Speculative Non-Buddhism

tool theory | radical critique

Samuel Beckett Stares at a Wall

Posted by Glenn Wallis on May 18, 2013

wall[Meditation] is a faith, with the sufficiency of faith, intended by necessity to remain empty but which necessarily evades this void by its repopulation with objects and foreign goals provided by experience, culture, history, language, etc. Through its style of communication and “knowing” it is a rumor—the [Asian] rumor—which is transmitted by hearsay, imitation, specularity and repetition.1

That passage came to mind while reading texts and watching video on the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society website.2 Laruelle is talking about philosophy, but the statement works equally well for meditation (and its varieties: contemplation, mindfulness, centering prayer, even yoga, tai chi, and so on). Much of what I read and heard about contemplation on the Center’s website struck me as reasonable enough. A typical example:

Contemplative Practices cultivate a critical, first-person focus, sometimes with direct experience as the object, while at other times concentrating on complex ideas or situations. Incorporated into daily life, they act as a reminder to connect to what we find most meaningful.

That’s reasonable—as an opening. An awful lot of questions would have to be asked about the statement, though. What, for instance, is this “first-person focus” of direct experience? What, for that matter, is “direct experience”? Anyone who has been reading this blog knows how attuned some of us are to the machinations of unacknowledged ideology. For instance, concerning this overlap between first-person accounts and experience, a reader recently wrote to me:

[T]here is a built in petitio principii that makes the viewpoint unfalsifiable. The ideology includes a meta-message regarding the autonomy of (meditative) experience as a veridical source of knowledge. This seems to be what [B. Alan] Wallace is up to with his emphasis on “first-person” experience, arguing from an assumption that such experience is autonomous and not already formed by ideology.

I agree with that assessment. It succinctly identifies the big question for meditation: is it a vessel for ideology or a science of ideology?3 Does the practice, in fact, produce new knowledge, about, say, subjective experience or the intransitive world, or does it merely reinforce the views provided by doctrine? I’m still holding out for the former (barely). So, I’d want to ask the people at the Center why, if they believe that meditation-contemplation holds such natural human promise (as the director says, in effect, on a video), do they incessantly populate it “with objects and foreign goals provided by experience, culture, history, language, etc.”? Why not let the practice do its work, unencumbered by over-determining doctrine? I am not going to offer a critique of the Center’s site here. I am more interested in the wide-spread x-buddhist phenomenon of what Laruelle calls here “re-population.”

“Re-population” is, of course, a somewhat polemical term. It assumes that the objects and goals that constitute the re-population are, in fact, “foreign,” or merely inserted. Such outcomes and goals, then, have the status not of knowledge but of “a rumor.” Re-population is what occurs when a form of thought or practice which is “intended by necessity to remain empty…necessarily evades this void.” That is the question: is meditation-contemplation a practice that to do its work (whatever that may be) must remain empty of, for instance, ideas about the practice? However you might answer that question, you would be hard pressed to find an account of meditation-contemplation that differs from other forms of faith. And, like all self-sufficient faiths, x-buddhist meditation, as it is invariably presented in the West “is transmitted by hearsay, imitation, specularity and repetition.” But is that, as Laruelle insists is the case for philosophy, necessarily so?

When I read sites like the  Center for Contemplative Mind in Society website, I can’t help but wonder if meditation has become irretrievably bound up in the peculiarly North American search for the Great Cure. I have come to expect that kind of utopian rhetoric from the x-buddhist industry, but the Center is, as their mission statement says, “working to transform higher education with contemplative practices and perspectives” (emphasis added). Convincing leaders of higher education will take a great deal of critical sophistication. As far as I can see, no such critical sophistication is on the x-buddhist horizon. So, I have to wonder whether x-buddhism is doomed to go the way of psychoanalysis—from Freud to Dr. Phil.

X-buddhism itself, of course, offers the Great Cure; so, it’s at the very root of the sprawling tree of tradition. The traditional Cure comes in numerous forms: nirvana, cessation of suffering, uprooting of craving, return to pristine consciousness, equanimity, being just this moment, and on and on. Many varieties of the Cure are born of the contact between x-buddhism and its new-found cultural environment. Medieval Japanese samurai culture, for example, required a particular inflection of “no-self” to accommodate its martial needs. And Buddhism was happy to concoct a fitting Cure–in the form of Zen. Can you imagine an American Buddhism that did not fulfill our demands for stress relief, better concentration, lower blood pressure, and all-around general giddy goodness? Part of the success that x-buddhism is enjoying in the West has much to do with its easy grafting onto our insatiable pursuit of health and happiness. X-buddhism seems to have a deeply-rooted need to please.

