12 responses to “In Search of a Non-Human: Trash Theory #1”

1. 

   Charles Nuckles

   April 5, 2019

   The meme of the omniscient “knower of truth” is not a correct take on the concept of the “spiritual guide.” The core purpose of having a spiritual guide is to be linked to a lineage. The spiritual guide leads one along the path laid out by the lineage. The spiritual guide’s role does not include doctrinal challenges and revisions of the dogma. They are not reformers. This does preclude the learner from changing lineages or challenging doctrine if they feel there are reasons to do so. So all that Emil Cioran is really saying is that Buddhism is not his personal cup of tea.

2. 

   David Vitello

   April 6, 2019

   First, what does it mean to “practice”? What, for instance, distinguishes practice from things like routine, habit, or simply a way of life?

   Practice is a repetitive activity or exercise performed in an attempt to gain skill and improve or maintain proficiency. Whatever we want to be proficient in is involved in self-formation because its meaningful to us, so we pursue it, even if it’s unconscious. Practice can be drudgery, but also pays off. It can lead to habits, routine, and a way of life that we think is “good.” Routine, habit, and a way of life when not linked to a conscious intended practice may result in life going “naturally—blindly and  irrationally”, which isn’t so bad either I guess, or maybe it is. Maybe that’s Trumps problem.

   Repetitive practice hopefully leads to the manifestation of the “program” as routine, habit and a way fo life. I practice scales so I can improvise on them during a jam session. Unfortunately the progressions and licks become habit, routine, and define my way of being a musician. Which then gets boring and I learn a new scale or style of music. I practice weight lifting and exercise so I can be mobile, competent, and do what I need physically as a matter of routine and habit on the field. I practice experiencing thoughts acutely as possible to see what their process is like, instead of believing them to describe reality. This hopefully leads me to routinely and habitually experience thoughts as process and this may inform my way of living.

   In summary, one way to look at it is that a practice leads to routines, habits and a way of life that we find meaningful. Nothing prodigious here. Practice is programming.

   And when is a practice one of healthy self-formation as opposed to one of ideological subjugation or romantic fantasy?

   This is the crux! What is a healthy self? Who defines this? What one century seems like a healthy progressive human the next seem like an ignoramus. I see no way out of the multitude of ideologies that are forming us, most of which we are completely oblivious too. Then someone like Glenn comes along and shows us and we freak out and call him hostile. Seems even the most thought out and well intentioned attempt at healthy self-formation will be saturated in infinite unknown kosmic rays and eventually someone really smart will tear the entire process apart and show how it’s simply ideological subjugation or romantic fantasy. Nonetheless, we must try right. We must aim for the utopia and to be the best human we can be given our current situation. So we find a practice that makes sense even though our goals may be unattainable. Or just read Ligotti and bleed out in the tub.

   Second, how can we conceive of practice in an age of profound skepticism toward the transcendental orientations of our so-called spiritual traditions? What might a materialist or, in the language of Pope Francis, an “incarnational” practice look like?

   I think tantra has something to offer here. Ideally one takes another step past transcendental emptiness (or Self) into the equality and value of every kind of incarnational experience humanly possible. You can develop skills in meditation to blip out, absorb, go into samadhi, experience emptiness, but this is only half the story. You go further and examine how experience is BOTH transient, flickering, immediate and at the same time incarnational wondrous patterning. I would press for a non dual view and not favor emptiness or incarnation, but work with both as inseparable.

   Third, rather than adapt the practitioner to the existing social formation, how can we ensure that a practice develops competent, courageous agents for changing their formations in closer conformity to their moral ideals? 

   Practice can become a permanently open question and engagement. There is no one correct practice or way to practice, or thing to practice that IS IT, like the “ideal practice divorced from social formations.” Practice remains nebulous, yet important, a work in progress. We have transcended the practice leading to enlightenment model. Moral ideals are fluid, so practices to match would have to be so as well. Practices that claim to develop competent and courageous agents have likely caused a lot of suffering and would continue to do so. Someone could be very competent and courageous and do very terrible things. How do we know what type of subject formation is best?

