Wednesday, February 5, 2014
Cartesian Diver
The trick is to get out of your own dead body in one piece. One quick hard twist and you’re out. Next, you turn black all over and taper at the extremities. Grow a red mane and huge milky eyes like a cat’s, with vertical slits for pupils. Now hover in air as if undersea, in a space enclosed by thick walls of ancient crystal with rich polychrome refractions. Within this limitless or at least vast container, move in the manner of a Cartesian diver. Rise and sink with the supple emphasis of slow motion. Scratch your tank’s smooth sides with sharp dirty nails.
-Roger Gilbert Lecomte
Thursday, November 8, 2012
Forms of Bodily Resistance
Given a recent strengthening of my own commitment to research, I'll try to make clear where I have identified useful lines, particularly those in contestation.
Qigong :
"being set free from cultural constraints by qigong practice, the body can express the emotional self repressed by the state." (961) "On one side of this struggle, the common practitioners of qigong embrace the spontaneous nature of its practice and use it as a strategy to dissociate their bodies from state control and power; on the other side of the struggle, the state bureaucracy attempts to lead qigong practitioners into "some realm of state-approved cultural values" (Ots 1994, 132) and to "harness the immense and unexplainable power of qigong by creating boundaries of legitimate scientific enterprise while appropriating its use for an officially mediated public sphere" (Chen 1995, 360). Those "state-approved cultural values" refer to such mental qualities as "control, quietness, relaxation, and harmony" (Ots 1994, 132-33), which are seen to oppose the involuntary arousal of spontaneous movements that might in their unpredictability threaten the state's cultural hegemony" (962).
According to Lin Housheng, a doctor who wrote Qigong xue (Qigong studies, 1988), who invented qigong anesthesia, and who himself was a qigong master, it was not until 1953, when Lui Guizhen's Qigong liaofa shijian (Practice of qigong therapy) was published, that the word "qigong" was first used to designate a group of discrete qi exercises which had had no standard meaning before (1988, 2-3). The use of the word "qigong" was officially sanctioned and the new category of qigong formally inaugurated on July 15, 1979, when the State Council held a conference on the results of various qi exercises applied in medicine (Lin 1988, 3). Because the institutionalization of modern qigong goes hand in hand with the massive reorganization of traditional medicine in the 1950s, it cannot be studied separately from this social use. That qigong can claim a much longer history, however, is due to the fact that its meaning was fixed retrospectively. (963) The component qi in the term qigong denotes what early Chinese philosophers conceptualized as a primary "matter energy," the basic constituent of the cosmos. Many scholars rendering Chinese texts into English translated it as "vital energy" or "cosmic energy."
Qi plays an exceedingly important role in the history of Chinese thought. It is a formless "reality," which, though not graspable by the senses, is immanent in all things. According to the cosmogony given in Huainanzi, a Han period (206 B.C.-A.D. 8) Taoist-oriented summa of Chinese philosophy, before the birth of Heaven and Earth, there was only a formless, fluid state called taizhao, like a clear transparent void. This void, which is the beginning of Tao, gave birth to the universe. The universe in turn produced qi. That part of qi which was light and limpid floated up to form Heaven, whereas the part of qi which was heavy and turbid coagulated to become Earth. Therefore, qi can be understood as protomaterial, a vital creative force that gives "form" to everything in the universe. "From this other perspective, the body is to be understood as concentrations and conformations of qi rather than as geometric objects demarcated by solid planes and edges. . . Surfaces were not impenetrable faces of geometric solids, but palpable interfaces through which the structural values of interiority interacted with the environment. Thus not only body organs, but bodies themselves were such phenomena. The body was the environment of the viscera and was itself within an environment at a higher level."
It seems to me that a relation between these notions and the Deleuzian/Spinozan (etc.) materialism that we have been working on is clear. A monist conception of what might be imagined as thee substance, in particular the substance that makes up Binah. There is of course, a very real danger of falling into a fatuous or lazy occultism (one, most of all, which is wrong) and there is something in phrases like "These experimental results (by Dr. Yan Xin and his coworkers) are a first in the world. They unequivocally demonstrate that without touching substances, the human body can affect them and change their molecular structures and properties" that verge very close to the kind of new age work that is very clearly bullshit - (particularly as they are anti-materialist - "mind over matter"). A union of political, religious, ethical and aesthetic truth and beauty is what we're looking for - a proper relationship to G~d (not necessarily as such) - that cannot accept the money-grubbing of new age press houses, or Deepak Chopra. Again, our starting place is somewhere closer to Deleuze, Wilhelm Reich.
It seems to me that a position of agnosis - of the unwillingness to explain in pat or reductionist terms, is a virtue here. We are attempting to bridge a gap, and we find on the horizon techniques that seem consistent with our philosophical understanding. This does not, and should not, demand the immediate formulation of a totalizing narrative that could explain these in relation to eachother, but an observance of the auspiciousness of the coincidence, occuring as it does within the context of those axioms we take to be true.
Towards proceeding from axioms rather than from a system.
