Speculative Non-Buddhism

weaving a bloody tapestry of ruin

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Un-Mindful Collusion

Posted by Glenn Wallis on May 17, 2012

I want to ask a simple question: Are contemporary western Buddhists complicit in what is arguably a rabid capitalistic system?  I don’t just mean the conservative western traditionalists, like the Zennites, Theravadins, Vipassanins, Tibetophiles, etc. I mean those communities that modify “Buddhism” with words that are meant to impress you with their enlightened advancement over such regressive and irrational religionists. Modifiers like Secular-, Atheist-, Progressive-, Post-traditional-, Agnostic-, Existentialist-, Naturalist-, Insight-, Non-sectarian, and Postmodern-. And we certainly can’t leave out the Mindfulnistas.

Are these communities unwitting agents helping to extend our predatory social, cultural, financial, and political status quo? And, if so, do they give a shit? In Marxist terms, which comes first for an x-buddhist: private profit or social need? Please pause and think before those bodhisattva buddhemes start booming in your brain.

We may have to pose an even graver question: do western Buddhist communities and media actively aid in the creation of a person who is incapable of the passionate, risky, and sustained commitment that is perhaps the first condition of real change? Is the contemporary Buddhist person-subject just too nice, mindful, and equanimous to be anything but a dupe to Exxon and J.P. Morgan? I cannot tell you how many times I have seen an x-buddhist douse himself/herself with a debilitating dollop of “non-reactivity” or “non-judgmentalism” in the face of genuine passion.  Well, why should I be surprised? After all, the  roots of x-buddhism lie deep in the yearnings of world-renouncing ascetics.

At some point, I want to return to an earlier post on this blog, called “Slavoj Žižek: From Western Marxism to Western Buddhism.” That post presented Žižek’s controversial essay contending that western Buddhism “is establishing itself as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism.” Indeed, thumbing through the latest slew of western Buddhist propaganda organs–Shambhala Sun, Tricycle, Buddhadharma, Mindful, The Mindfulness Bell –and checking my Google blog aggregator for x-buddhisty headlines, it is difficult to argue against Žižek’s claim that although “’Western Buddhism’ presents itself as the remedy against the stressful tension of capitalist dynamics, allowing us to uncouple and retain inner peace and Gelassenheit, it actually functions as its perfect ideological supplement.” More Žižek at another time.

For your present consideration, I would like to present to you a fragment of a comment that TOM PEPPER made on the preceding thread.(For the entire comment in its original context, go here, #7; edited to stand alone.) Pepper makes a crucially important assertion here. It is one, moreover, that will be pressed with increasing fervor on this blog. For, unlike x-buddhists, some of us at this blog still believe in the possibility of human liberation. Tom Pepper:

I want to point out what I think is the core article of faith of Secular Buddhism: the unquestioning belief in the ideology of capitalism. Badiou defines this very succinctly: the belief that “there are bodies and there are languages.” That is, we are bodily, biological organisms, seeking pleasure for our bodies (including our brains), and we do this by adopting the most convenient language/culture at will. There are no constraints to the culture we can adopt, and no truth content to it: we need only adopt the one that maximizes our bodily pleasure—what Batchelor calls “moment-to-moment flourishing.” This is why in his first paragraph [of his statement “A Secular Buddhist"] he can refer to “biological evolution,” “self-awareness and language,” the “brain” and our “fragile biosphere,” but it would never occur to him to mention our humanly constructed social formations as a source of suffering that we CAN ACTUALLY CHANGE!! This is why Secular Buddhists always seek to limit the discussion of suffering to sickness, death, loss, etc.—to those things that we certainly must learn to accept because they will doubtless always be with us. Passive acceptance of the inevitable, and maximization of bodily contentment, is the goal of Secular Buddhism AND of global capitalist ideology. This is why we accept the “scientific” research on mindfulness that operationally defines the successful achievement of “happiness” as the ability to remain undistracted by external stimuli; we achieve mindful bliss, it seems, as the ability to remain completely Unmindful of the world around us, and never let it disturb our brain/body comfort.

