Risky Business

The most recent post over at I cite about Zizek’s tremendous literary output and whether it is “too much” struck me in a different situation. Reading another of Cary Tenis’ advice columns, this time about a woman who apparently likes to engage in risky sexual behavior without telling her boyfriend, a lot of the responses I read appeal to her risky behavior being a problem and it being an indication that she’s living life to the fullest. In this context, at what point does risk transform from being authentically life-affirming to pathological? Moreover, which direction does the transformation move?

 

Traversing the Fantasy: Where Do I Go?

If we follow Descartes, we cannot be certain of things “outside” the mind, which are otherwise “objectively present,” though the subjective content of the mind qua mind is minimally certain. Cogito ergo sum. 

How is it that I know I am not psychotic, then, if the only content of my mind to speak of appears to me as objectively present? In other words, where is the minimal distance that separates truth from illusion, real from unreal, inside from outside?

Let’s make it clear by thinking of how people usually talk about The Matrix. They talk about being-in-the-Matrix as being different from being-not-in-the-Matrix, or rather, the kind of being of being-in-the-Matrix is different from the kind of being of being-not-in-the-Matrix. Where/what is the difference, but more difficultly where am I going when I traverse the fantasy of that difference?

UPDATE: Being-not-in-the-Matrix is, as far as I’m concerned, an absurd way to talk. Rather, for the sake of having a coherent sense of the world, we should talk about not-being-in-the-Matrix. There is a structural ambiguity here though: how are we to understand the difference between NOT being-in-the-Matrix and NOT-BEING (that is) in-the-Matrix? Is this difference simply a replay of the one I already considered. If the difference alludes you, think of at least two different ways to understand “he saw her with binoculars.” If that alludes you, you’re on the wrong blog.

 

Obscene Supplement: A Reaction

At Salon.com, Cary Tenis, in his advice column of sorts, he responds to a letter by a woman complaining that her and her boyfriend, while they both make good money, have radically different relationships with money. She spends what she implies is a “normal” amount, while he lives “frugally” and in something of a vow of miserly poverty. Miserly, because he “earns a decent income as a teacher and has investment income.”

In other words, he takes the oldest and most central rules of the Capitalist game so seriously—above all, save and work hard—to the detriment of the Superego injunction to enjoy (i.e. consume). What’s more is he, in a certain sense, wins the game according to the given rules, but not according to the unspoken ones of late Capitalist ideology. More amazingly is the way he gets criticized for being a miser, when what really bothers everyone complaining on the Letter Writer’s behalf is that he himself takes on the poverty that they need someone else to take on for them. It also doesn’t help that the guy seems to be satisfied with his way of life. In other words, there is an other way to experience jouissance.

Here it seems to be an Otherly jouissance, because the discipline with which he lives his life is focused on holding back the pleasure of consuming. It is this holding back, but especially in the dimension that he can tap into this comparatively (though not actually) infinite source of pleasure (i.e. consumption), that he has mastered in order to enjoy bearably. In other words, his enjoyment is not genital at all, but in a certain sense psychotically grounded in an anal pre-genital phase of development. To this end, inasmuch as he always risks being consumed by the Other’s jouissance should he partake in it as others do, he probably doesn’t know how to consume without being over-whelmed, which is why his life depends as much on not spending as it does making money. Money being the fiat of all commodities, which is to say obscured social relations of stolen surplus labor/jouissance, in a Capitalist society money (qua capital) is a libidinal and economic intensification. Only through the Symbolic mediation of the consuming practices of ideological identities are members of Capitalist society normally able to handle the intensity of social labour/desire. For the boyfriend, he doesn’t ascribe to the ideological identity of the age, the all-enjoying consumer, and therefore don’t know the first thing about what to do with money.

This identity is only commanded from off-the-scenes, as it were, while the official line of the Capitalist subject is: save and work hard. The guy is successful not because he hears the obscene superego injunction to consume, which creates an ambiguous meaning to money, commodities and things of consumer enjoyment; he’s successful because in the absence of such an external injunction telling him what to do with his money, and in the world of an otherwise operating Symbolic order, he knows how to take literally what others take metaphorically.

