Open Integral

In the Los Angeles Times, 9/10/07 by Denise Gellene

Even in humdrum nonpolitical decisions, liberals and conservatives literally think differently, researchers show.

Exploring the neurobiology of politics, scientists have found that liberals tolerate ambiguity and conflict better than conservatives because of how their brains work.

In a simple experiment reported todayin the journal Nature Neuroscience, scientists at New York University and UCLA show that political orientation is related to differences in how the brain processes information.

Previous psychological studies have found that conservatives tend to be more structured and persistent in their judgments whereas liberals are more open to new experiences. The latest study found those traits are not confined to political situations but also influence everyday decisions.

The results show “there are two cognitive styles — a liberal style and a conservative style,” said UCLA neurologist Dr. Marco Iacoboni, who was not connected to the latest research.

Participants were college students whose politics ranged from “very liberal” to “very conservative.” They were instructed to tap a keyboard when an M appeared on a computer monitor and to refrain from tapping when they saw a W.

M appeared four times more frequently than W, conditioning participants to press a key in knee-jerk fashion whenever they saw a letter.

Each participant was wired to an electroencephalograph that recorded activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that detects conflicts between a habitual tendency (pressing a key) and a more appropriate response (not pressing the key). Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W, researchers said. Liberals and conservatives were equally accurate in recognizing M.

Researchers got the same results when they repeated the experiment in reverse, asking another set of participants to tap when a W appeared.

Frank J. Sulloway, a researcher at UC Berkeley’s Institute of Personality and Social Research who was not connected to the study, said the results “provided an elegant demonstration that individual differences on a conservative-liberal dimension are strongly related to brain activity.”

Analyzing the data, Sulloway said liberals were 4.9 times as likely as conservatives to show activity in the brain circuits that deal with conflicts, and 2.2 times as likely to score in the top half of the distribution for accuracy.

Sulloway said the results could explain why President Bush demonstrated a single-minded commitment to the Iraq war and why some people perceived Sen. John F. Kerry, the liberal Massachusetts Democrat who opposed Bush in the 2004 presidential race, as a “flip-flopper” for changing his mind about the conflict.

Based on the results, he said, liberals could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas.

“There is ample data from the history of science showing that social and political liberals indeed do tend to support major revolutions in science,” said Sulloway, who has written about the history of science and has studied behavioral differences between conservatives and liberals.

Lead author David Amodio, an assistant professor of psychology at New York University, cautioned that the study looked at a narrow range of human behavior and that it would be a mistake to conclude that one political orientation was better. The tendency of conservatives to block distracting information could be a good thing depending on the situation, he said.

Political orientation, he noted, occurs along a spectrum, and positions on specific issues, such as taxes, are influenced by many factors, including education and wealth. Some liberals oppose higher taxes and some conservatives favor abortion rights.

Still, he acknowledged that a meeting of the minds between conservatives and liberals looked difficult given the study results.

“Does this mean liberals and conservatives are never going to agree?” Amodio asked. “Maybe it suggests one reason why they tend not to get along.”

denise.gellene@latimes.com

by Raoul Eshelman, Anthropoetics 6, no. 2 (Fall 2000 / Winter 2001)

Excerpt:

For the subject, postmodernism presents a mighty, seemingly inescapable trap.(1) Any attempt it makes to find itself through a search for meaning is bound to go awry, for every sign promising some sort of originary knowledge is embedded in further contexts whose explication requires the setting of even more signs. Attempting to find itself through meaning, the subject drowns in a flood of ever expanding cross-references. Yet even if the subject clings to form it fares no better. For postmodernism sees in form not an antidote to meaning, but rather a trace leading back to already existing, semantically loaded contexts. Every fixation of meaning is dispersed through cross-connected forms; every use of form links up with already existing meanings; every approach to an origin leads back to an alien sign. Searching for itself, the subject quickly ends where it began: in the endlessly expanding field of the postmodern.

