INSIDEOWL: You can't have it

You can't have it · 24 April 2009

Good old commodities: iron ore, wheat, petroleum, labor power

These are capitalism’s creation, the stock in trade of markets. On the market, unit of Wyoming petroleum = unit from Kuwait. The commodity is brought in to existence for the reason of sale. Its key qualities are uniformity and exchangeability. Gold from Potosí = gold from Anaconda. Sneaker assembly in Vietnam = sneaker assembly in Mexico. X = X = X.

Commidification is good: it greases the world. Commodification is bad: it denies the differences between places and humans and puts in thrall to the market, only capable of thinking in terms of objects and exchange.

Modern commodities: RAM. Carbon offsets. Human hearts and kidneys. Yoga postures.

All made of the same stuff and therefore transitive. For the getting and the selling.

The yoga industry has come into being because of a massive buy-in to the idea that a yoga posture is a thing. (It’s also, to a lesser degree, commodified “inner peace” and now sells it in 90 minute units, but that’s another story.) A teacher must advertise herself in the form of some god-awful contortion for all to see because this is the product she has to offer. She has to work on these terms: it's the language everyone speaks. Either you can consume her posture or, better yet, have it for yourself.

Ooooh… arm balance. I want that.

Yeah, you’re smart readers already. You know where this is going.

Commodification is what it is and it works, but there is a lie inside it. On a deep level, postures aren’t transitive. The body itself pushes back against the tide of commodification. Jack’s trikonasana is not Jane’s, neither internally nor insofar as anyone can “consume” it from the outside.

And, beyond that, doing trikonasana a bunch of times might natrally lead you from consuming that experience according to the rationale and valuations of capitalism… to just experiencing the experience.

Most of the teaeching and doing of yoga is locked inside the capitalist mindset. This is how it has to be. It isn't bad: consuming spirituality is still a kind of spirituality. It's oookkayyy: to rage against commodification is self-defeating and unintelligent, itself a denial of the way in which nobody fully escapes capitalism (for now). The capitalist mind is fully formed and sucks everything it touches in to its machine so that it can continue to function and expand. Reification is everywhere. It wants to be the only way, thinks it is the only way.

And yet!

It is in this context—the context so environing that we barely crane our necks to see it—that these Indian guys drop comments about the “purity” of traditional practice. It initially sounds like a rehash of the Puritanism that scares and repels us, but no. Purification is central to any mind-quieting spiritual practice, as Shinzen discusses at length. Purification is sweet and changes the nature of experience. It introduces new degrees of freedom.

Commodification will reduce humans and the planet to meaningless dust if it ever becomes complete. But that will not happen. The roots practices—humanism, environmentalism, traditionalism—are always here to push back, to create islands of “purity” vis-à-vis the logic that wants to dominate. And to offer options for the future.

To resist commodification in yoga is to fight that good fight, which has been in process for millenia and will never be lost. It’s not for everyone, but if you’re going to do traditional practice, recognize that it is a non-commodification practice. It is an island of non-capitalism. Rich, "pure," and not for sale. Not for sale because this yoga resists commodification, is too individal for it, too cool for it.

Because it operates on the logic of liberation, not the logic of get get get.

The paradox is doing non-commodified practice in the form of ashtanga. Because ashtanga, due to its systematic nature, due to the temporary things it makes and unmakes in the progress of a series, mistakes itself as a commodity all of the time. If you do it with your capitalist mind, you want postures, you show off postures, you lust for postures, you conspicuously consume postures for others to watch. Ditto for yoga abs and the nice ass. And the piece of the celeb teachers, the special relationship, you want for yourself. It’s all in the get. And it's in the uncritical participation in turning teachers into CEOs, and not calling them on it or providing some pushback when they act like extreme capitalists.

You don’t have to do traditional practice, but if you do, at least understand its power and participate in that rather than selling it out.

It’s simple: someone else’s posture is not a thing. You can’t have that. And your posture is not a thing. You can’t have that either.

Posted by (0v0)
Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , markets-networks-society

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Comment

This is interesting. You imply that basic human nature is capitalism. This is apostasy for Marxists.

Posted by: Carl · Apr 24, 09:20 AM · #
I do not imply that. It’s just the logic of the age.

Deep and largely taken for granted.

Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 24, 09:35 AM · #
Carl, isn’t it rather that the Western Post-Cartisian nature is to objectify and once an object it can then become commodified. Objectification begins with things moves on to practices and finally we become objects ourselves…or is that the other way around. Perhaps the purification you speak of Owl is nondualist, the difference between experiencing and having AN experience.

