I
think Bostock would have an unlikely ally in Walt Whitman, no Luddite, who
celebrated the trans-Atlantic telegraph cable in his poem “Passage
to India ,” which is largely
about the unfinished journey of Columbus .
Whitman writes about this journey symbolically (not from a historical
perspective, which would reveal Columbus ’
mission to Christianize and enslave the indigenous West) as an attempt to unite
East and West by bringing Europe and India together to begin a global
civilization. (Columbus’s journey is also Edgar Morin’s historical starting
point for the beginning of the planetary era in his book Seven Complex
Lessons in Education for the Future, which I’ve written about recently here)…
The
work of uniting the world is still in progress, but whether the means consist
of ships, cables, or the internet, technology always provides the backbone. In
“Song of Myself,” we encounter Whitman’s version of extension, his body taking
flight and touring the nation. However, he is not disembodied. His journey is
concrete and rooted to the land… His flight is rooted in the American
landscape, in the vast extension of the material world, the expanses of nature
on the continent…
Camille
Paglia argues in her 2000 Salon article The North
American Intellectual Tradition, that a kind of earthy, visionary
pragmatism is the dominant philosophy on this side of the Atlantic .
She argues against the continental philosophers (such as Heidegger, Derrida,
and Lacan) whose works are too dry, abstract, and jargon-laden to appeal to the
American sensibility. Instead of the disembodied mind, she embraces the body:
“My
argument is that the North American intellectuals, typified by McLuhan, Fiedler
and Brown, achieved a new fusion of ideas — a sensory pragmatism or engagement
with concrete experience, rooted in the body, and at the same time a visionary
celebration of artistic metaspace — that is, the fictive realm of art, fantasy
and belief projected by great poetry and prefiguring our own cyberspace.”
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Time of Useful Consciousness: Excerpts
Interview & Review by abdul
lateef Posthuman Destinies - Science, Culture, Integral Yoga NOVEMBER 18, 2012
We
always like to return to Whitman one of the poets with whom Sri Aurobindo’s
concludes his Future Poetry. Fittingly Ferlinghetti on his journey to the
West concludes by invoking Whitman whose oracular voice echoes through the
bohemians and the beats from the east village to north beach, it is here given
over in what will surely be one of last great exhalations from a founding
member of that generation (al)
Fichte and
Romantic Self-Assertion The Isaiah
Berlin Virtual
Library THE ASSAULT ON THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT
Fichte
is the figure who betrayed the rationalist and ultimately libertarian and even
democratic ideals of Kant, and the harmless, benevolent, decent, populist
ideals of Herder, who thought that there were many flowers in the garden and
that they need not struggle with each other at all.
The
person who foresaw where this was going to lead was the poet Heinrich
Heine, who in a very famous passage said, warning the French, I think after
1830, not to down their weapons, not to disarm, because of the fearful danger
from their neighbours: ‘Kantians will appear who will … ruthlessly with sword
and axe hack through the foundations of our European life … Armed Fichteans
will come, whose fanatical wills neither fear nor interest can touch.’ 26 And
who shall say that he was altogether mistaken? Page 30 FICHTE
AND ROMANTIC SELF The Isaiah Berlin
Literary Trust 2005 11:33 AM
Tweet 13h - Steven
Shaviro @shaviro I
accept the parts of Deleuze that stem from Bergson, Spinoza, Leibniz, &
Kant, but reject the parts that stem from Nietzsche & Hume.
On the Universality of Culture by larvalsubjects
What I’m trying to think– along with many others –is multiple causation
or how a variety of different causes interact with one another from both the
plane of expression and the plane of content. My gripe with a theorist
like Lacan, for example, is not that he’s wrong in pointing out that the
signifier– another example of an incorporeal machine –plays an important causal
role in human subjectivity and social assemblages. My gripe lies in the
way in which he tends to treat language as a “primary modeling
system” for everything else– “the universe is the flower of rhetoric” –treating
it as structuring an unformatted matter (everything else), without exploring
the causal contributions (“difference contributions”) made by non-signifying
entities. It’s not that Lacan is wrong, but that he is not
sufficiently thinking in terms of overdetermination. This is why much in
Guattari’s work represents a significant advance over Lacan. So
basically, without sharing her thesis that culture is universal, I’m on the
same page as Aprell…
The mark of the universality of culture in the
anthropocene thus does not lie in the universal reign of the signifier
structuring everything– cultural narratives and signifiers structure very
little in Antarctica –but rather lies in the universal effects of contemporary
technology and capitalist modes of production that have managed to transform
the fabric of the planet at the atmospheric, chemical, and biological level no
matter how remote the region. In this respect, the anthropocene does not
entail the erasure of the biological, chemical, or geological, but rather the
emergence of a new dominant actant that every other actant must contend with.
The Prince of This World: Thinking the Devil in Light of
Agamben’s Kingdom and the Glory from An und für sich by Adam Kotsko
From
this perspective, The Kingdom and the Glory represents a
crucial turning point in Agamben’s project, deepening his account of Western
theologico-political structures by beginning to work out how the logic of
sovereignty is deployed and transformed in order to penetrate the fine-grained
textures of everyday life. In place of the easily delimitable “state of
exception” where the sovereign suspends the law in order to save it, we are directed
toward the workaday realities of flexible management.
Though
it is perhaps surprising that he derives this logic from the Christian
theological tradition, it appears in retrospect that many of his key points
were more or less hiding in plain sight. For instance, who could deny,
after reading Agamben’s account, that Adam Smith’s infamous “invisible hand” is
modelled on theological accounts of divine providence?
It
is a bit of a mystery why Panditji called his theory Integral Humanism in
English. Not many of his articles really concentrate on “humanist” aspect. On
the contrary they concentrate more on “national character” and the role of
“individual character” in it… Deendayal Upadhyaya Institute has been doing some
fabulous ground work, especially with the Chitrakoot project. However,
unfortunately, there has not been much of intellectual activity from the
institute… We need to reestablish The Integral Approach as the core of the
right in India .
In
ancient times, the world was invested with spirit everywhere, in all things.
Sri Aurobindo describes it thus: “Ancient belief…saw a soul, a living godhead
everywhere in the animate and in the inanimate and nothing was to its view void
of a spiritual existence.”
The
development of the logical mind and its focus on dividing, classifying and
simplifying through trenchant separation rejected this view of life. It does
not mean, however, that this is the final answer to the question. Sri Aurobindo
describes a process of development that is one unified continuum, and this
implies that soul exists, in some form, not only in the human and the animal
existence, but even in the earlier, more primitive forms of life…
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