Sunday, May 16, 2021

Afro-Asian ring-necked parakeet (Psittacula): Non-theist Quakers' MD psychiatry ~ in all ~200 countries and their main languages at WUaS? * As a follow up, am glad Quakers have a very long historical approach to conflict in the Middle East, even if NtFs - nontheistic Friends/Quakers are young - The NtQ Wikidata Q-item # as a way to facilitate peace through developing MD psychiatry and psychiatric resources? :) Friendly nt-UQ or nt-QU regards, Scott * NtFs, nontheistic Quakers, UQs, All, identity questions :) religious identity questions religious tribal violence questions? potential peacemaking questions? "The Power of Identity" (2000, rev. ed.) is Manuel Castells book about this ... (with a brief read into Castells' thinking here * * Little Red Yogis re UU LRY - Liberal Religious Youth - is a reference to the transcendentalist thinking perhaps * But as I think I write in my Hippy Anjali Yoga Notations, skepticism and agency are helpful and good ideas in thinking about Yoga (and religion :) * * * Methinks Neo.life is as close as it gets to a kind of 'hippy News' these days, thanks to Jane Metcalfe in Berzerkeley, CA, And George Church in Cambridge, MA (they published the book Neo together I think) ... And that World Univ & Sch could complement a "Hippy News' even (and in 7k languages too!) * Rob Califf MD - "48 yrs ago yesterday. Modified hippie wedding--dress made from curtain cloth. Stylish bow tie. Headed for Myrtle Beach"

 

Non-theist Quakers' MD psychiatry ~ in all ~200 countries and their main languages at WUaS? 


Hi Nontheist Friends, Nontheist Quakers, Friends, All, 


You'll find here in some ways what some of us in the aggregate think nontheist Quakers are - https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2021/03/eldorado-national-forest-california-ntf.html - and in response to the Wikidata entry Q+item #'s DESCRIPTION of "nontheist Quakers" (- and for more about Jacques Lacan MD, and (Quaker nontheistic Friend) and 'friendly-affiliated' Lacanian psychoanalyst and psychiatrist George L Alexander MD, and their thinking here in thread, and in general, please see this blog label - https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/search/label/Jacques%20Lacan%20MD, as well as related blog labels).

Friendly cheers, Scott




* * 

In addition to Board-certified MD psychiatry in all 200 countries, online, I'd include, research-wise esp. ~


Lacanian psychoanalysis online 

evolutionary biology-informed psychiatry - https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/search/label/Jacques%20Lacan%20MD

Primatology - ie primates - and Great Ape, and other species, research for human psychiatry - https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/search/label/primates

John Money Ph.D. "Concepts of Determinism" informed psychiatry - https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/search/label/John%20Money%20PhD

with talk therapy, all online, and eventually with avatar bots :)

  And Asylum, e.g. Friends' Hospital, potentially even better in a virtual Harbin Hot Springs-informed (synthesizing Harbin's thinking about well being and mental health too) ~ https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/search/label/virtual%20Harbin

As well as meditation-focused - https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/search/label/meditation - regarding the relaxation response (even as a Non-theistically Friendly & scientifically measurable approach) - https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/search/label/relaxation%20response - with parallels to sitting in Quaker Silent Meeting esp ... 

And music, too - https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/search/label/music - eg why do JS Bach, Allman Brothers, Grateful Dead - much from the 1960s and '70s - seem to create well-being creativity and productivity when working at the computer, or doing things around home? ... 

and caring & nurturing-oriented especially ... https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/search/label/care :)


*

NtFs, Nontheist Friends, NtQs, ntfs, Friends, All, 

As a follow up, and

"Regarding the Wikidata Q-item statement about 'non-theist Quakers' - https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:EntityPage/Q7049628 - and many of your thoughts about this, I'm curious about the 'ontology' ('structure of knowledge' in this structured knowledge database, if you will) and how this term will be translated into" not only about ~300 languages (in Wikipedia and Wikidata), but into the remaining 6,839 known living languages in the world.  

With the very closed Unitarian Universalist Church of Kensington-Berkeley - a destination on a frequent walk in this ongoing coronavirus pandemic - am wondering if it could be considered a nt-Quaker Unitarian church, thanks to the silence and stillness that I sense there now. Appreciating too Unitarians openness to many different kinds of religious thinking including a kind of atheistic friendliness, and non-theistic reasoning while connecting socially (re friendliness too). 

But am wondering too, regarding the possibly spuriousness of the Covid-19 pandemic, re genetics, whether nontheistic-Friendly MD psychiatry could be of great benefit in all these languages, and especially in the war torn countries of the world (re Quakerly testimonies, not-theistic too). 

Here's MIT Professor of Shakespeare and literature Diana Henderson - https://twitter.com/DianaHe23732776 - who just re-Tweeted this - https://twitter.com/sahloul/status/1393720443077599234?s=20 (why are neurologists and their families, who are very close to psychiatrists in some of the world being killed?) - where I think there's a need of armies, corps, or incredibly greater numbers of best Universities' smart MD psychiatrists for all the war-torn countries in the world like Palestine, its neighbor, and African countries too, and other peace-impoverished lands and regions. ...

but find this focus on India by Harvard perhaps germane here -
Harvard Professor S.V. Subramanian offers an on-the-ground perspective as COVID-19 surges in India

https://twitter.com/Harvard/status/1394002212641193985?s=20 - instead. 

