op.cit. (LD), p.14
7. LD, p.14
8. LD, p.14
9. LD, p.14
10. Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point, p.90
11. Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stenger (1984), Order Out of Chaos, p.226
12. Stephen Hawking (2001), The Universe in a Nutshell, p.12
13. Capra, op.cit. p.89
14. Capra, op.cit., p.81
15. Capra (1996), The Web of Life, p. 39
16. Hawking, op.cit., p.26
17. Hawking (p.85) gives this rather droll characterization of the anthropic principle: “While it may be that intelligent beings can evolve without galaxies ands stars, this seems unlikely. …The anthropic principle says that the universe has to be more or less as we see it, because if it were different, there wouldn’t be anyone here to observe it.” And although he frequently equates the physical universe with “reality,” he qualifies his position as a positivist in a manner that is pertinent here (p.59): “From the viewpoint of positivist philosophy, one cannot determine what is real. All one can do is find which mathematical models describe the universe we live in. It turns out that a mathematical model involving imaginary time predicts not only effects we have already observed but also effects we have not been able to measure yet nevertheless believe in for other reasons. So what is real and what is imaginary? Is the distinction just in our minds?”
18. Humberta Maturana and FranciscoVarela (1987), The Tree of Knowledge – The biological roots of human understanding, p.96
19.  Ibid., p.211
20. Roger Penrose (1994), Shadows of the Mind, p. 406
21. LD, p.13
22. Prigogine & Stenger, op.cit., p. 22-23
23. LD, p.13

© Rod Hemsell
4/06

The Melodrama of Difference (Or, The Revenge of the Colonized) by Jean Baudrillard

Posted on by
10


Volume 3, Number 1 (January 2006)

The Melodrama of Difference (Or, The Revenge of the Colonized)1

Jean Baudrillard(Paris, France).

Translated by James Benedict
 

So what became of otherness?

            We are engaged in an orgy of discovery,exploration and “invention” of the Other. An orgy of differences. We are procurers of encounter, pimps of interfacing and interactivity. Once we get beyond the mirror of alienation (beyond the mirror stage that was the joy of our childhood), structural differences multiply ad infinitum – in fashion, in mores, in culture. Crude otherness, hard otherness – the otherness of race, of madness, of poverty – are done with. Otherness, like everything else, has fallen under the law of the market, the law of supply and demand. It has become a rare item – hence its immensely high value on the psychological stock exchange, on the structural stock exchange. Hence too the intensity of the ubiquitous simulation of the Other. This is particularly striking in science fiction, where the chief question is always “What is the Other? Where is the Other?” Of course science fiction is merely a reflection of our everyday universe, which is in thrall to a wild speculation on – almost a black market in – otherness and difference.A veritable obsession with ecology extends from Indian reservations to house­hold pets (otherness degree zero!) – not to mention the other of “the other scene”, or the other of the unconscious (our last symbolic capital, and one we had better look after, because reserves are not limitless). Our sources of otherness are indeed running out; we have exhausted the Other as raw material. (According to Claude Gilbert, we are so desperate that we go digging through the rubble of earthquakes and catastrophes.)

            Consequently the other is all of a sudden no longer there to be extermi­nated, hated, rejected or seduced, but instead to be understood, liberated, coddled, recognized. In addition to the Rights of Man, we now also need the Rights of the Other. In a way we already have these, in the shape of a universal Right to be Different. For the orgy is also an orgy of political and psychological comprehension of the other – even to the point of resurrecting the other in places where the other is no longer to be found. Where the Other was, there has the Same come to be.

            And where there is no longer anything, there the Other must come to be. We are no longer living the drama of otherness. We are living the psychodrama of otherness, just as we are living the psychodrama of “sociality”, the psycho­drama of sexuality, the psychodrama of the body – and the melodrama of all the above, courtesy of analytic metadiscourses. Otherness has become socio­-dramatic, semio-dramatic, melodramatic.

            All we do in psychodrama – the psychodrama of contacts, of psychological tests, of interfacing – is acrobatically simulate and dramatize the absence of the other. Not only is otherness absent everywhere in this artificial drama­turgy, but the subject has also quietly become indifferent to his own subjecti­vity, to his own alienation, just as the modern political animal has become indifferent to his own political opinions. This subject becomes transparent, spectral (to borrow Marc Guillaume's word) – and hence interactive. For in interactivity the subject is the other to no one. Inasmuch as he is indifferent to himself, it is as though he had been reified alive – but without his double, without his shadow, without his other. Having paid this price, the subject becomes a candidate for all possible combinations, all possible connections.

