Science, Culture and Integral Yoga

Wallace Stevens: The Snow Man

Rich — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 18:23:16 -0800

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

A Review of Dipesh Chakrabarty's "Provincializing Europe" by Amit Chaudhuri (London Review of Books)

Debashish — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 18:03:26 -0800

(recycled): Dipesh Chakrabarty's book "Provincializing Europe" is an important theoretical study of colonialism and its legacies in India. While [many] works outline the atrocities and dleterious effects of colonialism abound, Chakrabarti, one of the founder-members of the Subaltern Studies movement in Indian (and world) history tells the story from the lesser known side of the strategies used by Indians (in colonial Kolkata) for making an "alternate habitation" of modernity - i.e. adapting it to their own uses. In doing this, he also makes a number of important theoretical points about cultural situatedness and conditions for effective cross-cultural dialog. This review, taken from the London Review of Books is by Amit Chaudhuri, a well-known younger Indian novelist and commentator.

Darshan Day Message: Justice! (Heehs case stayed by Orissa High Court)

Rich — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 08:56:42 -0800

As reported by the Hindu, Justice A. S. Naidu of the Orissa High Court has stayed proceedings in a criminal case against Peter Heehs in the court of the subdivisional magistrate, Cuttack. This means, for those unfamiliar with legal terminology, that the case has been taken from the hands of the magistrate, and that all proceedings in the case have been halted until the matter is disposed of by the High Court. In addition the High Court has quashed (nullified) an order that had been passed by the subdivisional magistrate. The fact that the case in the lower court was stayed even before the magistrate was given a chance to hear it shows that the High Court found it to be fundamentally unsound in law

Within the limits of capitalism, economizing means taking care - Bernard Stiegler

Debashish — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 11:27:01 -0800

Over the past ten years, society as a whole (in industrialized countries and in developing countries), because of a spectacular drop in costs in the field of the electronic technologies of the fabrication of materials as well as transactions and duplications of data, acquires new practical, but also analytical and reflexive competencies, through the spread of digital apparatuses giving access to functionalities hitherto reserved to professional actors – these functionalities were hitherto organised by the industrial division of labor (and by everything coming with it, thus for example the law of intellectual property). These functionalities are those of the social networks.

This socialisation of innovation calls more and more often on social forms of apprenticeship that would appear to be self-organising and to elude the usual processes of the socialisation of innovation described as “descending” (piloted by the research/development/marketing complex: it constitutes what is more and more often called “ascendant” innovation. Ascendant innovation is a structural break with the organisation of social relations in the industrial world based on the oppositional couple production/consumption. It is founded on motivations oriented toward consistencies, that is, toward objects of what the Greeks and the Romans called skholè and otiumi, which are very specific objects of attention: the objects of knowledge (know-how, art of living, the disposition to theory, that is, to contemplation).

Digital technologies, where the technologies of information, communication and telecommunications converge and tend to amalgamate, and on the basis of which a sector of communicating objects called “internet objects” is developing, form a new technological milieu, reticulatory and relational in nature, belonging to what Simondon called an “associated technico-geographical milieu,” reconfiguring what he also called the process of psychical and collective individuation, and transforming into technologies of the spirit what hitherto has functioned essentially as technologies of control.

.................................

This is why the dynamics induced by the technological protocol of reticulation IP must be described as the effects of a process of psychical, collective and technical individuation the likes of which have never existed before. As poor and disappointing as the social-digital networks appear to us, most of the time, they bring together, henceforth, hundreds of millions of psychical individuals in a processes of collective individuation that can sometimes be evaluated as rich and inventive – if we recall on line video games, the network Second Life, Facebook, MSN, Skyblogs, etc. But we must also include collaborative platforms like Wikipedia, the open source communities in the field of software development with the Linux system, and so many other variegated initiatives that have taken off in the world – collaborative spaces of teaching, cooperatives of knowledge, and so on.

..............................

This is not to say that these technologies cannot serve the cause of the short-circuiting of transindividuation. All attentional technologies (and this digital technologies of transindividuation belong to the group of attentional technologies) are pharmacological to the strict extent that, as technologies of the formation of attention, they can be reversed and upturned into technologies of the deformation of this attention, and short-circuit this attention, that is, exclude it form the process of transindividuation and signification: they can always produce dissociation.

This is the context that ought to spur the European Union to elaborate a new industrial model, based on what I call with my friends in the association Ars Industrialis, an industrial politics of the technologies of spirit – that is, of sublimation – as the only sustainable libidinal economy. It is only on this condition that Rifkin’s proposition can supply a basis of subsistence (and a basis for a bio-politics conceives at the level of the biosphere) for a new politics of existence: a noopolitics susceptible of reversing and overcoming the deadly logic of psychopower. The actual question, for Europe as for the rest of the world, is whether it can invent with America and the other major industrialised countries, a European way of life where economizing means taking care.

AntiMatters vol 3 no 4 is out

koantum — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 00:23:04 -0800

Classicism, post-classicism and Ranjabati Sircar’s work: re-defining the terms of Indian contemporary dance discourses by Alessandra Lopez y Royo

Debashish — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 09:24:20 -0800

In this article on the work of the striking and short-lived Ranjabati Sircar, Alessandra Lopez y Royo discusses the problems of cultural decolonization in the wake of Orientalist and Nationalist constructions concerning India.

Does a nation (or any group identity formation for that mattter) have to seek its purity by denying historicity and creative change? Or is contemporary engagement with historicity a way towards the reinvention of cultural discourse as a form of body politics? The work of Ranjabati Sircar and her mother in Kolkata explored such issues which are pertinent to the fashioning of a postcolonial world. - db

Three Poems: After the Flip (III)

Rich — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 08:09:06 -0800

streaming algorithmic apparitions in a fractal Elysium
perish in the effluvium of electric oblation,
escaping the tyranny of genetics and memory,
for the magnetic field of the circuit,
for the immortal promise of the splice,

prosthetic bodies hollowed out in binary extracts,
thought traces etched in silicon,
sentient forms that vanish in a carbon dusk,
archiving an incarnation of deciphered flesh;
a zero/one existence that reconfigures the body
for desiring at the speed of light,
that remaps identity on to a frictionless destining of species
consecrating its virtuality while under cosmic erasure
without even a mote of dust to impart a corpuscular existence

with dense sea stratus shrouds after a dark night of condensation
gray fractus lifting slowly into coral sunrise;
shedding nuclei of terrestrial ash,
for an elemental omega point of air
a misty alphabet dissipating in heat radiance of incandescent star
evaporating dreams before apprehension stirs
once a soul awoke in a mantle urn,
to churn molten rock, spark consciousness in clay,
sculpt magma into obsidian blade and diamond body,
turn cytoplasm of orb into cell, skin, spasm
fire into torment, tapas, ecstasy

before the flip transfiguration was imagined
a metamorphosis of matter, ether, spirit,
now the alchemical anatomy edges its tropism
along the ph-gradient of the proto-cell,
across a firmament of code
weightless it bends toward counterfeit territories
to house its disappearance

Three Poems: Playground Meditation (II)

Rich — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 08:45:26 -0800

Playground Meditation

Its as if at twilight you’ve stepped onto a Fellini set
halos of golden light illumine miniature rainbows
refracting in the surreal slow motion steps of old men,
hunched over shadows creeping silently through clammy air;
a heat index like day time in Roma, but in this part of India,
a waxing monsoon moon has just begun to rise,

Grey beards who resist mortality, who revolt against nature,
who spit at the mugginess, make a beeline through the ardent nightfall,
piercing mist and mirages; sweating profusely,
old men whose nirvana is tightly bound to a body,
who run at a pace at which the tortoise overtook the hare,
who quiver breathlessly for the ecstasy of the finish line,
hoping to outrun death itself by making an offering to the impossible,

When they were younger the congregation gathered here
under the watchful gaze of its wise guardian, a Mother,
whose eyes wandered over this ochre playground
with the vigilance of a white-tale hawk, who; when their nest is approached
are airborne in a flash, observing swiftly the predator from above;
her protection was meted out through swift occult action,
intruders kept under surveillance, screech owls stopped from unfurling threats,
foreign worlds prevented from encroaching on the games of sun-eyed children

Once simple children who paraded lockstep over this playground sanctuary,
one arm over chest another outstretched before them
athletically pledging allegiance to the goddess nation,
but this still sticky evening a community of aging inmates file in for meditation,
initiates who long ago bargained away chance in the world, for a destiny here,
trading surrender for shelter, thought for a regiment of gymnastics and devotion,

After their ritual exercises they come here to sit and stare intensely inward
into an inner sarcophagus mind that houses the guru’s samadhi
but, the matriarch is no longer present,
her organ music replaced by the scratch of a distant analog machine,
darshan replaced by simulation, what remains is an empty chair,
a simulacra of enlightenment, a placeholder for a vacant avatar

Three Poems: Balloon Boy (I)

Rich — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 09:10:39 -0800

As SCIY charts its post human destiny, whatever that..maybe?...
Here is what my long strange trip reminiscences of it will be,in a sort of a triptych with poems, ...

Balloon Boy

Even before you awoke you knew the weather would be calm,
that take off was now imminent, across autumn’s parallax horizon
your heart started to race the dark fractured clouds streaming above;
when the squalls subsided before dawn a black hole appeared
within an atom of the storm, at that moment you knew that peak experience
could be found within a wormhole of bliss,

once a singularity became your destiny
you were certain that this last trip would be ecstatic,
like us all, you had caught a glimpse of danger,
a silver saucer, plywood bow pitched upward, riding gusts, gleaming in the sun,
streaking across open Colorado skies, a small boy huddled in darkness within.
clutching for a distant mother, dangling from a metallic balloon,

seeing the spectacle unfold, after a year of fending off demons,
you could imagine what it would be like to be that child inside;
that night you dreamed that you were six years old and you were learning to fly,
the threatening shadows of cumulonimbus whose anvils
had towered above you receded with the planet below,
as you reached escape velocity, you slept silently

Helium: atomic number: 2 atomic symbol: He
melting point: -272C @26 a.t.m boiling point: - 268.6 C near absolute 0
used in cryogenic research, expands greatly at room temperature
used for pressuring liquid fuel on Apollo lunar missions,
used to fill balloons, available at Wal-Mart in the party decorations section,
if asked; it could be used for a party you’ll be giving for your birthday,

fix the tube inside the plastic bag, pre-set the flow rate,
get comfortable, a cup of warm tea, soft lights and music,
turn the regulator on, hold the bag so it inflates,
place it loosely over head, secure the string so it does not float away,
keep the house as warm as you’d like,... relax,....
sleep,....... fall silently into azure sky

Review: Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood by Fredric Jameson (LRB)

Rich — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 13:02:02 -0800

Canada's Margret Atwood -who should be a candidate for the Nobel at some point- recent work has dealt with various dystopian themes of future societies ravaged by technological blowback and religious fundamentalism. I recently picked up her latest work, The Year of the Flood that continues where her previously acclaimed novel Oryx and Crate left off. This is a review by renown cultural historian Fredric Jameson, whose book on Utopias: Archaeologies of the Future, has been a subject of discussion on SCIY

Who will recount the pleasures of dystopia? The pity and fear of tragedy – pity for the other, fear for myself – does not seem very appropriate to a form which is collective, and in which spectator and tragic protagonist are in some sense one and the same. For the most part, dystopia has been a vehicle for political statements of some kind: sermons against overpopulation, big corporations, totalitarianism, consumerism, patriarchy, not to speak of money itself. Not coincidentally, it has also been the one science-fictional sub-genre in which more purely ‘literary’ writers have felt free to indulge: Huxley, Orwell, even the Margaret Atwood of The Handmaid’s Tale. And not unpredictably, the results of these efforts have been as amateurish as analogous experiments in the realm of the detective or crime story (from Dostoevsky to Nabokov, if you like), but including a message or thesis.[*] So-called mass cultural genres, in other words, have rules and standards as rigorous and professional as the more noble forms.

Review: Genorosity by Richard Powers (NY Times)

Rich — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 10:15:56 -0800

Richard Powers is one of America's most skilled novelist working today. His novels often explore the divide between the two cultures of science and art and issues concerning the emergence of the post-human. In his most recent work he explores the implications of science finding the happiness gene and the complex implications of enhancing future humanity for bliss. Its a good read.

"The new novel is certainly more buoyant than Powers’s last, the National Book Award-winning “Echo Maker,” which was, among other things, a dense and intricate exploration of neuropsychology with side trips into ornithology. While that book revolved around a young man who suffers serious brain damage, the central figure of “Generosity” is a woman ostensibly afflicted with hyperthymia — an excess of happiness. The new book poses the question, What if there were a happiness gene? Curiously enough it features a public debate between the two cultures, in which a tortured, charisma-challenged Nobel-winning novelist fares badly against a glibly articulate scientist arguing the case for genetic engineering."

Systems Evolution & Bio Feminism: Move Over Darwin by Rachel Armstrong (C Theory)

Rich — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 15:10:50 -0800

Synthetic form, possesses some but not all of the properties of living systems, are not alive and can be regarded as 'Living Technology'. This particular species (designed by the author -- unpublished) is able to construct magnetite tubes that resemble 'worm casts'.

.......
Biology is the study of the laws of the natural world. Nature may be regarded as the endogenous system underpinning the genesis of living organisms and their environment. In human terms, the organization of the natural world is reflected in the issues arising from the science of reproduction, heritability and the creation of life. Since these processes biologically occur within the intimate spaces of the female body, feminism has sought to represent the interests of women in the control and regulation of human reproduction in modern Western culture. To date the dominant political and social paradigms of Western society are patriarchal and invoke a dualistic worldview based on the dichotomy of male and female with an associated division of these roles in the creation of life.

This dualistic ordering of reality is also hierarchical: the principle of male over female, mind over body, culture over nature, and so on. Male, mind and culture are exercising hierarchical control over female, body, nature.

Shifting Blame is Socially Contagious

koantum — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 02:52:45 -0800
Released: 11/19/2009 9:30 PM EST
Source: University of Southern California
Newswise — Merely observing someone publicly blame an individual in an organization for a problem – even when the target is innocent – greatly increases the odds that the practice of blaming others will spread with the tenacity of the H1N1 flu, according to new research from the USC Marshall School of Business and Stanford University.

