Ok, I think I've got it... · 6 October 2008

What is the relationship of authoritarianism and intimacy?

This was the question I was trying to find. Questioning patriarchy isn’t a demand for gender-bending. People express their genders in so many different ways. It’s great! This has to do with personal history; and it has to do with your hormonal profile (seriously, this is fascinating: variations in hormone levels and intimate self-expression.) The energy in my self-expression is more dopamine than anything, equal parts serotonin and testosterone, and kind of low on the estrogen. And I wear high heels and, as they say, lipstick. Anyway. Gender is beautiful.

What I’m bringing to light is this very difficult, basically unseen masculine domination. I’m only doing this because I’m trying to understand a very wise teacher’s insight that yoga is going nowhere as long as it remains patriarchal. It’s pretty interesting, knowing me, that I’ve left this topic alone until now… but that’s why patriarchy continues. We’d rather not bother.

It’s like the editors of Ashtanga News, when I wrote to them about this mind-blowing article exactly a year ago. I asked, privately, why in the world they’d post something so old-school patriarchal and they said “we were just repeating what the previous woman had posted.” Yes. Exactly. This is how masculine domination gets legitimated! It’s passed on as if it’s just great and something to celebrate, and the non-critique is justified by saying it’s not our responsibility. At the time, I let it go. That is kind of bullishit on my part and all others, now that I think of it. Check out the comments on the post, too. It’s pretty amazing there was no real discussion there—only a few women expressing shreds of angst. Great illustration of the barriers to looking at this but also the fact that it's right here in front of our faces.

MM said that patriarchy is more evident in women teachers in this scene than in men. That’s true to my experience as well. In my experience authoritarianism is women’s effort to claim lineage-based authority—that is, authority within a still fundamentally patriarchal lineage. So in its manner, its still patriarchal. I could go all Pierre Bourdieu to argue this, but I have a sense that people will agree. Authoritarianism is pretty much a patriarchal thing. Yeah?

If practice is more about obedience than about self-exploration, what’s the point again? Reproducing domination seems to me to be a really large barrier to inside-intimacy as well as relational intimacy.

Sorry this is all scattered. My head’s in three places. Thanks for the patience as I try to find some traction on this topic… this blog is not normally such a haphazard scene. But it seems like a really good idea to figure out how to talk about this specifically in the context of ashtanga practice, and given the abysmal starting point here, I’m a bit at a loss for how to begin.

BTW, check out the penultimate post at Budismo e Yoga—in the article on ashtanga, there’s this wonderful discussion under the heading “Dharma en el Corazon.” The author writes that it is a great blessing to be able to use the practices of self-study without having to wrestle with the inherited baggage of a Guru system and the superstitions and self-denials this entails. I wrote to this guy to ask him if I can do a better translation of the article since the auto-translation probably isn’t great, and he said he'd be happy to work on that with me. but he did not write back. I’d go ahead and translate it anyway, but that’s a bit imperialist. A certain meaning is always lost in re-interpretation and I hesitate to take liberties with the author’s native language without his permission. I'll try to work up an English version when I have time.

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Categories: astanga yoga , social theory

Not to belabor the point, · 4 October 2008

Some questions opened in the long comment thread on the previous post.

This is an interesting set of questions, because of the ways they’re NOT interesting. It’s an almost-annoying topic, because it asks for reflection on stuff that’s somehow fun to leave unseen. Also, there’s this sense in me that talking about masculine domination is “whiny.” Ha! Obviously that’s the patriarchy in me trying to talk back. Still, it is good to speak of this forthrightly, not with self-apology and periodical impulses to run away.

I'm not trying to smash patriarchy. I'm saying it's a big, dumb obstacle that misallocates energy.

So if there is energy that I could put in to self-understanding that instead I'm putting in to reproducing and justifying patriarchal relationships and organizations, it's just inefficient. Why not strip away a bit of the clunky, heavy, distracting outdated technology? 

Maybe I’m asking these questions prematurely. Maybe people aren’t ready to think about masculine domination as an historical pattern, and are also afraid that all this will lead to a deconstruction of the basic ideas of masculinity and feminitiy. It’s not like that at all.

Patriarchy is both a way of organizing human activity (hierarchies, exhales, achievement, dominance) and a way of organizing personal, interior lives. Anyway:

Why would masculine domination be a problem in practice--a practical problem? I’m thinking both principles (goal oriented-ness, performance mindset) and politics (who gets/has to take power, who pretends/has to pretend to be needy).

Can there be systematic practice and transmitted lineage (two super useful things!) without patriarchy? (Is the very idea of energetic lineage just a legitimation racket for patriarchy? Shit.)

Is the experience of surrender sometimes—as we experience it—about participating in male-dominance? Can surrender be something else?

How can you learn to get really intimate with your own experience when you’re taught in a patriarchal manner?

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Categories: evolution , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Today · 1 October 2008

Three years ago, I spoke with a wonderful financial historian about all this. She said: let us hope that the US declines gracefully from its place of supreme dominance. Hope it for everyone’s sake.

Well… this is horribly abrupt and traumatic, and it will still be a long time before our mundane, taken-for-granted reality catches up. This vacuum of political power laid on top of a vacuum of market organization is ok, in a sense, because on mental and interpersonal levels things are holding together. We go on reproducing social order through our habits of being, thank god. It’s actually kind of great… the microsocial strength that sustains a whole society amid two phenomenal macrosocial failures.

Barack Obama’s ability to hold back from full-scale demagoguery makes me love him more—those crying for him to show more power and leadership are so very old school. He’s already running the show in his way.

For me, I love to watch the practical nature of the sense-making we’re all doing now. Had the LHC created a black hole last month the physicist would have all looked at each other shaking their heads Oops, tapping around to find where exactly it went wrong. The present crises are in certain ways the same. The levels of technical understanding vary, but even for those who have seen this coming for years, there’s some kind of aporia.

For me, there’s so much going on it’s ridiculous. I’ve been getting my dearest remaining presuppositions undermined to hell, and beautifully, by Mark Whitwell in recent days, and ought to blog about it but feel maybe it’s just too much to lay on you. Also, with what time? There’s none. I’d leechblock everything to stay on target, but the world is too good. Some bits for today in case you missed them and for my own future reference:

George Soros on a better bailout.

Thomas Frank on blame.

V Good Mark Buchanan Op-Ed

Kathy G’s Palintology

Oh, also important: Mohair Gravy.

Happy October. I woke this morning on the other side of about three rabbit holes, and will definitely need some time for these known and unknown revolutions to remake my everydayness.

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Categories: evolution , markets-networks-society , social theory

Mental Recession · 17 September 2008

Are the boxes of deskstuff carted yesterday out of Lehman just so much mindstuff, Mr. McCain? The houses bought on nothing and the cars with the no-interest loan—these are also whisps of consciousness and not part of some self-sufficient reality?

Everyone in fiscal conservative land wants to say this is a problem of trust and coordination.

When did the fiscal conservatives turn in to new-age mentalists? Is it just that this line is an easy means of denial? Are they solipsists? (I'm not joking.)