So playing with the NtF acronym, 
could someone who is a Nontheist Friend Unitarian Quaker be an UQ, if ...Unitarianism and Quakerism are combined? Or the grammatically spelling correct 'QU'? A NtF QU?

Here's a Duke Professor of Physics on Quakerism and Unitarianism - https://webhome.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Philosophy/god_theorem/god_theorem/node25.html - perhaps re their differences. (Why this is posted to a Duke Physics' URL is a bit beyond me:).

Am hopeful that MIT OCW-centric, and Yale OYC-centric wiki World Univ & Sch, NtF-informed too, might begin to graduate smart MD psychiatrists - in all 200 countries' main languages even, and make psychiatry available safely and newly online even!  

NtFriendly regards, 
Scott


PS
Here are some resources I looked up a few weeks ago regarding non-theism, psychiatry, Jacques Lacan MD, the French psychiatrist and "founder" of Lacanian psychoanalysis, for your perusal.  ... 

Thanks, again, Margaret and Bonnie, for bringing in the concept of the 'real' regarding NOT the supernatural - and also not the natural - I think. Am following up here, non-theistically Friendly wise with some thoughts from Lacan, and about Lacan's thinking and regarding the real. Appreciating, Margaret, your implications for the experience of love (re the God is love idea even???,  - and regarding perhaps ideas of the real re love). 


Lacanian psychoanalytic psychiatrist George Alexander MD suggested, in reading Lacan in French, that Lacan's 'real' as part of Lacan's tripartite registers that inform the 'unconscious' psychoanalytically, along with the 'imaginary' (or mirror)  and the 'symbolic' - is difficult to define for Lacan, and suggested too (for him) that the metaphor of 'the table' (as material as it is - with many other connotations, - eg for me, eating at the table, sitting at the table in business negotiations) might be one (of possibly many, many) way(s) to think about the 'real.' How many ways can we all think about the 'nature' of the real psychologically, let alone philosophically?

When I searched on 
"Does the "real" for Jacques Lacan have connotations of God or the divine?" (He was French and came out of a Catholic background culturally, albeit a medical doctor, and a psychoanalytic MD). And while the following are religiously-oriented a little, they offer interesting insight into how writers and scholars have engaged the idea of the real and even regarding seemingly some notions of 'God' - and not too NOT the natural. 


Lacan
and the real 1

Jacques Lacan, Encore: Feminine Jouissance, the Real, and the Goal of Psychoanalysis
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226349466.003.0006
This chapter discusses Lacan's Seminar XX as a theorization, in terms of psychoanalysis's emphasis on sexual difference, of Bataille's account of the deep divide within Christian mysticism. Bataille's work raises the question of how mysticism can be the site of both the desire to be everything; to escape the particularity, limitations, and constraints of the body; and of the recognition that one is not everything, of embodied subjectivity in all of its pleasurable and painful effects. For Lacan, this doubleness is rooted in the nature of human language as both bodily and irreducible to the materiality of the body, and in the nature of human subjectivity as embodied and yet always also split from the body. Lacan's work also opens the possibility of undermining that same set of associations, for he insists that the goal of psychoanalysis is to refuse the claims to mastery and wholeness on which male-dominant culture, society, and their unconscious rest.

Keywords:   Lacan, Seminar XX, Christian mysticism, male-dominant culture, materiality


in
Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History$ Users Without A Subscription Are Not Able To See The Full Content.
Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History
Amy Hollywood

Print publication date: 2002
Print ISBN-13: 9780226349510
Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: March 2013
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226349466.001.0001




Lacan 
and the real 2

Conversion and the Real: The (Im)Possibility of Testimonial Representation

Pastoral Psychology volume 65pages555567(2016)Cite this article

Abstract

Although the spiritual vibration of conversion can be felt (by the curious outsider) through what conversion performers say in their testimonial discourse, what transforms the convert ‘on stage’ into a ‘new being’ and what is ‘the real’ (le réel) in conversion performance remain unclear. An important question in this connection is, What is ‘real’ in a conversion representation, both with respect to the convert’s interaction with the audience and to the construction of social reality? Following Lacan’s tripartite register of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real, in this essay I argue that through testimonial discourse converts construct social reality as an answer to the impossibility of ‘the real’ in their performative discursive practice. In the first part, I question the constructed nature of testimonial representations—as well as some academic knowledge production that has governed conversion research in the last few decades—and how these representations encourage ‘outsiders’ to read the narrative repertoire as a negation or mirroring ‘the real’ of the conversion experience. In the second part, I apply Roland Barthes’ analytic reflections on photography to conversion research, especially the notions of the studium (the common ground of cultural meanings) and the punctum (a personal experience that inspires private meaning). This brings me to a number of theorists (mostly never used in the field of religious conversion)—Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Slavoj Žižek—who are important to the perspective that is developed in this essay.

Let’s get down, to the underground spiritual game.