His impulse to save is really an impulse to hold off the unbearable pleasure he risks in consuming it should he let it invade him the way Cary Tenis and his commenters seem to endorse. The difference between him and the CEO or the more traditional miser, is that he has no ideological supplement to make his practices coherent to him, which directs a mode of consumption. Not having been installed in the Symbolic order properly, so it seems, which makes itself clear here in the absence of a (capitalist) subjectivity, his lack of a consumer-identity means he lacks the ability to consume except directly through work.

What’s also interesting is vis-a-vis this psychotic relationship to money, there is a certain kind of feminization insofar as the female sexuation has been reproduced as a literal character of poverty as well as having access to the Other’s jouissance, normally under the care of a male’s endorsement. The LW is more typical of the sort of masculine subject that enjoys her much jouissance in this mediated way, and feels threatened by not only the Other’s jouissance, but the one who knows how to deal with it directly. If her enjoyment is, as it were, achieved through a certain kind of will to Nothingness, then the boyfriend enjoys by not-willing. If only the LW talked more about what was so great about the actual sex!

 

Losing Reality

When someone goes through some kind of acute psychosis, like schizophrenia or some species of delusion or paranoia, we often say “they’ve lost touch with reality.” How do we speak for them in this way when it implies we are certain of our being “in touch with” reality just as much as they are even when we tell them what they see or hear or anticipate is not real?

Often enough psychotics are treated enough or are not so “lost” that they can talk about their experience as unreal, but acting that way still seems beyond them. Below this threshold, psychotics will often act and talk about their experience as real, despite protestations and even physical intervention. What is our epistemic model in science and liberal democracy more than the consensus of empirical facts?

Such a model seems to function in a way that by definition exclude the psychotic’s gesture to being “in touch with reality,” which means the consensus model of knowledge functions by virtue of its lack of consensus, since it lacks the psychotic’s agreement with their interpretation of reality. Lacan will say that the psychotic break occurs when they encounter the name-of-the-father in the real, which in practical terms is when they receive an interpretation that they hear as outside their own from someone occupying or otherwise speaking from the place of the Symbolic Father. In their attempt to patch over this hole they poked in their world, they resist what is in more Heidegerrian terms a revelation of Being offered from an Other. We experience that as the psychotic losing reality, while they also talk as if its precisely reality that they are saving. However, we agree that this is an example of “losing touch with reality” only on the basis of agreement, which is always already impossible so long as the psychotic refuses to agree with the revelation of Being we offer them.

Chuang-Tzu was all over this 2000 years ago when he asked the brilliant question of how he know’s he’s not a butter-fly dreaming he’s Chuang-Tzu or the other way around

 

Beautiful Commenters with Beautiful Comments

This is a comment, posted by “chlamor,” on an Alter Net article on a self-proclaimed “yuppie” who “goes green” by moving to a farm in New Mexico.

There is much pretending throughout the progressive and liberal community.

Success and the good life, credentials and status, position and privilege must be protected, at least for people like “us.” At the same time, our position and privilege is dependent upon playing a certain role. We must pretend that we are not defending privilege and position and must pretend that we are for the downtrodden. We must pretend that privilege and position is all earned, and that anyone could have anything that we have. We must defend the system of dog-eat-dog competition

When our bluff is called, there is no amount of time and energy we will spare in internecine warfare arguing fine points of what a liberal is, or what our position should be on each and every minute issue and sub-issue and variations on every issue. These arguments can never be resolved, because there is no basis of consensus. Actually there is a consensus, but an important component of the consensus is that we never talk about it and we must pretend that it isn’t there.

The consensus from which liberals-progressives-Democrats operate:

“We are the better people. We are smarter, we are humane, we are more compassionate, we are better informed. We are better citizens, we are more cooperative and realistic. We are winners, not losers, and we deserve everything we get. We are spiritually superior. We are centered and balanced, calm and insightful. We are on the right side of history. We are building a better world.

Most of the problems in the world are the result of stupid people running things. If we smart people were in charge, all of the problems could be solved with science and technology and rational social planning.