To call this only a coordination problem and collective loss of trust, and to pursue solutions through propaganda and only that is to deny that the entire American economy is rotting at its core.

The people who have been telling us for ten years to “trust” and buy are the ones get the fees from our transactions. To them, our trust actually is commodity. But for the rest of us, the commodities look more like macbooks and condos. It’s all the same.

The whole reduction of the institutional failure to only a coordination problem feels like more bad avaita in my life.

I don’t even understand advaita, but do see some keen people who have bothered to take it deep practicing a metaphysics that understands that both the mind and the body—both ideas and the physical world—are equal contents of some consciousness. The substrate of reality is nondual big-mind or somesuch; and the apparent differences in its contents (that is, mind versus body) are trivial. Ok, sounds like a sort of tedious philosophical argument. It makes sense to me insofar as I can practice spacious awareness when I sit vipassana, but whatever.

What amuses is the clearly bad avaita practiced by westerners interested in eastern stuff: the attempts at nondualism that actually are extremely dualist because they reduce all of experience to the content of individual consciousness. For example:  

If you let go of all your fear, you’ll be able to take your calves in a backbend: no concrete limitations there, just emotional ones. The body isn’t real—it’s a collection of mental tics. The physical is an illusion.

Good avaita is slamming the wall and declaring “This is god!” (the physical is a manifestation of oneness, just as much as the mental). Bad avaita is slamming someone to the calves in chakra-b because the resistance there is only fear (the body is not real but only a container for mental problems).

Good avaita: the economy is fucked backwards and forwards!

Bad avaita: there’s a mental recession but the “more real” economic fundamentals are in no doubt. (Again, this is a reduction of the physical to the mental that actually just serves to deepen a dualism between the two.)

How much pain do we have to experience before we admit that there is a structural barrier to taking the calves in a backbend? And to how many suckers can get mortgages? Practice plays with just that physical structure—affirms that the physical is not less real than the mental. And ultimately makes space to see the edge where the physical and mental interpenetrate and don’t have to be isolated in “opposite” realms.

For someone who came to this practice wanting to pretend it wasn’t really about the body, the affirmation of physical reality that I do every day on the mat is the best way to realize that the physical is not reducible to the mental. Sometimes a charlie-horse is just a charlie-horse… a fluctuation of consciousness, yes—but embodied consciousness.

For me, pretending that the body is a shadow of the mind is a kind of retreat from the physical immediacy of reality. I recognize it as a lie I sometimes tell myself. For the mental-recessionistas, pretending that the crisis isn’t physical is a way of avoiding the more difficult physical realm of hunger and disease and homelessness and unemployment and pretending this is all about the numbers.

This uncanny marriage of mentalist New Age metaphysics to conservative if not regressive politics, led by the "we make our own reality" Rovians, continues to give me the shivers! But... maybe it makes sense. 

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Categories: arbitrage , integration , markets-networks-society , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Obama Pranayama · 12 September 2008

Pretty excited about Obama Pranayama here. “Whether we are doing yoga or just taking our next breath.... let us consciously breathe in the intent for change and help move Barack Obama into the White House.”

I want a breathe-in. Not kidding. I’m going through an extroverted cycle here

But about the OP. On the one hand, ok, it requires the solipsistic worldview of a very small child and hilarously low standard of reality-checking to think you can actually shape external political outcomes by sitting around breathing. The aether theory of consciousness-raising.

It is interesting that we Santa Monicans, whose lives are the most disproportionately blessed in the world by technological advancement and the inequities of global capitalism, hold to the most hocus-pocus explanations for our dramatic privileges. “The Secret,” the apotheosis of the hocus pocus, is first and foremost a legitimation scheme for those who are disproportionately privileged—so they can believe their parking spaces and the SUVs they park in them are manifestations of their own superior mental power.

Yeah; because people in H3s are the smart ones.

We actually don’t get to sit around and will Obama in to office. Ever hear of precinct walking? That’s what they do in neighborhoods a little closer to the reality line.

Onnnnn the other hand, intention does have power. Besides mind-reading and occasional clairvoyance (didn’t just say that), there are no superpowers of yogic consciousness. What looks like siddhis is just the intuition trained to a very high level of self-knowledge and knowledge of its environment. The more you are aware of the operating systems, the more freaky-accurate your reading of the present moment and the better your predictions of what’s to come. Breathing is really good for that: pranayamites have a mysticism about them because they’re hyper-aware. More conscious of the fine details.

A corollary of the idea that you can effect political outcomes with breath practice is the magical thinking that you automatically make the world a better place by working on yourself. If I may part ways with Ramana Maharshi and co., there’s no magic in this either. You don’t sit in a cave and raise global consciousness by some “vibration.” It’s that if you’re more worked out in yourself, you relate to the world in a series of relatively healthy encounters that increase the goodness in the world. Sitting in a cave (or at obama pranayama) doesn’t do that: it just prepares you to do that really well.

Preparing the ground for action is not the same as action. But… it is still a good idea.

So, it’s all good. I’m excited about obama pranayama.

The thing is: I’m wondering about Obama himself. Is he doing the OP and tapping in to the world-soul/ prevailing discourse/ dynamic possibilities of the present moment in a way that’s prepared him to speak with apparently-magical accuracy? Does he have a better map of this territory and where it might lead than the GOP with its tired fucking culture wars?

It might not happen, considering what I’m little I’ve seen of recent days’ politicking but

The guy could bust out. He may have his intuition so finely articulated, and may be so ready for this moment, that he finds the way to speak to these angry ghosts so a margin of them hear him. I only say this because the race speech in March was that. He wrote it himself when the time for it was perfect. The content and tone were the most brilliant political moment in the US in my lifetime. I was amazed.

The guy is carrying some measure of awareness and discursive power. The charisma factor, easy to forget amid this week of dread, is a big deal. But he’s also moving along in the rickety old sinking mothership of the Democratic Party, filled with a crew that doesn’t get it at all. So we’ll see what happens. If he can get some headspace to tap in, and just allow himself to get righteously pissed off, something might happen.

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Categories: markets-networks-society , self-deception , social theory

Breaking it Down · 8 September 2008

Why do I feel more anger when Sarah Palin mocks the Styrofoam Acropolis set at the DNC than when I think about what is going on right now in Guantanamo?

1. The GOP’s campaign is an attack on my feminity on many levels. Their fun insults me personally... whereas my tax dollars going to torture innocents feels somehow less about me. And for some reason part of me needs to experience these global events as being all about me.
2. Also: she’s messing up the plan! It’s our turn already. No fair! We didn't plan on being foiled by a last minute comicbook nemesis! Those wascally wabbits!!
   

What’s the use of my outrage at injustice if it’s built on self-protective fear and schoolyard reactivity?

I am not sure. I think it’s still useful, but there are also (1) it can’t be trusted insofar as it’s not self-aware and (2) it will spark a backlash in anyone I scorn. But… given that there is just so much straightup killing and torturing going on right now, why not work through the childish, un-self-aware, hateful anger and direct that energy into open outrage? Then act on it in a focused way, and let it go. Hmm. It would be nice to have a leader who could take it to that level.

