Michel I liked the recontextuaization of Tarde, because all these early 20th century thinkers like Tarde, Bergson, Aurobindo et al need to be re-read in light of the present. In Aurobindo's case we recontextualize his yoga, in light of rapid cultural evolution, to demonstrate that certain practices of yoga, stripped of their reactionary Hindu or new age context can be used as practices to resist the appropriation of attention by the global machinery of consumption. Indeed if one reads Aurobindo in context his yoga, can not really be separated from a liberation practice that was also evolved as a resistance to colonial occupation. Similarly when, the author of this article and people like Stiegler and others following Foucault express a need for constructing practices or "inner technologies" as a resistance to the contagion streaming through neo-liberal networks of global capitalism, that capture attention by employing the neuro-marketing of consumption, the need arises to develop practices that help to re-appropriate attention and resist conditioning by either markets or political ideologies. In the context of "phd" (aka Post-Human Destinies) we have suggested that -contrary to its appropriation by fundamentalist Hindus or new age philosophers like Ken Wilber- that integral yoga when practiced with a critical eye toward the contagion of markets and ideologies can be used as an effective inner-technology to facilitate liberation from their consumptive demands. Rich On Jan 15, 2011, at 8:39 PM, Michel Bauwens wrote:
Dear Richard,
thanks for this forward, I am aware of Tarde's work mostly through the reading of Maurizio Lazzarato (in French), and though I find it interested, I do not use it much, I guess I'm still much more of a structuralist-oriented thinker,
but please keep forwarding such items,
I'm particularly interested in the 'yoga of resistance', can you tell us more? and what is 'phd'?
Michel
On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 9:16 AM, Richard Carlson <[email protected]> wrote: btw. do you know Gabriel Tarde, there is an excellent article by Tony Sampson on network/contagion social theory that puts him into current perspective visa vie Durkheim, Deleuze, Thacker, Hardt and other while exploring the often unconscious transmission of what spreads through the affective feedback loops of infectable populations, - what intrigues me is that the resistance methods he explores at the end has interesting intersection points with what on "phd" we have begun calling the yoga of resistance
"Tarde's diagram comprises of mostly unconscious flows of desire, passion, and imitative radiations of muscular, as well as cerebral activities. In sharp contrast then, Tarde's society of imitation does not fall back on collective or individual representations. It is not at all about pure association as it concerns the disassociated connectivity (unconscious association) of a social somnambulist. Like this, Tarde's social becomes an assemblage of relationality composed of self-spreading and mesmeric imitative waves or flows. [54] What comes together does not occur by way of a collective consciousness pushing down on the individual, but is instead the "coherent" outcome of "desires that have been excited or sharpened by certain [social] inventions," which imitatively radiate outward, point-to-point, assembling what appear to be the logical arrangements of social form, like markets, nations and cities.[55] What radiates outwards are neither social facts nor collective representations, but the microrelations of shared passions, thoughts, conversations, beliefs, feelings and affects which pass through porous self/other relations in all manner of contagious environments, including corporate, economic and political arenas. [56] What comes together "socially" in these Tardean spaces is neither genetically subject-bound nor obligated to the wisdom of collective consensus, but is rather the outcome of an infra-individual relation that spreads below consciousness. The social, according to Tarde, is a vital force that self-spreads, radiates and vibrates out from capricious mechanism-independent social encounters with events and accidents"
Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks
http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=675
~r
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