The
“History of Yoga” (editor: Satya Prakash Singh) is a massive work comprising 40
chapters spanning about 900 pages written by 19 subject experts. It traces the
origins and development of Yoga starting from the Vedas to the modern times.
These are some interesting tidbits from the book. Continue reading →
In
one sense it doesn’t matter. There will always be people who disrespect
philosophy, or the type of philosophy you or I do, and you can keep on doing it
anyway without their approval. (What the physicists say here about philosophy
is no worse than what analytically and continentally trained philosophers say
even about each other.)
In
another sense, I think it’s philosophy’s own fault for being too deferential to
the natural sciences on questions concerning the inanimate world.
And
in yet another sense, you can read Feyerabend’s remarks about how
philosophically barbaric physicists became from roughly Feynman forward, quite
unlike Einstein, Bohr, & Co. I’m on the road away from my books, so I’m
afraid I can’t give a citation for that. But Hawking’s proud and
self-congratulatory claim to be a “positivist” gives a glimpse into that
barbarism.
I
also couldn’t disagree more with the Russell passage cited here, to the effect
that philosophy aims at knowledge, and that once knowledge is achieved in an
area it ceases to be philosophy. I’m with the Meno on this
one. Philosophy does not aim at knowledge. That’s even the whole point.
Paul
Ricoeur famously called these approaches to thinking “hermeneutics of
suspicion,” and he rightly saw them as ultimately deriving from the
self-questioning reflexivity of the late 19th century critiques presented by
Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche. Darwin
has been added to the list by some. 20th century suspicions of traditional
forms of philosophy simply built on those of the late 19th century, and the
general suspicions and reflexivities that were unleashed in the culture in
general at that time… And this is why for the last 40 years or so, since
post-structuralism came on the scene around the failed revolutions of 1968,
we’ve all been skeptics of a sort…
Deleuze’s
skepticism was in this sense broader than that of his peers. Rather than see
language, or the economy, or power, or the unconscious, as the source of
simulation, he sees the world itself as one giant simulation of itself, a
world-cinema in which all are images, and all images are real, but none as real
as that agency which produces images and yet is captured fully by none of them.
The virtual, Deleuze’s name for this force, is everywhere actualizing, but
nowhere fully actualized. And this is the opening to freedom. It’s all false,
which is why at points Deleuze speaks of the “powers of the false” which is to
say, the wonderful power to produce new worlds.
But
rather than deconstruct these worlds very quickly, as Derrida does, or let them
linger, so long as we keep in mind that they will ultimately self-deconstruct,
like Foucault and Lacan, Deleuze is the only thinker in the bunch that
emphasizes the freedom and creativity that unravelling brings. Rather than put
the emphasis upon the skepticism whereby everything deconstructs, Deleuze puts
the emphasis upon giving rise to the new. While sometimes this requires
deconstructing the past, this act of destructive shouldn’t be glorified for its
own sake. This would be to idealize skepticism, and in its way, death. While
death is essential if there is to be new birth, the birth is where the emphasis
should be. Creation. And while some have argued that Deleuze fetishizes the new
for its own sake, and in this way mirrors the capitalist push for continually
new products, Deleuze is quick to show that he criticizes capitalism for not
being new enough, for always giving us new seeming versions of the same, which
is, ultimately, profit. For Deleuze, the new can never just be more of the
same, it needs to be qualitatively new, beyond quantitative increase…
Deleuze’s
method is to keep mutating. Rather than be reduced to silence, he takes the
other path, proliferation. And so long as there is within one’s system a site
for pure proliferation, one which in theory can unravel your system, then you
have an anti-system that passes the skeptical attack of post-structuralism. But
rather than simply try to name this process of unravelling, and say nothing
more in your works than name this process, one can slow down a bit. Say
something. Create. Imagine. Dream. So long as there is a navel within the dream
that can unravel it, and which connects your dreams in a series of mutations,
then there’s a potential for creation which isn’t just naive. But which is
dreaming of new worlds, ones which are as open to change as the Derridean
system wants to be, but without the self-enforced quietism.