(By the way, at the time, I really did think the columns were campy. But now: I really do feel they were a nice, fun touch. Kind of like ice sculptures! And balloon drops! Only the columns have the added bonus of being phallic! {P.S. let’s not talk about the hadron collider this week, ok? I’m completely taken by it but the name is a bit much.} The only thing that’s changed is that SP has ridiculed the columns, so I deduce that my newfound like for them is as much defensiveness as it is good humor. Poor ridiculed columns. I hope the BOPL rescues them from EBay.)

Who do some people not know what to see in all this… feel like it’s not relevant?

1. It’s too much information and there are too many issues. It’s hard to see the true difference between these two campaigns.
2. Staking out a moral position is too uncanny. It’s dirty and connects you too much to social events. The intensity of feeling makes one feel that much more ungrounded and disconnected—that much more Camus’ stranger.
3. There is too much irony in acting. Malaise follows from the impossibility of acting, is the 21^st century version of Arjuna at loose ends.
4. Nothing really matters.

Just random possibilites, those. I don’t have an answer to this second question.

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Categories: crypto-Hegelianism , markets-networks-society , social theory

Death Embrace · 8 September 2008

It has been asked: Do rural people really feel hated?

Yes. (Insert a decade of ever more alienated returns home. Also, many painful slips of the tongue on all parts. Cf, when professors say things like religion has no sociological relevance because it’s “atomistic” or that rural America is “empty,” they don’t look smart.)

I think there are two streams of feeling here. The first is straight up fear—the libertarian strain of rural feeling. Giuliani’s sneering use of “cosmopolitan” points to the sensation that rural people have interacting with the cosmopolite: they feel authentic, hardworking and sincere… talking to hypocritical, affected lazyasses. I actually love the critique of hipster-bourgeois consumption (latte-drinking, volvo-driving liberals) that goes along with this.

The second is the desire to be hated for one’s own righteousness, as the New Testament promises—the evangelical strain of rural feeling (for pure distillations of this see Matthew 10:22, Vengeance Rising, etc. etc.). Martyrdom is a really common sentiment all over the place, and (together with anti-conservative haters and liberal snobbishness) it feeds the anti-snob politics that have worked brilliantly for the GOP since Nixon. The GOP’s line that “they won’t like Sarah in Washington but we sure like her” trades on this martyrdom-turned-aggressive vibe. And the thing is, the left keeps feeding it. The too-good-to-hate-you hatred is everywhere. And it’s easy for a progressive to begin to feel it when her own freedoms from sexism, racism and homophobia are being attacked.

I broke down and joined Facebook this summer when I got all sad that my trip home was falling through. The trendy timesuck factor of Facebook always put me off; and the idea of my three main networks coming together made me cringe. But I wanted to feel connected to certain people from high school, and letting those networks intertwine in a single node required a level of self-honesty that was good for me. I don’t want to be particularly available to people, but I also don’t need to hide from them. In the end though, it’s not about who sees me. It’s about who I see with a degree of connectivity. Who I see is SAHM conservative activists, a diesel mechanic, a few people who escaped MT by the one dependable route—joining the military. And the rest who I still remember so sentimentally: they aren’t online. Because they’re working and poor, and don’t live the kind of lives where far-flung global social networks are a reality.

It raises the question: where do we learn about the world? I mostly learn through reading history books, mainstream internet sites, datasets on demographics and public opinion, and making my friends who live really diverse experiences tell me about their lives. How high quality are my data? Why are the people with the best data in the world—American political parties—using it in such different ways? Seriously. I’m asking.

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Categories: crypto-Hegelianism , markets-networks-society , social theory

these times · 6 September 2008

Dahlia Lithwick: “There is a way in which she's cashing in on the ability of very, very, very pretty women to say very, very vicious things with a great big smile.” (Day to Day)

Gail Collins: “[Her] speech totally swallowed up all the attention in St. Paul, leaving nothing whatsoever for speakers like Mitt Romney… announcing: ‘We need change all right! Change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington.’ Tragically, nobody seemed interested enough to point out that this made no sense.” (NYT)

wozu: “since Plato, animals have played a vital role in political rhetoric.  That the barracuda, a fish universally regarded as vile, predatory, mercenary — a shark lacking even the nobility and solitude of sharks, a shark that also scavenges — has been elevated into the panzoon of respectable animals tells us a great deal about the state of American politics.”

Tom Friedman: “There is no bigger issue on campuses these days than environment/energy. Going into this election, I thought that — for the first time — we would have a choice between two “green” candidates. That view is no longer operative — and college students (and everyone else) need to understand that.” (NYT)

(0v0): Uncorked a cheap cabernet last night and caught up on Jon Stewart. It's all political theatre at this point, all of it, so of course the campaigns are going to be exercizes in overstatement all the way through. Statements made for effect. The bad cab shined up my sense of the absurd last night and here I am thick-skulled in the morning. I feel like archiving some thoughts here.

For months I’ve had a difficulty relating to people in my generation who would even consider voting against Obama. Or to be more accurate, the idea of voting against him makes me sick to my stomach. Facebook is a more private community than this one, but the (0v0) network—at least those of who talk to me—is much closer to me ideologically than the immediate friends in my Facebook. They are close to me in life, but far in feeling; and you are the inverse.

I have zero surprise that my family and everyone I know back home would vote against Obama—they have ways of seeing and hearing that pre-determine the message they’ll receive from him as Clintonesque and coat any line from the GOP in a sheath of pearl before they swallow it. Also, most of them are unconsciously racist in small ways, despite the best intentions of their hearts. Social conservatism is its own world of perception. But those from my generation—even the trust fund kids and the high-earners who I know have at times voted GOP even though it’s not hip—who are capable of even wondering how to vote… that’s just disturbing. Particularly those who do it for fiscal reasons, because fiscal conservatism is atomistic, whereas social conservatism goes much deeper inside. Yet conservatives of both kinds are fairly nestled into my life, and I don’t want it different. It is mind-blowing to read down a list of facebook updates with such a rage-range.

The theatre is out of control, but I really do have to engage this process sincerely. Both political science to my right and New Age Yoga to my left would say disengage and don’t identify with this, either because engaging is irrational or because it’s "bad energy." And then there's a certain hipster disconnectedness. To that, fuck irony. Irony is the near enemy of historical perspective. To all of it, we don’t get to sit this out. Don’t get to pretend that we’re moving to Canada. We’ve benefited from being Americans in every way, and constitute this monster both by our actions and our inactions; and that creates responsibility.

In a way, I wonder if my trust fund and high salaried friends who would think twice about Obama are practicing a form of cynicism. Disengaging from the political level of the question as staying the course as fiscal conservatives. Talk about making it easy on yourself.

Anyway. I wonder if all this will make my case to the academics that rurual America is real. Yes, the GOP is pushing this politics of “outsider” resentment because it’s just what has worked for them for so long—all the way back to Nixon. But also, of course their polls are telling them it resonates. Hello: people in rural areas have a completely different experience of nationhood. This stuff is real; the people who buy the “son of the soil” line are real. It actually is elitist not to know that.

