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!

Secular Buddhism, “like all ‘isms’…is at best a parody, at worst a constriction.”

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. First, as Batchelor himself notes, the Pali canon—Secular Buddhism’s go-to scripture—is a “complex tapestry” of data “shot through with conflicting ideas” (pp. 4-5). It is thus not the case that there is no ground to be staked out for a contemporary Buddhism on the basis of the Pali canon; rather, it is the case that there are numerous overlapping and intersecting grounds. Do you want your Buddhism to promise (actually, in the original context, threaten) rebirth? fiery hell? blissful heaven? It’s all in the canon. Would you like your Buddha to converse with horny spirits and cutesy gods til the wee hours of the morning? Grounds for that, too. How about a supernaturally powerful, miracle-performing Buddha? Yep. Oh, you prefer a Buddha who despises all of that mumbo-jumbo? Sure, no problem. How about banishing a member from your sangha for holding hands with a woman? You may do so! It’s canonical!

Batchelor is, of course, aware of the schizophrenic nature of the canon. So, he devises a methodology to get at the goods he wants. His method is to “bracket off anything attributed to the Buddha in the canon that could just as well have been said by a brahmin priest or Jain monk” (p. 5). Why this? Because if a Brahmin or Jain could have said it, that is evidence prima facie that it was “determined by the common metaphysical outlook of that time” and “derived from the worldview of 5th century India” (p. 5). And if only the Buddha said it? Well, then it is “an intrinsic component of the dharma.” And here we have Secular Buddhism’s first article of faith.

First Article of Faith: Transcendental Dharma

The dharma is unconditioned. It is not the product of any century, particularly not of that century in which its creator (discoverer?) lived. It is timeless. Being so, it somehow nonetheless clarifies for us here and now, “in this world, in this century (our saeculum)” (p. 1), the “great matter of birth and death” (p. 5). The dharma—that unity of unique and timeless truths uttered by the enlightened Buddha—addresses and resolves our “ultimate concern” as human beings. Interestingly, Batchelor, unlike the communities that his work has spawned, comes clean here: “my secular Buddhism still has a religious quality to it” (p. 5; emphasis in original). He reminds us, too, that “ultimate concern” is Paul Tillich’s gloss on “faith.” What did Tillich mean?

Paul Tillich believed that the essence of religious attitudes is “ultimate concern.” Ultimate concern is “total.” Its object is experienced as numinous or holy, distinct from all profane and ordinary realities. It is also experienced as overwhelmingly real and valuable—indeed, so real and so valuable that, in comparison, all other things appear empty and worthless. As such, it demands total surrender and promises total fulfillment (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; s.v. “Concepts of God”).

Why does Batchelor use for support, of all people, a Christian theologian? He gives a hint in his opening remarks:

I am a secular Buddhist. It has taken me years to fully “come out,” and I still feel a nagging tug of insecurity, a faint aura of betrayal in declaring myself in these terms (p. 1).

Stephen Batchelor needn’t be concerned; for he now holds the beacon that illuminates the ultimate concern. That light is “the dharma.” The first article of faith of all Secular Buddhists is that “the dharma” contains teachings that are (i) crucial to human flourishing, and (ii) otherwise unavailable or available only in inferior form from elsewhere. (Batchelor names four specific teachings. I will come back to these in a moment.) In my extended critique, I show that “the Dharma” is the transcendental norm that functions in all varieties of Buddhism, whether secularist-scientistic or flamboyantly devotional, in ways that are indistinguishable from other universal absolutes, such as God, Logos, Dao, or intelligent design. Here, I will only mention the logical impossibility of a timeless saeculum, and the irony of a Secular Buddhism grounded in deep religious sentiment. The first is absurd. The latter borders on bathos.

Why does Batchelor even bother to attach “secular” to his “Buddhism”? Here we have another constriction. The history of secularism is rich and complex. Contemporary secularism draws its inspiration from thinkers of the ancient Greek and Latin worlds through the Arab middle ages; it continues into the European Enlightenment with figures such as Voltaire, Spinoza, Locke, and James Madison, and comes down to modern times through Max Weber and Bertrand Russell. As this diverse gallery of thinkers suggests, there is not one secularism, but many. The term cries out for nuance. So, what hints does Batchelor’s outline “for a contemporary spirituality” offer about his usage of the term? All we get is the prosaic and literal “in this world, in this century (our saeculum)” (p. 1). That’s it? What about—just for starters—secularism as a robust rejection of religious faith and, indeed, of anodyne “spirituality” itself?

Second Article of Faith: The Buddha

Secular Buddhism’s second article of faith concerns the human source of this timeless dharmic clarification of the great matter of life and death: the Buddha. To arrive at just the right Buddha—the one who shares Batchelor’s unspecified secular values—Batchelor must perform yet another act of constriction. He writes:

And when you bracket off the quasi-divine attributes that the figure of the Buddha is believed to possess…and focus on the episodes in the canon that recount his often fraught dealings with his contemporaries, then the humanity of Siddhattha Gotama begins to emerge with more clarity too. All this supports what the British scholar Trevor Ling surmised nearly fifty years ago: that what we now know as “Buddhism” started life as an embryonic civilisation or culture that then mutated into another organized Indian religion. Secular Buddhism, which seeks to articulate a way of practicing the dharma in this world and time, thus finds vindication through its critical return to canonical sources, and its attempts to recover a vision of Gotamas’s own saeculum (pp. 6-7).

Batchelor already admitted to the cacophony of the Pali canon. So, to what canonical sources is he returning to extricate this humane master for our saeculum? I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating here.

Why do x-buddhists continue to embrace their Sunday-school fable of the Buddha? It is particularly curious that the scientifically-allied, ostensibly de-mythologized modern variety of Secular Buddhists do, isn’t it? Why this recurring, and seemingly unacknowledged argument from (mythological) authority? And why this dishonesty about the lack of reliable data for the so-desired authority? Or is it ignorance rather than dishonesty? And if ignorance, is it the dark unknowing kind or the willful variety? I admit that, in past writings, I myself have done some damage in arguing for the reconstruction of a recoverable historical figure named “Gotama.”

Let me repent. My several years’ effort of searching for a reliable historical basis for a biography of Siddhattha Gotama can be summed up as this: Gotama is a ghost. He is a non-entity. Or, he is an entity like Ahab—a literary fiction. So, I now refer to him as “the Protagonist:”

Protagonist, The. The progenitor of the Buddhist dispensation. He is referred to by various names, such as “The Buddha,” “Gotama,” “The Blessed One,” etc. Speculative non-buddhism’s designation “The Protagonist” is intended to indicate the irrefutable fact that “the Buddha” is a historical figure entirely overwritten by a literary one. Not the slightest wisp of evidence has survived that sheds light on the historical progenitor. Any reliable historical evidence that once existed has been reduced to caricature by the machinations of internecine Buddhist institutional shenanigans and the stratagems of ideological dupery. The figure of the Buddha in the classical Pali texts is a concoction of the collective imaginations of the numerous communities that, over several centuries, had a hand in the formation of the canon. Add to this imaginative mélange the imaginings—cultural, political, fantastic, ignorant—of all the iterations of all forms of x-buddhism, and the result is Buddha as Cosmic Magic Mirror, reflecting all things to all people. A viable composite human figure “The Buddha” can be salvaged from this protean symbol of buddhistic vanity only with force of the darkest, most atavistic yearning of puerile nostalgia for The Great Father.

May Secular Buddhists, in our time, put away their childish obsession with the ghost of Gotama.

Third Article of Faith: Special Teachings

Now, what about those presumably unique teachings that Gotama bestowed on humanity? That they are both exigent and unique constitutes the Secular Buddhists’ third article of faith. Batchelor writes:

Tentatively, I would suggest that this “bracketing” of metaphysical views, leaves us with four distinctive key ideas that do not appear to have direct precedents in Indian tradition. I call them the four “P”s:

1. The principle of conditionality
2. The process of four noble tasks (truths)
3. The practice of mindful awareness
4. The power of self-reliance

Some time ago I realized that what I found most difficult to accept in Buddhism were those beliefs that it shared with its sister Indian religions Hinduism and Jainism. Yet when you bracket off those beliefs, you are left not with a fragmentary and emasculated teaching, but with an entirely adequate ethical, philosophical and practical framework for living your life in this world. Thus what is truly original in the Buddha’s teaching, I discovered, was his secular outlook (p.6).

This statement echoes the apparently universal acceptance among Secular Buddhists of the sufficiency of the four noble truths/eightfold path framework for our saeculum. Now, with loud thumping of the canon, traditionalists will, of course, argue that such a constricted version of the teachings does precisely leave us with “a fragmentary and emasculated teaching.” (Why emasculated, anyway? Does Buddhism have a penis?) But that point does not interest me in the least. Neither does it interest me that a careful reading of Buddhism’s “sister Indian religions” reveals precisely the opposite of what Batchelor claims: there is much shared ground, much borrowing and reworking of each others’ ideas and practices. I am assuming that Batchelor knows that to speak of “Hinduism” at the time of the Buddha is wildly anachronistic—by well over a millennium; and that by “Indian religions,” he means the teachings that would eventually be recorded in the Upanishads, the Jaina canon, and the ancient yogic material. If that’s the case, he needs to return to those sources and read with heightened care. He will discover, if not outright incestuousness, at least a very close kinship between Buddhism and its “sister religions.” (Why sister, anyway? Buddhism is male and all the others are female?) But none of that interests me in the least. Finally, I will mention, though with disinterest, that Batchelor further constricts his Buddhism by reducing our expectations suddenly to a merely “adequate ethical, philosophical and practical framework for living your life in this world” (p. 6; first emphasis added).

What does interest me is the fact that “the four Ps” render Buddhism wholly expendable. If the four Ps encapsulate crucial knowledge about how we should live as human beings at this time (saeculum), we can do drastically better than to look to Buddhism for that knowledge. For, all four have been articulated throughout history, and continue to be formulated and developed, in ways far more sophisticated, hence appropriate to a modern audience, than Buddhism’s ancient, ascetically-driven versions. Secular Buddhism’s fourth article of faith is thus the inviolability of the principle of sufficient Buddhism.

Fourth Article of Faith: The Principle of Sufficient Buddhism

It does not matter that Aristotle, Hume, and Parfit, for instance, provide us with vastly more nuanced and astute thinking on “the principle of conditionality.” No need for comparison to or dialogue with these thinkers: Secular Buddhism’s version is sufficient.

It does not matter that fields such as philosophy, psychology, biology, literature, neuroscience, medicine, and the arts have developed effective and often profound models and applications for fulfilling “the process of four noble tasks” (namely: fully knowing suffering; letting go of craving; experiencing cessation of craving; and cultivating the eightfold path). No need for comparison to or dialogue with these fields: Secular Buddhism’s version is sufficient.

It does not matter that the world’s treasure house of culture is teeming with suggestions for how to realize the “practice of mindful awareness.” Virtually every religious tradition includes a contemplative practice that has been lovingly transmitted through the centuries. Psychoanalysis, from Freud to Gendlin, has given careful thought to the nature of attention and the movements of the mind. So has philosophy, from the Stoics and Epicureans to Aristotle, and from Descartes and Kierkegaard to Wittgenstein-inspired thinkers such as Peter Winch, Norman Malcolm, and D.Z. Phillips. I could go on. Think of the creative practices of our poets and painters. But it wouldn’t matter. There is no need for comparison to or dialogue with these traditions: Secular Buddhism’s practice of mindful awareness is sufficient.

Finally, it does not matter that Emerson’s thinking on “the power of self-reliance” makes the Buddha’s look like a novice’s. Let’s bring others into this conversation about self-reliance. How about Thoreau? Montaigne? Pascal? Nietzsche? Hell, while we’re writing invitations, why not invite the great American self-helpers like Dale Carnegie and Napoleon Hill? None of these thinkers will never get his invitation to the dialogue on self-reliance because Secular Buddhism’s version is wholly sufficient for our saeculum.

Fifth Article of Faith: Ideological Rectitude

Why do Batchelor and the Secular Buddhists believe that they possess an “entirely adequate ethical, philosophical and practical framework for living your life in this world” and thus have no need of consulting the wider world of knowledge? The answer lies in their fifth article of faith. Batchelor is apparently convinced that what he is proposing as a Buddhism for our saeculum is—and these are universal Secular Buddhist buzzwords— natural, empirical, pragmatic, and in accord with science. The teachings, as the ancient trope has it, are simply how things are. They are phenomenologically obvious. Thus, they posit not matters to be believed but tasks to be done. Batchelor writes:

Above all, secular Buddhism is something to do, not something to believe in…Instead of trying to justify the belief that “life is suffering” (the first noble truth), one seeks to embrace and deal wisely with suffering when it occurs. Instead of trying to convince oneself that “craving is the origin of suffering” (the second noble truth), one seeks to let go of and not get tangled up in craving whenever it rises up in one’s body or mind. From this perspective it is irrelevant whether the statements “life is suffering” or “craving is the origin of suffering” are either true or false. Why? Because these four so-called “truths” are not propositions that one accepts as a believer or rejects as a non-believer. They are suggestions to do something that might make a difference in the world in which you coexist with others now (p. 7).

