Zen and the Art of Democracy: Contemplative Practice as Ordinary Political Theory
| DOI | 10.1177/0090591719887224 |
| Date | 01 August 2020 |
| Author | Shannon Mariotti |
| Published date | 01 August 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
research-article2019
Article
Political Theory
2020, Vol. 48(4) 469 –495
Zen and the Art
© The Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
of Democracy:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591719887224
DOI: 10.1177/0090591719887224
journals.sagepub.com/home/ptx
Contemplative
Practice as Ordinary
Political Theory
Shannon Mariotti1
Abstract
In recent years, contemplative practices of meditation have become
increasingly mainstream in American culture, part of a phenomenon
that scholars call “Buddhist modernism.” Connecting the embodied
practice of meditation with the embodied practice of democracy in
everyday life, this essay puts the radical democratic theory of Jacques
Rancière into conversation with the Zen writings of Shunryu Suzuki
and Thomas Merton. I show how meditation can be understood as
an aesthetic practice that cultivates modes of experience, perception,
thinking, and feeling that further radical democratic projects at the most
fundamental level. Reading the landscape of Buddhist modernism to draw
out democratic possibilities, we can understand contemplative practices
like meditation as a form of political theorizing in a vernacular register.
Buddhist modernism works as a practice of everyday life that ordinary
users can employ to get through their days with more awareness and
attentiveness, to reclaim and reauthorize their experience, and to
generate more care and compassion in ways that enable, enact, and
extend the project of democracy itself.
1Southwestern University, Georgetown, TX, USA
Corresponding Author:
Shannon Mariotti, Professor of Political Science, Southwestern University, 1001 E. University
Avenue, Georgetown, TX 78626, USA.
Email: mariotts@southwestern.edu
470
Political Theory 48(4)
Keywords
democratic theory, democratic practice, Buddhist modernism, Zen,
contemplative practice
In recent years, contemplative practices of meditation and mindfulness have
become increasingly mainstream in American culture. San Antonio, Texas,
where I live, has a Zen Center, a Shambala Meditation Center, and an Insight
Meditation Center, all representing different Buddhist traditions. These sites
offer daily meditation sessions, weekly Dharma talks, and longer retreats that
are both led and attended by locals. Meditation and mindfulness are increas-
ingly part of social justice movements, especially as healing and sustaining
elements of abolitionist activism. These practices are used in hospitals—Jon
Kabat-Zinn’s “mindfulness-based stress reduction” therapy has become
highly influential in the health professions. Today, mindfulness and medita-
tion sessions are offered in schools at all levels. The counseling center at my
university hosts Meditation Mondays each week at noon, and three times a
week my son’s Kindergarten class has yoga with integrated meditation. An
increasingly broad array of corporations now offer onsite meditation and
invite “mindfulness experts” to advise their organizations. In addition to yoga
classes, my gym offers a weekly meditation session called “Be.” You roll up
your yoga mat and sit quietly in a darkened exercise room, with almost no
instruction, just breathing in and out for twenty minutes. There has long been
a market for Buddhist books. But today, even at the check-out aisles at gro-
cery stores, one can find special issues of mainstream magazines such as
Time and Newsweek devoted to mindfulness, meditation, and yoga, as well as
periodicals exclusively focused on these topics. In addition to websites,
blogs, and online communities, there are also mindfulness apps. You can
record data about how many mindfulness minutes you’ve worked into your
day—as the iPhone app says, “Quiet your mind. Relax in your body. Be in the
moment.”1
These are all markers of the “mindfulness revolution,” which has given
way to the “mindfulness wars” as practitioners and scholars disagree over
what to make of this phenomenon.2 As political theorists, our first instinct
may be to see the meditative and mindfulness practices of Western Buddhism
as modes of ideological production, representing power structures, belief sys-
tems, and modes of comportment that interpellate subjects into being. But
what kind of ideology is being produced here? Is it a capitalist spirituality that
aligns with neoliberalism, as the scholars of “McMindfulness” have sug-
gested?3 Many are concerned with how easily mindfulness and meditation
Mariotti
471
can be co-opted by neoliberal capitalism to cultivate productive and efficient
workers, pacified and docile bodies, self-absorbed and self-optimizing sub-
