an event hosted on 24/7/23 by the English Department, Presidency University, Kolkata
Contents:
- Humanism and Its Others by Debashish Banerji (PhD, Haridas Chaudhuri Professor & East-West Psychology Chair & Doshi Professor of Asian Art)
- Musical Individuation and Sonocultural Technologies of Becoming by Jonathan Kay (PhD student, California Institute of Integral Studies)
- Towards a Posthuman Psychotherapy by Jean Michel Borgeaud (PhD Student, California institute of integral Studies)
Humanism and Its Others
by Debashish Banerji
PhD, Haridas Chaudhuri Professor & East-West Psychology Chair & Doshi Professor of Asian Art
Humanism, as an ideology, an ism, accompanies the European Renaissance and may be seen as its psychological core. As implicit eponymously, it is a rebirth from earlier foundations in Hellenic Greece. However, in its historicity it inaugurates an opposition to the transcendent origins of knowledge in medieval Europe, beholden to the Christian Church. It is a displacement of this origin or source to an immanence in the human. In the Renaissance, what this means remains more indeterminate. to thinkers like Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) and his younger contemporary Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494), it was the immanence of divinity in the human soul. To some, such as Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), it connoted the immanence of a divine creativity, while to the new currents of science which were equally a trend of this age, it was the source of epistemology, centered in human rationality. Over the 17th and 18th centuries, it is this last meaning of humanism, the immanence of divinity in a rational soul, as interpreted from Greek sources such as Aristotle, that came to define its understanding, leading at first to the philosophy of Deism and then to the perception of the irrelevance of God to the scheme of understanding and consequently to agnosticism and atheism.
Epistemically this shift connoted the triumphalism of the scientific method and its application for acquiring knowledge and organizing human life. This nascent sense of triumph and the discovery of a new horizon accounted for the vast civilizational hubris which accompanied colonialism through this period, particularly from the mid-17th c., the missionary zeal of the white man’s burden. As Michel Foucault has pointed to the displacement of the practices of confession from medieval Christianity to modern educational institutions, government offices, factories, clinics and prisons, Enlightenment humanism established itself in the colonies through pedagogy and governmentality. We may pause for a moment to consider what this implied psychologically. It was an extrusion and normalization of the cogito as the defining characteristic of the human. I use the term extrusion to indicate the drawing out of this faculty from its latency, resulting in a new organization of the psyche. The consequences of this organization are all around us. The first consequence is a principled objectification of the world and its constituents and a location of the subject in a ordered phenomenological apparatus, with the eyes as the primary sense organ and the reason as the highest psychic faculty. The separation of self and world became qualitatively absolute, bringing a clarity and precision to our perceptions, which we prize so much in our times as high-resolution, aiming for constant unending improvement. It brought an endemic drive to classification, controlled in actuality by practical motives of power but carrying in itself a faith in an impersonal absolute, the finalism of a perfectly ordered world. The dimension of depth or distance became more real than ever, both an ontological/spatial distance of objects from its rational center and an epistemic/temporal distance from its teleological finalism. To its perceptions and classifications it brought its logical laws of non-contradiction and the excluded middle, extending the exclusivity of its ontology or should we say, technology of separation. The natural consequence of this was the exclusivity of the self, its individual separateness and alienation. Isolated in a world of alien objects, it sought to consolidate itself through identity politics and competitive ownership, the expansion of the me and the mine and the conversion, exclusion or elimination of the they and the theirs. The further consequences of this change have been drawn out in detail by the critics of the Enlightenment and I don’t need to rehearse them here, but can state them in passing – the schema of its absolute classification or enframing forming what Heidegger has called “standing reserve,” the conversion of world to a static relational database, ready to be put to use at the press of a button and the productive technological essence of such a world ordering.