A dear friend who is gay and Mormon—though not allowed, obviously, to go to church—is trying to convince the more politicized of her siblings that gay marriage is not a threat to their privacy. Some of them, meantime, are on the anti-gay activist rosters, and asking my friend not to “take it personally because it’s just about protecting our privacy.” This is the church’s line: if marriage is legalized, then the church’s privacy (their right not to honor the unions) will be threatened. First, pure lies. Second, what a brilliant inversion. It is the vagina police—of which the Mormon Church is an important constituient—that wants to violate privacy. What happens in the culture wars is that the public/private dichotomy gets breached in the wrong way. In a way that kills invidual choice while leaving the conceptual public/private binary intact. The right is so brilliant at self-identifying its own greatest outrage—here, that it is only the right that wants to invade your home life and your sex life—and declaring that this is exactly the sin of the “other side.”

Speaking of sides, these campaigns don’t even know how to talk to each other. They are both running against Bush, and doing so orthogonally to one another. It won’t go on like this—they GOP is trying to force the Dems to argue on their terms, as always—but wouldn’t it be interesting if they just talked past one another all fall? It’s what makes sense, really. The two campaigns are pitched at totally different kinds if mind. Luckily or cursedly, the media will make make them intersect. Must have “two sides” to things in the world of agree/disagree. It would be boring as hell if it weren’t so infernally interesting.

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Categories: markets-networks-society , self-deception , social theory

Reticulation and the world inside the world · 19 August 2008

I love to watch networks of humans create themselves and halfway-retreat, surge, drop whole nodules, regenerate. In web space the networks never die—the information down to the last errant comment-thread always remains out there, somewhere: the relationships forged and ebbed away, the self-discoveries through expression and through being witnessed in this way, the vast inconclusiveness but inexorably forward, expansive movement of it. There will be more human nodes in this web, more journals deployed in blog form, more relationships and conclusions and hiatuses and returns. Events that seem to divide are vicariances, separating species that then flourish along parallel trajectories on separate self-identified “continents” (“India” and “the West” in our ashtangosphere, these days)… though on the web a new pangea is possible at any moment.

The sheer amount of personal and collective data in every corner of the blogosphere is wonderful, stupefying, trivial, transcendent: boring as fuck and at the same time uniquely totalizing it its human digitization. No single brain could really ever see it all or understand its dynamics.

What excites and frustrates me is that even in the little corner of the blogosphere that is ours, most of the digitized relationships flow through hidden channers. There is the outside digital self, and the inside, that is, the email side of things. Sitting here in my in-box this morning, waiting for the time I let myself read them late tonight, are new missives from two most fascinating and very far-away quasi-strangers. People who know me in a sense, and who I know, in a sense. I feel awed by these little connections--by these interestingly personal, decontextualized but also sweetly (uniquely?) private, and all-over delightful sparks between would-be strangers.

Would it double the data to add the email-train of relationship formation to the map of the network? Triple it? Would it crash even the most capacious network analysis? Is the secret email web where the reticulation of the blogosphere really happens—in simple, private dyads?

I suspect so. Here’s something else in my blogger inbox, from a reader I adore in DC.

i had a dream about you last night that i had to tell you about, it was so weird!

i was having an "issue" and i can't remember what it was, but it caused me to have a little temper tantrum and i threw the coffee maker through a picture window (perhaps i hadn't yet had coffee and that was the problem?).  well, to cope with/ fix the problem i decided i had to go visit you in LA.  the next thing i knew i was in LA with you at your shala and you gave me up to karandavasana.  then we went for a hike in some crater lake type lake bed.  the water was recessed and there were all sorts of amazing skeletal remains. we were just hiking around looking at everything, when all of the sudden someone came running and shouting that we had to get out because the waters were rising and soon the way we came in would be covered with water.  i knew this was silly and i wasn't worried because i knew we would be able to get out no matter what.  and we did, and then i was back in the kitchen with the broken picture window and no coffee.

The dream side of the blogosphere… world inside the world. Is the understory always this good? I guess it must be. Imagining the secret notes exchanged between so many twosomes out there adds a layer of romance and intrigue, somehow. I'd love to peek (just a little) in your inboxes; I really would. 

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Categories: evolution , markets-networks-society , social theory

Ashtanga and Imperialism · 16 August 2008

CP wrote this post yesterday—one that’s difficult for many of us to handle. I’ve been waiting and hoping for just that kind of sacrilege out of him, and he delivered. In the comments (which are a terriffically honest and interesting conversation about the future of ashtanga), someone asked me the following:

For those of us who are long finished school but are still interested in these matters, what theoretical perspective has replaced tired 1990s neo-Marxism [and 1980s post-colonial theory]? I am serious. Please save this practicing lawyer from the tedium of her daily life by discussing some theory!

Ok. Trying to make a short answer. I’m just going to freewrite a bit and post whatever comes up off the cuff. Because if I try to make a coherent I’ll spend hours! It would be so delightful to build a study group or seminar discussing different philosophies’ and social theories’ perspectives on the moral, cultural and spiritual puzzles that the east-west meeting of ashtanga creates. I have a background in philosophy and social-political theory but rarely work in these literatures because they’re disconnected to real life. The mind likes to be bound; and I like the constraints of doing research on the ground—theory can say anything it wants without the discipline of real-world data. Abstract rhetorical wars are too easy.

Anyway, I should clarify that neo-Marxism and post-colonial theory have not effectively been replaced by something called post-modernism. Postmodernism is a disposition rather than a theory, and as much as it’s intellectually dishonest and stupid if taken to extremes it’s also the condition in which we all live. It’s just a suspicion of metanarratives (Lyotard’s line), or an awareness that all knowledge is situated in someone’s perspective and some matrix of power relationships. Postmodernism at its best is a background question of Oh yeah? Says who? It doesn’t stand alone as an interpretation and it explains nothing.

For me, by far the richest node of theory and research about culture and social philosophy now is in the little subfield of the sociology of culture. A lot of the subfield is bad, but the good stuff expresses what to me are the there most important aspects of what is now good theory: (1) non-essentialism, (2) a bit of self-aware empiricism, and (3) an attempt to synthesize all the modernist (Marxist and other) binaries like material/ideal, economic/cultural, structure/agency.

Briefly, non-essentialism (1) means that you don’t think race, nationality, culture, etc have any transcendent reality. They are social phenomena, or ascribed and acquired characteristics. This is huge—it takes the neo-Marxists’ critique of reification and follows it to its logical conclusion that culture itself is socially constructed. It means you don’t buy the idea that someone with brown skin is “naturally” a soulful dancer or the idea that someone with south Asian ancestry has a “natural,” superior claim to yoga. People are just people. Cultural artifacts are just artifacts. Which is not to say culture does not go deep—the ways in which we grew up, for example, determine our understandings of the world perhaps more than previous (non-empirical) theory could recognize! Culture may not be real on an “essential” or transcendent level, but the ways it shapes personal knowledge appear—based on research—to be very deep. As culture becomes increasingly complex and fast-changig globalized, this just becomes all the more interesting.