Students of ritual have a saying: power is not manipulative; disguising power is. The Secular Buddhist propositions are precisely there to be accepted as a believer or rejected as a non-believer. Whether you accept or reject the postulates makes a world of difference. Acceptance of those postulates conditions you for a particular way of seeing things, of interpreting experience, and so on. So, of course, you see things in those terms. You thereby share with others quite specific representations, language, and ideas about the world. Congratulations! You have an ideology (like the rest of us). The crucial question is whether the ideological nature of your worldview is overt or covert. Given its rhetoric of naturalness, pragmatism, and so on; given its fervent insistence on the obviousness of The Dharma; given its refusal to subject its beliefs to the rigors of humanistic discourse, Secular Buddhism cannot avoid the label of covert ideology.

I am not saying that Secular Buddhists intentionally disguise their ideological machinations, and thereby gain influence over their adherents. I am suggesting something deeper and darker than that. I am suggesting that Secular Buddhists themselves mistake the (ideological) lens for the data. They are blind to the fact that they even have an ideology.

Conclusion

Secular Buddhism and Stephen Batchelor are not, I suppose, necessarily synonymous. But you couldn’t blame someone for thinking that they are. Just read first some Batchelor and then visit the ever-proliferating array of Secular Buddhist sites. The two are intimately entwined. The pervasiveness of Batchelor’s influence throughout the Secular Buddhist universe is unmistakable. It often manifests in the form of his exact words. So, I think that it is legitimate to argue—at this juncture anyway—that Batchelor’s faith is Secular Buddhism’s faith as well.

A couple of final responses from my reading.

Contrary to James Blake’s enthusiastic proclamation, secular Buddhism, as it is manifesting in the works of Stephen Batchelor and on the budding Secular Buddhist community websites, blogs, forums, and Facilebook pages is not radical in any but the most trivial sense. It does not constitute a “reimagining [of] the dharma from the ground up.” It is the same old exercise that Buddhists have been engaged in since their revered teacher made—what my Buddha would consider—the colossal mistake of opening his big mouth: endlessly tinkering with the dharmic details. Batchelor is doing exactly what he asks us to believe he is not doing; namely, creating “just another modernist reconfiguration of a traditional form of Asian Buddhism” (pp. 3-4). I have seen nothing in the Secular Buddhist corpus that suggests otherwise.

I share the conviction that we need a radically new form of thought and practice for our time. So, I think it is unfortunate that Secular Buddhists have faith that they are salvaging eminently usable planks from the ancient, teetering, and dilapidated vehicle called Buddhism with which to build that new form. Slapping “secular” on a tradition born and nurtured in a world-renouncing asceticism inconceivable in today’s world, makes Secular Buddhism terribly close to a form of parody. Uttering “secular” before “Buddhism” certainly changes very, very little—and when Buddhism’s countless revisions throughout the centuries are taken into considerations, it changes nothing substantial whatsoever.

I have to wonder if Batchelor and the Secular Buddhists truly want such a radical reimagining of traditional Buddhism. In the end, they seem to swap radicality and innovation for the timeless certainties promised by traditional Dharma. The Secular Buddhist quest, then, becomes identical to that of the mythical Buddha: recovery of a lost truth. As Batchelor expresses it in his somewhat millenarian final words:

Perhaps we have reached a time when we need to recover and practice again a solar dharma, one concerned with shedding its light (wisdom) and heat (compassion) onto and into this world (p. 8).

Does Secular Buddhism represent a first attempt, however frail, at a genuinely radical re-imagining of  Buddhist postulates for the  twenty-first century? Or is it a phantasmagoric mythos sprinkled with pseudo-philosophical platitudes, bad science, and facile recommendations for living? Something else?

Until Secular Buddhists ask long, hard, and, of course, potentially destructive, questions about their need to bolster up and preserve Buddhism or “Gotama’s teachings” or “the Dharma,” they risk being agents peddling the very goods they claim to be disposing us of: subscriptions to an ancient religion.  Disguising that religion as “secular”—is that really what we need in our saeculum?

_________

* Original: Like all ‘isms’, libidinal materialism is at best a parody, at worst a constriction. Nick Land. The Thirst for Annihilation (London: Routledge, 1992), p. xxi.

Stephen Batchelor, “A Secular Buddhist.”

Image: “Burnt Paper Rorschach.”

A downloadable pdf file is available on the Articles page.

Once upon a time, in some remote corner of that universe which is effused into numberless glimmering solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. It was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history;” but, of course, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled, and the clever beasts had to die.—One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how pathetic, how shadowy and evanescent, how purposeless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened.(1)

Two claims.

• X-buddhist meditation dilettantes can be recognized by their desire to connect everything. Their rhetoric of practice hooks chaotic modes of human being together with logical connectives even though the logical relationship asserted by those connectives does not hold. To the person who cannot truly conceive anything as a unit, anything that suggests disintegration or discontinuity is unbearable; only a person who can grasp totality can understand caesuras.

• As long as you live under the compulsion of x-buddhist decision or the principle of sufficient buddhism, you live also within an impotence of thought and within an infinite culpability.

That first claim is a bastardized version of a statement made by Theodor Adorno concerning punctuation marks.(2) The second is a rewording of François Laruelle’s “Theorem 00000000000: On the Advent of Impotence.”(3) (See notes for original wording). I’d like to explore them in answer to a question recently posed on this blog. Doing so will allow me to review some features of non-buddhism (as I am conceiving it).

The question arose from claims that I made in an earlier post on meditation:

(1)   Speculative non-buddhism is deeply curious about the role that meditation practice might play in transcending the division between ideology and self-reflective critique. The raw remarks that I present [in that post (4)] stem from a re-reading, and hence a re-commissioning, of primary classical-buddhist postulates; namely, disenchantment, ancestral anamnesis, vanishing, phenomenal identity, nihility, conceptual proliferation, contingency, world, surface, perspicuity, unbinding-extinction (my translations of, respectively: nibbida, sati, anicca, anattā, suññtā, papañca, paticcasamuppāda, loka, sabba, paññā, nibbāna/nirvāṇa). My, still speculative, contention is three-fold: (i) these postulates can be (re-)read to constitute the Protagonist’s (i.e., Gotama’s, the Buddha’s) calculus, understood here as the qualification of real-world limits; (ii) the calculus, thus re-commissioned, subsumes nihilism, and (iii) meditation is, for the practitioner, an organon of nihilistic dissolution.

(2)   Non-buddhism is a theoretical practice proceeding by way of classical-buddhist axioms yet producing theorems which are buddhistically uninterpretable.

(3)   “Senselessness and purposelessness are not merely privative; they represent a gain in intelligibility. The cancellation of sense, purpose, and possibility marks the point at which the ‘horror’ concomitant with the impossibility of either being or not-being becomes intelligible.”(5)

The question put to me was this:

“What is the ultimate aim of this speculative trajectory that starts with your preliminary ‘zombification’ [of the original x-buddhist terminology], your potent ‘substitute’ of the desired dharmic good, a.k.a. ‘deep joy’? I gather…that if meditation is, as you say, an organon of nihilistic dissolution, then might it be that what you desire by gaining in intelligibility, is something that Brassier also calls ‘the truth of extinction’?(6)

Yes. I want to say that such intelligibility is something that I, as clever homo sapiens beast must come to “desire.” But that is the penultimate—preparatory, not final—aim of non-buddhism. The ultimate aim is a subject who resists x-buddhistic decisional representation, and thereby reinvigorates thought vis à vis empty reality (radical immanence: zero, axiomatic-quasi-fiction). Reinvigorated thought is thought that operates at para-zero. Such a subject has transformed the symptom that is dharmic self-sufficiency into speculative knowledge. The non-buddhist subject thus knows what to do with the de-dharmacized x-buddhist material (note: it is not that s/he knows how to be done with it; non-buddhism may have overtones of anti-buddhism, but it is not quite that.). Unlike the thought of the x-buddhist-subject, which is infinitely expandable, the thought of the non-buddhist subject is unremarkably collapsible—it collapses always back into the identity of mere man/woman. The “ultimate” aim of non-buddhism is the mirror-image of that of x-buddhism. Consider  Laruelle’s “Theorem 000000: On the Suicide Disguised as Murder,” reworded to suit our needs.

X-buddhism has but one goal: to make you believe that you must identify yourself with x-buddhism; to make you assume this suicide, a suicide disguised as murder charged against you.(7)

This language of suicide and murder may sound unnecessarily menacing. But anyone who has spent time within the thaumaturgical refuges of x-buddhism, and observed the formation of ventriloquized subjects there, will, I think, appreciate the violence of those words. Acquiescence to the point of reflexivity—a product of decision—requires evasion of oneself. This self-killing/evasion is the reason for the person’s “infinite culpability.” Non-buddhism is a radical laying bare of the brutal refusal of x-buddhism to honor its most basic pledge: abetment of liberation. A liberated subject will not—indeed, by definition, cannot—subscribe to the x-buddhist program of person-formation. Paths of liberation necessarily bend toward disintegration (of prescribed forms, etc.) and discontinuity (of cohesive programs, etc.), and so are unbearable to x-buddhism. Hence, the interminable connectives that constitute the  inventory of dharmic self-sufficiency— the binding of the person within the dharmic fortress, fastened down with “logical” connectives in the face of reality’s mayhem.

One way of conceiving of the ultimate goal of non-buddhism is in terms of the trope of incidental exile, given in the heuristic.(8) Exile involves a reversion to prior identity, a sloughing off of the hallucinated x-buddhist cipher, acquired via participation in the refuge. Another way of understanding the same thing is Laruelle’s “Theorem 0, or the Transcendental Theorem: On Nontransferable Identity,” which states (reworded):

Nothing can, except through illusion, substitute itself for you and for your identity. And you cannot, except through illusion, substitute yourself for x-buddhism, for The Dharma, etc. Homo sapiens is an inalienable reality. There is no reversibility between homo sapiens and x-buddhism.(9)

To repeat, a recalibration to para-zero identity is the ultimate goal of non-buddhism. X-buddhism, as self-described dispeller of delusions, as, hence, preeminent organon of awakening (of sapientia?—the wisdom, knowing, and ancestral memory that makes us human?), surely must desire the same. Yet it does not. It desires only to connect everything. How so? Via the decisional tension. It thus desires the maintenance and preservation of its dharma-samsara axis mundi.  What x-buddhism desires is to see its own narcissistic visage perpetually reflected, from on high, in the mirror of the world. And for that, x-buddhism desires, because it requires, an un-thinking ventriloquized subject. For, in the words, of a Zen Master: “Only without thinking can we return to our true self.”(10)

Non-buddhist practice deflates x-buddhist postulates to the point of para-zero. Doing so cleanses thought of dharmic excess, thus refreshes thought, and creates new possibilities for thinking with x-buddhist material. Let’s take a brief example. Let’s consider one of the Three Sovereigns of x-buddhism: anicca, impermanence. Let’s look at it as a unit. Let’s unbind it, that is to say, from the colossal network of voltaic servant-postulates that renders it distinctively x-buddhist.

[Along the way, we might consider the consequences of a de-symptomized anicca for, say, the “issue” of rebirth. (If you want to re-humanize a room full of mindful x-buddhists, just yell out, “Re-birth? Yes or no? Discuss amongst yourselves!” Then step back: non-judgmental awareness be damned!)]

Anicca: impermanence.

It invites thought about our situation.—Let’s review some of the facts. The universe is 13.7 billion years old. It spans a diameter of 150 billion light years (and recall that light travels at about 186,000 miles per second). Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is 120,000 light years across and has 200 billion stars. At its center is a black hole. Our earth accreted nearly 5 billion years ago. Life, as simple cells, began to rustle here 3.5 billion years ago. Our ancestors, homo habilis, appeared on the scene 2 million years ago. Anatomically modern humans appeared 150 million to 200 million years ago. This means that “we” have been present on our “home” for only 5-10% of its lifetime. The sun is about 4.5 billion years old. It has already used up about half of its nuclear fuel. Solar catastrophe will occur about 5 billion years from now, incinerating the earth. A recent report by a team of astronomers “seems to have finally put to rest an age old question… What is the ultimate fate of planet Earth?” The old view seems to have been a rare case of scientific wishful thinking. It was, namely, that billions of years from now the sun would “loosen its gravitational grip on the planet and allow it to escape a fiery demise.” How do things look now? “The sobering reality is quite different and the clock is now ticking for our beloved home planet.” The research of scientists in fields such as biology, climatology, geology and astronomy are revealing “what the future holds for planet Earth… and throws up some shocking surprises. Great supercontinents will form and fragment with lethal consequences, the oceans will turn red before floating away into space, plants and animals will be wiped from Earth before finally, all life will be extinguished forever.”(11)  But what about the universe itself? And what about this exquisite consciousness of us clever homo sapiens? Is there not a way to circumvent the solar catastrophe? Will life—in some form—not prevail in the end? Consider: “Roughly one trillion, trillion, trillion (10¹⁷²⁸) years from now, the accelerating expansion of the universe will have disintegrated the fabric of matter itself, terminating the possibility of embodiment. Every star in the universe will have burnt out, plunging the cosmos into a state of absolute darkness and leaving behind nothing but spent husks of collapsed matter. All free matter, whether on planetary surfaces or in interstellar space, will have decayed, eradicating any remnants of life based on protons and chemistry, and erasing every vestige of sentience—irrespective of its physical basis. Finally, in a state cosmologists call ‘asymptopia,’ the stellar corpses littering the empty universe will evaporate into a brief hailstorm of alimentary particles. Atoms themselves will cease to exist. Only the implacable gravitational expansion will continue, driven by the currently inexplicable force called ‘dark energy,’ which will keep pushing the extinguished universe deeper and deeper into an eternal and unfathomable darkness.”(12) —Meditation, if configured as organon, may awaken in us a searing, living memory of our ancestral scope and thought of descendent facts. It can be thus configured to establish a line of horizon that renders facile all notions of earth, indeed, cosmos, as “home.” How much more so does it obliterate fantasies of an unscathed exit, such as heaven, a Buddha field, or rebirth? How infinitesimally puny does the ostensible cognitive fizzle known as “enlightenment” appear against the cosmic catastrophe. Present-moment awareness? Ancestral anamnesis (sati)—another exalted member of x-buddhist royalty—means: remember, remember!

