Here are recent explorations of Dharma, history, theology, performance, and social justice discourse. Scroll down for academic work, including dissertation abstract and unpublished essays.
Working between Religious, Cultural, and Performance Studies methodologies, I research states of consciousness, contemplative practice, and the social justice turn in Western contemplative and artistic communities through a Buddhist phenomenological lens. My field work is with two primary cohorts: Theravāda Buddhist meditators and dance-based performance artists.
Combining work with meditators and dancers reveals similarities and differences in both View and praxis. The arts at their best teach us how to feel, and how to stay open to mystery, dissonance, and not-knowing. Meditation at its best does the same, but with different methods and aims. Live art is a culture’s visible growing edge, while dedicated contemplatives, often in seclusion, push that edge perhaps further, before returning to share their insights.
Current writing is focusing on issues of privilege, trauma, and systemic oppression in relation to Buddhist doctrines of renunciation, karma, and Dependent Origination.
PhD Dissertation (2016): “This Very Body is the Bodhi Tree: The Performance of Contemplative States in the Western Jhāna Revival & Contemporary Movement Theater” (abstract)
“Commit, Amplify, Inquire: Dark Work and Remix as Contemplative Rehearsal Practices” in Blum, ed., Dancing with Dharma: Essays on Movement and Dance in Western Buddhism (McFarland, 2016)
“Her Heart Can Lift Mountains by Beating: Form and Formlessness in Performance Process” in Hunter, Krimmer, Lichtenfels, eds., Sentient Performativities of Embodiment: Thinking alongside the Human (Lexington, 2016)
The One Who Listens: Meaning, Time, and Momentary Subjectivity in Music (2013) (presented at Performance Studies International 19, Stanford 2013.)
Inner and Outer Object, Inner and Outer Gaze: Paradoxes of Buddhist Performance (2013)
Hugo Wolf’s song “Der Verlassene Mägdlein”, an analysis (2012)
Inverted Bowls: Buddhist practices as protest vocabulary (2011)
Buddhist Pragmatic Phenomenology: an object-oriented inquiry (2012)
You Are the Music While the Music Lasts: Improvisation, silence, practice, research
(presented at IGPS Symposium, UC Davis, 2011)
Standing Somewhere and Nowhere: Buddhism, performance and social change (2011)
Mother Chord: Authority, meaning, and collaboration in music (2011)
Reason Exhausted, Concerns Forgotten: notes on a life in art and Dharma (2011)
(autobiographical reflections)
Deep River, Great Blackness: Ritual space and Black Power in the Art Ensemble of Chicago (2010)
From Nothing to Something: Music in experimental dance from Judson to Contraband (2010)
If you find the resources on this site of service in your own practice and study, and you are inspired to support Dr. Oakes as an independent teacher and scholar, please consider making a donation.
On the one hand, if modern linguistics remains completely enclosed within a classical conceptuality, if especially it naively uses the word being and all that it presupposes, that which, within this linguistics, deconstructs the unity of the word in general can no longer, according to the model of the Heideggerian question, as it functions powerfully from the very opening of Being and Time, be circumscribed as ontic science or regional ontology. In as much as the question of being unites indissolubly with the precomprehension of the word being, without being reduced to it, the linguistics that works for the deconstruction of the constituted unity of that word has only, in fact or in principle, to have the question of being posed in order to define its field and the order of its dependence.
Not only is its field no longer simply ontic, but the limits of ontology that correspond to it no longer have anything regional about them. And can what I say here of linguistics, or at least of a certain work that may be undertaken within it and thanks to it, not be said of all research in as much as and to the strict extent that it would finally deconstitute the founding concept- words of ontology, of being in its privilege? Outside of linguistics, it is in psychoanalytic research that this breakthrough seems at present to have the greatest likelihood of being expanded.
Within the strictly limited space of this breakthrough, these “sciences” are no longer dominated by the questions of a transcendental phenomenology or a fundamental ontology. One may perhaps say, following the order of questions inaugurated by Being and Time and radicalizing the questions of Husserlian phenomenology, that this breakthrough does not belong to science itself, that what thus seems to be produced within an ontic field or within a regional ontology, does not belong to them by rights and leads back to the question of being itself.
Because it is indeed the question of being that Heidegger asks metaphysics. And with it the question of truth, of sense, of the logos. The incessant meditation upon that question does not restore confidence. On the contrary, it dislodges the confidence at its own depth, which, being a matter of the meaning of being, is more difficult than is often believed. In examining the state just before all determinations of being, destroying the securities of onto-theology, such a
meditation contributes, quite as much as the most contemporary linguistics, to the dislocation of the unity of the sense of being, that is, in the last instance, the unity of the word.(Derrida, Of Grammatology, 21-22)
May the forces of delusion
not take hold, nor
weaken my resolve.
(Sharing of Merit)