—Fela Kuti, “Teacher don’t teach me nonsense”

Introduction

Triggered and supported by my research on the role of conversion testimonial among recovering drug addicts, my work over the past several years in these critical endeavors has been specifically focused on the validity, reliability, objectivity, and other methodological challenges in the empirical study of religious conversion (Sremac 20132014; Sremac and Ganzevoort 2013ab). In this essay, I want to continue in this manner, focusing on Lacanian notions of the real in conversion phenomena and the (im)possibility of its testimonial representation. My use of the term ‘testimony’ comes from Ricoeur’s (1979) work on the hermeneutics of testimony, in which testimony is understood not only as cognitive assent but also as a narrative dialogue with the narrator’s audience and the divine (see Sremac 2014). The narrative capacity of conversion testimony—particularly since it belongs to the representative sphere—is directed towards an audience with the aim of persuasion. Stromberg (2014) argues that reframing a life story through a testimonial account is “a powerful means of persuading oneself and others that a genuine transformation has taken place” (p. 125). Testimony is a central ‘technique of the self’ (Marshall 2009) and the principal mode of creating a new identity and collective belonging. Conversion experience, regardless of its narrative configuration, must be ritually transformed and animated in order to contextualize the power of spiritual transformation. This ritual employment of conversion testimony requires transformation, consecration, or animation by the audience; it conveys experience, which can only be fully understood by those who have already gone through the same experience. Conversion testimonies, as they are retold orally and composed as autobiographies, become the paradigms by which converts interpret their lives and spiritual transformations (Rambo 1993, p. 158). In this sense, conversion testimony functions as a mechanism of reinforcement and commitment. It is a radical re-examination of one’s own life in the form of public-representation.

Following Lacan’s tripartite register of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real, I argue that through testimonial discourse religious subjects construct social reality as an answer to the impossibility of the ‘real’ in their performative discursive practice. The testimonial order belongs to the imaginary register as a performative and imaginary frame, for example, the way the convert presents her or his spiritual transformation through testimonial performances and through identification (a mimetic movement) with others. The public aspect of this imaginary identification is perhaps a newly inscribed religious identity constructed through the gaze of others (Austin-Broos 2003, p. 2). Testimony is formed in the discourse of the other that becomes manifest in a public testimonial narrative (the communal-discursive construction of the ‘imagined self’). The symbolic order is the space of language and narratives and is passed through the filter of religious community; it is somewhat reminiscent of Stromberg’s (1993) ‘canonical language’. The symbolic order is considered to be the formative order of the convert; it is the ‘sujet en proces’ (Kristeva 1998) within which ‘canonical language’ can open itself to the sacred, the mystical, and the sublime. The symbolic order creates the narrative and culture in which the subject can express itself as a specific subject with its own identity.

The real, I argue, is to be taken not merely as something extra-imaginary but as a principal register that shapes the subject’s sense of reality and, at the same time, introduces the ‘constitutive lack’ that rotates conversion experience—the impossibility of the symbolic register to capture the fullness of a conversion lived experience in its deepest essentials and its totality. The real is, thus, ‘realized’ via the power of language that belongs to the symbolic and imaginary order as an attempt to represent the real. It is a supplement or the fulfillment of the lost or absent object. The testimonial repertoire is characterized by lack, dispersal, shattering, and a constant search for the missing or absent Other. It is the movement of spiritual desire that mobilizes this testimonial quest. This means that the real is the absent Other around which desire keeps rotating in movement, in action; the absence opens the space and potential for exposure to the real that can never be fully reached or reachable in itself. The real is the order, which cannot be articulated and represented in testimonial talk; at the same time, it infuses every aspect of the convert’s religious life. In a way, the real is inherent contradiction in the sense that it does not exist; it is “a hole in the symbolic order, but it is nevertheless described as a source of contingency” (Pirskanen 2008, p. 5).

The religious subject is (trans)formed in imaginary testimonial identifications with the other and experiences conversion through (canonical) language in relationship to the (symbolic) Other, but the real is the ‘constitutive lack’, the basis of both the cause and object of spiritual desire. These three orders of conversion cannot be entirely separated but rather are fundamentally interwoven. As I shall discuss, in testimony the real, imagination, symbolism, and desire emerge.

Beyond the narrative-constructivist framework

Many social scientists today would agree that there is no such thing as ‘the conversion’, even though they believe it is possible to capture ‘the real’ of conversion and thus to show what conversion really is. Conversion was earlier understood in terms of an inner psychological transformation relative to a supernatural agency or to a change in sociocultural commitment and more recently as a political and ideological representation. Dealing with spiritual transformation is a tricky business; it is not an easy task. As Heirich (1977) points out, converts have developed arguments about the nature of the divine-human encounter, whereas social scientists have proposed a variety of social and psychological explanations of it (p. 653). Rambo (1993) expresses this doubt when he writes that “it is difficult to understand, predict, and control that which is generally invisible to the outsider, mysterious and sacred to the insider” (p. 24). In other words, it is not possible to access the core experience of conversion—the ‘real’ conversion. The words ‘predict’ and ‘control’ in Rambo’s quotation are particularly problematic since the conversion representation belongs to the subjective (often mystical) dimension of ‘truth telling’. These are destabilized categories that can barely be ‘predicted’, ‘controlled’ or ‘fixed’. In other words, the researcher is not in full control and cannot fully master or dominate the conversion experience. Converts usually argue that their experiences are opposed to academic knowledge production and only partially and obliquely accessible to scientific investigation. This can also be understood as converts’ “politics of authentication” (van de Port 2011, p. 16).

