Ghost in the Wire

Ken, provocative post. All the more so because I just got back from a formal recitation of mindfulness trainings, and book discussion, and we talked about metta practice. I think the problem, which I think is the problem with hooks' efforts, is trying to make of loving-kindness a politics. Buddhism certainly doesn't ask it.

Part of our conversation today centered on how metta practice always begins with us -- in that sense we are never lacking an object, but then again, the distinction is less about it being there than about us seeing it there. One other thing that comes to mind is that metta does not have to be a program by itself, a practice of metta is well complemented by the other brahmaviharas (karuna, mudita, uppekha), and when those become our practice abode then everything we are/do is touched by them (This is tied to the notion of continuation in Zen also, of rebirth as our watering particular seeds that continue, which in turn is all connected to Karma as the repercussions of our actions).

From the most practical vantage point, loving-kindness, sympathetic joy, equanimity, and compassion, constitute an at times quite powerful set of values from which to move people.

In any case, I'm also not a "child of the sixties," but I want to ask you to expand on your statement "love is not a solution." It seems to me that it is one possible practice, one possible solution... no? even if marked through and through by impermanence.

Thanks Ken,

N

Thanks for the response, N. When I said that "love is not a solution," I was referring to a thought I used to hold more firmly to, though as I tried to note, I'm not so sure anymore. In graduate school, reading what I was reading, and watching the world disintegrate politically, it was difficult to imagine a route for love as an ameliorative for political and social ills. I'm more open to that route these days, thanks to my own practice and study, but still doubtful as to its efficacy as a politics. The problem is that I think Carl Schmitt was right, and that the political is structured fundamentally/essentially by the constitution of the enemy, and so, as Laclau and Mouffe have pointed out in various locations, this means that political action necessarily involves some sort of antagonism, a struggle against someone as well as something, and that the idea that we can think the political in the absence of this antagonism (say in a Habermasian deliberative democracy based on consensus and reason, or even a more immanent sense of political agency and change as we see with Hardt and Negri) is doomed to failure since it misses what makes the situation "political." Which isn't to say that alternate ways of thinking deliberation or agency aren't helpful, only that they do no necessarily obtain politically.

But I think there's certainly a role for love to play when it comes to ethics, and I like the idea that the ethical needs to be structurally related to but distinct from the political. It's the Levinasian in me. Over at LS, I recently offered a definition of democracy as the system of government best able to maintain the hypen that separates ethico from political, which I think is a definition that hints at the same argument, that there should be limits on the political (which may not be the same as saying there should be limits on politics) in order that an ethical might "take place" in a way that challenges the political. I don't know if this is making sense - the thoughts are a bit ill-formed at this point, but the basic idea is, at least to me, that we need to reconcile the projects of both Schmitt and Levinas, and I think maintaining the ethico-political distinction might be a way of doing that. Hence my temptation is to say that "the personal is the political" was in fact a poorly thought-out formation, or perhaps more accurately, that it has long since outlived its limited utility and has since come to pervert an entire way of being-political.

So Zen and love - indeed, all that defines a Bodhisattva - works perfectly well with this ethical sensibility, and therein I think love is indeed a solution, albeit a solution to a different problem.

Second, I think it might be worth pursuing the connection here between your sense of practice as an abode and the Greek conception of ethos as dwelling place. Might be some interesting discussion ground there.

Ken, thanks. I just got back from roaming the countryside with the in-laws, so am beat, but just quickly, yeah, the abode business and the ethos as dwelling place has been on my mind. I'm editing a paper precisely on the issue of ethos as dwelling place. In fact, following the lead of Wade Kenny (in Hyde's The Ethos of Rhetoric book), examining how metaphor helps create a vision of an ethical ground (dwelling place). My project is to show how a nice connection of metaphors emerges in a political campaign that helps transform a place of a highland peasant into a mythic space from which a subject bodies forth to save the nation. I'm trying to have it done by mid July. We'll see.

I went ahead and posted a long thing over at LS, and that is a paper I'd like to pursue also. Oh, I did notice your entry. Good, clear list. I need to think a bit more about that hyphen thing! : )

I'll catch up with you a bit more later, but I've also been giving some thought to rhetorical sensitivity issues. I've been thinking them through zen concepts: doubt, interconnectedness, not turning form into technique (and of course, form is emptiness and emptiness is form), no separate self, the net of Indra, and karmic consequences as what rhetoric wills as it works...

I owe you some thoughts on all of that.

Thanks again,

N

We (Christine, Helena, and I) so need to move out to the Northwest and trek the countryside. Not to emntion that it would be nice to have these conversations sans typing. Oh, and with trees not covered in kudzu.

And I love Wade Kenny. Hyde introduced me to him a few years back, and then shortly thereafter I watched as Wade - and it was pretty much him alone; a friend and I were there, but we had no idea what to do - tended to an elderly gentleman who collapsed near an escalator during the New Orleans NCA while the vast majority of the conference attendants, in full going-to-parties mode, walked right by. Ethos as dwelling place, indeed.

By the way, have you read Hyde's new book on acknowledgment? Way more Judeo-Christian than I expected from him, but totally worth it, especially chapters 3-4, and 8-9, which are extraordinairy.