Humanism was a glorified word of the 19th and 20th centuries, the badge of world civilization, offered to all citizen of the world at the finish—line of world history. But in its hour of near-completion, the establishment of its world-wide footprint at the start of the 21st c. as the Anthropocene Age, it has suddenly lost its lustre. More, it is being held responsible for a crisis in world civilization and more, in world or earth inhabitation. At the levels of the geosphere, the biosphere and the psychosphere, cultural, political and economic, the exclusion, ownership, exploitation and enjoyment of “the others” of the human have seemingly brought us to the brink of a disaster, from which we see little escape. Humanism is suddenly beginning to look identical to its hidden dark underbelly, colonialism; it is indeed the ontological colonization of the non-human, defined exclusively in terms of its own privileged center.
What is this colonized non-human or not quite/not white human? We may identify at a first glance classifications of the non-living and the non-human entities of the earth, those who are worldless or are poor of world respectively, according to Heidegger. The exclusion of the non-living and the non-human from the anthropocentrism of the human sees fit to colonize and eliminate the geosphere and the biosphere, leading us to climate catastrophe and to the increasing extinction of the earth’s creatures, tending inexorably to our own. Next, we may identify the degrees of non-humanity within our species – the predominance of any faculty other than the reason such as imagination, emotion, intuition, desire, will, sexuality, physicality. All these faculties and more, if not yoked to the rational center of the solar chariot, are considered less than human, to be tamed, controlled and used, and if that is not possible, to be segregated, isolated, treated or eliminated. The human, defined in this manner, also gives us a datum of what is “worth saving” or “keeping alive” and what is dispensable or eliminable, the basis of a thanatopolitics. This is the sphere of cultural colonization, the othering and distancing of its own by the human. It indicates the scale of civilization and barbarism and relegates any organization of the psyche other than its privileged epistemological apparatus as occupying peripheral locations on this scale. In a postcolonial age, however, an age of independent nations, the cultural lifeworlds of non-Western nations have retained the historical continuance of such other psychic organizations in engagement with the self-styled superiority of hegemonic humanism. Its relative psychic independence, however, it more often than not, the bliss of the ignorant, since economically, culturally and politically, the flag that flies invisibly at a height above that of all nations, is still that of the modern ontology of humanism, identical to the ontology of colonialism. Moreover, the political exclusivity of nation-states, itself a consequence of humanistic objectification, tends to the further exclusionary objectification of its alternative psychic organization, an identity politics of psychic organization, whether in the name of a national religion or cultural essence.
Are there other conceptions of the human than those organized internally according to an alternative organology and teleology? Yes, it is those who can be classed by a conceptual and existential difference in the boundaries of the inside and outside. I give two examples from premodern India. The first is the celebrated example of the indigenous peasant insurgency led by the charismatic leader Birsa Munda (1875-1900) against the British crown. A discussion of this revolt by Ranajt Guha (whom we have lost recently), forms one of the initiating studies of the Subaltern Studies group. Birsa was both a political and a religious leader and claimed to be receiving his directions from a supernatural cosmic source, thakur. Dipesh Chakrabarty, another founder-member of the Subaltern Studies group has pointed out how Ranajit Guha, in his humanist critical framework, becomes apologetic in accounting for such an “extra-human agency” when discussing Birsa’s leadership of the insurgency. He jusitifies it as a political strategy whereas Chakrabarty points to a more proper subaltern position being one of taking the leader more seriously at his word. From a posthumanist point of view, we need to draw attention here to the boundaries of inside and outside that constitute other conceptions of the human and note the porous boundaries in aa plethora of premodern (and even contemporary cases) ranging from spirit possession to shamanic animistic identification and cosmic “divine” agency.