Class analysis, and the struggles of working class people against tyranny have no place in modern society. They are obsolete and passe, and only something that we read about or see in movies. Romantic as those stories are, they are no substitute for hard-headed practical reality, whether we like it or not. This is a matter of being a mentally healthy, modern, well-adjusted adult in society. None of the lessons from history apply, because things are different now. Only strange maladjusted people are attracted to obsolete political ideas. They are all obviously losers, and are a great danger, almost as much of a danger as the Republicans are.

Since politics and economics in the traditional sense are dead, we embrace a new paradigm of self improvement and self-actualization. Anything that interferes with our focus on ourselves and our pursuit of creating ourselves as an actualized being is to be rejected. The way to achieve the perfect society is first to create a perfect self. Meanwhile, so long as the authorities do not interfere with our self-actualization, we must comply in all ways with that authority. This allows us perfect self-expression within perfect social conformity. Anyone who attacks our personal choices is the enemy, and anyone who attacks the social system based on personal choice is also the enemy.

Others, however, who do not share our values are not to be given personal choice, when and as we can prove that their personal choices are wrong, often with convoluted claims that their choice impacts us somehow. We support the police state and massive incarceration of people, so long as they are being harassed and imprisoned for the right reasons. Any variance from our idea as to how people should be is the right reason, by definition.

We believe that we must ‘be the change we wish to see,’ and the change we wish to see is more people like us: polite, talented, beautiful, intelligent, calm, successful, clever, enlightened. So we merely need to be ourselves, focus on ourselves, and serve ourselves. Those who cannot or will not become like us need to back down and get out of the way.”

It’s so bizarrely true too. Some of the responses garnered self-cataloguing that chlamor brilliantly picks up on without even decending to the imaginary level of the self-indulgent liberal-progressives’ clash with the “pretenders.” Cathyc responds:

What do YOU mean by the ‘progressive and liberal community’? To whom are you referring, exactly? People who PRETEND they are progressive and/or liberal?

Believe it or not, there are people in this world who ARE actually making progress with their lives, usually painstakingly slow progress, but REAL as opposed to pretend progress. I’m one such person. I’m in no hurry; one can’t hurry nature….

BTW, I’m so involved and focused on my natural progress, I don’t pay much heed to my critics aka The Pretenders. As far as I’m concerned, I’m ALIVE, they’re not and Vive la Difference!

To which, chlamor replies without denying or affirming Cathyc’s demand of “What do YOU mean by the ‘progressive and liberal community’? To whom are you referring, exactly?”

Re-read my post.

Then re-read your response.

Take note of how many times you referred to yourself.

Proving the very point.

Amazing how deeply inculcated is the self-indulgence.

It’s just swell when people refuse to give up their desire.

 

So What?

No, I’m not talking about the Miles Davis song, but you should listen to it.

Over at I Cite, Jodi resounds with me, albeit in a different register, in saying “so what?” to all the hub-bub raised over Obama’s speech on race. She comments that his pastor’s anger is politicized in a way that comparably anger coming from white pulpits is not, but also that “Many liberals (Zizek’s beloved liberal multiculturalists) like it this way. They are most comfortable talking about racism, not race. To notice race, in their way of thinking, is to be racist.” It’s telling that these same liberals take a similar distance to race as these Fox News jerks debating the finer points of what one can “get away” with when speaking of race, particularly when you are of one race and your comments are directed towards another.

Towards the end of that clip, Chris Wallace, another Fox News anchor, pretty smartly says that he thinks Obama’s generalization is true! One of the other anchors, however, was quick to downplay Wallace by suggesting that the sentiment is “generational.” In other words, we can be honest about the relevance of age difference in how people view the world, but not when it comes to race. To have invoked race on that show would have been to actually take their comments about racism seriously, but it would have probably yielded wildly different results. For example, it makes sense that Obama (black or white) invokes a “typical white person,” because there is a typical white experience in America, because that is practically all we know collectively. It makes no sense for a white-person like Hillary Clinton or Chris Matthews to talk about a “typical black person,” which in our collective self-image doesn’t exist, except as a scary blind-spot.

The offensiveness of it is not merely that there is a black experience not captured in white America’s white vision of itself, which is all too aware of the racism that persists to this day, but that when anyone tries to talk about the difference and why there is a difference they are dismissed or chided. You don’t have to argue that the black-experience is of equal or superior value to anything else in order to just point out that that very black-experience exists because and is a symptom of white hegemony. The key is not to enjoy the black experience (read as: the multiculturalist experience), but to reject the racist horizon defining this experience of race.

