Cosmos Café: A Radical Conversation with Terry Patten, author of A New Republic of the Heart [5/15/18]

[madrush (Marco V Morelli)]

Re: the word “radical”:

@achronon

One of the reasons I asked Terry what he meant by the term was to clear up what the term even means. When used in a “revolutionary” context (cf. the subtitle of the book), the term can conjure up rather vivid and active imagery. I was very happy to hear that he was using the term in a very similar way to our long-forgotten friend Flighty Dwighty (for later-comers that would be Dwight Macdonald and his monograph The Root is Man …

Here’s the thread you’re referring to, Ed, for anyone interested:

A new model for the left?

New thoughts from Slavoj Žižek. He says state communism is dead; social democracies are obsolete; and local democracy movements remain incapable of addressing large-scale imbalances. So, even if a progressive movement were to overthrow an existing neoliberal order, what would it put in its place? What large-scale models for structural transformation are available? Do we have something other than planetary dystopia to look forward to? [Slavoj Žižek: Why There Are No Viable Political A…

And re: the focus of our conversations:

@achronon

In both cases, however (and I’m oversimplifying, I know), getting too close to the text diverts the conversation from the message to the messengers in the background, and that does a disservice to both the backgrounders and the foregrounders, who are trying to do something with those frameworks which they respectively found useful, and to do it now .

I think I agree (the wording is a little off) but I think what I’d like to point out, to pick up on your distinction, is that before fore-grounding and back-grounding, we need common-grounding; otherwise, it can hard to determine whether we’re even talking about the same thing, thus what needs to be brought forth, and what’s better left behind or unsaid.

Re: saving the world. It’s a cliché, of course, which I think has to do with some new human order that can exist in harmony with nature. On a planetary scale: I can actually envision this. It would mean roughly what Terry means by “whole systems change.” I understand this to be a radical vision of what’s possible.

But in my imagination, this stage of human evolution (if that’s what we’re still talking about) would be the starting point for a whole new properly Universal (perhaps even Cosmic) phase. But first: I do believe we are charged with creating Heav’n on Earth. And yes: we are the Fallen Angels. And we may need to do this a few times before we get it right. (I am assuming we have already done this before, in some way.) And finally, I imagine that Heav’n on Earth will necessarily be concrete and imperfect, because if it was ideal and perfect, it would actually be Hell.

Re: future Cafés, I am interested in other spaces and metaphors that complement the cosmic. I am curious about Stuart’s Halls theory of encoding/decoding messages in mass media. Here is a piece we may want to read and discuss.

Hall-Encoding-Decoding-CSReader.pdf (280.5 KB)

I also think that while a “new republic of the heart” is a lofty and wholesome ideal, we/I also need to keep and strengthen our root systems in the ground—the underground, and the undercommons—which is where what’s “radical” is actually found and lived (and suffered)—where thinking actually takes place (where it remains unpopular) before the marketplace takes notice.

I believe we need more poetry, too! I am getting bored with philosophy and theory. I would rather care-fully interpret a single poem (or a line in a poem), which is spiritually high stakes and requires sensitive concentration, than vaguely generalize about interesting ideas, which yet don’t move the soul.