   Can we ever step out of imposed social formation to an extent that we could claim freedom? Theres no getting completely out of idealogical subjugation right? Please explain if I’m wrong. Once we know this to be the case, a practice could be reflecting and examining ones current formation to get freedom from it enough to then use it skillfully to enjoy and navigate life when that ideology seems appropriate. We can learn to be fluid with ideologies, practices and values. Chapman writes about transitioning to a meta-systematic worldview: “You have begun to recognize that you are subject to a system (ideology). This is a first step toward a self larger than any ideology, with the greater freedom and power of reflecting on and using multiple systems.”

   The stinker is, we are always caught in subject formations, always caught in a world view that we are likely unconscious of. We lack the view to see its influence, until we simply out grow it do to boredom or are forced to evolve from it for survival, and then the process starts again.

   Not sure any of this makes sense. I don’t write about this stuff or post on the internet much but felt compelled. I think I need to write more and more often to get my thoughts clearer but decided to post this anyway.

   Thank you Glenn for all your work.

   Onward!
   David
   IAMproductized.com

3. 

   Fragments for Immanent Practice #1 – nelsongondotcom

   April 6, 2019

   […] via Fragments for Immanent Practice #1 — Speculative Non-Buddhism […]

4. 

   Brad Potts

   April 6, 2019

   My initial reactions to this post, with possible explication of fragments to come at a later time:

   “First, what does it mean to ‘practice’? What, for instance, distinguishes practice from things like routine, habit, or simply a way of life?”

   Peter Sloterdijk defines practice as “any operation that provides or improves the actor’s qualification for the next performance of the same operation, whether it is declared as practice or not.” (You Must Change Your Life, 4.) To take up a practice, then, is to enter a discipline. This necessarily involves denying oneself in some way (abstention from easy, un-thought routines) in order to obtain or become that which would have been impossible without such discipline. To practice necessarily involves some striving toward an upward trajectory. The goal of practice is to become something more. If there is stasis in one’s practice it means one of two things: 1) you’re doing the practice wrong, 2) the practice has reached a plateau and it’s time to do something else or alter the practice in some fundamental way. Practice connotes verticality; mere habit, horizontality.

   :”And when is a practice one of healthy self-formation as opposed to one of ideological subjugation or romantic fantasy?”

   Sloterdijk again: “The healthy…are those who, because they are healthy, want to grow through good asceticisms; and the sick are those who, because they are sick, plot revenge with bad asceticisms.” (You Must Change Your Life, 33.) In addition to revenge plotting, I’d add (echoing Nietzsche) that the sick seek quick and easy comfort, static “well-being,” and non-confrontational “resilience” in the face of systemic oppression. Their “bad asceticisms” involve persistent denial of their own subjugation (or of the possibility of change), suppression of retaliatory desires within themselves (or others) in the name of “respectability” and “professionalism” within systems of oppression, fixation on the status quo, and disciplining of the mind and body not for oneself but for nationalistic and/or economic abstractions.

   Not to be overlooked are the “bad asceticisms” one finds on the radical Left: a naive and apocalyptic faith in the certainty (or strong possibility) of immanent Revolution, starry-eyed dreams of the utopia that will come “After the Revolution” (ATR), relinquishment of any and all personal responsibility due to “the System,” a marked tendency toward being killjoys, and a static reverence for and inability to think beyond whatever leftist orthodoxies one is allied with (Marxist, Anarchist, Maoist, etc.).

   In sum, on the side of sickness we find: stagnation, denial, delusions of grandeur (or of impotence; see: most liberals), tunnel-vision, nostalgia, smallness (though sometimes masquerading as bigness; see: most Communists), satisfaction with either the present or with some imaginary future that will only come ATR (whenever that will be!). Sickness in this sense is a form of perverted comfort.

   To move beyond sickness and toward health a practice must constantly challenge and provide something desirable that would not be possible without the practice. It is an expansion of powers, be they individual or collective. Ideally, practices paradoxically provide simultaneous dissatisfaction and joy: the former because one can always do better, and the latter because the practitioner is becoming more powerful, larger, more expansive. A practice of this kind is not “all for tomorrow” (e.g. “getting into heaven,” ATR) and nothing for today. It is for both present and future: a moving up the limitless vertical with results one can experience NOW.

   :”Second, how can we conceive of practice in an age of profound skepticism toward the transcendental orientations of our so-called spiritual traditions? What might a materialist or, in the language of Pope Francis, an ‘incarnational’ practice look like?”