Qigong :
"being set free from cultural constraints by qigong practice, the body can express the emotional self repressed by the state." (961) "On one side of this struggle, the common practitioners of qigong embrace the spontaneous nature of its practice and use it as a strategy to dissociate their bodies from state control and power; on the other side of the struggle, the state bureaucracy attempts to lead qigong practitioners into "some realm of state-approved cultural values" (Ots 1994, 132) and to "harness the immense and unexplainable power of qigong by creating boundaries of legitimate scientific enterprise while appropriating its use for an officially mediated public sphere" (Chen 1995, 360). Those "state-approved cultural values" refer to such mental qualities as "control, quietness, relaxation, and harmony" (Ots 1994, 132-33), which are seen to oppose the involuntary arousal of spontaneous movements that might in their unpredictability threaten the state's cultural hegemony" (962).
According to Lin Housheng, a doctor who wrote Qigong xue (Qigong studies, 1988), who invented qigong anesthesia, and who himself was a qigong master, it was not until 1953, when Lui Guizhen's Qigong liaofa shijian (Practice of qigong therapy) was published, that the word "qigong" was first used to designate a group of discrete qi exercises which had had no standard meaning before (1988, 2-3). The use of the word "qigong" was officially sanctioned and the new category of qigong formally inaugurated on July 15, 1979, when the State Council held a conference on the results of various qi exercises applied in medicine (Lin 1988, 3). Because the institutionalization of modern qigong goes hand in hand with the massive reorganization of traditional medicine in the 1950s, it cannot be studied separately from this social use. That qigong can claim a much longer history, however, is due to the fact that its meaning was fixed retrospectively. (963) The component qi in the term qigong denotes what early Chinese philosophers conceptualized as a primary "matter energy," the basic constituent of the cosmos. Many scholars rendering Chinese texts into English translated it as "vital energy" or "cosmic energy."
Qi plays an exceedingly important role in the history of Chinese thought. It is a formless "reality," which, though not graspable by the senses, is immanent in all things. According to the cosmogony given in Huainanzi, a Han period (206 B.C.-A.D. 8) Taoist-oriented summa of Chinese philosophy, before the birth of Heaven and Earth, there was only a formless, fluid state called taizhao, like a clear transparent void. This void, which is the beginning of Tao, gave birth to the universe. The universe in turn produced qi. That part of qi which was light and limpid floated up to form Heaven, whereas the part of qi which was heavy and turbid coagulated to become Earth. Therefore, qi can be understood as protomaterial, a vital creative force that gives "form" to everything in the universe. "From this other perspective, the body is to be understood as concentrations and conformations of qi rather than as geometric objects demarcated by solid planes and edges. . . Surfaces were not impenetrable faces of geometric solids, but palpable interfaces through which the structural values of interiority interacted with the environment. Thus not only body organs, but bodies themselves were such phenomena. The body was the environment of the viscera and was itself within an environment at a higher level."
It seems to me that a relation between these notions and the Deleuzian/Spinozan (etc.) materialism that we have been working on is clear. A monist conception of what might be imagined as thee substance, in particular the substance that makes up Binah. There is of course, a very real danger of falling into a fatuous or lazy occultism (one, most of all, which is wrong) and there is something in phrases like "These experimental results (by Dr. Yan Xin and his coworkers) are a first in the world. They unequivocally demonstrate that without touching substances, the human body can affect them and change their molecular structures and properties" that verge very close to the kind of new age work that is very clearly bullshit - (particularly as they are anti-materialist - "mind over matter"). A union of political, religious, ethical and aesthetic truth and beauty is what we're looking for - a proper relationship to G~d (not necessarily as such) - that cannot accept the money-grubbing of new age press houses, or Deepak Chopra. Again, our starting place is somewhere closer to Deleuze, Wilhelm Reich.
It seems to me that a position of agnosis - of the unwillingness to explain in pat or reductionist terms, is a virtue here. We are attempting to bridge a gap, and we find on the horizon techniques that seem consistent with our philosophical understanding. This does not, and should not, demand the immediate formulation of a totalizing narrative that could explain these in relation to eachother, but an observance of the auspiciousness of the coincidence, occuring as it does within the context of those axioms we take to be true.
Towards proceeding from axioms rather than from a system.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
From Thee Files
"David Shayler (1965 -) In the summer of 2007, former MI5 agent and whistleblower proclaimed himself to be the Messiah. He has released a series of videos on Youtube claiming to be Jesus, although has not built up any noticeable following since his claims."
"Shayler joined MI5 in October 1991 after responding to an oblique job advertisement in the 12 May edition of The Observer entitled "Godot isn't coming" a reference to the play Waiting for Godot in which Godot never arrives. The advert asked if applicants had an interest in current affairs, had common sense and an ability to write. Believing the job was media related, Shayler applied."
"Shayler joined MI5 in October 1991 after responding to an oblique job advertisement in the 12 May edition of The Observer entitled "Godot isn't coming" a reference to the play Waiting for Godot in which Godot never arrives. The advert asked if applicants had an interest in current affairs, had common sense and an ability to write. Believing the job was media related, Shayler applied."
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