Non-buddhism aims to de-populate x-buddhist terms of their dharmic static. It aims to transmute the consummate, closed doctrine into conceptual chora, “the chaos of the unorganized transcendental material.”4 Dharmic static constitutes the subjugating vibrato provided by other people’s experience, by the needs of culture, the formations of history, and the demands of language. Again: is that necessarily so?

***

Neurosurgeon, novelist, poet, activist, and friend of Samuel Beckett, Lawrence Shainberg, wrote a prize-winning account of Samuel Beckett’s quasi-encounter with Zen for The Paris Review.5 The following excerpt in particular offers rich raw material for a re-conceptualization of meditation. I present it here without commentary. If you’d like to write a commentary on the piece in relation to speculative non-buddhism, let me know. I may do so myself in a future post.

As it happened, the puppeteer’s wife was a Buddhist, a follower of the path to which Beckett himself paid homage in his early book on Proust when he wrote, “the wisdom of all the sages, from Brahma to Leopardi … consists not in the satisfaction but the ablation of desire.” As a devotee and a Beckett admirer, this woman was understandably anxious to confirm what she, like many people, took to be his sympathies with her religion. In fact, not a few critical opinions had been mustered over the years concerning his debt to Buddhism, Taoism, Zen and the Noh theatre, all of it received — as it was now received from the puppeteer’s wife — with curiosity and appreciation and absolute denial by the man it presumed to explain. “I know nothing about Buddhism,” he said. “If it’s present in the play, it is unbeknownst to me.” Once this had been asserted, however, there remained the possibility of unconscious predilection, innate Buddhism, so to speak. So the woman had another question which had stirred in her mind, she said, since the first time she’d seen the play. “When all is said and done, isn’t this man, having given up hope, finally liberated?” Beckett looked at her with a pained expression. He’d had his share of drink that night, but not enough to make him forget his vision or push him beyond his profound distaste for hurting anyone’s feelings. “Oh, no,” he said quietly. “He’s finished.”

I don’t want to dwell on it, but I had a personal stake in this exchange. For years I’d been studying Zen and its particular form of sitting meditation, and I’d always been struck by the parallels between its practice and Beckett’s work. In fact to me, as to the woman who questioned him that evening, it seemed quite impossible that he didn’t have some explicit knowledge, perhaps even direct experience, of Zen, and I had asked him about it that very first night at his hotel. He answered me as he answered her: he knew nothing of Zen at all. Of course, he said, he’d heard Zen stories and loved them for their “concreteness,” but other than that he was ignorant on the subject. Ignorant, but not uninterested. “What do you do in such places?” he asked. I told him that mostly we looked at the wall. “Oh,” he said, “you don’t have to know anything about Zen to do that. I’ve been doing it for fifty years.” (When Hamm asks Clov what he does in his kitchen, Clov replies: “I look at the wall.” “The wall!” snaps Hamm. “And what do you see on your wall? … naked bodies?” Replies Clov, “I see my light dying.”) For all his experience with wall-gazing, however, Beckett found it extraordinary that people would seek it out of their own free will. Why, he asked, did people do it? Were they seeking tranquility? Solutions? And finally, as with neurosurgery: “Does it hurt?” I answered with growing discomfort. Even though I remained convinced that the concerns of his work were identical with those of Zen, there was something embarrassing about discussing it with him, bringing self-consciousness to bear, I mean, where its absence was the point. This is not the place for a discussion of Zen but since it deals, as Beckett does, with the separation of subject and object (“No direct contact is possible between subject and object,” he wrote in his book on Proust, “because they are automatically separated by the subject’s consciousness of perception. . .”), the problems of Self, of Being and Non-being, of consciousness and perception, all the means by which one is distanced or removed from the present tense, it finds in Beckett’s work a mirror as perfect as any in its own sphere of literature or scripture.

This in itself is no great revelation. It’s not terribly difficult to find Zen in almost any great work of art. The particular problem, however, and what made my questions seem — to me at least — especially absurd, is that such points — like many where Beckett is concerned — lose more than they gain in the course of articulation. To point out the Zen in Beckett is to make him seem didactic or, even worse, therapeutic, and nothing could betray his vision more. For that matter, the converse is also true. Remarking the Beckett in Zen betrays Zen to the same extent and for the same reasons. It is there that their true commonality lies, their mutual devotion to the immediate and the concrete, the Truth which becomes less True if made an object of description, the Being which form excludes. As Beckett once put it in responding to one of the endless interpretations his work has inspired, “My work is a matter of fundamental sounds. Hamm as stated, Clov as stated … That’s all I can manage, more than I could. If people get headaches among the overtones, they’ll have to furnish their own aspirin.”

