Universality of Global Silence

photo by Shalin

"The criteria for success: you are free, you live in the present moment,
you are useful to the people around you, and you feel love for all
humanity."
- Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

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A global silence

“As we now go about Americanizing the globe – excuse me – as we now go about extending the benefits of universal human rights that have been discovered by a universally valid procedure of rational communication, perhaps we ought to be aware of which differences we silently obliterate, and perhaps we ought to remember that the universality of a cosmopolitan language is necessarily also accompanied by the universality of a global silence.”

—William Rasch, Sovereignty and Its Discontents: On the Primacy of Conflict and the Structure of the Political (London: Birkbeck Law Press, 2004), p. 129.

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Ideology, predestination, and the stories we tell

In one of his fascinating little fragments, the Jesuit thinker Michel de Certeau describes the social function of narratives: “Information, a private code, innervates and saturates the social body. From morning till evening, unceasingly, streets and buildings are haunted by narratives. [The narratives] articulate our existences by teaching us what they should be…. Seized from the moment of awakening by the radio (the voice of the law), the listener walks all day through a forest of narrativities, journalistic, advertising and televised, which, at night, slip a few final messages under the door of sleep. More than the God recounted to us by the theologians of the past, these tales have a function of providence and predestination: they organize our work, our celebrations – even our dreams – in advance” (The Certeau Reader, p. 125).

I rather like this connection between cultural narratives and predestination. Certeau’s “more than” here is not mere rhetoric, but it seems exactly right. The classical Christian belief in an all-determining providence was at the same time a belief in the hiddenness of the divine determination. True, you interpreted all your daily circumstances through a specific theological lens, but in this very act of interpretation you were presupposing a gap between “appearance” and “reality” – or rather, your consciousness itself was this gap.

In contrast, the “forest of narrativities” of which Certeau speaks is much more predestining, since here the gap between appearance and reality collapses. The cluster of narratives which organises our consciousness and even our dreams – that is “reality”; reality is that representation. This disappearance of the gap between reality and appearance is close to Slavoj Žižek’s definition of ideology: “ideology is not simply a ‘false consciousness’, an illusory representation of reality, it is rather this reality itself which is already to be conceived as ideological” (The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 21). Or as Žižek memorably puts it in his marvellous film, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, the illusion of the cinema screen is more real – it has more material “density”, more effectivity – than reality itself.

There is nothing “more real” than the stories we tell ourselves; it’s stories all the way down. And the church exists to tell a different story – to create spaces, for instance, “in which alternative stories about material goods are told” (William Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination, p. 94), so that a different kind of social order can emerge. Or to return to Certeau’s remarkable insight – “even our dreams” are organised by ideology – perhaps, as Christians, we need to ask ourselves whether we dream differently.

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The 'guinea-pigging' of vast swathes of the population has, up till now, solved two problems: the 'time' problem (namely, how to avoid addressing the underlying reasons for mental health problems), and how to create new markets amidst the flourishing of generic drug production, particularly outside of the US and Europe. Clearly the interiorisation of unhappiness is far more profitable than the outward realisation that perhaps misery has nothing to do with you personally and everything to do with the world in which you live.
- infinite thØught

(via wood s lot)

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A new issue of Big Bridge

An Anthology of Bay Area Women Writers
Edited by Katherine Hastings
big bridge

from
Memory Is Pictures Inside You

rivers coursing through before language
the way Moonlight whimpered as he watched
the movie in his sleep. Something
is happening, his four legs are following
the story line. One part of the brain works
as a camera, taking pictures, another part
puts it together. Edits. Which part
is the soul? O Tower of Babel, whoever is
the Self? We can't remember
everything, we can't forget anything

Poems by Sharon Doubiago

(from wood s lot)

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Supernatural Sounds and Enlightenment Silence
Christopher Grasso reviews Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment by Leigh Eric Schmidt

The modern Questioner still asks, but Vedder's sphinx is blank and silent. For Leigh Eric Schmidt, in his fascinating new book, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment, Vedder's stark vision of spiritual alienation is emblematic of "the oracular silences that had descended upon some modern listeners" (130). Enlightenment science and modern rationality re-tuned the ear, nullifying what were once considered to be the voices of oracles, angels, or God as trickery or madness. But that is only half of the story, for even in today's secular America millions still claim to hear divine voices and supernatural sounds. Schmidt's book traces the complex relationship of these two historical processes: how modern science disciplined aural perception, and how popular spiritual practices that place a premium on spiritual "hearing" persisted nonetheless.... (more)

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A Preface to Silence:
On the Duty of Vigilant Critique Norman K. Swazo
janus head

Shmuel, the chronicler: Memory...everything is in memory.
Moshe, the madman: Silence...everything is in silence.
-- Elie Wiesel, The Oath

...philosophy is perhaps the reassurance given against the
anguish of being mad at the point of greatest proximity to madness.
-- Jacques Derrida, "Cogito and the History of Madness," Writing and Difference

...it is wiser not to trust entirely to anything by which we have once been deceived.
-- Descartes, "First Meditation," Meditations on First Philosophy

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wood s lot