   Another term for practice is Sloterdijk’s concept of anthropotechnics: “methods of mental or physical practicing by which humans…optimize their cosmic and immunological status in the face of vague risks of living and the acute certainties of death.” (You Must Change Your Life, 10). Death is fairly self-explanatory, but “vague risks of living” can include all sorts of things: financial loss, physical or mental illness (often without the ability to reasonably pay for treatment), the catastrophes brought on by climate change, and the whole array of “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” The transcendentalist may take comfort in a better, second world that comes after this one. A materialist is left to her own devices to come to terms with the world’s fundamental, irreparable brokenness.

   I suspect the answer to the “problem of materialism” is to go deeper into materialism: into the world of the physical, the erotic, the hedonic, and the genuinely immanent. This doesn’t mean abandoning the ascetic or the ethical. On the contrary, pleasures can be increased through discipline, delay of gratification, refinement of libidinal impulses, careful study leading to mastery, and various strategies that allow for the intensification of a wide range of pleasures, both gross and subtle. Ideally this does not occur only for oneself but for others as well: a community of pleasure-connoisseurs. Note by “pleasure” I do not mean “happiness.” I’d also note it’s not for me to decide for others what is pleasurable or not.

   How does an emphasis on pleasure provide for optimization of our “immunological status in the face of vague risks of living and…death”? First it should be pointed out that relieving pain (or the threat of pain) is itself pleasurable. When the toothache is gone, you automatically feel good. To eliminate or mitigate pain in society would necessarily involve checking off many boxes on the socialist agenda. It should be kept in mind that the aim in doing this is not to fulfill some ethereal ethical requirement, but to give BODIES what they need and want. Even dying may become a pleasure (or at the very least less painful) through the administration of drugs and aestheticization of the process and the facilities in which dying occurs.

   The guiding questions that any materialist practice must answer are these: How can we discipline our bodies (bearing in mind the physical is coterminous with the mental) to experience more intense and varied pleasures? How can we construct communities of care that allow for the gratification of human social desires in all its myriad (and perhaps yet unheard-of) forms? How can we build objects (e.g. buildings, technology, art) that are hedonically fulfilling? Importantly, how do we start doing this NOW? Individually? Collectively?

   :”Third, rather than adapt the practitioner to the existing social formation, how can we ensure that a practice develops competent, courageous agents for changing their formations in closer conformity to their moral ideals?”

   I’ll return to this one…

5. 

   place9011

   April 6, 2019

   For me, practice is meditation and mindfulness and studying sutras. It is a middle way between conventional and eternal truths, conventional time and primordial time, form and emptiness, the 3-headed 8-armed demon and the 16 foot golden Buddha body. It is wandering in a dark labyrinth bouncing off walls of opposites: logic and myth, desire and no-desire, motive and no-motive, thinking and not-thinking. It is a not quite wayless way that is both practice and realization, is what Dogen calls passage (kyoryaku). Is practice/realization something we are already doing without knowing it, something we can’t avoid doing, something that whatever we do contributes to?

6. 

   Glenn Wallis

   April 7, 2019

   Hi David. Thanks for your ruminations on practice. About what constitutes/who decides “healthy,” that would be determined within the new image of practice itself. This goes along with your comments about the impossibility for stepping outside of social formation per se. We can step outside of a social formation, but always into a new one. My “trash theory” of practice is groping toward precisely an explicit reflection on these matters–matters that are typically buried and obscured within the very image of practice. So, this assumed requirement already has us pointing toward a collective, dialogical image of practice. I am suspecting it is also turning us away from the current x-buddhist, x-spiritual image, which implicitly assumes a yogic form of practice. (I think I should throw down some fragments on what I mean by an “image of practice.) Onward in thought-practice!

7. 

   Glenn Wallis

   April 7, 2019

   Thanks, place9011. But what is the actual. physical process of what you are describing? What is the image of thought/practice at work? Is it done ultimately in isolation? That is, does this ” wandering in a dark labyrinth bouncing off walls of opposites” play out principally within your own consciousness? Is the world one thing and your inner self another? About your final question, my view is that we are indeed always subject to a practice. That Sloterdijk quote was meant as a way of signaling the possibility that we are caught between externally imposed forces of formation and internally self-determining ones. But as my questions to you are groping toward, where does the one end and the other begin? What might a practice look like that refused this basic dichotomy altogether? For one thing, Dogen’s idealist assumptions would be rendered extremely questionable and problematic, wouldn’t they?