So I did finally give up the questions, and though he always asked me about Zen when we met —”Are you still looking at the wall?” — I don’t think he held it against me. His last word on the matter came by mail, and maybe it was the best. In a fit of despair I had written him once about what seemed to me an absolute, insoluble conflict between meditation and writing. “What is it about looking at the wall that makes the writing seem obsolete?” Two weeks later, when I’d almost forgotten my question, I received this reply, which I quote in its entirety:

Dear Larry,

When I start looking at walls, I begin to see the writing. From which even my own is a relief.

As ever,

Sam

__________________
1 François Laruelle. Dictionary of Non-Philosophy. Trans. Taylor Adkins. Paris: Editions Kime, 1998.

2 Center for Contemplative Mind in Society website

3 This issue has been addressed in numerous posts and comments on this blog. See, for instance, the earliest instance, “Raw Remarks on Meditation, Ideology, and Nihilism,” and the latest, “The Epistemic Meditator.”

4 Laruelle, in Katerina Kolozova. “Theories of the Immanent Rebellion: Non-Marxism and Non-Christianity.” Laruelle and Non-Philosophy. Eds. John Mullarkey and Anthony Paul Smith. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. 214.

5 Lawrence Shainberg, “Exorcising Beckett.” The Paris Review, no. 104, fall 1987.

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On the Grammar of Meditation: Parataxis

Posted by Glenn Wallis on May 16, 2013

parataxis2Here, mute world.
There, dharmic tale.
Near here, inching ever closer,
the persecuted human.

Terrence Malick’s film The Tree of Life is, by nearly every account that I have heard or read, painful to watch. It is frustrating, boring, uninteresting. Nothing happens.  No story is told. Imagine—a movie without a story!

These are curious reactions to a film that enables us to be present at the creation of the universe, watch dinosaurs fighting in pristine forests and frolicking on the shore, be voyeurs of a darkly suffering family in 1950s suburban Texas, and witness the stellar conflagration that ends it all.

Yet, it is true: no story is told. In this lack, the film shows us a way to exorcise the enchanters haunting x-buddhist meditation.

Exorcise it of what, exactly? First of all, of the controlling narratives which invariably cleave to it. I mean the heroic narratives about its origin, value, use, benefit, purpose. Once we evacuate the narrative from the practice, we can exorcise it of the subordinate grammar that supports the narrative. What is left is a form of severe parataxis. Severe, but just. It is an existential grammar without coordinating or subordinating connectives. It’s this next to that. No hierarchy. No and, for, with, because. No therefore, since, and then, as, if. No essential sense or meaning—the fires that fuel the narrative juggernaut.

Malick’s paratactic cinematic grammar is a model for our meditation grammar. Although all of life, from creation to destruction, is swirling and humming around him, Malick, as filmmaker, simply makes himself present. He is present, moreover, alongside of the life, not above it or below. From above, as omniscient narrator, he could connect disjunctions, reveal patterns, intimate meanings, announce conclusions. From below, he could expose the organic viscera that propel life’s relentless torrent. He doesn’t.

He stays right here, on the surface, alongside of the life unfolding. In remaining parallel and present, he does not so much refuse to tell a story as to render himself incapable of crafting a narrative whole. He simply cannot explain the life that he is present to. Explanation is the fata morgana that rises on the horizon of our cognitive-linguistic connectives—and, and then, then, so, therefore, but, or. Explanation hallucinates a reality hidden beneath the brute discontinuity of life. As Malick’s temporal trajectory shows, life persists, yes. But it does so mutely. It tells no story.

That is severe. That is just.

In “The Justice of Non-Philosophy,” Joshua Ramey says that in persisting in this manner, in abstaining from representing that which cannot be represented, Malick:

does an almost unconceivable justice to human life. If human life is a story, then each life is its own story. Thus every telling of that tale is an abstraction, perhaps a kind of distortion. But what kind of story is a life? The discontinuities in life—including violence, suffering and death itself—seem either ineffable or patently betrayed by narration…What any narrative must do, but seems incapable of doing in good faith, is to deal with discontinuity. For living—in pain or pleasure through loss or ecstasy, and with the constant burden of the past—is different from narrating that living, and it is difficult to see how narration could fail to fail existence, to merely pretend to keep the secret of life by telling it.1

If life, the lived, is foreclosed to narration, we, the living, are wholly prone to it. We, in fact, require narratives. They give shape to experience. They create cohesion.  They provide an explanation. They help us make decisions and predict outcomes. Apparently, they are also inevitable. So, two important questions become: what is the source of our narrative, and are we aware of it as narrative?

Here, mute world.
There, dharmic tale.
Near here, inching ever closer,
the persecuted human.