LACMA 111909 - Debashish Banerji

Debashish — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:54:24 -0800

peeling the feeling i read that language
compassion is yours for me and more
akin to the fractured golden
silences waiting timelessly around us
but sadness not for me not for you
sadness of surfaces that refuse restitution
hurtling headlong in a time of terrible ambiguity
sadness of the incomprehesible
of words that crumble and dissipate
engendering looming monsters where once was beauty
like a pungent tea the savor of irony rises.

The Hindus: An Alternative History by Wendy Doniger review by David Shulman (NYRB)

Rich — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 22:07:23 -0800

Generally, modern historians tend to stick to the terra firma of inscriptions, coins, the accounts of foreign travelers, and other precisely datable sources. There are obvious advantages to such a method, and we can certainly learn critically important things from such evidence; but one unfortunate byproduct of these choices is that modern histories of India, heavily empiricist in the narrowest sense and loaded down with unwieldy records of temple donors and royal land grants, tend to be boring.

No one would say such a thing about Wendy Doniger's new book. Experts on India and professional historians of South Asia will, no doubt, find something to disagree with on every page; but they will also, I think, be charmed by Doniger's scintillating and irreverent prose (perhaps against their better judgment) and by the unexpected, strangely delightful connections she makes. Her book is no ordinary trek through inscriptions and chronicles. It is more like a psychedelic pilgrimage to sites, ritual moments, and beloved texts scattered over three millennia. Make no mistake: it's a bumpy ride, with a provocative and erudite guide who scorns the usual rules of the historical guild. That is not to say that this improbable history lacks method. There is a sense in which Doniger is close to the indigenous South Asian, "puranic" model of writing history, of the type that put off al-Biruni.

Do not go gentle into the night (Dylan Thomas d. Nov 9, 1953)

Rich — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 08:58:01 -0800

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Dylan Thomas (d.11/9/53)

In memoriam Ron Jon Anastasia d. October 20th 2009

Rich — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:04:31 -0700

"Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep - he hath awakened from the dream of life - 'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep with phantoms an unprofitable strife." Shelley

With great sadness we announce the passing of Ron Anastasia who passed over into the greater life on Tuesday October 20th. Ron was the founding editor and inspiration for Science, Culture, Integral Yoga (SCIY). Without him this site would not exist. Our prayers and thoughts are with his wife Kim who did a remarkable job caring for him through the last year of his illness.

And death shall have no dominion
by Dylan Thomas

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

John D. Caputo: A Postmodern, Prophetic, Liberal American in Paris by Michael E. Zimmerman

Debashish — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 23:02:03 -0700

In this wide-ranging appreciation and critique of John D. Caputo, one of the most lucid and original contemporary thinkers in the shadow of Heidegger and Derrida, Michael Zimmerman unravels the far reaches and complex contradictions inherent in the tradition which he furthers.

It would be no exaggertaion to say that Caputo today stands on his own as a forefront thinker on the implications of modernity and postmodernity. Arriving out of the American branch of liberal post-Enlightenment discourse, Caputo struggles to relate, accept, reject and integrate ideas between his own moorings, the Germanic post-Nietzschean nationalistic transcendentalism of Heidegger and the Francophone post-Heideggerian deconstruction of Jacques Derrida.

Zimmerman's critique of Caputo raises very interesting and pertinent conundrums, those for example between rights and responsibilities or more importantly, between transcendentalism and obligation to "the Other." Particulalry interesting are Zimmerman's concluding reflections on evolution and the place of the human in its "presencing."

David Hockney's iPhone Passion by Lawrence Weschler (NY Review of Books)

Rich — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 19:51:53 -0700

What does it say about the state of art and technology when one of the world's great living artist uses the world's hottest technology to create his latest art exhibition.rc

Hockney first became interested in iPhones about a year ago (he grabbed the one I happened to be using right out of my hands). He acquired one of his own and began using it as a high-powered reference tool, searching out paintings on the Web and cropping appropriate details as part of the occasional polemics or appreciations with which he is wont to shower his friends.

But soon he discovered one of those newfangled iPhone applications, entitled Brushes, which allows the user digitally to smear, or draw, or fingerpaint (it's not yet entirely clear what the proper verb should be for this novel activity), to create highly sophisticated full-color images directly on the device's screen, and then to archive or send them out by e-mail. Essentially, the Brushes application gives the user a full color-wheel spectrum, from which he can choose a specific color. He can then modify that color's hue along a range of darker to lighter, and go on to fill in the entire backdrop of the screen in that color, or else fashion subsequent brushstrokes, variously narrower or thicker, and more or less transparent, according to need, by dragging his finger across the screen, progressively layering the emerging image with as many such daubings as he desires.

Over the past six months, Hockney has fashioned literally hundreds, probably over a thousand, such images, often sending out four or five a day to a group of about a dozen friends, and not really caring what happens to them after that. (He assumes the friends pass them along through the digital ether.) These are, mind you, not second-generation digital copies of images that exist in some other medium: their digital expression constitutes the sole (albeit multiple) original of the image.

Hockney and Camera Obscura

Rich — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 19:50:49 -0700

Hockney has an interesting if not somewhat controversial theory of early technology in the arts of the Old Masters.

Hockney bio

Rich — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 19:43:34 -0700
Hockney, David (1937- ). British painter, draughtsman, printmaker, photographer, and designer. After a brilliant prize-winning career as a student at the Royal College of Art, Hockney had achieved international success by the time he was in his mid-20s, and has since consolidated his position as by far the best-known British artist of his generation.

A reprieve from Arctic ice meltdown?

Ron — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 09:09:10 -0700
(Excerpted from an article on the New York Times website)

October 6, 2009, 11:31 am

New York Times blog

Over the Summer, a Spread of Thicker Arctic Ice

By Andrew C. Revkin

The National Snow and Ice Data Center released its summary of summer sea-ice conditions in the Arctic on Tuesday, noting a substantial expansion of the extent of “second-year ice” — floes thick enough to have persisted through two summers of melting. The result could be a reprieve, at least for a while, from the recent stretch of remarkable summer meltdowns.

According to the center, second-year ice this summer made up 32 percent of the total ice cover on the Arctic Ocean, compared with 21 percent in 2007 and 9 percent in 2008. The percentage of ice that was many years old, forming thick pancaked expanses, was at its lowest since satellite observations began 30 years ago. But that could change next year as the second-year ice adds mass through the long winter freeze. ...

Jackson 2Bears: The Technological Unconscious, Animism and the Uncanny

Rich — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 12:50:48 -0700

This is an excellent attempt to think technology in terms of art and spirituality. Jackson 2Bears is both a member of the Haudenosaunee First Nations Peoples of Canada and an astute Theorist of culture and technology. His presentation given in this video at the Critical Digital Studies Workshop sponsored by Arthur Kroker and The University of Victoria is an excellent attempt to think through the technological unconscious in terms of the collective unconscious and traditional spirituality of the First Nations People. His comparison of the role of the mask in indigenous spirituality and the virtual reality mask that transports us to cyberspace is a fascinating one.

Jackson 2Bears The Technological Unconscious, Animism and the Uncanny This paper takes an interdisciplinary approach to the question of technology by examining points of convergence between Jungian psychoanalysis and Indigenous philosophy. The theoretical trajectory of the text will consider traditional Haudenosaunee cosmologies as a way of re-thinking contemporary questions about our digital present and future, in turn proposing possible means of engagement and resistance. Central to the text is a critical analysis of select writings on the topic of dreams and the unconscious by Carl Jung, while at the same time reflecting on traditional Indigenous teachings extracted from the Haudenosaunee theory of dreams. The end goal of the text is to develop an Indigenous theory of technology that is faithful to traditional teachings, while addressing the uncanny essence of digitality in contemporary times.

Global warming impacts sooner & worse than expected ?

Ron — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 10:36:34 -0700

Thanks to Rakesh for suggesting this article. -ra

(Excerpted from an article on the New York Times website)

Op-Ed Columnist
Cassandras of Climate

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: September 27, 2009
Every once in a while I feel despair over the fate of the planet. If you’ve been following climate science, you know what I mean: the sense that we’re hurtling toward catastrophe but nobody wants to hear about it or do anything to avert it.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Paul Krugman

And here’s the thing: I’m not engaging in hyperbole. These days, dire warnings aren’t the delusional raving of cranks. They’re what come out of the most widely respected climate models, devised by the leading researchers. The prognosis for the planet has gotten much, much worse in just the last few years.
What’s driving this new pessimism? ...

You shouldn't believe everything you read, yet according to a classic psychology study at first we can't help it

koantum — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 05:21:57 -0700

Believing is not a two-stage process involving first understanding then believing. Instead understanding is believing, a fraction of a second after reading it, you believe it until some other critical faculty kicks in to change your mind.

Arundati Roy on sham Democracy in India

Rich — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:38:44 -0700

In a country where one can be arrested for writing a book because it offends the sentiments of religious devotees or criticizing or for criticizing the judiciary this interview with Arundati Roy addresses sham democracy in India. One has to confront Arundati one by one on the issues she raises for social justice that are wide ranging and concern Maoist in Orissa, armed occupation in Kashmir, the ever latent potential for genocide within the power regimes couched within Hindu or Islamic fundamentalist movements or even more to the point, the model of Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalism for ethnic cleansing that is being adapted by the Home Minister (and former Enron lawyer) India's new neo-liberal elite, its global corporations to move 85% of the population from the villages and countryside into mega-city slums, appropriating the lands of indigenous peoples, to harvest for themselves India's last remaining natural mineral resources, such as bauxite....

Conference Proceedings: Fundamentalism and the Future

Debashish — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 00:57:30 -0700

The conference Fundamentalism and the Future was held at the California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco on Friday, September 11 and Saturday, September 12, 2009. The conference was hosted by the Department of Asian and Comparative Studies.

Here are the audio recordings of the conference proceedings.

A Life Of Its Own: Where Will Synthetic Biology Lead Us? by Michael Specter (The New Yorker)

Rich — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 10:11:28 -0700

What happens to the yoga of the cells when cells become synthetic? rc.

"Synthetic biology is changing so rapidly that predictions seem pointless. Even that fact presents people like Endy with a new kind of problem. “Wayne Gretzky once said, ‘I skate to where the puck is going to be.’ That’s what you do to become a great hockey player,” Endy told me. “But where do you skate when the puck is accelerating at the speed of a rocket, when the trajectory is impossible to follow? Whom do you hire and what do we ask them to do? Because what preoccupies our finest minds today will be a seventh-grade science project in five years. Or three years.

“We are surfing an exponential now, and, even for people who pay attention, surfing an exponential is a really tricky thing to do. And when the exponential you are surfing has the capacity to impact the world in such a fundamental way, in ways we have never before considered, how do you even talk about that? ”

For decades, people have invoked Moore’s law: the number of transistors that could fit onto a silicon chip would double every two years, and so would the power of computers. When the I.B.M. 360 computer was released, in 1964, the top model came with eight megabytes of main memory, and cost more than two million dollars. Today, cell phones with a thousand times the memory of that computer can be bought for about a hundred dollars.

In 2001, Rob Carlson, then a research fellow at the Molecular Sciences Institute, in Berkeley, decided to examine a similar phenomenon: the speed at which the capacity to synthesize DNA was growing. He produced what has come to be known as the Carlson curve"....

New direct-drive turbines to lower cost of offshore wind energy.

Ron — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 12:27:42 -0700
(Excerpted from an article on the MIT Technology Review website)

Wednesday, September 23, 2009
GE Grabs Gearless Wind Turbines

New direct-drive turbines promise to lower the cost of offshore wind energy.

By Prachi Patel

One speed: ScanWind has been testing gearless 3.5-megawatt wind turbines on the Norwegian coast since 2003.
Credit: GE

With a new purchase, GE is betting on an early-stage turbine technology that could make offshore wind farms cheaper to maintain. The acquisition of ScanWind, based in Trondheim, Norway, has also secured GE a foothold in the growing offshore wind energy market.

Instead of gearboxes, ScanWind uses a novel direct-drive generator technology in its 3.5-megawatt turbines. This makes the turbines more reliable, the company says, by cutting downtime and repair costs--an especially important consideration for turbines offshore, where it's more expensive to send technicians for maintenance. ScanWind has been testing the turbines on the Norwegian coast since 2003.

GE, based in Fairfield, CT, is the world's second-largest maker of wind turbines, with more than 12,000 turbines installed globally. But GE's offshore wind energy portfolio has been minimal so far, and the company wants to expand its offshore offerings. By acquiring ScanWind, transferring its expertise and understanding of onshore wind, and adding technologies such as remote monitoring and sensing, GE hopes it can make a solid, cost-effective offshore wind product. ...

Tribute to J.C. by K. Curtis Lyle (from Electric Church)

Debashish — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:14:34 -0700

K. Curtis Lyle is a contemporary African-American poet born and raised in Los Angeles, California. He was a founding member of the Watts Writers Workshop, joining it in 1966 and becoming a prominent member of the Los Angeles renaissance the group represented. He has taught, lectured and read his poetry in performance in the major intellectual and urban centers of North America. Lyle is committed to restoring poetry to the forefront of performing and ritual arts, speaking from a fundamental grounding in unity and ecstatic religious experience, seeking community and communion. He currently lives in St. Louis, Missouri.

The following poem is taken from his book Electric Church, published in 2003.

John Coltrane, Avant Garde Jazz and the Evolution of "My Favorite Things" by Scott Anderson

Debashish — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 18:33:43 -0700

Today, many people of a younger generation, musicians and non-musicians alike, are looking for what Michael Bruce McDonald calls “an experience of the sacred” (275). In this search they are rediscovering avant garde jazz for the numinous properties with which it was often consciously imbued by its greatest purveyors, notably Sun Ra (who claimed to hail from the planet Saturn and sought to produce music that corroborated his claim) and John Coltrane (whose fascination with “outer space” themes manifested itself more in mystical and spiritual explorations than in science-fiction fantasies). - Scott Anderson

Next week being John Coltrane's (1926-1967) birthday (September 23), the following piece is meant to be in memory of one of the giants of our era who pushed the bounds of cultural expressiom across the boundary that separates the human past from a numinous posthuman future.