The way out of postmodernism does therefore not lead through the intensified search for meaning, through the introduction of new, surprising forms or through the return to an authentic origin. Instead, it must take place through a mechanism completely impervious to postmodernism’s modes of dispersal, deconstruction and proliferation. This mechanism, which has been making itself felt with increasing strength in the cultural events of the last few years, can be best understood using the notion of performance. Performance in itself is, of course, not a phenomenon new or unknown. In Austin’s speech-act theory it refers to a language act that does what it promises (“I now pronounce you man and wife”). In the sense of an artistic event in the modernist avant-garde, a performance foregrounds or “makes strange” the border between life and art; in the happenings and performance art of postmodernism it integrates the human body or subject into an artistic context. The concept of performance I am suggesting here is, however, a different one. The new notion of performativity serves neither to foreground nor contextualize the subject, but rather to preserve it: the subject is presented (or presents itself) as a holistic, irreducible unit that makes a binding impression on a reader or observer. This holistic incarnation of the subject can, however, only succeed when the subject does not offer a semantically differentiated surface that can be absorbed and dispersed in the surrounding context. For this reason the new subject always appears to the observer as reduced and “solid,” as single- or simple-minded and in a certain sense identical with the things it stands for. This closed, simple whole acquires a potency that can almost only be defined in theological terms. For with it is created a refuge in which all those things are brought together that postmodernism and poststructuralism thought definitively dissolved: the telos, the author, belief, love, dogma and much, much more.

The first models of a reduced, holistic subject seem not to have been formulated by writers or artists, but rather by literary critics reacting with antitheoretical or minimalist arguments to poststructuralism. Thus Knapp and Michaels, in their groundbreaking article “Against Theory” (Mitchell 1985, orig. 1982), call for the unity or “fundamental inseparability” (1985, 12) of the three basic conditions of interpretation: authorial intention, text, and reader. To this unity they oppose “theory.” According to Knapp and Michaels, theory privileges the one or the other part of the whole interpretation process while ignoring or playing down the others (the hermeneutical critic plays up authorial intention, the deconstructivist the sign, the relativist the reader, and so on; compare the discussion in Mitchell 1985, 13-24). In Knapp and Michaels’ view “theory” does not refine or improve interpretative practice, but rather represents an unacceptable attempt to take a position outside of it: “[Theory] is the name for all the ways people have tried to stand outside practice in order to govern practice from without. Our thesis has been that no one can reach a position outside practice, that theorists should stop trying, and that the theoretical enterprise should therefore come to an end” (1985, 30). This insistence on the absolute unity of author, sign, and reader has indirect, but nonetheless far-reaching consequences for recreating the subject. Interpretation no longer takes place through floating, proliferating semiotic acts continually eluding their progenitors, but rather through the competition between individual, holistic statements made by discrete subjects. The subject expresses itself in holistic performances in which it believes; other, competing subjects question these acts of belief (cf. Mitchell 1985, 28). Antitheoretical subjects are opaque (they have no set qualities), but they are always present; the reader always has practical access to them on the basis of a discrete interpretative performance. In a similar sense Michaels, in a later book (1995), argues against searching for cultural identity in the past, in race or in foreign roots. Cultural identity is given in the way people live their lives at a given time; it is unproductive, and in fact impossible, to establish identity outside of that empirical frame. Both “theory” and the ideology of cultural pluralism work by disarticulating a part from a whole (the signifier from the interpretative act, race from culture) and making that part into a continually receding, unattainable other (cf. 1995, 15-16 and 128-129).

University of Chicago, November 14-16, 1997

The Conference posed a specific question: If we absorb postmodernism, if we recognize the variety and ungroundedness of grounds, but do not want to stop in arbitrariness, relativism, or aphoria, what comes after postmodernism?

What postmodernism teaches is not new. Heraclitus said, “You cannot step into the same river twice” and his student added, “not even once, since there is no same river.” The ancient Eristics showed the unreliability of logic alone.

The variety of viewpoints was well represented in the wild range of personages that Plato brought together in the gathering of philosophers in the Protagoras. Richard McKeon taught the variety in the fifties: Anything you assert instances always only one approach. However you proceed, McKeon can supply three other ways to do it, with different outcomes of course. The current relativism is historicist, which may be its worst version because while it sees only an arbitrary succession of different sets of assumptions throughout history, it also claims that we cannot move among them as with McKeon; supposedly we are locked into one set that is dominant in our historical period.

