And Now For Something Completely Different

These are babies, pretending to be stupid animals; see how the one on the right has a human ear. It is somehow significant that we only see one, but are likely to assume there are two. This is what babies would say if they could really talk, and this is how they would appear to us if we really heard them.

From Buddhist Geeks:

We continue our discussion with Shambhala acharya, Judith Simmer-Brown, about how we can strategically invest in American Buddhism so that it survives in the long-term. We explored the first three areas of importance in-depth in part 1, which included the translation of core texts, the development of a monastic lineage, and the appointment of dharma heirs.

In this part of the discussion we flesh out the details of the fourth area, which is royal patronage. Judith speaks about how, given a lack of that kind of support, most dharma teachers and organizations turn whole-heartedly to the market to sustain them. And with that come all sort of issues–including the pursuit of fame and fortune. We finish the discussion, going back to the question of whether we’ll be able to develop a monastic community in the West, and why that’s important to the healthy development of Buddhism in America.

What better than a Buddhist Church Inc. to supplement the post-modern feudal order? I mean, Nazi Germany was nominally Christian, right? Stalin’s Soviet Union was still haunted by the big Other. What about nationalism is consonant with a vision of universal liberation?

From Zizek’s recent appearance speaking at “Marxism 2009″:

“The whole wager of communist revolutionary is: you can make State work against itself.”

This is what you could say is at stake in Jesus suggesting that we “turn the other cheek.” Turning the other cheek means using the impropriety surrounding the using your unclean left hand to force the abuser to hit back with an open palm, which is a gesture of equalization. Zizek’s ideal State, in keeping with his emphasis of class-struggle over social-antagonism, is what Nietzsche would call one’s good-enemy.

This is a society where even the enemy is loved.

Nietzsche and and Zizek, like Jesus before them both, are both philosophers of and *advocates* for (in the biblical sense) the good enemy.

This is the radically liberating equality that Nietzsche strikes at in his support of the agon, what Zizek gets at in his insistence on the necessity of class-struggle for creating a classless society, and is really the only way we can understand why the event of Jesus would lead to something like the Christian tradition, with its Church-state structure. Jesus advocated for that sliver of radical equality which broke with the Lawful (pagan) hierarchy of distinctions – that is, for that moment in equality that was itself freedom. Equality before the (Capitalist/Jewish) Law doesn’t get us very far when it is also the Law that you are untouchable or a slave or property, but it’s in a sense necessary to get as far as we have.

You have heard it said that we should feed the poor, and when the Ayn Randian or similar Libertarian says that is only rewarding or sustaining weakness, we should understand what’s true and untrue about it. It is true that this act sustains poverty, but to be kept poverty is hardly a reward. The latter, to put it as Zizek would, is ideology at its purest. This makes it both a useful example for Leftist ridicule, but perhaps one that has lost its symbolic efficacy. It’s not as distasteful among (at least the American) working-class anymore to suggest, as many right-wing propagandists and their liberal fellow-travelers do, that welfare is something that can in some sense be abused. It functions as both an a condemnation and a defense: a bad-apple doesn’t spoil the bunch. We see its bourgeois-double in the excuse for Capital made by those who sanctify CEOs left and right as “abusers” of Capitalism’ natural bounty. These abusers are really its heros, because we recognize in their abuse of the system their fundamental affirmation of it also: it’s got so few bad-apples that we’ll keep letting it grow. The problem is not simply that Capitalism rewards abusers, at the top and bottom, which must be regulated, but that the abusers are a structural necessity for its functioning.

You will know a tree by its fruits, and cut down the bad ones. We should be clear here though: jesus tells us we should cut down the bad trees, not just the apples. The liberal, pragmatic apology for capitalism is: so what if it produces bad-apples, it produces more apples total and less bad apples porportionately than anything we can imagine.

Cue John Lennon song.

True abundance cannot be abused, cannot be founded on abuse. This is why Ursula K. LeGuin’s short-story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” is so fundamentally ANTI-Utopian: the choice between a living in paradise founded on a fundamental abuse and walking away from it is a forced one, and choosing to change Omelas (for the better) is impossible unless you want to take away everyone’s happiness and well-being.