So (2) empiricism is the sense that social theory that isn’t rooted in examination of the world is probably BS. Seriously, how do we know that cultural traits are socially constructed? Well, for example consider how race works in Brazil vis-à-vis how it works in the US. Totally different ideas of what is blackness and whiteness, what characterizes race, how many races there are, etc. (Yet at the same time, some things are common: racial hierarchies priveliging white skin, the possibility of becoming more white as socio-economic status increases, local beliefs about the essential qualities of different “groups,” etc.) It’s complicated. The sense now is that even universal pronouncements about social construction have to be made in reference to something real. Pure theory is a joke. Even in philosophy, the richest areas of development are empirical—biomedical ethics, philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of science. For me, my hero of empirical social theory is Pierre Bourdieu. He makes me think, first, that pure ideas without social research are boring and, second, that living one’s life as a kind of social theorist—always considering the theoretical presuppositions and implications of action—is a rich and beautiful form of practical self-awareness.

The third characteristic I see in present-day theory, a valuation of synthetic work (3), is both the most interesting and the most difficult to summarize. For a while in the 1980s and 1990s, theory was obsessed with “difference” and “play” between the supposed binaries of male/female, dark/light, material/idea, structure/agency, objective/subjective, inside/outside, etc. etc. etc. And, since Hegel, the idea of the thesis-antithesis dialectic of consciousness has been encrypted within much social theory. To be brief, now there is a sense that theory does not have to be just about structure or agency, not just leftist or rightist, just about material or ideal, just from the subjective or objective point of view. In fact, theoretically insightful empirical work SYTHESIZES these apparent opposites. This is a dangerous idea, because it resonates with the wacky Integral people with their fourfould AQAL framework, and because it sounds an awful lot like eastern mysticism, what with yoga being the “union of apparent opposition” and all that. In my own work, I strive to synthesize whatever oppositions I find in the world, and not just settle to oscillate from one side to the other. Incidentally, this is why I find it difficult to take a hard line either way in the present debate on the regulation and commodification of ashtanga.

I have saved my withering remarks for the ashtanga mercenaries for the end, so hopefully they will be missed by anyone who will find them offensive, and only read by people who understand the lightness of heart— but also the impatience with self-deception —with which I write.

Anon’s critiques of the cultural imperialism of Cody’s market analysis, and righteous indications that Cody has transgressed against Edward Said, indicate little more than that Anon got a fancy western education before s/he went off to India and discovered huself. If Anon and likeminded western practitioners who see themselves as guardians of the Eastern authenticity (oh essentialist modern concept!) are the true guardians of the lineage, it is only because they’ve performed another level of the cultural appropriation of which they accuse others. They are, as Bourdieu would say, the cultural imperialists par excellence, both appropriating the tradition and then pretending to be its owners and protectors.

In case anyone out there didn’t quite catch it… Yes, traveling to India to practice ashtanga yoga is “imperialist” for both ideational and economic reasons, both material and ideal, both personal and collective. If you are actually concerned about “imperialism” because you think (erroneously, I’d say) that culture belongs to particular nationalities and races, than you really have no business traveling to India nor raging against anyone else for being imperialist. Because to the degree that you think you own ashtanga, you are the biggest “imperialist” of all.

The same people who are out to defend the integrity of the tradition are those who are extremely identified with it and fantasize that they own it, through all manner of superficial language study, celebration of holidays they actually know little about, professions of love for certain kinds of cuisine. But do these people really understand the culture they are appropriating? Do they see only light and spirituality in India—do they fantasize (ultimate Imperialist self-deception) that the beggars have equanimity or that Indians themselves are simply “more spiritual.” Do they recognize that they are using India as a playground where their currency and passport buy easy living and implicit international protection? Do they see that they see “spirituality” because it’s an easy life where they don’t have to deal with a more grounded spirituality that comes from their own early experiences, don’t have to deal with the economic pressures that give so much value to their dollars, don’t have to look their own history in the eyes but can instead vacation in an alternate spirituality with rituals that are easy to love because they’re different and new, and seem to offer an escape from all that is too real and too dark and to dirty to examine at home?

I’ve departed from social theory to psychological theory here at the end, but if we are honest with ourselves, isn’t this the terrain for examining this particular war over who owns ashtanga? The “imperialist” slur is a red herring, is it not? I suspect that when we westerners tangle over who owns ashtanga and whether it’s ok to see the practice from a (creepy but not at all irrelevant) marketing perspective, we are fighting at a deep level with ourselves.

Apologies for the incoherence and doubtless typos all over this post. I wanted to respond to Monkey’s question, but also am not going to take the time to make the response shorter.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , crypto-Hegelianism , markets-networks-society , science , self-deception , social theory

Instrumental Rationality · 12 August 2008

Fussy. Sorry, internet. Here goes.

Remember the ashtanga energy market? This is related, in a way. 

When you love a practice—sociology or ashtanga—being around careerist people is sometimes really hard. That’s been the main distraction of letting academia draw me in on a professional level, as is now happening. And I’m transparent, so my feelings about this are inconveniently obvious.

Instrumental rationality is useful for getting things done and can coexist along with more value-based motivations. Actions can be partly instrumental and partly value-driven; people ourselves are some of both.

But god is pure instrumentalism tacky. It’s so apparent when someone asks “what can I get out of this?” with respect to every relationship. Yes—I see the little wheels turning. Right there.

It’s also obvious when someone is obsessed with social hierarchies and institutional power and jockeying for their own position in the web. When some self-promoter wants to be close to the energy, the power, the money—even if they have no energy or real intelligence of their own to contribute.

For two years I’ve considered writing an anonymous piece for the Chronicle of Higher Ed on the tragedy of professional success for grad students whose egoes are too fragile to take it—how this creates a slithering kind of professionalism and dissolves community. Today year I’d actually do it if I had the time. It would start with a discussion of how many people now practice yoga to get through their dissertations, and an exhortation to ethical arbitrage: bring the karma-yoga ethic of Arjuna over to your professional life. Put a little soul in your soulciology.

Anyway. It seems obvious that my love of true believers grows out of this exact shadow—my despair when I see the “what can I get out of this relationship?” mechanism churning. Userism. You don’t have to be a player to be in the game, and you don’t have to hate the game even if the players make it ugly. “Networking,” and some bit of instrumental rationality, are natural to professions and networks and social life.

But it’s people who actually have little energy or love or inspiration or intelligence to give, and who play for the get, who seriously damage the practice. Stop that, ok?

Here’s more free-association from the world of Evangelical music. It’s all coming back to me these days from my subconscious. You people listening to Madonna and Wham! in your misspent youths, oh what you missed without Sparrow Records. Good thing you read this blog. As a reward for getting through this post, here’s something hilarious. It's not a parody.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , social theory , sound

The Logos and the Tao · 26 July 2008

I dreamed that I was doing a comparative analysis of The Logos and The Tao.

My subconscious, apparently, has its own sense of humor.

The dream is funny because the Tao and the Logos are both concepts that purport to be the one thing. Reality’s underlying substratum. The logical principle. That which has no equal, no opposite, no split-apart twin. The Most Meta.

