Open Integral

Regarding the definition and relationship between so-called constructive and deconstructive postmodernism I offer a couple of excerpted paragraphs from the conclusion of Mark Edwards’ Integral Theory Conference paper, which Balder was kind enough to forward to me. I hear it was voted best paper at the conference? Edwards says:

Integral metastudies is a postmodern activity in that it recognizes the plurality of use and seeks to integrate them within abstract and generalising frameworks. As such I regard integral metastudies as a counterpart to the more typical forms of decentering and deconstructing postmodernism which seeks to identify and give voice to the personal story, the local history, the grounded experience and the marginalised instance. These two postmodern activities are fundamentally different and provide critical counter points for the development of each other. Decentering, pluralist postmodern research is not something to be integrated within an integral metastudies. They are complementary. Where integral postmodernism develops abstractions, decentering postmoderism develops grounded stories. Where integral postmodernism creates imaginative generalised frameworks, decentering postmo creates particular narratives and personalised accounts of human experience.

This is not a developmental modernism versus postmodernism battle. It’s an ongoing complementarity (e.g. Plato & Aristotle). An integral metastudies should not be seen as a rational project of integrating every perspective, concept, paradigm or cultural tradition within its domain. There must be some things that, be definition, lie outside of its capacities to accommodate and explain. Consequently, an integral metastudies needs a decentering postmodernism that it cannot integrate, that lies outside of its scientific purview, which continually challenges it and is critical of its generalisations, abstractions and universalisings. The decentering form of particularising postmodernism is not something that integral metatheory can locate or neatly categorised somewhere within its general frameworks. Decentering postmodernism will always provide a source of critical insight and substantive opposition to the generalising goals of an integral metastudies. In the same way that postmodernism often misunderstands integrative approaches as just some form of scientific monism, there is a danger that integral researchers can misrepresent the decentering and localising concerns of postmodernism as simple relativism.

See this article at the NY Times.

Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac. It almost sounds like the title of a country love song. But no, it’s how business is done in America. Create companies with minimal legislative checks that grow way beyond their means to handle the losses and reap obscene profits for the top and then let we, the people, pay it off when it goes under. No, we cannot help out the poor families that are losing their homes, that would be socialism. But socialism is fine for these corporations when they go bankrupt, i.e., the costs are shared by each taxpayer instead of letting the company go out of business when it fails. What happened to personal responsibility for our actions? It obviously doesn’t apply to corporations or the people who run them.

But we can’t let them default, they’re too big, it would destroy the economy. No, the point is that the lack of regulation in the first place, obtained by insider lobbyists, created a situation that let them get too big without proper capitalization. They got too big purposely to create massive wealth for the top on the backs of the hard-working homeowners and then left the bill for them to pay off, in addition to losing their homes. Oh yes, they deserve the huge profits because they took the huge risk? Please, what risk? When you know you’re going to create a co-dependent monster that will collapse the whole system should it fail, and knowing it will be bailed out by the taxpayer, then there’s no risk in that at all. To the contrary, it’s a deliberate and insidious plan to game the system at our expense.

So don’t buy the usual, empty conservative rhetoric about the free market versus socialism. Their version of the free market is privatize the profits but socialize the losses.

I’m with Bruce Kunkel (of Santa Rosa Integral Salon) on becoming aware of how we define and confine ourselves by our perspectives, and how we have to open to newer perspectives beyond them. And perhaps even to open into, as Gebser calls it, the aperspectival. I’d say to do so we even have to examine what we’re calling our integral belief system.

In that light I offer this link to an essay by Rich called “Integral Ideology” at the Science, Culture & Integral Yoga blog. Rich has participated in a couple of the dialogues over at Integral Review and one of his perspectives might be labled Aurobindian, but he is much more than just that.

Do we recognize ourselves in any of his analasynthesis?

Obama too has questionable economic advisors: Jason Furman. See this article in The Nation questioning Obama’s judgment in naming him as head of the economic team.

You might be interested in Keith Oberman’s investigative report on the above. It turns out that McCain’s chief economic advisors were part and parcel of creating a law that caused the Enron debacle and now artificially inflated oil prices.

It seems in general that politics, public policy and good citizenship have been neglected subjects in integral studies. Granted there are some exceptions but it seems to lag behind things like personal meditation practice, business coaching or developmental studies. Here are a few words of recognitiion and encouragement on this apparent lack:

“In general, the related fields of public policy, dialogue and deliberative democracy, and the related fields of adult development and learning appear to be standing as surprisingly separate silos. I advocate for dismantling these and many other such silos that limit our ability to see and work with the whole. I also advocate for and even predict that a new integral field of public issue analysis is ready to emerge.”

From Jan Inglis, “How then do we choose to live? Facing the climate crisis and seeking `the meta response.’” Integral Review, 4:1, June 2008

“I remember seeing proofs of a CIA interrogation manual, something we’d been sent unofficially, for comment,” the old man said. “The first chapter laid out the ways in which torture is fundamentally counterproductive to intelligence. The argument had nothing to do with ethics, everything to do with quality of product, with not squandering potential assets.” He removed his steel-rimmed glasses. “If the man who keeps returning to question you avoids behaving as if he were your enemy, you begin to lose your sense of who you are. Gradually, in the crisis of self that your captivity becomes, he guides you in your discovery of who you are becoming.”

“Did you interrogate people?” asked Garreth, the black Pelican case under his feet.

