45 Comments

Whatthefuckism is not much more developed than trying to encompass the complexity and mystery and persistence of reality (and the multiplicity of accounts of it) and going..."WTF?!!!" If it starts to develop into a position it loses the special wondrous perplexity of the thing.

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I did a dumb thing and scanned the reasons that some paying subscribers decided unsub and a number cited frequency, so it is a real feature of "the market."

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Sweet, thanks for the support!

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Smart man. I think I picked on this particular idea or argument to push against because it typifies a kind of blindness in intellectual/critical discourse that caused me a lot of anxiety and internal warring as I pursued dharma practice while not turning away from engaged thinking. Still irks me.

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Thanks for the comment. Buddhism definitely sharpens the sword. Good luck with that too!

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Well its interesting. If you acknowledge that bare life IS a possibility for the state to enact, that the body can be stripped down in this way, why would not a similar stripping down be possible in a less violent mode? I don't think anyone is saying that meditative bare life somehow pops the body out of historical/samsaric context, but there is something highly deconstructive happening vis a vis both the historical personality and even the templates that structure ordinary perception.

Finally I think its really important to acknowledge that we are talking about a spectrum here, not a binary situation. That is, meditative practices move *in the direction* of a deconstructed bare life, whereas neurotic compulsion and ego-driven conflict move *in the direction* of totally separate dualistic historical personality. We may never get "there," but closer to there, like an asymptote. In such a situation, you have not escaped history or reached some sort of absolutely pure consciousness (though religious rhetoric may say that) but instead move the dial to the edge of possibility. In terms of identity you could say that identity does not absolutely disappear but becomes radically nonhuman, broad, or empty of specific contents. The quality of I-ness carries on though so even phenomenologically the quality of identity remains.

Why is this important? Because critics of this sort of practice or way of thinking can reify the poorly stated seemingly binary claim that meditators "escape" history or identity, and then use that reification to write off the whole operation. As in, thats bullshit that you escape history or identity, therefore get back into the struggle with the rest of us. Whereas its more of a directionality that shifts the assemblage point of awareness vis a vis the ongoing clusterfuck of history and identity.

Thanks for responding!

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Yeah, its always funny when one diagnoses people you don't know, but part of the charm of Ziz is how he wears his symptoms on his sleeve, but when he is both so ignorant and so adamant about something like this, its hard not to conclude the way you have -- which is also more or less how Morton considers him in his great essay on Buddhophobia. There are real intellectual features too -- I sometimes think his dislike of both Hindu and Buddhist modes is that the historical personality is not the agent you are striving for, which reduces the tension of historical forces, and if you are a historical materialist you would be more comfortable with Abrahamic religions where the historical personality is generally more affirmed and agency is more directly tied to history.

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I love it when old lines scream forward with new pertinent meanings...lotsa Jacks out there...

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Yes, half the days of the week I occupy something like your scenario here: there is nothing really to be done, and nothing to prevent a very bad situation (or one of a number of possible bad situations). Then how do we live? What do we "do"? How do we practice with the grief, and the love? While it is seen as "fatalistic" to talk this way, I also feel like we do ourselves a disservice to not see if we can occupy that possibility space without utter despair and bitterness.

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I know! It's like everything is a koan. The rain just stopped and the sun is coming out..."What the fuck??!!"

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I hear you B, I really do. At the same time, I used to be a full-time journalist working at weeklies and monthlies. I am pretty familiar with how many pretty good pieces and sometimes great ones came out of the pressure of a deadline. I never let myself phone it in, which meant that I worked a lot, and intensely, but I produced a lot of shit over a decade plus of that kind of writing. I write differently now but I still have that internal task master reminding me of the power of cranking it out. That said, for me Substack works better at a slower pace. I also mostly resist commenting on the latest topic de jour, or at least only do so when I really feel I have something to say.

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Thank you!!

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There should be a word for real sincere things that unintentionally out parody the best parodies.

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Thanks for the tips. The Nagel I have really been meaning to read, I resonate with those thinkers who appreciate hard science approaches to consciousness but take the gaps in our explanations very seriously. Cosmos or Mind? Is the prison in you or you in the prison?

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Here's a review of Mind and Cosmos by Raymond Tallis:

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/bringing-mind-to-matter

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Thanks Chris. I really admire your work on Sleeveen, it reminds me of the kind of pieces I would like to have written had I stayed closer to the NYC pop culture critic machine. Also I think we share a similar generational sensibility. Part of my struggles over the demand to publish on Substack is that, while I can critique the pressure to have a steady output from an aesthetic perspective (see B the Author's post) I also know how much good stuff I churned out when I was deadline for weekly alternative newspapers. There is something productive about just sticking to a schedule, and the luckiest of us can do it without too much repetition. You succeed! There's no way out of the Oven!

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Zowie, thats not a light at the end of the tunnel, its a hungry glow worm!

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