Posted by: grimmly · Apr 24, 09:49 AM · #
Yes. And non-dualist practice can be seen as rootsy, traditionalist, pre-capitalist. But it’s also post-capitalist. This is just a particular era. We are in it, but we do not have to be of it.

It is obvious to someone who has stepped outside this mind that it is no big deal, and that we can have freedom from it.

But most people have never figured this out or been offered this version of practice.

It’s interesting that you can do a lot of ashtanga without even figuring that out. The KPJAYI is partly to blame for that. They’ve let themselves be made in to a corporation insofar as we experince it (it's actually a cottage industry, but on the world stage it pretends to be kind of a rock concert production organization). Hard for them to resist, and mostly just a response to us practitioners and our thrill to consume experience, but still somewhat lame.

Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 24, 10:13 AM · #
This isn’t how I’ve been thinking about the same thing (sometime soon to take a shot at incarnating it in language) but it’s in the same zone.

The tangent I’ll offer is that there’s a big difference (just for the heck of it) between seeing someone pull a contortion in “real time,” and seeing a photograph of said contortion. I think even video is closer to “the real” here, than photography is, and much moreso than retouched (ahem) magazine-cover photography. Sure, this isn’t any more directly about capitalism/“purity,” but I don’t want to mess up my own metaphor for what you’re talking about here, by digging into that.

Posted by: patrick · Apr 24, 10:45 AM · #
Nope. No difference. Still objectification. Still capitalist mind. (As is Lacan.)

“The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.”

Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 24, 11:26 AM · #
What a brilliant and necessary post. Thank you for this!

Posted by: dana · Apr 24, 11:31 AM · #
‘The name itself is a fraud,
The method intrinsically flawed,
A body fragmented,
A sangam demented,
You aint ‘samadhu’, just bored!

The ‘vinyasas’? Mere clownish gymnastics,
Performed on om-embossed plastics,
A crass competition,
Backed by faux-erudition,
And relentlessly dull onomastics.

The crafty Karnatakan’s greedy,
His eyes rapacious and beady,
To poke mula bandha,
With a digital danda?
Ineffective but typically seedy.

The Certified egos arrayed,
At workshops where nothing is made,
Seem mighty pious,
Sidling up to the dias,
But then whisper, “How much have we made?”.

All that is solid? It melts,
Dripping down into pools from the delts,
The sacred, profaned,
The Rishis, defamed,
And sold-off like poached tiger pelts.’

Well all the above may be tue,
From a purely prakritical view,
But i’ll be up in the morning,
For some Surya-based fawning,
And I’m sure that you will be, too.

Even if it is a Saturday.

Posted by: meniscursus · Apr 24, 12:59 PM · #
Sometimes I like to think about jazz musicians before recording technology, improvising. Just sound into air and then gone.

Posted by: Karen · Apr 24, 01:27 PM · #
I grok your position. ahem.

Posted by: Gregor · Apr 24, 02:48 PM · #
Love that poem.

Sometimes I think some of the “commodification” comes from the simple fact that there are so many of us, perhaps too many on this lifeboat Earth. I don’t know of anyone willing to give up their seat for altruistic reasons. Is it even possible to do something unique and hand crafted from your immediate surroundings these days (like it was done for millenniums)? When the astanga western pioneers went in the 70’s there were 3.6 billion potential yogis. Now, less then 40 years later, its almost doubled. Additionally through our technologies of media people have learned how others are living – as veritable kings. So 7 billion people and almost all of them want to live like kings. Mass produce the kingly experiences for everyone and by everyone, how else could it go? You too can have a Mysore palace with resident Krishnamacharyan and he might even stand on you in Kapotasana while nails go into your shoulders if your lucky….

Posted by: e&sj · Apr 25, 08:07 PM · #
If only there were a global coefficient for avarice... some kind of Gini index for greed. Yes, it is a good poem. The fifth stanza takes off from the passage I quoted in the previous comment, but then M’s intertextuality is often so right. And… unrecorded jazz. Innocence! Practice can be innocent like that.

I just had lunch and read the following:

This BEAUTIFUL and wonderful article. Well, I only read page one, but the rest will be a delight for later.

This, a nuanced discussion of what I meant by purity and the contingency of traditional and modern approaches to yoga practice.

Oh and this.

Now I have to write some sociology. Bye.

Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 26, 11:47 AM · #
Article 1: I’ll save you the trip to Mr Dwelley’s. Zazen and excessive navel-gazing are NOT appropriate practices for Nordics. Dancing, weightlifting, feasting and plenty of fresh air are what’s needed, especially after a crap childhood. As for sitting around asking such dopey questions as “who believes they have a self?” a man of his age should know better and just distribute the lecture-notes with a jaded grimace.