Why “persecuted”? A defining characteristic of an x-buddhist is that s/he looks to The Dharma for narrative cues. “The Dharma” is the x-buddhist “big other.” In Lacan’s terms, the big other provides the symbolic apparatus for negotiating the base material real. It also serves to regulate the community’s social interactions while the community enacts its symbolic apparatus. A symptom that some x-buddhist is in thrall to the dharmic big other is that in “seeing” a direct correlation between the words of the narrative and material reality, he is self-evidently, and of his own free will, “seeing things as they are.” In other words, the symbolic-fictional nature of The Dharma is wholly opaque to him. This spell is difficult to break, for a further function of the specifically x-buddhist big other is, in Zizek’s words, to mask the “intricate cobweb of unwritten implicit rules.” These rules:

are never explicitly stated. If you state them explicitly you even usually commit some kind of crime or violation. This is what always interests me: how what holds communities together are not explicit rules but the unwritten rules which are even prohibited to be announced publicly… My point is that the appearance of a free choice [has] to be sustained.2

The Dharma as x-buddhist big other is a topic for another day. I am bringing it up here in the hopes of catalyzing some consideration of an obviously unbearable thought: The Dharma as persecutor. Is it conceivable to think The Dharma as yet another human-obliterating narrative that harasses, coaxes, seduces, negates, and incessantly nags the practitioner to do this, think that? Among x-buddhists, the very possibility of examining the ways in which this may or may not be the case is implicitly prohibited from even being broached.3 Acceptance of The Dharma as an overarching, cosmically anchored narrative which “provides a safe haven in the flurry of contemporary confusion of roles and identities,” as Zizek says of the “new age” versions of the big other, is non-negotiable.4

Meditation as existential parataxis, however, can break the spell. For, when sitting in still, silent, present attentiveness, the dharmic narrative, and with it, its persecution, is erased.

Here, mute world.
There, dharmic narration.
Near here, inching ever closer,
the persecuted human.

That does not mean that the intransitive truths cataloged in the dharmic inventory are invalidated.5 It means that once their exalted warrant is cancelled, their magisterial vibrato silenced, and their network of voltaic postulation disabled, they became raw, unprocessed chora–chora borne, or not, in the immanence of the mute world.

[Materials for Practice 2]

___________________

Image: See the discussion on this image at Language Log.

1  Joshua Ramey “The Justice of Non-Philosophy.” Laruelle and Non-Philosophy. Eds. John Mullarkey and Anthony Paul Smith. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. 80-99.

2 http://slought.org/content/11236/

3 Zizek’s example, in the talked linked above, of the requirement that the prohibition be implicit is illuminating:

Imagine a session of the central committee where someone stands up and starts to criticize Stalin. Now, everyone knows this was prohibited. But that’s the catch. Imagine someone else standing up and saying: “But listen, are you crazy? Don’t you know that it’s prohibited to criticize comrade Stalin?” I claim the second one would be arrested earlier than the first one. Because although everybody knew that it’s prohibited to criticize Stalin, this prohibition itself was prohibited. The appearance had to be unconditionally maintained that it is allowed to criticize Stalin, but simply why criticize him since he’s so good. My point it that the appearance of a free choice had to be sustained.

4 Slovoj Zizek. “The Big Other Doesn’t Exist.” Journal of European Psychoanalysis. Spring – Fall 1997. http://www.lacan.com/zizekother.htm

5 See “Radical Potential.” On the intransitive, see Roy Bhaskar. A Realist Theory of Science. New York: Routledge, 1998. p. 22:

[Th]e intransitive objects of knowledge are in general invariant to our knowledge of them: they are the real things and structures, mechanisms and processes, events and possibilities of the world; and for the most part they are quite independent of us. They are not unknowable, because as a matter of fact quite a bit is known about them… But neither are they in any way dependent upon our knowledge, let alone perception, of them.

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The Epistemic Meditator

Posted by Glenn Wallis on May 14, 2013

blackarrowCan meditation produce knowledge? Or is it a vessel for dogma?

The latter is without question the case. How else should we understand the perfect confluence of some x-community’s practice with its doctrine? It never fails. It appears to be as inevitable as it is complete. Whether Trappist, Quaker, Zen, TM, Shamanic, Wiccan, Vipassana, MBSR or any other form, what happens in meditation never fails to validate the claims of doctrine. Let me converse for five minutes with any meditator, and I can tell you to what system of thought he or she subscribes. Meditation, it seems, is a potent tool for inculcating ideology. And the meditator, as good subject of that ideology, cannot hide the fact. S/he cannot but expressively ventriloquize the terms and beliefs that populate the practice.

If it is demonstrably the case that meditation can be employed as a tool for indoctrination, is it necessarily so? Can the term “meditation” be used to designate a human practice that produces knowledge? If so, what conditions might be required?

On the back cover of her new book, In-Cite: Epistemologies of Creative Writing, Camelia Elias, writes:

The epistemic creative writer is not merely an expressive writer, a writer who writes for creative writing programs at diverse university colleges. Rather, the epistemic creative writer is the writer who understands that in order to say something useful you must step out of the space that engages your ego. Awareness of what really matters comes from the contemplation of the futility of words. Before the word there is silence. After the word there is silence. But during the word there is knowledge that can be made crystal clear. [Links at bottom.]