First,
it misses the fact that for Spinoza, all bodies are similar in some respect or
other. In other words, it misses that our capacity for identification
with others is, in principle, infinite. This is an argument
that Bennett makes as well in Vibrant Matter in her defense of conatus.
She sees the potential of conatus and the sympathies it can
generate as extending well beyond morphological similarity.
Second,
this misses the point that in Spinoza (and Spinoza misses this point in his own
thought), that our ability to identify with our fellow humans is every bit as
fraught and difficult as our ability to identify with nonhumans. Spinoza
feels that he must give an argument to show that we should have
regard for other humans? Why? Because all humans have different
constitutions and are therefore as dissimilar as they are similar. It is
as hard as it is to identify with your fellows as it is to identify with your
dog. Indeed, it’s often easier to identify with your pet. Spinoza’s
argument as to why we should have regard for our fellows is that “nothing is
more useful to man than man”. In other words, he tries to show all the
ways in which others benefit our conatus. If we ought not
harm our fellows, then this is because we benefit from them in all sorts of
ways and harming them tends to produce disruption in ways that disrupt the
flourishing of our conatus. It’s notable that this is
precisely the sort of argument that Marx makes in his political writings.
Far from making a case for pure altruism, Marx shows how the common benefits us
far more than pursuing our own isolated self-interest. Marx makes an
argument from enlightened self-interest. It takes knowledge and an
imaginative leap, however, to see why this is so because it’s necessary to see
how we benefit from the work of others as well as their flourishing.
Now
why is all this important? It’s important because the case is no
different from nonhumans. In a state of ignorance we only see the shark
eating the fish we’d like to catch to eat or coming at us to eat us.
When, by contrast, we understand the nature of ecosystems and our place in
ecosystems, we come to understand both how our exploitative actions can be
destructive of ourselves and of the world on which we rely. This can
heighten regard for these nonhumans and perhaps lead to different practices.
It
is precisely such an ecological approach that Hasana Sharp proposes in her
reworking of the concept of ideology in her remarkable book Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization. As
Sharp writes, “…I argue that in Spinoza we find an alternative
“renaturalization” of ideology whereby social critics and political activists
can grasp how ideas grow, survive, and thrive, or shrink and die, like any
other natural being” (55). While I don’t share all of Sharp’s Spinozist
theses– though Spinoza is one of my six most important thinkers, the others
being Lucretius, Deleuze and Guattari, Lacan, and Luhmann –her thesis is that
1) ideas have an autonomousreality of their own, and 2) that we are
in and among ideas (among other things, such as material bodies), rather than
ideas being in us.
Drawing
on Spinoza’s theory of conatus, whereby all beings
have an endeavor to persist in their being, Sharp argues that this is true of
ideas as well. In other words, ideas, texts, signifiers, and signs, independent
of us, can be understood as striving to persevere in their being.
Here we should think of the way in which ideas strive to persevere in their
being in the same way in which viruses or microbes strive to persevere in their
being. There need not be any conscious intentionality involved, just a
set of aggregate results. Such a claim amounts to claiming that ideas,
texts, representations, signs, and signifiers, develop strategies for both
getting themselves copied or replicated throughout a population and defending
against other ideas by insuring that they remain marginal and scarcely present
within the socius. Ideas defend against critique and the development of
new ideas.
A
materialist rhetoric and critique of ideology examines these strategies of
replication and defense and develops techniques for diminishing these powers so
as to introduce other ideas.