Article 2: I don’t trust anyone from that region with any kind of philosophical pretensions, but the footballers, just like their Illyrian ancestors, can be trusted in a crisis.

Article 3: I just don’t understand this sort of thing at all.

Posted by: meniscursus · Apr 27, 04:00 AM · #
Funny, was just considering a summer trip for river swimming and tarot reading with the psycho-yogis to the north. What is a non-excessive amount of navel-gazing?

Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 27, 04:37 AM · #
Just under 2 seconds longer than it takes to pick out the fluff

Posted by: meniscursus · Apr 27, 04:56 AM · #
hi (0v0)
these days i have to do self practice and so i struggle with practicing. i find that i’m not greedy for poses, just happy to get the ones i get in that day. i photograph my practice, i think, to communicate to fellow cybershalamates that i practiced that day – sort of a way to send a visual clue that i did my practice that day. but i understand what you’re talking about, commodification of poses. i suppose it helps that the people who do it can display them well.
hugs
Arturo

Posted by: arturo · Apr 27, 05:01 AM · #
You’re joking. If I was as greedy for fish soup as you are for postures I’d be the king of Sumo rather than the (young) god of Ashtanga yoga.

Posted by: meniscursus · Apr 27, 07:59 AM · #
I offer Bergman as an example of Nordic omphaloskepsis.

Curious: there’s a lot of chitchat about a certain young man teaching a certain practice in a big eastern city. Seen any of it?

Posted by: patrick · Apr 27, 06:54 PM · #
Oh wow.

Intense.

My first feeling is sympathy all around. I see both perspectives—thankfully both are so clearly defined here. One player in this drama sees that ritual as all about asana performance. The other sees the ritual as all about illustrating and sacralizing guru purnima.

Both can be modes of stilling the mind. Both are also kind of superficial—compared to contemplating the breath, the MB, the One, Nothingness, whatever-you-call-it.

My ethical/aesthetic preference is toward letting the lineage have its day and delighting in the incredibly beautiful group ritual. SO BEAUTIFUL, people—as long as we don’t over-reach and pretend it’s more than it is. That’s always an aesthetic problem. :-)

Just personally, I have this new happy, heart-warming affection for S—a gratitude that doesn’t need to pretend he’s enlightened or psychic because he certainly he makes no claim to be nor does he seem to see that as his path. I earned that gratitude, and a confidence that the existence of strong leadership is not a threat of any kind to me or my personal practice, by watching the institution work in Mysore. Those feelings weren’t in me before.

Anyway. This is a good moment to see the practice deciding how authoritarian it’s going to be. Deciding both from above and from below. It’s an ongoing negotiation, though not usually such an explicit or dramatic one.

The more self-aware we all are about the rawness of these encounters and their potential to shore up our edges in a unique way, the better.

Hopefully the touurs will still be as rich in that sense now that SKPJ’s out of the ring, and not just a control-loss/fan-child ritual in the vein of a rock-n-roll tour. Leave it to westerners to make it all about performance. Both of asana and of charismatic instruction. Meh. That would just be a reeking flatland postmodern circle jerk. Let’s not sink to that level, ok? It’s our choice… we’re the ones deciding how this really goes.

It can be a beautiful thing. I’ll go up to SF to find out. If he chastises me, right on. Always good to be seen.

Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 27, 07:49 PM · #
Stop lumping us all together. The performative ‘westeners’ you allude to seem to reside primarily in a couple of narrow strips of our glorious Occident. Their imitators elsewhere are few, and even they tend to quit (or go nuts) when they realise how pointless (and profitless) such antics (physical and ‘devotional’)are.

The rest just get on with it, one way or another, for however long it takes to get the point.

So don’t worry too much about ‘the practice’ and its authority index. Who pays attention, anyway?

btw, can you imagine this old nordic knocking his hip out in siddhasana?
http://www.oddhaugen.com/home.htm

Posted by: meniscursus · Apr 28, 04:59 AM · #
“incredibly beautiful group ritual”
yes!

Posted by: Liz · Apr 28, 09:03 AM · #
Ok.

As for tricks, here are the squirrels out on one of my daily walking routes on campus.

Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 28, 10:33 AM · #
Ooh! Omphaloskepsis is a cool word!

Posted by: Carl · Apr 28, 04:35 PM · #
The video is wonderful- thanks for the link!

Posted by: Liz · Apr 28, 09:27 PM · #