The other example I wish to provide is modern and humanistic epistemological attempts to describe medieval Indian state polities. I am following here the extensive discussion of scholarly frameworks discussed by Ronald Inden in his book Imagining India and in his later writings as well as those of his students, such as Daud Ali and Jonathan Walters at the University of Chicago or following them, William S. Sax of the University of Heidelberg. Inden’s analysis is elaborate; I don’t have time to go into its details except to point to a similar rejection of the boundaries of human agency by modernist frameworks or their reification in substantialized agents in the case of Orientalists. Inden adapts the notion of complex agency from C. G. Collingwood to discuss medieval polities in India. Other ideas which may be thought of as similar or synonymous to complex agency as those of subjectum developed by Heidegger or subjectivities without subject discussed by Foucault. In Inden’s analysis a medieval polity in India was a system of co-existing and overlapping interacting agencies from the complex agency of the state to the king, the priest, the religious sect represented by the priest, the subjects of the state and the polities of states that existed in a relational unity with the polity considered as an imperial circle (rajya mandala). In the soteriological world making schemes of medieval Indian religious sects, such as Pancharatra Vaishnavism, Pashupata Shaivism or Shakta Tantrism, priests and kings collaborated in temple building activities and investiture rituals involving the different constituents of the state. Such activities involved at its center a becoming-divine of the king and his subjects. Each of these partook through the ritual of a double agency of being the divine and being a devotee of the divine at different distances from the center, the icon in the temple and the king as its representative in the world order of the sect. Thus divine agency, complex agency and individual agency interacted dynamically through ritual performances aiming at coincidence.
Inden makes it clear that this is not to say that individuals have no agency outside of that which is bestowed on them through the ritual, in other words a symbolic agency. Individuals have a dynamic and creative agency in the lived and improvized performance of the ritual at its heightened instance and in its extended manifestation in the day to day life of the state. Here too the limits of inside and outside of the human are porous both in terms of divine or cosmic agents and collective agents. Rituals to the gods continue in our times, whether in seasonal pujas or daily or special temple rituals and the establishment of divine agents in the world are symbolically carried out in these rituals as well. But the self-definition of the human in these rituals renders them at best as transactions of individualized human benefit or the political show-business of state mythologies, not an existential lived becoming-divine of collective polities.
I would like to end with a modern response to humanism as part of the reaction to colonialism in late 19th and early 20th c. India, particularly as developed here in Kolkata during the Bengal Renaissance. It is not fortuitous that this also calls itself by the name of a rebirth, a reinvention of premodern conceptions of the human under conditions of modernity. This is through a revised definition of the human as given by Vivekananda and furthered by Sri Aurobindo. This definition of the human takes the porosity of inside and outside of the premodern conception, both in the vertical sense of a cosmic relationality and a horizontal sense of a collective or political reality, and the calls for a praxis of self-creation freed from ritual and top-down state politics. They do this by repurposing the term yoga. The term yoga has a varied and plural history in India, which became evident to the world in the 1960s and 70s with the arrival of a large number of yoga gurus teaching different goals of becoming to the West in response to the countercultural movements of that time. Still largely under the sway of modern humanism, the majority of these schools remained uncritical of the effects of humanism and provided at best subjective coping mechanisms to its problematic. A closer look at the content given to yoga by figures like Vivekananda and Aurobindo, however, show a scope of self-transformation with critical and social implications. In this view, what the human takes itself to be at any time is just a relative organization of psychic faculties and contents. Taking itself as normative, it builds a world of legitimate and illegitimate desires and values, constituting an inside (subject) and an outside (object). This givenness of the human is always relative and can be reorganized. Yoga is a methodical approach to such a reorganization based on a chosen goal of individual becoming and world-making.
In times closer to ours Michel Foucault, in his later writings, points to the way in which “technologies of the self” from antiquity, which were individual approaches to goals of becoming, and required parrhesia or truth-telling as a cornerstone of praxis were appropriated for social control by the technologies of confession. Today, he points out, perhaps an art of reclamation of such technologies of the self from their social appropriation is a way to pluralize our human goals and open them to the outside of their epistemic enclosure. Not merely goals of individual becoming but such goals as are responsible to world and earth are perhaps what call us today in an age of the posthuman as an age of the pluralized conceptions of the human. A porosity to cosmic agency as also wider relational subjectivities without subject, that of nation, world and earth can be our new goal of self-becoming, the transitional status of the posthuman as seen by Nietzsche and seconded by Aurobindo. Perhaps, here in India, this is one way in which we can understand today the message of yoga given by Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo, releasing not only our entrapment to the human but the entrapment of these prophets of the future from the humanist appropriation of ultra-national religion.
