OPM 226(27), September 28th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 221-222

This morning I was reflecting on what I wrote in yesterday’s commentary, and wondered about the project as motivated, in large part, by a desire to deconstruct the dominant figure of what my post-Marxist friends would call the neoliberal subject, and what was sometimes called (back in the Reagan 80’s) the ‘hero’ of cowboy Capitalism.  There is that figure, and then there is the system that attempts to produce his values by ‘guaranteeing’ that all students have the ‘equal opportunity’ to the education that will enable them to ‘succeed’ in a market economy.   Of course, this is all ideology, and a depraved one at that, with the biggest delusion happening with the total inversion of the very logic of cowboy capitalism and its strong solitary figure.  Cowboys should be spared the insult of being drawn into the neoliberal ideology.  Cowboys are intense about their work, but appear much more caring toward their animals, have their own relatively deep relationship with Nature, and are part of a somewhat archaic tradition, especially if we root their practice in shepherding.   Not the cowboy, but the figure of the Wild West, the sociopath (Billy the Kid) is the most apt hero of neoliberalism:  the serial killer, whose insane single-mindedness leads to a path of destruction.   In our own time we experience the murder of Nature, not to mention the death of the future for millions of children whose dreams are foreclosed by war.  The figure of the single-minded power hungry captain of industry is the degenerated form of the modern subject and his will to power.   Even more degenerated is the version of that figure who sits in relatively inconsequential seats of bureaucratic power, administrating the dictates of the neoliberal agenda in schooling (pre-higher ed), which is nothing more than an attempt to control education and stifle the free theater of learning.   It is this figure of the banal sociopath – the one who kills through administrative strangulation – that I had always ready-to-hand insofar as I was writing always in close proximity of an embodiment of such a figure. 

It is with that reflection in mind that I turn to the writing from 9/28/04, BL 221-222.  It is difficult material to understand and demands a close reading.  The meditation begins by stepping back and insisting that the deconstruction of the “man of singular purpose” is beyond the scope of romantic idealism.  Indeed, if this figure is described as a sociopath then the best strategy would be to watch carefully and monitor his movements, but avoid any direct contact with him.  (In my case, the real life impersonations of this sociopath have been women, but that is an aside.)   The strategy implies that we take the Gandhian approach and set up a parallel community, the proverbial “change we want to see in the world.”   But it would be naïve to suppose this can happen without diligent awareness of the imminent threat (and thus one needs to understand and operate under the same logic as the neoliberal surveillance state).  

The alternative community is precisely what the sage organizes, but in the writing from 9/28/04 there is a presumption that the pathology of instrumental reasoning can not only be warded off but thwarted by the example offered with the community.   This would be, of course, the endgame of justice for the Gandhian alternative community.  On 9/28 (BL 221) the learning community’s radical hospitality is said to be waiting upon the arrival of the “man of singular purpose” with “the stillness and quite of ‘humble patience’…”   Now the radicality of the community’s hospitality is only ever an expression of the open region:  this is the ethos of the dwelling that Heidegger says we learn from Heraclitus’ fragment 119 that is usually (and misleadingly) translated as “a man’s character is his fate.”  Ethos (‘character’) is determined by daimon (‘spirit’ or even ‘god’).   Heidegger reads the legend told by Aristotle as revealing the relationship between character and spirit as one of dwelling in close proximity of the ‘gods’ (the divine).  My own reading of Heidegger and Heraclitus is that place (e.g., the place near the figure where “the gods too are present”, Heraclitus) is ‘holy’ or ‘sacred’ in the sense that it determines who we are.  The question Where  are we? (Donde Estamos?) is a question that arises when we are gathered onto the holy and sacred location. 

The gathering of the learning community happens when we are gathered onto the open region. “To dwell within this region is to be the learner, the hero of peace and freedom…” (BL 222)   To be gathered onto this holy and sacred place is described as in-dwelling, which is a way of emphasizing the force of place over those who are gathered.  Gathering is always a happening to, an event of interpellation where the subject is called into a new set of relations (natural, spiritual, social, etc.).  In turn, the learning community is gathered into being by an in-dwelling where “we find ‘the real nature of the spontaneity of thinking.” [The line is a quotation from the ‘Teacher’ in Heidegger’s dialogic “Conversations On A Country Path.”   The ‘Teacher’ responds to the ‘Scholar’s’ reciting of a ‘few lines’ from a friend’s poem titled “In-dwelling.”   The ‘Scholar’ suggest the word ‘in-dwelling’ for the name for the ‘releasement’ happening in the steadfast reception “of the regioning of that-which-regions.”  What is quite fascinating is the claim that the real nature of the spontaneity  of thinking is found the passivity of the reception of the regioning that releases.  For me this shifts (consistently) our orientation toward the source of improvisation from the ‘strong poet’ (Rorty) to the ‘sacred place’ (‘holy time and space’…kairos).  Perhaps the ‘strong poet’ is the one who can endure most the reception of the regioning?  But such strength, I would conjecture, is always held inter-subjectively, communally, in congregation.  The strength of antrhopoetikos is a shared power.