 

Hegel’s Return to Rhetoricality, and Getting High With Moses

One of Hegel’s complaints in the Phenomenology is against what he calls “picture-thinking.” If it’s not a complaint against it as such, it’s definitely a complaint about a way of thinking about the world people have used it for. A great example of this latter sort of ambiguity is in paragraph 346, where after finishing his discussion of phrenology and otherwise physiognomy, Hegel turns to a rather potent analogy (pun most definitely intended). Since his discussion of phrenology was more or less a discussion of the difference and relationship between the objective world (i.e. explicit appearances) and Spirit, and specifically in the context of phrenology the relationship between the physical skull and the Spirit, he makes a nifty point: the genitals, but more obviously the phallus, are at once the organs of perhaps the highest ecstasy natural to human physiology (Hegel actually refers to its specialness in it being “the organ of regeneration,” which is to say procreation) as well as the organs that handle some of the most nasty stuff we regularly deal with, like urination (cf. Woody Allen in Sleeper: My brain, it’s my second favorite organ!”). While not necessarily making an interpretive point about human physiology (like Freud does with the Oral, Anal and Genital stages of development, which are all sites of otherwise nasty physiological function and pleasure, which we can easily think of as organs of (re)generation if we think of the painful pleasure (jouissance) neurotics seek out of repetition compulsion), Hegel uses this duplicity to say something about how Reason can take this fact.

Brain fibres and the like, when regarded as the being of Spirit, are no more than a merely hypothetical reality existing only in one’s head, not hte true reality which has an outer existence, and which can be felt and seen; when they exist out there, when they are seen, they are dead objects, and then no longer pass for the being of Spirit. But objectivity proper must be an immediate, sensuous objectivity, so that in this dead objectivity—for the bone [of the skull] is a dead thing, so far as what is dead is present in the living being itself—Spirit is explicitly present as actual. The Notion underlying this idea is that Reason takes itself to be all thinghood, even purely objective thinghood itself; but it is only in the Notion, or, only the Notion is the truth of this idead; and the purer the Notion itself is, the sillier an idea it becomes when its content is in the form, not of the Notion, but of picture-thinking, i.e. if the self-suspending judgement is not taken with the consciousness of this its infinitude, but as a fixed proposition the subject and predicate of which are valid each on its own account, the self fixed as self, the thing fixed as thing, and yet each is supposed to be the other. Reason, essentially the Notion, is directly sundered into itself and its opposite, an antithesis which for that very reason is equally immediately resolved. But when Reason is presented as its own self and its opposite, and is helf fast in the entirely separate moment of this asunderness, it is apprehended irrationally; and the purer the moments of this asunderness, the cruder is the appearance of this content which is either only for consciousness, or only ingenuously expressed by it. The depth which Spirit brings forth from within—but only as far as its picture-thinking consciousness where it lets it remain—and the ignorance of this consciousness about what it really is saying, are the same conjunction of the high and the low which, in the living being, Nature naively expresses when it combines the organ of its highest fulfilment [sic], the organ of generation, with the organ of urination. The infinite judgement, qua infinite, would be the fulfilment [sic] of life that comprehends itself; the consciousness of the infinite judgement that remains [i.e. gets stuck] at the level of picture-thinking behaves as urination.

What Hegel is anticipating is his eventual turn back towards Christianity (now that he has just made a certain turn away from it in his ostensible critique of the Unhappy Consciousness), when by the end of the book he ends up arguing how his metaphysics is the literal truth of what is only the metaphorical truth of Christian theology. What is amazing about this move is how it restores the place of the rhetorical, or at least rhetoricality, in contrast to hundreds of years of literalistic picture-thinking qua knowledge as representation. It goes back even further if you consider Hegel’s subtle alignment with medieval Christian mysticism. What Hegel shakes loose, decades before Nietzsche was even born, is the ascetic ideal. Nietzsche is still necessary later on though, because Hegel does not really take himself seriously enough: even in Hegelianism we idealize the transitory world, which is implicitly an attempt to escape from it that Hegel never makes explicit.