OMELAS DOESN’T EXIST.

From an exchange I had with Hannah:

Me: I had an encounter with who I could only call a holy man in the deli the other day, though it was something of a mixture of two separate occasions with the same guy.

[The first time], he ordered a half-sandwich from our list of prepared recipies. However, per some stupid rule, we’re not allowed to sellf half-sandwiches from that list. You have to do the ‘make it yourself’ option to get a half-sandwhich. He wanted it with our soup-and-sandwich special, which is a half-sandwhich with a cup of soup. I started to go into my script of why I can’t do it and why I think it’s still a dumb rule, but I stopped myself and just said, ‘you know what, I’ll just make it for you.’ He then wouldn’t stop applauding me, and said I was a model worker, someone who he’d hire in a heart-beat if he had the money to run his own sort of business (sandwich related or otherwise).

Hannah: lol

i’d applaud you too

Me: A couple weeks later, he came back again, and was chatting up me and my partner. The prior incident kind of came up again, and quickly turned into a conversation about how the management don’t manage properly (i.e. they do it top-down). I can’t remember exactly how he put it, which unfortunately was what I thought was so significant about it, but he said something to the effect of ‘you know how I know when God is talking to me? He doesn’t talk down, but talks up.’ That struck me as absolutely brilliant, and reminded me of something Peter O’Toole said (‘When did I realize I was God? Well, I was praying and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself’). It’s also the basic philosophy I have toward social organization, especially in terms of ‘the work-place.’

This is why I think 1 Kings 3:16-28, the story about Solomon solving a dispute between two women arguing over a baby, is so important.

God’s will does not descend down through Solomon to the women in dispute, but arises from the true mother herself* – i.e. the one who would give up her baby, as well as her utterly vital status in the community as a mother (she was otherwise a prostitute, an under-classling), her life essentially, rather than have it cut in half per Solomon’s judgement).

There is a lesson about collective (political) action in this story, which the holy man brought together for me by connecting it to the way the deli was ran. The key is to view all these characters as actors in a network, and not mere individuals (you are starting to get through to me Levi). My experience in the deli has re-enforced by faith in communism, of collective self-management. The injection of the privative relation, the one which the false mother maintains both towards the child and Solomon’s judgement, that disrupts the flow of this process, is experienced coming from above.

It is not hard to make the leap from this to saying that Capitalism is self-managing, but this self-management is a kind done in bad faith, again as represented by the false mother, who exercises her selfishness by way of Solomon’s (external) judgement. What I am talking about is the self-management of the “You have heard it said … but” sort. Jesus is, after all, speaking within the Jewish tradition, while simultaneous breaking (from) it.

You have heard it said that you may only order half-sandwiches from the make-your-own menu, but…

*I do not know why Adam Kotsko doesn’t get this reading. What he calls “the common-sense reading” I associate with the abstract “common-sense” of “the uneducated” in Hegel’s “Who Thinks Abstractly?”

In an instant-messenger conversation with my friend Jon, more of which I will post above as their own chunks, I was stroked by genius.

Me: I didn’t notice this earlier, but this is the (neo)liberal fantasy par-excellance: ‘my practical goal is to bring about a fruition of captialism worldwide with as few losers as possible.’ It’s a kind of bodhisattva vow made in bad faith.

Jon: oh yeah

Me: That’s a really interesting marriage of theological concepts: a bodhisattva vow made in bad faith. I think it embodies what Zizek sees in Western Buddhism.

Me: Oh my God.

I think I just figured out my paper topic for that conference.

Jon: woaaaah! do it!

Update: From further down the conversation, still concerned with Zizek and Buddhism, I take up an earlier issue in the conversation concerning hegemony and the tendency of the Left to try to undermine hegemony rather than use it.