Musical Individuation and Sonocultural Technologies of Becoming
by Jonathan Kay
PhD student, California Institute of Integral Studies
To give a little background to this presentation, I’ve been a musician my whole life, traveling around the world cultivating traditional and contemporary forms of musicals knowing. I have only just entered academia 5-6 years ago because I felt an inner calling to better express my musical experiences through transcultural approaches to philosophy and psychology. In our times of world crisis I feel the deep need to address the question of how art and music can be seen as important modalities containing revolutionary potentials required in building new futures. Therefore my research is looking to find the horizons between sound and thinking, or music and philosophy/psychology.
In my PhD work under the mentorship of Debashish Banerji, I am looking at my musical life through an autoethnographic lens aiming to study how music has acted as a psycho-cosmological field of individuation. This means exploring how different musics, specifically improvised jazz music, North India raga music, and Japanese shakuhachi music functioned as technologies of self-exceeding and transformation, and offered sonic milieus facilitating individual and collective individuation. My work asks what is the role of the sonic arts specifically in ontogenesis and how can musical individuation palpate a shared collective aspiration cultivating a transindividual soundbody.
Being immersed in musical cultures and praxis throughout my whole life, the formative powers of sound and music are very clear within my lived experience yet how does one adequately put these affective experiences into conceptual frameworks without reducing them. In other words, how we allow music to speak for itself, rather than speaking on its behalf using analytic and musicological reductions. I find serious problems with the methodological frameworks of Eurocentric musicology and anthropology, and because of their underlying assumption of based on humanist ontology and epistemology, I choose not to pursue musicology or ethnomusicology, but an academic path which can facilitate new postcolonial methods of cross-cultural engagement. I have found a necessity to undertake a transdiciplinary approach to my research because to understand a culture’s music, one must also understand the metaphysical container the music is housed within, as well as the transformational goals of that culture’s engagement with music. This requires an intersection of philosophical, psychological as well as sociological studies to rigorously engage with the broader forces which shape a culture’s music.
When we listen to music, many common questions arise: Where is it from? Who performs it? What is it’s purpose? How does it make me feel? Is it beautiful? But most importantly I would ask you to consider what does it do? What psycho-cosmological forces does it invoke within me? What new potentials does it activate within me? It is these later questions I have engaged with throughout my musical life. I felt that different music traditions have offered me entire worlds which I was immersed in, confronting cultural and cosmological forces that were much bigger than myself. I also have felt that these musics offered me different ways of knowing myself, and activated new potentials from which I built myself.
And it was through immersing myself not only in the musical sound-worlds, but also in the sonocultural practices of transformation through this musical praxis that certain types of signs of individuation would appear. As I deepened myself into a sonoculture, it came to have a life of its own, and I discovered each sonoculture to have a gravity of becoming, a kind of attractor embedded within it’s praxis. In other words a technology of becoming and a power of transformation. Through my autoethnographic analysis, I can use my musical life experiences as data to engage with broader discourses in cultural philosophy and psychology. To be clear, this method is not autobiography, which allows you as an author to write subjectively about whatever you want, but rather uses my life experiences within a rigorous methodology which aims to form structures of relationship and analysis between subjectively unique and universal experience.
I will discuss the sonocultrual signs as they have appeared to me in formative events in my life using a poststructural framework based on the metaphysics of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. My analysis will be grounded in each sonoculture understood as a problematic site of individuation and approach each sign and transformative invitation to becoming-other, to become something different than oneself.Each sonoculture has very deep cultural and sonic histories that I have spent decades engaging with and immersing myself in, allowing these sonocultures to become the fabric of my individuation.
I opened this presentation by playing a jazz composition by John Coltrane called Wise One. John Coltrane was one of my earliest influences, as he looked to the East to study and discover non-western ways of musical knowing. He following his interests in world religions and spirituality and folded many aspects of non-western musical cultures, musical and spiritual, into himself as a jazz musician. Jazz has always had the openness to fold outside influences and forces into it’s expressions, and I believe that the tradition of jazz contains within it a drive to integration, what Debashish Banerji calls the integrative impulse. This impulse was contained in the heart and soul of jazz as it was passed onto me, and I was drawn to North Indian raga music and Japanese shakuhachi music to explore alternative possibilities of musical expression and transformation. In other words, to equal the problematic of the integrative impulse as it appeared to me, I was building a transcultural yantra/mandala (meaning a psycho-cosmological machine) of sonocultural becoming.