Similarly, the “epistemic meditator” is not a ventriloquized subject, one who practices obediently within a particular tradition and dutifully absorbs the views of that tradition. Rather, the epistemic meditator is one who understands that in order to think or learn something important he must step out of the very space within which the community’s subjugating practice does its work. That space is demarcated by the words of the community’s doctrine. Words are the furniture and infrastructure of the x-buddhist fortress. By accident or by design, those words are compelling and coercive. “What really matters,” for example, is already given in x-buddhist postulates. It is, in fact, provided at the very inception of “Buddhism.” X-buddhism’s origination myth has the Buddha-figure attaining to saving knowledge. And so the first tracks of borrowed thought are lain. “Awareness of  what really matters” is not awareness at all: it is rather acquiescence to tradition’s formulation. The x-buddhist who “sees” that “all is suffering” (or whatever) is merely seeing what he, by his affective acquiescence, has decided to see.  What he has “seen” is the ostensible value of a particular formulation. If contemplation reveals “the futility of words,” the first words to fail are those that say what contemplation is.

Before the word there is silence. After the word there is silence. X-buddhism, like all systems of thought, is nowhere to be found in this empty silence. Yet, x-buddhism, the paladin of emptiness, is nothing if not a loquacious filler of the silence.

But during the word there is knowledge that can be made crystal clear. This brings us back to the original question: Can meditation produce knowledge? Can it, for instance, engender thinking about the basic qualities of the mind-independent world that we all inhabit, as well as the meditator’s own cognitive-affective relationship to that world? Can it produce knowledge about the social-symbolically-formed mind of the meditator? Or is meditation never more than an instance in a recursive self-referential loop? If it is a way of knowing, about, for instance, that loop, how can it be expressed? Stripped of the script that is x-buddhist doctrine, what words will the meditator use to express what knowledge gained?

[Elias on In-Cite:] This book is about extracting what writing means to a few writers who formulate ideas about creative writing without, however, making claims to instruction. Can creative writing that produces knowledge be taught without a method?

Imagine a book in which meditators formulate ideas about meditation without making claims to instruction? To do so, we must first conceive of a meditation practice that silences the shrill vibrato of “The Dharma.” We have to permit meditation to cancel all previous x-buddhist (and other “spiritual”) warrants on knowledge and truth. Given our current models, this is inconceivable. X-buddhist teachers, from the most orthodox to the most innovative all read from the same oppressive, over-determining script, which they invariably refer to as “The Dharma.” An x-buddhist subject, from the Dalai Lama on down, is by definition one who is affectively and cognitively beholden to this pre-fabbed knowledge.

How unfortunate for a tradition that has the coruscating lightening rod of “to know” (buddh) driven into its very heart.

[Materials for Practice 1. To be continued.]

______________

Camelia Elias, In-Cite: Epistemologies of Creative Writing (Roskilde: EyeCorner Press, 2013). EyeCorner Press website.

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Radical Potential

Posted by Glenn Wallis on May 10, 2013

MalevichSpeculative non-buddhism is an attempt to think x-buddhism via radical concepts. A radical concept is one that has the status of a transcendental minimum. In Laruellen language, a radical, transcendentally minimal concept is one that “clones” the real rather than the wholly transcendental, and is thus posited by the “human-in-human” rather than by some totalizing x-system. Intriguingly, yet confoundingly, x-buddhism itself is populated by radical concepts. In Cruel Theory | Sublime Practice, I argue that the prime calculus of classical-buddhism is constituted by radical concepts. I have in mind concepts such as vanishing, ancestral anamnesis,  symbolic identity, nihility,  surface, and others (anicca, sati, anattā, suññatā, sabba).

And yet I claim that the brutal failure of x-buddhism throughout its entire history has been its inability (or refusal?) to unleash the revolutionary potential of its thought. I further claim that what has filled the space of this failure/refusal is not a merely quasi-revolutionary force-of-x-buddhism; it is, rather, an impotent collusion. Contemporary x-buddhism’s impotence makes it easy prey to the very status quo its calculus is, arguably, designed to upset. Do we need any further evidence of this than the smooth grafting of x-buddhism onto the western marketplace? In fact, this is an old pattern. Everywhere Buddhism has been brought–Tibet, China, Japan, Thailand, Sri Lanka, etc.–it has been co-opted by the ruling power structures, and thereby seduced away from its revolutionary designs.  It is fair to ask whether today, in Europe and North America, x-buddhism is not just another product that enables its consumer merely to retreat and  refresh before the next day’s onslaught. That would certainly fit the ancient pattern. Chinese Chan, for example, was a mix of agrarianism, Daoism, and Indian Buddhism bound tightly with the heavy chains of Confucianism. In the West, we have a mix of feel-good pop psychology, Hallmark Card-like positive affirmation, and world-buddhism trapped in the bloated cage of consumer capitalism.

