wanted : a dialogic community

something i've been thinking about and working on. the writing is nowhere near finished nor is the idea fully formed ... but i wanted to put it up whilst i still can.

aim :

to form a dialogic community which brings humans who are thinking and/or writing about, and working in political, spiritual and therapeutic spheres/domains/realms into dialogue with each other.

who?

philosophers, therapists, political activists and thinkers, buddhists, muslims, christians, atheists, agnostics, somethingists, artists, musicians, singers, writers, theorists, carers, teachers, therapists, doctors, mothers, fathers, children, asexuals, transgenders, straight people, queers, carnivores, flexitarians, vegetarians and vegans of all ages, races and creeds and anyone who might be interested. people who work with vegetables. cleaners.

method :

individual and collective dialogues which are speculative and which you and i may be radically optimistic could lead to transformation/revolution/an actual enlightenment, perhaps not even during our own lifetimes.

where :

everywhere. live and virtually individually and collectively

background :

Below is the blurb for a course run by Eric Cazdyn at the University of Toronto.

Post-Capitalist Fantasy, 1-3 (Thursdays)

Every now and then we sense a world beyond the capitalist one in which we live. Maybe it is a society without punishing inequality. Or a self without anxiety. Or an ecosystem without human rapaciousness. This sense (feeling, impulse, drive) can be as banal as a quiet moment alone, or as go-for-broke as a revolutionary act together. Like death, it is something we already know and something beyond our wildest dreams. Like love, it is in us more than us. Sometimes we attempt to shake open this otherness by the sheer force of our imagination or collective will; other times we meet it without any intention, without any focused desire or recognition that we are actually engaged in such a radical act. Regardless of whether such post-capitalist worlds are possible or whether such desires are naïve or hysterical, our encounter with them — with these speculative futures — is promising. But promising of what?

Cazdyn is one of the authors (with Timothy Morton and Marcus Boon) of a book which connects “three desires that are regularly laughed out of polite conversation: Enlightenment, Cure and Revolution.” It's called Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (with Marcus Boon and Timothy Morton, University of Chicago Press, 2015) and it's interesting for a number of other reasons, not the least of which is Timothy Morton's contribution called Buddhaphobia 🙂 There is a slightly illegal free copy downloadable from the zlibrary... ← there.

My own interests are slightly to the left of this — perhaps that is not actually spatially correct :) but there are some radical connections being made here which are inspring, connections between the kinds of freedoms envisaged by buddhism, which I might for now, to avoid confusions, refer to not as freedom from desire but as freedom-from-wanting-things-to-be-other-than-they-are; by psychoanalysis (and perhaps other approaches to therapy/medicine) and by radical politics, specifically socialism and anarchism.

I have been known to characterise these freedoms with a transformation (or turn ← omkeer in Dutch) which I refer to as posthuman, since I think/feel/believe the fundamental problem is how humans perceive humans, both collectively (humanism/anthropocentricism) and individually (self/ego). Our entire history and culture since the so-called enlightenment has centred around the human and focussed on the individual.

What prevents 'us' from being free? Is there a cure? — Free from what? Free from anxiety and fear, free in the sense of living in a society without punishing inequality, and a world with an ecosystem which is free from human rapaciousness ← shameless hack from Cazdyn's course blurb.

What can you and i do?

I think/feel/believe that what you and i can do is engage in dialogue individually and collectively. I made a start with this is 2018/9 with a project called posthumanist conversations in various cities around the world. I now announce a new initiative which follows on from that called posthuman dialogues which will begin in the Dutch city of Eendhoven (and other places in the time to come) as soon as pandemic restrictions allow.

The core of the idea is to create a dialogic community which brings together humans thinking, writing, working or simply interest in political, spiritual and therapeutic spheres into dialogue with each other.

the method

it's not that we are all one, we are all different, unique and complex individuals with our own foibles, idiosyncrasies and peculiarities.

but you and i need an end to transcend divisiveness and individualism/narcissism ← especially the wounded variety :p

the powers that be, that is the 1% who own 99% of everything, encourage and promote divisiveness because as the numbers indicate, if the 99% of the people who have very little acted in unison they would simply overwhelm the 1%.

you and i need to work and think together, to enter a dialogue about the time to come, beginning now.

this is the work, which is a praxis, cazdyn says about this :

Praxis names the desire to unite theory and practice, however impossible such a project is fated to be. Praxis drives — and is driven by — this incommensurability. Praxis is the ceaseless movement among thinking, meditating, understanding, experimenting, acting, attaining, losing, and changing —none of which exist autonomously, but all of which are always supplemented by the others, and always inextricably tied to the logic of the historical moment during which they are at work.

will there be blood? i don't know. i hope not. but maybe our own. maybe you and i will need to bleed a bit.

soon : participants

20210403-150931