Badiou explains: “the modern name for necessity is, as everyone knows, ‘economics,’ which should be called by its name: the logic of Capital.” The one unchangeable truth is the ineffable uncontrollability of the capitalist economy, and we must all simply adjust our languages and medicate our brains/bodies to maximize our bliss in the face of this inexorable truth. Secular Buddhism seeks to become the ideology of this power, which forces us to participate in the production of oppression, poverty, and suffering for the majority of the world population. We focus on being nice and accepting sickness and death, and believe if those poor folks in the southern hemisphere would only become secular Buddhists too, they’d be fine. Their suffering isn’t the result of economic and political oppression; it results only from their inability to become oblivious to the world around them! Be mindful, and enjoy your poverty!

Posted in Critics, Speculative Non-Buddhist | Tagged: , , , | 118 Comments »

On the Faith of Secular Buddhists

Posted by Glenn Wallis on May 9, 2012

Secular Buddhism, “like all ‘isms’…is at best a parody, at worst a constriction.” (Nick Land*)

I am working on a detailed critique of the Secular Buddhist movement in the West. The critique employs speculative non-buddhist theory. What it shows is that Secular Buddhism is beholden to the identical transcendental norm as the most flagrantly religious and conservatively orthodox forms of Buddhism.

In the meantime, I read Stephen Batchelor’s “A Secular Buddhist.” This short piece is being distributed in advance of a public discussion between Batchelor and Don Cupitt, a self-described “secular Christian,” at London Insight Meditation. (Link below.)

Here, I would like to offer a raw reader-response account of my reading of Batchelor’s statement. I know that his piece itself is too brief to base a broad criticism on. But there are two good reasons to attend closely to it. The first is that, according to the website, it represents Batchelor’s “outlining” of his vision “for a contemporary spirituality.” The second, and more important reason, is that it contains axiomatic features that are endemic to all writing on Secular Buddhism—whether in Batchelor’s numerous books or on the newly sprouting Secular Buddhist websites, blogs, forums, and Facebook pages. These features form the very foundation on which Secular Buddhism is currently building its house. I say that they are axiomatic because these features go unchallenged, indeed unquestioned, by Secular Buddhists of all stripes, including the secular-scientistic community around Jon Kabat-Zinn. These features, in short, constitute the faith at the heart of Secular Buddhism. It is a faith, moreover, that renders Secular Buddhism indistinguishable from every other system of religious belief. The grounding of an “ism” in faith is neither new nor interesting. It is, however, a serious—perhaps debilitating—weakness in one that claims to reach for the values encapsulated in the term “secular.”

Radical?

James Blake’s comments introducing Batchelor’s and Cupitt’s statements alerted me to the first of several constrictions that render both arguments anemic. Blake announces that:

Both visions are radical…Radical is a paradoxical word, associated with the new and sometimes shocking, but literally meaning ‘of roots’. Stephen and Don are in this sense true radicals.

Blake says that Batchelor’s and Cupitt’s arguments are “rooted in deep study of the evidence for the lives and philosophies of the Buddha and Jesus respectively.” Batchelor confirms this claim of radicality when he writes that his vision is “not just another modernist reconfiguration of a traditional form of Asian Buddhism…It is more radical than that: it seeks to return to the roots of the Buddhist tradition and rethink Buddhism from the ground up” (pp. 3-4).

That sense of “radical” is, in Batchelor’s case, fraught with more pitfalls than the ostensible badge of honor is worth. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Critics | Tagged: , | 179 Comments »

No More Meditation!

Posted by Glenn Wallis on March 15, 2012

Speculative non-buddhism poses a simple question: shorn of its transcendental excess–its adventitious conceptual representations–what might x-buddhism offer us? That question suggests a methodology. It starts by deflating the lofty doctrinal postulates, hovering above our heads like the Hindenburg, and watching them come crashing down. As they lie there, prostrate on the ground, we can have a closer, less doctrinally-determinate, look.

In the present post, Matthias Steingass continues a lively discussion about the prospects of raw, doctrinally-shorn, x-buddhistic materials for practice. This discussion started with the post and comments (particularly those by Tom, Robert, and Erick) on “Raw Remarks on Meditation, Ideology, and Nihilism,” continued with Matthias’s article “Meditation and Control,” and has since arisen on the comments of virtually every post here, regardless of the post’s topic.

