Originally posted on sciy.org by Rich Carlson on Sat 03 May 2008 01:44 PM PDT
This is the abstract for a longer article, the first part of which Good Bye to All That has already been posted to SCIY.
Future Bodies: Evolution & Progress
(occult
slippages and cultural considerations)
RC.
(courtesy Google Images)
This paper seeks a long overdue critical exploration of Sri Aurobindo's evolutionary vision and how it might inform contemporary discourse on globalization and those regimes of techno-science whose productions propel its advance. That such a critical inquiry is overdue is regrettable because we live at a time in which we are undergoing what is perhaps our most rapid period of change in human history. We live in an era in which the dislocation of our physical, life and mental worlds seems to result from the pull of three strange attractors accelerating at different speeds.
Gazing out from the edge of digital culture in North America to do a critically inquiry into the future is problematic because our perspectives are already conjoined to the gaze of a culture entrained in exponential change. But what would constitute a future view? An epistemology of the Other? A discourse on the never quite? The future is that distant coordinate which is only know[n] through its proximity to our present. So what does the present teach?
In America we are traveling so rapidly that from here we do not hear the voices of indentured knowledge workers standing in lines of up to mile, amidst the smoke and decay of south India, to compete with the multitudes of Heidegger's “standing reserve†for their conditions of economic bondages; of eight to twelve partitioned hours a day spent facilitating the global flow of virtual capital. Although the gaze from here may sense the desiring nature of the machine it lacks an epistemology for coping with its assemblages and a methodology for resisting its discipline.
If
as Foucault says, our bodies are disciplined by the panoptic gaze of
society, made to conform to the power relations of specific
historical eras, then our bodies today are increasingly disciplined
by the compression of global markets even as our social spaces are
redrawn to conform to the economic requirements of the networked
society with its shrinking time demands. In the future our bodies may
come to favor certain genetic mutations which facilitate their ease
of insertion into virtual environments, just as today our fingers
must develop the necessary dexterity for navigating key boards and
our bodies adapt to half slumped postures needed to peer into video
monitors. Our bodies will be passed on to future generations as
technological progress outstrips our ethical imperatives, our biology
following patterns of culture which specify the parameters of the
spatial dimensions we inhabit and provide metaphors for our
orientation in language.
We
surround our bodies in dromospheric environments of a culture
organized around the instantaneous transfer of information/capital
which allows little time to consider adaptations or world views other
than those which conform to its networked demands for rapid mental
processing of telematic images. These images are fed back to us in
the eternal reconsumption of the same 24/7 by electronic mass media.
As our physical and lifeworlds accelerate blind spots fissures,
discontinuities open up in fixed reference frames. Anyone who has
spun too rapidly on a roundabout knows this feeling of the resultant
vertigo.
When this vertigo becomes our culture reference to maintain balance we may want to collectively consider whether we will be able to evolve perspectives which allow us to revision physical, vital, and mental ways of orienting ourselves in the world through a way of knowing which integrates head, heart, and hands.
What Sri Aurobindo envisions in his integral yoga can be called a “authenticity of coalenscences†in which different ontological sheaths or structures of Being, physical (cellular/matter), vital (will/heart), mental (graduations) supramental (gnosis) are integrated in a “progressive†movement of the evolution of consciousness. Although Sri Aurobindo speaks of a progressive evolution of humanity it is a bit more complex than a linear time sequence would imply. In fact, he conceptualize progress as paradoxically intertwined with an eternal return in a repetition of yugas and karma. He sometimes even speaks of circular progress in which Origin remains equidistant to a general advance of human consciousness from infra to supra-rational (his terms), in which civilization follows the cognitive path laid down by individuals or those visionary truth/seers who first apprehend those radically new epistemologies which will become our future cultural metanoias. Perhaps using a familiar trope we can call this an advance in which phenotype eventually recapitulates the mutations of a graced genotype. From this perspective the progression of human civilization follows on pioneering individuals who first explore those rarified topologies of mind through a praxis which will yet reveal vast new cognitive experiences and with this knowledge also a power and a methodology for their excavation and scaling.
In short Sri Aurobindo['s] aim is no less than the reconciliation of the great philosophical questions, being and becoming, unity and multiplicity, difference and repetition through an evolutionary movement which reveals a commitment to the authenticity of our future embodiment.