“It’s an intimate process,” the old man said. “Entirely about intimacy.”

–Spook County by William Gibson, p. 275.

Here is some news you won’t get in mass media. Thanks to Randi Rhodes for the links.

Perhaps 60% of Today’s Oil Price is Pure Speculation

The Truth About America’s Energy: Big Oil Stockpiles Supplies and Pockets Profits

One Piece of Legislation is why the Price of Everything is Going Through the Roof: Part I

Part II

Bush, Congress Must Hold Oil Industry, Speculators Accountable for High Gas Prices

Bush Has ChevronTexaco Lawyer Head Up Fed’s Oil Price Gouging Probe

Bruce Kunkel has a song on his new CD called “Race to the Bottom.” Ironically there’s a new article in The Nation (5/1/08) with the same name about Clinton’s campaign tactics and how they are alienating some of her previously strongest supporters, the feminist movement. Excerpts from the article follow:

Yet what is most troubling–and what has the most serious implications for the feminist movement–is that the Clinton campaign has used her rival’s race against him. In the name of demonstrating her superior “electability,” she and her surrogates have invoked the racist and sexist playbook of the right–in which swaggering macho cowboys are entrusted to defend the country–seeking to define Obama as too black, too foreign, too different to be President at a moment of high anxiety about national security. This subtly but distinctly racialized political strategy did not create the media feeding frenzy around the Rev. Jeremiah Wright that is now weighing Obama down, but it has positioned Clinton to take advantage of the opportunities the controversy has presented. And the Clinton campaign’s use of this strategy has many nonwhite and nonmainstream feminists crying foul.

The Wright, Farrakhan and Ayers controversies have been fueled by a craven media, and ABC’s performance in the debate has rightly been condemned. But given that Clinton is the one who is running for President and who purports to represent liberal ideals, her complicity in such attempts to establish guilt by association is far more troubling. While she has dealt gingerly with the matter of Wright in the wake of his recent appearance at the National Press Club–accusing Republicans of politicizing the issue–she also took pains to remind reporters that she “would not have stayed in that church under those circumstances.”

It’s disappointing, to say the least, to see the first viable female contender for the presidency participate in attacks on her black opponent’s patriotism, which exploit an anxious climate around national security that gives white men an edge both over women and people of color–who tend to be viewed, respectively, as weak and potentially traitorous.

Of course, Clinton’s decision to play the hawk may have had other motivations. Perhaps she really believed that voting to authorize the war in Iraq was the right thing to do (which is, arguably, even more worrying). But her posture in this campaign–threatening to “totally obliterate” Iran after being asked how she would respond in the highly improbable event of an Iranian nuclear strike against Israel, for example–has at least something to do with a desire to compete on a macho foreign policy playing field. It’s the woman in this Democratic primary race who has the cowboy swagger: the nationalist and militaristic rhetoric, the whiskey-swilling photo-ops, the gotcha attacks for perceived insults to a working-class electorate (as in “Bittergate”) that is usually depicted as white and male.

Subtitle: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, By Yochai Benkler

Available as a free e-book at Benker’s site:

From the Introduction:

Information, knowledge, and culture are central to human freedom and human development. How they are produced and exchanged in our society critically affects the way we see the state of the world as it is and might be; who decides these questions; and how we, as societies and polities, come to understand what can and ought to be done. For more than 150 years, modern complex democracies have depended in large measure on an industrial information economy for these basic functions. In the past decade and a half, we have begun to see a radical change in the organization of information production. Enabled by technological change, we are beginning to see a series of economic, social, and cultural adaptations that make possible a radical transformation of how we make the information environment we occupy as autonomous individuals, citizens, and members of cultural and social groups. It seems passe´ today to speak of “the Internet revolution.” In some academic circles, it is positively na?¨ve. But it should not be. The change brought about by the networked information environment is deep. It is structural. It goes to the very foundations ofhowliberalmarkets and liberal democracies have coevolved for almost two centuries.

A series of changes in the technologies, economic organization, and social practices of production in this environment has created new opportunities for how we make and exchange information, knowledge, and culture. These changes have increased the role of nonmarket and nonproprietary production, both by individuals alone and by cooperative efforts in a wide range of loosely or tightly woven collaborations. These newly emerging practices have seen remarkable success in areas as diverse as software development and investigative reporting, avant-garde video and multiplayer online games. Together, they hint at the emergence of a new information environment, one in which individuals are free to take a more active role than was possible in the industrial information economy of the twentieth century. This new freedom holds great practical promise: as a dimension of individual freedom; as a platform for better democratic participation; as a medium to foster a more critical and self-reflective culture; and, in an increasingly informationdependent global economy, as a mechanism to achieve improvements in human development everywhere.

The rise of greater scope for individual and cooperative nonmarket production of information and culture, however, threatens the incumbents of the industrial information economy. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we find ourselves in the midst of a battle over the institutional ecology of the digital environment. A wide range of laws and institutions—from broad areas like telecommunications, copyright, or international trade regulation, to minutiae like the rules for registering domain names or whether digital television receivers will be required by law to recognize a particular code—are being tugged and warped in efforts to tilt the playing field toward one way of doing things or the other. How these battles turn out over the next decade or so will likely have a significant effect on how we come to know what is going on in the world we occupy, and to what extent and in what forms we will be able—as autonomous individuals, as citizens, and as participants in cultures and communities—to affect how we and others see the world as it is and as it might be.