Nov 02 2009
Quibbles & Pseudo-Prophetic Ramblings
I watched “Strange Days” before reading Quinby’s reading, and though I agree with most, and love the Foucauldian analogy between alliance, sexuality and programmed perfection, I have a three points to quibble on:
1. “From the Book of Revelation of the Heaven’s Gate website, denial of embodiment has been a heterosexist obsession that defines itself oppositionally to women’s bodily excess and lesbian and gay sexuality.” (135)
Perhaps true for Revelation and Heaven’s gate, there are others reasons for “denial of embodiment.” In Buddhism, it is because the body and all conceptualization of self cause suffering. In Kabbalah, the body is in direct contrast to the soul, or more broadly, to spirituality. In Tristan and Isolde, the body is what separates the two lovers from union, and in some stagings of Wagner’s opera, Isolde sings her final aria while slowly humping Tristan’s dead body, as if they were both floating up together, spirits entwined, into the afterlife – at least according to Prof Long at Hunter College.
I agree the castoff of the body can be read as discriminatory towards women and gay sexuality, however this is not the sole propagation. To my dismay, this point was made then abandoned without greater discussion.
2. “Max’s desire to have Lenny jack in to his acts of rape and murder of Iris and his sadomasochistic sex with Faith fuel homophobic fears and hence fortify the “safe” and “healthy” heterosexuality represented by Lenny.” (142)
Lenny is the one, however, who is quick to offer the Lawyer at the beginning fantasies involving men and chooses for him to be an 18 yr old female washing her body in the shower. If Lenny personifies white-male heterosexuality, he is certainly comfortable with a variety of sexual practices and inter-racial love.
The greater point is that Max’s desire to have Lenny watch his rape is not homosexual. Like the argument goes, rape is more about expressing power than sexuality. Here Max uses his rape as power over Lenny, not to entwine them homosexually. Also, porn is often watched in groups of heterosexual men as a means of establishing a collective base for what’s cool and what’s not etc and certainly the heightened sense of group/communal involvement – perhaps a psychological facet of gang-rape.
3. “When Mace turns to Stickland as her champion, activism is replaced by a reassertion of authority of the white-controlled state.” (145)
This feels overly pessimistic. Why “replaced?” And not, “activism working together with authority?” Also, why is it important that the chief is white? If he were black, would it be a reassertion of the black chief who sold out? Authority will perpetuate and so will activism, the two should work together.
However, it does point to the weakness in the storytelling of having a good man at the top but corruption omnipresent beneath him – but then again, Kathryn Bigelow is not a filmmaker known for her consistency but rather adrenaline-pumping male-centered action films.
Lastly, techno oppression has already manifested in our society and will continue to do so. However, technology seems more to me like the great and final democratizer. Cyborgian culture will rip down the walls between gender and all other classical notions about what it means to be human. From our insides to the outside, our economic and social infrastructure will change. A collective consciousness will arise. Governments won’t be necessary… But these are just my crazed, pseudo-prophetic ramblings, not be taken seriously, for sure.
I don’t know enough about Buddhism or Chassidic Judaism to respond myself, but found this article below on the former to be relevant.
In terms of dualism and this discussion, I hope to keep us to textual/rhetorical analysis as much as possible, asking what the truth claims are in a given text, if and how transcendence is promised, and what the relationship is between body and mind. At times, we find anti-apocalyptic texts that are themselves quite apocalyptic in every respect we’ve studied–but that have been dramatic in opening up spaces of freedom. At other times, Christian beliefs of all different forms have done that too, from the least apocalyptic, process theology to the apocalyptic forms. In other words, it is helpful to look to both the categories of thought within these discourses and the consequences they have had in the world to say something about them–that is the power analysis part. So you might help us by addressing the truth claims and transcendence claims of Buddhism, for example. What is at stake in seeing suffering as the central idea? How does dualism get resolved in terms of placing consciousness above everything? Are extreme forms of asceticism akin to self torture of the body?
Buddhism and Violence
by Bernard Faure, Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University; published December 6, 2003
Is Buddhism pacifist? One would think so, to hear the Declarations of the Dalai Lama and those who claim there has never been “Buddhist war.” So has Zen Buddhism’s “drift” to militarism been only an aberration, after the timeless message of Gautama, the warrior-prince who, once he became the Buddha, preached nonviolence? We are not simply faced here with a gap between theory and practice. Even though Buddhism has no concept of a “holy war,” it doesn’t mean its doctrine does not at times legitimize the recourse to violence and the just war.