But we’ll have to save reflection on that for another day.

____________

Notes.

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn, part one, first paragraph.

2. Theodor W. Adorno and Shierry Weber Nicholsen. “Punctuation Marks.” The Antioch Review, vol. 48, no. 3. (Summer, 1990): pp. 300-305. Original:

Literary dilettantes can be recognized by their desire to connect everything. Their products hook sentences together with logical connectives even though the logical relationship asserted by those connectives does not hold. To the person who cannot truly conceive anything as a unit, anything that suggests disintegration or discontinuity is unbearable;o nly a person who can grasp totality can understand caesuras.

3. Theorem 00000000000: On the Advent of Impotence:

As long as man lives under the Decision or the Principle of Sufficient Philosophy, he lives also within an impotence of thought and within an infinite culpability.

François Laruelle, “Theorems on the Good News.” Translated by Alexander R. Galloway. Originally published as: François Laruelle, “Théorèmes de la Bonne Nouvelle,” La Décision philosophique 1 (May 1987): 83-85.

4.”Raw Remarks on Meditation, Ideology, and Nihilism.”

5. Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2077): 254.

6. Tomek Idzik posed this question. He is founder of the Polish blog  “Buddyzm i Psychoterapia.”  The Brassier quote is ibid: 239.

7. Theorem 000000: On the Suicide Disguised as Murder

Philosophy has but one goal: to make man believe that he must identify himself with philosophy; to make man assume this suicide, a suicide disguised as murder charged against man.

8.”Nascent Speculative Non-Buddhism.”

9. Theorem 0 or the Transcendental Theorem, On Nontransferable Identity:

Nothing can, except through illusion, substitute itself for man and for his identity. And man cannot, except through illusion, substitute himself for philosophy, for the Other, etc. Man is an inalienable reality. There is no reversibility between man and philosophy

10. Zen Master Bon Seong (a.k.a. Jeff Kitzes) of the Empty Gate Zen Center, Berkeley, California.

11. Source: “Death of the Earth”

12. Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: 228.

Image: Kirstin Dunst, from the movie Melancholia.

A downloadable pdf file is available on the Articles page.

In contemporary North America, the question is being posed in the broad terms of the science-religion distinction. I think that the current x-buddhism debates—those between the scientistically exultant/secularly liberal forms, on the one side, and the spiritually exuberant/conservatively orthodox forms, on the other—are primarily debates about the relative merits of science and religion. Secondarily, of course, the debate is about where Buddhism properly fits in. Once that’s established, one can proffer what s/he thinks x-buddhism does, what it accomplishes (e.g., it illuminates the world “as it is;” it reduces stress; it constructs a worldview; it heals; it eradicates craving; it enables “deep joy” and “real happiness;” it enlightens; it ensures favorable rebirth; it ensnares in an deceptively ideological web; it liberates, etc., etc.).

Another way of understanding current x-buddhism debates is that they concern the relative value of immanence-oriented and transcendence-oriented systems of thought. Science is an instance of the former, and religion, the latter—right?

To spur us on to further thought about these matters, I present you with a provocative essay by Adam S. Miller. It is provocative on several counts. First, with the backing of French sociologist of science Bruno Latour, it insists on an inversion of values whereby science is seen as surveyor of the transcendent, as “a third-person exposition of the [distantly or minutely] unavailable.” Religion, contrary to our habitual way of thinking about it, names, in this account, a relentless thrust toward immanence; it is “a first-person phenomenology of the obvious.”

Miller’s second provocation should thus be obvious. Science, not religion, indexes the “spiritual, miraculous, soul-lifting, uplifting;” and “it is religion that should be qualified as local, objective, visible, mundane, unmiraculous, repetitive, obstinate, sturdy” (Latour’s words).

From this, a third provocation: religion as correction of vision, as organon of immanence.

A hidden provocation here, to my eyes, is the insistence on preserving what, in light of the very analysis, begins to look like calcified terminology (science, religion). It is a refusal to provide an easy way out of a very modern, western dilemma with the mere conjuring of acceptable terminology.

I think the relevance of Miller’s essay to speculative non-buddhism will be clear to careful readers. Speculative non-buddhism is, in Miller’s terms, interested in the question of the line: as a line of vision, is x-buddhism vertical, horizontal, circular, or something else?

From a speculative non-buddhism perspective, x-buddhists error in insisting on a vertical line. It is because of x-buddhism’s intransigence in adjusting its line of vision that a speculative non-buddhism is necessary. X-buddhism’s line runs from dharmic-oracular transcendence to samsaric immanence and back again. Speculative non-buddhism adjusts that line by tipping it horizontally. Why? In order to make a good democratic citizen of aristocratic x-buddhism—to make x-buddhism mingle, on the same level, with representatives of all humanistic knowledge.

Or, in Miller/Latour’s terms, it does so in order to make x-buddhism a religion devoid of religion.

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Practicing Myopia
Adam S. Miller

A. Introduction

Say we assumed that everything religion tell us – Eastern, Western, Buddhist, Christian, Whatever – was true . . . except that all of it applied exclusively to the ordinary, commonplace stuff circulating here and now and in plain sight.

Say we assumed, with just one caveat, that religion was right about everything – the caveat being that we would refuse, from this moment on, to countenance the idea that any religious claims ever referred to any absent objects.

Say we assumed that the one thing religion is never about is a tenuous “belief” in AWOL people or places.

Say we assumed a kind of non-religious religion for the sake of being super-serious about religion. What would we see? Wearing such spectacles, how might things look?

If religion corrects for my defective vision, what’s the nature of my defect? Wearing an earnest religion on the bridge of my nose, what kind of specular correction am I getting?

B. Hyperopia

The defect is common enough. Hyperopic, we mistake the living for the dead.

Religion corrects for this congenital farsightedness. It brings into focus bodies that are otherwise too close to be seen.

Life, like breath, is too close, too familiar, to be easily seen. Absorbed in the middle-distant gray of worry and desire, a tree, a dog, a neighbor, even my own flesh, may show up as lifeless simply because I fail to notice its breathing. A breathless body is a corpse and a living body that looks breathless presents as undead. Absent the breath of life, the world rolls by like an empty carnival ride, bumper to bumper with weirdly mobile but gaily painted sepulchers.

Phenomenologically, this hypermetropia should be familiar. Without quite meaning to, you can easily spend unbroken years wavering in limbo between the living and the dead – hoping for this, avoiding that, clenching your teeth asthmatically.

But whiting your sepulcher is no kind of life. No one cares about the shade of your semi-gloss. Quit this work and, instead, roll back the stone. These bodies are no tombs. Their hearts still beat, their nerves still crackle, their bowels still move, their lungs still breath.

The answer is not to see farther or move faster. Rather, get religion and start practicing nearsightedness. Sit in self-emptying silence with the pulse of your temple and the swell of your lungs.

Religion is nothing but this corrective practice of myopia. Religion is no cure-all, but you may, at least, stop mistaking the living for the dead.

According to Bruno Latour, confusion about religion results when we expect religion to do some other kind of work. In particular, confusion results when we ask religion to do the work of science.

Latour claims that where religion corrects for our inability to see what is otherwise too close, too familiar, too immanent, science brings into focus those bodies that would otherwise be too distant, too transcendent, and too strange to be seen.

Mark this distribution. On Latour’s account the field of religion is immanence, the discipline of science is transcendence.

C. Irreduction

This unusual distribution of tasks follows, for Latour, from an “experimental” approach to metaphysics that is, in turn, shaped by what he calls “the principle of irreduction.”

If any single term characterizes the antithesis of Latour’s project, it is reductionism. Latour isn’t opposed to reduction per se, but he views the blanket imposition of any preliminary expectation of reduction as the primary obstacle to an actually empirical metaphysics.

Reductionisms that attribute explanatory strength to hidden macro-forces, assume some original ontological unity or fundamental compatibility, and then sublate any remaining local differences in the conspiratorial movement of a global system make for bad science and bad religion.

We must resist the metaphysical temptation, Latour pleads, to assume some elementary force that would “be capable of explaining everything, translating everything, producing everything, buying and redeeming everything, and causing everything to act” (PF 172).

Instead, Latour argues, we must begin by making the axiomatic move that characterizes an experimental metaphysics as such: we must begin by granting full metaphysical dignity to the buzzing multitude of objects that are presently and availably at work in the foreground of the world and then assume that they are capable of explaining themselves.

Latour refers to this axiom as the principle of irreduction. Its formal version looks like this: “Nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else” (PF 158).

The brilliance of Latour’s formula shines in how it balances reduction and irreduction. On my account, as an axiom, it makes two distinguishable but soldered claims. Given an original multiplicity, (1) no object can be entirely reduced without remainder to any other object or set of objects, and (2) no object is a priori exempt from being reducible in part to any other object or set of objects.

Latour doesn’t describe things this way, but we might summarize the two halves of the principle of irreduction in terms of (1) resistance, and (2) availability. Every object resists relation even as every object is available for it. No objects are wholly resistant and no objects are entirely available. Objects are constituted as such by this double-bind of resistant availability.

Phenomenologically, the “visibility” of each object also depends on this double-bind of resistant availability. The visibility of an object depends on the varying degrees of resistance and availability that characterize it relative to a given line of sight.

Developing an image depends on optimizing the balance between an object’s resistance and its availability. Objects that are either too resistant or too available will fail to appear. Both the unavailable and the acquiescent tend toward invisibility. In one case, the object is too distant, too opaque, too transcendent. In the other, it is too close, too transparent, too immanent.

The phenomena of life, depending on our line of sight, may be either.

D. Science and Religion

For Latour, science and religion differ in their approach to life because they address two different kinds of invisibility. Where science aims to illuminate resistant but insufficiently available objects (like cell structures), religion aims to illuminate available but insufficiently resistant phenomena (like breathing).

Science is a third-person exposition of the unavailable. Religion is a first-person phenomenology of the obvious.

With this distribution of work, Latour means to untangle religion from the wide web of vestigial expectations that now only serve to hamper it. In defending religion, he says, “I am not longing for the old power of what was in effect not religion but a mixture of everything” – politics, science, philosophy, mythology, psychology, art, etc. (TS 217).

Religion is just one among many “different types of truth generators” or “regimes of enunciation” that help relate and articulate the multitude of objects at work in the world.

With respect to Latour’s take on religion, his originality lies less in his attempt to identify a more modest but still viable role for religion than in his striking redistribution of its responsibilities in relation to science. For Latour, religion and science do have distinguishable magisteria – but these magisteria are anything but “non-overlapping” and, more critically, Latour finds their commonly assigned division of labor laughable.

“What a comedy of errors! When the debate between science and religion is staged, adjectives are almost exactly reversed: it is of science that one should say that it reaches the invisible world of the beyond, that she is spiritual, miraculous, soul-lifting, uplifting. And it is religion that should be qualified as local, objective, visible, mundane, unmiraculous, repetitive, obstinate, sturdy.” (TF 36)

It is the work of science to build fragile bridges of carefully constructed, painstakingly tested, and incessantly extended chains of reference. It is science that gropes out into the dark beyond and bring us into relation with the distant and the transcendent. It is science that funds the miraculous, defends the counterintuitive, excavates the unbelievable, and negotiates with the resistant and unavailable.

But the invisibility of the resistant and transcendent is only one kind of invisibility. The invisibility of the available, obvious, familiar, local, repetitive, sturdy, matter of fact phenomena remains. This invisibility, while quite different in character, is just as difficult to breach.

Confusion results when it is assumed that all invisibility is reducible to a single kind, accessible from a single line of sight. In particular, confusion results when it is assumed that the invisibility proper to religious phenomena is identical to that of scientific phenomena.

On Latour’s telling, the story of our common confusion about science and religion goes something like this (though the analogy is mine).

To great applause, science works out dependable methods that correct for our near-sightedness and bring into focus distant, transcendent phenomena. This work is to be commended. However, full of its own success, science starts comparing itself with the Joneses. Science borrows some spectacles from religion (spectacles meant to correct for our hyperopia), puts them on, and then loudly complains that these glasses are useless. All of its hard-earned objects have suddenly become blurry or disappeared altogether!

The mistaken assumption that commonly follows – for religious folk and scientists alike – is that religious talk, because it doesn’t address the transcendent objects articulated by science, must then be referring to “an invisible world of belief” that is even more distant, even more transcendent, even more miraculous, than the one science itself is articulating.

As a result, both science and religion get backed into a corner. Scientists think such religious talk about the super-transcendent is ridiculous and religious folk feel compelled by the strength of their own practice – knowing that religion does in fact bring something crucial into focus – to make a public virtue out of believing in the super-absurd.

“Belief,” claims Latour in response, “is a caricature of religion exactly as knowledge is a caricature of science” (TF 45). Both of these caricatures need to be abandoned. Science doesn’t deal with obvious facts any more than religion deals with magical beliefs.

