[Xmca-l] Marvakis's Utopian Surplus á la Bloch

[Annalisa Aguilar]

Dear xmcars,


Now that I'm a little into the Marvakis paper, I thought it was interesting how before I'd read it I made a reference to undifferentiated energy as deriving from Being, and then, once getting into the paper finding on page 5 there was a reference to "the volcano of productivity" !


I am recognizing that the concepts here are setting up to potentials of replicating patterns of thinking of the past to consider what has been, and instead place them into patterns of the future to consider what could be...  :)


There is a seductive quality of thinking that by projecting into the future we can eliminate patterns of thinking in the past, just by orienting those thoughts in time (to the future, instead). That may sound like I'm being a wet blanket here, but I'd like to ask how can we be sure that just by orienting to the timeline of the future that we can be safeguarded from replicating habitual (thought) patterns of the past? Particularly if those patterns have been destructive ones? (Thinking about Birren the drug addict for example).


Do habits dissipate just by orienting to the future?


I am not adverse to these conceptions but I'm not sure how it is possible to consider the past or the future without BEING in the present. The mind is always orienting FROM the present even if it may be orienting TO the past or TO the future. (Consider a directory map and the necessity for the YOU ARE HERE X in order to orient to the map) There is no difference in the act of orienting except the direction (of time).


I'd like to know how I think about the future (or the past) without being in the present. I'm always in the present, even if I'm unconscious of it, by thinking (orienting) to the past or the future. Both realities of past and future are projections onto a Western construction of conceptual time, looking something like:


[past] present [future]


The orientation to hope is also interesting and I'm pleased to make an inquiry into it. So I shall read some more! I like the idea of conceiving of cognition and emotion as thinking and hoping because these seem to situate into the present moment rather than into an abstract space of -tion (aka shunning!) However, these experiences still suffer the Cartesian disease, as they are dual by being separated. Why is that the case? When I think and when I hope these are not divergent experiences, but unified.


I would still like to offer that much of what is at issue in everyday living (for me anyway while relating socially) is the prevalence of an incapacity for being in the present moment. This seems to be something largely cultural. The malaise of modern living (my take) is largely because of the habitual tendency of whisking attention away from matters from the moment of now to moments of anything but now.


There is a wealth of potential that arises not by orienting to the future (or the past) but by BEING in the present moment. In fact we cannot detect the change of time (to even sense a sense of becoming), without there being something constant, and that constant is the present moment. This would mean that the BEING of now is a different entity than the BECOMING of the mind.


But that's a different conversation! :)


Kind regards,


Annalisa