Yamane (2000), in his article “Narrative and Religious Experience”, addresses the current methodological difficulties with studies of religious experience, arguing that when we study the religious experience of the individual we cannot study ‘experiencing’, which is to say the religious experience in real time and space. Therefore, we must study retrospective linguistic representations of religious experience, including conversion. Yamane (2000) makes a clear distinction between experiencing and an experience: “While experiencing is a constant temporal flow from the standpoint of an individual and therefore cannot be directly studied, an experience is the intersubjective articulation of experience. . . . One cannot experience and reflect on experience at the same time” (p. 174). The articulation of an experience is temporally distanced from the experiencing itself because “all subjective meaning is constituted in retrospect through reflection, rather than in present moment of the lived experience” (p. 175). The interpretation and representation is therefore part of the experience in that any experience contains interpretative elements; it is an interpretative perception. What is presented is always some collection of the lived experience, or more precisely it is made up of the retrospective ‘interpretation-of-representation’. Ricoeur (1979, p. 144) argues that the testimonial account itself interprets and also gives to interpretation the contents of experience.Footnote 1 Accordingly, conversion can only be studied on the level of its representation in testimonial form, and there is no direct purchase on the real experience. Although the real conversion is radically deducted and absent from any structure of representation, this does not mean that the via negativa of conversion is the best solution. It also does not mean we have to be silent about it, even though we are not able to directly grasp the ‘really real’ experience of conversion.Footnote 2

The conversion narrative is the testimonial account of an interpreted experience of spiritual transformation; the experience comes down through a testimony (the imaginary frame), and the testimony is transmitted to the audience on the symbolic level or what Stromberg (1993) rather neatly calls a ‘canonical language’. The symbolic are the various representations and narrative codes that structure the testimonial apparatus. In this way, the conversion narrative is not the ‘real’ experience of spiritual transformation itself but a representation and articulation of the experience as it is stored in the memory of the convert. Therefore, an understanding of a conversion experience is possible only on the level of its narrative and symbolic interpretation. This requires critical narrative investigation of testimonial reliability (see Bruce 2006; Sremac 20132014). However, with Staples and Mauss (1987, p. 138), I hold that conversion is fundamentally a subjective phenomenon (‘conversion-according-to-the-convert’), and thus only the subject is qualified to tell us who he or she really is.

Because of these methodological problems, conversion theorists have shifted their focus from ‘real’ conversion experiences to the narrative performance of account-giving. For example, current psychological and sociological literature devoted to the phenomenon of conversion has moved away from the causes and consequences of conversion and the stages of the conversion process, which have occupied most researchers’ attention for the last 40 years, to the more recent narrative-social-constructivist approach. The linguistic narrative perspective is becoming prevalent in contemporary research on conversion since Snow and Machalek’s (1983) first attempt to introduce a focus on language to the study of conversion. Narrative theorists argue that only through the testimonies of converts can conversion experiences be comprehended, and it is precisely for that reason that the conversion (narrative) corpus should be subjected to linguistic analysis.

Narrative conversion researchers consider conversion testimonies primarily as speech acts and analyze their structural/formal, rhetorical/symbolic features, and connection with the wider sociocultural context, including the specific religious tradition of the convert (Buckser and Glazier 2003; Giordian 2009; Gooren 2010; Harpham 1988; Hindmarsh 2014; Jindra 2014; Leone 20042010; Marzouki and Roy 2013; Stromberg 19932014; Zock 2006). The narrative-social-constructivist approach further helps us to observe how the subject begins to employ the specific rhetoric of the religious group, thereby incorporating into his or her life the language of transformation inherent to the particular group. The religious canonical language serves as a new frame of reference that has the potential to radically transform the worldview of the convert. The way in which people transform and articulate their spiritual evolution (reperform the conversion act) is often determined by replication and repetition of discourse. This regularized repetition is understood here in Deleuze's (1994) sense as a relationship and discursive behavior toward an event (conversion) that is not comparable or a counterpart to anything else. As such, repetition is experienced as an encounter with the impossible. Building on Kierkegaard’s ‘religious repetition’, Žižek (2001) holds that the act of Christian conversion is the prototype of repetition as an attempt to repeat Christ’s own humiliation. However, the effect of faith ‘grammar’ is most significant in the formation and shape of religious subjects. Conversion’s ‘autobiographical remix’ and its testimonial repetition not only reveals how religious identities are framed and created, it also shows how the converts make sense of themselves and how they construct meaning and interpret their lives and their world.

Narrative conversion investigations primarily understand conversion as a linguistic construction of self-performance whose focus is on interiority enacting, or the process of “giving an account of oneself” (Butler 2005). For example, Snow and Machalek (1984), Staples and Mauss (1987), Leone (2004), and Stromberg (1993) focus on the ‘lived experience’. Acknowledging a close connection between the conversion testimony and the biographical experience, they describe the socio-psychological functions that conversion testimonies fulfill in the biography of the converted person (Zock 2006, pp. 55–56) and underscore the socially constructed and communal character of conversion accounts. Staples and Mauss (1987), drawing on the work of Snow and Machalek (1984), argue that biographical reorganization is the marker and the only true indicator of conversion, which involves a change in one’s ‘universe of discourse’. Testimony means that a person’s communicative use of language (words, metaphors, symbolic interactions) undergoes a radical change as a result of the conversion experience in order to make sense of the self and the world (Staples and Mauss 1987, p. 135). Staples and Mauss (1987) take a functional approach to language and argue that a conversion narrative is not a reflection of some underlying change of consciousness but a tool to achieve self and communal transformation. They view conversion as a process that is “fundamentally one of self-transformation”. This “self-transformation is achieved primarily through language; [and] the convert plays an active role in his or her own self-transformation” (p. 146).

