Performing Irreducible and Primitive Presence

This is the Preface and Preliminaries sections of my 100-page tract on a contemporary, materialist mysticism. I am considering offering a few sessions on it at Incite Seminars. Let me know if you have any interest in joining. You can use the comment section here or email inciteseminarsphila@gmail.com.

The tract is broken up into several sections:

Part One

Preface
Preliminaries
The Spirit of Heresy
Immanent Performance
Buddhofiction
In Spirit

Part Two

Hard Propositions
Breath
Stillness
Destitution
Love-Compassion
Uchromia

Part Three

Stranger Sutra

You can read more about and order this text at the publisher’s site.

Hold on to this and you will know and understand love more and more. 
But you will not know or learn anything else—ever. 
—Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love 

Preface

Non Buddhist Mysticism: Performing Irreducible and Primitive Presence is not a work of philosophy or religion or, indeed, even of “scholarship.” It is certainly not pedagogical. It contains no knowledge or wisdom. Or, if the reader determines that it does, that is purely accidental. 

The reader will be best served by approaching this work, rather, as dramaturgy. The aim of dramaturgy is to “adapt a story to actable form,” to “assess the most compelling and appropriate means of staging a particular theatrical work.” At the heart of this work, then, is performance. The stage is the World; the actor is the reader; the dramaturgy catalyzes a lived enactment, a life. In the end, it may make more sense to call it a mystoturgy or a buddhofiction rather than a dramaturgy. The point, however, remains: this work aims to give direction for a particular lived drama.

The “method” of this dramaturgy relies heavily on the work of contemporary thinker, François Laruelle. I will not, however, provide an introduction to his work. Rather, I will follow his own somewhat anti-methodological procedure as presented in his substantial and far-ranging Introduction to Mystique non-philosophique à l’usage des contemporains. (Laruelle, 2007). Laruelle writes:

If this Introduction requires continuous reading and linear comprehension, if it is a kind of exoteric memento for a theory, it is in order to provide the reader with an organon allowing a possibly random, free, and dispersive reading “at random” of the poorly regrouped body of the text, made up of advances, cross-checks, research, and sketches of a Word comprised of lived axioms, but which gradually constitutes a canvas. (Laruelle, 2007, 7)

(Let’s think of the present work as gradually constituting, rather, a staging.) One benefit to this approach is that we don’t have to get bogged down in tedious explanations. Again, I am not interested here in philosophy or religion or any other academic discipline. I am not interested in “getting it right.” I am interested in provocation, imagination, and, ultimately dramatic enactment. This text is thus written with a certain desire precisely to disturb the usual manner of traditional presentations. As Georges Bataille says of “Molloy’s Silence,” Non Buddhist Mysticism is a work:

signing the expiration warrant of a doctrine composed in the language of dreams, preferring a speech disheveled by the wind and pitted with holes, but with the kind of authority that a ruin cannot help but have and that no mere movement can ever possess. (Bataille, 1986, 131; slightly reworded.)

We have at our disposal an extraordinary model for such an approach, namely, that of an exalted, if an ultimately heretical, Christian mystic:

The model of this disturbance of mystical language is [Meister] Eckhart…a reading of these fragments should be of a musical type….they must finally resonate in the imagination as the experience of a new thought. (Laruelle, 2007, 11)

Again, I prefer the metaphor of theater over music here, but the point stands. If my readers persist (in the folly of their reading?), they will at least find themselves thinking things, maybe even feeling and doing things, that they have likely not yet thought, felt, or done—for better or for worse.

Let’s begin…

Preliminaries

What happens when we adjoin “mysticism” and “Buddhism“? That is the question that catalyzed Non Buddhist Mysticism.

Why this question, though? Does it address anything of relevance to our lives, or does it merely initiate a speculative theory?

I believe that the question addresses matters of extreme importance. The matters that are addressed are so important because they constitute “first things,” matters that stand at the beginning. Most immediately, the issues addressed concern our relationship to authoritarian thought systems. By “thought system” I mean the many discourses that attempt to articulate what a human being is. The list of these discourses is very long. It includes philosophy, religion, anthropology, psychology, psychoanalysis, history, literary studies, neuroscience, biology, politics, education, technology, economics, aesthetics, jurisprudence, sociology, and so on. Under each heading is nestled numerous sub-headings. Under “politics,” for example, we find “political theory,” which, furthermore, includes communism, liberalism, anarchism, libertarianism, conservatism, social democracy, illiberalism, fascism, etc., each of which can be further nuanced based on differences that emerge from history, geography, context, doctrine, and so forth. 