Postmodernism brought much that we wish to retain. It brought play and humor, no small contribution. It made visible the economic, political, gender, and colonizing hegemony inherent in western “objectivity” and “universality.” Postmodernism puts the recognition of the ungrounded variety of assumptions first. Although always recognized, the problem appeared only at the periphery. Or it might be tucked in, half-hidden, for the benefit of those who already recognize it.

For example, after a long series of quite wild distinctions:

The Stranger: We must always make our distinctions so that they cut between the bones.

The Youngster: But Stranger, how can we tell whether they cut between the bones, or not?

The Stranger: That is a question we will take up another time.

(Plato, Statesman, 262)

It is a postmodern contribution to begin from this awareness and to make it obvious to everyone, rather than keeping it as a subtle knowing-better reserved for the few.

Many people sense that there is somewhere further to go. Yes, every assertion is made from some vantage point, and depends at least partly on culture, politics, and language, which we can only pretend to control. All assertions seem to pretend to control. All words bring an unavoidable “metaphysics.” But, since it is unavoidable, can we do no more than constantly remind each other of it? Is the furthest thinking only decentering, undecidability, rupture, limbo, aporia, flux? For the most part it results in arbitrariness, stoppage, an inability to think further. Overcoming this effect is the topic of our conference. We want to think further, to begin a discourse that moves on, after postmodernism.

Several lines of an “After Postmodernism” discourse, issues on which we need not agree, but have developed various specific points or steps — paths of thinking after postmodernism:

• Is there a distinct role for logic, and for a kind of scientific objectivity that would not be naive? How can conceptual systems function in relation to more-than-conceptual intricacy?

• In what sense do we move beyond the utterly different meanings that each culture gives even to the most universal words such as “body” and “person?”

• Is there a path from Wittgenstein? He could let a word acquire many new meanings. Although one cannot represent language, no concept or metaphysics controls new uses of words in situations.

• Can we speak-from practice-and-theory and implicitly intricate bodily experiencing?

• Can we speak-from ourselves without subjectivity/objectivity? (Example: “If someone has a pain in the hand … one does not comfort the hand, but the sufferer.” Wittgenstein, P I 286)

• Can a new phenomenology speak-from intricacy, rather than attempting “description?”

• Can we articulate the implicit political and ethical stand of using the critique of assumptions to free people, rather than to silence them?

Science, logic, mathematics, well formulated theories, empirical research

We think that post-modernism does not relate pertinently to these topics. The post-modern critique of science provides no re-understanding of anything specific in science; it has no import for how we understand scientific procedures and findings, or how we might reconceptualize a scientific object. It has little to say to science beyond globally denigrating all of it as obviously not “objective,” not free of all sorts of assumptions. This insight must lead to more than arbitrariness.

For example, recently a competent anthropologist’s report on his field work engendered lively questions. Then he said: “From post-modernism we know that there are no facts, so I can really say anything I want.” It stopped the discussion.

Recently a Nobel Laureate physicist was asked to comment on an interpretation of specific findings. He approved, point by point. When asked to say more, he added: “In physics today you can say anything you want.”

A retort from the side of logic and empirical science is surely possible, after first accepting the fact of ungroundable assumptions and the impossibility of naive objectivity. In what way does science involve a more sophisticated kind of objectivity than that which is currently derided as naive? Or, in what way does logic involve more than the pretense of clean-cutting patterns that fail to cut cleanly? These are sample questions.

Human Nature, the subject, culture, ethnography

The members of an animal species all feed on similar food, build similar shelters, and have similar mating procedures. In this regard humans are not even one animal species. Only some tissue processes are the same. To think of human beings as one species seems like the merest “biologism” (as Heidegger called it).

Is there a way to think about inter-human parameters (perhaps of a new kind), taking account of the utterly different meanings that the cultures give to even the most universal words such as “body,” “religion,” “person,” “marriage,” and so on?

In what language could one examine the question?

This is a problem not only because of cultural and conceptual relativism, but because what one can say in language about language will instance, and cannot encompass, the ongoing working of language.

One cannot pretend to step outside of language and pretend to be making observations and inferences from there — of course in words — whether about language or about something before or without language.