The literal truth Hegel wants to suppose for his metaphysics as opposed the metaphorical truth of otherwise symbolic Christianity, which for the most part looks ludicrous when taken literally (a fairly popular approach), is a sort of lala-land that pragmatists, starting with James want to reject. I know I skip over Emerson, who in his own way rejects the foundationalist lala-land of literal meaning or abstract truth, but not only is he not exactly writing polemics like James kind of is (a good thing, on Emerson’s part, by my read), I’m in no position to distill anything interesting about that right now. What Rorty inherits from the pragmatists and Nietzsche is a love for language and its inescapability in how we talk about truth. One thing to which this leads him, much as with Nietzsche and to a lesser extent with Freud and Lacan, is a romantic view of language that argues for a return to, if not a full on valorization of poetry. For other anti-foundational thinkers, like Bloom, this linguistic turn has meant more modestly returning to texts themselves.

This was Hegel’s creative and not logical response to the philosophers of his time and before, though his thinking otherwise would prove to limit his system in the end. When he simply says (mind you, not argues) in Paragraph 82, “…call to mind the abstract determinations of thought and knowledge as they occur in the consciousness,” he is acting more like a poet than a philosopher typical of his time. In a certain sense, he takes experience in general to be a text, to which he returns us when he just starts interpreting it. The logical necessity, the truth of his project is, as Rorty says of truth in general, a compliment he pays to how well thinking this way, saying these things works for him. That it has and hasn’t worked for others since him has nothing to do with the text he produced, but with whether it has worked for them. I like this return to the text, but it the book, the speech of the analysand, or to what is there in all its stupid ambiguity and debatability.

It’s thinking of the text like this that I was pissed off by Benny Shannon. Professor Shannon, as he’s referred to in the article published in the Daily Mail about the burning-bush story of Exodus being a case of drug-use, is laughable and potentially dangerous as the religious zealot who claims Moses is really (no, seriously, really) talking to God in the burning bush. The story has the air of another Bible-story debunked, and I’m all for giving historical depth to otherwise literary documents, but there is no depth to be had by Professor Shannon’s interpretation. The Exodus, certainly the portion recounted in the burning-bush story, is on fairly shaky historical ground, in terms of outside, contemporary sources talking about it on terms outside of the deeply ambiguous and sometimes fantastic terms of the text itself. Professor Shannon wants to, like religious zealots, take this text as for serious about something that really happened, but wants to say what happened was something else. If we were dealing with a historical document, then I’d have less of a problem with this, but what Shannon is doing is interpreting the meaning (his meaning, his 21st century experimental drug-taking and academic meaning) “of the text” as what for serious is meant in the text itself.

On its face, we can take this as just another interpretation, but in its appeal to a real historical happening about which there are clear meanings, it asks to be nothing less than the word of God. I’m not a Christian or a Jew, but I find something fiendish in this, just as I find something fiendish in interpreting anything absolute in user-supplied meaning of the text. I am with Lacan in this respect, whose big beef with Ego Psychology was its insistence on interpreting the transference (i.e. the imaginary relations) rather than the analysand’s Symbolic context, which is to say the text that is the analysand’s situation. There is nothing particularly dangerous about Shannon’s interpretation, which is why my complaint may seem a bit over-blown, but neither is there anything particularly harmful about interpreting the text the way religious zealot does. What’s at stake for me is the very orientation to the text these interpretations take, or rather don’t take. Neither of them really have anything to do with the text itself, and that in itself is what is dangerous about this kind of thinking. Not having anything to do with the text, but ostensibly grounding themselves “in” it, this sort of thinking is effectively made up, but on dangerously unchecked grounds.

I think the more radically middle path would be give up both the concern for what the text really means, and to return to the text itself. When you hear people start talking about what this or that means, you can be sure as sunday that they’re in lala-land, because it is obvious that if we’re talking about this or that that it means something. It’s when they foreground their description with a statement of what we already know that we should be suspicious, like Zizek is of the Bush Administration’s to up-front talk of torture, and wonder deeply why are you saying this; what do you mean by your foregrounding of what this or that means?