The two concepts are also different in very many subtle ways. That was the point of the dream: I was comparing the concepts to see where they lined up and where they mapped different territories. Where one conception of “the way” falls short of capturing the totality of experience, at least vis-à-vis its own distant reflection in a split-apart concept of “what’s really real.”

So comparing the two reveals that neither is natural or complete—each has a social history, has edges, has the ability to express some stuff and the inability to express other stuff. If you research enough of the world, you find there is no one way dammit. It's contingency all the way down.

Comparing is interesting because you come up against harsh evidence that everything has a history. I like that kind of spelunking, but lately I’ve been just annoyed with comparison as a mode of analysis. “Compare and contrast” is a jayvee operation—a frosh exam. Simplistic. Pre-statistical. Non-causal. Abfuckingstract. When you strain to see what is similar between two cases, don’t you lose all the interesting, highly specific aspects? Is it not more useful to focus on JUST ONE THING? Like, one-pointed style?

The tao and the logos are two things and one thing. But not one thing in the way I want it. My unconscious is having fun with that.

I googled the collective unconscious, an activity almost as automatic as dreaming. Turns out a lot of people have done compare-and-contrast projects on this.

There’s even a book, The Tao and the Logos. Has the words “literary hermeneutics” in the title (kneejerk eyeroll… hermeneutics is too circular even for me). But… the authors are quoting Rilke (p. 86 & seq.). It’s all ok. Better than jayvee. Check it out:

Though we exist but once and never again, says Rilke, to have lived once fully is in itself worthwhile:

even if only once: to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

…Here we have one of the most powerful pleas in modern poetry for the power of language. Saying is conceived as more intensely ontological than things themselves could have ever dreamed of being: it is language, the naming of simple things—house, bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher—that brigs things into existence and defines what is uniquely human. Rilke proclaims:

Here is the time for the sayable, here is its homeland. Speak and bear witness.

One thing, two things. Red things, blue things. I don’t know.

Comparison is about creating abstractions, and also about ignoring case-specific qualities that don’t generalize. Maybe I can do that, but still find specificity in it. My two research cases are “one” thing, insofar as I can find what’s sayable. The tao of social science is that banal. Tonight, I will read Herakleitos.

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Categories: arbitrage , integration , science , social theory

Some notes on Mysore Style · 24 July 2008

I. Working a room. It helps to have waited tables for a long time. It helps to have great peripheral vision developed over years of sophisticated driste practice. Does a teacher understand that the first key is to coordinate, and intensify, the energies of the individuals? Or does she make the huge mistake of letting her energy pool in certain parts of the room, or—worse—periodically honing in on single students in a way that the rest of the room falls into darkness for several minutes? Driste—one pointedness, but the environing universe is still present and in motion. Teachers who don’t get this—and who can’t handle being service persons/facilitators—should do some time in the hospitality business.

Related: once I went to work at Amnesty International for a summer, taking three months of my waitressing job. Came back and tried to serve the same-sized sections on day one. DISASTER. Took many nights before I could play the table service video game again with any kind of skill.

Also: So can my working class service skills jump the hierarchy to working the rooms at the dozen giant cocktail parties I have to attend in Boston next week? Even though we’re talking rooms of very powerful, smart people who have things I—from my spot at the veeeery bottom of the hierarchy—want? Or will I let my energy pool in corners, stay occupied with those I know, fail to engage with the whole space? I actually hate this question (I never use that word). Working a room from the bottom, where you don’t have a prescribed service role but instead are doing self-promotion, requires a sense of entitlement or just another level of connected charisma I don’t possess. Bravado I can do, but essentially I hate the spotlight. It’s a question of whether I’ll decide to hone a high-brow version of my middle class skill. Such an annoying, creepy prospect, but if I can see table-waiting as just a video game…

Thoughts to develop some other time---

II. The dynamic between what you know what you’ve been taught, and the way this shows up in how you engage a student. And how this dynamic shapes the degree to which a teacher is able to teach an individual or teach a system.  

The first “teach” is a transitive infitinitive verb. The second is intransitive. Both have value. I am biased toward the first.

III. Holding a space, or owning a space. How this relates to a teacher’s feelings toward her own now-absent teacher. How teachers’ authoritarian vibe relates to her own projection process, specifically to whether she has followed this process to its resolution by recognizing that her teacher/therapist is a human.

What’s the teacher’s own relationship to authority? Has she seen her own teacher as such an authority figure that practicing without the teacher is still very mournful and makes her feel abandoned? (One way to tell that is if she tries too hard to fill the shoes of the departed authority: sometimes the heaviest-handed teachers are filled with nostalgia for the imagined heavy-hand of their teacher and trying to fake it in order to comfort themselves.) Often, put-on authority is rooted in sadness for the departed teacher, and for the fact that the young  teacher herself can no longer be observed as a good student and act out of submission and compliance. Lots of karma yoga in moving from compliant to first-person active.

IV. Ritual—what is it there for?

Between (a) mind-containing structure and (b) grasping for meaning…

in other words, (a) understood as arbitrary or (b) understood as magic.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , social theory

Process mindset, release of expectations, peripheral vision, problematizing documentation · 20 July 2008

All those terms have the same meaning here.

A client who is also a personal coach says she chose me as a teacher in part because I have a “process mindset.” This disposition “makes everything ok,” and turns experimentation and “failure” into play. It doesn’t give a shit about accomplishment. Doesn’t think about “results.”

This student, who describes herself as “fixed mindset” and “goal oriented,” has the, well, goal of becoming process-oriented. Because it seems like someone goal-oriented is less able to experience flow, does not experiment or learn very much from foul-ups, is less happy in general, and is more attached to getting things.

Ok. This is a useful conceptualization. Process and fixed mindsets. And I guess for YOGA practice, a process mindset is pretty helpful.

But what if you’re a writer? What if you’re a scientist? What if you want to contribute something for godsakes?

Not so helpful: this spontaneous, flow-oriented, “screw accomplishments” sensibility. Let me just confirm that.

Should I really be immersing myself in a practice that makes me even more process-oriented and even less interested in objectifiable results?

There’s the rub. This whole personality-definition just legitimates my endless playfulness. At a time when fixating on results would particularly annoying and painful.

Here’s what I’m thinking. If I can generate results as a byproduct of happy but sincere action, staying in process-mind is possible and—this I can verify—way more fun. I don’t swear off or denigrate results, but as long as they keep coming, they can stay parenthetical. They can be at the periphery of my field of vision. Just like my body parts when I put them in an asana. This is ideal, though. An anti-goal that is really a goal. I'm not there, when it comes to the writing-practice. It means being good. 

Here is what else I’m thinking. Of the blogger called CP. Cody Pomeray, Dean Morarity: alternate names for the man who catalyzed a whole movement of obsessive thing-creators. But what did Neal Cassady himself create? Enthusiasm, relationship, life. His life was his art. That it got documented is an accident: how many other artists- detached- from- product never made the history books? What unwritten, unpraised current lies there?