In whatever countries Buddhism has became official ideology—whether Theravada Buddhism in Southeast Asia or Tantric Buddhism in Tibet or East Asia—war has often been zealously waged. At present, the Buddhists of Sri Lanka, for example, have openly taken up the struggle against the Tamil freedom fighters. What is true of Japanese Zen holds equally for other forms of Buddhism. Long before its lyrical metaphysical flights exerted their charm, Buddhism took hold first and foremost as a tool for protecting States.
The Buddha’s sermons seem, however, to condemn all violence, toward oneself and toward others. Suicide, it is true, is not formally forbidden. And Buddhism remains ambivalent toward the interiorized form of violence that is asceticism. Well-ordered violence begins with oneself. Chinese monks, to show their determination, would sometimes mutilate themselves—cutting off or burning one or more of their fingers. In extreme cases self-denial could extend to self-immolation by fire. We recall the horrific image of the Vietnamese monk who, at the start of the U.S. military intervention in his country, chose this death as a sign of protest.
Murder, on the other hand, is clearly condemned. As the Buddha states in the Brahma Net Sutra: “If a child of Buddha himself kills, or goads someone else to kill, or provides with or suggests means for killing, or praises the act of killing or, on seeing someone commit the act, expresses approval for what that person has done, or kills by way of incantations, or is the cause, occasion, means, or instrument of the act of inducing a death, he will be shut out of the community.”
Buddhist compassion extends to all beings. By the principle of karmic transmigration, animals are perceived as future Buddhas or past humans, linked to us perhaps by ancient bonds of kinship, so that it seems natural to extend our concern to them. Furthermore, Indian Buddhism distinguished itself from Brahmanism by its rejection of animal sacrifice—whence its vegetarianism. Yet it does not appear that the first Buddhists were strict vegetarians, and the Buddha himself, if we are to believe legend, was said to have died from indigestion after eating pork. If vegetarianism and the related concept of nonviolence gradually took hold in India, the credit seems to belong to Jain rather than Buddhist ascetics. In societies such as Tibet and China, in which a meat diet predominated, a less strict clergy sought to eradicate its sins through grand rites that set fish and birds free.
On the iconographic plane, if compassion is well expressed by serene images of meditating Buddhas, the angry gods of Buddhism and Mongolia partake, conversely, in a puzzling symbolic violence: does it mark a return of the repressed, an outlet for real violence, or is it, on the contrary, its mirror-image, indeed, its underlying cause?
Buddhist law often had to bow to reason of State. But in many instances it also provided an ideology for counterforces, inspiring peasant revolts in the name of a millenarianism centered on the coming of the future Maitreya Buddha. In one of these movements, in China, arising at the start of the sixth century c.e., the rebels, using the Buddhist title of “Grand Vehicle” (Mahayana), undertook to rid the world of its “demons”—starting with the era’s Buddhist clergy.
In Japan, on the other hand, Buddhism managed to pave the way for feudal struggles, creating a new type of religious figure, the “warrior monk.” It is only at the end of the sixteenth century, after centuries of internecine struggles, that the great monasteries were subdued by the military government. The ensuing subordination explains in part why, after the Meiji Restoration (1868), Japanese Buddhism proved no force against militarism, and fell into line with “spiritual mobilization.”
Thus, Japanese militarism blended Buddhist doctrine with the imperial sauce, reducing it to its simplest expression, to bend it to official propaganda. The Buddhist theory of selflessness served, for instance, to justify giving one’s life for the Emperor, while the notion of the Two Truths (conventional and ultimate) served to explain the contradiction between the principle of respect for human life and patriotic duty. However, these ideas are not merely belated deviations in the necessary adaptation of Buddhism to Japanese culture. They have a long history.