The coalescence of being/becoming he envisions reorients our move toward the future and suggests a way forward and out from our current disassociation. While this is certainly a philosophical move in a grand style it does contrast precisely the view of ourselves as assemblages of spinning parts which we perceive in our vertigo. An integrative whole would remain obscure to one whose senses are spun in an sparking whirl of frictional parts. If an integrative whole were to presence itself through a sensation of balancing ourselves at the edge of a chaotic networked society then our first perceptions of it would be of alterity.
The alterity I refer to here is the gaze of Sri Aurobindo, whose radically expansive epistemology contextualizes this inquiry streaming along gradient toward two attractors; synthesis and hybridity. Here, synthesis refers to the practice of integral yoga which derives from a synthesis of karma, bhakti and jnana yogas, while hybridity refers to the orientation of the spiritual practices of India (yoga) within the progressive evolution heralded by Modernist European scholars at the beginning of the 20th century.
While a synthesis is an atemporal fusing of sheaths or horizons of being (koshas) a hybridity is a fissionable production of history.
In my use of synthesis or integral, I refer to a psychological process akin to what Whitehead refers to a " pre-hension". It is very difficult to describe this phenomena with words but one may come close by referring to it as an intuitive grasp of the pre-existent unity of seemingly discontinuous elements comprising a whole which is always greater than the sum of its parts. Although the parts of such a whole may subsequently be revealed analytically as individual events or structures, they are implicitly continuous with the horizon of the whole, and do not act independently of it.
A
whole formed from a hybridity by contrast is a
grafting of differing elements together in which the parts may be
mutable but their autonomy remains discernible. Wholes instancing
such hybrids can be found in societies, linguistic communities,
ethnicities. Bakhtin provides a good definition of hybritity: “It
is a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single
utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between
two different linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one another
by an epoch, by social differentiation, or by some other factorâ€.
(Bakhtin 358)
In this paper I begin
by interrogating Sri Aurobindo's ideas of progressive evolution and
the future body he envisages emerging from it. In doing this I
contrast his evolutionary perspective with those of the Catholic
philosophers Teilhard de Cardin and Marshall McLuhan, who believed
that the formation of a new consciousness would result from its
collectivization through a planetary thinking layer and/or the
deployment of global communications technologies.
I also explore post-modern critiques of technology and culture whose arguments strongly contest views of the future in terms of progressive evolution. Through these arguments an attempt is made to understand our future bodies in terms of how these are subject to discipline, control, and the panoptic gaze of the socio-economic and technological structures in which they are embedded.
Additionally, I examine the occult mechanism which Sri Aurobindo argues to be the main driver behind the evolution of consciousness and the body. I suggest that what we now know indicates that the primary impetus behind the evolution of human consciousness is culture. I also argue that by virtue of the paradigm of complexity found in science today, especially in its framing of autocatalytic processes and cybernetic principles may now provide satisfactory explanations of what was previous thought of as occult. My interests lie in examining the process by which nature (Prakriti) can be simulated and demystified through algorithm and computation, and I believe this is a view which would be accepted by Sri Aurobindo and most Eastern spiritual traditions.
The question then arises just how much of our experience of the world is given to us as natural entities through the billions of years we have been programmed by nature. To what extent can we separate ourselves as autonomous human agents from our conditioning as merely the automata of nature? Just how much of human nature is machinic in nature? How much freedom do we actually have? These questions prove themselves to be difficult to answer.
- I will attempt to answer these questions without exploring the weird world of quantum physics which paints a picture of sub-atomic reality as strange as any occult explanation of reality found in the world's mystical traditions. Illustrations from this science could also demonstrate one of my central premises which is that the advance of science is a solvent for dissolving what was previously thought occult. However, as I wish to elevate this conversation above merely empirical and scientific observations of the world to explore phenomenological themes, for the most part I will avoid using these descriptions. -
Finally, I argue that by re-visioning Sri Aurobindo's evolutionary perspective to account for the cultural transformations of the past half century suggests the possibility of a way of knowing from which an ethos emerges which privileges caring for the physical and life worlds rather than a view of the body and experience that can be discarded as just so many bytes of information. I argue that this ethos may provide a guiding light for the future sciences as they intervene in nature to create the future body through the grafting of information science on to flesh and bone.
5/3/08
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