Reading Wednesday

[sabotabby]

 Just finished: Red Enlightenment by Graham Jones. This wasn't quite the book I thought it was going to be from the description (which is not so much the author/book's fault as it is the marketing of it)—it was a lot more high-concept and philosophical for an undereducated prole like me to parse. It was a compelling thesis, though. I'd have preferred a bit more specificity and decisiveness in the Obligatory What Is To Be Done chapter at the end.

Is it me or does anyone else's eyes glaze over when they see the word "body" too much in academic writing?

Anyway, I thought it was good and I'd like to see more of this kind of thing.

Currently reading: The Meaning Wars by Michelle Brown. #4 in the omnibus, where the various plot threads and characters in the previous novellas and short stories come together. Crystal is struggling with Jai, who she got together with in the last book, and her job building wormholes in a relatively open, cosmopolitan setting, while Sarah is out of prison, living with her cousin and working in a bar, and haunted by the trauma of her imprisonment. She's drawn to a revolutionary leader, Patience, who has a tie back to my favourite of the short stories. The depiction of trauma and chronic pain is particularly skillfully done—it's intrusive in a way that, let's put it this way, I can really relate to.

Crow Winter by Karen McBride. A wild plot has emerged! Hazel's late father was, apparently, conspiring with a local scumbag (who himself is the descendant of another local scumbag appearing in the archival documents Hazel is working on) to sell the family's quarry to a mining interest. Nanabush, in crow form, shows her various visions of the recent past, leading her to conclude that her beloved family may not be all it appears to be.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville. We get another metal chapter where the Pequod meets another ship. This crew has encountered Moby Dick, and you can tell because...the captain has a missing arm! His prosthesis is also made out of whalebone, and he and Ahab clink whalebone prothesis in a greeting, which is cute. Weird, but cute. Anyway, Ahab's like, "you going after Moby Dick" and the other captain is like, "BY NO MEANS isn't losing one limb enough for you???" but Ahab is determined to storm heaven and punch God in the face, as one does.

Comments

[ioplokon]

Okay, so prefacing this by saying that I'm not commenting on your own spiritual/philosophical evolution. I basically think people should do whatever makes the most sense to them. I'm more sharing my own feelings about the book's premise (& only doing so bc I feel like we know each other well enough that you can trust I'm not judging you).

I dunno, I guess the wall I hit with stuff like Red Enlightenment is that it feels kind of condescending to say we can't expect religious people to act in solidarity with atheists unless we adopt an artifice of spirituality (I know both Jones and you are not engaging with this artificially but, if this were the movement gaining steam, I would be; I have no genuine spiritual feeling & I think everyone would see this and be put off by any moves I made in that direction).

Honestly, it feels a bit like giving up. Where else has the left benefited by abandoning a philosophical defense of its principles? And I'm not saying being an atheist is a leftist principle, but if you are a leftist atheist, I think it's worth while defending that as a legitimate way of being and saying, hey, it is possible to work alongside people who are different and not assimilable into your world view. I guess, as someone who has pretty intimate knowledge of a religion & even the more leftists sides of it (liberation theology, Catholic Workers, etc) & works with religious people on political/social projects all the time, I see a different side of this, where I either keep quiet on religious and philosophical discussions or I'm flagged as a target for conversion.

But then again, most Marxists are basically Hegelians, which is basically theism, so I can see why it would make sense for some people. :p

[sabotabby]

I don't think that he's trying to say people should fake it, or not argue or push back (quite the opposite; he recommends pushing back within these communities), so much as meeting people where they're at and not acting like atheism is superior or inherently more rational.

But it's also like, a shockingly small part of his argument compared to all the metaphysical things that I don't pretend to understand at all.

[ioplokon]

I just think like... that idea doesn't get us closer to a two-way street, where religious and/or spiritual people respect people's beliefs that fall outside of their favored rubric. I really don't think you can push back or argue much about these things without coming across as an asshole (I'm even really worried I'm being an asshole right now??).

I guess, overall, it doesn't sit well with me that he (or maybe his publisher???) dressed up advocacy for his particular set of spiritual/metaphysical beliefs in the mantle of pragmatism? Like, to me this feels really dismissive of the idea that someone who is not religious or spiritual might, nonetheless, hold genuine philosophical commitments. I'm wondering if maybe what he really wanted was to write a philosophy dissertation & then tacked on the pragmatism stuff to get a publisher interested? This is why, first and foremost, we need to bring back monograph culture in the anglosphere...

[sabotabby]

Oh, I think he does believe that atheists, etc., hold genuine philosophical commitments. He does seem in favour of a broadening of the definition of spirituality to, say, encompass the feeling of solidarity you get at a mass demo, but I don't think that's the main thrust of his argument.

But yes, absolutely book that feels like it wanted to be a monograph.

[ioplokon]

He does seem in favour of a broadening of the definition of spirituality to, say, encompass the feeling of solidarity you get at a mass demo

Yeah, I super-object to this! This seems disrespectful to everyone? We shouldn't try to assimilate the Other, but rather work together, alongside one another; living in difference?????