In fact, reasons for bending the principle of nonviolence were never wanting. There were considerations of a practical nature: when Buddhist Law is threatened, it is necessary to ruthlessly fight the forces of evil. Kill them all, and the Buddha will recognize his own. Murder in this case is piously qualified as “liberation,” since the demon, duly killed out of compassion, will be released from its ignorance and can then be reborn under better auspices. The crucial moment in Tibetan ritual dances comes when the priests stab an effigy personifying the demon forces. This ritual is thought to repeat a monk’s murder of King Glang dar ma (842), a persecutor of Buddhism (as such, clearly “possessed” by Evil). Various other theories use this same casuistry, including the idea that it is just to kill out of charity or compassion, to prevent another person from comitting evil.
Indeed, how can one kill another person, when, according to good Buddhist orthodoxy, all is emptiness? The person who kills with full knowledge of the facts kills no one, since he has realized that all is but illusion, himself as well as the other person. The idea, moreover, is not exclusive to Buddhism, since it can be found in the Hindu scriptures, in the Bhagavad Gita. In China a Zen text similarly states that, if a murderous act is perfectly spontaneous, it is of the same order as a natural disaster, and thus entails no responsibility. One finds this sort of sophism in the writing of Zen apostles like D.T. Suzuki. Here as elsewhere, the recourse to higher truths provides justification for the worst aberrations.
Thus, there have been, and will again be, “Buddhist wars,” and Buddhism’s superiority in this regard is entirely relative. Yet, on the whole, it remains more tolerant than the other great religions and ideologies—which is no small matter, at a moment when the world seems threatened once more by fundamentalisms. In every age, the Buddhist clergy’s will to power has been balanced by the ideal of compassion. But Buddhist doctrine, in order not to remain a dead letter, must take account of the violence inherent in the human heart, in society, and in Buddhism itself.
translated by David Jacobson
Source: A shorter version of this article appeared in Le Monde, October 12, 2001.
An International Review of Culture & Society, Issue No. 9, Spring 2002.
Buddhism and chassidic Judaism have never (to the best of my knowledge) justified torture and killing and wasting the earth, however both advocate some form of asceticism, but whether asceticism is good or bad is another issue.
What I’ve noticed throughout MS and the class, is that the study of apocalyptic literature dances around the edge of the red button, which is to say, I feel that just discussing the apocalypse wedges one into a ring of dualism and calls to action. It’s hard not to fight the enemy on their terms – there I go again…
As for the last paragraph, I think it can be read as either millennialist (which judging from your response has negative connotations) or optimistic.
Hi Daniel, thanks for your response—all more important than mere quibbles! As you know, I am convinced that it sharpens one’s thought to be confronted with disagreements, so I appreciate your criticisms (which is not to say I agree with all of them, as I will now try to explain).
In terms of the first point, I would say that the age-old sentiment against flesh and blood bodies and the earth itself in favor of a person’s spiritual essence and the transformed earth into a timeless and transcendent New Jerusalem continues to denigrate what we have here and now and need to take care of. Yes, our bodies suffer disease and death, but acceptance of these is part of what I mean by non-apocalyptic thought. They also provide pleasure and joy and for me learning to be grateful for that is equally important. So basically, I agree with your point that other beliefs provide other reasons for rejecting embodiment—but I disagree with them too and think that the brunt of this teaching too often justifies torturing and killing bodies and wasting the earth, or sunply be too passive or indifferent in regrd to them. This is, as you say, not limited to mistreatment of women and gays and lesbians, but, at the time I was writing, those identity politics were particularly on my mind.
For point two, I don’t say that Max’s desire to have Lenny experience the rape is homosexual. I say that the scene fuels homophobic fears—quite a different point, since those fears are often part of heterosexist (not heterosexual) panic, which is part of a constructed homophobic fantasy that makes male-male desire look like Max’s. That is related to what you describe in regard to groups of men watching porn together, while denying the homoerotic element of that experience via the strident and sometimes violent hetersexist depictions. This I take as a lesson to avoid so much jargon!
You make a good point with your third comment in terms of a way to see Strickland working in concert with the activists, although it feels like the cavalry coming over the hill to me. I agree with you that is shows a weak point in the plot.
As for the final comment, whoa, that sounds really millennialist to me! Am I missing a tongue in cheek? Hope so.
Also, Zizek proposes at the beginning of his film, “The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema,” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0828154/) that cinema informs us as to what our fantasies are, thus making it the true pervert art. I’m surprised he didn’t discuss “Strange Days,” which through its meta-experiences (of Us watching Lenny watching Max watching Iris watching Max rape her) says a great deal about who is informing who about fantasies.