But then… getting praise isn’t the point, in that current.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , science , social theory , spirituality

Between ADD and OCD · 17 July 2008

I am really ok with a little open disagreement. Seems like healthy exercise for not taking things personally—and not making them personal. Also, it ups the ante on figuring things out and makes for quick learning.

That said, this last thread on whether ashtangis practice something beyond asana is the most elementary thing this blog has ever seen. Conduct the primary series one thousand times and make your own brilliant deductions, Watsons.

Meantime, time for the semi-annual confab on the next tagline for ashtanga yoga. Everyone here? Here are some new ones to surface in recent weeks.

Ashtanga Yoga. Yes We Can! (From Katie, who just got Ekapadabakasana.)

Ashtanga Yoga. The breathing practice with guts. (A quislingism of 0v0 and the LadyGoverNess.)

Certified Teachers. Emotionally secure. So you don’t have to be.

Authorized Teachers. Preserving the letter of the law. So the spirit may live on.

            Or on second thought,

Authorized Teachers. Preserving the letter of the law. Whatever that is.

The one we settled on last time was just

Ashtanga Yoga. Shut up.

But my favorite is still

Ashtanga Yoga. Reviving the grail quest one true believer at a time.

Back to the authorized teachers taglines, maybe the first one would help all of us to accept these legalistic souls who are hyper-identified with the ashtanga brand and anxious to have you know they have "the blessing," like to talk about the (um) sacrifices involved in being a yoga teacher, and incidentally will have you know that’s not the correct vinyasa for Prasarita C. Authorized teachers are the footsoldiers of the code, the Knights Templar to the Certifieds’ Illuminati. It falls to them to keep the faith intact in a sea of anus-shiva-power-xtn yoga, which can manifest as a sea of maya. Brave quixotic knights, they are. Their generation has difficult role to play.

What do you do? Somebody’s got to fixate on the individual trees in the forest. What we tend to think of as insecure legalism also keeps the lineage coherent. In this sense, the “authorized” vibe is our Julia Butterfly. 

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Categories: astanga yoga , crypto-Hegelianism , evolution , integration , markets-networks-society , self-deception , social theory

WWND, Moon Play, Streams of Practice · 18 June 2008

What would Nietzsche do is a concentrated question. Use sparingly and apply only to the affected area. Yields extraordinary mental clarity! But may cause will-to-power-disease if taken incorrectly.

It was a WWND day.

First thing in the morning, I went out the Santa Monica pier and skated north to Malibu and back. A summer idyll—waves big, sun clear, light salty breeze. Me and the runners—tourists don’t show up until later. Listening to Tropicalia and, after that, David Byrne.

It’s indecent to have access to this picture any old day.

Afterwards, still hyper, wrote for a while. Then I hit the asana class NYT billed as “most advanced in LA,” to let the teacher know I still love her. Received some amazing personal instruction (very helpful), was told to take lotus in handstand (ok, interesting that’s possible), and might (as a result) have frightened one or two students. A surprisingly, sweetly internal class for that venue, opening and closing with instruction on pratyhara (which calmed me down the way a few sun salutations and standing postures cannot). This deviation from the tradition is “damaging yoga”? Really? Damaging the monopoly, yes. But a scene like this is so different from ashtanga that the two do not need to fear each other the way they do. I wish they would stop trashing each other. Soon, we need different words to refer to the two kinds of practice: they have little in common and neither is going away.

Anyway.The thing about the ashtanga teacher, the one who does primary before a moon, is that he doesn’t go in for arbitrary rules. He’s got too much positive instruction on tap to need to frame his room in negative instructions. It's different, but there are a lot of reasons one might specify first-only before a moon: my guess is that he knows he attracts physically intense students whose minds could use a super-internal practice at regular intervals on random days. No kidding: this guy is the best asana instructor I have ever encountered. This shocks and amuses me. He is gifted in physical intelligence and has made third easy yet particularly intense for me. And my back, which has been trippy for 16 months, has undergone some kind of healing this spring, in a way that I might try to explain later.

I am still not very “physical” about this stuff—thinking and talking about asana is unbearably tedious, especially where my own body is concerned. I’m interested in the head-trip, energy, culture, history, spirit, emotion—ANYTHING but mechanics. Which is why a very physical teacher, who has mastery in the area I avoid, is a great benefit.

This brings me to something Gregor and I put together in a thread the other day. I think he was drunk when he brought it up but the idea makes sense if you stay with it. Say there are different streams of mastery—physical, mental, spiritual, maybe another. If you’re going to practice something, you’ll probably be drawn to focus on the stream in which you feel most competent. Too, maybe you feel insecure in one of the other streams and try to avoid it. High school athletes (who might claim to be non-intellectual) find a physical practice; introverts (usual klutzes) turn to meditation; mental people (who say "quieting the mind" is a stupid idea) pursue intellectual athleticism.

Would it be possible for a single practice to work in all three streams simultaneously, and actually harmonize them over time? A practice in which you may get in for the appeal of, say, physical mastery, but soon find you have to work with equal intensity in other less familiar streams in order to pursue that supposed strength?

Ashtanga has the potential to be that. A kind of practice that balances the streams.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , morality , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Frame Bold Conjectures! · 5 June 2008

I get some pretty weird email through the contact link on this blog. But one today was so alienated by my writing, and generally angry towards my strong positions, that it concerns me that others might feel the same.

If you do, I’m sorry.

If you have been reading this for a little while, and looking at the comments, hopefully you have an idea of my personality—that any strong position is usually taken with a wink. If I get in to it with R or DailyM or Carl or Cody or Patrick in the comments, that is us enjoying each other and learning a lot in the process.

I am sort of a child of the philosopher and research methodologist Karl Popper, who said Frame Bold Conjectures! And then do everything you possibly can to try to falsify them. 

I see ashtanga as a “science” of research on the self, and feel that Americans get in our own way by heaping unnecessary fantasy-world beliefs and hero-worship in the way of their own experience. So sometimes I toss out a bold conjecture in hopes of encouraging others to frame their own, different experiences in a clear way. The contrast challenges all of us to pare down useless beliefs, understand each other better through ribald epistemological compromise, and dig that much deeper in to our own intuitions and experiences.

I’m here to figure out what ashtanga is about. Collectively, culturally, individually, spiritually, whatever. This is just my way of investigating. 

My favorite people are those who are curious, brave, interested in everything, and have finely-tuned bullshit detectors. I guess I write the way I do to attract those excitable skeptics, expecting that a little non-PC boldness will be taken lightly.

Namaste and shit. And with all the love of my well-loved, wrung-out, blown-open, hardworking little heart.

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Categories: social theory

Mercury is Always in Retrograde · 27 May 2008

Am I going to have a car accident now because Mercury is in retrograde? Am I safe from car accidents the rest of the time because Mercury is direct? Shall I initiate nothing for the next month because the planets are more powerful than the clarity of my vision? Shall we all just sit around and wait, hoping not to awake the sleeping astral giant of calamity? Will June 2008 be not worth living due to something as insanely shallow as a little misfortune, even if it does come? Are fortune and luck what we are living for anyway--elaborately constructing our lives so as to catch the planetary winds at just the precisely perfect moment so everything will be ok?

