From: "Eric  Salstrand" <eric_and_mary-AT-email.msn.com>
Subject: Re: The Widening Gyre
Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 18:58:45 -0600


>This comment was a playful aside, but it is based on my own (partially
>baked but somehow still light and flaky) optimistic worldview.
>    It's simply that we may indeed be bound for glory. Though we cannot
>know humanity's future, from recent developments we can at least project
>that the possibilities are immense.
>    Imagining the future, where bodies may become irrelevant,
>immortality may be the rule, intelligence immense, transport and
>communication immediate, don't laugh!, I also think of ancient myths and
>writings about evolving to perfect beings, being linked to immense
>continuums, oneness with all things, being with God in heaven, or being
>like gods. Perhaps we always knew, and the myths of old were born of a
>Darwinian pragmatism, but mixed with a primordial knowing that may still
>inhabit our cells. Ken Wilbur’s Atman project folds in here if I
>remember correctly.
>best, Ed Atkeson
>
>>Your message elicits several responses from me.  In the first place, you
allude to a kind of cyborgian development. Lyotard, in his more recent
writings such as The Inhuman and Postmodern Fables tells us a similar story,
set in the context of the dying of the sun.

“The hero of the fable is not the human species, but energy …It is a complex
form of organizing energy.  Like other forms, it is undoubtedly transitory.
Other, more complex forms may appear that will when out over it.  Perhaps
one of these forms is preparing itself through techno-scientific development
right from the time when the fable is being recounted…the exile’s hero,
destined to survive the destruction of terrestrial life will not be a mere
survivor, since it will not be alive in the sense we understand the word.”
(PF p.92-94)

The point seems to be that as knowledge becomes fully externalized, the
human becomes superceded.  There is no emancipation; only a new development,
previously unanticipated.

Your post also mentions Ken Wilbur.  I am not aware of any place where
Lyotard discusses Eastern spirituality.  However, if we read between the
lines, I believe it is possible to argue that Wilbur is firmly in the camp
of Enlightenment philosophy.  He refers in his writings to both Hegel and
Habermas in positive ways, and it is clear that he envisions himself
developing his philosophy along the same lines they have, except that he
extends it further into the transrational and transpersonal domains. There
is no question, in my mind, that Wilbur remains a modernist; tied to a
metanarrative of emancipation through enlightenment.  His philosophy is
simply a mystical and individualistic version of Habermas.  (Despite the
mindless accolades on book jackets that he is a kind of Einstein of
consciousness; in reality he seems much more like the Herbert Spencer of our
time.  His pre-trans distinction is a phallacy that lends itself easily to
deconstruction along Derridean lines.)

I find it interesting to compare Wilbur's spiritual philosophy with the man
he cribbed it from, that renegade trickster crazy man guru Da Avadhasa (or
whatever his name may be these days).  Da developed a similar process
oriented overview of the human condition that he entitled the seven stages
of life.  However, contrary to this, he also simultaneously advocated a much
more radical viewpoint that does away with these stages altogether.  This
paradoxical view which he calls crazy wisdom is similar to the teaching of
some Buddhist sages that samsara and nirvana are the same.  In other words,
from an enlightened perspective there is no difference between enlightenment
and unenlightenment.  (Please, I beg you, don’t ask me to explain.)

However, it is interesting to note that there has always existed a kind of
underground stream within religious orthodoxy that has attempted to
deconstruct it as a kind of social language game that ultimately stands in
the way of what we really desire.

The radical philosophy of Da is similar in many respects to this
anti-tradition and in some of his writings he even seems to endorse a
postmodern spirituality (see The Dreaded Gom-Boo for one brilliant example).
However, it also needs to be said that he has set up his own game, in a way
that is cultic with a vengeance.

Nonetheless, his more radical views seem similar in certain respects to that
of Deleuze and Guattari .  Just as Da speaks in terms of transcending
Narcissus as the great contraction, feeling to infinity and erasing the
taboo on ecstasy, the Rhizome twins speak of going beyond Oedipus, becoming
nomads and evoking the intensities of desiring machines.

Personally, I believe the eventual downfall of eastern religion will be the
very thing that now makes it so attractive to the west.  By emphasizing
mysticism and religious experience, religious promoters seem to open up
unwittingly the possibility that these potential developments are actually
closer to technology than spirituality. Once this becomes realized and
enacted upon by profane nomads, the great tradition of spirituality will go
the way of alchemy and astrology, as a kind of pseudo-science; a mythic
prelude to the real thing. (Perhaps all that will remain of religion are
ethics and art and these too will be translated into atheological
perspectives.)

My personal reading of Lyotard  is that he is very close to Deleuze and
Guattari.  These writers seem to regard each other as comrades in the great
refusal. Even though Lyotard abandons the language of desire and intensity
after The Libidinal Economy, his advocacy of the paralogical, the
experimental, the differend and the sublime seem to emanate from within the
same machinic spectrum.  How are liberating practices possible which do not
entail a metanarrative of Enlightenment?  This seems to be the basic
question all these writers are asking.

What if Lyotard’s postmodern fable is ultimately one of desiring machines?
We have met the cyborg and it is us.  Deus ex machina.