Scott Anderson's paper looks at the evolution of John Coltrane's music through a consideration of four recordings of Coltrane's rendition of "My Favirote Things."

This entry includes part of a late live rendition of the piece to give a sense of what Anderson is talking about.

The Holy Grail of the Unconscious : Jung's Red Book (N.Y. Times Magazine)

Rich — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:13:08 -0700

Although they are very different texts that perhaps address different ranges of consciousness there are certainly some similarities in this story of Jung's Red Book - in which he worked out his inner experiences during his quest for individuation (and at times just for sanity) - and Sri Aurobindo's Record of Yoga, in that the public -and even many followers- were largely unaware of these personal records of inner experiences that seem to have emerged quite unexpectedly long after they were written.

The book tells the story of Jung trying to face down his own demons as they emerged from the shadows. The results are humiliating, sometimes unsavory. In it, Jung travels the land of the dead, falls in love with a woman he later realizes is his sister, gets squeezed by a giant serpent and, in one terrifying moment, eats the liver of a little child. (“I swallow with desperate efforts — it is impossible — once again and once again — I almost faint — it is done.”) At one point, even the devil criticizes Jung as hateful.

He worked on his red book — and he called it just that, the Red Book — on and off for about 16 years, long after his personal crisis had passed, but he never managed to finish it. He actively fretted over it, wondering whether to have it published and face ridicule from his scientifically oriented peers or to put it in a drawer and forget it. Regarding the significance of what the book contained, however, Jung was unequivocal. “All my works, all my creative activity,” he would recall later, “has come from those initial fantasies and dreams.”

Advanced Solar Panels Coming to Market

Ron — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 12:16:45 -0700
(Excerpted from an article on the MIT Technology Review website)

Nanosolar's new factory could help lower the price of solar power, if the market cooperates.
A promising type of solar-power technology has moved a step closer to mass production. Nanosolar, based in San Jose, CA, has opened an automated facility for manufacturing its solar panels, which are made by printing a semiconductor material called CIGS on aluminum foil. The manufacturing facility is located in Germany, where government incentives have created a large market for solar panels. Nanosolar has the potential to make 640 megawatts' worth of solar panels there every year.
Solar cells made of the CIGS semiconductor, which is composed of copper, indium, gallium, and selenium, have long been considered a potential challenger to conventional solar cells made of silicon. At least in the lab, CIGS cells have reached efficiencies comparable to silicon-based solar cells. And in theory, they could be made using inexpensive printing processes, leading to much less expensive solar power. But developing manufacturing processes that maintain the high efficiencies has proven difficult.

Toward a Theory of Phantasmal Media: An Imaginative Cognition- and Computation-Based Approach to Digital Media D. Fox Harrell (C Theory)

Rich — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 09:53:21 -0700
The issue of the interface between creative imagination and the regime of computation has been explored several times on SCIY. The difference between imaginito phantasie (fancy or associative imagination) and Imaginito vera (true or creative imagination) was a theme developed by the medieval Alchemist and carried on in the work of such romantics poets as Coleridge who makes the following distinction between Fancy and (creative) Imagination:

The distinction between Fancy and the Imagination rest on the fact that Fancy was concerned with the mechanical operations of the mind, those which are responsible for the passive accumulation of data and the storage of such data in the memory. Imagination, on the other hand, described the "mysterious power," which extracted from such data, "hidden ideas and meaning." It also determined "the various operations of constructive and inventive genius."

What occurs to the eidetic powers of mind when it resides in a mental environment that is ceaselessly bombarded by media images that represent the collective "fancy" of neo-liberal globalization? The question of creating computational platforms to facilitate the interface between the creative imagination of the human subject and the design of software programs will perhaps be an important one for maintaining the integrity of the creative faculties of human consciousness in its future evolution. This article on phantasmal media is a fascinating exploration of the theme. rc.

(Loss, Undersea is a phantasmal media work by the author in which a character dynamically transforms according to undersea metaphors - as in the silhouettes on the right - and poetry is dynamically generated according to affective constraints.)

Rendering this vision of computational expression tangible requires new terminology. The name given to ideal examples of the type of meaning making systems considered in this article is phantasmal media. The term "phantasmal" may summon, for some readers, mental pictures of ghosts, spooks, apparitions, and specters. Yet here it does not refer to those supernatural entities, but rather to the human capacity to construct any other mental images both consciously and unconsciously. The focus is on two related perspectives on the phantasmal. Regarding the first perspective, that phantasmata are conscious mental images, thinkers such as W. J. T. Mitchell have argued that they are closely related to visual images and verbal images as well. [10] Such mental images comprise a range of meaning phenomena. They are imaginative meanings, but crucially are not restricted to language. They can refer to embodied sensations, cultural contexts, and more abstract ideas. Certainly, all of our engagements with media artifacts are accompanied by the mental work of interpretation. Yet, the focus of the concept of phantasmal media is a type of work that often concentrates (primarily through interactive and generative multimedia) on creating narrative and poetic mental imagery to express artistic and critical statements about the world.....

The Irony of Time: Baghdad in early Islamic History - Gaston Wiet

Debashish — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 10:24:27 -0700

In this book chapter from Gaston Wiet's Baghdad: Metropolis of the Abbasid Caliphate one gets a bird's eye view of the center of a cosmopolitan world civilization, marked by the Pax Islamica, from the 8th to 12th c.

The conduit for the exchange and tranferrence of knowledge between east and west, Baghdad became also the center of scholarship which initiated the European Renaissance and hence, led to the modern world.

Seen in this light, it is a peculiar irony to contemplate the fate of this queen of cities today.

Astronomers Plan Galaxy-Sized Observatory For Gravitational Waves

Ron — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 15:57:31 -0700
(Excerpted from an article on the MIT Technology Review website)

An array of pulsars should shimmer as gravitational waves wash over it, making a galaxy-sized observatory

Gravitational waves squash and stretch space as they travel through the universe. Current attempts to spot them involve monitoring a region of space several kilometres across on Earth for the tell tale signs of this squeezing. Although great things are expcted, these experiments have so far thrown up precisely nothing.

But there's another way. Gravitational waves should also stretch and squeeze pulsars as they pass by, subtly changing the radio pulses they produce. So by monitoring an array of pulsars throughout the galaxy, astronomers should be able to see the effects of nanohertz to microhertz gravitational waves passing by. The array of pulsars should effectively shimmer as the waves wash over it, like a grid of buoys bobbing on the ocean.
So the plan is to keep a beedy eye on an array of carefully chosen pulsars. It's called the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves or NANOGrav and it's part of an international effort to spot gravitational waves in this way. ...

Group Polarization: The Trend to Extreme Decisions

koantum — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 01:30:02 -0700

PSYBLOG:

Say you put 10 people in a room and asked them to design a car. Would they design something average or something wacky? Would they be more likely to come up with the Ford Focus or "The Homer", designed by Homer Simpson in this classic episode of The Simpsons?

The bottom line: nurturing dissent in a group by encouraging the discussion of multiple perspectives and critical viewpoints counteracts the spontaneous phenomenon of group polarization.

The Alien Home by Pico Iyer

Debashish — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 23:25:21 -0700

In this last chapter of his autobiographical novel The Global Soul, Pico Iyer captures the peculiar malaise of contemporary modernity - the uncertainty of belonging, the illusory surface of global consumerism, the search for traditional fixities.

Perhaps underlying this statement of alien homecoming lies a tragic absurdism; perhaps it opens a door on an alternate modernity; perhaps it is a call for an engaged postmodernity. Iyer leaves us with ambiguous questions.

How to Create Quantum Superpositions of Living Things

Ron — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 16:00:35 -0700
(Excerpted from an article on the MIT Technology Review website)

First photons, atoms and molecules. Now physicists want to create a quantum superposition of a virus, which will allow them to perform Schrodinger's Cat experiment for real.

One of the great challenges for quantum physicists is to find quantum behaviour in macroscopic objects. There are obvious examples of quantum behaviour on a large scale, such as superconductivity and superfluidity, but physicists want more.

Having created quantum superpositions of photons, electrons, atoms and even molecules, one of the current obsessions is to create a quantum superposition of a living thing, such as a virus. The question is how to do this and whether it makes any sense to say these things are living at all.
This is an experiment that will be hard. But today Oriol Romero-Isart from the Max-Planck-Institut fur Quantenoptik in Germany and a few buddies suggest that it is achievable with current technology and outline the challenges that will have to be tackled to pull it off. ...

Hindutva Undermines the Pristine Values of Hinduism

koantum — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 05:37:36 -0700
MAINSTREAM, VOL XLVII, NO 39, SEPTEMBER 12, 2009
By Sailendra Nath Ghosh
The RSS is deeply in love with the word “Hindu”, shorn of Hinduism’s values....
...Hindutva was very different from Sri Aurobindo’s inclusive concept of Hindu nationalism which was not at all divisive....
...At this moment, a heart-warming event is taking place in Delhi’s Tihar Jail. The Hindu inmates are observing Roza (that is, fasting in the daytime) along with their Muslim fellow-prisoners and sharing the food brought by their kins in the evenings, in this month of Ramzan. This is quintessentially Indian civilisation. Bonhomie between religious and racial communities is its credo. Sectarian ideologies savouring sectarianism are incongruous with it....

The Rise of the Rest by Fareed Zakaria

Debashish — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 19:49:31 -0700

Fareed Zakaria, author of "The Post-American World" reflects here on globalization as America's principal postmodern export and the contours of a world in the making as a consequence. This speculative piece may be an interesting companion read to Paul Valery's essay "Crisis of the Mind." Like Valery, though without his Eurocentric bias, Zakaria expresses concern over the dwindling world hegemony of "the west" (Europe for Valery, America for Zakaria). But unlike Valery, Zakaria hardly addresses the discourse of subject-formation or of the struggle for autonomy against its determining regime.

Crisis of the Mind by Paul Valery

Debashish — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 19:14:39 -0700

"The Crisis of the Mind" was written by by the French Symbolist poet and essayist Paul Valery at the request of John Middleton Murry. "La Crise de l'esprit" originally appeared in English, in two parts, in The Athenaeum (London), April 11 and May 2, 1919. The French text was published the same year in the August number of La Nouvelle Revue Française.

Valery's post WWI text, read today, bears a curiously contemporary prescience in its final aphoristic paragraphs, though it is also marked by the pervaisve Eurocentrism of the turn of the 19th/20th c. It also illustrates a form of poetic thinking and writing style which braids a scientific temper with Nietzschean mysticism in what he calls "a physics of the imagination."

The striking yet understated ending points to the way ahead for contemporary man in the thought of Valery (following in the wake of Mallarme and other French modernist thinkers). It lies in a new freedom at the margins of modernity and its social determinism. In thinking this self-reconstitution, the human can perhaps reconfigure himself in his historicity.

Censorship as its own art form: 'Censoring an Iranian Love Story' by Shahriar Mandanipour (review LA Times)

Rich — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 09:43:03 -0700

Censorship is an endlessly fascinating subject; a puzzle box, a Russian nesting doll in which the writer's truth is buried and often lost. Czeslaw Milosz's 1953 classic "The Captive Mind" revealed the insidious and creative ways that censorship enters and inhabits the mind of the artist. Shahriar Mandanipour, an Iranian film critic and the editor of a literary journal in Iran, was not allowed to publish fiction from 1992 to 1997. He came to the United States in 2006. "Censoring an Iranian Love Story" is his first book published in English. In this novel, a writer (also named Shahriar Mandanipour and the author's alter ego) tries to write the story of Sara and Dara, a young couple in love, and finds himself in a metaphorical burka. He is forced to change his story, characters and dialogue to comply with the restrictions of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance in the person of a Dostoevskian character, Mr. Petrovich.

"I am an Iranian writer tired of writing dark and bitter stories," he tells his reader, "stories populated by ghosts and dead narrators with predictable endings of death and destruction. I am a writer who at the threshold of fifty has understood that the purportedly real world around us has enough death and destruction and sorrow, and that I did not have the right to add even more defeat and hopelessness to it with my stories." The key word here is, of course, "purportedly."

Censorship, seen as its own art form, is just another way of messing with reality. It's hard enough to generate one's own ideas without having someone else's superimposed over them, but the fictional Mandanipour tries.

Health Insurance, Pure Economy of Desire by The Critical Art Ensemble

Debashish — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 21:30:56 -0700

The Critical Art Ensemble is a collective of five artists of various specializations dedicated to exploring the intersections between art, technology, radical politics and critical theory.
Here we carry part of one of their Tactical Projects on "The Therapeutic State."

Objectivity by Lorraine Datson & Peter Galison (Book Review by Norberto Serpente)

Rich — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 19:59:11 -0700

In light of the invectives that were hurled decrying Peter Heehs as "Mr. Objective" due to the academic style of his biography of Sri Aurobindo, it should give us pause to note that the phenomena of "objectivity" did not emerge fully formed from the head of Zeus and that in fact "objectivity" has a Foucauldian history all its own. A history that that is intrinsically coupled to the evolution of the scientific subject and that has undergone several epistimic ruptures over the centuries that has radically changed the meaning of the concept.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2008.

"Objectivity has a history, and it is full of surprises. In Objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison chart the emergence of objectivity in the mid-nineteenth-century sciences—and show how the concept differs from its alternatives, truth-to-nature and trained judgment. This is a story of lofty epistemic ideals fused with workaday practices in the making of scientific images."

"This richly illustrated book deeply renews the meaning of accurate reproduction by showing how many ways there have been to be 'true to nature.' Art, science, and reproduction techniques are merged to show that 'things in themselves' can be presented with their vast and beautiful company. This splendid book will be for many years the ultimate compendium on the joint history of objectivity and visualization."