“The difference between science and religion would not be found in the different mental competencies brought to bear on two different realms – ‘belief’ applied to vague spiritual matters, ‘knowledge’ to directly observable things – but in the same broad set of competencies applied to two chains of mediators going in two different directions. The first chain leads toward what is invisible because it is simply too far and too counterintuitive to be directly grasped – namely, science; the second chain, the religious one, also leads to the invisible but what it reaches is not invisible because it would be hidden, encrypted, and far, but simply because it is difficult to renew.” (TF 46)

Science corrects for our myopia. Religion corrects for our hyperopia.

E. Presence

Sciences that dispense with the religion of science are more scientific. Similarly, on Latour’s account, religions that dispense with the religion of religion are also more religious.

In particular, Latour claims, such religions are more religious because they are more revelatory. Correcting for our farsightedness, religion draws us close to the invisible and brings into focus those bodies that science leaves untouched, those bodies that are hidden not because they are too distant and too transcendent, but because they are too close, too available, to be seen.

Religion displays the invisible, “but what is hidden is not a message beneath the first one, an esoteric message disguised in a banal message, but a tone, an injunction for you, the viewer, to redirect your attention and turn it away from the dead and back to the living” (TF 42).

To be unfamiliar with the tone of this message – with the breath-giving, life-saving tone of the living rather than the dead – is to be unfamiliar with religion itself. “If, when hearing about religion, you direct your attention to the far away, the above, the supernatural, the infinite, the distant, the transcendent, the mysterious, the misty, the sublime, the eternal, chances are that you have not even begun to be sensitive to what religious talk tries to involve you in” (TF 32).

Latour is impatient with believers and nonbelievers alike who insist on mystifying religion as a poor man’s science. “I always feel more at home with purely naturalistic accounts than with this sort of hypocritical tolerance that ghettoizes religion into a form of nonsense specialized in transcendence and ‘feel good’ inner sentiment” (TF 34).

“Religion,” he continues, “in the tradition I want to render present again, has nothing to do with subjectivity, nor with transcendence, nor with irrationality, and the last thing it needs is tolerance from open-minded and charitable intellectuals who want to add to the true but dry facts of science, the deep and charming ‘supplement of soul’ provided by quaint religious feelings” (TF 35).

Religion has no role to play in helping us escape this world. This very desire to escape, to turn away, to avoid the demanding familiarity of the present, the close, the nearby, is at the root of our crippling detachment from life. It is this desire to escape that leaves us bent over, vision blurred, coughing, wheezing, and breathless.

Religious practices intervene and force the breath of life back into our lungs by arresting our attention and prompting us to lower our gaze. “Religion, in this tradition, does everything to constantly redirect attention by systematically breaking the will to go away, to ignore, to be indifferent, blasé, bored” (TF 36).

To purposefully disappoint the drive to escape, “to divert it, to break it, to subvert it, to render it impossible, is just what religious talk is after” (TF 32).

Mark this definition: religion is what breaks my will to go away.

“It is religion,” Latour argues, “that attempts to access the this-worldly in its most radical presence, that is you, now, here transformed into a person who cares about the transformation of the indifferent other into a close neighbour, into the near by” (WS 464-465).

“The dream of going to another world is just that: a dream, and probably also a deep sin” (WS 473).

We practice myopia in order to quell our indifference and acquaint ourselves with life in its most radical presence. We sit in self-emptying silence in order to feel, again, the swell of our lungs and hear, again, the approach our neighbors.

Surrounded by silence, listen for that particular, peculiar tone that is the mark of religion.

“Religious talk, as we begin to see, cannot be about anything other than what is present. It is about the present, not about the past nor about the future. It speaks when we no longer strive for goals, far away places, novel information, strong interests, as though all had been replaced by a much stronger sort of urgency: it speaks of now, of us, of final achievements that are for now, not for later.” (TS 232)

Abbreviations:

(PF) Latour, Bruno. The Pasteurization of France. Translated by Alan Sheridan and John Law. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.

(TF) ——. “‘Thou Shall Not Freeze-Frame’ or How Not to Misunderstand the Science and Religion Debate.” In Science, Religion, and the Human Experience. Edited by James D. Proctor. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

(TS) ——. “‘Thou Shalt Not Take the Lord’s Name in Vain’: Being a Sort of Sermon on the Hesitations in Religious Speech.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 39 (Spring 2001): 215-234.

(WS) ——. “Will Non-Humans Be Saved? An Argument in Ecotheology.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15 (2009): 459-75.

___________________

Adam S. Miller is a professor of philosophy at Collin College in McKinney, Texas. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Villanova University, as well as a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Brigham Young University. His areas of specialization include contemporary French philosophy and philosophy of religion. He is the author of Badiou, Marion, and St Paul: Immanent Grace (Continuum, 2008), Rube Goldberg Machines: Essays in Mormon Theology (Kofford, 2012), and Speculative Grace: An Experiment with Bruno Latour in Object-Oriented Theology (Fordham University Press, forthcoming), the editor of An Experiment on the Word (Salt Press, 2011), and he currently serves as the director of the Mormon Theology Seminar. He contributes to the blogs The Church and Postmodern Culture and Times and Seasons.

Downloadable pdf file of “Practicing Myopia” on the Articles page.

Image: Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), “Still Life.”

Speculative non-buddhism is way of thinking and seeing that takes as its raw material x-buddhism. It is a thought-experiment that poses the question: shorn of its transcendental representations, what might x-buddhism offer us?

Matthias Steingass’s last essay on the prospects of a reconfigured “meditation” (or, perhaps, non-meditation?), exemplifies both the spirit and method of this theoretical aim. His subject, “meditation,” is, moreover, one of the three central, and recurring, recipients of speculative non-buddhist analysis.

Tom Pepper, in the current essay, “Naturalizing Buddhism Without Being Reductive,” continues a discussion on the second recurring concern of non-buddhist analysis: ideology. In short, he asks: if, as it seems, we are ideological creatures by nature, might we still be creatures that are capable of gaining conscious awareness of our ideologies?  And if that is the case, might certain reconfigured forms of x-buddhism offer us methods with which we can do so?

It may be that such reconfigured x-buddhist postulates are unrecognizable to traditional practitioners. But, if this small act of destruction enables us to produce more effective ideologies and—who knows—a better world, surely no one will object, will they?

Please note Tom’s questions at the end of the essay: “Is this coherent?  Where are the obscurities, aporias, and just plain conceptual blunders?  Does there seem any possibility of such a practice ever existing?”

________________

Naturalizing Buddhism Without Being Reductive

a radical, and ridiculously arrogant, reinvention of Buddhist thought

 Tom Pepper

It’s almost a commonplace in academic thought that it is impossible to accept all of the core teachings of Buddhism without accepting contradiction.  We cannot, it is assumed, take seriously both the teaching of non-self, and belief in rebirth; either one, taken to its logical conclusion, would necessarily preclude the other.  What I am going to present here is a redefinition of the core terms of Buddhism which allows all of them to be accepted without requiring any contradiction, without the need to choose which concepts to accept and which to reject, and without any hidden acceptance of a world-transcendent atman.

I am writing this to ask for criticism, to ask for any response that can point out errors or blind spots.  That said, I am going to insist on a few provisos.  First, I am not willing to engage with disagreements which depend on the insistence that there is in fact an atman, soul, or world-transcendent consciousness; I will offer, here, no argument against such beliefs and do not expect to persuade anyone out of these beliefs with this essay.  Second, I am not willing to engage the debate the I use too many hard words or ask to much mental effort of my audience; I intend, in this essay, to be fairly accessible and clear, but if you don’t know the meanings of the terms I use go look them up.  Finally, I am especially not interested, for reasons that I hope I will be able to make clear, in any citations from specific sutras which contradict my reconstrual of terms; my interest is not in the academic attempt to determine how exactly a term was used, or what exactly a concept meant, to a particular school of Buddhism at a particular time.  I think this is an incredibly valuable kind of work to do, but it is not what I am doing here; instead, I am trying to construct a possible construal of Buddhist concepts which would allow them all to cohere, and allow them to be of use for us today.

This attempt is somewhat in the vein of Laruelle’s concept of non-philosophy, not as an attempt to disprove, reject, or dismiss philosophy, but to determine what kind of human practice it is, and what we might still be able to do with it.  However, it will probably be clear that I have some serious objections to Laruelle’s thought, that I am much more in league with Badiou in that current debate.  Nevertheless, I think a non-buddhism, which enables us to step back from the realm of x-buddhist thought, can be of benefit here, so I will shamelessly use some of Laruelle’s strategies while reserving the right to disagree with what seem to me to be his most fundamental conclusions.  What a non-buddhism can do, I will argue, is explore what truths appear in the history of Buddhist thought, what can escape the insistent drive toward relativizing everything, the postmodern attempt to disable all conceptual thought through hyper-contextualizing and over historicizing and remove any means of directing our attempts to act in the world to change things for the better.  My claim is that there is a way of understanding Buddhism, of reconstituting it from its frozen concentrate if you will, that can enable us to use Buddhist thought and practice to establish a discourse and practice capable of guiding meaningful change.

I want to be relatively brief here (for me), and so I will offer limited citations and limited debate with or warrant from other thinkers.  I won’t, that is, take the space here to demonstrate that my understanding of Nagarjuna, of Buddhist history, of the sutras, or of Althusser, Badiou, Lacan, etc., are correct.  I feel sure that they are, and I may make a fuller presentation in some other venue.  At this point my question is: Is what I am saying comprehensible, and does it seem potentially useful?

Before I can even begin to present my reconstrual of Buddhism, though, I will need to begin with a defense of the Althusserian concept of ideology.  Whatever errors Althusser may have made, it seems to me that he his greatest contribution to philosophy is in his concept of ideology as the reproduction of our relations to the relations of production.  It will be my claim that many of the conceptual difficulties and apparent contradictions in Buddhist thought dissolve once we understand samsara as the realm of ideology.  The endless wandering in circles is the blind reproduction of existing relations to relations of production, and the project of Buddhism is to escape the prison of our ideologies.  Not to escape the need for ideologies, but to break free of the naturalizing and reifying of particular ideologies.

Ideology and Its Discontents

Althusser’s most famous, most anthologized, most cited, most widely read work is, I would argue, almost never understood.  “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation” (hereafter, the ISA essay), has generated thousands of pages of commentary, more often than not attempting to argue against the existence of such a thing as ideology.  So, despite the fact that the essay is so well known that almost any graduate of a halfway-decent college probably believes she already knows what it says, I am going to briefly recount its most important claim here.

Ideology is not an illusion, a false consciousness, or a deception.  It is not a mistaken understanding of reality, because it is not primarily an understanding of reality at all.  The most important insight in Althusser’s essay is that ideology does not represent reality in some distorted form, in order to deceive us into accepting our oppression.  Instead, ideology is that set of practices in which we reproduce our relations to the relations of production.   Our ideological beliefs always exist in a material practice—if they do not, if our beliefs are not productive of an reproduced by some concrete behavior, then they are not our actual ideology, and we do  not in fact believe them at all (although we may believe in the need to claim we believe in them).  There is nothing necessarily false or distorting about ideology; it may include some distortions, some falsehoods, but it does not need to do so.  What it must include is a set of beliefs-in-practices which function to reproduce the existing relations of production, the material and economic system in which we are living.  These beliefs are primarily on the order of morals, values, tastes, emotions—not beliefs about mind-independent reality, although certain conceptions of what is real may be entailed.

This seems to be tremendously difficult for most readers of Althusser to fully grasp, to think and not just “understand.”  We do not represent our mode of production in our ideology, any more than we represent the physical universe there.  Instead, what ideology does is to produce a set of beliefs and values connected to practices, all of which function to enable the reproduction of our existing social formations.  The educational system serves as Althusser’s central example in the ISA essay, so perhaps we can use that example here.  There is clearly a sense in which education requires a conception of the mind-independent world, a depiction of both the physical universe and human social formations.  However, the specifically ideological function of education is in its reproduction of the existing means of production and social relations.  Without education, we could not reproduce our current relations of production—we need individuals with specific technical skills to keep things running, and need to sort individuals into specific social functions, and education is the system we have produced to do this training and sorting.

Let me try to clarify this with a metaphor.  What Althusser would call “scientific” knowledge functions to describe reality, both the natural world and humanly created social formations.  It functions, in a sense, like a map: scientific knowledge attempts to give a useful model of the world, and can be more or less accurate.  Our maps may be wrong, may be imprecise, and can be corrected and refined.  Ideology does not function to map the world, but to enable us to get around in it; so, metaphorically, ideology functions more like the mode of transportation.  The mode of transportation and the map are, of course, related.  If our mode of transportation is an automobile, we are most interested in road maps; road maps are not “incorrect,” they are not (usually) deceptive or illusory, but they are of limited use if we decide we want to go for a hike in the forest.  The difficulty of ideology is that we tend to believe that our existing mode of transportation is the only one possible, that it is natural, universal, and cannot be modified or changed, so that it becomes inconceivable to do such a thing as go for a hike.  Instead, we focus on changing the map of the world, paving the forest to make is accessible.