Polanyi’s
stock is currently running high (Hann and Hart 2009). In The Great
Transformation (1944) he traced the disaster of two world wars and the
Great Depression to the installation of a “self-regulating market” in Britain
during the nineteenth century, culminating in several decades of financial
imperialism (Polanyi preferred to call it haute finance)
underpinned by the gold standard, which came to an end in 1913-14. His critique
was aimed both at the subversion of social institutions by market economy and
at its ideological justification by the free market economics of the day. With
this in mind, Polanyi inverted the liberal myth of money’s origin in barter:
The
logic of the case is, indeed, almost the opposite of that underlying the
classical doctrine. The orthodox teaching started from the individual’s
propensity to barter; deduced from it the necessity of local markets, as well
as of division of labour; and inferred, finally, the necessity of trade,
eventually of foreign trade, including even long-distance trade. In the light
of our present knowledge [Thurnwald, Malinowski, Mauss etc], we should almost
reverse the sequence of the argument: the true starting point is long-distance
trade, a result of the geographical location of goods and of the “division of
labour” given by location. Long-distance trade often engenders markets,
an institution which involves acts of barter, and, if money is used, of buying
and selling, thus, eventually, but by no means necessarily, offering to some
individuals an occasion to indulge in their alleged propensity for bargaining
and haggling (1944: 58).
Money
and markets thus have their origin in the effort to extend society beyond its
local core. Polanyi believed that money, like the sovereign states to which it
was closely related, was often introduced from outside; and this was what made
the institutional attempt to separate economy from politics and naturalise the
market as something internal to society so subversive.
Polanyi
distinguished between token and commodity forms of money. “Token money” was
designed to facilitate domestic trade, “commodity money” foreign trade; but the
two systems often came into conflict. Thus the gold standard sometimes exerted
downward pressure on domestic prices, causing deflation that could only be
alleviated by central banks expanding the money supply in various ways.
The tension between the internal and external dimensions of economy often led
to serious disorganization of business (Polanyi 1944: 193-4)…
In
a later article, “Money objects and money uses”, Polanyi (1977: 97-121)
approached money as a semantic system, like language and writing. His main
point was that only modern money combines the functions of payment, standard,
store and exchange and this gives it the capacity to sustain the set of
functions through a limited number of “all-purpose” symbols. Primitive and
archaic forms attach the separate functions to different symbolic objects which
should therefore be considered to be “special-purpose” monies. Polanyi is
arguing here against the primacy of money as a medium of exchange and for a
multi-stranded model of its evolution. I will return to this later.
Marcel
Mauss’s position on markets and money (Hart 2007b) is an even more persuasive
contribution to institutional economics than Polanyi’s. The Gift (1925)
is an extended commentary on Durkheim’s (1893) argument that an advanced
division of labour is sustained by “the non-contractual element in the
contract”, a largely invisible body of state-made law, custom and belief that
could not be reduced to abstract market principles. Mauss held that the attempt
to create a free market for private contracts is utopian and just as
unrealizable as its antithesis, a collective based solely on altruism. Human
institutions everywhere are founded on the unity of individual and society,
freedom and obligation, self-interest and concern for others. The pure types of
selfish and generous economic action obscure the complex interplay between our
individuality and belonging in subtle ways to others.
For
the meantime, however, in this protracted cosmic interregnum, God’s agency is
through the government of men wielded only vicariously. Consequently, Agamben
argues, the problem of governance is paradigmatically not ontological but
economic. Vis-à-vis the acts of governance, power is always allusive. Because
every power “deputizes for another…there is not a ‘substance’ of power but only
an economy of it.” (141). As far as power is concerned, that is to say, the
pressing question is not what, but how.
If
not a substance, power might be said to possesses a currency. That currency is
glory. For the sustenance of both the divine Kingdom and Christian government,
the flow of glory is necessarily wholly reciprocal. The government depends on
the glory of God for its survival, but for his nourishment, God too needs
glory, which he receives through the acclamations of men and women. And in this
process of production and exchange, “the economy glorifies being, as being
glorifies the economy” (209). Indeed, it is in this very velocity of
circulation that glory is glorified. But this circulation on which both God and
State so desperately depend is all that there is. In one of his big reveals,
Agamben writes: “Government glorifies the Kingdom, and the Kingdom glorifies
Government. But the center of the machine in empty, and the glory is nothing
but the splendor that emanates from this emptiness, the inexhaustible kabhod that
at once reveals and veils the central vacuity of the machine” (211). No gold
standard props up this currency. The only thing backing it, rather, is a form
of collective faith.
