Celebrating Ang Lee by censorship
The BBC reports that the PRC major press is quick to claim Ang Lee as a great "Chinese" director - even as it censors his comments on homosexuality. The government also excludes Brokeback Mountain from its list of approved films.
This allows me to dilate a moment on the famed concept of "Eastern Tradition" and its special knowledge of the body: unfortunately, you'll find in most Eastern traditions a brutal attitude toward homosexuality and women. And Buddhism as a form of spirituality seems designed to cultivate resignation with regard to the status quo.
So if the only way to imagine overcoming what is given is identification with the tale of doomed (gay) love, then I think the Chinese government has responded "correctly" according to its old puritanical Communist Party imperatives.
But to make of Ang Lee a Chinese national treasure while repudiating the film he made is sad, very, very sad.
This allows me to dilate a moment on the famed concept of "Eastern Tradition" and its special knowledge of the body: unfortunately, you'll find in most Eastern traditions a brutal attitude toward homosexuality and women. And Buddhism as a form of spirituality seems designed to cultivate resignation with regard to the status quo.
So if the only way to imagine overcoming what is given is identification with the tale of doomed (gay) love, then I think the Chinese government has responded "correctly" according to its old puritanical Communist Party imperatives.
But to make of Ang Lee a Chinese national treasure while repudiating the film he made is sad, very, very sad.
7 Comments:
The role of women or the relation to the "status quo" of Buddhism has strongly varied over history. There are extensive studies on both of these.
Psychoanalysis is hardly different here btw., already in the short span of its existence. Lots of political indifference and brutal sexism there! I know a fairly prominent writer in psychoanalysis who was excluded from training as a traditional Freudian analyst, because he was gay.
"Strongly varied" views on women is not good enough for me -- I'm afraid that it is only with secularization that women can arrive at full civil rights -- Secular modernity, insufficient as it seems, is also the foundation of the rights of the queer.
I would prefer that we say then that "psychoanalysis" like Buddhism -- also "has a history" and that it too has varied in its attitudes toward homosexuality.
Play fair anonymous --
I really do agree with most of what you are saying. Including with secular modernity. I'm not really writing in order to defend Buddhism per se.
Practicing Buddhists, so far as i know, have been adjusting to modernity and do so very willingly. The topic of women has become widely addressed at the initiative of both men and women. At its philosophical core, Buddhism is after all extremely secular, in some respects more so than modernism because of its longstanding vehement antiessentialism. Exactly what is secularity, beyond tautologically defining it in terms of western modernism? It has to do with metaphysics and cultural norms.
As to fairness, I would have liked to have seen you considerably more fair concerning your representation of Zen and Buddhist philosophy. You were using only esoteric terms from pop literature, and not one of them really occurr in those forms in the canonical literature of the traditions you targeted. Well so be it, you can't stand the stuff. I like you anyway ;-)
I do have one idea recently where one might find a point of common interest between Bud. and Ana., namely the idea of the death instinct. I need to look and think more into what the metaphysics on the anlaysis side looks like to say more. I find it rather mysterious and bordeline unsecular already in terms of psychoanalysis. It's a helluva unsecular notion!
I'm trying to keep an open mind on the Buddhism issue, but I like to use this analogy --
imagine anonymous if you (I'm assuming you're not Chinese) move to Beijing with your family when you're little and you grow up Judaeo-Christian in this foreign culture and then one day all your 30something "cool" friends have "discovered" Episcopalianism or Judaism or whatever your family's religion was or is and they think it is the COOLEST thing EVER. And they're wearing kabbalah bracelets, or cool yarmulkes, or else they're sporting "retro" crosses and really, really into freeing Jersualem from Palestinian rule. Wouldn't you be a LITTLE creeped out? They're like, "Jesus is COOL...he's a man of peace." Or else, "Moses like ROCKED 'cause he found the ten commandments!"
I'm just trying to make you see it my way -- from the folk/pop/familial Buddhist point of view, where karma is just another word that Boy George used in his song, but rather one that your mother evoked in her moments of deepest despair.
Chew on that!
That of course makes a lot of sense.
But this brings back the issue of populism. Trying to discuss populist religious or sociological issues tends to end in mud slinging.
We don't need populist versions of Dogen, Hakuin, Freud, Derrida, Heiddeger, nor Adorno for that matter, or we just end up with Jonathan Kendell style obituaries and nothing interesting left to discuss. There has to be some honest interest in the non populist exegesis of a subject, and above all, pitting populism against an honest critical interest puts the latter at a disadvantage usually. That's how politics work!
It is an interesting trait of Buddhism (which I take no pro or con on here) that it sees popular teaching as legitimately heuristic, and explicitely allows for provisional untruths. This is probably ultimately tied to its anti essentialism, btw.
So popular ideas about karma + reborn souls, can be refined to the view about no-self (anata)or no-soul and causality, and the possibility of causal intervention into self-manifestation.
It is nearly metaphysical materialism: a metaphysics in which causality is more important than "being".
I don't mention these as alternatives to be followed, but as contrasting ideas which help us see the metaphysics in analytic primitives like "libido", "Kraft", " death instinct" , and perhaps also to point to the posibility that our psyche is motivated and effected additionally by other things than these conceptual primitives, already for causal reasons. If it weren't there could be no such thing as medicative psychiatry!
I like secular modernism and psychoanalysis. But I truly fear if it does not self-critically investigate the blind-spots in secularism (i.e. the naive belief it avoids metaphysics), then it will be simply be replaced. We already see it happening. Popular religion and esoterics are gaining ground everywhere. It's time to look at the assumptions of modernism more closely for its own sake.
Anon,
I agree that it is HIGH TIME to take populism very seriously!
And that is exactly what I do in the book I'm writing -- can't comment more than that -- I've got a lot more to say on the death drive, but I am going into conference planning mode -- will link to the conference on the blog and will return next week -- to take up your EXTREMELY legitimate challenges!!!
I'm more Buddist than yoooo
I'm more Buddhist than yooo
nyha nyha nyha nyha
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