            The interactive being is therefore born not through a new form of exchange but through the disappearance of the social, the disappearance of otherness. This being is the other after the death of the Other – not the same other at all: the other that results from the denial of the Other.

            The only interaction involved, in reality, belongs to the medium alone: to the machine become invisible. Mechanical automata still played on the differ­ence between man and machine, and on the charm of this difference – something with which today's interactive and simulating automata are no longer concerned. Man and machine have become isomorphic and indifferent to each other: neither is other to the other.

            The computer has no other. That is why the computer is not intelligent. Intelligence comes to us from the other – always. That is why computers perform so well. Champions of mental arithmetic and idiots savants are autistic – minds for which the other does not exist and which, for that very reason, are endowed with strange powers. This is the strength, too, of the integrated circuit (the power of thought-transference might also be considered in this connection). Such is the power of abstraction. Machines work more quickly because they are unlinked to any otherness. Networks connect them up to one another like an immense umbilical cord joining one intelligence and its twin. Homeostasis between one and the same: all otherness has been confiscated by the machine.

            Does otherness survive anywhere after being banished from this entire psycho-dramatic superstructure?

            Is there a physics as well as a metaphysics of the Other? Is there a dual, not just a dialectical, form of otherness? Is there still a form of the Other as destiny, and not merely as a psychological or social partner of convenience? These days everything is described in terms of difference, but otherness is not the same thing as difference. One might even say that difference is what destroys otherness. When language is broken down into a set of differences, when meaning is reduced to nothing more than differentiation, the radical otherness of language is abolished. The duel that lies at the heart of language – the duel between language and meaning, between language and the person who speaks it – is halted. And everything in language that is irreducible to mediation, articulation or meaning is eliminated – everything, that is, which causes language at its most radical level to be other than the subject (and also Other to the subject?). The existence of this level accounts for the play in language, for its appeal in its materiality, for its susceptibility to chance; and it is what makes language not just a set of trivial differences, as it is in the eyes of structural analysis, but, symbolically speaking, truly a matter of life and death.

            What, then, does it mean to say that women are the other for men, that the mad are the other for the sane, or that primitive people are the other for civilized people? One might as well go on for ever wondering who is the other for whom. Is the Master the slave's other? Yes, certainly – in terms of class and power relations. But this account is reductionistic. In reality, things are just not so simple. The way in which beings and things relate to each other is not a matter of structural difference. The symbolic order implies dual and complex forms that are not dependent on the distinction between ego and other. The Pariah is not the other to the Brahmin: rather, their destinies are different. The two are not differentiated along a single scale of values: rather, they are mutually reinforcing aspects of an immutable order, parts of a reversible cycle like the cycle of day and night. Do we say that the night is the other to the day? No. So why should we say that the masculine is the other to the feminine? For the two are undoubtedly merely reversible moments, like night and day, following upon one other and changing places with one another in an endless process of seduction. One sex is thus never the other for the other sex, except within the context of a differentialistic theory of sexuality – which is basically nothing but a utopia. For difference is itself a utopia: the idea that such pairs of terms can be split up is a dream – and the idea of subsequently reuniting them is another. (This also goes for the distinction between Good and Evil: the notion that they might be separated out from one another is pure fantasy, and it is even more utopian to think in terms of reconciling them.) Only in the distinction-based perspective of our culture is it possible to speak of the Other in connection with sex. Genuine sexuality, for its part, is “exotic” (in Segalen's meaning of the term): it resides in the radical incomparability of the sexes – otherwise seduction would never be possible, and there would be nothing but alienation of one sex by the other.

            Differences mean regulated exchange. But what is it that introduces disorder into exchange? What is it that cannot be negotiated over? What is it that has no place in the contract, or in the structural interaction of differences?

            What is founded on the impossibility of exchange?

            Wherever exchange is impossible, what we encounter is terror. Any radical otherness at all is thus the epicenter of a terror: the terror that such otherness holds, by virtue of its very existence, for the normal world. And the terror that this world exercises upon that otherness in order to annihilate it.

            Over recent centuries all forms of violent otherness have been incorporated, willingly or under threat of force, into a discourse of difference which simulta­neously implies inclusion and exclusion, recognition and discrimination. Childhood, lunacy, death, primitive societies – all have been categorized, integrated and absorbed as parts of a universal harmony. Madness, once its exclusionary status had been revoked, was caught up in the far subtler toils of psychology. The dead, as soon as they were recognized in their identity as such, were banished to outlying cemeteries – kept at such a distance that the face of death itself was lost. As for Indians, their right to exist was no sooner accorded them than they were confined to reservations. These are the vicissi­tudes of a logic of difference.

            Racism does not exist so long as the other remains Other, so long as the Stranger remains foreign. It comes into existence when the other becomes merely different – that is to say, dangerously similar. This is the moment when the inclination to keep the other at a distance comes into being.

            “We may assume”, wrote Victor Segalen, “that fundamental differences will never resolve themselves into a truly seamless and unpatched fabric; increas­ing unity, falling barriers and great reductions in real distance must of themselves compensate somewhere by means of new partitions and unantici­pated gaps.”

            Racism is one such “new partition”. An abreaction to the psychodrama of difference: a response to the phantasy of – and obsession with – becoming “other.” A way out of the psychodrama of perpetual introjection and rejection of the other. So intolerable is this introjection of differences, in fact, that the other must be exorcized at all costs by making the differences materially manifest. The biological claims of racism are without foundation but, by making the racial reference clear, racism does reveal the logical temptation at the heart of every structural system: the temptation to fetishize difference. But differential systems can never achieve equilibrium: differences oscillate con­stantly between absolute highs and absolute lows. When it comes to the management of otherness and difference, the idea of a well-tempered balance is strictly utopian.

            Inasmuch as the humanist logic of difference is in some sense a universal simulation (one which culminates in the absurdity of a “right to difference”), it leads directly, for all its benevolence, to that other desperate hallucination of difference known as racism. As differences and the cult of differences continue to grow, another, unprecedented kind of violence, anomalous and inaccessible to critical rationality, grows even faster. Segalen’s “unanticipated gaps” are not simply new differences: what springs up in order to combat the total homoge­nization of the world is the Alien – monstrous metaphor for the corpse-like, viral Other: the compound form of all the varieties of otherness done to death by our system.

            This is a racism which, for lack of any biological underpinning, seizes on the very slightest variations in the order of signs; a racism which quickly takes on a viral and automatic character, and perpetuates itself while reveling in a generalized semiotics. And this racism can never be countered by any huma­nism of difference, for the simple reason that it is itself the virus of difference.

            Sermonizing on the internalization of the other and the introjection of differences can never resolve the problem of the monstrous forms of otherness, because these forms are the product, precisely, of this selfsame obsessional differentiation, this selfsame obsessional dialectic of ego and other. Herein lies the whole weakness of those “dialectical” theories of otherness which aspire to promote the proper use of difference. For if racism in its viral, immanent, current and definitive form proves anything, it is that there is no such thing as the proper use of difference.

            This is why it may also be said that the critique of racism is substantially finished – just as Marx said that the critique of religion was substantially finished. Once the vacuousness of the metaphysical account of religion had been demonstrated, religion was supposed to disappear as the conditions of a more advanced mode of production became operative. Likewise, once the vacuousness of the biological theory of races has been demonstrated, racism is supposed to disappear as the conditions of a more advanced universal inter­mixture of differences become operative. But what if religion, for example, contrary to Marx's predictions, had lost its metaphysical and transcendent form only to become an immanent force and fragment into countless ideologi­cal and practical variants under the conditions of a religious revival drawing sustenance from the progress of the very social order that was expected to eradicate even the memory of religion? For the signs of just such a turn of events are all around us today. And much the same goes for racism, which has also become an immanent, viral and everyday reality. The fact is that the “scientific” and rational critique of racism is a purely formal one, which demolishes the argument from biology but remains caught in the racist trap because it addresses a biological illusion only, and fails to deal with biology itself qua illusion. Similarly, the political and ideological critique of racism is purely formal in that .it tackles the racist obsession with difference without tackling difference itself qua illusion. It thus itself becomes an illusion of criticism, bearing on nothing, and in the end racism turns out to have survived critique by rationalism just as deftly as religion survived critique by materia­lism – which is why all such critiques are indeed substantially finished.

            There is no such thing as the proper use of difference – a fact revealed not only by racism itself but also by all anti-racist and humanitarian efforts to promote and protect differences. Humanitarian ecumenism, the ecumenism of differences, is in a cul-de-sac: the cul-de-sac of the concept of the universal itself. The most recent illustration of this, in France, was the brouhaha over the wearing of headscarves for religious reasons by North African schoolgirls. All the rational arguments mustered in this connection turned out to be nothing but hypocritical attempts to get rid of the simple fact that no solution is to be found in any moral or political theory of difference. It is difference itself that is a reversible illusion. We are the ones who brought difference to the four corners of the earth: that it should now be returned to us in unrecognizable, Islamic, fundamentalist and irreducible forms is no bad thing.

            The guilt we feel in this connection assumes gigantic proportions. Not long ago the organization Medecins Sans Frontieres became aware that the medical supplies it had been distributing in Afghanistan were being resold rather than used directly by their recipients. This precipitated a crisis of conscience for the programme's organizers. Should donations be discontinued, or should this immoral and irregular commerce be tolerated out of respect for ”cultural differences”? After much soul-searching it was decided to sacrifice Western values on the altar of difference, and continue to underwrite the black market in medicines. Humanisme oblige.

             Another charming illustration of the confusion besetting our humani­tarians concerns X, posted to the Sudan to study “the communications needs of Sudanese peoples.” Seemingly, the Sudanese did not know how to communi­cate. But they were certainly hungry, and needed to learn how to grow sorghum. Sending agronomists being too expensive a prospect, the decision had been taken to teach by videocassette. The time had come for the Sudanese to join the communications revolution: sorghum via audio and video. No hook-up, no eat. It was not long before towns and villages were crammed with VCRs. A little longer, and the local mafia created a lucrative market for itself in pornographic videotapes which held a distinctly greater interest for the populace than educational cassettes on sorghum cultivation. Porno-Sorgho­ Video: The Same Struggle!

            The risibility of our altruistic “understanding” is rivaled only by the profound contempt it is designed to conceal. For “We respect the fact that you are different” read: “You people who are underdeveloped would do well to hang on to this distinction because it is all you have left.” (The signs of folklore and poverty are excellent markers of difference.) Nothing could be more contemptuous – or more contemptible – than this attitude, which exemplifies the most radical form of incomprehension that exists. It has nothing to do, however, with what Segalen calls “eternal incomprehensibility”. Rather, it is a product of eternal stupidity – of that stupidity which endures for ever in its essential arrogance, feeding on the differentness of other people.

            Other cultures, meanwhile, have never laid claim to universality. Nor did they ever claim to be different – until difference was forcibly injected into them as part of a sort of cultural opium war. They live on the basis of their own singularity, their own exceptionality, on the irreducibility of their own rites and values. They find no comfort in the lethal illusion that all differences can be reconciled – an illusion that for them spells only annihilation.

            To master the universal symbols of otherness and difference is to master the world. Those who conceptualize difference are anthropologically superior – naturally, because it is they who invented anthropology. And they have all the rights, because rights, too, are their invention. Those who do not conceptualize difference, who do not play the game of difference, must be exterminated. The Indians of America, when the Spanish landed, are a case in point. They understood nothing about difference; they inhabited radical otherness. (The Spaniards were not different in their eyes: they were simply gods, and that was that.) This is the reason for the fury with which the Spaniards set about destroying these peoples, a fury for which there was no religious justification, nor economic justification, nor any other kind of justification, except for the fact that the Indians were guilty of an absolute crime: their failure to under­stand difference. When they found themselves obliged to become part of an otherness no longer radical, but negotiable under the aegis of the universal concept, they preferred mass self-immolation-whence the fervour with which they, for their part, allowed themselves to die: a counterpart to the Spaniards' mad urge to kill. The Indians' strange collusion in their own extermination represented their only way of keeping the secret of otherness.

            Cortes, the Jesuits, the missionaries and, later on, the anthropologists – even Tzvetan Todorov himself in his Conquest of America – all came down on the side of negotiable otherness. (Las Casas is the sole exception: towards the end of his life he suggested that the Conquest be purely and simply abandoned, and that the Indians be put back in the hands of their own destiny.) All these enlightened souls believe in a proper use of difference. The radical Other is intolerable: he cannot be exterminated, but he cannot be accepted either, so the negotiable other, the other of difference, has to be promoted. This is where a subtler form of extermination begins – a form involving all the humanist virtues of modernity.