Me, reading a book: This could have been a monograph

[sabotabby]

I used to have a problem with that, but then I think if the actual value of spirituality to people (particularly if one doesn't believe in God) is emotional, ritual, communal, and transcendent, I think he sorta has a point? None of that negates difference philosophically or theologically.

But yeah it coulda/shoulda been a monograph, because 80% of it wasn't about that at all.

[ioplokon]

I resent all good emotions and sense of responsibility and connection to other people being classed as inherently or definitionally spiritual. If people experience certain things spiritually, that's great. Someone can look at a butterfly and find this a profound religious experience. I don't and I don't think I'm wrong or lesser not to.

[sabotabby]

I think it's the other way around. One can have a profoundly spiritual experience and it can build solidarity and connection (or...not, as is often the case).

[ioplokon]

Maybe I've misunderstood the thesis of the book, but isn't it that the left needs to be "more spiritual"? This is what I disagree with, not that there are viable models of leftist spirituality.

[sabotabby]

No, that's not the thesis. If there's a thesis (see: monograph), it's that the left needs to create a secular form of spirituality, but it digresses into talking about Enlightenment principles more generally, which is why I found it a bit muddled.

[ioplokon]

I guess I don't see a substantive difference between needing to create a form spirituality and needing to be more spiritual? Why do we need to create it if not because we are insufficiently spiritual right now?

But honestly, as someone who doesn't have "spiritual experiences", I do think this is getting a bit away from me. Just like, idk, I think people should leave a little room for people like me in their big models of the world; I try to do the same.

[sabotabby]

I don't either, which is part of why I'm fascinated. (Like, is it something you could induce? Non-chemically? Or is it something that exists or doesn't and you and I are just part of the minority that doesn't experience it.)

I think—and like I said, I find his thesis not very clear in this regard—it's more of what we can learn and adapt rather than we should turn ourselves into spiritual people if we're not already.

[springheel_jack]

Sounds like a version of the binding problem, as borrowed by politics from epistemology. How do you, affectively, stick people and groups of people together to fight for a common cause, and make them invested in acting like a coherent group? You can't make movements out of atomized individuals, each constantly running a self-interest calculation, etc. It's not, I confess, an aspect of political theory that appealed to me very much, but it's been something much talked about amid Current Conditions™.

[sabotabby]

That's a large part of it, and something kind of under-discussed in favour of broad "well you have to organize." Organize what, for what, how, etc?

[symbioid]

Red Enlightenment makes me think of the various projects in socialist history like the Cult of Reason. (Robespierre can fuck off with his Cult of the Supreme Being). Also the whole god-building from Lunacharsky.

I'm curious I'll have to check the book out. Wondering what in it is especially "over your head"? Or was that a joke about how the proles need something a little less theoretical?

I think this is one of the hardest nuts to crack. God's nut.

[sabotabby]

God doesn't really seem to have a problem nutting.

It's mainly that I just don't have a grounding in philosophy—not even at the high school level. I tried to read Hegel and Kant and I just find them completely incomprehensible. I think I'm capable of understanding, but I'd probably need to take courses and have some kind of grounding that I don't currently have.

It's actually similar when I read religious texts—something about the terminology and language just gloss over me, so even though I understand every word in the text, the actual underlying concept isn't something I can grasp on to.

[springheel_jack]

I Should do a KantHegel 101

[sabotabby]

God, could you????

[springheel_jack]

one of the things about not being in the academy anymore, and not being around those people all the time, is that I miss certain trends and fashions that seem to blow up out of nowhere and infect every discourse. I don't know where they come from or what's actually at stake in them; everyone In the Know just glosses over the sources and meanings of these tics, and the rest of us are left to either copy them by rote or get irritated about it.

So I don't know why political philosophy these days seems mostly to be about "bodies" and not about human beings. Foucault used to use some of this terminology - disciplining bodies, and all that - but it had a specific meaning there; he was talking about the utterly dehumanizing nature of biopower. I can't figure out if everyone is just saying the same thing, because We're All Foucauldians Now, but it really puzzles me when theorists are clearly no longer just talking about the dehumanizing logic of power, which doesn't admit of subjectivity at all, but are speaking more broadly, about liberation, and suddenly the "bodies" are supposed to have rights and points of view again. But they're still "bodies" and not people. That reads to me like a category error. Confusing. I've tried to figure out the source of this usage (it isn't just post foucauldian, because that's been a minute and not everyone talked that way, but now they do) and no luck yet.

[sabotabby]

If you find out, please let me know. I mostly see it with BIPOC scholars ("Black bodies") and as you point out, they're not using it in the Foucaultian sense. And Jones appears to be using it in entirely a different sense.

And Naomi Klein's Doppelganger, which I recently finished, has an entire different use of the term, though she's not primarily an academic so she was using it in a much more comprehensible sense, which is the physical body and a second, mirror body consisting of the actions you take by virtue of your positionality. So you might have one body that opposes child labour but every time you buy clothes, your second, external body contributes to it, that kind of thing.

This is why I find philosophy hard.