Practice, Experience, the Body, Giving Birth, Psychotherapy

Since individuals exist only in historical, cultural, and linguistic contexts, how can something that might be called “experience’ play some roll in our thinking? We know that assertions cannot be grounded in a supposedly neutral experience. And since all description imports its assumptions and categories, we know that no observational reports are just neutral.

Insights and examples from specialized practices such as law or psychotherapy, or from movements such as Feminism, might shed light on the following question:

Is there a mode of thinking with or from what is variously appealed to when one invokes practice, experience, the body, psychotherapy, the experience of giving birth, or anything else which would not be utterly derivative from linguistic historical and cultural assumptions? On the one hand it seems self-evident that there is; on the other hand, except uncritically, how may it play a role in thinking?

American Pragmatism

Until Oxford Linguistic Analysis crowded it out, the work of Peirce, James and Dewey was dominant in American universities. Its main ethos was a kind of answer to earlier versions of our question. Pragmatism deliberately employed the variety of approaches, finding a way to do so in the very nature of practice. Something about doing eluded the pretended determinism of the different interpretations. Instead, assumptions and values could be seen as generated from practice, and modified by it. Current attempts to rediscover this have not been widely hailed as successful. We must first save Pragmatism from the simplistic corruption which gave it its bad name: Its criterion seems to be “what works,” but without a way to examine the purposes which are of course assumed, when something is said to work, or not to work. Can we articulate how Pragmatism can answer this charge?

Wittgenstein

Unlike most philosophy, theory, and science, Wittgenstein spoke from just that place from which we ordinarily speak: in midst of situational involvement where words mean what they do, what changes they make in the situation in which we say them. This would seem to be the very place that poses the problem that all assertions are from a “situated” center. Is an advance possible from Wittgenstein if he is read, not as basing himself on external observation, but as speaking in and from situatedness?

Phenomenology

One cannot offer a neutral description of phenomena, but can something more than speculation play some role in a kind of thinking that could claim to be phenomenological?

Ourselves: The self, (“subject,” “I,”)

Is it really true, as currently maintained, that we cannot say anything from or about ourselves if we reject the old subject/object dichotomy and other rejected assumptions?

Articulation of assumed values

The lack of grounds for any approach, centering, or categories has provided a valuable opening for critiques of the dominant approaches by feminism, anti-colonialism, and other liberating movements. But implicitly these movement go beyond critique, and beyond post-modernism which holds that liberation is impossible because some categories, distinctions and social controls will always again re-surround any liberating attempt, and also that liberation is not a ground for deciding anything. Going beyond these two tenets of post-modernism, can we articulate the assumption that we will and should use the demise of all categories to free people, rather than to justify Dostoyevsky’s Ivan, or one’s own “superior” culture, class, or “free” market economics?

The University of Chicago ethos

Like post-modernism, but a generation earlier, the University of Chicago shifted the recognition of ungrounded variety from the outer limits of thought to the center and the beginning. No student can be here for more than a few weeks without encountering our ethos that there are many intellectual approaches to any issue, and no possible resolution of this fact.

One professor tells an audience of first-year students: “The University of Chicago holds that every approach is canceled out by some other approach, so there is no point in studying any of them.” The students laugh. This indicates both that they have already encountered the problem, and that it is a puzzle, since they find the thinking here so extremely exciting and rewarding. Obviously the different viewpoints do not just cancel out, but how and why not has never been articulated.

We constantly speak of it here, but the unavoidable variety is just as familiar elsewhere, and its positive role is recognized. It must therefore be possible to articulate in detail exactly how it has long affected one’s thinking, and how one deals with it. This is something familiar, but usually private. Articulating it would open a new discourse.

I find these days that I’m becoming less and less interested in this thing called “integral.” It seems like a fad that has come and is now going, fading into the sunset with bellbottom jeans and long sideburns. It was all so glorius, a new worldview that was the most comprehensive, the most inclusive, that gave me a sense of meaning and place in the universe, that fed my desire to be “on top” with the best and the brightest. Yet now it seems like so much ado about not much, more about an in-crowd religion than a useful tool for making the world a better place. It seems to have served its purpose for me but I’m feeling it’s time to move on to the next phase or level or whatever. Or maybe there is no “next level” at all and I need to branch out wider, more like a network or rhizome than a hierarchy or holoarchy. I don’t know. What I do know is that trying to fit all knowledge and experience into an integral framework has lost its magic for me. I’ve lost the need to make sense of and control the world. I think it’s ok now to just reside in ambivalence and uncertainty and relativity (with qualitative distinctions). It does lack security, not knowing what road one is on or where it is going. But it also makes for an open adventure, not knowing what is next.

hi guys,

Open Integral has been on air for about a year now. Congrats! The initative taken in the tumultuous aftermath of Wyatt Earp has proven to be viable.