Although he does not cast it explicitly in such terms, Matthias’s piece is, in my eyes, an example of what we can do with non-buddhism. Maybe it is fairer, and in fact more to the point, to say it is an example simply of what we can do with thinking–thinking being what happens when we drain from cognition the charism surging in from the x-buddhist power grid.

I hope the reader will pay especially close attention to the programmatic remarks Matthias makes toward the end of the essay. There is something concrete there that we can build on, something promising that we can explore in action.

__________________

No More Meditation!

Matthias Steingass

There is a lot. Calm, the coming and going of explicit thought, feeling, sensation, mixtures of this and its phasing in and out of syntactically correct renderings, spots of non-thought presence, the wandering of the focus of attention, physical effects, effects which might be reflected in behaviour, insights, ideas, dullness… but no meditation.

Let’s turn the thing around. No introduction to “meditation” but search for experiences which might point to or are certain specific properties of being conscious. There are experiences which one can describe. It is not from semantic content to experience but vice versa. The point is, one has to find a way to describe experience in a fresh way. Talking about “mindfulness” is not talking about mindfulness: it is talking about something one has learned to say about mindfulness in a series of expensive seminars. The other thing is not learned but is a given – and it is for free, which, in our economic culture, means it has no value. What is the point to know that I am right now? That is at once a trivial and at the same time very important question. This is nothing mystical; it is present experience – for which one can find expressions. Interactional expression is the creative scribe which maps out and structures – with all the colourful complicating reciprocity that this brings with it.

But let us abandon the word and then look for experience as not looked for but experienced – and just let’s say “No!” to “meditation.” Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Constructivists, Critics | Tagged: , | 156 Comments »

Come On, X-Buddhists, Pump Up The Polemos!

Posted by Glenn Wallis on March 1, 2012

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby. —Walter Benjamin

Is there any such thing as x-buddhistic polemics? Or are x-buddhists too busy primming themselves with right speech, loving kindness, and equanimity to consider such nastiness? I can imagine my x-buddhist friends asking how I can even suggest that the perpetually-grinning paragons of compassion that are their beloved teachers would even want to engage in something as “un-buddhist” as polemics.

Come to think of it, I have to ask them a question right back: Is it conceivable that your myriad x-buddhist values (compassion, right speech, renunciation, loving-kindness, forbearance, right thought, etc., etc., etc.) are precisely a passive form of polemics? In “cultivating compassion,” for instance, are you, as x-buddhist, arming yourself for the fight?

Consider this. When asked why he does not engage in polemics, Michel Foucault answered as follows.

The polemicist . . . proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will never agree to question…. [T]he person he confronts is not a partner in search for the truth but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is armful, and whose very existence constitutes a threat. For him, then the game consists not of recognizing this person as a subject having the right to speak but of abolishing him as interlocutor, from any possible dialogue; and his final objective will be not to come as close as possible to a difficult truth but to bring about the triumph of the just cause he has been manifestly upholding from the beginning. The polemicist relies on a legitimacy that his adversary is by definition denied.

To my non-buddhist ears, this description of a polemicist astutely, if unintentionally, describes the contemporary western x-buddhist. This is because, from a non-buddhist perspective, an x-buddhist is nothing if not a person “encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will never agree to question,” and  someone who “relies on a legitimacy that his adversary is by definition denied.” This legitimacy, this privilege, is, of course, The Dharma. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Critics, Speculative Non-Buddhist | Tagged: | 143 Comments »

Mindful Lobotomy

Posted by Glenn Wallis on February 10, 2012

Obedience to normalcy
is what lobotomies are for.—Crass

Someone sent me a link to Tricycle magazine’s “Daily Dharma” for February 3-10. My first response, when I get such links from the Buddhist glossies is to hit delete. Ready for some procrastination, though, I read this one.  The advice distilled in this “Wisdom Collection” confirmed a growing suspicion of mine:   meditation/mindfulness in present-day North America is hardly distinguishable from lobotomy.

