Struggle Forever!

In the beginning, there was nothing. No ground. And then things began to come together – literally come together.  Through the forging of relationships, beings began to compose themselves and one another.  Began, as well, to join together in new and ingenious ways to compose beings more complex and more diverse than before.  If there is a miracle in the universe, it is the miracle of cooperation and collaboration – the miracle of working together.  Nothing had to exist.  And yet, here we are in a universe populated by stars, planets, nebulae, black holes, neutrinos, oceans, whales, cats, dogs, fish, flowers, trees, clouds, air, rivers, fossils, statues, buildings, books, mountains, asteroids, computers, bagels, people, paintings, oil tankers, birds, octopuses, bears, turtles, boats, telephone poles, houses, gardens, laser light shows, music, ice cream, microbes, insects, and much much more!  That any of these things exist is a miracle because they are all the product of many different beings working together to create new things and new ways of being.  This is the hope in post-nihilism: the universe may be without meaning, but we can create our own meaning with those around us!  The world is what we (all of us – whether human or not – together) make of it!

Following up on my previous two posts (here and here) on buddhism and the recent visit of the Dalai Lama, I want to elaborate on the position I see for Buddhism in the struggle for a better world.

What is Buddhism?  It’s not a religion like any other.  In those sects where deities are acknowledged, they are recognized as immanent beings rather than transcendent, and subject to the same limitations as other worldly beings.  In most sects, deities play little or no role at all.  At the core of Buddhist philosophy is the impermanence of the world.  The world is suffering, the Buddha tells us, but “suffering” is not necessarily the appropriate term. The world is dynamic – always changing.  Beings come in and out of existence, and the nature of our relationships with other beings is constantly in flux. Attempting to hold fast to one form of existence – to a particular kind of being or a particular kind of relationship – is, in the nature of things, to experience dissatisfaction. Huxley says it well:

Because his aspiration to perpetuate only the “yes” in every pair of opposites can never, in the nature of things, be realized, the insulated Manichee I think I am condemns himself to endlessly repeated frustration, endlessly repeated conflicts with other aspiring and frustrated Manichees.

So Buddhism is, at its core, a philosophy of coexistence. This world is changing because it is heterogeneous, because there is no ground. So what do we do about it? How does one live in a world coinhabited – co-constructed – with myriad other beings? Buddhism provides an answer in the eightfold path – right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.  Notice, though, that these are not commandments – “Thou shalt”.  They are open-ended, defined not by some divine creator or an essential nature of being (the search for which is still reflected in the search for scientific truth), but rather by the circumstances.  So how do we know what “right” means in any given context?  Again, Buddhism has an answer for us – through the practice of meditation.

Meditation is a diverse practice.  There are many different kinds of meditation, and each does something different.  However, broadly speaking, they are all practices (in the sense of “practice makes perfect”) of cultivating a particular kind of affect or cognitive-emotional state.  At the least, meditation cultivates an affect of tranquility and peace of mind, at it’s best, it cultivates an affect of awareness.  Huxley, again:

Concentration, abstract thinking, spiritual exercises—systematic exclusions in the realm of thought. Asceticism and hedonism—systematic exclusions in the realms of sensation, feeling and action. But Good Being is in the knowledge of who in fact one is in relation to all experiences. So be aware—aware in every context, at all times and whatever, creditable or discreditable, pleasant or unpleasant, you may be doing or suffering. This is the only genuine yoga, the only spiritual exercise worth practicing.

Does Buddhism offer us a way of retreating inwards (and thus competing with critical theories that would have us turn outwards in our struggle for a better world)?  The answer is, in some sense, yes.  Buddhism – especially as it has been transformed by its encounter with Western, Capitalist modes of thought – offers us the possibility of a happiness that does not demand social change.  But it doesn’t have to be that way, and the practice of cultivating affect can be (I might go so far as to say is an essential) part of struggle.

Our affects – the way we feel and experience the world around us – are also part of the world we live in.  Our affects can be as inscrutable and unknowable as the lives as other beings.  In that sense, the usual division between inside and outside becomes irrelevant, and instead we can look at any given situation as a complex assemblage of factors and features, one of which is our affect.  What is it that compels an individual to struggle?  What is it that keeps that same individual, at a different time, from participating?  Affect is not the answer, but it is part of the answer.  A person who is simply depressed and unable to leave her room is not capable of struggle – for her own benefit let alone that of others.  It may be that her depression is tied to many factors that are beyond her immediate control (a lifeless job, or an oppressive marriage), and these factors will not go away magically through the practice of meditation.  Nor should meditation be seen as a way to achieve peace and happiness within those circumstances – she could be happy, perhaps, but happiness is not an end itself.  Instead, the cultivation of an affect of awareness might allow this woman to recognize how her depression is limiting her and shift her affect towards one that would allow her to struggle for the change that she wants – whether that new affect is happiness or something else.