Keep in mind that this is only a metaphor, and like all metaphors it is limited.  Ideology functions to enable us to keep the world running, but it also produces much of our motivation and investment it the world.  We need to educate new individuals in our existing technology, to produce new technology, and to organize the world in such a way that individuals are sorted into functional roles.  In order to do this, we need to value technological change, hard work at tedious tasks, financial success, an understanding of higher education that emphasizes technical training over critical thought.  Our ideologies are, for Althusser, how we reproduce the existing relations of production; they are not an image of those relations of production, not an image of the world.  Education clearly enables the reproduction of relations of production, but so do other ideological practices.  We believe in love, so we court, marry, reproduce, and support our families: love and the nuclear family are essential ideological formations in the reproduction of the exiting relations of production, assuring that there will be new individuals interpellated into all the existing roles in society, into each socio-economic strata, in a way that appears to us fully “natural;” for an American today, what could be more “natural” than the nuclear family as the primary unit of social organization?  These ideological formations are not false or delusory, are not imaginary in the ordinary sense of the term—people really do feel romantic love, really are attached to their children—but they can become problems when we mistake a socially produced practice for a natural and necessary one.  We will always need some ideology, but we need to know that that is what it is, and be able to change it when it is no longer a useful way to produce human happiness.  If it should become desirable or necessary to go into the forest, we need to realize that we can get out of the car.

And for Althusser, this is entirely possible: “As is well known, the accusation of being in ideology only applies to others, never to oneself (unless one is really a Spinozist or a Marxist, which, in this matter, is to be exactly the same thing)” (ISA, p. 175, my emphasis).  We are, as Althusser puts it, an ideological animal by nature: we produce practices invested with meaning which enable us to reproduce and transform our relations to the natural world, so that we can escape the constraints of natural history.  And we do transform our ideologies all the time (metaphorically, we produce new and better modes of transportation with every passing generation); but too often we do it without conscious awareness.  Our ideologies, that is, begin to reproduce themselves, and we simply go along for the ride.  What must not be missed, but often is, is that we are also an animal capable of gaining conscious awareness of our ideologies.

Althusser’s theory of ideology has come in for quite a bit of criticism, not least from Marxists who see it as leaving the subject completely trapped in the realm of illusion.  This is, I would argue, a misunderstanding of the profound insight of Althusser’s essay.  The usual argument against Althusser goes something like this: on Althusser’s account of ideology, only subjects can take action in the world, and subjects are always only functioning as supports for social structures (they are subjects of and ideology); theoretical practice can produce objective knowledge of the world, but is powerless to motivate action, since action can only be taken in an ideology by a subject.  We are left, the argument goes, with the choice of knowing what changes to make but being unable to make them, or being active subjects in the world but with no objective knowledge of the effects of our actions and so blindly reproducing the existing social formation.  All objections to Althusser’s theory of ideology I have ever encountered ultimately boil down to this same problem.  But this is a misunderstanding of Althusser, which ignores the importance to his theory of those subjects (Spinozist or Marxist) who can know their own ideology.  The ISA essay does present an overwhelmingly claustrophobic picture of the pervasiveness of ideology, but this must be understood to function as Ernest Mandel has suggested Marx’s third volume of Capital does: it is meant to explain how such a system is so often able to work at all, not to argue that it is inexorable.  We have powerful attachments to our ideologies.  Certain degrees of transformation are already built into the system of reproduction.  We mistake our humanly created social formations for inexorable natural occurrences.  And so, ideology keeps us going round in circles, reproducing our subject positions and filling the vacancies in the structure with new individuals interpellated as subjects.

For Althusser, we can escape this endless going round in circles, and there are practices which will make it more likely that we can do so.  It will be my argument that a non-buddhist practice can serve this purpose.  It can do so, I will argue, because Buddhism has always operated in the register of the ideological.  It can function to produce another kind of subject aware of its ideology.  In order to explain how this is possible, I will want to have recourse to many of the concepts produced in the thought of Alain Badiou.  So, to make the leap from the Althusserian theory of ideology to my reconstitution of Buddhist concepts, I will need to detour through a brief reading of Badiou’s project, in which I will make what may seem, to those familiar with continental philosophy, an unlikely claim.

Alain Badiou’s Continuation of the Althusserian Project

It is my contention that, perhaps even contrary to his own claims, Badiou’s entire body of work is in fact a continuation of the project begun by Althusser’s ISA Essay.  In the seventies, Badiou published a book largely devoted to the rejection of Althusser’s theory, entitled De L’ideologie.  His argument there was that as an “image of an image, ideology has no referent,” with the effect that “consciousness of our exploitation and revolt against exploitation are unthinkable, with no possibility of objective knowledge of class relationships having any effect” (p. 30).  His concern was that “if the ‘young Hegelians’ struggled against the illusions of consciousness, our ‘young Marxists’ have gained no ground at all if they are only using their knowledge to incite the ‘subjected’ masses to struggle with all their hearts against the unconscious”(p. 21).   Badiou is clearly concerned that Althusser’s theory will lead to a kind of postmodern relativism, in which all we can do is blindly struggle to change our ideological cathexes, with no guarantee that the change will be for the better, and no real need to develop a practice in which to change the social formation.

This is a valid concern; there is always the danger that Althusser’s theory could be misunderstood (in fact, it very often has been misunderstood) to suggest that we need only change our ideologies to eliminate our oppression.  This is clearly not the intention of the ISA essay, however, which is motivated by the events of 1968 and is an argument that change will require a reconstruction of our material institutions.  Althusser’s goal is to enable the production of a subject that can go out and change the social formation.  This, I would argue, is what the ISA essay calls for, but does not fully realize; Badiou’s theory of the subject, of “Worlds,” and of the relationship these have to truth, makes enormous progress toward producing the kind of subject Althusser suggests is possible.

In Theory of the Subject, Badiou had suggested that the subject be understood very differently from the Althusserian’s subject of an ideology.  In that work, Badiou wanted to insist that the only true subject is the subject of a truth, free of the limitations of its ideology and able to force the acceptance of a truth foreclosed by the ideology of its time and place.  When we get to Logics of Worlds, however, the role of the subject has become more complex, with multiple possible relations to truth and ideology.  It is now possible for the subject of truth to be opposed by the reactionary subject, intent on denying the truth, or the obscurantist subject, intent on mystifying it.  Badiou has replaced the Althusserian concept of ideology with his concept of “World,” but the function is much the same.  Worlds, in Badiou’s theory, are the structuring of a particular appearance or construal of reality, and reality can only ever appear in a particular World.  There is truth, but there it must always appear in a World, and every World, in allowing a certain reality to “appear,” necessarily excludes from appearance other parts or construals of reality.  Badiou’s concepts of truth procedures and Worlds may be more subtle and sophisticated, may be a useful advance in thought, but it is still in line with the Althusserian division of science and ideology, which always shape and limit one another, but operate in different registers.

Worlds, for Badiou, are produced by a structuring principle which determines what appears, and what remains unthinkable.  Like Nagarjuna’s concept of “conventional truths,” Worlds are all we have to work with, we cannot step outside of them, and they are always limiting, subjective, socially produced—but, they are nonetheless capable of presenting truths.  To clarify at the risk of oversimplifying, we can think of a mind-independent truth such as the occurrence of evolution of species.  This can only ever be known in a World, in a conventional construal of reality, and so, for us, will always necessarily include some value judgments functioning to shape how we experience ourselves.  In some Worlds, this truth may be completely foreclosed, but it remains a truth; in other Worlds, in which it appears, it may take on different meanings, different significance, different importance.  We could imagine, for instance, a World in which we referred to the “adaptation” of species, without the implicit teleology and anthropomorphism of the term “evolution.”  The process, however, as a mind-independent truth about reality, would still be the same.

The subject of the truth, then, is the subject which functions to force the truth into appearance in a World which forecloses it.  The subject is not identical with the biological individual, cannot be mapped onto a brain, but exists in the human socially produced symbolic/imaginary system (the influence of Lacan’s thought on Badiou is quite clear).  To overstate the matter somewhat, the mind is not in the brain but in systems of symbolic communication, which must always take place between multiple individuals.  It is not that we have a mind which then attaches to a symbolic system, but that there is a symbolic system which makes use of individual biological organisms.  A subject may be a political party, a couple, an entire school of thought.  This subject, then, transcends the individual bodily being, and can be reborn, brought back to life, by new individuals in a new World.  The actions of each individual’s life will affect the subject, of which it is part, far beyond its bodily death—because the subject can and often does continue, even “unappear” and “reappear” in Worlds, far beyond a bodily life.  As Badiou puts it: “Several times in its brief existence, every human animal is granted the chance to incorporate itself into the subjective present of a truth. The grace of living for an Idea, that is of living as such, is accorded to everyone” (Logics of Worlds, p. 514, my emphasis).  If we are able to become the subject of that truth, we have the chance “to live . . .’as an immortal’”(p. 40).

We must not forget the significance of what Badiou calls, in Ethics, “interest.”  Our motivating cathexes, attachments, sources of pleasure, which we cannot and should not fully renounce, may at times, in ideal situations, align with the demands of the truth procedure, and “disinterested-interest might be representable as interest pure and simple” (55); this is possible, but it might always turn out that the alignment is less than perfect, and we will need some form of thought and practice which can enable us to persevere in the truth.  And pursuit of truth is always going to be a struggle, because there is a tendency for any truth in any World to produce a reactionary subject, fighting against the emergence of that truth. Worlds will tend to reproduce themselves in an endless circle of blind determination, oppression, and suffering.  And a World, it seems, will always produce a degree of suffering, because despite his objections to Spinoza, Badiou is quite Spinozist on this point: the source of joy for the subject is in its ability to move towards the greater appearance of truths in its World.  Depriving us of this ability, attachment to a world, blocks our conatus and produces suffering.

Much of Badiou’s work, then, is an attempt to determine what kinds of practices are truth procedures, capable of producing subjects which will force the appearance of truths in the world.  My suggestion is that, in Althusserian terms, this is an aesthetic project, because for Althusser the aesthetic is the practice of producing a distance from our ideology.  In “’The Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht,” Althusser argues that, like Brecht’s epic theatre, the production of Bertolazzi’s play produces an alienation of ideology which “is really the production of a new spectator, an actor who starts where the performance ends, who only starts so as to complete it, but in life”(151).  The danger is that the aesthetic object may be captured by what Althusser calls an “aesthetics of consumption,” in which it produces only comforting pleasure that subtly reinforces our existing ideologies—sort of like watching Avatar or reading Harry Potter.  To ensure the aesthetics of distantiation requires a certain prescriptive practice and a conceptual framework for the aesthetic experience.  This theoretical apparatus would consist of a theory of ideology and the subject, and also a theory of the strategies of containment by which the distantiating effect is managed in various literary genres, according to what ideology is being distanced and what alternative ideology is being produced in its wake.

If Badiou’s project is a step forward in producing the subject that is aware of its ideology, this is because it advances the theoretical knowledge of ideology, subjects, and strategies of containment. To return to my metaphor of the map, the subject of truth is more capable of choosing the best mode of transportation for any part of the map it seeks to explore.  We can stop reproducing Worlds, and start remapping them.  The final section of this essay, then, will suggest that the production of this form of subjectivity has always been one possible use of Buddhist concepts; the production of the reactionary subject seeking to reproduce the existing World is perhaps the unavoidable consequence of this.

Buddhism as a Theory and Practice of Ideology

My final claim, here, is that we can thoroughly “naturalize” Buddhism, eliminating all supernatural and otherworldly notions from its profound philosophical insights, only if we see it as operating in the register of the ideological.  That is, Buddhism has nothing useful to tell us about the neurological processes underlying contentment, or about ontology or the natural world.  Its domain is the realm of humanly produced symbolic and imaginary systems, of Althusserian ideology, or Badiou’s “logics of Worlds.”  It can teach us a great deal about how we produce Worlds, and about how we can more consciously transform them.

The historical emergence of Buddhism, what we might in Badiou’s terms call the Buddha Event, occurred at a time when the stagnation of the social system was becoming particularly difficult to maintain.  The existing World of the ruling class sought to fix the social system, by insisting on the existence of a pure divine language in which truth existed, and the repetition of formal ritual.  The truth that appeared in the world was the rejection of the Brahmanical ideology, the recognition of the socially produced nature of social formations, the chance to break out of stagnation and open up new possibilities for the exercise of human productive and creative potential.  Buddhism, in short, is an attempt to produce a new social practice that enables a subject capable of escaping the endless circle of the reproduction of the existing relations of production—a primarily agricultural form of production and a “sacrificial” form of distribution and exchange.  The history of Buddhism ever since can be seen as a struggle between the reactionary, obscurantist, and faithful subject, the dialectic of radical forcing of truth and mystical or institutional strategies of containment.

I offer here a partial glossary of naturalized Buddhist terminology, then, as an illustration of how Buddhist concepts can be coherent and useful once we reject the reactionary denial, and the obscurantist mystification of, the truth of the Buddhist Event:

Samsara becomes simply the endless self-reproduction of a World, which always requires the closing off of the appearance of something new, the foreclosure of some truths, and so is always a source of suffering.  Reproducing our existing ideologies, as if they were the goal instead of the means, is the source of the suffering of subjects.

Karma can be understood as the structures of our reality, including both ideological formations and the relations of production.  Karma has always referred to both intentional actions and the effects of those actions.  In my reconstitution, then, we can see karma as a thoroughly natural concept, referring to both the ideologically shaped actions we take in the world and their ongoing effects in shaping the possible actions of subjects in the future.  We reproduce our world by acting with “intention” in our ideologies, and will bear the effects of these actions as subjects long after our individual bodies are gone.  We can, then, escape our karma, not by being freed from some magical force, but by coming to see the constraints on our actions produced by our ideologies, which exist in structures that have been built up by the actions of countless generations.  As Marx said, we can make our own history, but we cannot make it exactly as we choose.  We escape our karma once we can see the constraints within which we can act, and the degree to which we can change the structures we bear instead of merely reinforcing them.  Karma, then, exists and operates at multiple levels: it is the existing productive capacity of the human race, but it is also the current social construction of the form and content of our unconscious minds.