>You could think of a hegemon as the monopoly on the production of knowledge, where bodhisattvas ‘rely on prajna paramita’ or the production of wisdom for their work. What is wisdom though? Maybe it’s just the way that liberating knowledge first appears, and in todays spirituality industry we (arguably Zizek) have a glimpse into a primitive accumulation of our very souls. If the stress of living in capitalism is experienced as a kind of (what Zizek would call) subjective violence, the spirituality industry inflicts an objective violence that we do not immediately experience, just as we do not immediately experience the environment or our social support networks degrading. I want to risk an even more daring hypothesis though: what if the subjective violence that we experience as stress and other psycho-physiological distortions caused by Capitalism’s gutting of our world were a manifestation of the objective violence more usually called structural violence? In other words, they are not-two. This is the psychoanalytic marxist description of the Buddha’s compassion for suffering.

That is to say, people caught in the new-age, thearapeutic religious loop try to address their subjective suffering at the expense of an objective suffering, though they are one in the same. Such a spiritual path remains stuck in a dualistic paradigm, the very same paradigm it threatens to realize in its relegating of social welfare to self-fulfillment. Freedom for all beings: that is the answer to the first half of Lenin’s rhetorical question aimed at proponents of democratic freedoms in a capitalist society: “freedom for whom, and to do what?”

What of the latter though?

From Slavoj Zizek’s “The Eclipse of Meaning: On Lacan and Deconstruction”:

This gap that forever separates the lost Thing from symbolic semblances which are never ‘that‘ defines the contours of the ethics of desire: ‘do not give way as to your desire’ can only mean ‘do not put up with any of the substitutions of the Thing, keep open the gap of desire’. In our everyday lives, we constantly fall prey to imaginary lures which promise the healing of the original/constitutive wound of symbolization, from Woman with whom full sexual relationship will be possible, to the totalitarian political ideal of a fully realized community. In contrast, the fundamental maxim of the ethics of desire is simply desire as such: one has to maintain desire in its dissatisfaction. What we have here is a kind of heroism of the lack: the aim of the psychoanalytic cure is to induce the subject to assume his constitutive lack heroically; to endure the splitting which propels desire.

From Robert Aitken and Kazuaki Tanahashi’s translation of Dogen zen-ji’s “Genjo-koan”:

When dharma does not fill your whole body and mind, you think it is already sufficient. When dharma fills your body and mind, you understand that something is missing.

Is Dogen preaching a similar heroism of the lack? This is so different from the Western Buddhism that Zizek critiques, which clings to the pseudo-Gelassenheit, “let it be” attitude, and sometimes exerts itself as the commandment to tolerate or in the liberal apology for ‘the market’. The ‘liberal pragmatic’ outlook and charge of many Western Buddhists, compared with ‘religious fanaticism’, is an ideological caricature that veils class-struggle. However, Zizek’s emphasis has been on the obfuscating qualities of this ideological veil, not too unlike Marx’s critique of ‘false consciousness’, while neglecting the revelatory dimension of such a veil, which by definition functions on account of both concealing and unconcealing.

The question to put to Zizek’s critique of Western Buddhism IS NOT what can it do for the Left, but what can it not do for itself? What is missing—not as a specific object, but in terms of the splitting and rendering asunder that propels desire? Moreover, what do popular conceptions of ‘balance’ and ‘harmony’ put in the place of this lack, this missing-something, so as to maintain a certain semblance?

I should have posted this days ago, from over at IndyBay. Butler makes many points, but the one that resonated with me is how many who voted for Obama did not transcend their bigotry so much as voted with their wallet. For this she points to the majority of Proposition 8 supporters who also voted for Obama, or those who did not give up their racist beliefs or attitudes so much as temporarily subordinate them.

If there are avowed racists who have said, ‘I know that he is a Muslim and a terrorist, but I will vote for him anyway,’ there are surely also people on the left who say, ‘I know that he has sold out gay rights and Palestine, but he is still our redemption.’ I know very well, but still: this is the classic formulation of disavowal. Through what means do we sustain and mask conflicting beliefs of this sort? And at what political cost?