Stromberg (1993) follows Staples and Mauss’s approach to conversion. In Language and Self-Transformation, he provides a sophisticated and insightful analysis of the language and rhetorical techniques used by converts in their testimonial accounts. Stromberg starts with the assumption that conversion accounts are not a reliable source of information about the history of past events and experiences. The change efficacy of the conversion is not restricted to the original event.Footnote 3 Stromberg argues that the process of telling and retelling conversion testimonies is an essential performance of faith, the framing of personal experience in canonical language, that the convert has fostered. Conversion, he proposes, is an ongoing process of identity formation and reality constitution that is intimately reflected in the language and discourse style of the conversion narrative. The ‘performance’ is a form of religious ritual activity in the present. Stromberg emphasizes, “It is through the use of language in the conversion narrative that the process of increased commitment and self-transformation take place” (p. xi). Stromberg’s study looks at the performance of conversion narratives and argues that the performance itself is central to the efficacy of the conversion. Because of this, he assumes that religious discourse represents ongoing efforts to resolve deep emotional conflicts and ambivalences in the converts’ lives.

Similarly, Hutchison (1963) argues that religious language is characterized as symbolic or expressive language used for “the purpose of total life orientation” (p. 13). The symbolic language serves as a link between a believer’s deep emotional concerns and the larger community. Stromberg’s (1993) main concerns are how the symbol system (social symbolic reality) used within a particular tradition can give the convert a sense of self-transformation and how self-understanding is socially constructed in the discursive communities of which the convert is a part. The discursive community also provides an outlet for the expression of the convert’s ‘transformative or redemptive self’, and it creates a discursively mediated environment in which a new model of narrative production emerges. As such, the communal discourse plays an important role in what I would like to call the ‘autobiographical remix of life’ and in narrative identity empowerment. The discursive environment makes it possible for converts to reinvent themselves through the production of new narrative identities. There arises a new rhetoric of conversion, implying and combining codes, symbols, and metaphors that specify well-established testimonial linguistic coordinates that manifest in the symbolic space.

Stromberg attempts to explain these transformative effects of conversion by building upon two root distinctions. First, he distinguishes between the referential and the constitutive functions of language as a component part of human communicative behavior. Stromberg argues that when converts share their testimonies they use a type of speech (‘meta-language’) that always comprises both the referential and the constitutive forms of communications.

Secondly, Stromberg distinguishes between two further subclasses of communicative behavior relative to conversion narratives: canonical and metaphorical language. Canonical language, which in Stromberg’s (1993) method is essentially referential, is “the most certain and unquestionable of meaning” (p. 12). Ganzevoort and Visser (2009) argue for a different understanding of the referential role of canonical stories. They describe canonical stories as culturally validated story structures, which means they regard the legitimacy an audience confers on a story a more important criterion than the referential role of the story. Canonical language refers to the religious context of meaning and becomes meaningful in a broader sense. It links canonical language directly with individual experiences (Popp-Baier 2002, p. 57). In this regard, canonical language fosters a change in the convert’s self-understanding and newly adopted religious role. This suggests that the conversion narrative is a practice through which converts seek to establish a connection between the language of their particular religious community and their own immediate situation. It enables the verbal expression of previously inaccessible desires while deepening the commitment to faith. The conversion testimony constitutes the narrator’s self-transformation. Metaphorical language (the symbolic frame) is about unfamiliar word usage undertaken to define and grasp the novel, the numinous (das Heilige), mysterium tremendum (Otto 1950), or the horror. In Lacaninan terms, it is the real as a radical and traumatic Otherness. In developing the conversion testimony, the canonical becomes constitutive (i.e., meaningful)—it becomes anchored in the details of the convert’s personal drama—and the metaphorical comes to be referential, ‘interpretable’. In this regard, conversion testimony is first and foremost a way of talking, a way of using language to make sense of spiritual transformation in an individual’s life.

To sum up thus far, conversion testimony as a ‘transformative practice of self’ is linked to the discursive communities that provide a subculture for understanding and explaining one’s ‘real’ experience and spiritual transformation. Testimony involves a willingness to have one’s life formed and transformed in and through the practices and patterns of canonical language. These patterns are immediate, localized, and authorized in the communal narratives and other religious symbols that enable converts to interpret their own experience. Communal discursive styles and regulations serve as guidelines that influence how a new experience is interpreted and significantly affect the interpretation of any other experience. The developed conversion testimonies must be embedded in, and constructed out of, a convert’s particular faith community and its formalized practices—that is, the specific grammar of faith and the pattern of its well-formed assemblage of belief and value system (Sremac 2014). Canonical language is transmitted and shared, it involves converts in particular symbolic coordinates, and it plays a central role in (trans)forming the converting subject. It reflects the convert’s ability to make use of established genre and discursive regimes in order to configure and constitute his or her life in culturally and religiously recognizable and acceptable patterns. In short, religious subjects gradually bring the lived experience of their lives into a resemblance of the core story of their faith community.