—Bruno Latour, author of Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy

As Daston and Galison argue, atlases shape the subjects as well as the objects of science. To pursue objectivity—or truth-to-nature or trained judgment—is simultaneously to cultivate a distinctive scientific self wherein knowing and knower converge. Moreover, the very point at which they visibly converge is in the very act of seeing not as a separate individual but as a member of a particular scientific community. Embedded in the atlas image, therefore, are the traces of consequential choices about knowledge, persona, and collective sight. Objectivity is a book addressed to anyone interested in the elusive and crucial notion of objectivity—and in what it means to peer into the world scientifically.

Objectivity by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison is not just a fine book, it is that rare thing, a great book. It is almost shockingly original, genuinely profound, and amazingly learned without ever being pedantic. It should force everyone interested in science and its history or in objectivity and its history to think more deeply about what they think they already know. It gives me great satisfaction to learn that thinking and writing of this brilliance and depth are still going on, even in this age of consumerism and mass markets.”

— Hilary Putnam, author of Ethics without Ontology

“Historically brilliant, philosophically profound, and beautifully written, Objectivity will be the focus of discussion for decades to come. At one and the same time a history of scientific objectivity and a history of the scientific self, rarely have rigor and imagination been combined so seamlessly and to such deep effect. No one who opens this book can fail to be engaged and provoked by its energy, ideas, and arguments. One emerges from reading it as if from a series of intellectual earthquakes — sound but no longer safe.”

— Arnold Davidson, author of The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts

Integral Psychology – Theorizing its Disciplinary Boundaries

Debashish — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 18:11:50 -0700

The following is a revised transcript of a talk given by me at the Cultural Integration Fellowship, San Francisco in 2008 and carried in the current edition of Sraddha, a journal of the Sri Aurobindo Bhavan, Kolkata.

In this, I bring into dialog the epistemic boundaries of the western academic discipline of Psychology and Sri Aurobindo's formulation of Integral Yoga, so as to reflect on the disciplinary formation of a field of Integral Psychology. What would such a field hold out and how would it impact the existing assumptions of both Psychology and Yoga? The insertion of such a discipline into the academy is not a trivial task. It is a project fraught with danger and possibility, which needs to be carefully negotiated. - db

On Universalism: In Debate with Alain Badiou by Etienne Balibar

Debashish — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 00:21:16 -0700

Etienne Balibar (1942- ) is a French philosopher and political theorist who was among the principal students of Louis Althusser. In this thought dialog with Alain Badiou (a worthy counterpart of the interview on Universalism carried on sciy earlier), Balibar conducts a sophisticated investigation on universalism - its dichotomies, its establishment as truth and the responsibility implicit in its pursuit.

Why is universalism always ridden with contradiction? Can it be spoken of in a singular fashion or can it be reduced to the proper side of a single dichotomy? In tracing a speculative history of universality, Balibar moves through the variety of dichotomous displacements through history to bring to focus the intrinsically dialectical essence of universalism.

This leads him to the political question of the establishment of universalism. Balibar extends the philosophical discourse of dialectics to the perpetuallly revolutionary essence of the politics of universalism - that is, it is in ceaseless reviolution that the single-dual ideal of what Balibar calls "equaliberty" becomes the quasi-transcendental horizon of realization. One may say that social consciousness expands in this process in unpredictable dimensions.

Finally, on the question of the responsibility intrinsic to the pursuit of universalism, Balibar points out how the question of violence is also intrinsic to it. This question is not merely an external or extensive one, a fact of revolution as mentioned before, but an internal and intensive responsibility - that of the violence of internal exclusivism. This is the specter of the terror of totalism or absolutism which we are so familiar with today. Balibar points to the always present specter of this danger and something the responsibility of the pursuit of universalism needs to be constantly vigilant about. - db

Capitalism a Love Story by Michael Moore

Rich — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 17:37:16 -0700

Michael Moore returns with economic barbarism and class warfare on his mind.

An Interview with Alain Badiou: “Universal Truths & the Question of Religion” by Adam S. Miller, Journal of Philosophy and Scripture

Debashish — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 01:11:48 -0700

Is universalism an ideology in the self-proclaimed name of the Human which is meant to spread its normative hegemony over all forms of particularism, with a discursive disciplinary and regulative mechanism so ubiquitous that it disappears into unnoticeability? And in doing so, does it indeed wipe out all particularisms, or being itself a particularism pretending to be undeniably universal, does it instead enable a numberless plethora of fundamentalistic particularims to be equal claimants to the right of universalism in innumerable contested definitions of the Human?

What then happens to universalism? Must we discsard this utopian ideal of the Enlightenment in the rubbish heap of History? Or is it an alternate locus that we must seek for it, a locus in which difference can inhere at the horizon of identity ? Alain Badiou (1937- ), prominent French philosopher and former chair of Philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure, addrersses these questions in a book on St. Paul, where he develops his notion of universalism as a revolutionary aspect of becoming rooted in the idea of the Event. Such an Event cannot be predicted outside the appearance of dialectical contradictions, but in its appearance, such contradications lose their contradictory significance, either in an indifference or in a coexistence where new properties subsume their significance beyond contradiction. Perhaps it may not be too far to apply Sri Aurobindo's phrase to this event-ual nature of the becoming: "Trasncendence transfigures," though to Badiou such transcendence does not bear any inevitability or predictability to it.

In the present interview with Adam S. Miller of the Journal of Philosophy and Scripture, Badiou expands on his views on universalism and also inflects his positions vis-a-vis that of Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Zizek. - db

The Fundamentalism Project: A series from the University of Chicago Press Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, Editors

Rich — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 17:15:44 -0700

The Fundamentalism Project (1991–95), a series of five volumes edited by the American scholars Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby. Marty and Appleby viewed fundamentalism primarily as the militant rejection of secular modernity. The Fundamentalism Project has produced the definitive text on the phenomena of Fundamentalism

15th August 2009: 137th Birth Anniversay of Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950)

Debashish — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 09:55:20 -0700

The Myth of the New India by Pankaj Mishra

Debashish — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 00:24:07 -0700

In this article, Pankaj Mishra considers contemporary India's middle class myth of emerging economic superstardom. Is this a reality or a make-believe narrative swallowed as part of neo-liberal globalization with its own convenient interests? According to Mishra, "Many serious problems confront India. They are unlikely to be solved as long as the wealthy, both inside and outside the country, choose to believe their own complacent myths."

AntiMatters New Issue Released

koantum — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 18:26:23 -0700

The new issue of AntiMatters (Vol. 3 No. 3, dated August 15, 2009) is out.

Home Page

Table of Contents

Introduction to the 9th Issue

Les Paul 1915-2009

Rich — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 15:44:42 -0700

Les Paul, the guitar virtuoso and inventor who revolutionized music and created rock 'n' roll as surely as Elvis Presley and the Beatles by developing the solid-body electric guitar and multitrack recording, died Thursday at age 94. (LA Times)

Les pioneered sound recording technology and simultaneously fathered the sound of the "electric guitar" that made rock & roll possible. And what an epistemic rupture that triggered!!!

White Noise by Don Delillo - review by Jayne Ann Phillps (Ny Times)

Rich — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 11:53:44 -0700

Another riff on White Noise

White Noise is the eighth novel by Don DeLillo, and is an example of postmodern literature. Widely considered his "breakout" work, the book won the National Book Award in 1985 and brought him to the attention of a much larger audience. Time Magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.

Code Drifts: Tethered to Mobility, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker

Rich — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 15:24:14 -0700

Riffing off the concept of evolutionary science known as "genetic drift" the Krokers use "code drift" to describe the evolution of the global genome and the technological destining of our species. In the scenario they theorize "code drift" is the evolutionary driver of the post-human body that is tethered to its digital mobility..

In this lecture they conclude with consideration of McLuhan and Teilhard whose prophetic vision of the exteriorizion of consciousness forewarned of a planetary bio-electric nervous system, that functions now as the cultural epigenesis of our post-human bodies . The Krokers claims the originating Nietzschean event of the eclipse of one human species form and the emergence of its networked successor has already occurred.

"Code drift is the spectral destiny of the story of technology. No necessary message, no final meaning, no definite goal: only a digital culture drifting in complex streams of social networking technologies filtered here and there with sudden changes in code frequencies, moving at the speed of random fluctuations, always seeking to make of the question of identity a sampling error, to connect with the broken energy flows of ruptures, conjurations, unintelligibility, bifurcations. When the Book of Genesis gives way to the Book of (Information) Genetics, we are suddenly exited into a culture of epigenesis with code drifts as its primary impulse, all the human anxiety of being tethered to mobility its primary affect, and the novel historical experience of literally being skinned by technology as the body is increasingly wrapped in the new nervous system that is the global data genome"

White Noise - a book review by William E. Connolly

Debashish — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 13:53:08 -0700

This book review by William Connolly, one of the most original political philosophers of our times, turns its attention on Stephen White's book Sustaining Affirmation, inflected with the sensibility of contingent and unpredictable becoming borrowed from Don DeLillo's novel White Noise. But much more than a book review, it is an engagement with White's text so as to affirm a number of positions held by Connolly himself, pertaining to his existential faith in immanent naturalism and the ontological condiitons for an evolutionary pluralism in the micropolitcs of contemporarary social life.

Connolly constellates his thought with what he calls the radical Enlightenment of Spinoza and a lineage he draws from this leading through Nietzsche, Bergson, Foucault and Deleuze. What one may see as common among these thinkers is the affirmation of a creative Becoming-without-Being or a Being as Becoming. That there is an infinte abundance to this which exceeds the human power of thought but to which thought can lend itself as an instrument of meaning and a part of its generous creative process, form core aspects of the faith which Connolly calls "immanent naturalism." Among the most pertinent causes driving this geneaolgy of postmodern thinking is the reaction against ontotheology, where a transcendental Being is inscribed with the name of God and assimilated into a fundamentalist metaphysics with an ideology, teleology, theology and normative boundaries to differentiate an inside and outside and institutional strutures to enforce these boundaries. Modernity is characterized by a displacement of the ideology of the Enlightenment onto pre-modern ontotheologies with a totalitarian scope in terms of absolute systemic knowledge and a cosmic-scaled will to power as technology. This ontology of the modern has also transformed mysticisms of the past into ontothelogies.

It will be clear from Connolly's text that he is hardly against the private affirmation of a faith in transcendental Being, but that this needs to be scrupulously rejected from becoming an ideology and needs to be subordinated to a practice of creative Becoming through openness to temporal proceses leading towards ever greater horizons of meaning and experience. -db

Technology in a Global World by Andrew Feenberg

Debashish — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 06:25:43 -0700

In this article, Andrew Feenberg, a major thinker on culture and technology (more properly the culture of technology) refelcts on globalization and the contribution of national cultural histories to its increasingly systemic pervasion. The specific non-western nation he takes for his illustration and the exploration of a thesis of alternate modernity is Japan. How is modernity technologically assimilated in Japan and how is world modernity shaped by Japanese culture? Is there any cultural distinction which can be spoken of here? Do cultures change as a result of modern technology or do they remain the same? Or can they influence modernity? Or are they capable of alternate modernities? These are some of the questions Feenberg starts with.

In further developing his refelctions, Feenberg draws on the thought of early modern Japanese thinker, Kitaro Nishida (1870-1945). It is interesting to see how Nishida's ideas of the rise of Asia and the concord of national cultures in an organic globalization resembles Sri Aurobindo's thesis on the ideal of human unity. Neo-Hegelian reflections of this kind were an important staple of early modern thought, on the threshold of a wave of world modernization, and Sri Aurobindo's own contribution to this imagining of the future must be read within this discourse. Feenberg points to the ultra-national distortions in Nishida's text, but also to its continued relevance and fertility. - db

Cosmiccomics by Italo Calvino (review Ursula K Le Guin: The Guardian)

Rich — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 18:54:26 -0700

'If you have never read Cosmicomics, you have before you ... the most joyful reading experiences of your life' - Salman Rushdie

Calvino along with Borges is an author whom I believe could claim membership in the pantheon of those who have furthered the evolution of the short story form in the Sri Aurobindonian sense. Cosmiccomics is a brilliantly conceived humorous account of the evolution of matter from the earliest moments of the universe until the birth of homo sapien. It has just been reissued with seven new stories and it is this summers reading of Ursula K Le Guin who reviews the book here

"What was Italo Calvino? A prepostmodernist? Maybe it's time to dispense with modernism and all its prefixes. A young resistance fighter for the communists during the Nazi occupation of Italy, Calvino became and remained a consistently original writer of intellectual fantasy. And what is a cosmicomic, this form he invented midway through his career? Clearly a subspecies of science fiction, it consists typically of the statement of a scientific hypothesis (mostly genuine, though sometimes not currently accepted) which sets the stage for a narrative, in which the narrator is usually a person called Qfwfq"....

Slavoj Žižek - A Lacanian Plea for Fundamentalism (8/9)

Rich — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 11:06:27 -0700

Continuing with Zizek on Fundamentalism in this excerpt Zizek takes on the Jewish God, Egyptian mysteries, India and British Colonialism Daniel Dennet, the Other, Multicultural Racism, etc:. Also in the post itself is an article on the same subject, here is an excerpt, in which his sometimes overt Lacanian fundamentalism is palpable :

Schelling who wrote: "God is a life, not merely a being. But all life has a fate and is subject to suffering and becoming. /.../ Without the concept of a humanly suffering God /.../ all of history remains incomprehensible." Why? Because God's suffering implies that He is involved in history, affected by it, not just a transcendent Master pulling the strings from above: God's suffering means that human history is not just a theater of shadows, but the place of the real struggle, the struggle in which the Absolute itself is involved and its fate is decided. This is the philosophical background of Dietrich Bonhoffer's deep insight that, after shoah, "only a suffering God can help us now" - a proper supplement to Heidegger's "Only a God can still save us!" from his last interview. One should therefore take the statement that "the unspeakable suffering of the six millions is also the voice of the suffering of God" quite literally: the very excess of this suffering over any "normal" human measure makes it divine. Recently, this paradox was succinctly formulated by Juergen Habermas: "Secular languages which only eliminate the substance once intended leave irritations. When sin was converted to culpability, and the breaking of divine commands to an offense against human laws, something was lost." Which is why the secular-humanist reactions to phenomena like shoah or gulag (AND others) is experienced as insufficient: in order to be at the level of such phenomena, something much stronger is needed, something akin to the old religious topic of a cosmic perversion or catastrophe in which the world itself is "out of joint." Therein resides the paradox of the theological significance of shoah: although it is usually conceived as the ultimate challenge to theology (if there is a God and if he is good, how could he have allowed such a horror to take place?), it is at the same time only theology which can provide the frame enabling us to somehow approach the scope of this catastrophe - the fiasco of God is still the fiasco of GOD.