8. 

   Glenn Wallis

   April 7, 2019

   Thanks for your comment, Charles. Cioran is saying more than that. Implicit in his comments is a challenge to your view that the “spiritual guide” is such a cipher for “lineage.” The further challenge would be that “lineage” itself is anything other than yet another untheorized ideological current, drawing acolytes into its stream against their own interests. Of course, we’d have to discuss this notion of “own interests,” but a quick take on it is that we don’t need anyone to point it out to us. Another deep notion that would require dissection is your usage of the word “spiritual.” What, for instance, would it mean in an anti-idealist image of practice?

9. 

   place9011

   April 8, 2019

   In my view meditation and mindfulness are actual mind-body processes, and so is studying sutras. I use conventional truths as we all must to get through our days, but I’m open to the view that there are another class of truths that only the enlightened, like Buddha and Dogen, have open access to. It is hard to say this, which is why Buddha who taught for decades is also said never to have utter a single word. I am not enlightened. I respect Dogen’s claims about it, that it is not what we imagine it is. I would not keep studying him if what he says had no resonance in my very ordinary experience. Internal/external is one of those conventional truths that can be used and discarded. It seems not to be ultimate. Dogen is not an idealist like Hegel and Plato, did not think his way into realization/practice. His process seems more like un-thinking, not-thinking; terms I cannot define but can explore in texts. I’m in no hurry.

10. 

    Shaun Bartone

    June 24, 2019

    I think it’s important that people know a little bit more about this Emil Cioran.

    Emil Cioran was a Nazi sympathizer, including admiration for mass expulsion and extermination of the Jews. He adored Adolf Hitler and the uber-masculine authoritarianism of Nazi Germany, and equated European ‘effeminacy’ with ‘decadence’. Cioran was a Fascist who admired the utter cruelty of the Fascists, but was probably too cowardly to commit that kind of cruelty himself.

    “Cioran is so smitten by the “virile” order established by Hitler in Germany that he can’t have enough of it, so he wants a version of it transplanted into his native country. In a letter to another friend, Petru Comarnescu (December 1933), he wrote:
    [Cioran] I agree with many of the things I’ve seen here [Nazi Germany], and I am persuaded that our native good-for-nothingness could be stifled, if not eradicated, by a dictatorial regime. In Romania, only terror, brutality and infinite anxiety could still lead to some change. All Romanians should be arrested and beaten to a pulp; only after such a beating could a superficial people make history.”

    Cioran reads like a Trump supporter who is utterly convinced that the whole world is going to hell and human beings are utterly worthless piles of shit. Life is endless suffering, doomed to violence, destruction and decay. Like Trump supporters, he doesn’t think life in any society is worth living; people are better off not being born. And so he admires the Fascist Strongman who can commit mass murder and kill everyone, thus expelling them from this worthless life.

    [Cioran] “Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out every day: massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without destroying each other, without hating each other to death?”

    When Fascism finally did come to Romania in 1940, Cioran hailed it triumphantly:

    “Within a few years, when Romania’s own fascist movement, the violently anti-Semitic Iron Guard, would gain access to power for a few months in late 1940, Cioran would endorse them, if in his own ambiguous way. A “Romania in delirium,” of which he used to dream, was finally taking shape, and it was an ugly sight: Romanian Jews were hunted down and murdered in cold blood, their properties looted and burned to the ground, while the gentile population was subjected to brutal religious-fundamentalist brainwashing.”

    Read more about Cioran here: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/philosopher-failure-emil-ciorans-heights-despair/#!

11. 

    Glenn Wallis

    June 24, 2019

    Yes, all of this is well-documented. Cioran was a colossal misguided fascist shitbag as a young man. The awakening of his social conscience was a long painful slog. This is in part, I suspect, what makes his dagger so sharp.

12. 

    Trash Community Declaration – The Failed Buddhist

    September 22, 2019

    […] Glenn Wallis observes in Trash Theory #1: […]