Following this theoretical framework, it is not entirely clear to whose reality or ‘reality’ the conversion testifies. Do testimonies constitute the reality of the transformative event itself? Who motivates the possibility of testimonial speech from the converted person? Is it possible to affirm the ‘real’ in the conversion phenomenon while allowing that such an affirmation can take place only through social and linguistic relationships? Should priority be given to the elusive and mysterious experience in the conversion phenomenon or to the social process? Can we reduce conversion ‘reality’ to speech embedded merely in relations and practices? Is conversion nothing more than a human construct? Is it simply the product of the personal relationships within a faith community, which has significant implications for the way in which converts form and organize their experiences and testimonies but possesses no intrinsic ‘ontological weight’ (Latour 2005)?

Conversion theorists have been concerned with the interplay between the linguistic practices of converts, but in their work there is a tendency to become preoccupied with the discursive details of variations in linguistic styles, semantic regimes, or faith grammar in a way that largely ignores other aspects of religious world-making embedded in lived experience. The conversion speech is never entirely comprehended by linguistic ‘grammar’. Drives, affects, fantasies, dreams, ecstasies, the sense and the nonsense (the absurdity) of conversion, hopes, desires, the unconscious, sensations, moods, and performative bodily actions are trans- and extra-linguistic experiences that constantly erupt into the symbolic/linguistic and the materialFootnote 4 order. Van de Port (2011) argues against the ‘discursive colonization’ of academic production, holding that constructivism, like other ‘isms’, is merely a different attempt to “uphold the truth of a vision against the constant intrusions of the Real; different designs to provide a particular world view with a sense of the real; different attempts to keep the-rest-of-what-is at bay to thus safeguard a particular reality definition—or invoke it to upgrade the persuasiveness, depth, credibility of that particular world view with a sense of a sacred ‘beyond’” (p. 29).

The reality of conversion, even though it is given in linguistic categories that belong to the symbolic register, cannot be reduced to a discursive statement of certainty. Converts use established discursive modes and regulations of conversion that help them to experience a spiritual transformation of reality—and that also seduce them into a particular relation with the signifying work of the ‘real’. In other words, converts can disorient themselves in the symbolic space through “modes of speech that have an impersonal nature” (Butler 2005, p. 52). The symbolic space is constructed through a mimetic activity, and the very possibility of discursive agency is delivered by the canonical language. Hindmarsh (2014), building on a Marxist conceptual framework (particularly Althusser’s notion of ‘interpellation’), shows how (conversion) language can be inscribed to people as interpellated by the dominant ideologies of cultural, political, or religious institutions. He argues that the narrative—or testimony in this context—becomes “not the expression of an individual point of view, but a site that registers the push and pull of social values as embodied in institutions and power structures” (p. 350). But the question is, What if the convert never really chooses this signifying grammar of faith? This signifying performance can indeed ‘alter symbolic reality’ by “transforming retroactively the signifying network which determines the symbolic significance of the ‘facts’. But here, signifying work ‘falls into the Real’, as if language could change extra-linguistic facts” (Žižek 2005, pp. 130–131). Beyond the shadow of reality, the conversion event points to the encounter with the sublime; the revelatory event as a dramatic reordering of the convert’s horizon of meaning. The real exists only in contradiction to reality, and it resembles the limits of language and presentation in general. This is precisely the most problematic aspect in academic knowledge production of the conversion experience and the convert’s public representation of it. I would like to challenge this rather limited constructivist understanding of conversion by adopting the Lacanian perspective of the real and problematizing the distinction between construction and the real experience in conversion scholarship.

“The gods belong to the field of the real”: Conversion and the quest for the real

Lacan (1981, p. 45).

According to Lacan, the real is the unknown that exists at the limit of the socio-symbolic universe (socially constructed representations), and it is a permanent strain with it. The real is the cause and effect of social reality, but it also undermines that reality. It occurs prior to symbolization and articulation, prior to the ‘materialization’ of the symbolic order (Žižek 2005, p. 192). In the Lacanian triad, the real is opposed to both the imaginary and the symbolic. The real is “the impossible” because it is impossible to imagine, impossible to integrate into the symbolic, and impossible to achieve (Lacan 1999). The real is something beyond comprehension in which language collapses. In short, the real cannot be summarized and totalized. For Žižek (



*

As a follow up, am glad Quakers have a very long historical approach to conflict in the Middle East, even if NtFs - nontheistic Friends/Quakers are young

NtFs, Nontheist Quakers, All, 

As a follow up, am glad Quakers have a very long historical approach to conflict in the Middle East, even if NtFs - nontheistic Friends/Quakers are young, and don't so much, possibly yet -  ... and that even psychiatry might be newly imbricated with this in many languages especially ...  


The NtQ Wikidata Q-item # as a way to facilitate peace through developing MD psychiatry and psychiatric resources? :)

Friendly nt-UQ or nt-QU regards, 
Scott

Glad to have heard a Friends' Association for Higher Education (FAHE) presentation recently, with Swarthmore Professor Sa'ed Atshan, Cara Curtis (a Haverford and Harvard Div school alumna), and moderated by Bryn Mawr's David Ross, and with Haverford's Walter Sullivan as technical support, and which recording you'll find here - https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2021/05/bengal-tigers-in-water.html ... Sa'ed went to the Ramallah Friends School (since ~1869), before matriculating at Swarthmore, and is the 5th generation in his family to do so! :)  



*

NtFs, nontheistic Quakers, UQs, All, 


identity questions :)

religious identity questions

religious tribal violence questions? potential peacemaking questions?  