Three crucial facts, I believe, emerge here. The first fact is that such discourses are not abstract ivory tower exercises; they are, rather, the very stuff out of which our diverse views of the world are constituted. Each of these discourses, each of these views, moreover, work through institutions, organizations, and communities within which subjects, or models of a real human being, are created and replicated. As such, they have a material existence that exerts influence on society and thus on us. In fact, this influence, I will argue, is not merely suggestive, it is decisive to an overdetermining extent. This is why I say that thought systems are “authoritarian.” (I believe that stronger words such as “domineering,” “harassing,” “totalizing,” and even “violent,” are applicable, but “authoritarian” will do for our purposes.) 

The second fact is that it is not possible to escape the cumulative effects of these authoritarian thought systems. The reason for this inescapability is that the systems comprise nothing less than our very world. This fact is captured by the German term, sometimes used in English, Weltanschauung. Although this term is typically translated as “worldview,” its meaning is much closer to ideology. The term Anschauung was coined by Immanuel Kant to indicate something like “intuition.” This is not intuition in the New Age meaning of a kind of sixth sense or hunch that ostensibly constitutes superrational knowledge. Rather, as Kant intended, “intuition” refers to the fact that the experience of space, time, and sensory objects occurs without conscious thought. Nothing like knowledge is given in an intuition. The thoughts, representations, concepts, appearances, that, in turn, ensue from such intuitions, however, do constitute our “knowledge,” specifically, our “knowledge” of the world; and this “knowledge” is determined, indeed, overdetermined, by what I am calling authoritarian thought systems (hence, the scare quotes). So, when we encounter the world—when we cross paths with an unfamiliar person, think about global warming, react to a politician’s speech, desire a new smart phone—our spontaneous response is determined by that “knowledge.” A Weltanschauung is not just an innocent “worldview.” It is the image of society’s dominant discourses reflected back to us in a manner that compels us to particular responses. This is how ideology functions; namely, as ideas and beliefs about the world embodied not (only) in our heads but in practice. As the example of desiring a smart phone shows, the social practice that is ideology, moreover, is so spontaneous as to seem the most natural and self-evident matter in the world. And in a very real and important sense, it is; namely, if we take the notion of “the world” to designate precisely that catalyzing reflection. All of this is of course somewhat simplified. But the point is that such a reflection, arising out of intuitions followed by data-encoded representations, is inescapable. This fact makes it all the more crucial to address the ways in which authoritarian thought systems act on us. 

The third fact is that, on examination, I argue, we don’t recognize ourselves in these representations of the human. And even if we did, the world we have created in conjunction with these representations is obviously deeply damaged. The suspicion arises that the cumulative effect of our authoritarian thought systems is not so much the articulation of a human and of a world as it is an articulation of an android, an anthropoid, an abstract self-model, perhaps even a zombie, vampire, or monster in Hell. Does not the interminable catastrophe of our situation justify at least consideration of such a perspective?

But, here, another question arises. Why mysticism and Buddhism? These two discourses are, after all, quite clearly sub-categories of the hyper-authoritarian thought system called “religion.” Indeed, they are arguably discourses that carry seeds of severe self- and world-negation. And, implicit in my original question is another one that I should mention here: might Buddhism and mysticism offer us valuable materials for constructing more salutary ideologies and subjectivities?

Ever since the European Enlightenment, mysticism has generally been viewed as a discourse of dreamy irrationality, hostile not merely to the world and to the flesh, but to thought itself. Of course, a mystical acolyte would see it differently, namely, as a practice for apprehending a profound truth that is wholly foreclosed to everyday consciousness. The oldest English attestations of the noun mysticism (early eighteenth century) capture something of both the method and goal of mysticism (first definition) as well as to how the uninitiated view it (second definition).

1. Mystical theology; belief in the possibility of union with or absorption into God by means of contemplation and self-surrender; belief in or devotion to the spiritual apprehension of truths inaccessible to the intellect.

2. Religious belief that is characterized by vague, obscure, or confused spirituality; a belief system based on the assumption of occult forces, mysterious supernatural agencies, etc. (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. mysticism.)

Long before the invention of the collective noun mysticism, ancient and medieval mystics understood themselves to be engaging in “contemplation” or in “the mysteries” or indeed in contemplation on the mysteries. As the first definition above indicates, such engagement also took the form of reflective analysis, hence, “mystical theology.” In all of this, the original Greek root of the term, mystikos, an initiate, is operative. The image of such an initiation is also the source of the many related associations of the term: secret, hidden, dark, mysterious, esoteric, occult.

