Abstract
What I aim to explore in my presentation is how the practice of Thai Buddhist chanting creates an experience wherein the embodied subjectivity gets decentered or even replaced in the cosmic flow of sound. I base this analysis on a combination of my fieldwork in a Bangkok temple and a speculative application of concepts.
In order to arrive at an understanding how the experience where the "I" as a carrier of the human gets temporally displaced or at least overwhelmed by something other, I will draw on machinic theory (Bryant 2014). By machine I mean, following the Deleuzian tradition, an assemblage of heterogeneous parts producing a certain effect.
What is important, is that "a machine is composed of parts that impose constraints on each other's movements" (Morita 2015, 45). The chanting machine is a combination of corporeal and incorporeal machines, which include Buddhist theory.
The human machine can produce sound which makes the chanting event possible, becomes part of the chanting machine, which in turn effects the human. The effect I am concerned with here is the experience where the body is not an expression of an individual's subjectivity, but of a superceding chanting subjectivity that precedes and engulfs each present body.
It is precisely the constraints that produce the effect of the receding individual subjectivity. The materially caused surrounding sound combines with frantic searches in the chanting books for inexperienced laypeople, while more advanced laypeople and monks focus on the materiality of the utterances of the chanted words.
Each body is seated separately and faces the (statues of the) Buddha. The body becomes a mediator of the flow of the chants and its task is to make it possible for each individual to enter this flow through producing sound waves.
The concept of subjectivity from which this cultural technique (Krämer & Bredekamp 2003) emerged is closer to notions of distributed cognition: Buddhist teachings take among their central tenets that there is no self (anātman), because any subject is the product of much more complex, pre-human processes - something that can be noticed in chanting practice. Not only does a self disappear while chanting, the material limitations of the chanting machine force this disappearance.
Still, for laypeople this can be but temporary, as when the material surroundings change, so will subjectivity reappear. This has of course been lost in quasi-Protestant Western Buddhism which, conditioned by the Cartesian culture of ignoring corporeal effects on the incorporeal, considered the teachings as eventually realized in individual mediation practice as central, but not the wealth of ritual machines that had emerged in many Buddhist conditioned societies.
This includes techniques to modulate one's voice production, which Buddhist monks learn (Chen 2005, Soeta et al. 2014). Thus, the potential for thinking the post-human has mostly disappeared from more mainstream accounts of Buddhist traditions.
One aim of this presentation is to make possible a thought practice based on the encounter between Buddhist life-worlds and post-humanist approaches, such as machinic and media theories.