And so this is what my PhD research has allowed me to understand retrospectively about my life, and about the larger forces I was in relationship with, which brought me to live in Kolkata for 10 years learning Raga music. My time in Kolkata gave me the necessary space and time outside of my own cultural container, to challenge and reject unwanted assumptions I had inherited from my Western upbringing, and through cultivating a contemplative lifestyle based on the yoga of music, I was able to rebuild myself according to new transcultural goals of becoming based on a praxis through the sadhana of music.
As academia has challenged me to think more deeply and theoretically about my musical life, I am engaged in critically thinking about aspects which did not serve my deeper goals of becoming. For example, there are many problematic aspects of my time learning jazz in an institution which I now am challenging as a music teacher at this institution. For example, a white washing of jazz history and a removal of the revolutionary potentials contained within it. Rather than excavate cultural histories of the roots of jazz in black cultural practices, this institution taught the language of jazz as a conventional system of signs based upon learning predictable patterns and licks. This approach to pedagogy ultimately focused on creating professional workers (cogs) in the machine of the culture industries, and rather than asking cultural or spiritual questions about the revolutionary power of jazz and role of the artist in building liberated societies, one is given the goal of fitting into the industry aesthetic by creating easily enframeable images of consumption which ultimately are reducible to a semiotics of convention.
At a certain point in my life, the goal of becoming a professional, this didn’t satisfy the deeper questions emerging from the integrative impulse of jazz. This is when I decided to engage more in jazz and improvisation as an art form on the periphery of the culture industries. This was one step in the right direction, but I also found that many experimental art music and avant-garde traditions rooted in countercultural drives had codified into conventions and was understood as a niche in the fabric of the culture industries.
After a couple of liminal and mystical experiences playing music, I found that it was the question of the spiritual that was attracting my musical life. At this point I came to India to explore, and I was fortunate to right away find a guru to teach me in the guru-shishya parampara, the traditional method of learning the tradition. Raga music, being rooted in Indian metaphysics, provided a new technology of the self through a praxis based on a sono-ritual offering access to self-transcendence through engagement with ragas as cosmic deities. This was very new to me, yet it felt exactly what I was searching for. After years of becoming an insider to the Raga music tradition, I noticed how building another, non-western, node in my mandala of becoming offered me so many new creative potentials and transformational capacities.
While living in India I continued my engagement with the jazz, excavating minor genealogies of the tradition and discovering so many musicians never mentioned in my institutional jazz education, such as Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Roscoe Mitchell and the Art Ensemble of Chicago to name some. These new artists opened me to a whole new sonoculture within my own tradition, and as my research deepened I found so many countercultural impulses and revolutionary potentials in their music which fought against the white aesthetic of the jazz industry and aimed to sonically induce liberatory potentials and collective freedom.
These minor genealogies are in general not a part of the major institutional narrative of jazz, which is more akin to Ken Burns documentary series which reinforces a major lineage jazz based on the marketplace aesthetic and logic of the (white run) jazz industry. A great example of this selective logic is found even within the legacy of John Coltrane which reduces him to a post-bop musician, largely erasing anything after 1965’s A Love Supreme, until is death in 1967, a prolific period of experimental music based on principals of cosmological and spiritual.
Now I would like to focus on the period of my life here in India and discuss how India helped me to break down the kind of epistemic horizons that I felt limiting my potential, inherited from my upbringing. It was only by leaving my own cultural container that I could begin to bracket out and observe from a distance the most internalized aspects of who I was and how I selectively constructed my identity based on Western neoliberal values. This contemplative space allowed for new vantages of cross-cultural translation, overcoming logics of the dogmatic image of thought, based on mental translation and analysis rooted in the concepts such as the analogous, the similarity, and the negative.