Buddhism, too, is born in world-renunciation. Although forms of Buddhism with varying degrees of social concern have arisen from time to time—from ancient Mahayana to modern Buddhist Socialism and Buddhist Anarchism to contemporary Engaged Buddhism and even (perhaps) Mindful-this-and-that—the impulse toward self and social abnegation is arguably embedded in Buddhism’s very DNA. It certainly looms large in Buddhism’s origin myth of the Buddha’s “Great Renunciation” (Sanskrit: abhiniṣkramaṇa) of his social ties, social status, social values, and more. As such, like the yearning to be saved from the world that seeps back into Christian liberation theology, the repressed of Buddhist negation inevitably returns. Simon Critchley captures this negative tendency with his term “passive nihilism.” In a comment that brings together our two discourses, Critchley writes: “In the face of the increasing brutality of reality, the passive nihilist tries to achieve a mystical stillness, calm contemplation: ‘European Buddhism.’ In a world that is all too rapidly blowing itself to pieces, the passive nihilist closes his eyes and makes himself into an island” (Critchley, 2007, 4-5).

So, why put these particular terms, Buddhism and mysticism, to work to help us discern the first things that I mentioned?

In fact, I think the result of such a conjugation of Buddhist and mystical discourses would be wholly predictable. This is what I would predict: With a formation such as “Buddhist Mysticism” or “Mystical Buddhism” or the like, we would become ensnared in a schema whereby we are seduced into pursuing the very opposite of the first things that concern me. Namely, we would become ensnared in some transcendental Other, some super-essential yet absent Order, some eternally curative hyper-Real. The ensnaring terms are familiar to readers of our discourses: God; Buddha mind; Buddha nature; enlightenment; the divine ladder; the eightfold path; mystical union; ascension; pure awareness; the womb of the Buddha; cosmic consciousness. Requiring, as the traditional forms of mysticism and Buddhism invariably do, an apparatus of mediation—between the Absolute X and the world, between the teacher and the student, between the preceptor and the initiate, between the Wise One and the ignoramus—such a formation inescapably entails the subjection of the seeker. For this reason, I reject this orientation out of hand.

We can, however, refine the question toward more productive, and, indeed, even more rigorous, ends: What happens when we infuse future mysticism with non-buddhism?

“Future mysticism” is François Laruelle’s term for his novel usage of mystical materials conceived as a materialist spirituality. It is grounded not in a transcendental Other, but in what he calls “the radical base of the Real;” in, that is, the irreversibly immanent human (glossed throughout by my neologism, the in-human.) Unlike its transcendentally-oriented counterparts, future mysticism is thus “born in the spirit of heresy rather than sanctity.” As Eleni Lorandou writes,

Future mysticism springs from the effort to join the human with itself rather than with God…The human is emptied of its identity, becomes a Christ-subject who comes to fight for the World. (Lorandou, 2018, Abstract)

Similarly, the raw material of “non-buddhism” is “Buddhism” shorn of its transcendental representations. The result is a profound radicalization of Buddhist material. It is radicalized in the two senses of being reduced to its immanent roots and of, thereby, being robustly oriented toward interventions into the social world. The practitioner becomes a Buddha-subject, one whose wakefulness (√buddh) renders them “fit for the clash with Hell” (Laruelle, 2007, 229).

Thus, the task of Non Buddhist Mysticism is to conjugate future-mysticism and non-buddhism in order to construct a model of “first things”—those modes of thought and action that stand at the forefront of the particular ideology and subjectivity that I wish to dramatize.

I should indicate at the outset a move that I imagine some readers will receive as bizarrely counter-intuitive for a book with such a title: the subject of this discourse is one who possesses an “active indifference to union with God” and is outright “devoid of the mystical tendency or impulse” (Laruelle, 2007, 16). In a non-buddhist idiom, our subject is one whose traversal of the path to awakening has rendered them not so much indifferent to—for they burn with passion!—as thoroughly dis-identified with the very formation called “Buddhism” or “mysticism.”

In a Buddhist idiom, we are speaking here of the affect that catalyzes the search for awakening: disenchantment (Pali: nibbida). The last sentence of my book A Critique of Western Buddhism reads: “Disenchantment augurs passage” (Wallis, 2019, 172). Non Buddhist Mysticism aims to further open that passage.