Mullahs and Heretics by Tariq Ali (LRB)

Rich — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 15:33:19 -0700

We also explored the many burned houses. How were they burned? I would ask the locals. Back would come the casual reply. ‘They belonged to Hindus and Sikhs. Our fathers and uncles burned them.’ Why? ‘So they could never come back, of course.’ Why? ‘Because we are now Pakistan. Their home is India.’ Why, I persisted, when they had lived here for centuries, just like your families, and spoke the same language, even if they worshipped different gods? The only reply was a shrug. It was strange to think that Hindus and Sikhs had been here, had been killed in the villages in the valleys below. In the tribal areas – the no-man’s-land between Afghanistan and Pakistan – quite a few Hindus stayed on, protected by tribal codes. The same was true in Afghanistan itself (till the mujahedin and the Taliban arrived).....

A good place for a historian of Islam to start would be 629 AD, or Year 8 of the new Muslim calendar, though that had yet to come into being. In that year, 20 armed horsemen, led by Sa’d ibn Zayd, were sent by Muhammad to destroy the statue of Manat, the pagan goddess of fate, at Qudayd, on the road between Mecca and Medina. For eight years Muhammad had tolerated the uneasy coexistence of the pagan male god Allah and his three daughters: al-Lat, al-Uzza and Manat. Al-Uzza (the morning star, Venus) was the favourite goddess of the Quraysh, the tribe to which Muhammad belonged, but Manat was the most popular in the region as a whole, and was idolised by three key Meccan tribes that Muhammad had been desperately trying to win over to his new monotheistic religion. By Year 8, however, three important military victories had been won against rival pagan and Jewish forces. The Battle of Badr had seen Muhammad triumph against the Meccan tribes despite the smallness of his army. The tribes had been impressed by the muscularity of the new religion, and Muhammad must have deemed further ideological compromise unnecessary. Sa’d ibn Zayd and his 20 horsemen had arrived to enforce the new monotheism.

From Post to Neo and back: Habermas and Derrida by Raymond van de Wiel

Debashish — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 01:16:27 -0700

Juergen Habermas (1929-) has spent a lifetime trying to promote the universal values of the Enlightenment through the development of conditions for understanding and human acceptance through acts of communication in an interusbjective public field. In this endeavor, he has come up repeatedly against the postmodern/poststructuralist thinkers who have consistently assumed a counter-Enlightenment stance, moving the question of the text away from meaning, humanism and epistemology towards multivocality, antihumanism and ontology.

Habermas' distrust of the Francophone post-metaphysical revolution also stems from his sensitiveness to the history of Nazism in Germany and the geneaolgy of postmodernism traced to its Germanic roots in Nietzsche and Heidegger. It is particularly Heidegger's "mistake" of temporarily espousing the cause of the Third Reich and attempting to explain it away in terms of the history of Being that Habermas is particularly reactive against, seeing this as an essentistic failing intrinsic to the subjectivism of his ontology, and something carrying over into the postmodern tradition.

Habermas did not engage personally with Foucault, though their respective followers continue a heated exchange. Habermas personally entered into a long-standing debate with Derrida, which remained technically incocnlusive though the two developed amicable relations towards the end of Derrida's life and even issued some joint proclamations.

This debate between post-Enlightenment and post-structuralist positions, particularly through their sophisticated contemporary exponents, Habermas and Derrida, is reminscent in important ways of the antagonisms between the Confucians and the Daoists in the Hundred Schools period (6th-5th c BCE) in China. While the Confucians approached the problem of social disorder through the analysis of conditions of mutuality, the Daoists sought the solution in individual attunement to a cosmic or trascendental principle of harmony. One took an empirical and intersubjective approach, while the other was subjective and ontological.

In this essay, Raymond van de Wiel explores the aporia in this debate, showing how though there can be no dialectical resolution or even staging, there may not be such a profound gulf after all between the respective utopianisms of Derrida and Habermas, and that both may be moving towards the same goal, one through empirical and the other through phenomenological means.

To arrive at this conclusion, Wiel takes the reader for a ride through the contemporary landscape of nationa states and terror with Derrida and Habermas as tour conductors.- db

Zizek: A Lacanian plea for Fundamentalism (part 6 or 9)

Rich — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 11:32:06 -0700

This is part of (midway through) an excellent lecture by Zizek on Fundamentalism. In this particular part of the lecture he considers the differences in how Derrida and Habermas treat the question of "the other" and how in his view they actually compliment each other. In the other parts of the lecture Zizek gives his insight into why, if Max Weber were writing today, he would call his book, "Taoism and the Spirit of Capitalism", (aka why westernized Buddhism or Taoism is the perfect compliment to neo-liberal globalization). Zizek also addresses the differences in fundamentalism between the type practiced by Tibetean Buddhist and Amish versus moral majority Christianity and radical Islam as well as eurocentric tendencies to exoticize the other

About half way through this part of the lecture are some questions raised (that are difficult to hear) but if one listens to the entire lecture (either the series of nine u tube videos or the mp3) one will be richly rewarded, because Zizek is here, at the top of his game wildly speaking to issues of fundamentalism, eurocentrism, orientalism, and otherness.

The link to the utube page with the entire series of nine videos and the mp3 download of the lecture is given in the body of the post....

The Other of Derridean Deconstruction: Levinas, Phenomenology and the Question of Responsibility by Jack Reynolds

Debashish — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 00:13:52 -0700

Postmodernism destabilizes the determinable construction of the world through its emphasis on the Other. If Jacques Lacan approaches the Other psychologically, there are also phenomenological and theological approaches to the Other. Jacques Derrida was one of the great masters of contemporary thought who enagaged all his life with the various possibilities of the Other. Is the "other" a relative difference or an absolute difference? To what extent can it be assimilated to the subject? Is it closer to the phenomenological Other of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty or to the Other of the exitential theology of Kierkegaard and Levinas? These are the nuances with which Derrida grappled.

In this essay, Jack Reynolds explores Derrida's engagement with the Other and its ambiguities. In the process, he dwells on the late preoccupation of Derrida with the messianic. Reynolds draws the important distinction betwen the messianic and messianism in Derrida's thought; before concluding with the treatment of the Other in the phenomenological non-dualism of Merleau-Ponty. - db

Jacques Lacan and the Other

Rich — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 18:27:31 -0700
The big Other designates radical alterity, an otherness which transcends the illusory otherness of the imaginary because it cannot be assimilated through identification. Lacan equates the big Other with language and the law, and hence the big Other is inscribed in the symbolic order. Indeed, the big Other is the symbolic insofar as it is particularized for each subject. Thus, the Other is both another subject in its radical alterity and unassimilable uniqueness and also the symbolic order which mediates the relationship with that subject.

“It’s development, stupid !” or: How to Modernize Modernization by Bruno Latour

Debashish — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 16:26:12 -0700

Bruno Latour (1947-) is Professor and vice-president for research at the Institut d'études Politiques de Paris. Latour is a leading and very influential anthropologist of Modernity whose major contribution may be called holistic politcal epistemology. This, for Latour, is not a form of idealism, but what, following William James, he calls "radical empiricism." Latour is (in)famous for his pronouncement "We have never been modern." By this he means that the overarching hubris of modernity for human autonomy and mastery is a sub-narrative in a larger embeddedness in holistic properties which is only beginning to make its imperative critical demands on human attention. This emergence depends on the recognition of a change of telos and and a political epistemology of interdisciplinarity which takes humanity beyond itself into the fullness of global embodiment. In this essay, he reflects on environmentalism, society, technology and theology. - db

The Violence of the Global by Jean Baudrillard

Rich — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 09:15:02 -0700

The analogy between the terms "global" and "universal" is misleading. Universalization has to do with human rights, liberty, culture, and democracy. By contrast, globalization is about technology, the market, tourism, and information. Globalization appears to be irreversible whereas universalization is likely to be on its way out. At least, it appears to be retreating as a value system which developed in the context of Western modernity and was unmatched by any other culture. Any culture that becomes universal loses its singularity and dies. That's what happened to all those cultures we destroyed by forcefully assimilating them. But it is also true of our own culture, despite its claim of being universally valid. The only difference is that other cultures died because of their singularity, which is a beautiful death. We are dying because we are losing our own singularity and exterminating all our values. And this is a much more ugly death....

We are really not talking about a "clash of civilizations" here, but instead about an almost anthropological confrontation between an undifferentiated universal culture and everything else that, in whatever domain, retains a quality of irreducible alterity. From the perspective of global power (as fundamentalist in its beliefs as any religious orthodoxy), any mode of difference and singularity is heresy. Singular forces only have the choice of joining the global system (by will or by force) or perishing. The mission of the West (or rather the former West, since it lost its own values a long time ago) is to use all available means to subjugate every culture to the brutal principle of cultural equivalence. Once a culture has lost its values, it can only seek revenge by attacking those of others. Beyond their political or economic objectives, wars such as the one in Afghanistan [7] aim at normalizing savagery and aligning all the territories. The goal is to get rid of any reactive zone, and to colonize and domesticate any wild and resisting territory both geographically and mentally.

Sri Aurobindo's Integral Education in Contemporary Higher Education

Debashish — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 09:00:47 -0700

Sri Aurobindo envisaged the goal of human becoming as a transformed society and civilization based on the expressions of an integral consciousness. However, in keeping with the collective dimension of this goal, a transformed society was envisaged by him not merely as the end result of individual transformations, but as the dynamically transforming life-context or field which would allow and facilitate individual transformation. Seen from this standpoint, the social discipline of education, meant to “socialize,” “in-form” and inculcate the cultural, knowledge and epistemological skills of the social habitus for individual engagement takes on a changed meaning related to a new phenomenology, epistemology and teleology of human and social becoming. Integral Education then becomes a socially acknowledged and authorized praxis of the Integral Yoga or at least the pedagogical condition for its social possibility and collective transformation.

Though much has been written and several attempts at implementation made to formulate Integral Education as a form of child education, the higher educational possibilities and ramifications of Integral Education have remained largely untheorized. This paper is an attempt to think through some of these possibilties and implementations. Debashish Banerji is the educational coordinator of The University of Philosophical Research in Los Angeles.

Into the Inferno: Hollow Language and Hollow Democracies by Arundhati Roy

Rich — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 07:32:55 -0700

Today, words like “progress” and “development” have become interchangeable with economic “reforms”, deregulation and privatisation. “Freedom” has come to mean “choice”. It has less to do with the human spirit than it does with different brands of deodorant. “Market” no longer means a place where you go to buy provisions. The “market” is a de-territorialised space where faceless corporations do business, including buying and selling “futures”. “Justice” has come to mean “human rights” (and of those, as they say, “a few will do”).

This theft of language, this technique of usurping words and deploying them like weapons, of using them to mask intent and to mean exactly the opposite of what they have traditionally meant, has been one of the most brilliant strategic victories of the tsars of the new dispensation. It has allowed them to marginalise their detractors, deprive them of a language in which to voice their critique and dismiss them as being “anti-progress”, “anti-development”, “anti-reform” and of course “anti-national” – negativists of the worst sort. Talk about saving a river or protecting a forest and they say, “Don’t you believe in progress?” To people whose land is being submerged by dam reservoirs and whose homes are being bulldozed they say, “Do you have an alternative development model?” To those who believe that a government is duty-bound to provide people with basic education, health care and social security, they say, “You’re against the market.” And who except a cretin could be against a market?

An Imaginative Geography - Chapter One of "The Myth of Shangri-La" by Peter Bishop

Debashish — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 10:35:25 -0700

As globalization strips the veil from the last inviolable topos of earth and real-time surveiilance renders every square unit of the planet physically transaparent in its utilitarian Google Maps and Star War strategies, the sacred plexuses of the earth also multiply in their resistant cultural geographies of surreal uptopia.

Peter Bishop teaches Communication and Cultural Studies at the University of Southern Australia. Bishop's entertaining and erudite analyses of contemporary material culture pry open the spaces where spirituality, imagination, cultural history and material practices intersect. In this first chapter from his book, The Myth of Shangri-La: Tibet, Travel Writing and the Western Creation of Sacred landscape, he presents the makings of a theory of sacred cultural materiality - the spiritual, psychological, aesthetic, cultural, historical, political, economic and geographic transactions which establish the utopian spaces of contemporary spiritual desire. - DB

Cogito in the Matrix by Erik Davis

Rich — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 10:34:31 -0700

Erik Davis is one of the most talented authors writing on the subject of technology, culture, and spirituality. This article from the book prefiguring cyberculture from MIT University Press is representative of the insightful work he has done. The concern of this piece revolves around the construction of subjectivity in an epoch which can perhaps best be called posthuman.rc

Of all the lumbering giants of the Western philosophical tradition, none resembles a punching bag more than René Descartes. He gets it from all sides: cognitive scientists and phenomenologists, post-structuralists and deep ecologists, lefty science critics and New Age holists. The main beef, of course, is the stark divide that Descartes drew between mind and body, a dualism that, by its very claim of rationality, now appears even more obscene than the religious dualisms that stretch back to Zarathustra. Nearly across the board, contemporary thought calls us to defend and affirm the body that Descartes rendered a machine, a soulless automata under our spiritual thumb. It doesn't really matter that the body so affirmed is itself multiple and even contradictory: the materialist object of biology, the phenomenological bed of Being, a feminist site of anti-patriarchal critique, the New Age animal immersed in Gaia's enchanted web. Regardless of the framework, the song remains the same: we are bodyminds deeply embedded in the world. For many thinkers now, the sort of abstract, disengaged soul-pilot pictured by Descartes -- the "I" immortalized in the famous cogito ergo sum -- is not only bad thinking, but, ideologically speaking, bad news.