 

Activity in Buddhism

[x-posted at Progressive Buddhism]

Whitney Joiner wrote an interesting appraisal of the Dharma Punx phenomenon, which she playfully titled “Dive-bar Dharma.” Specifically she considers how this new phenomenon within American Buddhism relates to the more original phenomenon of American Buddhism itself (i.e. Buddhism that rushed into America after WWII and proliferated with the then counter-culture). In the end she comes out with what, I think, is the typical utilitarian/skillful-means defense of the movement. Rather than strive for appeal through the quasi-authority of Eastern exoticism—which may or may not fairly describe the original appeal for ’50s and ’60s counter-culture-warriors like Allen Ginsberg, who like many other disaffected youth of his time was already enamored with quasi-mystic figures of the Romantic movement like William Blake and the less mystical but no less romantic Walt Whitman, not to mention being steeped in the Jewish and Christian mystic traditions—Joiner thinks Levine and a fellow dharma punk, Ethan Nichtern, are on the right track with their edgy new approach to spreading/practicing the dharma. What I think is missing from this sort of account is the flip-side of even this movement. I’ll digress for a moment in an excerpt from the lengthy comment I left, which I think says my point about as well as I care to right now.

The key to understanding how active Buddhist practice is already (before getting hipsterfied or whatever) is in understanding how active our minds are already.

We are typically dominated by a more or less mild froth of mental activity, both in the moment but largely also out of it. That is to say, when we pull out the drawer to get a spoon for eating our freshly poured bowl of cereal, our minds are probably engaged in that activity, but more likely than not a bunch of other stuff too—whatever we were doing before we made our bowl of cereal, whatever we anticipate doing afterwards and associations and thoughts of other sorts. What happens is we are constantly pulled out of the moment and to the extent that we are in the moment, the weight of the rest of our mental activity can make things that are not in this moment feel very present. Isn’t it common to be in a bad-mood and to take what someone said or did, or some otherwise inadvertent circumstance, as we put it “the wrong way,” only to realize later that “I was just in a bad-mood” and feel crumby about it?

Tarrying with this mental activity, which takes us out of the moment when we don’t even normally realize it until after the fact, is the core of Buddhist practice. Stilling the mind is not simply turning our inessential mental activity off, because we can’t turn our thoughts off like that. Luckily for us, what comes goes, and the same is true for our thoughts. So, the trick of Buddhist practice, at least when we’re talking about meditation, is staying with these thoughts long enough to notice that they are there, but not so that we become unaware of everything else that is going on around us. This is, on the one hand, profoundly difficult, more difficult than anything else someone can try and do, because it is asking that we stay in full contact with every nook and cranny of our mental activity so we don’t lose track of it. On the other hand, it turns out to be profoundly simple too, since after establishing our mindfulness, the mental activity goes away by itself. We’re just there to watch, engaged enough to know what’s going on, but not so much that we’re really worried about what’s going to come of it, since we already know: when this arises, that arises; when this ceases, that ceases.

In this way, Buddhism is already profoundly active from the get go. I’m very much on board with what one of the commenters said about the ease of this practice perhaps unskillfully being put before its simultaneous [depth and] difficulty. As much [as] overly esoteric practices and teachings are unskillful (not in themselves, but because they are brought [up in] an inappropriate context), I think that overly exoteric practices and teachings are probably just as unskillful. The idea that “you aren’t doing anything” isn’t wrong, as I already pointed out, but it’s incomplete, and it is incompleteness of a view or a practice that makes it unskillful. What we do on the meditation cushion, or however you meditate is, first of all, tremendous work, but it isn’t to be just something we do on the meditation cushion. The goal is bring this practice we have in meditation into every moment of our lives. If that doesn’t sound like positively the most difficult thing anyone has ever suggested to you, then I don’t know what will. Nonetheless, somewhat in defense of the article, it doesn’t matter what’s going on the outside so long as the same practice is happening on the inside, whether you say “Peace, man” or “Oi!”