"The Power of Identity" (2000, rev. ed.) is Manuel Castells book about this ... (with a brief read into Castells' thinking here - http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Castells/castells-con0.html :)

Non-harmingly (ahimsa or Friendly Peace Testimony) NtQ greetings, 
Scott 
Manuel Castells' label (in daily blog), and am a bit of a Castellian 
... and in one of the courses I teach - http://worlduniversityandschool.org/InfoTechNetworkSocGlobalUniv.html - 



-- 
- Scott MacLeod - Founder & President  

- World University and School

- 415 480 4577


- CC World University and School - like CC Wikipedia with best STEM-centric CC OpenCourseWare - incorporated as a nonprofit university and school in California, and is a U.S. 501 (c) (3) tax-exempt educational organization. 


* * 

Dear Ma, Sandy, Pin, Ed, Tym, Matt, All, Cuttyhunkers, and camping van travellers esp., :)

I guess I'm curious how designers of the autonomous van Toyota Proace vehicle - https://youtu.be/0tp_2Qf3U7o ... - would develop a warm shower for 4 in far northern NORWAY in -10 degrees Celsius winter under the open rear hatch with drop down shower curtain and warm floor, that could even also function as an additional sheltered living space - or sun room too - when not used in winter as a shower :) ... perhaps as an add-on for 3 seasons, and an add-on for deep winter (and how would the shower curtain dry out too?:)

Here's a pic of the Eurovan hand shower, factory installed, at the back of thevan :
https://www.thesamba.com/vw/forum/viewtopic.php?t=572623&postorder=desc
which appears to be VW factory-installed hand shower ... (and not sure if it was warm water or not either)

Shower from back hatch - cool!
Am doubting that a factory VW shower like this was mass produced ... 

Identity psychiatry ? 
Again, sadly, with all the wars in the world, it seems like there's more need than ever for excellent multi identity psychiatry - https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2021/05/psittacula-non-theist-quakers-psychiatry.html - (and maybe World Univ & Sch can help)!

Warm regards, Scott
Scott
https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2021/05/psittacula-non-theist-quakers-psychiatry.html - 
https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2021/05/patagonian-cypress-fitzroya-pulling_12.html



-- 
- Scott GK MacLeod  
Founder, President, CEO & Professor
World Univ & Sch (WUaS) - PO Box 442, Canyon, CA 94516 
1) non-profit World University and School - http://worlduniversityandschool.org  
2) for profit general stock company WUaS Corporation in CA - http://worlduniversityandschool.org/AcademicPress.html

(m) 412 478 0116 - sgkmacleod@gmail.com 

World Univ & Sch Innovation Research -  scottmacleod.com 




* * * 

Little Red Yogis re UU LRY - Liberal Religious Youth - is a reference to the transcendentalist thinking perhaps

Ma, I wanna say Little Red Yogis re UU LRY is a reference to transcendentalist thinking ever since the Emersons et al. in 1st 1/2 1800s ... and R could be left of the aisle types (re British Isles and France origins:), little could be modest or humble ... and religious ... somehow open to connecting socially in positive ways (unity word origins in Unitarians, & Universalists, and bonding or yoga-ing - from yoke word - in Yoga) ... Am wondering now where the Bhagavad Gita - that great Hindu text 🙂 - goes with the word and idea of Yoga:)? Heard about the idea of Little Red Yogis from Kevin Bell, brother of Diane Bell, a Reed student too, who owned the Brooklyn Street House and collective, and kind of a commune too ... where I lived on and off for some years in the early 1980s 🙂 Love, Scott


*
Kinda interesting what Google brings up: 🙂 - "So what does Krishna say is yoga? Well, Krishna uses the word yoga over 100 times in the Bhagavad Gita, so he has plenty to say about it! In its original Sanskrit text, the word yoga appears in the Bhagavad Gita seventy-eight times as a noun and thirty-six times in its verbal form as yukta.Feb 29, 2012

Krishna's Ten Definitions of Yoga in the Bhagavad Gita ..." - https://www.elephantjournal.com/2012/02/krishnas-10-definitions-of-yoga-in-the-bhagavad-gita/ -




*
Further interesting ideas: "What does the Bhagavad Gita say about yoga?
Bhagavad Gita – Lord Krishna defines yoga

Yoga is a balanced state of the body and mind. Yoga is a balanced state of emotions. Yoga is a balanced state of thoughts and intellect. Yoga is a balanced state of behaviour." - https://www.yogapoint.com/info/what-is-yoga.htm -



*

But as I think I write in my Hippy Anjali Yoga Notations, skepticism and agency are helpful and good ideas in thinking about Yoga (and religion :) ... http://www.scottmacleod.com/yoganotations.html ... Caveat emptor, buyer beware, in the idea-sphere, too, Ma! 🙂 Love, Scott





* * * 

Yakima Nation Cultural Center WA, Columbia River Gorge OR, Reed College Cherry Blossoms, Carla's House :)

Hi Ann, Tym, Carla, Lynn, All :)

Methinks Neo.life is as close as it gets to a kind of 'hippy News' these days, thanks to Jane Metcalfe in Berzerkeley, CA, And George Church in Cambridge, MA (they published the book Neo together I think) ... And that  World Univ & Sch could complement a "Hippy News' even (and in 7k languages too!)