The longer I lived in the Bengal and the more deeply immersed in the soil of classical Indian musical culture I became, the more I could feel how I was building a new sonocultural container, or house, from the ground up. And so I had two houses, jazz and Indian classical music. Yet, for many years, they were very separate, and necessarily so, as I had to bracket my western sensibilities in order to cultivate new affective and music logics. There was also a drastic difference between jazz, as a non-classical art form, and Indian classical music, and I found these edges to create conflicts within these multiple houses. Over time I found the more deeply I internalized each tradition, the less I depended upon authoritative and external structures of value and interpretation, and I could open to experiment with how each house could relate to each other. This was a long process of overcoming my inner habits and it was through cultivating long-circuits of contemplation that I found how each node in my mandala of becoming started to creatively communicate with each other.
It was through this artistic process that I found myself able to experience multiple centers in my mandala of becoming simultaneously. As I rebuild myself based on a transcultural mandala of becoming, I found that each tradition began to communicate with each other in unforeseeable ways. In this sense, it was culture difference in-itself which lead to the greatest creative potentials. Now that the analytic mind had been silenced and put in its place, I found many new creative potentials based on transcultural and heterocultural processes. The aesthetic of these practices reflected less of a multicultural mosaic, or cross-cultural confluence, but more of an experimental and transductive space which allowed the spirit, or being, of each sonoculture to combine and entangle with each other on its own terms, through me as a vessel or medium of their collision.
Through these artistic processes, it was revealed to me that I was in essence composed of a multiplicity of drives, motivations and impulses, and through my spiritual practice of Sri Aurobindo’s integral yoga I learnt to ground myself as the bindu (center point) in my mandala of becoming. Phenomenologically, I experienced this as an aporetic vanishing horizon point, in which I could allow each node in the mandala to expand and contract according to its own dynamics and logics of becoming without reducing one to the other. It was in this process that I saw how I was starting to overcome my own dogmatic image of thought, and experience within my own lived experience, as well as artistic processes, that a new ethical dimension of cultural confluence could emerge. This was based on being able to experience multiple centers simultaneously which helps overcome the hegemony of any one center over another. Therefore my autoethnography show how in my musical development, I went from exploring multicultural and cross-cultural methods, to developing experimental models of transcultural and heterocultural improvisation.
In my experience, the aesthetics of revolutionary free jazz, as well as the spiritual praxis of Raga music, have functioned as technologies of the self which have allowed me to break with the semiotics of white neoliberal subjectivity and escape approaching music as a product to be consumed as cultural capital. They both have functioned within my mandala of becoming to generate psycho-cosmological potentials of transformation, jazz more along an immanent horizontal/transversal and relational/collective axis, and Raga music along a more vertical axis based on technologies of transcendence.
I would like to end by briefly speaking to the important question of how each of these sonocultures offer individual, but also at the same time collective potentials of transindividuation. I see within both sonocultures an engaged community of participant in which listeners are not passive consumers, but active and co-creative listeners in a sono-ritual which is based on a shared aspiration of collective transformation. This is counter to images of consumption based on either a ‘cool’ jazz hipster, or an elite raga music connoisseur, but a co-participant in a sublime experience in which the entire field of becoming is transformed.
In conclusion, I invite you to ask how can you change your listening posture to become an active and co-creative listen in such countercultures, and how can you become a node in new emergent revolutionary sonocultures? How can the sonic arts, or any art for that matter, invoke new worlds, new affects and activate new logics of sense? How can we find new postures of listening based on alternative goals of becoming and build new collective networks which can palpate a transindividual soundbody?