That’s pretty much all I have to say, but I should still add a bit more. What is at stake for Buddhists brought up in Generation X and now Generation Y is still very much what was at stake for the first mentionable generation of American Buddhists in the last century: suffering and its cessation. I probably gloss over a lot when I say this, but I’m not giving a rigorous historical account, just a perspective. The way I see it, people have come to the dhamma because they are ready to begin taking up the path to the cessation of (their) suffering and dissatisfaction with life. If they aren’t, then allure of the exotic (whether its from China, the hippie commune, or the tattoo-parlor) wears off, as everything does, and they get on with their lives—still unsatisfied.

The point I fear is missed by many in the Dharma Punx movement and those surrounding it is that we practice the dharma for its own sake—not because it’s cool or fun or whacky or edgy or however you want to describe the vehicle. I think this marks one of the difficulties for the development of a truly Western (or American) Buddhism, because we have a deep cultural penchant for commodities (i.e. things whose first and practically only purpose is to be consumable by as many people as possible, which is to say, things that are all exterior), which translates into approaching something like the dhamma asking “so what is it good for?” The only meaningful answer I can think of is: everything, and nothing less.

This reminds me of a story I’ve heard from somewhere about the Buddha and a farmer. The farmer comes to the Buddha, who he heard has this great teaching, and asks him if it can help him with this or that mundane problem of his life (nagging wife, unruly kids, failing crops, etc.). The Buddha says his teaching cannot help with any of those problems. He tells him that life is full of all kinds of problems, 83 to be exact, and the Buddha’s teaching will help him with none of them. The farmer, kind of ticked off, asks the Buddha just what good his teachings are then, if they in no way answer to any of these issues in his (or anyone else’s) life. The Buddha points out that his teachings are good and only good for one still yet unmentioned problem, an 84th problem enveloping all the other 83 problems: the farmer wants to have no more problems.

In a similar way, the American Buddhist community’s task is not to be popular (i.e. prolific in a social context insofar as that context stays the same), like when the farmer asks if it can fix this or that problem (i.e. a fix for a problem only when it’s a problem), but to remain effective. By effective I don’t mean in the sense that there is any particular, conventional issue it addresses, but because it remains true to its only purpose: the cessation of suffering.

 

Choice

I’ve noticed an interesting trend in libertarian circles to adopt a rhetoric of choice (mostly in economic terms, and then largely as an issue of taxation) deliberately paralleling, and in many cases competing, with choice as an issue of women’s reproductive rights. It has the potential to digress into blue-in-the-face identity politics shouting matches, but I also think it might be a useful strategy for over-coming just this obstacle to solidarity and dialogue. If so, it’s probably not a conscious effort, in the sense that anyone’s thought of it quite this way and acted accordingly. At any rate, it’s a trend that I hope gains some traction, though not for the libertarians’ sake, but for the sake of Leftists who have yet to formulate any good ways of addressing oppression as a function of identity and vice versa without the divisiveness of identity.

 

Wow!

For Stanley Fish, “that’s more than enough in my view to justify the enterprise of humanistic study,” he writes in a follow-up column (in the New York Times) to an earlier one that entertains the question, “Will The Humanities Save Us?” His argument—much like one he outlines in the introduction to his 1989 book, “Doing What Comes Naturally,” where he argues that “theory has no consequences” (14)—is that the study of the humanities (that is, the professional study of the humanities) has no (tenably) extrinsic use, but only intrinsic value. In other words, “To the question ‘of what use are the humanities?’, the only honest answer is none whatsoever. ” What’s more is that, as he puts it, this is “an answer that brings honor to its subject.”

What I take Fish to be suggesting, as the at once explicit and tacit question of these articles is why we should fund the study of the humanities and why should anyone study them professionally, is that, as anti-climatic as it seems, the humanities are worth preserving in themselves. This also goes for (financially) supporting the study of the humanities, specifically, however, avoiding the notion that through studying them we become “well rounded citizens.” In this sense, Fish is saying that studying the humanities anymore persists because the people who devote their lives to the study of the humanities (like Fish) are people, which is to say, they are not agents of some extrinsic goal. An agent of some extrinsic goal would be like a job (or our idea of being a worker with a job) in relation to the idea of retirement (or our idea of not being workers anymore): paradoxically we commit our lives to something, and in effect make it that something, purely for the sake of something that is not it.