Learned from this somewhat hippy visionary Genetics' oriented newsletter 


of 'motherboard' (small m in Neo Life)  ... The search for Which brings up ... https://www.vice.com/en/section/tech
And Which seems to offer another alternative to other news ... 


I found this recent interview of George Church - 
https://twitter.com/geochurch/status/1392899305485254657?s=19 - by a young interviewer (is she 'sweet 16' ?) Fascinating re STEM inspiration ... And wonder too ...

Could George Church genetically engineer himself back to be a teenager again, and of color, even - the video above made me wonder :)? 

Know of any Hippy newspapers these days? :)

Here's a related pic from Rob & Lydia Califf MDs wedding 48 years ago :)

In my ongoing seeking of a life partner, and as a follow up, both Susan and Anke - former wonderful girlfriends - were a bit hippy-inclined, and am appreciating Rob Califf, MD's wedding photo here in these regards (where 1) Rob is a former FDA commissioner and Duke Emeritus Professor of Cardiology, and Rob also graduated from Duke, and 2) Bob Harrington MD is the chair of Stanford Medicine, and a cardiologist ...and I've met with both of them at UCSF & Stanford). ...

"Congratulations Rob and Lydia.  Great pic! The two of you haven’t changed a bit.  Here’s to many more years."

"48 yrs ago yesterday.  Modified hippie wedding--dress made from curtain cloth.  Stylish bow tie.  Headed for Myrtle Beach."

They're pretty hippy 48 YEARS ago ... Could Myrtle Beach refer to town on the Oregon coast too? :)


Scott 
Hippies 

genes

longevity 



* * 

Hi Ann, Tym, Carla, Lynn, All, 

The book I'm thinking of by George Church is Neo.Life, not Neo, and here's the book release party, with authors 

Neo.Life Boston
https://youtu.be/t3M1hRpSa6E

and Jane Metcalfe in silver dress as moderator ... 

(But check out Church's book "Regenesis") ... 

Appreciating George Church's comments toward the end of this video - https://twitter.com/geochurch/status/1392899305485254657?s=20 ... "Synthetic Biology with Dr. George Church"
 - and regarding being addicted to questioning authority ... as an example of him still being a hippy in so many ways :)

Interesting 2015 interview with him from the Vineyard Gazette of Martha's Vineyard too  ...

Scott
Some of this at bottom here - 



-- 
- Scott MacLeod - Founder, President & Professor

- World University and School

- 415 480 4577

- CC World University and School - like CC Wikipedia with best STEM-centric CC OpenCourseWare - incorporated as a nonprofit university and school in California, and is a U.S. 501 (c) (3) tax-exempt educational organization. 



* * * * 

Tu, May 18, 2021

Dear Ma, Dick, Ed, Matt, All,


A life partner out of a LRY tradition (UUA) somehow? :)

I just learned that LRY - Liberal Religious Youth - of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA), active it seems in the 1960s and 1970s, ended about 1981 or '82 ... having blogged about them here on Sunday - https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2021/05/psittacula-non-theist-quakers-psychiatry.html - and regarding the terms 'Little Red Yogis,' as well (which Kevin Bell, around 1981-82, had called Little Red Yogis, in the Brooklyn Street House which his sister Diane owned, and which I lived in on and off from around 1980 to 1987, I think, and which was a Reed collective, or Reed House, - and see above blog post ) ... 
https://www.uuworld.org/articles/liberal-religious-youth-merged-fifty-years-ago (I wasn't ever part of LRY interestingly - having not been part of the UU Church in Pgh from 1974-79 - perhaps due to my father's thinking, and having also not been part of a UU Church in the DC Area before that (1971-73/74), or in New Haven CT (from 1966-1971 or so) either ... although my parents met and married, in 1957, in the UU Church in Cincinnati, OH, and my mother's parents were very long-time UUs there). 

I'd think LRY were a very exploratory group of UU-circle hippy young people in a fascinating time - the '60s and '70s - around the world, and especially in the USA, culturally, regarding creative alternative cultural explorations ... 

And apparently LRY has become ... 

A life partner out of a LRY background, I wonder? A MD who is 25 and has time in her life to have kids too? ... But I am also a bit 'old fashioned' or 'traditional' in relationships ... 2 terms a family friend George Alexander MD used re life partner (like his standing by The Desiderata below - which I find illuminating, and re World Univ & Sch too)  ... Identity questions - many here - for me too, I think ...

How are you doing? 

Fondly, Scott

PS
And as I just wrote to my friend, Ed: (And will we be able to genetically engineer ourselves back to being 30 year olds at some point in the not too distant future, which video observation by George Church I haven't yet found again?:) Looking forward to seeing you, and exploring somewhere soon-ish on a hike :)


Desiderata: 


Desiderata

GO PLACIDLY amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.

Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.

Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.

And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

By Max Ehrmann © 1927
Original text


-- 
- Scott GK MacLeod  
Founder, President, CEO & Professor
World Univ & Sch (WUaS) - PO Box 442, Canyon, CA 94516 
1) non-profit World University and School - http://worlduniversityandschool.org  
2) for profit general stock company WUaS Corporation in CA - http://worlduniversityandschool.org/AcademicPress.html

(m) 412 478 0116 - sgkmacleod@gmail.com 

World Univ & Sch Innovation Research -  scottmacleod.com 

 






*








https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psittacula

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose-ringed_parakeet

...




No comments: