Timepass

Timepass: having sat four days under the Bodhi tree in Bodhgaya and watched in procession:

– an ant struggling to go the wrong way as hundreds of devotees perambulate around the tree/shrine – it was eventually crushed flat
– literally thousands of feet passed as I watched – people’s feet are so varied in India, rings on toes, twisted toenails, variety of socks (its winter)
– a red carpet was laid out, before some dignitary came an was shown the shrine
– Tibetan, Thai, Sri Lankan, Indian, and occasionally European monks
– groups of 30 spiritual tourists and tour guide sitting and chanting in 15 minute blocks (there must be a schedule)
– a scramble for a fallen Bodhi leaf (one had fell on me while sitting with the meditators in 1989 – I did not realise its meaning, but could see the devotees looking at me and wondering why someone who had come for just 15 minutes was lucky enough to get a leaf – I gave it to one of them

– a glossy-bearded well-groomed clean/wealthy US american 35 year old explaining everything about the temple, from the Lonely Planet web guide, to a younger female, loudly, during the monks chanting, and quite annoying (sent to test my patience I think).
– the Tibetan, Thai, Sri Lankan, Indian monks accepting gifts of money and gold jewellery from 30-something Korean, Japanese women visitors dressed in elegant salwar kameez
– older white women doing full exotica
– crazed Indian sadhu types that speak fluent English hippy
– eastern European women and Indian men about 25 doing full length body prayer, pranam crouch, sit up, yoga type perambulations round the shrine (there is a name for this that I’ve not looked up in google brain).

– 65 year old Australian guy watching all this with his Vietnamese friend who sneaks snacks from her bag (strictly buddhist!). This guy takes occasional notes in a notebook
– a spider web spun among the Bodhi tree leaves
– bodhi tree leaf sellers, a jewell embedded in the leaf, vacuum sealed in a plastic cover
– armed police, male and female, and a ruckus started nearby, they join with enthusiasm and lathi sticks
– different nationalities with organised meditation spots – the Vietnam one usually vacant after the first saturday

– non-la (vietnamese conical bamboo hat) is more evident here than in HCMC.
– Indian female army troop in a fabulous blue and white camouflage pattern uniform – you would not be able to find them in… an aquarium.
– 50 year old californian walking super slow, mindful of each step, in everyone’s way nevertheless
– stray dogs
– monk feeding female stray (so ‘not’ stray) metres from the holiest of holies
– crows, apparently dying but because rubbish is cleared too quickly now and they are starving, evident here also (as in Kolkata)
– all mosquitoes matter
– cleaning staff work 5 hour shifts, while devotees offer a few minutes cleaning as votive penance, murmuring gatha or parithas.

– other parts of the bodhisattva’s journal not emphasised in Bodhgaya, as if he landed for those 7 weeks from outer space – sci fi buddha

– still peace, much heavily robed, cloth selling, fashion-conscious, peace (tailor stores doing well near the main market)
Much more of this…World keeps on being interesting I guess. I am not ready to renounce…

Reich on moralism

‘There are not many mistakes as significant as the conception that class consciousness is a matter of morality’ (Reich [1935] 1971: 24)

< the one who must steal to eat has more rebellious spirit than the sucker who quietly lays their head on the capitalist block and awaits the axe.

Picture from a company that allows power naps… as a AI-search-limit example of mixed opportunism.

Bad Marxism

Thinking of returning to this problem of time – how everything has got more urgent, but nothing is moving at all – hyper-stagnation.

From the reviews of Bad Marxism 1.0:

“The dominant theme around which “Bad Marxism: Capitalism and Cultural Studies” is organised concerns a critical account of the (often limited) engagement of key cultural theorists with Marx’s ideas.

Two related lines of critique are threaded together. Firstly, the book criticises the myopic obsession with the absurd and the incongruous that characterises much theorising within contemporary cultural studies. The increasing marginalisation of Marx’s (global) political project behind, for example, James Clifford’s ‘fascination with spicy little details’ (p 42) or Jacques Derrida’s ‘new astonishment at time and technology’ (pp 63–64) is forcefully condemned throughout the book. Accompanying this derision of the ‘stunned contemplation’ (p 183) marking contemporary cultural analysis runs a concurrent attack on the subsequent political paralysis within which leftist theorising has remained content to reside. Complicity of an ‘institutionalised quietism’ (p 12) in a world still ravaged by imperialism, plunder and war represents nothing less than a ‘giving up’ (p 193) of intellectual responsibility and effort.

Having critiqued, then, a number of ‘bad Marxisms’ within which the transformative project of Marx’s writings have been lost, the book’s second theme seeks a re-engagement with questions of political prescription and action. Insisting on a critical, open-ended and practical engagement with a Marxism capable of intervention and resistance. Emphasising the truly global dimensions and consequences of capitalist accumulation and exploitation, this is contextualised with reference to the current geopolitical climate of South Asia.”

Working day – time sucks, colour coded stomach-turning adulterations of food…

“In ‘The Working Day’, Marx reports that the appointment of Mr. H. S. Tremenheere as Commissioner of Inquiry coincides with the occurrence of “several public meetings and … petitions to Parliament [whence] arose the cry of the London journeymen bakers against their over-work … [appealing] not [to] the heart of the public but its stomach” (Marx [1867–1887] 1990, 215). And what was it that turned the stomachs of this public if not the “incredible adulteration of bread, especially in London … revealed by the House of Commons Committee” (214). Marx observed that this committee was unmoved by the urgent cry of the bakers and retained its “conviction that free trade meant essentially trade with adulterated, or as the English ingeniously put it, ‘sophisticated’ goods.” He paints this as a “kind of sophistry [that] knows better than Protagoras how to make white black, and black white, and better than the Eleatics how to demonstrate ad oculos that everything is only appearance” (215). Appearance matters – Erscheinungsform, a key word in the Marxist lexicon for commodities, fetish-characters, and how things at first glance may look – and yet here black and white is not used only to invoke classical, pre-Socratic erudition, or comment on adulteration alone. The black–white tint also references en passant the “barbaric horrors of the slave trade” (240), skin (246, 259), and the white worker’s getting a hiding. The complaints of the workers in England are linked to slavery emancipation in the U. S. as thematic features in an overall complex of strategic writing, presenting evidence in a design that calls for collective resistance and refusal of capital. In his letter to Abraham Lincoln, Marx adopts a chromatic metaphor to instruct the U. S. President in these terms: the “highest prerogative of the white-skinned labourer” is not “to sell himself and choose his own master.” The “struggle for emancipation” has broken through this “barrier to progress” with “the red sea of civil war” (Marx to Lincoln, 28 January 1865, in Marx 1865).”

For more on this – “Black, white, blue, red: struggles against death and vampires in Marx’s Capital” Nineteenth-Century Contexts, DOI:10.1080/08905495.2024.2336615

https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2024.2336615

Always happy to send a pdf to friends… Email me.

Saving Time – research theme

The one thing I am urgently trying to write is a text on the need for time (I don’t have time to write it, so there’s the problem). Nevertheless, I keep getting things that need to be read or recorded or transcribed… Here for economy, is a recent conversation written up as a note:

There are topics that sociologists should regularly discuss – the problems with the university because that is where we mostly are – especially as, worldwide and locally, it is facing huge pressures because of the new marketing systems, branding, commercialisation, corporate capture of all areas, from teaching to research, creativity to critique (even critique has become a brand). A key question is always that of how to support the widest range of students, especially from the earliest entrance to university of anyone with curiosity, those who are interested in research, as all students ideally must be, but also all of us face difficult carrying out research in the face of increasing restriction and regulation at all levels. The very idea of research needs much critical discussion, and ‘Research’ cannot be left only as an afterthought or an isolated category within administrative considerations. Research cannot be considered as if it were only a cost, assuming we all know what research is and what resources it requires (and then how to reduce that cost!) is a recipe for closing-down thought.

The concepts and guiding modalities of sociology must always be discussed. Resting on older concepts as if they were resolved and any debate or critique of them is no longer needed is stagnation, but then some older concepts are jettisoned or ignored when they might spark renewal. Aiming to be always new, even when sometimes this means the old should be considered as new. Social structure must be debated, the family and received categories must be debated, to keep them alive as ideas and themes, not as habitual routine tasks. Most importantly, there must be clarification of the possible interpretations of what and how research can be multiplied expansively among the many varieties of research methods that match up with many different styles of writing. Such a discussion needs to happen in forums bringing together undergraduates, Masters, PhD researchers, all staff, teaching and administrative, alumni, support workers, parents, elders and of course those already past retirement age. All other topics that we could and should discuss – be it Ukraine or Palestine, or family sociology as a dominant theme, welfare, migration, and not only the popular themes, but also those that may tend rather to be neglected somewhat, or even avoided, or relegated to the responsibility of disciplines apparently seen as ‘outside’ sociology, which seems to have happened to social theory, political philosophy, even political sociology.

Time is a pressing, paradoxically urgent, problem, too often ignored. The idea of long-term fieldwork in anthropology is rarely supported and short ‘ethnographic’ survey-based fieldwork is dominant, not only because there is little time for anything more. For this reason as well some degree of push-back against the rapid-fire demands of the neoliberal university needs support from critical elements of sociology based on its history and its more engaged forms wherever they may be – noting especially that oftentimes these critical views are elsewhere, in for example, Rojava, Palestine, Morocco, Senegal, Brazil, Kolkata, New Zealand, and the reality of the need to translate also takes time.

We might also consider the real problems of how especially younger colleagues have too little time to read anything in a reflective way. Too many long classes, long staff meetings, and too much admin to do leave them little real time for reading – but they are thrown in the face of a new plethora of branded products offering shortcuts for reading, summarising PDFs or paraphrasing arguments without having to internalise or argue any positions through – the replication of the same is strong here. Digital technologies of reading summarise on repeat, the possibility of anything new entering such processes is reduced.

The work of clarification, self-clarification through writing, preparing and working out what your view is in advance of trying to publish also takes time. An ‘time-saving’ app does not save time, rather fills it with commodification of even more of everyday life. Separately we might consider this digitalisation of knowledge and time as a new enclosure and the present-day version of proletarianisation of cretinisation.