            An alternative account of the extermination is that the Indians had to be exterminated not because they were not Christians but because they were more Christian than the Christians themselves. Their cruelty and their human sacrifices were intolerable to the Spaniards not because the excited pity or moral indignation but because the cruelty bore witness to the authority of their gods and the strength of their beliefs. This force of conviction among the Indians made the Spaniards ashamed of how little religion they themselves had. It made a mockery of a Western culture which, behind its flimsy facade of faith, had no gods except god and commerce. The Indians, with their implacable religiousness, made Western culture ashamed of its profanation of its own values. Their fanaticism was intolerable because it was an implicit condemnation and demystification of Western culture in its own eyes (the same role is being played today by Islam). This crime could not be expiated, and in itself sufficiently justified the extermination of its perpetrators.

            It is by no means clear that the other exists for everyone. Does the other exist for the Savage or the Primitive? Some relationships are asymmetrical: the one may be the other for the other without this implying that the other is the other for the one. I may be other for him although he is not the other for me.

            The Alakaluf of Tierra del Fuego were wiped out without ever having sought to understand the Whites, without ever even speaking to them or negotiating with them. They called themselves “Men” – and there were no others. In their eyes the Whites were not even different: they were unintelligible. They evinced no surprise at the newcomers’ vast wealth and amazing technology. Despite three centuries of contact, the Alakaluf adopted not a single Western technique, continuing, for instance, to row around in skiffs. The Whites might oppress and slaughter them, but it was for all the world as if they did not exist. The Alakaluf were to be annihilated without conceding anything of their otherness. They would never be assimilated – indeed, they would never even reach the stage of difference. They would perish without ever allowing the Whites the privilege of recognizing them as different. The Alakaluf were simply irrecuperable. For the Whites, nevertheless, they were “others” – beings that were different yet still human, or at least human enough to be evangelized, exploited, and killed.

            As a sovereign people the Alakaluf called themselves “Men”. Then the Whites applied to them the name that they had originally applied to the Whites: “Foreigners”. They eventually came to refer to themselves as “for­eigners” in their own language. In later times they called themselves “Alakaluf” – the only word that they still pronounced in front of Whites, meaning “Give, give”. They thus ended up with a designation connoting the mendacity to which they had been reduced. First, then, they were themselves, then strangers to themselves, and finally absent from themselves: three names reflecting three stages of their extermination. Naturally their murder is to be attributed to those who possess the universalizing vision, those who manipu­late otherness for their own profit. In their singularity, which could not even conceive of the Other, the Alakaluf were inevitably vanquished. But who can say that the elimination of this singularity will not turn out, in the long run, to be fatal for the Whites too? Who can say that radical foreignness will not have its revenge – that, though effectively conjured away by colonial humanism, it will not return in the form of a virus in the bloodstream of the Whites, dooming them to disappear themselves one day in much the same way as the Alakaluf.

            Everything is subservient to the system, yet at the same time escapes its control. Those groups around the world who adopt the Western lifestyle never really identify with it, and indeed are secretly contemptuous of it. They remain excentric with respect to this value system. Their way of assimilating, of often being more fanatical in their observance of Western manners than Westerners themselves, has an obviously parodic, aping quality: they are engaged in a sort of bricolage with the broken bits and pieces of the Enlightenment, of “progress”. Even when they negotiate or ally themselves with the West, they continue to believe that their own way is fundamentally the right one. Perhaps, like the Alakaluf, these groups will disappear without ever having taken the Whites seriously. (For our part we take them very seriously indeed, whether our aim is to assimilate them or destroy them: they are even fast becoming the crucial – negative – reference point of our whole value system.)

            The Whites will perhaps themselves disappear one day without ever having understood that their whiteness is merely the result of the promiscuity and confusion of all races and cultures, just as the whiteness of white light is simply the resolution of the melodrama of all colours. And just as colours become comparable amongst themselves only when they are measured against a universal scale of wavelengths, so cultures become comparable only when they are set against a structural scale of differences. But there is a double standard here, for it is only for Western culture that other cultures are different. For those other cultures themselves, Whites are not even different – they are non-existent, phantoms from another world. Outward conversion to Western ways invariably conceals inward scoffing at Western hegemony. One is put in mind of those Dogons who made up dreams to humour their psychoanalysts and then offered these dreams to the analysts as gifts. Once we despised other cultures; now we respect them. They do not respect our culture, however; they feel nothing but an immense condescension for it. We may have won the right by conquest to exploit and subjugate these cultures, but they have offered themselves the luxury of mystifying us.