The same issue is at stake in an anecdote Zizek recalls in “The Antinomies of Tolerant Reason,” and probably somewhere else given how Zizek writes, where

In the course of the Crusade of King St.Louis, Yves le Breton reported how he once encountered an old woman who wandered down the street with a dish full of fire in her right hand and a bowl full of water in her left hand. Asked why she is doing it, she answered that with the fire she would burn up Paradise until nothing remained of it, and with the water she would put out the fires of Hell until nothing remained of them: “Because I want no one to do good in order to receive the reward of Paradise, or from fear of Hell; but solely out of love for God.”

To Fish the humanities, or those who study and write on them for a living, perform in their very existence the function of the old woman. This is NOT in the sense that they have an agenda to destroy all instrumentality, but that earnestly pursuing the humanities quickly turns itself away from an agenda apart from itself. This is kind of at odds with his equally emphatic insistence that even this is not to be put to extrinsic use (i.e. as inspiration to be better people, or as a standard against which we can hold ourselves). A possible way out is to conceive of the study of the humanities as fundamentally interpretive, but only in the sense that Fish also says that EVERYTHING is interpretive, and that the in studying the humanities we make interpretation its own interpretive end—as opposed to, say, interpreting some data to decide on doing this or that.

On the one hand, it could be viewed in that same sense of a kind of “higher ideal” to which we aspire, while on the other hand I think the Buddha’s notion of “Mindfulness” can help us figure out what this has to do with the rest of our lives.

I think that the former view still fails because, insofar as we’re going along with Fish and saying that EVERYTHING we do is interpretation, the humanities cannot claim to have something not present in other spheres of life/academia. Fish somewhat gets at this when he critiques in the second article the notion that there is something called “critical thinking,” which incidentally is crucial to everything we do and only can be learned within the humanities. He points out that we engage in critical thinking all the time in popular culture, and cites as support some (sloppy) examples of political analysis on television. Some commenters pointed out the weakness of these examples, but none did nor could get rid of the point he is still making: there isn’t anything we’re doing in studying the humanities that we aren’t or can’t be doing at least some of the time elsewhere.

If we take the humanities as Fish invokes them to be where we are studying or getting at what the Buddha taught as Mindfulness, then we can appreciate what people are doing there and how it can/does relate to what they and others are doing elsewhere. Mindfulness (Pali: Sati) is part of what the Buddha taught as the Noble Eightfold Path, and specifically in this sense he referred to it as Right or Whole Mindfulness (Pali: samma-sati). In a nutshell, it is intentional awareness of/in the present moment. As it appears in the literature, mindfulness is basically the practice of “contemplating [body, sensations, perceptions, consciousness and mental dispositions] within [body, sensations, perceptions, consciousness and mental dispositions].” On its face, this asks us to have nothing to do with interpretation or discriminating thought, though the through-going interpretation going on in the humanities, particularly when it leads one to one of those “Wow!” moments, may have more to do with it than it would seem.

I say this because, at its height, the study of literature, philosophy and history is, as Dogen Zenji and later Shunryu Suzuki said, the study of ourselves, which has become blatantly obvious with the rise of French-influenced literary theory. More deeply, the influence there is from Hegel, who would agree that we are studying ourselves (that is, ourselves as Spirit) when we study not just the humanities, but the world in general. Where Hegel does not go, though, is that we study ourselves in order to forget ourselves. Lacan (and, perhaps, Foucault) seemed aware of the vanishing quality of the subject, already anticipated in the vanishing moments of Hegel’s dialectic, such that as we realize the radical emptiness of the Other, its not really being there except for us acting as if it were, we realize something radically empty about what we call our self.

When Fish says that the study of the humanities is worthwhile in itself, and that this is a good thing, he is affirming the basic gesture of (life-) affirmation itself. In this same way, as D.T. Suziki said in his deceptively thin “An Introduction to Zen Buddhism,” (Zen) Buddhism is seeking a higher affirmation—not of some external goal or use, but of something in itself. This becomes instantly relevant to everything else in our lives as we begin to realize how to pursue goals as ends in themselves. As Emerson said, “To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road … is wisdom.” I want to say that the modern study of the humanities seeks this same affirmation, with its same radiating quality, and that scholars like Fish are giving us a better vocabulary for realizing this quality both within and without the humanities.