Capitalism and other oppressive systems depend on our internalizing, to some degree, the logic of the system.  They depend on us becoming our own minions, to use Stengers’s phrase.  Much ink has been spilled in articulating how this is achieved: through schooling, media, etc. – the ideological state apparatus, however you conceive of that.  In that sense, taking time to cut out those voices all around us, and being attentive to the ways in which our own internal voice mimics them, might be a powerful form of resistance – one of the cracks that must be grasped and ripped open in order for struggle to continue. This is the cultivation of an affect of awareness that meditation (and sorcery, perhaps) offer.

But, you might say, what about enlightenment? Isn’t the goal of Buddhism to achieve enlightenment and escape from the world of illusion?  If so, how does that not compete with a desire/need to change the world itself?  It’s true, perhaps, for some forms of Buddhism.  However, what becomes very clear when exploring the philosophy of Buddhism and the concept of enlightenment as retreat from the world, is that it’s impossible.  Impossible because, even as enlightened beings, we cannot escape this world – the only out is death.  Our experience of enlightenment is subject to the same transitory existence as all of the rest of being, so achieving enlightenment becomes a project and practice of cultivation, and one which involves coexistence and co-construction with other beings as well.

All of this is not to say that Buddhism is a philosophy and practice of struggle.  It’s just to say that Buddhism and struggle are not, in my opinion, fundamentally incompatible, and that Buddhist practices can be important aspects of struggle.  There may be aspects of particular Buddhist philosophies that don’t fit well with struggle, and there are certainly aspects of the way Buddhism is practiced in both the East and the West that seem opposed to struggle.  However, the core philosophy of Buddhism (The Four Noble Truths) and the practices that it encourages (The Eightfold Path, and meditation) are compatible and possibly even valuable for struggle.

Today the University of Maryland had the honor of hosting H.H. the Dalai Lama for the Sadat Lecture for Peace.  You can view the entire lecture here.  I was, unfortunately, not able to attend because I was teaching.  I may have more to say on this lecture shortly.

This weekend I’ve been skimming through parts of Holloway’s Crack Capitalism (thanks to Andre, Aaron, and dmf for pointing it out to me), and I think it seems to be a really powerful book.  Written in a kind of manifesto style, a call to action rather than the often dry and pretentious style of much revolutionary theory, this book could easily be picked up by anyone and understood.  And the ideas are powerful, revolutionary for revolutionary thought.  I class this in with J.K. Gibson-Graham, Hakim Bey, and Stengers’ Capitalist Sorcery for proposing a conception of struggle as working through the cracks and holes that Capitalism never completely fills.  But this book is a little more accessible than the others, and so I think – I hope – it has more potential for change.

Capitalism may be a totality, but it is not totalizing.  Taking cue from the ontological literature I engage with, no totality can ever be totalizing. There are always cracks, holes, aporias, interstices, or openings where one can catch hold and begin to compose a new world.  If anything, what makes Capitalism totalizing – what keeps us from grabbing hold – is the illusion of its totality.  As Andre points out, following Stengers, Capitalism’s minions are continuously engaged in plastering over the cracks and making it appear that it is, indeed, the “end of history.”  Coupled with the seemingly limited character of any kind of resistance, and the frequent “failure” of such struggles, it seems a futile effort. Add, finally, the “critical” theories that imagine Capitalism as a pervasive force that seeps into our consciousness and turns all struggle, ultimately, against itself, and you have a recipe for apathy, and distress.

But the bounded nature of various struggles (both temporally and spatially) ought not be taken, in my opinion, for failure. As the authors I’ve mentioned above point out (and David Graeber seems to suggest as well), no struggle has ever been won by the seizing of power, and the overthrow of a system.  Those are the manifestations that we cling to, and fantasize about, but if you look with finer resolution, it becomes clear that it was the everyday work and struggle of people in the margins and gaps that gave rise to revolutionary transformations.  I’ve said before many times, there is no place from which one can grasp a whole system, one can only grasp at parts and, by means of these parts, make a difference to the system.  But making a difference – especially a positive, directed difference – takes work, continuous work over time: Struggle Forever!  In other words, Occupy didn’t fail, it was a resounding success, but a bounded one.  The struggle is to continue to recreate those bounded successes in order to make them a continuity.

Books like Holloway’s grasp at the cracks, but not only in a way that makes an immediate opening in the system, they chip away at the plastering of the Capitalist minions.  It’s a kind of anti-sorcery whereby the cracks are made apparent – a chipping away at the plastering in our minds that keeps us from seeing the possibilities for a different world.