Towards a Posthuman Psychotherapy
by: Jean Michel Borgeaud
PhD Student, California institute of integral Studies
In his famous, or rather infamous paper for many psychologists, coming from a talk first given in Paris at the College Philosophique in December 1956, ironically called ‘What is Psychology’, George Canguilhem radically challenges the status and power investments given to psychology by portraying it as a weak philosophy and a false science. According to French philosopher Roudinesco “the triple alliance of the science of spirit, of technology and biological and genetic biologism has now triumphed in all the domains of knowledge.” (1993, 144). Inspired by these foundational ideas and in the same vein, the postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault, answered the question asked him by a journalist for television in 1965; “Is there a unity of psychology Foucault answered ‘yes’ if we admit that when a psychologist studies the behavior of a rat in a labyrinth, what he is trying to define is the general form of the behavior that could be valid for a rat as well as for a human being and that therefore psychology leads to a fatal and unavoidable impasse.” In other words, western psychology, as a category of science, and as an offspring of occidental philosophy, the mother of all sciences, has now become a privileged tool for the sedimentation, measurement, and ultimately control of individual and collective subjectivity. that became objectified and normalized within the confines of the colonial humanistic paradigm rooted in the European Enlightenment. In this sense, the impasse that Michel Foucault is talking about is the result of this paradigm that equates what it is to be human with the rational mind (cogito). From this perspective, the Anthropos endowed with ‘rationality’ becomes the measurer of all things, resulting in colonialization which existentially and historically subjugates other agencies traversing non-western humans. Today, I am addressing this humanist impasse created and sustained by ideology embedded within modern societies that remains largely unacknowledged. Suppression, absence of acknowledgment, and bypassing, of all agencies that exceed or supersede human rationality are understood as an idealized image of thought.
What interests us most here is to share some elements that might shed light on the ultimate consequences that this represents within modern psychotherapy, that has in our times most predominately allied itself with psychiatry. These disciplines are founded on the premise of quickly and efficiently normalizing human behavior for it to fit a word model invested in technological modes of being that serve Capital as the hard core of its ontology. We are here referring to cognitive and behavioral therapies that essentially reeducate thoughts and emotions through mechanical processes of self-assessment and surveillance while the more radical and impetuous forces traversing one’s experience are suppressed with the use of psychiatric drugs.
In this context, it is relevant to remember that Freud was one of the first, in his own way, to point out to the need to address forces at play in humans that exceed the bounds of human rationality and volition, discussed through his explanation of the unconscious as a system of repartition of psychic force and the drive of the libido. I see this as one of the first cracks in the humanistic paradigm, and one of the first signs for the future possibility for the emergence of a non-reductionist and posthuman understanding. The important point here is not that this transversal and converging point in life we call the posthuman is to be created, but that its existence first must be recognized. The symptoms of its suppression in the form of collective and individual psychological symptoms be addressed as the unavoidable consequence of a word that denies its reality through an organized effort that rests on the mechanization and objectification of the spirit as a volitive mind.
Especially considering the implications of humanism on psychotherapy models, the element of thought as rational volition becomes paramount. If we want, as psychotherapists, to open the door for posthuman possibilities in human care, it seems important to first consider the implicit agency that is foundational in the maintenance of its power, that is a mystical investment in Judeo-Christian dogmas and religious practices. The consequences of religious humanism which places rational volition at the core of what it is to be human, can be seen as weaponizing absolute systems of valuation and imposing moral codes which govern the notions of good and evil and salvation and hell. The corruption of rational volition was then viewed as an invasion from demonic forces, initiated by an inherent condition of sinfulness from which the person was ultimately held accountable, as Foucault points out. The extirpation of demons from a human body was the role of the exorcist in the Catholic Church, and the extirpation of neurotic or psychotic symptoms is now the function of the psychiatrist or the psychologist. As Freud had already pointed out there are unconscious forces in humans that supersede his rational volitions, it is the entire religious construct of the West that is shaken and precipitated into a moral crisis.
I do not hold the pretension with such little time to even start to exhaustively problematize the question of any mode of religious morality within a post humanist perspective, but only suggest that in psychotherapy, this archetypal duality externalized as morality, that is the antagonism of good and evil, light and darkness, the unconscious and the conscious, is the result of a mode of consciousness that exists only within the confines of the human as mind, rationality standing as its sole desirable pole, and unconsciousness as its opposite, even when the goal of the psychotherapy becomes the relative or absolute revelation of unconsciousness or a dialectic of balance and cooperation between the two.
