Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Space and time have become relativized or unhinged

However, in the present rapidly uniformalizing phase of neo-liberal globalization, the Hegelian end-of-history, there is no “inside” whether social or psychological which is immune from the determination of this fundamentally political regime...
One sees a good example of this active today in the increasingly overt politicization of the ashram. I see this as the inability to see yoga simultaneously as social/cultural/psychological. The continuing denial of their intimate braiding has lead on the one hand to a rupture of the yoga in its alignment with extreme right wing politics and on the other to the willed refusal of the ostrich. 11:53 AM 

Comment on Introduction to The Seven Quartets of Becoming by debbanerji from Comments for Posthuman Destinies by debbanerji … “an eternal perfection is moulding us in its image.”
What is the yoga of self-perfection but an ethics (will-to-right) and aesthetics (will-to-beauty) of self-fashioning? … As I said earlier, there are many descriptions of the Integral Yoga which Sri Aurobindo held simultaneously, and “an aesthetics of the self” leading to the image of Beauty, I believe, is one such description. 8:00 PM

dnag02 commented on Dilip Kumar Roy Simply APURBO (Excellent) article!! 
I did not know or care to know until very recently (I am just so ashamed and embarrassed now) anything about DKR even though my dear and genuine pal of mine, Chandramowli mentioned DKR many times in the past in relation to IY. He then through some divine push, I guess now, felt goaded to get the book "Sri Aurobindo came to me" for me from Pondicherry. As I have been reading the book and reading and getting to know more about DKR now, I am just pondering how much I would have missed if I had not read and known about DKR. I understand now the context of many of Sri Aurobindo's letters and responses that I had read years ago from various sources without knowing that those were directed to DKR. Thank you so very much for the very informative article.

Sri Aurobindo has shown that the truth does not lie in running away from earthly life but ... Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1919, “Apart from all phenomena of decline or ...

Other writers like Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) and Harindranath Chattopadhyaya (1898-1990) dealt with religious or mystical subjects. After India attained ...

Sri Aurobindo breaks new ground in interpreting the ancient Vedas. His deeper insight into this came from his own spiritual practices for which he found vivid ...

Sri Aurobindo wrote prophetically, almost a hundred hears ago, that the future poetry “transcending the more intellectualised or externally vital and sensational ...

The latest issue of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion contains the presidential address of British sociologist James A. Beckford. In it, Beckford critically reflects on the concepts of public religion and the postsecular. From the abstract:
The term “postsecular“ is proliferating in the writings of scholars working in the humanities and social sciences. This article assesses the variety of meanings attributed to the term, groups them in six clusters of ideas, and raises questions about the tensions that exist between some of its different meanings. Taking the central idea that religions enjoy relatively high visibility in the public sphere of postsecular societies, the article then considers how well this applies to the case of Britain. It argues that the visibility of religion in Britain’s public sphere—far from being postsecular in any of the current meanings of the term—is actually associated with the state’s “interpellation“ of selected religions as partners in the delivery of public policies for managing diversity, combating inequality, and promoting social enterprise. Read the full address here (subscription required).

Here is the talk I gave last week at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Boston. (I published the abstract for the talk when I originally submitted it last summer here.) …
In the 21st century, the very expansion of the techniques of intensified continuity, especially in action films and action sequences, has led to a situation where continuity itself has been fractured, devalued, fragmented, and reduced to incoherence. That is to say, the very techniques that were developed in order to “intensify” cinematic continuity, have ended up by undermining it… 
Even in classical narrative films, following the story is not important in itself. It is just another one of the ways in which we are led into the spatiotemporal matrix of the film; for it is through this matrix that we experience the film on multiple sensorial and affective levels. I am making a rather large theoretical claim here, one that I will need to justify, and further develop, elsewhere. But I think it has major consequences for the ways in which we understand post-continuity.
In post-continuity films, unlike classical ones, continuity rules are used opportunistically and occasionally, rather than structurally and pervasively. Narrative is not abandoned, but it is articulated in a space and time that are no longer classical. For space and time themselves have become relativized or unhinged. 

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