Speculative Non-Buddhism
Don’t worry! Be happy!ruins of the buddhist real
A talking trout, citing Bobby McFerrin, commands us: “Don’t worry, by happy.” Pharrell Williams encourages us to “Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth.” Fairy Tales end “happily ever after” with dizzying frequency. Happiness takes us over the rainbow and moon to cloud nine and the top of the world.
Parting from contemporary imperatives to be and find happiness, as well as happiness’ function as both a synonym and barometer of success, this workshop takes at its core affects and emotions—the good, the bad, and the in between. Whether deployed idiomatically in everyday speech or song, or as the driving force behind a lifepath that must surely end with 2.5 kids and a white picket fence, happiness is operating on behalf of much more than smiles. We are led to ask: what, after all, is happiness? How is it tied to systems and structures of normativity and oppression? What of the unhappy, the sad, the anxious, the disgusted, and the angry? And what of the feelings that remain nameless altogether? When is a smile a sign of defeat and what forms does affective resistance take?
By way of exploring happiness and its alternatives, this seminar also centers affect theory’s recent turn to negative, ugly, and backward feelings. Beginning by questioning happiness and moving through its contraries, this seminar introduces participants to theories and thinkers on the forefront of feminist, queer, and cultural critique. Dialoguing with Sara Ahmed, we will interrogate contemporary imperatives to be happy while discussing the political, anti-racist, anti-patriarchal potency in unhappy figures like the feminist killjoy, the unhappy queer, the angry black woman, and the unhappy migrant. Through Sianne Ngai’s work, we will engage a wealth of ugly feelings such as envy, paranoia, irritation, and anxiety as indexes of capitalism’s ever-growing inequalities. In conversation with Heather Love and her notion of backwardness, we will ponder the aesthetic and political possibilities that resisting normative emotions (like pride) can offer.
Reading, thinking, and feeling together, this seminar sets out to question affective norms and (re)potentiate some of our most frequent experiences and unpleasant feelings. Its objectives are threefold, aiming to 1) introduce participants, albeit briefly, to the field of affect theory and some of its major debates, 2) articulate the political, sociocultural, and aesthetic work good and bad feelings do, and 3) bridge the gap between theory and practice, connecting readings to lived experiences in this moment of heightened political dissonance, anti-affirmation, and dissent.
Facilitator: Thomas Conners specializes in theories of affect, queer theory, and Latin American and Latinx literature. His dissertation centers contemporary U.S. Latinx narratives of loss to trace how literary manifestations of affects and emotions shift in relation to the advent of neoliberal multiculturalism. Conners is a Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania where he received his masters. He has taught a wide range of classes on culture, literature, and language at UPenn, the University of Delaware, and Ithaca College. Visit his homepage.
Date: Saturday, September 14, 10am-2pm
Cost: Pay-what-you-can, up to $90
Readings: Pdf of Seminar Reader
I think that many of the Dalai Lama’s books on “Happiness” work a certain bait and switch on “Happiness,” but it is a “Happiness” that the Zen fellow can also buy into. Namely, there is a Big H “Happiness” that is Happy to take life on its own terms, which is not always small h “happy.” It is a certain Joy to sometimes be small j joyous, a Joy to sometimes be broken hearted, a Joy to sometimes be somewhere in between. It is a Joy to sometimes be sick and scared and miserable, a Joy to sometimes be healthy and feeling fine. It is a Happiness which might not necessarily be always felt as feeling “happy” or felt at all, a kind of trust and acceptance of life right in even the hardest times when one is as far from “happy” as one can be. This is perhaps a Buddha’s Equanimious center right in the heart of this world of ups and downs and in betweens, Samsara.
Beyond that, so many people here in Samsara make themselves miserable of their own doing by the games they play between their own ears. They make “Hells” and “Heavens” and in betweens in their own heart, by their thoughts of excess desire, anger, violence and divided thinking. Our Practice is medicine for that.
Hi Jundo. Thank you for your comment. It may help to give you a sense of the most basic position of the majority of texts published on this blog to mention the following. You say: “so many people here in Samsara make themselves miserable of their own doing by the games they play between their own ears. They make “Hells” and “Heavens” and in betweens in their own heart, by their thoughts of excess desire, anger, violence and divided thinking. Our Practice is medicine for that.” A perpetually employed premise of the SNB texts is that just the opposite is the case. That is, what you are assuming as the genetrix of mind, consciousness, “heart,” “thoughts,” desire,” etc., is in fact the atomistic, individualistic phantom that the Buddha referred to as atman. The SNB texts generally assume the correctness of this x-buddhist postulate. And so we view mind, etc., as largely a social or social-linguistic phenomenon. We try, again, for the most part, not to slip in a new atman via notions such as the games played between our own ears, and so forth.
If you get a minute, I wonder if you can tell us what you think of this article by Tom Pepper: “Taking Anatman Full Strength.
Hi Glenn I do not reify the mind as atman, a fixed thing. It is more the manifold ever changing process(es) that are happening in the neurons between the ears, the entire nervous system and human body, as will as the feedback loops of external stimuli and and conditions that allow to think, including social or social-linguistic conditions. Our seeing is what happens in the visual cortex of the brain, as well as the eye organ, as well as the light which enters the eye from vibrating atoms apparently external to the eye, as well as the digestive track and lungs which allow the brain and eye to function, as well as all the earlier linguistic and other socializing that shapes our thinking in categorizing and judging what is seen as the object that appears to us as internal experience, as well as the earth we walk on, the air we breathe and all that has happened since the Big Bang (or beyond that) to allow there to be neurons and eye and photons and earth and air at all. However, that being said, we have tremendous power through our Buddhist Practice to altar in various ways that categorizing and judging of the internal experience. In such way, we can learn to experience a certain Joy to be joyous and Joy to be sad, Joy to be healthy and Joy to be sick, as well as a dropping of all categories by which was can complete transcend the seeming contrasts of sickness and health, birth and death altogether.
As to the article you linked, “Tom Pepper: “Taking Anatman Full Strength.” I am in full accord. I believe that there is no “self” for any Dharma in most radical sense. No me, no you, no this or that, nor some Grand Thing that sweeps it all in. I sometimes compare reality to a Dance that is so much motion and change, sweeping in and out of each of its dancers (which do not exist as separate being themselves, but are also that dance in motion) that there is truly no “Dance” to nail down as an object at all. (If there is not even that, then there is only nihilism, so we cannot say that the Dancing is not happening either.) Yet we see these people and things (including our own sense of being an abiding self) provisionally (someone seems to be typing this, and someone seems to be reading it). We cannot only see things from one angle too, so the “fiction” that appears between my ears also has a certain reality as that fiction (so is not a fiction in that sense), and I can learn to shape it to experience the world and my apparent relationship to it in various ways. One way is to so realize my “self,” not as a separate “dancer” but so much as this dancing (which itself is not a fixed thing) that I am willing to be swept along totally as this dance plays out. There is Joy to dance sickness, Joy to dance health, Joy to dance happy times, Joy to dance sad times, Joy to dance birth (when a separate dancer misleading appears to be spun out of the dance as a fixed thing) Joy to dance dance (when it appears the dancer evaporates back into the dance) … yet this dancing (which is not thing) dances on and on ….
By the way, I am prone to typos with a touch of dyslexia. Is there no pay to edit a post once posted?
“no way to edit … ” 🙂