Consider this. Among the “good results” of a prefrontal lobotomy are calming of obsessive-compulsive states; reduction of chronic anxiety; lessening of recursive introspection; amelioration of affective disorders; reduction of  feelings of inadequacy and self-consciousness; reduction of emotional tension. Sound familiar? Most significantly—Kabot-Zinnites take note!— prefrontal lobotomy

has also been used successfully to control pain secondary to organic lesions. In this case, the tendency has been to employ unilateral lobotomy, because of the evidence that a lobotomy extensive enough to reduce psychotic symptoms is not required to control pain. (My source for all of this is Leland E. Hinsie and Robert Jean Campbell [1970]. Psychiatric Dictionary. Fourth Edition. Oxford University Press.).

I am not saying that meditation has similar effects as a lobotomy. How could I? Pardon the pun, but “meditation” is nowhere near as cut and dry as “lobotomy.”  My point is that the contemporary western rhetoric of meditation/mindfulness suggests a similarity. In case you think my comparison of the two is overly cute (as opposed to merely cute), here are some pearls of wisdom from Tricycle’s “Daily Dharma.”

In “Finding Sense in Sensation,”  S. N. Goenka recommends that we attend to the “arising and passing” of sensation. Why? Well, precisely not to feel life more acutely; precisely not to be more alive to the rich, intricate textures of human existence. No. The “sense in sensation” is to “understand its flux,” in order to  “learn not to react to it.” Fuck that is my reaction. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Critics, True Believers | Tagged: , , | 86 Comments »

Extrapolating Equanimity

Posted by Glenn Wallis on January 30, 2012

I saw an exchange on the Secular Buddhist Facebook page today that got me wondering. The exchange arose out of a post about certain religious communities’ anger at Rick Santorum’s ignorant claim that, as the article put it, “‘equality’ is solely a Judeo-Christian concept.” One person responded:

Get government out of our lives. Go libertarian…I see so many buddhists, secular and otherwise, claiming to be socialist and want social engineering (big government). Buddha taught individual responsibility for our own awakening. He advocated maximum individual freedom, a concept directly opposed to big government (right or left leaning).

Reading that comment, it occurred to me just how rare it is to encounter anything overtly political in Buddhist forums. To read western Buddhism-oriented magazines, blogs, and Facebook pages, you could easily get the impression that x-buddhism is, in fact, a wholly apolitical affair. Central features of x-buddhist rhetoric even seem to encourage the kind of  political complacency that Žižek accuses western Buddhism of when he contends that it “is establishing itself as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism.” (Can “equanimity” be seen as a buddhacized “complacency”?) Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Critics | Tagged: | 11 Comments »

Meditation and Control

Posted by Glenn Wallis on January 14, 2012

"Keep on selling me my future and I'll keep on wearing my disguise."

Meditation lies at the root of the myth of Buddhist exceptionalism. The cataclysmic event known as “awakening” and its aftermath (liberation, the overcoming of suffering,  perfect peace of mind, etc.), was, we are asked to believe, ignited by the Buddha’s practice of sitting meditation.

A central concern of speculative non-buddhism is to explore the relationship between x-buddhist doctrine and its meditation practice. One impetus to this investigation is the curious fact that practice seems invariably to verify doctrine. That fact raises the suspicion that x-buddhistic practice is impotent to effect anything even remotely resembling “liberation,” and, on the contrary, functions as a tool that reinforces established x-buddhistic ideology.

Or is such hallucinatory coercion only the result of subsuming “meditation” under “Buddhism”?  I present you here an essay, “Meditation and Control,” by Matthias Steingass, that gives thought to what might happen if we invert this equation. Such a move is necessary, says Steingass, for, “meditation as a sub-set of x-buddhism is logically unable to see more than that which this framework and setting are able to reveal.”

Along the way, Steingass presents a provocative case for the vampiric demands of our technological society on our attention. In sum, he asks: (1)  “What is our situation; how is it influenced socially by technological-economic forces? (2) Can meditation be of help in our situation? (3) What might the nature of such a practice be?

_____________________

Meditation and Control

By Matthias Steingass

A distinguishing characteristic of the situation we live in is that our attention is very much in demand by media everywhere we go the better part of our waking time. The combined average time of media usage is over eight hours per day. TV-usage alone in Europe and the US is generally around four hours per day; advertising is literally everywhere our senses reach, and the content we are exposed to via this steady input does not seem to be a flow of information we process consciously as much as a stream in which we live with a lot of bait bobbing for our attention.