That unfortunate, recurring fate of x-buddhism is an issue for historians. Speculative non-buddhism is practical theory. It is concerned with the inherent, present conditions of x-buddhism. Because the radical concepts that speculative non-buddhism works with are derived from x-buddhist thought itself, speculative non-buddhism may be viewed as a form of immanent critique: It considers its subject while immersed in its subject; it remains open to and curious about its subject’s premises and postulates; it follows, in the first instance, the contours of thought drawn by its subject. But it does so not in order to validate the structure of that thought, but to expose the fault lines where x-buddhism’s governing principles break apart.

As a simple example of the confluence of some of these issues, let’s look at the following comment from another blog. The writer is lamenting the tendency of x-buddhist teachers to lure people into their groups with sensible talk sprinkled with a things as they are naturalism, pragmatism, and so on, and then eventually springing religious dogma on them. In other words, the old bait and switch of the peddler.

I saw Ajahn Sumedho give a talk on his way to retirement in Thailand where he pronounced the good news that there is more than this life! So I asked him what experience he had that he based this knowledge on, and did it occur in a meditative state. He ignored the question, like a slick lying politician, and gave me a basic dharma instruction. This is one example of that duplicity in action.

Sumedho was not being duplicitous. He was being consistent. As a bona fide peddler of x-buddhist wares, Sumedho was simply offering up the goods at his disposal. Those goods are that which is indexed by the term “basic dharma.” “The Dharma,” is a non-radical concept. It is, in fact, the polar opposite: a wholly or absolutely transcendental concept. A radical concept stems from a question, one, crucially, posed by the human in and as human, one rooted in our immanent situation. The Dharma, by contrast, constitutes a complex of prescribed answers. Like all wholly transcendental structures, The Dharma’s answers are static and inert. They are not born of the demands of our primitive situation, a situation that alters over time and that science can chart. The Dharma’s answers are born of the demands–logical, emotional, cultural–of a differential, one, moreover, of its own creation, unavailable to science or any other local knowledge.

In his essay “What Kind of Buddhist are You?,” Tom Pepper presents a valuable typology (borrowing from Alain Badiou). In the terms of that typology, Ajahn Sumedho is performing as an “obscurantist” subject (link at bottom).

The obscurantist subject is that subject who [quoting Badiou from Logics of Worlds] “systematically resorts to the invocation of a full and pure transcendent Body, an ahistorical or anti-evental body” which “has the power to reduce to silence that which affirms the event, thus forbidding the real body from existing”(59-60).  The obscurantist subject appeals to some ineffable truth beyond words, which science threatens to destroy, the “truly human” that escapes reason, and can only be found in miraculous revelations and is always hidden in obscure origins.  We see this in x-buddhism whenever there is an insistence that awakening is beyond language, that Buddha never used language to teach, that we must never think if we hope to become enlightened, or that the ultimate goal is some full and pure “substrate consciousness,” Buddha-nature, or “true self.”  We see this subject whenever argument is squashed with appeals to tradition or sutra-quoting or lineages.

The person asking Ajahn Sumedho the question seems be prepared to follow the obscurantist line. For, what if Sumedho had replied, “yes, I attained this knowledge of future births in deep, non-conceptual meditation.” Would that claim have been enough to satisfy the query? If not, the questioner may be approaching the status of a “faithful” subject.

The faithful subject is the one that notices the truth event and tries to force its acceptance in the World. “Forcing” is a term borrowed from set theory, and refers to the attempt to transform the discursive practices and institutions of the World in such a way that the truth becomes demonstrable, is able to appear and be spoken of; in a sense, it is offering a “proof” of a truth that it as yet only “intuitively” grasped. Until it is “forced” into appearing, a truth is indeterminate, it does not seem to belong to the World, and is on the fringes of the discourses and institutions—it exists, but it does not officially appear (Badiou uses the example of undocumented workers in France).  The faithful subject notices the truth event, the occurrence in a World of something that seems a contradiction, an excess, something that cannot be accounted for, and this subject struggles to remake the World to bring this truth into appearance. As Badiou puts it, the faithful subject “engenders the expansion of the present and exposes, fragment by fragment, a truth”(53).

In the terms I am using, a faithful subject thinks x-buddhism via its own radical concepts. What happens to the traditionalist’s “rebirth” and “awakening” or, for that matter, the “non-reactivity” and “present moment” of the post-traditionalist, when forced to reckon with fading (anicca), radical contingency (paticcipasamuppada), and nihility (suññatā)?