jects. Others argue that the mainstreaming and popularizing of Buddhist
modernism is problematic in some ways but valuable nonetheless, opening
up access and availability for more kinds of people to experience helpful
contemplative practices they might not otherwise encounter. Some worry that
mindfulness and meditation are increasingly aligned with a secular, medical-
ized, scientific ideology that operates through objectivity and value neutral-
ity, based on biological materialist assumptions, using MRIs to see what
happens to the brain when we meditate, for example. Or is the mindfulness
revolution part of a more countercultural ideology, representing a liberatory
micropolitics and mode of embodied social change that revises our way of
being in the world and how we relate to self and other, that reworks our social
and political culture in ways oriented toward social justice?4 Along with
scholars from virtually every discipline, political theorists have begun to ana-
lyze meditation, mindfulness, and contemplative practices, exploring ques-
tions related to these different modes of ideological production.5
The concept of “Buddhist modernism” encompasses all these possibili-
ties. In The Making of Buddhist Modernism, David McMahan argues that
what some have called “Western Buddhism,” “American Buddhism,” or
“new Buddhism” is best understood as “Buddhist Modernism.”6 Buddhist
modernism is formed through a complex process whereby eastern and west-
ern figures package and present varieties of Asian Buddhism in ways that
resonate with theoretical and tacit understandings of the intellectual worlds
and lived practices that animate what it means to be modern.7 The makers of
Buddhist modernism emphasize organic connections between Eastern and
Western intellectual traditions but also borrow terminology, concepts, and
ideas from romanticism, transcendentalism, and modernism. “Modernism” is
a broad term whose meaning in relation to Buddhist practice will be devel-
oped over the course of this essay, but this term captures the sense that some-
thing has been lost in modernity that can also only be recovered through a
different engagement with, a different aesthetic experience of, the objects
that exist on the surface of ordinary life within modernity. Buddhist modern-
ism is essentially shaped by, and critical of, modernity. Ultimately, this repre-
sents another moment in a 2,500 year process where the thing called
Buddhism has adapted to fit new cultures and hybridized many times over, so
McMahan is skeptical of the idea that Buddhist modernism is not “really
Buddhism” or “authentic.” Ultimately, “all transmission and translation are
also inevitably transformation.”8
So meditation works within modernity in complex ways, but McMahan
helpfully reminds us that “what it means for meditation to work—the work
472
Political Theory 48(4)
that meditation does—is different, sometimes radically different, in different
contexts.”9 Even under the broad umbrella of modernity, meditation does not
cultivate states that “are the same at all times and places.”10 Rather medita-
tion is best seen “as a way of self-cultivation or self-transformation that aims
at creating particular ways of being in the world,” particular social and cul-
tural contexts, particular social imaginaries, made up “by a repertoire of con-
cepts, attitudes, social practices, customs, ethical dispositions, institutions,
power relations, and structures of authority.”11 Even if meditation is framed
as letting go, as not trying to do anything or be anything in particular, but just
“be,” it still encourage us “to be certain ways—compassionate, insightful,
calm”—and also guides “the mind to actualize the ideals of the tradition and
the culture laid out in various maps, models, and templates.”12 Additionally,
those who take up these practices do so because they are “struggling with the
content of their lives in particular times and places.”13
So we can’t think of meditation apart from context and ideology. But what
about Zen variants of Buddhist modernism that work in more deconstructive
ways to help us see existing processes of ideological production that are
working on us rather than creating substantively new ones? Zen highlights
the contexts and categories that filter and frame our modes of perception as
contingent and constructed, applying this deconstructive lens to itself also.
McMahan notes that if he thinks about Buddhism only in terms of ideological
production and prescription, Zen “winds around to tap me on the shoulder.”14
This is especially interesting given how influential Zen has been in the West;
Zen was the first form of Asian Buddhism to really take root in North
America, there was a “Zen boom” among the Beat generation of the 1950s,
and Zen continues to have the largest footprint in...
To continue reading
Request your trial