I am not concerned here with promoted products—with the ads and fads washed around in this hotchpotch. Rather, I am interested in the values which are transmitted to us through this multiple media frenzy. That the definition of beauty for example is inscribed into the consumer via this steady infusion is a more obvious case; but what about more subtle messages concerning, for example, moral values, what to expect from life, what goals to accomplish and how to reach them, notions of fairness in interacting with my partner, neighbors, colleagues, competitors or even with somebody hostile and hateful? Another question: how does this steady stream of media input influence our consciousness on even more basic levels? Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Constructivists, Critics | Tagged: , | 85 Comments »

Sick Progeny? Buddhism and Psychotherapy

Posted by Glenn Wallis on September 14, 2011

Wherever Buddhism goes, it absorbs the values, assumptions, and ideologies of local cultures.We speak of Tibetan Buddhism, Late-Ming Buddhism or Western Buddhism. Doing so is a way of inscribing specific cultural modifications into the, ostensibly, stable descriptor “Buddhism.”

Whatever other values are intermixing with the X-Buddhisms in the contemporary West—or certainly, in the United States, where I live—those that originate in psychology are unquestionably among them. Is this cross fertilization salutary? Given the proliferation of mutual admiration societies and celebratory books and workshops, one would assume that the question has been settled. But before allowing psychology’s values to transfuse unseen into the various mélanges of Western/Secular/Progressive/Post/Mindfulness/X-Buddhisms, may we consider the opposite: that the genetic admixture of Buddhism and psychology produces sick—albeit socially “well-adjusted”—progeny?

I present to you here and essay by Tom Pepper (links at the end of the post) that does just that. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Comparativists, Constructivists, Critics | Tagged: , | 36 Comments »

Raw Remarks on Meditation, Ideology and Nihilism

Posted by Glenn Wallis on July 12, 2011

[I will be high in the Alps (high up, that is) and largely internet-free, until early August. I would like to leave you with a few stray, suggestive, unprocessed, and probably irresponsible remarks about meditation practice. These remarks stem from a chapter of a book that I am working on. Although I won’t be able to respond now to your comments, I hope you will nonetheless “talk amongst yourselves.”]

As I was about to post my raw remarks on meditation, a comment by Tom Pepper arrived on the “What is non-Buddhism” page. I encourage you to read his comment. Tom’s questions, insights, suggestions, and general attitude exemplify the kind of thinking needed for the work that I am hoping to stoke, or indeed incite, on this blog. After reading his comment, I went back and selected different raw fragments, ones that might better speak to his remarks. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Constructivists, Critics, Interpreters | Tagged: , , , , | 15 Comments »

Elixir of Mindfulness

Posted by Glenn Wallis on July 3, 2011

The mighty “Mindfulness” juggernaut continues to roll joyously throughout the wounded world of late-capitalism. And why shouldn’t it? The Mindfulness Industry is claiming territory once held by the great occupying force of assorted self-help gurus, shrinks, health care workers, hypnotists, preachers, Theosophists, the church, the synagogue, actual gurus, yogis, meditation teachers, and even—gasp!— Buddhists themselves.  Who, after all, can compete with an industry that claims to offer a veritable fountain of bounty, an elixir to life’s ills? According to the new website mindful.org (links provided at end of post) “a dose of mindfulness (or a very large helping) can enhance your joy and appreciation of everyday life—and help you to deal with some of life’s toughest challenges when they arise.”

“Mindfulness” can, apparently, be applied to virtually any activity whatsoever, thereby enhancing that activity’s compass of well-being. According to the site, mindfulness, for instance, significantly impacts activities as dissimilar as caregiving, dying and death, sex, parenting, healing and health, navigating intimate relationships, consumerism, finances, cooking, eating, entrepreneurship, creativity, sports, activism, education, protecting the environment, working with prisoners, and much, much more.

How, you ask, can mindfulness accomplish so much? Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Comparativists, Constructivists, Critics | Tagged: , | 27 Comments »

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