Posting this note: I noticed the following stats: There are currently 172 posts and 1,936 comments, contained within 24 categories. That’s great!

Could someone give a brief overview of the topics covered so far? Which were the most  lively debates? Which areas could lead to essays for Integral World (Yes, always hungry for content).

Are we making a difference in the integral community? Can people find us?

All the best,

Frank Visser
Webmaster Integral World
www.integralworld.net

 

This question arises from some previous comments in another thread, enclosed below. This whole rules idea has opened my own can of worms, which by virtue of my being an author here you now get to suffer through. Eww, worms? Yep, dirty, smelly, wriggling and disgusting worms. Without which of course our entire eco-system would collapse along with our highfalutin ideas and philosophies.

Anyway…part of why I like the blog format is because it is more open and allows for a variety of types of expression. I am by training a scholar so you’d think I prefer the academic process within a more orderly structure of reasoned debate. And to a degree I do. But what of my emotional and gut responses, my bad moods, my outbursts, my being human? In other words, what about the integral picture of the author of a piece? What about the process of his thinking, not just the finished product is some structure essay or book? What about the dialogic process on interacting with the author, with questioning and critiquing him, and all of it being open and in print in real-time? I even recall Ray saying previously something to the effect of how blogs allow him the freedom to express in a way not ordinarily found in academy. All of this is to me what blogs are, and it seems a tough one to “corner” with road rules. Any ideas?

ray harris Says:

April 24th, 2007 at 7:40 pm e

There’s something frustrating about all this. Most of it is assertion. There is no agreed system of arbitration and no agreed arbiters. Of course any system is going to assert it is superior – it must, otherwise it makes itself redundant. Of course Wilber, Aurobindo, etc are the highest because if they are not as a follower you are admitting you are following the second-best.

Furthermore, no-one judges ‘correct views’ by the same standards. A fundamentalist Abrahamist regards their belief to be the ‘correct view’ by their rules and they simply reject other rules.

So rather than ask is this the ‘correct view’ we need to agree on the ‘correct rules’.

Tusar N. Mohapatra Says:

April 25th, 2007 at 12:23 am e

Happy to see Ray Harris uttering the hated name, Aurobindo!
Can we remember The Mother also?

jose Says:

April 25th, 2007 at 4:03 pm e

Of course Wilber, Aurobindo, etc are the highest Sri Aurobindo of course, but Wilber? I am amazed you can even compare them as if they were “equals”. Has Wilber any realization? Does he has the Divine Consciousnes?

ray harris Says:

April 25th, 2007 at 6:14 pm e

These last two posts merely illustrate my point. Who decides and by what rules?

Edward Berge Says:

April 25th, 2007 at 6:58 pm e

Almost makes one want to use cognitive “altitude” as the rule huh?

Matthew Newsham Says:

April 25th, 2007 at 8:05 pm e

Turn, turn to the dark side Edward!

I just can’t go along with Ray in agreeing that there should be set rules to evaluate with- that would imply an authority badass enough to not only lay down rules, but lay down a set that will always be true. Even Ken doesn’t claim that one.

I would say that anyone taking on one position to the point at which they can no longer address all the others meaningfully and in nuance is demonstrating a potential deficinecy of their system. Is there really much of a difference between a system that says that such and such a “model” is absolutely the best for such and such a reason, and a system that can point for point refute it? Sure different systems frame and draw out different experiences, but it seems that if you can have a conversation about such differences then you have enough experience in common that the issue being addressed is roughly clear. I would view this as both parties having roughly the same cognitive altitude- and whats more- that this level is necessary for the individuals involved to further develop ANY system. Are some systems perfect already? I say no for any number of reasons, mainly relating to the limitations of humanity itself.

