Glenn Wallis, Matthias Steingass, and Tom Pepper reevaluate Buddhism. Dismissing quiescent and supernatural states, they seek a practice grounded in liberating socially engaged agents, committed to intellectual rigor, ideological application, and political confrontation. If they push Buddhism to the brink, they may glimpse an abyss, or play among the ruins if the tipped, upended dharma shatters. Expanding ideas discussed at the Speculative Non-Buddhism online project, they deny world-transcendence while affirming a collective mind--outside the individual brain--as liberated subjects revitalized, after a truth-event named as Buddhadharma.
This esoteric, exacting study demands concentration. In cruelty, via Antonin Artaud's theater, it unnerves the practitioner. With practice, invigorated by theory, the informed and radicalized subject revives. After Wallis's précis about its individually authored chapters, Tom Pepper rejects an "ultimate cosmopolitan anti-intellectual aesthetic practice" which comprises most of Western Buddhism. In "The Radical Buddhist Subject and the Sublime Aesthetics of Truth," he equates postmodernism with "sophisticated anti-intellectualism." (22) While this appears to be applied to philosophical rather (or arguably to me better) than literary varieties, this equation would benefit from more support.
Pepper prefers to dismantle philosophical constructs which ease disengaged, dissatisfied audiences away from "the desolate landscape of postmodern thought." He castigates those Western Buddhists who eschew thought within meditation, and those who further "global capitalism" by choosing a more comforting "aesthetic negotiation" which prefers the comfort of beauty to any confrontation with an edgy, uneasy "sublime" harnessed to economic reform and radical change. (23)
Moving from David Hume's aesthetics, through Pali texts, past Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics into Louis Althusser's "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," Pepper promotes as a corrective Alain Badiou's version of the sublime. He reflects on ways to start remapping worlds which stop reifying false premises.
This "sublime" may not soothe, but it can awaken. No-self, dependent arising, and conventional truth provide markers by which humans can achieve consciousness rather than submission to "reactionary or obscurantist subjectivity." (83) How this will be achieved pragmatically, as in many manifestos, remains nebulous, but the promise of philosophical and political change lingers.
Elaborating his scrutiny on the Speculative Non-Buddhism site, Glenn Wallis has moved beyond his translations of the Dhammapada (2004) and sixteen suttas as Basic Teachings of the Buddha (2007). He devises "non-buddhism" inspired by the procedures of François Laruelle. Wallis alters "critical operations" to produce "theorems that are buddhistically uninterpretable." (91) He seeks to expose the hidden syntax, the viability of the propositions, and the "ideological excess" within Buddhism. (92)
Non-buddhism, neither negating nor affirming Buddhism, incorporates a concerted strategy which "aims to stimulate the cognitive and affective conditions that render decision intelligible." (105)
X-buddhism (endless varieties of the dharma produced and perpetuated) resists these radical terms. As a counter-measure, Wallis adapts Althusser's formulation of interpellation, to show how a "contemporary Westerner" refashions into an "x-buddhist subject." (115) Liberation lets go of the "thaumaturgical refuge of x-buddhism" full of "ventriloquized subjects," as the one unthinking one's self as a non-buddhist enters into exile. (121)
Eager to defeat Buddhism as a "particular variety of sameness," Wallis escorts "x-buddhism's representatives" (136) to his "Great Feast of Knowledge." (144) There, these claimants can hold their own, albeit democratically, under the "same rules of engagement as all of the sciences and the humanities, as all local knowledges."
A digressive approach follows from Matthias Steingass. "Control" pinpoints in Thurman's salvific, Tibetan version of Buddhism a lack of ethical embedding in a "social context." (165) A disengaged version cannot impel followers to awaken.
Dissenting from Thurman's viral, slapdash "Neo-Buddhism," Steingass notes that neither a Shangri-La fairytale nor a dynastic clash of titans reveal a realistic approach towards Tibet, drifting as "oscillations in a fantasmatic landscape" mirroring a Western gaze. He nods at Tibet's noble savage as the West's preferred reflection, using Chogyam Trungpa as a case study. After looking at music and art, Steingass tries to assemble a critique of the drive in the West for an inner "authenticity" which denies any political or social reality.
Winding back to what disturbed him in finding a war photography volume in an elegant bookstore, Steingass reflects that the sudden encounter "shifted my perception and intensified it." (208) Instead of acceptance or resignation, Steingass concludes, we as liberated spectators turned wise subjects can look at each other differently, as he looked at war photos, or how museum goers look at an artist setting herself up as an installation.
Similarly, Steingass reminds us as do his co-contributors separately (this volume would have benefited from sustained cross-references), Buddhism pulses with a potency that jolts a witness. (The sublime is achieved, not the aesthetic, to apply Pepper's terms, albeit unspecified by Steingass.) Freeing viewers as actors, as those liberated from consumers to appropriators who own the art, and who create their own, radical reclamation beckons.
Each section contains documentation but each remains autonomous. A few introductory paragraphs by Wallis and three synopses of the chapters by each contributor provide a cursory overview. The authors could have transcribed a panel discussion on "what is to be done," sifting and refining their collective ideas. If appended with a cogent articulation of their plans to transform their ideological critique into a practical agenda to make headway among those students and critics of Buddhism dissatisfied with so many x-buddhisms, this anthology would have increased its utility. Moving from in theory from "x" to "non-," the next step stays shadowed in practice.
The reader, after examining three expansive exegeses, will find a few hints how to put non-Buddhism into action, in either the virtual or real worlds. Wallis's revised vocabulary as a thought-experiment coda, Pepper's admonition for an ideologically aware cadre, or Steingass's wish for an invigorated viewer's insight to adapt as a common vision offer suggestions, if inclined toward subtlety or density. The adamant tone of two-thirds of this treatise may daunt some readers, however familiar with Buddhist and philosophical concepts.
By contrast, Steingass roams into popular culture and recent history widely, but he shrouds several thematic links. What deserves keeping and what needs discarding from the dharma, after such fierce scrutiny, waits as tenuous. Context may be gleaned by inspecting the Speculative Non-Buddhism website, but this book does not duplicate (cf. a claim by another reviewer) that material--beyond the numbered elements underlying Wallis' section-- the objectives of that online project.
Pepper's hopes for a revolutionary vanguard and Steingass's concluding appeal to passive consumers turned engaged appropriators of art tend not to intersect on their respective paths to pursue the possibilities of non-Buddhism. However, with Wallis's ambitious formulations as the book's pivot, the patient reader will uncover his or her own suggestive resonances and correspondences. A tighter connection between essays and a bit more proofreading (I tally a few slips in the first section and the last) would have amplified the long-range impact of Cruel Theory/ Sublime Practice. All the same, as a reevaluation and valuation of the hidden drives within Buddhism, this strategy invites those in search of radical renewal.
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Cruel Theory - Sublime Practice: Toward a Revaluation of Buddhism Paperback – 23 Jul 2013
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