What happens, in other words, when we take x-buddhism at its own, radical, word?

____________

Link: Tom Pepper, “What Kind of Buddhist are You?“

Image: Kazimir Malevich (Russian. 1879-1935), Suprematist Composition: White On White, 1918, Museum of Modern Art New York.

Posted in Critics, Interpreters | Leave a Comment »

Go fann on Calls

Posted by Glenn Wallis on May 7, 2013

Mark Rothko-orange and yellow,1956-2I am going to retreat for a while into my workshop. I will craft text there. I will craft tools there, too, tools that should prove useful to your sifting through the ruins of the dilapidated fortress we call x-buddhism. Who knows what treasures you may find? Remember, our ruin is ruin because of treasure.

I will continue to present my finely-wrought wares here.

The work I want to get back to requires concentration. In order to do it, I will be disabling discussion here. I will allow ping backs. They will show up to the left there, where the commentators do now.

Thank you for your participation. Thank you for all your comments.

As many of you know, thoughtfully writing and responding to comments can be extremely time-consuming. On many days over the last two years I have spent several hours responding to comments. I can tell from many of yours, too, that you must spend a great deal of time crafting your comments. I also happen to be conscientious about getting back to readers when they make an interesting critical point or ask a valuable question. So, I am not the kind of blogger who can post something and then turn away. Sometimes I lose sleep over it. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of you do, too.

I have learned a great deal from many of you. Thank you.

I will leave the comments open on the previous posts for a couple of days, or until I can reconfigure the blog a bit. That way, you can finish up whatever conversations you were having. Who knows, maybe we’ll have a forum for exchange again someday. Better yet, maybe one of you will create one somewhere else.

It’s been a fun experiment. Now, where did I leave that old slack tub…?

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Pause to Reflect

Posted by Glenn Wallis on May 6, 2013

EndlicherLet’s take a moment to reflect.

I am always receiving advice on how to conduct this project of non-buddhist criticism. Nearly all of it  misses the point.  Nearly all of it is nonetheless worth considering. I would like to take a pause, and share some of that advice with you. I will also say what I will do about it.

Advice #1: Remain substantive
Advice #2: No naming
Advice #3: Stop trolling
Advice #4: Address alternatives
Advice #5: Moderate comments
Advice #6: Stop Tom Pepper!
Advice #7: Be more self-critical
Advice #8: Stop already! The blog has run its course Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Constructivists | 37 Comments »

Žižek v. Buddhism: who’s the subject?

Posted by Glenn Wallis on May 3, 2013

LacanSubjectŽižek v. Buddhism: who’s the subject?

By Adrian J. Ivakhiv

This started out as a response to Slavoj Žižek’s recent talk at the University of Vermont on “Buddhism Naturalized,” but evolved into a consideration of subjectivity, which happened to be the topic of my next post in the pre-G (process-relational ecosophy-G) series. [Links at bottom.] So this can be considered part 1 of a 2-part series.

There are Western philosophers with a good understanding of Buddhism. Some of them are Buddhologists: longtime scholars of Buddhism, like Herbert Güenther, Jay Garfield, Kenneth Inada, Jin Park (the definition of “Western” gets a little blurry here), Brook Ziporyn, Stephen Batchelor, and others who are philosophers in their own right (if not necessarily academically sanctioned ones), and who have cut their teeth interpreting original Asian Buddhist texts.

Others have come to Buddhism through a side door: either by accident or through a logical extension of their own interests. Owen Flanagan is one of these, and his recent book The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized provides a model for how an established analytic philosopher can develop a critical dialogue with a philosophical tradition that is foreign yet ancient, complex, and clearly worthy of comparative assessment.

Then there are those whose writing about Buddhism extends somewhat beyond what they know about it. In the past, this was excusable by the dearth of material for western commentators. Buddhist literature is voluminous — one might say it’s Himalayan in its voluminousness — and the fraction of what’s been translated into European languages is still comparatively small. But there is enough now to support full-time positions in Western universities for those who specialize in refined sub-areas of Buddhist studies. And with Buddhism alive and well now in the West and in the East, there is no end to what a Buddhist scholar can do.

Where does Slavoj Žižek fit into this continuum? Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Constructivists, Critics, Interpreters | Tagged: | 20 Comments »

YOU ARE BANNED

Posted by Glenn Wallis on May 2, 2013

bannedYOU ARE BANNED.

[UPDATE: Ted Meissner immediately wrote me to say that it's a technical problem. I wish I could give him the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, the post still stands as a general reflection on a real phenomenon in the x-buddhist internet world, including the Secular Buddhist Association. I stand by the post. Also, I want to make it clear that I did NOT receive the usual message you get when a site has trouble loading, the one about technical difficulties. The message I got read:]

YOU ARE BANNED.