In many ways I share this urge to trace the networks that embed consciousness in phenomenal reality, and to insist on the extraordinary (though not exclusive) value of causal explanations rooted in the history of matter. But I am no absolutist. The fact that Descartes keeps popping up like a Jack-in-the-box suggests that a splinter of the cogito remains in our minds, some fragmentary intuition or insightful glimpse that we cannot accommodate and so wall off in order to reject. I am not interested in philosophically defending the cogito, or at least the metaphysical cogito we are familiar with: the rational and disengaged instrumentalist manipulating the empty machinery of matter. But I am interesting in probing for that splinter, which I suspect is lodged somewhere in the apparently yawning gap between self-conscious awareness and the phenomenal world -- a gap that, despite some hearty attacks from nondualists East and West, continues to inform subjectivity. ....

The Melodrama of Difference (Or, The Revenge of the Colonized) by Jean Baudrillard

Rich — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 20:25:29 -0700

So what became of otherness? We are engaged in an orgy of discovery, exploration and “invention” of the Other. An orgy of differences. We are procurers of encounter, pimps of interfacing and interactivity. Once we get beyond the mirror of alienation (beyond the mirror stage that was the joy of our childhood), structural differences multiply ad infinitum – in fashion, in mores, in culture. Crude otherness, hard otherness – the otherness of race, of madness, of poverty – are done with. Otherness, like everything else, has fallen under the law of the market, the law of supply and demand. It has become a rare item – hence its immensely high value on the psychological stock exchange, on the structural stock exchange. Hence too the intensity of the ubiquitous simulation of the Other. This is particularly striking in science fiction, where the chief question is always “What is the Other? Where is the Other?” Of course science fiction is merely a reflection of our everyday universe, which is in thrall to a wild speculation on – almost a black market in – otherness and difference. A veritable obsession with ecology extends from Indian reservations to household pets (otherness degree zero!) – not to mention the other of “the other scene”, or the other of the unconscious (our last symbolic capital, and one we had better look after, because reserves are not limitless).

A Critical History of Architecture in a Post-Colonial World: A View from Indian History By Swati Chattopadhyay

Debashish — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 20:24:59 -0700

One of the things that Edward Said's book Orientalism (1978), based on a Foucaultian critique of the discourses of colonialism achieved, was to demonstrate the essentialized portrayals of colonized cultures, whether through the lens of western positivism (modernity) or through Orientalism. Nationalism as an indigenous colonial discourse, had to create an independent place for itself within the interpellation of the west by identifying its own essentlalized and ahistorical features for the nation.

Postcolonial sociality in erstwhile colonized nations is still largely driven by the unfortunate identity politics of these discourses. Nationalism, as created by its founders, was largely thought of in its own time as a strategic essentialism, an invention of the soul-expression of a nation, to enable its identification and survival. But if such ahistorical descriptions become identity markers fossilized by institutional fiat, the resultant identity politics in an age of pluralism can only lead to violence and misfortune. Ongoing creative hybrid engagements are the way out of the postcolonial predicament. In this article, Swati Chattopadhyay, professor of Architectural History at UC Santa Barbara, shows how colonized nations create their own blind-spots based on the inability to classify the hybrid. At the same time, a situated social history of culture (here architecture) shows us that hybridity is the norm of human culture and its recognition leads us to the necessary evolution out of a phase of strategic essentialism into one of dialog and human co-existence.

Born Again Ideology (religion, technology and terrorism) by Arthur Kroker

Rich — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 20:20:22 -0700

Kroker's book Born Again Ideology examines Fundamentalism and its relationship to Empire. Although written as a response to the techno-militarist expansionism of George Bush and his neo-conservative American ideology, that fuses the protestant ethic with streamed capitalism, that expresses manifest destiny under the sign of a its simulacra deity; the digital commodity form, and re-territorializes the planet through a Nietzschean will to technology, there are global parallels drawn in making explicit how many global fundamentalist movements appropriate techno-science for their often millennial aims. In chapter 5 for example he uncovers ideological similarities in the exploitation of techno-science in the India Shining Movement with their their mastery of infomatics with the expertise in developing technologies of cyber-warfare of the Zionist occupation forces. Kroker makes medieval and millennialist Fundamentalism fully relevant to the new millennium

Why is the United States the spearhead of the technological future? Beyond its massive power as the leading empire of 21st century political economy, what explains the remarkable historical situation that since its Puritan origins America has actually innovated the future thanks to a seemingly singular cultural genius for innovation, creativity and (patent-driven) consumer practicality? Here, seizing upon the language of technological innovation as its primary means of expression, what might be described as the discourse of technology and the American mind has become both the essence of American drive towards the fully realized technological future and increasingly, due to its hegemony as a dominant political power, the dominant cultural code of global society.

Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 1250–1625 Reviewed by Daud Ali

Debashish — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:56:41 -0700

If Edward Said's Orientalism stands as a watershed in modern studies by disclosing the essentalized nature of colonial discourses which form some of the major sources of our contemporary discontent, this work has also been criticized for its own essentlialistic nature.

By ignoring the reality of cultural histories and generalities of culture, it has played into the hands of post-Enlightenment modernity for which postcolonial peoples have been rendered historyless. It has also failed to disclose the internally conflicted nature of the discourses of colonialism or the strategies and possibilities of understanding at work within them.

Post-Orientalistic scholarship has addressed some of these errors and lacunae in Said's work. At the forefront of new discursive approaches to medieval histories of India is the work of Daud Ali, professor of Early Indian History at the School of Asian and African Studies at the University of London. In this article Ali reviews a book on Renaissance travel literature on India and shows how useful such documents are as expressions of "truth games" (Foucault), the creative ways by which identity and difference are negotiated in furthering the establishment of what is true in any given time and space.

Conference: Fundamentalism and the Future

Rich — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 09:54:40 -0700

Conference Announcement: Fundamentalism and the Future
Friday, September 11 and Saturday, September 12, 2009
California Institute of Integral Studies
1453 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA
A two-day conference will be held Friday, September 11 and Saturday September 12 on the topic “Fundamentalism and the Future.” The conference will be at the California Institute of Integral studies in San Francisco, hosted by the Department of Asian and Comparative Religions. The conference organizers are Rich Carlson, Debashish Banerji and David Hutchinson. Registration is free. For details on the conference, location, and registration, please see http://fundamentalismandthefuture.com

Fascism and False Guru Sects (Kheper.net)

Rich — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 12:35:49 -0700

It seems that many of the attributes of authoritarian regimes, listed above, also define authoritarian cults and cultic and abusive guru movements. The reason is that in both cases there is a highly narcissistic but also fearful and shadow-projecting individual or individuals at the top, who through giving in to adverse entities, acts in a way to supress any creativity, originality, individuality, authentic spirituality or anything else that threatens the ideology, belief-system, personal worldview, or hypersensitive ego of the leader or leadership.

The Resonant Soul: Gaston Bachelard and the Magical Surface of Air by Robert Sardello

Debashish — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 16:17:21 -0700

Robert Sardello, Ph.D. is a Jungian psychologist and scholar of Gaston Bachelard and Rudolf Steiner. He is a co-founder of The School of Spiritual Psychology, and the author of a number of books, inclusing the recently published Silence. He served as Chairman of the Department of Psychology at the University of Dallas, head of the Institute of Philosophic studies there, and graduate dean. He is also co-founder and faculty member of The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, whichas undertaken the Bachelard Translation project, and through which most of Bachelard's English translations are available.

In November 2002, The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture sponsored a conference titled "Matter, Dream, and Thought: A Symposium of the works of Gaston Bachelard." Sardello's contribution to that Symposium dealt with one of the elements which form Bachelard's meditations on the Imagination of Matter - Air.

Gaston Bachelard: poet/philosopher of the imagination and epistemological rupture

Rich — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 19:21:58 -0700

Bachelard was a philosopher/poet of the imagination and poetic reverie. While his works on poetics and phenomenology are classics of the genre, the concepts he developed in the philosophy of science such as the epistemological rupture were taken up and developed both by Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault

* A man is a man to the extent that he is a superman. A man should be defined by the sum of those tendencies which impel him to surpass the human condition..... Gaston Bachelard...

Towards a Postcolonial Modernity: AsiaSource Interview with Partha Chatterjee

Debashish — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 11:50:12 -0700

Partha Chatterjee, founding member of the Subaltern Studies editorial collective, is director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, and visiting professor of anthropology at Columbia University. Chatterjee's interests are diverse and include Bengali theater. He has acted in Mira Nair's adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri's story The Namesake.

Chatterjee's work on anticolonial and postcolonial nationalism has left a definitive mark on contemporary scholarship. He has grappled with the problem of an Euro-American modernity politically institutionalized by the nation-state, in its implementations in terms of resistant cultural nationalisms among non-western and colonized peoples and their imagined communities.

The present inflection of his work moves towards postcolonial governmentality and the grassroots cultural politics of claiming identities within its categoric specifciations.

Chatterjee points out how the standard secular form of post-Enlightenment nationalism has been adapted in attempts to arrive at alternate forms within non-western cultures, yet how such adaptations have been marked by serious ambiguity, becoming co-opted by the forms they have sought to resist, rendered impotent or transformed into fascict ideologies. He calls for a continuous popular/communitarian creativity in understanding and dealing with such transformations, though his voice in this matter, judging by India's postcolonial history, tends towards pessimism.

For example, this is what he has to say about the moibilization of religion in its anti-colonial adaptations:

The innovations in nationalist thinking and nationalist mobilizations which have occurred in the postcolonial world have tended to get repressed by the emergence of fairly standardized forms of governance. Many of these innovations were actually repressed because they were not seen to be consistent with the known forms of the modern state. For instance, if you had movements or parties which were largely based on religion, this was seen to be somehow inconsistent with the idea of a modern constitutional state. Therefore, there was always this problem of what to do with such movements. Yet, those movements have been very influential and powerful in terms of mobilizing people against colonial rule.

So, once the objective of decolonization and transfer of power to a new nationalist elite had been met, the question was how to contain or manage these forces that had been released in the course of the national movement. That is where many of these tensions remained unresolved. If you look at the case of post-independence India, this whole debate about the "secular" state and what the secular state must do and what it means, in a sense, reflected this unresolved tension. In the historical process of the emergence of that state, a great deal of the mobilization had used religion, had depended on extremely powerful religious reform movements, of actually shaping what were seen to be religious beliefs and religious practices but changing them, reformulating them, in order to conform to what were seen to be the new challenges of the modern world.

So these religious reform movements were often completely part of the broader set of social changes that brought about nationalism, that brought about the new state, that brought about new political formations. They were integrally tied with many of those movements and yet the requirements of the secular state presumably forbade religion in public places or public life, or forbade political parties based on religion, because these were somehow inconsistent with a modern nation-state. Very often, there were all kinds of shortcuts or repressive ways of keeping those things under cover, as it were. Many of the tensions around secularism, for instance, and the kinds of challenges that emerged later on, in the case of India's Hindu right-wing in the 1980s for instance, were very much part of these unresolved questions from within the national movement. What the Hindu right then appealed to was not to say that nationalism was all wrong; they said, in fact, that they were the "true" nationalists. The reason why that could be said persuasively was because of a great deal of religious-based rhetoric and the presence, as I said, of these powerful religious reform movements, which were always part and parcel of nationalism.

So these remained unresolved problems. The overall frames remained derivative, almost imitations of forms of the state as developed in the West, but in actual practice what had to be done was to find completely innovative practices at the localized level. The real problem occurred when many of these local adaptations and innovations required a new translation into the larger frame.

Empire@Play: Virtual Games and Global Capitalism by Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter (C Theory)

Rich — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 13:19:26 -0700

We use "Empire" in the sense proposed by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri to designate a post-Cold War planetary capitalism with "no outside," [1] but we modulate their account to take greater consideration of the internal frictions wracking this order since the millennium. By Empire, we mean the global capitalist ascendancy of the early twenty-first century, a system administered and policed by a consortium of competitively collaborative states, among whom the US still clings, by virtue of its military might, to an increasingly fragile preeminence. This is a regime of biopower based on corporate exploitation of myriad types of labour, paid and unpaid, for the continuous enrichment of a planetary plutocracy. Empire is an order of extraordinary scope and depth. Yet it also is precarious, flush with power and wealth, yet close to chaos as it confronts a set of interlocking economic, ecological, energy, and epidemiological crises. Its governance is threatened by tensions between a declining US and a rising China which could either result in some super-capitalist accommodation, consolidating Empire, or split it into warring Eastern and Western blocs. Its massive inequalities catalyze resistances from below, some, reactionary and regressive, others, like the global justice and ecological movement, protagonists of a better alternative.

What makes virtual games' technocultural form exemplary of Empire is their identity with its key means of production, communication and destruction--the digital network. More than any previous media other than the book, virtual play is a direct offshoot of its society's crucial technology of power. Sprung from the military-industrial matrix that generated the computer and Internet, games are today a test ground for digital innovations and machinic subjectivities: online play worlds incubate artificial intelligences; consoles plug to grid computing systems; games are media of choice for experiments in neurobiological stimulation and brain driven telekinesis. And, once suspect as delinquent time waster, virtual play is increasingly understood by state and corporate managers as training populations for networked work, war and governability.

We examine the relation between games and Empire in terms of the virtual and the actual, conjugating this couplet with intentionally fuzzy logic in two distinct yet overlapping ways. The virtual is the digital, the on-screen world, as opposed to existence "IRL". But "virtual" also denotes potentiality; the manifold directions in which a given, actual, situation might develop. [2] The technological and ontological virtual are distinct and should never be conflated. [3] But they are related, through the practice of simulation. Computers create potential universes. They model, dynamically, what might be. Such simulation is vital to a power system engaged in the high-risk military, financial and corporate calculus required for globalized control. It is from such simulation that virtual games emerged, broke loose into ludic freedom--only to now be reintegrated into the assemblages of world capital, as a means of inducing the "flexible personality" [4] demanded by digital work, war and markets. Yet this ludic apprenticeship can generate capacities in excess of Empire's requirements. Just as the eighteenth-century novel was a textual apparatus generating the bourgeois character required by mercantile colonialism (but also capable of criticizing it), and twentieth-century cinema and television were integral to industrial consumerism (yet screened some of its darkest depictions), so, we suggest, virtual games are the exemplary media producing subjects for twenty-first century global hyper-capitalism but also, perhaps, of exodus from it.