The rules, for the good of us all, are up for grabs.

Edward Berge Says:

April 26th, 2007 at 8:43 am e

Actually some guidelines might be helpful. Perhaps Robert’s Rules of Order? (http://www.robertsrules.com) Or Ken’s Road Rules for Transformation? (http://pods.zaadz.com/ii/discussions/view/79531)

I come round and round again to the above. Ken has made much of the complaint that his critics don’t understand what he’s saying, that they twist his meanings to often contrary purposes. He explains this as them not being of a high enough level of consciousness to understand because they don’t yet have the developmental signified to apprehend the referent. I think there is some validity to this but it doesn’t seem like the whole story. There is also valid, legitimate interpretation issues going on at the same level, different and competing signifieds for the same referent. Or maybe it’s not the same referent at all. Maybe the referent is itself  “enacted” by the paradigm and was never “there” (here) to begin with. Or maybe…

Or maybe I don’t have a clue. Even with the above example there are times when I work through something via explanatory inquiry only to realize that by feedback it seems that the interpreter has only filtered what I said through their own lens and that’s not what I said at all, at least from my perspective. An “understanding” wasn’t reached and it seems like it can never be reached, at least with such ineffable things/processes like meaning and reality. For lack of a better metaphor I feel lost in aperspectival space with all these different and competing perspectives fighting for dominance in their control over defining “what is.” It’s such a rat race based on, it seems to me, power. Hence philosophers like Foucault in his critique of chasing one’s tail into infinity and then getting the trademark.

I don’t have an answer here today. Not likely any day soon. Or ever. Just the ongoing and ever-returning questions when I engage in dialog on such topics. Who is right? Who is more right, at least in the “most developed” context? Why the fuck does it even matter who is right or more right? How the hell can I be content right now, despite the lack of answers? Can I let go of my own need to be right or more right? Can I accept myself and others as we are, here and now, instead of always judging by some “higher” standard? What drives me to even want to know? Eros? Or a power drive to control the “answers?”

It seems to me at times (often) that the entire spiritual quest is exactly the latter, the power to control the “ultimate” realm of “heavenly” meaning. The meaning with the mostest, the meaning that matters more than any other. “I” experienced causal formlessness today, I’m more developed than you. “My” altitude is turquoise as verified by Ken Wilber, so I’m more right than you. My model of reality includes and transcends yours, so it has more accurate grasp on “everything” so you are obviously wrong. Or even more insidious, you are only “paritally right.” And on and on and on.

Why do I even try to be understood when I know, for whatever reason or non-reason, that others will just filter what I say through their own perspsectives and twist it to suit their own agendas? And of course I will do the same. Can we truly only ever connect with another when we believe the same things, when we are in the same program or model, when we inhabit the same memes? Can we truly ever just show love and compassion to all despite their beliefs or models or programs? Do we have to be “right” before we can deign to offer solace or care to each other? Today, and most days, I just don’t know.

In the process of collaborative inquiry here at OI I’m getting closer to describing or labling myself. Here is a tentative attempt, which is of course subject to change in the constant flux-process of said inquiry.

I am an A(qal)-(w)hole(on) with a Nargaridean, Derrijunan bent. Just call me an A-hole for short.

Who are you?

Ray referenced an article by Gregory Desilet at Integral World. I include below a letter he wrote to Skeptic Magazine on the topic of Derrida. The link will also take you to the original article to which he is responding. 

The following letter to Skeptic magazine is a response to an article by L. Kirk Hagen published in 2005 (Skeptic, Vol. 11, #4). The parts of my letter in brackets [ ] were omitted by the Skeptic editors—but these parts were not crucial to the thrust of the letter. For those who would like to read Hagen’s article, the full text is included following my letter. Using red brackets [ ] and font, I have embedded within Hagen’s text my commentary and “corrections.”

Letter to the Editor of Skeptic
Published in Volume 12, #2, 2006, page 17 

In his dismissal of Derrida (“The Death of Philosophy,” Skeptic, Vol. 11, #4, 2005) L. Kirk Hagen demonstrates a thorough and ironic misunderstanding of deconstruction—thorough in the sense that it could hardly be more wrong and ironic in the sense that as a scientist Hagen is especially well-equipped to understand deconstruction. Hagen claims that deconstruction is the antithesis of the scientific attitude and the tradition of Enlightenment rationality and its spirit of inquiry (sometimes referred to as “modernism”). Nothing could be further from the truth. 