Punabbhava (rebirth) is possible, then, because there is no soul to be reborn, no world-transcendent entity that leaps from body to body.  Instead, the mind, which exists only in the socially produced symbolic and imaginary system, can interpellate new concrete individuals to participate in a subject position.  As Roy Bhaskar puts it in From East to West: Odyssey of a Soul: “If the soul is regarded as a disposition to be embodied, then traditional Buddhist objections to a realist rendition of it are overcome” (p. 92).  The reborn “soul” is nothing but a disposition or tendency in the symbolic/imaginary structure to reproduce a certain kind of subject by interpellating new bodily individuals.  Our attempt to change our karma, to transform the structures we bear, can lead to better rebirth, to dispositions to produce subjects less prone to suffering.

Bodhi (enlightenment, awakening) then need not be a supernatural state we must humbly deny having reached; instead, it can be a quite real state of being the Buddhist/Spinozist/Marxist subject which is aware of its ideology and better able to change it.  It is, in Badiou’s terms, the subject faithful to a truth, and engaged in changing its World to force the appearance of this truth.  We can be awakened without claiming grand supernatural powers or even perfection as human beings: we can be awakened only as subjects, not as individuals, and no subject can be awakened except in relation to some truth.  Bodhi can be far more common than the reactionary or obscurantist subject of Buddhism would have us believe, and to claim it is not to make a claim about one’s individual, personal worth but about a truth procedure to which one remains faithful.

Finally, the concepts of sunyata, anatman,  pratityasamutpada: we can see that once we grasp these as attempts to theorize the particular immanence of a truth in a World, the mystery and incomprehensibility disappears.  Nagarjuna becomes much more comprehensible once we grasp that he is arguing that there is certainly a truth, but it can always only appear in a World.  There is no single form in which a truth must appear (it can potentially, if it is a truth, appear in every conceivable world, and will always take the form necessary to that World); there is no abiding self, because the subject is always only a socially constructed symbolic/imaginary system, which transcends the bodily individual but is clearly not other-worldly or immortal; everything is always dependently arisen, even a universal truth, because it can only ever exist in a particular World, and to change any subject requires a change in the entire social structure which it inhabits.  To claim, in postmodern fashion, that all we can change and all we need to change is our minds, is absurd if we understand that the mind is a product of, dependently arisen from, the structures it inhabits.  To change our mind, we must change our World.

The only question, then, is: how is change possible?  If our mind is the socially produced symbolic/imaginary system, where is the Archimedean vantage point from which to force a change?  This is where we must reject the radical disconnection Badiou argues exists in Althusser’s thought between ideology and objective truth (the argument is echoed in the Anglophone world by Althusser’s major expositors, Eagleton, Elliot, and Benton).  To suggest that there is no clear way out of the prison of ideology fails to see that the solution lies precisely within the register of ideology, not in a move into a realm of pure truth.  Ultimately, Althusser remains a realist, and our ideology is not so perfectly sealed-off as it might appear to be when it is working successfully.  There is a mind-independent world, which does not yield to our conceptual reconstrual of it.  Occasionally, we are going to drive our car into a tree.  There will be catastrophic failures of the economic system, for instance, which cannot make any sense in the current state of knowledge.  Our ideologies may just break down.  Eagleton suggested that Althusser has “produced an ideology of the ego, rather than one of the human subject” (Ideology: an introduction, p. 144), and this is true to an extent: to the degree that ideology works seamlessly and smoothly, it works like the ego—but it never does work completely seamlessly and smoothly, there is always the problem of the unconscious, of the superego.  If Althusser seems to have produced and “ideology of the ego” this is only because he is trying to explain how it is ever possible that something so certain to produce error and suffering is so powerfully persistent.

There is always the possibility that, even without crashing head-on into reality, we can gain the capacity to alter our World.  It is important to remember that there are always multiple Worlds, that there is no single, monolithic ideological position, that there are always multiple subjects.  We need not worry about the problem of solipsism, because there is no possibility of a private, personal and untranslatable symbolic system, and we need not worry about being trapped in a single ideological vision because we can always see another person’s ideology, and point it out to them, and they can, hopefully, see ours.  Just as there are limits to the possibility of psychoanalyzing oneself, there are limits on an individual’s ability to escape her ideology; however, we can serve as one another’s analysts, and bring to consciousness what is unconscious.

There are some difficult implications of all of this.  We cannot, for instance, simply “live and let live.”  The current obsession with “tolerance” and “multiculturalism” would need to be rejected, because we cannot gain our own freedom from samsara without forcing a change in the world.  Our mind is a social construction, and so I cannot change “my” mind without changing “yours.”  We must not accept the quietist notion of learning to accept the world as it is, because the world as it is constructs our mind; we must demand the right to change the world, to insist that others see truths they don’t like, because we are not atomistic individuals.

There is also the likelihood that the “interest” of the individual, in Badiou’s sense, may trump the desire to see the truth.  There may be so much material benefit, so much comfort, so much attachment, that seeing the truth would require a kind of asceticism, an abandonment of individual cathexes, that is unlikely to be successful.  As I mentioned earlier, Badiou suggests that in the ideal state the individual interests and the interest of the subject faithful to the truth will so coincide that there is no feeling of ascetic renunciation, no need for great effort; however, this ideal state is unlikely to often occur.  What, then, can take its place?

For Althusser, the aesthetic is the practice that can produce a motivational attachment to changing our ideologies, and the world.  I would argue that Buddhist practice can become such an aesthetic practice.  Because the best way to produce an investment in change is to actually experience the truth that the mind is not an atomistic entity but a socially produced effect of a symbolic/imaginary system.  We can become subjects faithful to a truth, even a truth that opposes the interest of our own individual bodily existence, once we experience the truth of what a subject is.  To experience the existence of our mind in the trans-individual symbolic/imaginary system could motivate us to place the interest of the entire system above the interest of our individual bodily selves.  The difficulty, and importance of this experience can easily be seen in many works of and on Buddhism.  To take just one particularly explicit example, Sue Hamilton, in her book Early Buddhism: A New Approach, attempts to reconceive Buddhist concepts in modern philosophical terms.  The book is interesting, provocative, erudite and insightful; but ultimately Hamilton’s understanding of Buddhism is limited by her insistence that one simply cannot “experience that one has no self . . . in any context outside of a madhouse” (p. 21).  For all her knowledge of Buddhist thought, and that is quite a bit, she cannot access an experience which would allow anatman to make sense to her.   Much like psychoanalysis, in which simply accepting the truth of the offered interpretation does nothing to alleviate our symptoms, a purely intellectual agreement with this theoretical position can do little to produce change.  Perhaps only engaging in a material practice, which must involve multiple individuals, and which is designed to allow the experiencing of the constructedness of the mind, can produce subjects faithful to the truth of the Buddha event.

The history of Buddhism has been a dialectic of emergence and containments of truth, of faithful subjects being endlessly absorbed into reactionary or obscurantist subjects.  When meditation seeks to stop all thought, to insist on a world-transcendent experience of pure consciousness outside of language, it is functioning to strengthen the hold of our ideological formations, to shore up the walls of our World, by insisting on the timeless universality of our purportedly “pure” perceptions.  What we need, instead, is a framework for Buddhist practice that is faithful to the truths of samsara, sunyata, anatman, karma, bhava, and bodhi.   We can produce subjects capable of stepping out of the car and walking.

My suggestion, though, is that we can do this only if we grasp that Buddhist concepts can be understood in a completely naturalist way, with no need to accept any world-transcendent of mystical beings or forces.   Further, we need to grasp that Buddhism operates completely in the register of the ideological, its truths are transcendent truths of human ideological practices; Buddhism includes no truths of physical reality external to the existence of human social structures.  We may be able to produce such truths, we may even need to do so, but we would be better able to do so as subjects aware of our own ideologies, and able to change them in productive ways guided by rigorous thought.

The Buddha’s great insight was that humans are ideological animals; in Althusser’s terms, it was a production of a theory of, or truth about, “ideology in general.”  This insight enables us to escape samsara, to be freed of our karma, and to create our own World.  Unfortunately, it requires us to break free of our ideology, to take responsibility for the structures we bear, and to remake our World.  The price of awakening is eternal diligence.

So, I ask, is this coherent?  Where are the obscurities, aporias, and just plain conceptual blunders?  Does there seem any possibility of such a practice ever existing?

There is, clearly, much to be worked out.  There are clearly different strata of ideology, from the construction of the structure of individual psychology to political and economic strata.  It would be necessary to determine whether different practices or different theoretical frameworks would be needed to address each different strata, and to decide how extensive one’s theoretical knowledge must be to produce the proper distantiating aesthetic experience.  What might be the role of ritual, what kind of meditation might be most useful?  Most of us, I believe, still participate in some Buddhist practice, and non-buddhism need not entail walking away from this, but remaking it.

References

Althusser, L .  “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatusses (Notes towards an Investigation.” Lenin and Philosophy.  Trans. Ben Brewster.  New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971.

—.  “A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre.” Lenin and Philosophy.  Trans. Ben Brewster.  New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971.

—.  “The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht.” For Marx. Trans. Ben Brewster.  New York: Vantage Books, 1970.

Badiou, A. Logics of Worlds.  Trans. Alberto Toscano.  London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009.

— . Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil.  Trans. Peter Hallward. New York: Verso, 2001.

— . De L’ideologie.  Paris: Francois Maspero, 1976.

Bhaskar, R.  From East to West: Odyssey of a Soul.  London: Routledge, 2000.

Eagleton, T. Ideology: An Introduction. New York: Verso, 1991.

Hamilton, S. Early Buddhism: A New Approach.  New York: Routledge, 2008.

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Tom Pepper

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You can download the essay on the Articles page..

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.

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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.”

A big step forward would be to stay with the development of meaning in interaction as it unfolds from the hither and thither of conversation on all levels of talk, gesture, movement, expression and so on. But at first the observation must be trained because the intricacy from which all those social gestures arise is normally not observed. In this sense there is a training of being with or in or as the stream of consciousness, of experiencing this facticity of bodily sensations, feelings, thoughts, rushes of emotion, fatigue, daydreaming or knowing the difference of the latter from presence as such.

Maybe there are some preliminaries or auxiliaries like attention to breath or looking toward the corner of the room where the dog sleeps. But this is no end in itself. The importance lies, I think, in the skills which could be developed from there. Social skills which are able to go with the ongoing generation of meaning in interaction. Maybe some techniques like the Bohm-dialogue or Ruth Cohnʻs Theme-Centred Interaction or Gendlinʻs Focusing help to facilitate and develop this. With the development of this skills would come the widening of the possibilities of the interacting group and the downing of ideological thinking which loses its grip as it becomes clearer how it arises from contingent sources. In this sense a simple technique like calm abiding could be part of a wider spectrum of developmental practices.

But “meditation” is no longer an option.

It is not important, from the point of view of interaction, whether there is some sort of pure awareness, whether this is a phenomenal primitive or pure apperception. From the point of a somebody in an experience of non-thought the question is just another thought, and non-thought might be just another form of thought – which might be presence as such, grounded in neurochemical subsystems of intricately contingent being. What matters more, in the context of interaction, sociality, being with others, is that from here the contingency and construction of individual thought, feeling, (re)acting and so on and hence individuality, could be seen better – what then could be of further use to push being in a direction of more enhancing, life-supporting, non-violent social spheres.

Of course it is interesting to see how far one can go into the microstructure of one’s own consciousness. The dissolution of a thought, a gap, the bubble from which a new one arises, the holding of presence, the slaying of discursiveness to the point where it begins to look like Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, sound-waves filling space with pink and yellow turmoil, vanishing only to leave the shimmering edges of presence where no-one knows what the real is and where a relaxed insignificance in full light of nature’s indifference abides.

But from there the question has to be solved how to interact being indifferent and resonating at the same time – annihilation is certain but mirror-neurons still fire. Modern buddhist ideology is of no help here. When the tsunami hit Japan in March 2011 a buddhist e-mail arrived calling for reciting mantras for the suffering people! The question about any intra-conscious praxis is how it affects inter-conscious praxis.

There is another aspect of a training of consciousness for more self-awareness, for more cognizance of the particles of self. Apart from the questions of decision, pure awareness, phenomenal primitives, etc., there are on the level of interaction and sociality forces which enforce a commodification of awareness itself: the time of consciousness is synchronized with time objects of the culture industries. The individual consciousness is linked and fed realtime with the steady input from a normalizing power. This transforms and reduces the person to an irresponsible junky whom, if the stream is cut off, is rendered helpless. Helpless because this stream is not simply a channel, for example, for advertising but a steady stream of infusion of standards which in a subtle way guide the individual, making it feeling free, but in the last instance controlling it by preventing every form of individuation. It is an autopoietic structure creating for its self-stabilization, among other things, the impression that the outside of it is uninhabitable or even unthinkable while the inside is nirvana. Hence the happiness-hypothesis of the Dalai Lama. Opting out is no option, therefore in buddhism one always has to cultivate something – even awareness itself (buy it at Sogyalʻs rigpa-shop!).