India has posited, a within the transcultural field of Yoga Psychology, the existence of a non-dual dimension of universal consciousness accessible to humans, One without a second, that metaphysically does not necessarily exclude the plural word of becoming, like in Sri Aurobindo`s Integral model, but is the meta-psychological source and condition of its existence. This for us can be the starting point for our psychotherapeutic posthuman aspiration. Most Western models do not question or work directly or indirectly with the identification of consciousness with thought or mind. For them what is called consciousness arises within thought, while the initial state of Yoga, that is a path towards the non-dual, arises when thought is starting to be perceived within the consciousness. But what is consciousness and the nature of its dynamic and constantly renewed investment with thought is one of the vital questions that psychotherapy can hold. A holistic space of true sacredness, interdependence, and radical plurality can form the conditions for the emergence of posthuman healing.
Following traditional Yogic processes, the ultimate value of the exploration of the nature of consciousness and its interface with the mind, senses, and body must start from the posthuman proposition that the answer to it will always exceed language without excluding it altogether, it will never be fully answered by the mind. Ramana Maharshi has proposed to apply in this sense the simple formulation, “Who am I?”, as a starting point, constantly rejecting mental answers, revealing the separate nature of a witnessing observing consciousness, and thoughts that arise within it. In the context of psychotherapy that fundamentally differs from a Yogic sadhana, the healing effect of such a question on the mind can be contemplated as its opening to various agencies that include the mental apparatus as perceived within a sea of potentially creative or destructive forces that the patient for the lack of a better word can learn to discern within and without through the recovery of its inherent creative potential.
If a certain distance is recognized and sustained between the consciousness in the form of witnessing all mental movements, an element of intuition as a mode of knowledge can slowly start to actualize itself, at first potentialized mainly within the heightened space of attention and intensity that the therapeutical set creates, and later flowing as healing transformation in a more continuous mode. Practically we are here working within two poles that fundamentally differ from humanistic therapies, instead of the poles of the rational and the irrational, the conscious and the unconscious, the cognitively functional and the dysfunctional, we try to establish a portion of the mind as a witness for the emergence and revelation of a potential of unbounded consciousness and also try to cultivate a non-normative transformation of the mind as a creative instrument through an ongoing unfolding of language as a mode of psycho-poeisis. The two poles of witnessing and poeisis can become the vehicle of a non-dual but still plural and therefore Integral unfoldment in posthuman psychotherapy.
Posthuman psychotherapy through acceptance, detachment, and witnessing cannot in our understanding restrict itself to the facilitation of an alleviating and escaping flight into solitary and pure being-ness that only escapes the mind without transforming it. In this sense, the erasure of the rational does not qualify by itself as a characteristic of the posthuman. Psycho-poiesis, which is for us the exploration of the plasticity of language for the becoming a transitional zone between the mind and the Infinite that paradoxically can be discovered as No-mind being-ness to borrow Buddhist terminology, is the creative instrument by which posthuman psychotherapy must endeavor to radically escape any form of mechanical and dead repetitions.
Finally, one could consider mirroring similarities between the kind of relational therapeutic mode proposed so far and the true meaning of the Disciple and Guru relationship of Yoga, that is, not based on the colonial violence of authority but on the sitting-near pedagogy of the Upanishads. To sit near is an act of Presence, or to become present to the Presence. For the therapist, it can be cultivated as an availability to the power of resonance that our posthuman potential holds creating an open space of listening, and cultivating a deep trust in the power of co-creative resonance can create the conditions for healing that descends from beyond any of the words that are being uttered, consciously resisting the immediacy and facility of psychological interpretation and formalism that could, if systematically and mechanically applied verbally or non-verbally only result into some form of identification and humanistic closure.
References
Canguilhem, George. 1958. Qu`est ce que la psychologie?, Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale.
Roudinesco, Elisabeth. 1993. Situation d`un texte, qu`est ce que la psychologie? In Georges Canguilhem philosophie histoire des sciences. pp. 134-144.