            The strangest feeling one is left with after reading Bruce Chatwin's Songlines is a lingering perplexity about the reality of the “lines” themselves: do these poetic and musical itineraries, these songs, this “dreamtime”, really exist or not? In all these accounts there is a hint of mystification; a kind of mythic optical illusion seems to be operating. It is as though the Aboriginals were fobbing us off. While unveiling the profoundest and most authentic of truths (the Austral myth at its most mysterious), they also play up the most modern and hypothet­ical of considerations: the irresolvability of any narrative, absolute doubt as to the origins. For us to believe these fabulous things, we need to feel that they themselves believe them. But these Aboriginals seem to take a mischievous pleasure in being allusive and evasive. They give a few clues, but never tell us the rules of the game, and one cannot help getting the impression that they are improvising, pandering to our phantasies, but withholding any reassurance that what they are telling us is true. This is doubtless their way of keeping their secrets while at the same time poking fun at us – for in the end we are the only people who want to believe these tales.

            The Aboriginals' secret resides not in what they omit to say, however, but entirely within the thread, within the indecipherable filigree of the narrative; we are confronted by an ironic form here, by a mythology of appearances. And in the manipulation of this form the Aboriginals are far more adept than we are. We Whites are liable to remain mystified for a good while yet.

            The simulation of Western values is universal once one gets beyond the boundaries of our culture. Is it not true, though, that in our heart of hearts we ourselves, who are neither Alakaluf nor Aboriginal, neither Dogon nor Arab, fail signally to take our own values seriously? Do we not embrace them with the same affectation and inner unconcern – and are we not ourselves equally unimpressed by all our shows of force, all our technological and ideological pretensions? Nevertheless, it will be a long time before the utopian abstraction of our universal vision of differences is demolished in our own eyes, whereas all other cultures have already given their own response – namely, universal indifference.

            It is not even remotely a matter of rehabilitating the Aboriginals, or finding them a place in the chorus of human rights, for their revenge lies elsewhere. It lies in their power to destabilize Western rule. It lies in their phantom presence, their viral, spectral presence in the synapses of our brains, in the circuitry of our rocket ship, as “Alien;” in the way in which the Whites have caught the virus of origins, of Indianness, of Aboriginality, of Patagonicity. We murdered all this, but now it infects our blood, into which it has been inexorably transfused and infiltrated. The revenge of the colonized is in no sense the reappropriation by Indians or Aboriginals of their lands, privileges or autonomy: that is our victory. Rather, that revenge may be seen in the way in which the Whites have been mysteriously made aware of the disarray of their own culture, the way in which they have been overwhelmed by an ancestral torpor and are now succumbing little by little to the grip of “dreamtime”. This reversal is a worldwide phenomenon. It is now becoming clear that everything we once thought dead and buried, everything we thought left behind for ever by the ineluctable march of universal progress, is not dead at all, but on the contrary likely to return – not as some archaic or nostalgic vestige (all our indefatigable museumification notwithstanding), but with a vehemence and a virulence that are modern in every sense – and to reach the very heart of our ultra­-sophisticated but ultra-vulnerable systems, which it will easily convulse from within without mounting a frontal attack. Such is the destiny of radical otherness – a destiny that no homily of reconciliation and no apologia for difference is going to alter.

Jean Baudrillard once said to an interviewer: “You can always fight the global in the name of the universal.  I prefer the direct confrontation between globalization and all the antagonistic singularities.  To maintain the humanist meditations at all costs is to put an obstacle in the way of that confrontation in its radicality”.2

 

Endnotes

1 This essay, among the most thought provoking of Baudrillard’s writing on difference, otherness, and the  West, was originally published in The Transparency of Evil: Essays On Extreme Phenomena (c 1990). Translated by James Benedict. New York: Verso, 1993:124-138. See: http://www.Versobooks.com/index.shtml

2 Jean Baudrillard. Paroxysm: Interviews With Philippe Petit (c 1997). Translated by Chris Turner. New York: Verso, 1998:23.