Waltz with Bashir

Rich — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:06:02 -0700

Ari Folman's semiautobiographical "Waltz With Bashir" is nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at this year's Oscars. It also was considered a potential nominee in the documentary and animation categories. I suppose you could call it an animated documentary by way of oral history, but it's best not to get caught up with labels concerning this film.

What begins as an introspective odyssey examining the effects of war on the young Israeli soldiers turns into a provocative exposé on the Sabra and Shatila massacre, an event that sent shock waves through Israelis who were made inadvertent collaborators. But the final word is not their emotional trauma, but the stark reality of the event itself.

Phalange Party

Rich — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:05:08 -0700
The Phalange party in Lebanon represents an extremist faction of Maronite Christians in Lebanon that was modeled under the fascist parties of Spain, Italy and Germany. They serve also as the militia arm of a movement that marries the self-determination of Maronite Christians to self-determination of the nation of Lebanon. In some ways the Phalangist party mirrors those of Hindu nationalist parties such as the RSS or VHP in India, both claiming a long history of suffering under occupation, both fascist, both wishing to unify God, Nation and Family under a militarist banner that preserves national purity.

Under the watchful eyes of Ariel Sharon and the Israeli Military a Phalange militia committed one of the worst atrocities in the recent history of the Middle East the Sabra and Shatila massacres of many hundreds of Palistinian refugees, in revenge for the killing of their leader Bashir Gemayel.

The long struggle that the Maronites had for self determination, over some fifteen hundred years, in which they have suffered greatly at the hands of history has forged in them a strong national identity. While deserving much praise for their perseverance of identity as a “people”, the historical persistence of a collective identity, the inheritance of memory whose pain become ones own, is always a co-dependent arising with the “other” who one can demonize for inflicting suffering, the "other" on whom one can seek revenge.

A history of the Phalange party and the Maronite Christian community follows....

Rushdie's Satanic Verses and Khomeini's Reaction By Eric Hutchinson

Debashish — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:08:20 -0700

Eric Hutchinson is a contributor to the University of Vermont's History Forum. In this literary analysis grounded in social history, he shows how Rushdie's hybrid text on creativity, mysticism, psychosis, orthodoxy and negotiation contains layers of self-fulfilling prophecy and opens up the aporetic division between subjective freedom and traditionally defended authoritarianism, a disturbing which runs like a subtext through our times.

Twenty years on: how the fatwa on Salman Rushdie has gagged our society By Anthony Drew (The Observer)

Debashish — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:27:02 -0700

The contemporary history of cutural coercion, of which the response by religious zealots to Peter Heehs' The Lives of Sri Aurobindo may be seen as an instance, draws its legacy from Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa on Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses:

It's 20 years since Iran's religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced a death sentence on Salman Rushdie for 'insulting' Islam with his novel The Satanic Verses. The repercussions were profound - and are still being felt. Andrew Anthony traces the course of the affair, from book-burnings and firebombings to the dramatic impact it had on freedom of expression in a multicultural society:

Who would dare to write a book like The Satanic Verses nowadays? And if some brave or reckless author did dare, who would publish it? The signs in both cases are that no such writer or publisher is likely to appear, and for two reasons. The first and most obvious is fear. The Satanic Verses is a rich and complex literary novel, by turns ironic, fantastical and satirical. Despite what is often said, mostly by those who haven't read it, the book does not take direct aim at Islam or its prophet. Those sections that have caused the greatest controversy are contained within the dreams or nightmares of a character who is in the grip of psychosis. Which is to say that, even buried in the fevered subconscious of a disturbed character inside a work of fiction - a work of magical realism fiction! - there is no escape from literalist tyranny. Any sentence might turn out to be a death sentence. And few if any of even the boldest and most iconoclastic artists wish to run that risk.

The recent case of The Jewel of Medina, a work by Sherry Jones which is neither bold nor iconoclastic, exemplifies the problem. In 2007 the American publishers Random House bought the rights to this historical novel about the prophet Muhammad's wife Aisha. By all accounts the book is something of a cheesy romance. Jones herself believes it is a circumspect fiction which "portrays the prophet Muhammad as a gentle, compassionate, wise leader and man respectful toward women and his wives". But a professor of Middle Eastern studies named Denise Spellberg advised Random House that it might provoke violence. The publishers duly cancelled the publication.

"We stand firmly by our responsibility to support our authors and the free discussion of ideas, even those that may be construed as offensive by some," Random House explained in a statement. "However, a publisher must weigh that responsibility against others that it also bears, and in this instance we decided, after much deliberation, to postpone publication for the safety of the author, employees of Random House, booksellers and anyone who would be involved in distribution and sale of the novel."

This has become a familiar conceit in recent years: we defend the right of freedom of expression but prefer not to exercise it in situations that might endanger us. Random House publish Rushdie, and he was angered by what he saw as a capitulation to the threat of Islamic reprisals. "This is censorship by fear, and it sets a very bad precedent indeed," he said.

In Britain the book was taken up by the independent publisher, Gibson Square. But on 27 September last year the London home of Martin Rynja, Gibson Square's publisher, was firebombed. As things stand, the book's British publication is indefinitely postponed.

Nor is this self-censorship restricted to literature. Ramin Gray, associate director of the Royal Court Theatre, recently admitted that he would be reluctant to stage a play that was critical of Islam. "You would think twice," he said. "You'd have to take the play on its merits but given the time we're in, it's very hard because you'd worry that if you cause offence then the whole enterprise would become buried in a sea of controversy. It does make you tread carefully."

The expressed intention of [Khomeini's] fatwa was to defend and strengthen the clergy, and one of its effects in Britain has been to create a kind of pseudo-clergy, a class of Islamist intellectuals and militants who presume to speak not just for their co-religionists in Britain but 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide. At the same time, in the late 80s and early 90s, another clergy of fundamentalist preachers, often refugees from despotic Middle Eastern regimes, began to attract a disaffected constituency that had been radicalised by The Satanic Verses protests. As Hirsi Ali put it to me: "The paradox in the UK with regard to freedom of expression is that most of the radical literature and most of the radical mosques moved from Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia and established themselves in the liberal West, where there is freedom of religion and expression, with the bizarre purpose of destroying those freedoms."

In the 20 years since the fatwa, the parameters of cultural debate in Britain and elsewhere have undoubtedly narrowed. If the Islam of Khomeini and other fundamentalists has played a key role in redefining what is and is not acceptable, then it is not the only factor. Other religions have also got in on the censorship act. In 2004 the play Behzti (Dishonour) was cancelled at the Birmingham Rep after a riot by Sikh protesters on the opening night. Christian groups too have taken to organising more intimidating protests - though with less success - against shows and productions they deem offensive.

Taken together they are all part of a multicultural accommodation that has come to determine the terms of public discourse. In hindsight, The Satanic Verses was published at a turning point in progressive politics. Throughout much of the 20th century a battle had been waged against discriminating on the basis of race (The Satanic Verses itself was avowedly anti-racist) and class. In other words, those aspects of humanity that are biologically inherited or socially imposed. For a variety of reasons, including the fall of the Berlin Wall later on in 1989 and the emergence of minority group activism, a new identity politics emerged. Class and race were replaced or trumped by culture.

The emphasis moved to combating cultural discrimination. All cultures were deemed equal, and therefore all components of culture - religion, tradition, beliefs - had to be protected from critical appraisal. Obviously culture is socially inherited, but in a free society it is also a matter of freedom of choice. The liberty to change your beliefs, reject your traditions and question your religion is what distinguishes individuals from members of an enforced collective. Such liberty necessitates the discussion and expression of ideas that may be unpalatable to others. Increasingly, therefore, this has become a process that is actively discouraged.

Amos Elon (1926-2009) by Tony Judt (NYRB)

Rich — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 08:36:52 -0700

Thus Amos, unlike so many of the land-fixated commentators among his fellow countrymen, was one of the first to recognize that the settlements in the territories Israel has occupied since 1967 were a self-imposed catastrophe: "The settlements...have tied Israel's hands in any negotiation to achieve lasting peace.... [They] have only made it less secure."[2] That a country with the strongest military in its region, and with an unbroken string of armed victories behind it, should be so obsessed with the security risks of relinquishing a few square miles of land may seem odd indeed. But it speaks to the changes that have overtaken Elon's homeland in recent decades.

As he foresaw in 2003, Israeli insistence upon ruling over an Arab population that will eventually become a majority within the country's borders can only lead to a single authoritarian state encompassing two mutually hostile nations: one dominant, the other subservient. With what outcome? "If Israel persists in its current settlement policy,...the end result is more likely to resemble Zimbabwe than post-apartheid South Africa."[3] Many have since come to this depressing conclusion; I believe Amos was the first to make the point.

Amos wrote more in sorrow than anger. Many years ago, when few nonspecialists were even paying attention, he wrote despairingly of "the hu-man energies wasted for more than a generation on short-sighted settlement programs.... Think of what might have been achieved had the billions poured into the shifting sands of Sinai, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank, been spent on more useful causes."[4] Such misplaced efforts he attributed to what he called "the astonishing mediocrity of Israeli politicians." That was written in 2002. The incompetence and political cowardice of a generation of Israeli Labor statesmen, from the sainted Golda Meir to the egregious Shimon Peres, were already manifest. But there was worse to come: Amos Elon would live to see the resurrection of Benjamin Netanyahu and the obscene elevation to foreign minister of Avigdor Lieberman, sad confirmation of his assessment....

Esalen Conference on Fundamentalism: Jewish

Rich — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 08:30:18 -0700

Shlomo Fischer opened the conference by questioning the validity of the term "fundamentalism" when referring to radical religious Zionists. In particular, Fischer suggested that the defining text in the world of fundamentalism studies—the monumental five volumes of the Chicago Fundamentalism Project—may actually hinder more than help understanding religious extremism in and around Israel. Because the Chicago volumes sought to synthesize a massive amount of data, they had to be necessarily selective in both the questions they pursued and the data they included. This led the volumes to leave out significant material regarding the Zionism. For, as Fischer pointed out repeatedly, politics and religion are nothing if not local affairs. We cannot understand radical religious Zionism without paying close attention the peculiarities of small, sometimes disparate subgroups that nevertheless exert a political and religious influence beyond their numbers. This attention to peculiarity requires us also to pay attention to the constantly shifting nature of Zionist discourse. So called "Jewish Fundamentalism" is a moving target, changing with circumstance, re-inventing itself again and again in response to historical, political and social developments. This has caused the material about Zionism in the Chicago Fundamentalist Project to become quickly dated. Consider the way the Landscape has changed in the twelve years since these 5 volumes were published: Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated, the Oslo accords fell apart, the state of Israel initiated a nonviolent disengagement from Gaza, and, most recently, the Second Lebanon War (the 2006 Israel-Lebanon Conflict) occurred.

A Matter of Mind by J. Kepler

Debashish — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 21:13:34 -0700

At the core of much of the recent discussion and controversy in the Integral Yoga (IY) online community seems to lay the role of the mind and mental reasoning. Many statements from Sri Aurobindo and Mother could be quoted both praising the essential, enabling contributions of the mind, as well as criticizing the mind’s obstinate, obstructing features and liabilities. This dual nature of their commentary itself may point us in the right direction. It’s the particular use made of the mental faculty in a particular context that determines its helpful or harmful status.

Many quotes could be furnished where Sri Aurobindo and Mother state definitively that their teaching is a living spiritual path and not a set of fixed doctrines or dogmas to be religiously recited and referenced. But especially in documents that pertain to their own practice, in Sri Aurobindo’s case his Record of Yoga, in Mother’s case l'Agenda de Mère, and in other miscellaneous talks and letters by both of them, they exhibit a characteristic attitude and approach to mental formulation. This attitude is marked by a highly flexible and, one could even say, experimental approach to mental formulation of the vast spiritual experiences they passed through.

Considered in this light, the current Heehs controversy is perhaps best seen not as simply a flawed biography by a flawed ashramite who upset many devotees with his academic approach to evaluating Sri Aurobindo’s life. The controversy might also represent a stark and revealing light being cast upon the mental formations and constructions that have hardened among many associated with IY. All should be able to agree that the Mother’s approach is never a static one and she always seeks to propel us toward the future, breaking our comfortable habits of thinking and feeling as need be whenever our advance requires it. “her feet are rapid on the upward way.”

Apocalyptic Islam and Iranian Shi'ism book review by Ray Takeyh (NYRB) / interview with Abbas Amanat (U Tube)

Rich — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 20:35:54 -0700

Excellent interview and associated article from the New York Review that opens a way to understand present day Iran by tracing the genealogy of its apocalyptic Islamic ideology to its location in the Zoroastrian world view. The review of the book by Abbas Amanat and his interview sheds needed light on current events (rc)

"During the past decade the Jamkaran mosque near Qom in Iran has become one of the most visited Shiite shrines, rivaling Karbala and Kufa in Iraq as pilgrim destinations. Here thousands of believers pray for intercessions to their messiah—the Mahdi or Twelfth Imam—whose return they believe to be imminent. Written petitions are placed in the "well of the Lord of the Age," from which many believe the imam will emerge to bring about universal justice and peace. Six months after his surprise election to the Iranian presidency in June 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad predicted that this momentous eschatological event would occur within two years. With the turmoil in neighboring Iraq, where Shiites continue to be attacked by Sunni extremists, expectations for the return retain their appeal.

While the Shiite faithful (along with their Jewish and Christian counterparts) are still awaiting their messiah, the Islamic Republic is investing heavily in the Jamkaran shrine, spending more than half a billion dollars on enlargements that rival those of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, with vast interior courtyards and facilities—including offices, research centers, cultural departments, slaughterhouses, and soup kitchens—not to mention the farms where Jamkaran raises its meat. In a country where the religious establishment dominates state institutions, Jamkaran's burgeoning bureaucracy seems set to outstrip that of the longer- established shrine complexes of Mashhad and Qom.