 

The woman below is Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann, probably most well known for her recent interview with Chris Matthews on Hard Ball where she basically calls for a McCarthy-era witch-hunt.

On its face, this is an attack on equality. However, the Representative makes a valid point that she distorts for her own purpose. The distortion as well as the sense of this being an attack on equality are both superficial. There is a truth here, but we have to know how to read/hear it. If we take the Representative’s remarks seriously, more seriously than she does even, then we are in a position to return them to her in an inverted form: of course not all cultures/values are equal, and your culture and values are some of the most unequal of all.

The Left shouldn’t turn away the political debate teeming in these remarks, but engage it whole-heartedly. If not all values/cultures are equal, then clearly the Left is in a position to advocate its own culture and values over those cherished by the Representative and her likely supporters. That means striking down the phony multi-culturalism that dresses up racist anxieties with pretensions of tolerance AS WELL AS the overt racism that the Representative otherwise champions.

In other words, don’t let the conservatives/Republicans/Fascists frame the debate to their advantage, but just the same don’t pretend there isn’t a real political struggle going on either. Imagine if the Allies responded to the Nazi’s anti-semitism with a tolerant attitude, and even proposed holding of judgement until coming to fully understand the Nazi’s position—”maybe we should see if what they say about the Jews are true?” Hell no! This is a culture and set of values that we resolutely rejected and fought a war (arguably still fighting it) to defeat. This demonstrates the Representative’s point clearly. That’s not to say that we should engage in a bloody war. I do not think we’re there yet. What it means is taking the Representative more seriously than she takes her self—”we know that ‘not all cultures/values are equal’, but why are YOU of all people telling us; what extra bit of meaning are you trying to slip in when you tell us what we already know?” This is an instance of where appearances—rather than “substance”—matter deeply, because it is on the level of appearances that the the Representative manipulates what her common-knowledge remarks “really mean.”

Another perfectly related example would be the meaning of credit-cards for the American worker whose wages have been stagnating since the 1970s. They were marketed to mean what a decent wage and retirement through Social Security or a pension used to mean, above all the “freedom” to continue conspicuous consumption, which itself has been shoved down our throats for God knows how long as what it “really means” to be “free.” The unequal value of this “ownership society,” and the position in which the Left are in to advocate something better, is the truth of the Representative’s remarks.

This morning I was tipped off by Perverse Egalitarianism (again) about a 40-minute video lecture. The lecture is given by Dr. Richard Wolf, of University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and is called “Capitalism Hits the Fan A Marxian View.” The google-video description reads: “Richard Wolff a professor of economics at UMass Amherst talks on the current “financial” crisis and capitialism in general. A form of socialism is presented as a possible alternative. This talk was presented by the Asociation for Economic and Social Analysis and the journal Rethinking Marxism.” For about the first half-hour of it I was impressed with his smart yet accessible overview of the last 100 years of Capitalism, leading up to the last 30 or so years of wage stagnation, over-production, and the replacement of wage increases with credit-lines. As the above description indicates, he offers “a form of socialism as a possible alternative.” This is where I became less impressed, and I’d like to say a little about why.

I found Wolff’s socialist alternative lacking. That’s not to say I didn’t like the way he positioned it contra both a conservative and liberal view about the crisis and the response to it. I thought that and the talk up to that point was brilliant. The bad taste his socialist alternative leaves in my mouth has two parts.

1) Wolff assumes a lot is going on around these worker-owned companies that make them possible. He and a lot of other people before him have done the work to re-think how a company (any company) can re-organize itself according to principles worker-ownership and management. This approach, more syndicalist than socialist, doesn’t address the way such companies interface with the wider society that depends on them nor the wider socio-economic conditions on which they themselves depends. That leads me to the second aspect of this bad taste.

2) His proposal does not address the capitalist mode of production so much as the relations of production, and not even those so much. In fact, what he’s talking about depends on the profit-motive and the productive arrangements that make it possible, if not necessary as in otherwise top-down ran Capitalism. This has two unpleasant blind-spots in-itself.