In an article in The Quarterly Journal of Speech (Vol. 85, #4, 1999, available at this site; click here for link), I argue that the difference between modernism and postmodernism (particularly deconstruction) is one of degree and that postmodernism is a logical and thorough extension of the modern breakthrough insight, prominent in Newton’s work, consisting of a new approach to understanding oppositional relation. Stephen Hawking points out that Newton’s laws of motion imply, contrary to Aristotle, that there can be no point of absolute rest (an implication that Newton himself could not accept) thereby altering the discrete oppositional division between motion and rest. Einstein’s work brilliantly confirms and extends this understanding of motion and leads to a similar alteration of the discrete oppositions between space and time, wave and particle, and matter and energy. 

Derrida’s views of language constitute an analogous alteration of oppositional relations, oppositions implicit in the modernism of structuralism, that led to new ways of seeing the tension between signifier and signified, text and context, sameness and difference (in relation to meaning). Derrida’s work also leads to the formulation of laws of language, one of which he refers to as “the law of iterability,” (see Derrida, Glyph 2: Johns Hopkins Textual Studies, 1977, 234; for a full account of these laws see Cult of the Kill, Chapter Five). These laws serve in relation to language much as Newton’s and Einstein’s laws serve in relation to the world of macro and micro physics. They enable predictions and they are capable of falsification by one contrary piece of empirical evidence. But, so far, no one has been able to offer any contrary evidence in relation to Derrida’s laws of language, and, as a consequence, his view of language stands as the most viable and the most complete to date in terms of accounting for all the empirical evidence offered in the various modes of interpretation, communication, and miscommunication language presents through endless textual examples. 

[Similar to Hagen’s case, it is even more surprising that a trained physicist such as Alan Sokal should also fail to see the similarity in the approach to oppositional relations evident between contemporary physics and postmodern language theory in the form of deconstruction. In fact, after presenting the evidence, I claim in the QJS essay that Derrida’s method and views are “as much in keeping with the tenor of scientific tradition since the Enlightenment as anything that can be imagined” and that “Derrida is in this sense more a keeper of the scientific tradition than Sokal.” Furthermore, “given the understanding of opposites implicit in his arguments, Sokal belongs more to the Aristotelian tradition.” The same can be said of Hagen.] 

[Both] Hagen [and Sokal] appear[s] to be almost hysterically overwrought about the assault on objectivity and “the real world” believed to be presented in the challenges of deconstruction. If so, this hysteria is groundless and represents an appalling misunderstanding. [In one of numerous attempts to set the record straight on such misunderstandings Derrida had this to say: “… the emergence of the value of objectivity…belongs to a context. We can call ‘context’ the entire ‘real-history-of-the-world,’ if you like, in which this value of objectivity and, even more broadly, that of truth (etc.) have taken on meaning and impose themselves. That does not in the slightest discredit them. In the name of what, of which other ‘truth,’ moreover, would it?” To accuse Derrida of more extreme versions of relativism such as implicit in the “anything goes” form of interpretive license and notions such as “physical reality is at bottom a linguistic construct” is to be grossly unfair and inaccurate. In light of Derrida’s efforts to put such confusions to rest, the kind of blindness Hagen and Sokal show toward deconstruction, despite their academic qualifications and scientific training, is difficult to understand.] 

Derrida does not discredit “truth” nor abandon “objectivity.” He does not do so any more than does Einstein—the author of the theories of special and general relativity. Why is it so easy for scientists to accept a form of relativity in the realm of physics but remain stubbornly opposed to any analogous relevance of a form of relativity in the realm of semiotics? 

Gregory Desilet
Longmont, Colorado 

 

I’m just starting this new thread as a follow-up to Edward’s What happened to Open Integral? query, and the comments I made there in reply.

If we have a group or forum, it would be interesting to see what everyone here means by “Integral”.  So what do you, readers, contributers, lurkers, whatever, mean by “integral”?