This has been the fifth year running that communication and political
science students from the American University of Paris
have been coming to Auroville for their undergraduate practicum. Also for the
past few years they have been joined by students from Linneaus
University in Sweden .
Auroville provides a perfect platform for the students with all the different
projects and activities they can get involved in. To round of their 2-3 week
visit they all gave a presentation of the work they have been doing in
Auroville.
Lalit on Queens
University & CEPT from Auroville Radio by contact@aurovilleradio.org (Andrea)
Jan 16, 2013
Auroville Integral Sustainability Institute shares the experience of
hosting 2 different groups of visiting planning students from Queens University , Canada
Among Heideggerians, for
example, Heidegger research becomes an end in itself, whereas the aim should be
understanding of being and the world. Among the democratic party,
perpetuation of the democratic party becomes an end in itself, rather than
representing the interests of the people. The first question we need to
ask of any form of organization– and this is why we need anarcho-communism as a
regulative ideal –is that of how we can insure that parties, groups, and
organizations remain “complex, adaptive systems”, rather than becoming ends in
themselves and machines of alienation. How can we organize in a way that
remains responsive to the alien and singular?
The second problem with group structures is of greater concern and has
darker implications. As I have argued for a number of years now, group
identification has the structure of masculine sexuality (the left side of the
diagram to the right). I will not rehearse the intricacies of Lacan’s
graph of sexuation here (readers who are curious can consult chapter 6 of The
Democracy of Objects or my article “The Other Face of God“, .pdf)… Such was Zizek’s conclusion
regarding the function of the symbolic figure
of the Jew in anti-semitism. Anti-semitism has nothing to do with real Jews,
but is instead a fantasy structure designed to explain why the organic and
harmonious communities dreamed of by conservative ideologies fail (today the
figure of the Jew has been replaced by leftists and Middle Easterners).
Most Overrated Philosopher Of The 20th Century Science 2.0 By Massimo Pigliucci
January 16th 2013 Reprinted from Rationally Speaking, January 11, 2013 Willard van Orman Quine, Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Bertrand Russell, &
Martin
Heidegger, a major practitioner of the phenomenological and existentialist
approaches in philosophy, buddy of the Nazi (the well! what the well!), and a
top competitor with Derrida for most obscure philosophical writer of the 20th
century. He talked a lot about Being (and Time).
Eric Schliesser follows
last week’s ‘Philo of Economics’
with this week’s on “Foucault and the Invisible Hand”. Eric refers to Michel Foucault's treatment of
Smith in “The Birth of Biopolitics”.
While commenting on Smith's use of "invisible hand" in the Wealth
of Nations (hereafter WN), Foucault insists that Smith is committed to the
claim that:
“Everyone must be uncertain
with regard to the collective outcome if this positive collective outcome is
really to be expected. Being in the dark and the blindness of all the economic
agents are absolutely necessary. The collective good must not be an
objective... Invisibility is not just a fact arising from the imperfect nature
of human intelligence which prevents people from realizing that there is a hand
behind them which arranges or connects everything that each individual does on
their own account. Invisibility is absolutely indispensable. It is an
invisibility which means that no economic agent should or can pursue the
collective good” (Foucault 2008: 279-80).
Comment
I am not going to comment on Foucault’s general reasoning on Adam
Smith’s use of the IH metaphor in this post. His reasoning tends to
be obscure. To argue that “human
intelligence prevents people from realizing that there is a hand behind them
which arranges or connects everything that each individual does on their own
account” is a strange way of putting it. The “hand behind them which arranges
or connects everything that each individual does on their own account”
is either saying that “human intelligence” stops them fantasising about an IH
that actually exists or prevents them fantasising about one that does not
exist. That is what makes philosophy such a tormented subject; it’s
never really clear as to what they mean except by engaging in constant “deep
thinking”. Those excellent teacher’s of philosophy (such as Eric
Schliesser) are unfazed by textual ambiguity and are among the brightest
and best of social scientists. They are always stimulating when
listened to in conversation or in seminars and stretch their student’s critical
faculties…
I suggest Hayek’s defiant conjecture (Fatal Conceit) that knowing
every action of 7 billion of people about matching possible choices among
billions of products and services (36 billion choices in New York alone each
minute of the day – only a few dozen choices for gatherer-hunter upper Amazonian
tribes) is well beyond human comprehension or understanding, let alone
practical even in a Providential fantasy of the imagination. Surely it is an
extreme theological idea, even as a figure of speech. A Must Read New Book
on Friedrich Hayek Eamonn Butler: “Friedrich Hayek: the ideas and influence of the libertarian economist”
The limits of Karl Polanyi’s anti-market approach in the
struggle for economic democracy from The Memory Bank by Keith Hart Jan 16, 2013
I am a fully paid-up member of the Karl Polanyi fan club. In the past
few years I have published, with my collaborators, a collection of essays on
the significance of The Great Transformation for understanding
our times (Blanc 2011, Holmes 2012) and have made him a canonical figure for my
versions of economic anthropology, the human economy and the history of money.
I have also published two short biographical articles on him. I have
contributed in this way to the recent outpouring of new work on Polanyi to
which this book is a significant addition. I am a believer, but some believers
also have doubts. I still have reservations about a Polanyian strategy for
achieving economic democracy and these are linked to his historical vision of
“market society”. Theories are good for some things and not for others
and, in my view, the plural economy would be best served by a plural approach
to theory and politics. But first let me summarise what I most value personally
in what I have learned from Polanyi.
Most anthropologists take their lead from the academic work done by
Polanyi and his collaborators at Columbia
University
Regarding a passage in Savitri in which
Sri Aurobindo describes the universe as a play between He and She.
"This whole wide world is only he and she," He, the Supreme in love
with her, her servitor; She, the creative Force.
As one too great for him he worships her; … This
whole wide world is only he and she.
What a marvellous work! He goes into a completely different region, so
much above thought! It's constant vision, it isn't something thought out—with
thought everything becomes flat, hollow, empty, empty, just like a leaf; while
this is full, the full content is there, alive.
To begin with, any successor must be someone who will swear personal
loyalty to Manoj Das Gupta as against Sri Aurobindo. Some of the names being ...
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