Stop it right now everybody. Come on. Can we please look life directly in the eyes again here?

Chaos is always present. We don’t get to draw tidy boundaries around it and pretend the rest of life operates according to some magical order. A lot of times there is no control, and everything is chaotic, and there is no god or law or element organizing everything and making things happen for a reason.

We are so afraid of admitting that there is chaos, and become greedy for explanations. But chaos is always out there, just beyond the edge of our imperfect explanations. Even when Mercury is not in retrograde! Myths and archetypes just give an operating framework within the chaos. 

Which is all good. I love that. I saw Indiana Jones on Monday and take rueful energy from its image of disheveled scholarly heroism—a hero who winkingly apologizes for his own cornball sincerity even as he smashes power hungry commies (and capitalists, this time) in the face, chases away the demons of unreason, glorifies fieldwork (!) as the real route to knowledge of the world, and (especially) bears witness to magical-realist secrets that the scientific framework can never incorporate. Indy’s a real fucker, but he’s also perfect. How do I even know what kind of scholar I am without that image? Would I have even thought to research culture as an object, wear khakis and live in the tropics, or button up for the ivory tower without that image?

Astrology—the idea that I’m a Scorpio/Aries in a productive cycle at the height of my powers—is the same. There’s a lot of energy in that archetype and myth, even if there is no literal “truth” in it at all. Experience is the only thing I have, the only thing that I can honestly say is true. I like having some structure, but the control it gives is a game.

Archetypes and myths are interpretive. Not explanatory. They create meaning and outline possibilities for action in an uncertain world. They are not the reason that things happen.  I am (sometimes). Other times there’s no reason to be found at all.

Scary. :)

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Categories: evolution , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

A small bridge · 5 May 2008

The workshop this weekend was sweet. For someone who is often drained by social interaction, it was surprising to see how inspiring and energizing this community can be to me. I sat around the edges, an active wallflower. I don’t often step back in this way—being in a group is all or nothing and usually involves getting sensitive to each individual's needs. But the relationships in this group are mutually supportive at a deep level, even as we transition into predominantly spoken interactions.

Sunday, I stayed afterwards and talked to my teacher—who I won’t see for a while—and then slipped away before someone buttonholed me in to the group dinner. Drove down the ramp and stopped short as a light, determined and quick walker darted into the sidewalk space I was about to cross. Who else dresses in all black and moves with such Newyorkish purpose on a spring evening in Santa Monica?

It was my PhD adviser. Same age as my other teacher and twice the body weight if just as light on her feet, she bounded around to the driver’s window and said she’d been thinking of me all afternoon, because re-reading a book she knows I love. I wanted to hug her, but I kept my hands on the wheel while we talked.

What a beautiful transition, one teacher still upstairs and the other there on the ground, and my path down the ramp linking the two. One a hippie ex-engineer who dropped out and found a spiritual path, one avid and brilliant Marxist feminist who just by staying with her work accidentally became a major player. Both big names despite themselves, anti-self-promoters who laugh at the organizations in which their work is embedded even as they believe so deeply in the value of giving themselves as they can. They are both (unlike me) coffee lovers and easily could have met on this street some other day this spring, bumped in to each other in line and laughed together at some little thing in the world around them. I never realized it, but their dispositions and aspects are so similar, and nothing like mine. But otherwise I'm their only link.

I am back in her hands, for now.

Here’s a passage from a really disturbing talk by Bell Labs physicist R. Hamming. People who identify with their work and become one-dimensional research bots drive me to blogging in the margins, obviously. I have very different notions about how to enjoy and cultivate my energies and mind, and how many dimensions of myself it’s possible to maximize at a time. But this tribute to the shadow-benefits of one-pointedness did give me pause…

Well, we know very little about the subconscious; but one thing you are pretty well aware of is that your dreams also come out of your subconscious. And you’re aware your dreams are, to a fair extent, a reworking of the experiences of the day.

If you are deeply immersed and committed to a topic, day after day after day, your subconscious has nothing to do but work on your problem. And so you wake up one morning, or on some afternoon, and there’s the answer. For those who don’t get committed to their current problem, the subconscious goofs off on other things and doesn’t produce the big result. So the way to manage yourself is that when you have a real important problem you don’t let anything else get the center of your attention - you keep your thoughts on the problem. Keep your subconscious starved so it has to work on your problem, so you can sleep peacefully and get the answer in the morning, free.

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Categories: arbitrage , integration , social theory

SLI: Dirty Feet, Dirty Concepts, Ashtanga on Demand · 25 April 2008

Skipped work Friday and took my two-year-old niece to the beach. We rode the creepy carousel on the Santa Monica pier, me just zoning out to the nightmare calliope, staring into the spiraling mirrors, and waiting for it to end.

Then we rode it again. And again.

She’s so excited by her environment, her huge slate blue eyes beneath hair the same weird color as mine are wide, glinty, always hypnotically changing. She misses her mom and attaches to the thing that most resembles her… a big plushie owl. The intense, preternatural need in her, the rawness of emotion in this, her first transference relationship. Her trust and love for me, as perhaps with students’, come from other associations that map easily on to me. (I am not too maternal, but don’t throw up much static for someone who might want to see that here). It is wonderful to be there for it. I will be her Aunt her whole life. I feel myself reciprocating the bond, letting her pull me out to the water with my jeans on, even though there’s nothing I hate like dirty feet and sand in my things.

What else? This week, the longstanding rivalry between yogis and hipsters dissolved when Time magazine equated the two.

It’s not that a cultural boundary has changed so much as that both concepts have lost their crispness enough that the middlebrow milquetoast magazine can throw them around like nothing. As a notorious, maddening, extremely cute, French sociologist reminded me Thursday, our concepts are little animals and when we take them out to play, sometimes they get dirty. That’s when we bring them home and clean them up again for future use, so our thoughts become clear again.

I’m all for cleaning up “hipster,” restoring it as a properly circumscribed term of abuse. But maybe we’ll leave the concept of “ashtangi” a little more dirty?

Meanwhile, until the hipster/ashtangi boundary gets redrawn, I will celebrate yoga-hipster nonduality by publicly demonstrating the primary series, on a Saturday, at a yoga lifestyle store I often ridicule. (Turns out their labor practices are improving a bit). The friend who set up this event is upset that there is no ashtanga awareness in the culture this corporation is generating.

Ok. So I’m taking my manifestly nerdy ass over there in my anti-brand-name clothes. Will they dress me up in trademark garb to get a on my Marichyasana D?

It’s one o’clock Saturday at Lululemon, and don’t you dare bring a camera if you swing by. I’m feeling weird enough about it already, but I know two hours of secret Saturday ritual beforehand will mellow out the introverted awkwardness. Saturday after SS is when my wheels finally, briefly spin to a stop every week, so it’ll be interesting to see how public ashtanga-on-demand fits in to the energetic cycle.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , markets-networks-society , social theory

"Decatur memos" · 22 April 2008

The first year, the question in play was What is this mental state am I experiencing every day?