I was out of town at a conference this past week, and spent the weekend getting caught up on some grading and helping out at UMD’s outreach day (called Maryland Day), but I saw this post by Levi and thought it might be a good one for me to add/respond to.  So here goes.

In the post, Levi begins to address the question of normativity from his Machine-Oriented perspective.  How do we account for norms?  How do we ground them?  The problem, it seems, is that in spite of thousands of years of philosophical effort, we have not been able to come up with a single, all-encompassing normative principle.  Kant has his categorical imperative, Mill and the Utilitarians have their pleasure principle, Aristotle has his virtue ethics, and so on.  Further complicating the matter is the question of how to treat other cultures that have a completely different basis for normativity (I’m not going to address the neurological issues Levi raises because it’s not my area of expertise, and I haven’t had time to fully think it through).  Do we treat them as somehow less than human?  Simply uneducated or uncivilized?  If we adhere to the principle of cultural relativism, then we can’t do so – we have to treat all ethical systems as fully legitimate ethical systems even if we don’t agree with them.

So where does normativity come from?  On what can it be grounded?  I think Levi is right to look to ethnography for the clues.  In fact, I’ve been thinking about this issue a lot lately as well.  Over the past semester, I’ve been taking a class – through the entomology department, oddly enough – on animal ethics.  We read most of the chapters from The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics.  It was interesting to me, because the class took a completely different approach to animal ethics than I’m accustomed to.  Most of the animal ethics readings I’ve done have been in the post-structuralist vein (most notably Donna Haraway), and the approach in this book was very traditional philosophy – attempting to reason out the appropriate ethical principles by which we can measure our actions.  The early chapters took a particular approach – Kantian, Utilitarian, or Virtue ethics – and attempted to extend the ethical boundaries to animals.  Later chapters explored more specific issues, and ultimately addressed practical ethics.  There was a great deal of agreement between all of the authors, but also a great deal of disagreement, and some that were way out in left field.  What all of them had in common, though, was the search for this universal (and transcendent) ethical principle – even with the recognition that such a principle can never really be expected to be found.  Interestingly, the professor was a Kantian, so most of our discussions ended back at the Kantian approach, but with some modifications by Christine Korsgaard to extend the ethic beyond the human.

I’ll not spend any more time describing or explaining the animal ethic approaches outlined in the book and discussed in class, because it’s not what this post is about.  Instead, what fascinated me about this class, and what gets to the heart of Levi’s questions, is the process that we underwent in this class.  From one perspective, we were attempting to reason out those fundamental and universal principles.  From another, we were engaged in a performative discourse whereby ethical principles are formulated, contested, modified, rejected, or accepted.  It’s a fundamentally local performance.  And, looking ethnographically, we see that this is how all ethics are composed.  Not through the discovery of some fundamental principle or universal ground, but through the process of discourse between subjects, though many different kinds of grounds are invoked to support or reject a particular ethical principle.  In fact, over at ANTHEM, dmf has posted (I’m sure not coincidentally) a nice video of Daniel Smith arguing something very similar from a Deleuzian perspective.

From an empirical (ethnographic) perspective, ethics emerge out of discourse.  But it’s not just discourse that gives rise to ethics or norms, they emerge from the confluences of biological, ecological, economic, political, spiritual, and practical factors.  Some norms will be easier to accept than others simply because of our biological natures and the ecological contexts in which we find ourselves.  But even those norms that are based in part on biology and the complexities of having to live and work together cannot be said to be universal.  Take the incest taboo, for example.  If any norm could be said to be universal, it is this.  But the application of the incest taboo – most obviously in the definition of kin – varies enormously from culture to culture.  Even this fundamentally biological principle can change depending on social, cultural, and environmental factors.

In other words, norms are generally agreed upon practices that allow us to live together in a heterogeneous world.  There is no ground, only a tangled knot of co-existence, and the continual process of performing ethical discourse.  In this way, norms are composed and recomposed over time and space.  Obviously, this doesn’t tell us what norms we should follow, and, in fact, it can’t tell us that.  Does that mean that anything goes? No, because norms are – must be – composed collaboratively and in relation to our biological and ecological contexts – in this sense, the discourse (taken broadly, and including non-human factors) is the ground, and it is this process and performance of discourse that bounds normativity within a particular social group. Does it mean that we can’t or shouldn’t intervene in the normative practices of others if we find them to be abhorrent?  I would argue not, but it does mean that we can’t or shouldn’t expect others to simply and unproblematically accept our own normative principles.  Changing others minds takes time and work, and in the process, our own normative claims are made vulnerable.  The universal does not exist, it must be made, and it is always prone to failure.