There has to be a training of weaning off from this infusion with the additional problem that it cannot be the cultivation of something new because “something new” is always a generation of more content from the normalizing power. A “laying bare,” might describe the undoing of this. But one sees the problem when buddhists prefer the colourful non-non-thetic tantric stuff, the elaborated rituals of zen or a happening with the Dalai Lama in one of those gigantic circuses with noisy legions of true believers instead of being for a few moments with whatever is… in the kitchen, on a busy sidewalk, on a plane, in a park with the distant sound of playing children, a whiff of flowery fragrance and shimmering reflections of the water behind the trees, “basking in the sunshine of a bygone afternoon, all around me golden sun flakes” – but of course, this is pretentious kitsch, and the question is how to distinguish kitsch from experience in a time where sometimes it seems more honest to be a straightforward junky than a fuzzily maneuvering meditational infected non-empty empty entity.

Along with any training in, for example, calm abiding as an antidote to the infusion of the culture industries – which is the destruction of attention – there has to be, in my opinion, a cultivation of knowledge about the construction of knowledge. Calm abiding or whatever praxis could be a catalyst for opting out but not if it is not accompanied by studies of some kind which foster an understanding of historicity on the macro level, on the microlevel the weaving of the ubiquitous manipulation of reality in everyday life without looking for a real beyond and on the level of personality the uncertainty of memory which can lead to insight into the illusory status of the steadiness of self.

In any case, the weaning off from the infusion is also a political affair, as it should reinstate individual responsibility, which, in politics as in buddhism with it’s lamas and roshis and whatever, is eroded up to the point where acting as an infantile shmoo is à la mode.

The situational awareness which comes with responsibility – which might have to do something with the mahayana ideal of the bodhisattva – both being not two entities but qualities which are non-existent when separated, might lay the ground for a space in which talk about “meditation” can finally develop. And at the same time, simply the attempt to talk in an honest, sincere and non-violent way helps to further the mentioned qualities.

I think all this is a level which is at certain points open to a much wider perspective. But first it is about creating an environment in which a conversation can take place. In western buddhism there is mostly no conversation. Talk comes from the guy in front which is invested with the necessary paraphernalia to talk in a one-way monological manner. But this is only to preserve the status quo, to reestablish a hierarchy which in the west went missing in action during the last 50 or 100 years when the societies of discipline developed to the societies of control.

Conversation would mean to establish peer-groups which resemble our hierarchically flat social landscape, in which none the less knowledge is unevenly dispersed, to provide room for the (development of forms for the) exchange of portrayals of experience. Therewith certain laws should govern this exchange. For example “truth is the death of communication” or “all memory is fiction and, more specific, “there is no secret hierophantic knowledge told only to the true believers” and: every attempt to express experience is totally free in the confines of “this is what I make of it,” while at the same time the spontaneous affective all-knowing critic takes a backseat and shuts up. There are many models to establish an environment which facilitates an open and creative atmosphere for conversation about or better “in” experience. But, sadly, buddhism, perhaps, even less than other religious undertakings, seems to be one of the domains where this aspect of an open society is strongly prohibited.

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Matthias Steingass is the founder of the German-English language blog Der Unbuddhist. Matthias studied math and economics. He has worked in the financial markets for the past seventeen years. Matthias has also worked as a musician (bass and sampling). In addition to his career, Matthias is currently pursuing his interests in philosophy while at the same time pursing music again, this time as a songwriter.

Matthias can be reached at: matthias.steingass@web.de

You can download the article on the “Articles” page.

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby

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.

A speculative non-buddhist thesis holds that x-buddhism is incapable of the self-critique that might permit what Benjamin refers to as a “genuine polemics” (more on this below). One reason for x-buddhism’s failure in this regard is the centripetal force that dharmic decision exerts on the thinking and behavior of all x-buddhists. To be an x-buddhists is to be reflexively beholden, affectively and cognitively, to the force of dharmic postulation. The x-buddhist is x-buddhist precisely insofar as s/he seeks—indeed, is impelled toward—the pure point of dharmic verity.

Decisional reflexivity explains why intra-buddhist discussions and debates are so vapid. It also explains why x-buddhist blogs, magazines, dharma talks, podcasts, websites, Facebook pages, about.com sermons, and all the rest are predictable to the point of brain-corroding monotony: all of them, no matter what their particular x represents, simply spin around and around, shoulder to shoulder, on the same reeling pulpit. For decision, as the speculative non-buddhist thesis goes, is a fecund supposition of uncircumventable validity that manifests as infinite iterations of “x-buddhism.”

This state of affairs can explain in one swoop both the insipid nature of intra- x-buddhist dialogue and the non-existence of robust contemporary Buddhist-Non-Buddhist (Christian, etc.) polemics…

…But wait a minute, haven’t I just inverted the value of the term “polemics”? Indeed, I have. I will leave you with some comments by Catholic thinker Paul J. Griffiths on the topic  “Why We Need Interreligious Polemics.” Griffiths takes a stance opposed to Foucault’s. (Fitting for a post on polemics, isn’t it?)  But before I do, a question:

Why do x-buddhists behave like such disingenuous duckies when debating their views?

Here’s Paul Griffiths:

The intellectual life is essentially and constitutively agonistic. It progresses almost entirely by struggle, by challenge and response, by thesis and antithesis, by getting it wrong and then moving, always asymptotically, toward getting it right. Hegel was wrong, so far as I can tell, about most things, but he was right at least about this: the movement of thought is, in the sense just mentioned, dialectical. Nagarjuna, the second-century Buddhist philosopher, was, if possible, wrong about even more than Hegel, but he too was right at least about the unavoidable necessity of reasoned argument for the maintenance of ethical and epistemic respectability.

If the intellectual life is like this, if struggle is its blood and bone, then one ought to expect those who think rightly about it to delight in and deploy the imagery and metaphors of battle and war to capture its flavor. And so they do. If you like Buddhist examples, consider the famous image, found in numerous Indian Buddhist works from the first century onward, of the two magical warriors, neither of whom has enduring independent existence, battling one another until both cease to exist: this is an image, for its users, of the nature of argument, but it is also an image that has vitally important soteriological implications, a point that I shall return to later. And you don’t have to read far in current English-language philosophy to stumble over (or delight in, depending upon your tastes) similarly martial imagery: philosophers marshal their forces; they propose defeators; they proffer knock-down, drag-out arguments; they line up their propositions and schemata of argument like so many tin soldiers.

This sort of thing is what I mean by the word “polemics.” I take it to denote an intellectual virtue. Perhaps more precisely, I take it to denote a mode of intellectual engagement that flows directly from a proper and clear realization of what serious intellectual work is for and how it should best proceed. If you properly engage in this work, you will be interested in arriving at a position on whatever it is that interests you (philosophy, critical theory, history, philology, literary criticism, or whatever) that is preferable to any other that you know of on that question, and you will concomitantly want to be clear as to what the position that you construct and defend is, what it excludes, how best to show that its competitors are less adequate than the one you want to defend, and in what sense this is true. “Polemics,” as I use it here, does not denote or connote simple hostility, or opposition for its own sake-even though the term has come to mean something like this in ordinary English usage. It points, rather, to the kind of engagement that does and should occur when those who take what they believe seriously encounter others equally serious about, and committed to, their beliefs.

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* “Polemics, Politics, Problematizations.” Michel Foucault interviewed by Paul Rabinow. Foucault is contrasting this view of polemics with the following:

In the serious play of questions and answers, in the work of reciprocal elucidation, the rights of each person are in some sense immanent in the discussion. They depend only on the dialogue situation. The person asking the questions is merely exercising the right that has been given him: to remain unconvinced, to perceive a contradiction, to require more information, to emphasize different postulates, to point out faulty reasoning, and so on. As for the person answering the questions, he too exercises a right that does not go beyond the discussion itself; by the logic of his own discourse, he is tied to what he has said earlier, and by the acceptance of dialogue he is tied to the questioning of other. Questions and answers depend on a game—a game that is at once pleasant and difficult—in which each of the two partners takes pains to use only the rights given him by the other and by the accepted form of dialogue.

** Paul J. Griffiths, “Why We Need Interreligious Polemics,” First Things (June/July 1994).

Obedience to normalcy
is what lobotomies are for.

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.

Goenka’s is a rhetoric of control, of resisting the demands of unruly, hence dangerous, sensation. It repeats the tendency of contemporary x-buddhistic meditation rhetoric to condemn strong emotions. In employing such rhetoric, x-buddhism’s roots  show; and they have the fleshless hue of ascetic, world-renouncing moralizing.

Allan Lokos’s “Daily Dharma” of February 4 continues in this vein. The wisdom he imparts involves, as his title states, “Cooling Emotional Fires.” “Anger, annoyance, and impatience deplete energy,” he teaches.

So, what should we do to tame these quite natural and often exceptionally useful human responses to our environment? Well, first of all, we should just be patient, for “Patient effort strengthens our resources.” I find such tired x-buddhistic clichés exceedingly annoying. I suppose the protesters on Tahrir Square finally did, too. And they, alas, would not have cared for Lokos’s advice on what to do with their impatience and anger:

We need to practice cooling emotional fires and alleviating fierce disruptions from our lives.

Again, a crypto-ascetic rhetoric of human denial, emotional repression, and general lassitude. We don’t need no water—let the motherfucker burn is the  fierce disruption from my life.

Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein reinforce this emotion-phobic rhetoric of x-buddhism in their February 6 “Daily Dharma,” titled “Cutting Through Anger.” Their use of the word “cutting” also, of course, unintentionally creates a parallel to lobotomy. Like 1940s-era doctors, they, too, want to cut off vibrant, pulsing expressions of human being in the name of some utopian, and anodyne, “well-being.” They call their lobotomy “mental noting:”

 Mental noting takes us in a very different direction from getting lost in a story: “Oh, this anger is so miserable; I am such a terrible person because I’m always angry; this is just how I will always be,” and so on. Instead, we simply say to ourselves, “anger, anger”—and cut through all of that elaboration, the story, the judgment, the interpretation.

Sharon and Joseph, I have a question for you: how will you cut through all of that elaboration, through that story, through that judgment and that interpretation? Or are you two liberated from story?

Bullshit bullshit is the miserable story I’m getting lost in right now.

“Mental noting” is just another strategy of real-world renunciation; it is just more crypto-ascetic x-buddhistic rhetoric. Yet, no sooner do I say this than Clark Strand contradicts me in the very next “Daily Dharma,” titled “Living with the World.”

 We are not called upon as Buddhists to deny the world, and certainly not to escape from it. We are called to live with it, and to make our peace with all that is.

Well, wait a minute; I take that back. Making “our peace with all that is” is not the same thing as “living with the world.” In fact, it is just the opposite. It is not living at all. It is merely operating under the yoke of vacuous spiritualized prescription. Strand’s “called upon/to” is about as close to Althusser’s “hailing/interpellation” as I’ve heard an x-buddhist come to admitting the hidden ideological claws of x-buddhism.

Again, this is a rhetoric of renunciation that veers toward the human-hostile. Do you want the promise of Buddhism to manifest in your life? Then you must make peace with all that is, goddamit! Oh, yes, that promise. Let us bow our heads:

The world of worries we wish to escape from in the beginning of Buddhist practice is found to be enlightenment itself in the end.

The “world of worries” is not fucking “enlightenment.” It is the world of worries.

We continue to get lobotomy-like results and instruction in Jason Siff‘s “Gentle Meditation” (“try approaching [meditation practices] in a softer, gentler manner,” etc.), in Peter Doobinin‘s employment of the “just do it” rhetoric (“You’re just walking. This is a good instruction: just walk…sense the joy in simply walking”). Brad Warner tops it all off by reminding us that “there are no magic solutions.” Ironically, though, he sprinkles fairy dust on his “no magic” by claiming for it the “one lesson that runs through pretty much every Buddhist tradition.”

In “Axiomatic Heresy,” Ray Brassier comments that François Laruelle sees “a philosopher” as a person who never says what he is really doing, and never does what he is really saying. Can we say the same for those x-buddhists who prescribe, and subscribe to, the formulations of contemporary x-buddhist meditation/mindfulness rhetoric? In what sense could any of them really be doing what they claim here? And do you really believe that they are honestly saying what they do do? What would other guests at the Great Feast of Knowledge—biology, physics, gastronomy, literature, political science—have to say about their claims?

“Obedience to normalcy is what lobotomies are for,” barks Steve Ignorant. Is that what meditation/mindfulness is for, too? Reading Tricycle’s “Daily Dharma,” you really have to wonder.

***

Tricycallergic? Yea. Try this instead:

Or this:

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Tricycle’s “Wisdom Collection.”

Leland E. Hinsie and Robert Jean Campbell (1970). Psychiatric Dictionary. Fourth Edition. Oxford University Press (on Google books).

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”?) I’ll come back to that point in a moment.

To the “Libertarian” comment, someone else astutely noted:

Have you read the vinaya? I don’t think you would walk away from it thinking that Buddhism advocates “maximum individual freedom.”

That is an astute comment because, really, the Vinaya is the document to go to if you want to know what the early Buddhist community “advocated” about social organization. I thought, well, if everyone now pulls out his/her copy of the Vinaya, that’ll be the end of that discussion. For it is indeed difficult to name a more controlling, micro-managing, anti-individual-freedom-loving document than the Buddhist Vinaya. Like all codifications of behavior, the Vinaya is the very antithesis of contemporary libertarianism. It is, in fact, an exemplary guide to extreme group-think.

But then someone else objected to the first comment on different grounds:

Gotama set up a communal society and urged its members to look out for each other’s welfare. I don’t think he would be a Ron Paul supporter.