That’s the message I get when I try to access the Secular Buddhist site (links at bottom). I checked: it’s a blanket IP ban.  You may wonder: what does it take to get banned from a Buddhist site? I wonder the same thing. After all, aren’t x-buddhists always telling us how they embody compassion, mindfulness, and equanimity? These values, you would think, serve even the most discordant conversations. Couldn’t banning someone just be an admission that your claims to (ostensibly) pro-social dispositions like “non-reactivity” and “non-judgmentalism” are a bit shabby?

Ted Meissner, the founder of the Secular Buddhist Association and its Facebook page, generously sprinkles his sites with words that, I suppose, are designed to signal serious thought and a willingness to engage others with dialogical vigor, words like critical (critical thinking, critical eye, critical examination, etc.) naturalism, pragmatism, science, secularism, evidence, and so forth. Meissner adds to such good habits of thought a rigorous ethics of engagement. We can glean his ethics from such recent Facebook nuggets as the following (Meissner signs all of his sayings “TSB.” TSB = The Secular Buddhist = Ted Meissner. Why does he use quotation marks to quote himself? Does it makes what he says appear more important?):

“I would rather be shown wrong and have the opportunity to correct my understanding, than maintain a comforting delusion.”

“Our practice is neither avoidance nor suppression of suffering, but direct and sincere engagement.”

“Today — respond with a heart of friendliness, rather than react with a knee of jerkiness.”

*Today* — Decide to be an enthusiastic participant in this moment, every moment.

“Only a weak faith is intolerant of questioning. A strong faith encourages it, sincerely, without an underlying requirement that you find their own answers.”

*Today* — That lightness of heart you may have after meditation? Bring that with you as you encounter the very next person.

“To question is to demonstrate a desire to find the truth. And that quest can only strengthen *us*, however much it may weaken our cherished *views*.”

Meissner does not practice what he is preaching here. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Critics, Secularists | Tagged: , , | 38 Comments »

Adbusters and Sogyal Rinpoche. Really?

Posted by Matthias Steingass on April 26, 2013

X-buddhist anti-intellectualism at Adbusters?

Yesterday I received the latest issue of Adbusters.

On page thirteen we find a citation of Sogyal Rinpoche. It is superimposed on a two-page reproduction of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. The citation begins:

Because in our culture we overvalue the intellect, we imagine that to become enlightened demands extraordinary intelligence.

And it ends with an alleged Tibetan proverb:

Theories are like patches on a coat, one day they just wear off.

I was shocked to read a citation of Sogyal Rinpoche in Adbusters. If there is one big liar in Tibetan Buddhism, it is this man. I wrote a comment at the Adbusters site at once, formulating my objection, but it didn’t go through and wasn’t published. Strange.

The citation is a case of the typical anti intellectual stance x-buddhists take as their savoir vivre.

The logical mind seems interesting, but it is the seed of delusion.

Such a “logic” (also from the citation) is enough for the x-buddhist to disparage thinking once and for all. But this is not the point here. The point is that Adbusters, a magazine that is the self-declared front of the revolutionary meme-war against the dead dog of capitalism is falling prey here to their very enemy. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Critics | Tagged: | 86 Comments »

“A Sickness unto Death”

Posted by Adam Miller on April 17, 2013

BrainNon-buddhism is instrumental. It’s a whetstone for chisels, a forge for hammers. Its tools are meant, as Glenn recently put it, to

deflate, flatten, and simplify the object of the application: x-buddhism. Then, you can place x-buddhism’s raw material next to mute reality. You can also democratize totalitarian x-buddhist material by putting it in dialogue with local knowledges. It is in enabling such acts of decommissioning that non-buddhism is a radical practice, “radical” meaning rendering some x-material minimally transcendental.

The aim is to “decommission” some religious material, to uncook a bit what’s been cooked up, and give us a peek at the x-meat when it’s still raw. This rawness becomes visible to the degree that the material has been rendered “minimally transcendental.” Such uncooking, Glenn suggests, can be accomplished just by bringing religious material into unprotected dialogue with other kinds of local knowledge.

Take the idea of “enlightenment.”

One straightforward way to render the notion of “enlightenment” minimally transcendental would be to assume the (not unlikely) hypothesis that “enlightenment” is, medically speaking, a pathology, a sickness, a defect, an accidental side effect of a bug in the human system.

If enlightenment is a kind of weird, local, peripheral pathology of my already strained humanity rather than the summum bonum toward which all reality bends, then . . . what?

That’s the non-buddhist question: then . . . what?

In her book, My Stroke of Insight, Harvard-trained neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor describes what it was like, from the inside out, to suffer a massive stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain.

It turns out that, on Taylor’s own account, this kind of massive physiological trauma looks like “enlightenment.” Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Constructivists, Critics, Interpreters | Tagged: | 51 Comments »

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