While external observers perceive the struggle in Iran between conservatives and moderates in political terms, the Islamic Republic's conflicting ideological currents also find expression in the age-old rhetoric of the apocalypse, which originated in the region more than two thousand years ago. As Abbas Amanat explains in Apocalyptic Islam and Iranian Shi'ism, the Jamkaran makeover was part of the campaign orchestrated by conservative clerics in Qom against the government of former President Mohammad Khatami and his reformist allies.

Unlike many academics, Amanat, a professor of history at Yale, is willing to venture into regions outside his specialty of Iranian studies, which makes his book particularly valuable, as it is informed by the knowledge—all too rare among Islamicists—that Islam is one variant in a cluster of religions rather than a subject to be treated on its own. Messianic expectations are fundamental to all the West Asian religions, articulating forces that are both dynamic and dangerous:

The vast number of visitors to Jamkaran demonstrates the resurgence of interest in the Mahdi among Iranians of all classes—including the affluent middle classes in the capital—and the triumph of the Islamic Republic in capitalizing on symbols of public piety.

Although these symbols, such as the Jamkaran shrine, are specific to Shiism, their appeal—not to mention their mobilizing power—is universal. As Amanat points out, apocalyptic movements have been motors of religious change throughout history. Christian origins are inseparable from the spirit of apocalypticism that consumed the Judeo-Hellenistic world in late antiquity. Muhammad's early mission cannot be explained without reference to the "apocalyptic admonitions, the foreseen calamities, and the terror of the Day of Judgement, apparent in the early suras [chapters] of the Qu'ran." Later examples—to name but a few—include Martin Luther's call for reforming the Catholic Church and Sabbatai Zevi's claim in the seventeenth century to be the Jewish messiah. The Mormon church, the most successful of the new American religions, was born in the millennial frenzy that swept through the "Burnt-Over District" of upstate New York in the 1830s. Amanat sees all these as conscious attempts to fulfill messianic visions conceived on the ancient models preserved in Zoroastrian and biblical scriptures.

In a brief but masterful compression of insights gained from readings of Norman Cohn, founding father of millennial studies, and other scholars in the field, Amanat reviews the dynamics of apocalyptic histories. On the positive side the anticipation of imminent divine judgment can be translated into a message of social justice, with individual choice replacing dogmas handed down by ancestors, tribes, or communities. Historically, apocalyptic movements tend to be socially inclusive, appealing especially to the deprived, marginalized, and dispossessed. The negative side is the demonization of perceived enemies in a world where the People of God—the saved remnant of humanity—see themselves as the sole bearers of divine wisdom or knowledge. The utopian project of realizing paradise—when the messiah's followers choose to enact the millennial scenario in real historical time—may be as devastating as the earthquakes, fires, plagues, and wars of apocalyptic imaginings.... (see article)

Unending Desire: De Certeau's Mystics

Debashish — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 11:33:48 -0700

"Unbeknownst even to some of its promoters, the creation of mental constructs . . . takes the place of attention to the advent of the Unpredictable. That is why the 'true' mystics are particularly suspicious and critical of what passes for 'presence'. They defend the inaccessibility they confront." - Michel de Certeau.

The writings of Michel de Certeau on mysticism are interdisciplinary, original and tantalizing. They draw on disciplines ranging from history, theology and spirituality to psychoanalysis, semiotics and cultural theory. While de Certeau concentrated on sixteenth and seventeenth-century French and Spanish spiritualities with their emphasis on 'spiritual experience', one of his most controversial views was that mysticism is not purely a matter of interiority but is a form of disruptive 'social practice'.

In a time of institutionalized comforts, of Integral Theory, Integral Religion and Integral Psychology, the caution of Michel de Certeau becomes more pressing than ever. De Certeau relates the rise of mysticism with social conditions which "possess" and displace experience within the language of orthodoxy. The science of 'mystics' he proposes is not so much a system of named experiences as a blueprint of praxis, a language of tactical retreat, a shifting map of recognized departures and social attitudes of refused identification. In this article, Philip Sheldrake, Vice-Principal and Academic Director of Saturn College, Salisbury and Honorary Professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Wales, Lampeter, opens a window on de Certeau's studies and caveats on mysticism.

Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, Sarod Virtuoso, Dies at 87

Debashish — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 21:51:54 -0700
Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, the foremost virtuoso of the lutelike sarod, whose dazzling technique and gift for melodic invention, often on display in concert with his brother-in-law Ravi Shankar, helped popularize North Indian classical music in the West, died on Thursday at his home in San Anselmo, Calif. He was 87. In this obituary from the New York Times, William Grimes provides an outline of this most extraordinary musician.

Heterologies of the Spiritual and the Everyday: The Quest of Michel de Certeau

Debashish — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 22:13:50 -0700

Catholicism, history writing, cultural psychology or postcolonial hybridity - the passionate language of Michel de Certeau has opened up heterologies of contemporary interpretation and resistance to the regimes of institutional orthodoxy everywhere. In this introduction to his life and works in The New York Review of Books, Natalie Davis writes of the ways in which de Certeau worked to restore subjective agency and wholeness to the individual life within the pervasive circuits of postmodern technocratic power.

June 16th, Happy Bloomsday!

Rich — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 08:10:42 -0700

June 16th 1904 is that faithful day in the life of Dublin marking the epochal birfurcation of narrative, given in the epiphanies of Stephen Dedalus & Leopold & Molly Bloom. The last lines of the 644 page turning story of Ulysses - a book that at times one does not read but rather, wades through - are the subject of this video; also known as the soliloquy of Molly Bloom.

Esalen Conference on Fundamentalism: Christian

Rich — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 13:46:27 -0700

Several years ago the Esalen Institute sponsored a series of conferences on Fundamentalism. The next few post concern the conferences on Fundamentalism of the Abrahamic Faiths. First up Christian Fundamentalism.....

Hankins began by emphasizing the need to differentiate (in a way popular culture often fails to) evangelicals and fundamentalists. He joked that an evangelical is anyone who really likes Billy Graham, and a fundamentalist is an evangelical who is angry about something. More seriously, although there is a fair amount of truth in the joke, Hankins described fundamentalism as a late 19th and 20th century Christian reaction to the threat of theological modernism. Throughout the 19th century, as George Marsden has shown, most Anglophone Protestant Christians simply called themselves evangelicals, and this self-identification included the mainline denominations as well as new (holiness and premillennialist) revivalist groups. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, American evangelicalism had begun to polarize sharply between theological liberals and conservatives. Conservative Christians in this period found themselves increasingly troubled by two cultural phenomena. On the one hand, higher criticism imported from Germany had begun to question the integrity of the Scriptures by calling attention to literary techniques that suggested that many of the books of the Old and New Testaments were written far later than tradition had claimed, or by calling into question the presumed authorship of various books within the Bible (so, for example, the higher criticism denied that Moses authored Genesis through Deuteronomy, or more scandalously that a number of the New Testament letters attributed to Paul, such as 1 Timothy, were written by someone else). On the other hand, conservatives were troubled by some of the claims of modern science, particularly Darwin's claims that some saw as threatening or contradicting the Christian belief in God as Creator.[2] The central issue in both of these challenges was the question of authority: where does authority reside for the Christian church? Theological modernists reacted to higher criticism and the challenge of Darwinism by saying that authority ultimately resided in experience. Conservatives, however, felt that the authority of the church resided pre-eminently in her scriptures. As the 19th century drew to a close, the difference between the modernists and their emphasis on experience and the conservatives with their belief in the authority of scripture continued to widen and threatened to break.

The pre-history of the fundamentalist movement really gets underway with the extravagant publishing venture of Milton and Lyman Stewart, the millionaire brothers behind Union Oil Company of California (today known as UNOCAL). Between 1910 and 1915, the Stewarts commissioned and published 12 volumes known as The Fundamentals, which defended such positions as the virgin birth and the literal resurrection of Jesus, and attacked the assumptions of higher criticism. The Stewarts financed the project extravagantly so that the volumes could be distributed without charge to every pastor, missionary, theologian, Sunday school superintendent, college professor, and so on, throughout the English speaking world. Three million volumes were distributed in all. This bold and aggressive publishing campaign not only gave its name, but also bequeathed its character to the Fundamentalist movement that arose in its wake, which is why George Marsden describes Fundamentalism as the "militant defense of traditionalist Protestantism."

Hankins explained how World War I exasperated the divide within Christianity between theological modernists and the emerging Fundamentalist movement. Though it is not often remembered today, it was theological liberals and progressive Christians who championed the United States' involvement in World War I, while conservative (especially, pre-millennialist) Christians called for restraint. The horrors of the war however, radicalized the positions of everyone involved, and conservatives soon felt that they saw something far more insidious than a merely political conflict. They began to feel that Germany, which had once been the land of Luther, had degenerated under the influence of modernism, into an overly militaristic and Nietzschean nation. Traditionalists argued that even though the United States might win the land war, it was in danger of losing the battle with German culture and so they connected the triumph of theological liberalism (which had its roots in German higher criticism) with the cultural annihilation of America itself.

Tariq Ali: the Duel (Pakistan on the Flight Path of America Power)

Rich — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 20:12:36 -0700

Requires Adobe Flash Player

Once again, Pakistan is in crisis, with Waziristan the newest "most dangerous place" in the world. Islamabad can't control the escalating conflict, and the government is again run by an unpopular, incompetent and nepotistic civilian administration.

And again, Pakistan is going hat in hand to the IMF, Saudi Arabia and China to face off oil prices, food inflation, dwindling foreign exchange and declining terms of trade.

Tariq Ali has been warning of Pakistan's collapse for four decades. For those sins, his books have often been banned there, and "generals, corrupt politicians and bearded lunatics" dislike him in equal measure. In The Duel, Ali provides a gossip-filled, witty and polemical history, revealing, with perspicacity and verve, the flight into the abyss. ...

This guy won! (or so they say) L.A. Times

Rich — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 10:48:43 -0700

Iran: Fundamentalism and the Future

Asked about the state of civil liberties in Iran, Ahmadinejad said Iranians enjoyed "absolute freedom" of speech.
"Don't worry about freedom in Iran," Ahmadinejad told reporters. "Newspapers come and go and reappear. Don't worry about it."

The road out of Kabul goes through Kashmir by Graham User (LRB)

Rich — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 20:12:49 -0700

Pakistan and India have been at war since 1948. There have been occasional flare-ups, pitched battles between the two armies, but mostly the war has taken the form of a guerrilla battle between the Indian army and Pakistani surrogates in Kashmir. In 2004 the two countries began a cautious peace process, but rather than ending, the war has since migrated to Afghanistan and the Pakistani tribal areas on the Afghan border. ‘Safe havens’ for a reinvigorated Afghan Taliban and al-Qaida, the tribal areas are seen by the West as the ‘greatest threat’ to its security, as well as being the main cause of Western frustration with Pakistan. The reason is simple: the Pakistan army’s counterinsurgency strategy is not principally directed at the Taliban or even al-Qaida: the main enemy is India.

Much ado about Ganesha: Paul Courtright, Wendy Doniger, and the Hindu Right (Rajiv Malhotra) by Amardeep Singh - (w/ Courtright review)

Rich — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 19:25:51 -0700

Malhotra makes some good points, but he lacks restraint. Because the western scholarship on Hinduism he singles out is markedly psychoanalytic in nature, he feels it is appropriate to "reverse psychoanalyze" the critics in question. He speculates on the sexuality of these scholars in ways that are extremely distasteful at best, and libelous at worst. Here is an example of a particularly ugly passage from Malhotra:

1) Western women, such as the famous professor herself, who are suppressed by the prudish and male chauvinistic myths of the Abrahamic religions, find in their study of Hinduism a way to release their innermost latent vasanas, but they disguise this autobiography as a portrayal of the “other” (in this case superimposing their obsessions upon Hindu deities and saints). For example, here is Wendy acknowledging projecting her psychosis onto her scholarship:[lxxx] “Aldous Huxley once said that an intellectual was someone who had found something more interesting than sex; in Indology, an intellectual need not make that choice at all…. Is sex a euphemism for god? Or is god a euphemism for sex? Or both!” 2) American Lesbian and Gay women's vasanas, also suppressed by Abrahamic condemnation, seek private and public legitimacy, and therefore, interpret Indian texts for this autobiographical purpose. 3) Sexually abused Western women, seeking an outlet for anger, find in the Hindu Devi either a symbol of female violence or a symbol of male oppression -- another cultural superimposition

Ugh. To Mr. Malhotra: if you disagree with the arguments and methods of these scholars, debate them respectfully...

Further evidence of Ranade's and Pandey's involvement in legal action

koantum — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 19:57:37 -0700

In a recent post, Alok Pandey shows that he and Sraddhalu Ranade are in fact involved in the court cases.
More than that, Pandey's letter indicates that their intent in urging and drafting material for court cases was never a matter of “hurt sentiments,” but rather deliberate political maneuvering. They have been trying to change leadership at the Ashram through petition campaigns and court cases: “If [Peter] chooses to move out... the court cases might be dropped.”

Apparently both Pandey and Ranade consider court cases a legitimate method for removing a person from a position in the Ashram, and forcing a person to leave the Ashram itself.

Pandey: "And, yes, perhaps if he chooses to move out of the Ashram and stay in Auroville, where he has a number of admirers, or to some other place where he can follow the yoga in his own way, then, perhaps the court cases might be dropped." (http://www.thelivesofsriaurobindo.com/2009/06/shadow-and-after-by-alok-pandey.html)

Contrast this with Pandey's and Ranade's previous statements re court cases, e.g. in Ranade's "Open Letter to Auroville and Centres":
Court cases: Neither Alok nor I have the competence or the resources to handle court cases. Contrary to IYF's claims, neither of us is responsible for them, and neither do we have a say in their withdrawal.
The paradox is interesting: if they have no say in withdrawal of court cases, how can they lay down conditions for dropping them? On the other hand, if they have been involved in the cases from the beginning, are in touch with the lawyers, and have influence over the cases, as we have demonstrated, then it makes perfect sense.