On the one hand, when a company depends on private profits for what it does, it is still at odds with government regulation, which cuts into profits. Wolff might argue that the enlightened working-class folks running their own company know that the regulations and taxes (he said nothing of taxes though) are for the workers’ own benefit, so they would not have a problem with them. What’s the point of making a profit then, particularly a profit destined to decline according to the very same processes Wolff elaborated earlier in his talk? The only conceivable point is that profit is never merely a means nor an end, but always both. In light of that, the self-consuming logic of Capital will explode these like all other relations of production, lest it simply be run into the ground.

On the other hand, “democratizing” the work-place in this syndicalist fashion does not over-come the essential privatization of an otherwise social(ist) movement. The workers depend upon their company as an engine of profit and not the State as the guarantor of social equity, which competes with the profitability of these worker-owned/managed companies. It’s only a partial socialization, both of losses and profits. While better than the current arrangements, the fundamental problem of the Capitalist mode of production is not properly addressed and will undo any relatively equitable relations of productions when they endanger profits, as it did in the mid-20th Century with trade unions and New Deal regulations.

In short, from Dr. Wolff’s talk, his “socialism” is not much better, if all that different, from what Marx critiqued in the Communist Manifesto as “petty-bourgeois socialism.”

Alerted by Perverse Egalitarianism to this new London Review of Books article by Zizek, I thought I’d say a couple things I like and find lacking in Zizek’s assessment of the financial crises.

While I like how he takes the time to strike down “bi-partisanship,” he only does so for when McCain advocates it. I see him trying to fudge Obama as being in the position most relatively aligned with The People, and it would help Zizek seem less hypocritical to explain how he sees “setting aside politics to get stuff done” function in the discourse of either candidate when both are significantly bought up by business interests. Maybe the difference is between how McCain and Republicans in general seem to think the question is “state-intervention or not,” while Obama and the Democrats in general seem to be more focused on what Zizek calls “the real dilemma … what kind of State intervention?”

Of course, then there is the possibility that the Democrats will advocate the wrong kind of intervention and/or for the wrong reason(s). Yes, most Democrats may recognized that “Main Street can’t thrive if Wall Street isn’t doing well,” but I don’t think we can hand it to them that they fully recognize or demonstrate in their voting records that “what’s good for Wall Street isn’t necessarily good for Main Street.” Alternatively, if the Republicans and conservatives face what Zizek’s called “the real dilemma,” their response to “what kind of state-intervention?” could be fascism or more State Capitalism. Thinking and talking no longer about the possibility of state-intervention, but state-intervention as such, is what I take Zizek to be advocating when he says “don’t just do something, talk,” but he should be saying that to the Democrats as much as the Republicans, Obama as much as McCain.

In a similar vein Jodi Dean concludes:

If this is the collapse of neoliberalism, we have to push a positive, affirmative view of state action. But it can’t be a kind of apologia for the wrong sort of state action.

I think N. Pepperell has been all over the stakes of this space of critique, too, for over the last week:

All of this needs more analysis than I can provide at present… But one interesting dimension of the current crisis is the rendering manifest of these distinctions in much more popular discussion than we’ve seen for some time, I think… Articulations can have their own hard power – as well as normative force: large-scale public discussion of capitalism – what it is, what it should be – has now opened up on a massive scale. What is articulated now will likely define a space of possibilities for the sorts of actions that lie ready to hand in the decades to come… Opening some potentials… Placing others farther out of reach… This is a time when theorising structural possibilities becomes… unusually impactful… The previous major structural transformation opened an experiential and interpretive gap into which flooded the interpretive systems and policies that have led us here. The question when confronting present and future transformations is how to open the potential for something other – for something that holds onto emancipatory promises that can otherwise be easily drowned out in reactive responses, conditioned by an environment primed to be receptive to ideals of capitalism as an end in itself…

In other words, the dog-eat-dog world of the “[free] marketplace of ideas” has to be re-thought from within very carefully, but what is emerging now out of what Zizek has called the Denkverbot of our “(post-)ideological consensus” is the possibility of thinking again.