That comment made we wonder: what kind of political philosophy might we extrapolate from x-buddhist teachings? Now, an obvious follow-up question is: which teachings? Since one of the favorite activities of x-buddhists is the interminable interpretation cum exemplification of x-buddhism, that question will just send us around in circles, chasing our tails.

I am not sure what “set up” of Gotama’s that last commentator had in mind. It certainly was not the Vinaya. For that text offers up an unhealthy dose of misogyny, homophobia, bullying, paternalism, draconian punishment, and outright abuse. Looking out for one another’s welfare? Sure, there is some of that. But for God’s sake–at what cost! (Google is looking out for our welfare, too…right?)

In any case, what interests me here, as a critic of x-buddhism, is not really a theoretical Buddhist politics per se, as interesting as that question is. It is the practice of extrapolation itself that interests me. What might some of the ramifications of x-buddhist dispositions, values, and qualities be when pulled out of the warm nest of “the sangha” and brought into the furious sphere of real-life political action? Take the motto of “non-judgmental awareness.” What does it mean to be “non-judgmental” in real-life, political terms? I don’t mean, how can you use non-judgmentalism as an “antidote” to knee-jerk political thinking. X-buddhism is filled with techniques of emotional micro-management and OCD-like inventory-taking. I don’t mean that. I mean a pure extrapolation.

What about these other x-buddhist values: just doing it; equanimity; not-thinking; letting go; effortless effort; compassion; non-conceptual awareness; mirror-like mind; non-reactivity; tolerance; forbearance; stepping into groundlessness (the title of a Pema Chödrön interview I just–ahem–tried to read). Like the equanimity→complacency equation, what new values might the extrapolation produce?

Extrapolation as a thought-experiment is a valuable exercise. It is a way of taking sensible-sounding x-buddhist values (whether classical or contemporary) out of the x-buddhist sanghic vacuum, and handing them over to the crucible of thought.

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The Secular Buddhist Facebook page.

Image: from the Union Yes website.

"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?

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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? Does it do so; and, if it does, how does it alter our capacity for deep thinking, how does it affect attention span, and what is its influence on the  synaptogenetic level (neuronal development in childhood)—on a child not even two or three years old, exposed to this never sleeping, maniacally colorful maelstrom, moving, shifting, whispering, magically conjuring I-want-everything-and-I-want-it-now? If you’ve ever seen a child in front of a TV, you know how completely attention can get hooked.

My question is, can meditation be—together, perhaps, with other practices—a form of attention-control? And if this is indeed possible, can such a practice have some kind of impact on hooked attention?

In my view, the situation is very problematic. It is not only that attention is hooked and we are manipulated at a very basic level of our being. It is that attention is a scarce commodity over which the fight is on, and that we as living beings are the one‘s producing this raw material around which our society in the age of information is revolving. This is not a paranoid fantasy about some Matrix in which we live (that film anyway is a false metaphor with that pill Morpheus gives Neo in order to see real reality). One can make a compelling case about how certain forms of reality and social norms are generated, and how these realities and norms we fill with life are destroying basic, essential forms of interaction.

The French philosopher Bernard Stiegler analyses the situation in depth in his book Taking Care of Youth and the Generations. He cites Primo Levi in his introduction: “Not to consider human beings as things is to escape the total humiliation and demoralization which leads to spiritual ruin.“ It is an inadequate understanding of the technological thrust of our culture which leads to the conception of the human as just another thing, and, with this, to the destruction of spirituality—or to name it more fitting to the situation now in which spirituality is also a commodity: Responsibility!

Can meditation do something about this situation? If one has learned about meditation in a Buddhist context one would think it necessary to put this question to Buddhism itself. Is Buddhism able to see this problem of attention as raw material which is produced by humans who are treated as things? Buddhism declares itself to be a soteriological problem-solver which knows all about the human situation. From this point of view it seems logical that Buddhism is a solution in this situation and that meditation then is part of the solution.

But is this so? Is meditation a sub-set of Buddhism? I don‘t think so. In a certain sense, I would put it the other way around: Buddhism is a sub-set of Meditation. Buddhism is a multifaceted patchwork of theories about mind, social behavior, the meaning of life, speculations about the from and where-to of Dasein. As such, it is just another culturally conditioned answer to the question that the ape who has to confront seeing his own death must ask himself. In contrast to this conditioned answer, meditation, as a „natural“ ability to think in a certain way, is a given to this ape. It is a present of life —or seen from the theory of evolution, it is the developed ability to be present with the representation of parts of the environment in a mode of nowness, while this representational nowness-system is transparent to itself.

Buddhism in this context is, like many other known, unknown, long forgotten and yet to come cultural developments, inventions, innovations and creative solutions of the Homo sapiens, just one answer—an answer, furthermore, that has to compete with all other answers. It is in no way a superior answer; and as Glenn Wallis’s article on this blog, “Nascent Speculative Non-Buddhism,” shows [link below], it is more likely caught in a circularity of defining reality and giving answers to this defined/constructed reality without being conscious of the act of definition, which rather invents a certain reality, while stipulating that this definition/construction is the last and ultimate answer. Buddhism is unaware of the fact that it is in itself a representational act. The inability to see this is partly due, I think, to the transparency of consciousness as an island of nowness, an island which cannot see, or only to a limited extent, its foundational structures—which, as far as it concerns moral values, are to a good extent, or maybe for the most part, built by the attention-harvesting culture industries. Seen from this angle, with Buddhism being unaware of the situation and being itself a product sold to the consumer, it is part of the problem, not of the solution. If the Buddhism in question is a x-buddhism as seen from non-buddhism then by definition it is unable to to do something about the social situation in which the human as such is raw material with his attention as his central organ to be exploited. “The Dalai Lama MasterChef” ” [link below], seen in this light, is an example par excellence of how Buddhism is put to work to exploit consumer attention.

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.

Contrary to this, meditation as an ability of consciousness for  introspection, to look for the limits of introspection and to think about representations as representations is part of the becoming aware of the possibilities and limitations of consciousness.

Seen from this angle meditation must also examine buddhistic postulations about meditation and its object. For example in Tibetan Buddhism, the so called luminous or space-like mind or mind-itself is seen as an immortal entity. Does this  impression hold? In light of what we know today, the impression of immortality might simply be a misinterpretation of the transparency of consciousness. If consciousness is limited in its ability to see its own foundational structures and if it calms down enough, while staying alert, to contemplate awareness as such, then it very well might regard this seemingly unborn, deathless, sky-like crystal clear space as immortal—simply because it cannot see the mortality of its foundational structure.

Furthermore, while some forms of meditation might, as is claimed, have positive effects on personal health, on interpersonal interaction, on sociality, etc. (and while this might have to do with learning to dissociate from compulsive behavior), there is on the other side no source for knowledge down there in this clear cool well of calm abiding. The Buddha certainly did not find knowledge about quantum physics sitting under the bodhi-tree. If sitting in calm awareness, in relaxed dissociation from content is of value, then as the foundation of knowledge in the sense of Thomas Metzinger’s phenomenal self-model and not as knowledge itself or as a channel which leads to knowledge somewhere in a mystical way without simple learning. Perhaps the direction is of importance here. To dig deeper is impossible. The bare, utter, naked awareness is the invisible concrete wall which is permeable only in deep sleep and death—in the sense that the self-model there, hereafter, does not exist, is unthinkable. In the opposite direction, mind unfolds in myriad strategies because of the need to ask questions.

So the answer to the initial question seems to be: Yes, meditation can be of support for a better life in terms of health and sociality; but with consciousness transparent to itself it cannot, out of itself, gather knowledge about itself. As Thomas Metzinger puts it: “From the structure of our own inner experience, epistemological claims are not yet deducible.” With this conclusion one can say meditation alone is unable to see the problem situation sketched above.

This has far reaching consequences not only with view on the immortal Buddhist mind but also in view of our own socially contingent character structures. If we want to become better beings, more tolerant, politically aware, morally grown-up, less addicted to a surrogate-life full of tomorrows which never come; and if we must doubt at the same time the ability of introspection to reveal the formative powers of our value-systems, then the very important question arises: how can we judge the quality of our knowledge?  I think non-buddhism tries to give an answer here.

Meditation as relaxed and calm dissociation from content might contribute to this if it establishes a calm base from which the search does not try to reach ever more further inwardly but from where it reaches out to the other. In the problem situation Bernard Stiegler sketches in the book mentioned above, this other is in danger of disappearing. He or she, the being we live with, disappears behind a smoke screen of fake sociality. Disappearing —and this is the main point—because we loose control of our own attention. The situation we live in is a situation in which our attention is the commodity which really counts as economic fuel, a commodity which is of crucial importance for the market. It is not, of course, a commodity that is physically traded at the CME (the Chicago Mercantile Exchange), but it is one which is nonetheless at the heart of our being and therefore at the heart of being with our fellow human beings. If we switch on the TV, then a feature film, a soap, reality-TV, a cooking show with some celebrity shaman as guest—these are nothing more than the tools to lead our attention to its maximum alertness when the next commercial starts. What the TV-company sells to the advertising company, and further, to the producer of bliss and happiness forever, is our attention. It is brain time—literally— on which they trade. Our brain time.

In a sense the price per minute payed for a commercial is the market quotation for attention. This is one of the defining features of control-society. Attention is its main commodity. The term „control-society“ should not be confused with “surveillance-society.“ The latter situation is the one which, especially after 9/11, is in full bloom. Data-scanning and gathering in every manner here and data protection, privacy, the fight for the right of anonymity there, are the two antipodes fighting. Control-society is a much less debated item. It is by definition much more difficult to discern because it is the entity which controls the individual by bringing him to the point where he willingly and joyfully consents to the norms governing his society. It is a control which is not experienced as control. The term stems from Gilles Deleuze, who coined it more than twenty years ago in an astonishingly farsighted text entitled “Post-scriptum sur les sociétés du contrôle.“ In this short text, Deleuze develops further Foucault‘s historical analysis of the disciplinary-society and the sovereignty-society. The latter, being the oldest form, is typical for the feudal state in which the sovereign is in full charge over life and death of the individual. From this form in Europe with Napoleon the change to the disciplinary-society was completed. This is the society in which the individual is disciplined via family, school, barracks, factory, and so on. A highly hierarchical social order is typical here, while the following control-society which is our home now, developing strongly since the second world war and especially since the roaring sixties, is a relatively flat hierarchy in comparison. A further distinctive feature here is that this (information) society shifts its main emphasis from workforce to brainpower whereby the exploitation shifts to the attention which is produced by the brains. One could say the consumer is the new proletarian, and that it is no longer his workforce that is exploited but his attention.

The analysis Bernard Stiegler offers shows in detail that the way the attention of the citizen is harvested and strained is destroying the possibility of individuation, and with this, responsibility on every plane of society from the most basic—the love of two as “an atom of transindividual universality, as the first degree of the individual‘s passage to an immediate beyond“ (Badiou)—to the most general—the question how life in this civilization will go on. Control-society, not as an entity controlled by a secret organization like the Illuminati or a hidden agenda of the government ,but as an autopoietic institution, is deaf to this. It has by the very nature of its being no possibility of gathering knowledge about itself with the tool of simple introspection. So if one wants to understand the social fundamentals of our irresponsibility, of our moral failure, it is not enough to sit down and train in meditation. Meditation as attention-control from and for the individual can be  part of the solution if it is accompanied by learning and the widening of the horizon of knowledge in unforeseen directions—directions that are not, and cannot be, redacted by institutions mostly busy supporting themselves instead of engaging in real, risky interaction.

In this context here I want to propose meditation as a tool of gaining control of our own attention. In the freed space which can develop in this way there must then be learning. The free space itself is not enough and can, as every pharmakon, become poisonous. A cleared space within as a result of meditation can only be understood as a basis and not as an ultimate aim. It would be a base in which one would refuse to let one‘s attention be exploited and it would be the basis from which a new learning could develop, a learning that would try to understand the situation of the human in relation to technology and program industries and the relation of these forces vis-a-vis  attention and responsibility. Meditation as a clearing becomes a weapon against the parasitic forces of attention exploitation—and it protects and supports thinking as the original capability of the Homo sapiens.

This all is very cursory. The main questions again are: 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?

To develop this case further, there is some reading to do: Bernard Stiegler’s Taking Care of Youth and the Generations is the main reference point to deal with the question of our situation. Thomas Metzinger‘s Being No One, or the summary of this in his “Grundkurs Philosophie des Geistes, Band I,” is a first approach to deal with the question of consciousness and to look from here—not vice versa —on older discussions about this phenomenon, and, specifically, to assess what is in general usage fuzzily called “meditation.“ Regarding the latter, I would suggest  a look at  Longchen Rabjams A Treasure Trove of Scriptural Transmission (Chapters 9 and 10) in Richard Barron‘s translation. Longchen Rabjams “natural meditative stability“ (tib: bsam gtan) is an important term here that needs to be looked at. What is left of “natural meditative stability“ when it is shorn of its transcendental ornamentations remains to be seen.

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Matthias Steingass is the founder of the German-English language blog Der Unbuddhist. Matthias studied math and economics. He has worked in the financial markets for the past seventeen years. Matthias has also worked as a musician (bass and sampling). In addition to his career, Matthias is currently pursuing his interests in philosophy while at the same time pursing music again, this time as a songwriter.

Matthias can be reached at: matthias.steingass@web.de

Links

“Meditation and Control” pdf file (Articles page)

“Nascent Speculative Non-Buddhism“

“The Dalai Lama MasterChef“

Photograph: From an advertisement for Philips Aurea flat screen TVs.