Integal theory has its roots in the hangups of the English imperial project

Monday, December 04, 2006: The use of Derrida as a bogeyman in the polemic of Integral theory and in right-wing rantage has caught my attention. It's not necessarily a representative selection, but at one point in his now-infamous "Wyatt Earp" blog entry Wilber actually characterizes Derrida's project as destroying everything of value and then spraypainting your name on it.

Is Wilber familiar with Derrida's remarks on the ambivalence of the signature? This perception of deconstruction as narcissistic, aimless destruction is one that deserves a closer look, because it's ridiculous. Deconstruction is a danger to the status quo, but the regime at hand is a danger to most of the world's population. To women, for starters. In my humble opinion, the best post-Derridean work may very well be in the field of gender studies. It's a useful example here, too, because it speaks to the early Derrida that people are often exposed to as undergrads, get angry about, and then quit reading or thinking about: the business of binaries.

Think about how Helene Cixous or Gayatri Spivak deconstruct the binaries of gender, and explain to me how this strategy of reading and writing is destructive of anything of value. This is hardly "jerking off," or burning down the town and hitting it with a rattlecan tag as an ego-trip. This is the serious work of making the world liveable for female people, which is another way of saying, making the world a bit saner. Sound like an integral project to you? It does to me.

Pushing matters further: the reaction against Derrida (not Derrida's actual writings, but the construction of a straw-man called "Derrida" in polemic) is a fundamentally conservative move. What color is the terror alert level? "Mean green?" When something threatens the ideological apparatus of the status quo, those with some investment in it freak out. Some of 'em get their own shows on a.m. radio. I'm suggesting that this fits a pattern traceable back to Aurobindo, that integal theory has its roots in the hangups of the English imperial project. It's ideologically tied up with a nest of now-discredited hierarchies, but as I've said before, it need not be this way. Anyway, if you're looking for something to write about, there's a topic for you. posted by DGA at 9:24 PM

Tuesday, December 05, 2006: You can trace the genealogy of this tedious gripe about Derrida--that he's essentially covering all value structures with gas and setting them on fire--back to Nietzsche. Curiously, though, Nietzsche was a remarkably conservative guy. How so? Well, where do values, truths, come from? According to Nietzsche, the regime of the master. From those in power, to serve those in power. Nietzsche doesn't think this is inherently bad; he's not throwing out inequalities in power or wealth or "nobility." Instead, he's saying that contemporary values are crappy and must be replaced by a yet more powerful regime, basically that of the good ol' Stoics. Such is the Ubermensch thing.

Guess what? This makes Nietzsche every bit of the reactionary Pat Buchanan is, or Nietzsche's inspirations, Thucydides or Dostoevsky. Buchanan wants a return to an imaginary anglo-Christian past; Nietzsche celebrates the coming (recurrence?) of a proto-Romantic Great Man. It's the same ideological structure, though. Change the thing back to what it was. Nietzsche's project is properly liberatory in my view (or properly destructive in, say, Wilber's polemic against Derrida's application of Nietzschean method) when stopped in the middle. If values and truths are those of the regime at hand, and the regime can be changed, then... no, impossible! You mean to suggest that capitalism isn't always and forever the Only Reality?

This is why Deleuze and Guattari were correct in building their integralism on the methods of Nietzsche and Marx, and why savvy post-Marxists such as Negri and Laclau see revolution as an ongoing, contingent transformative process, rather than a predictable developmental (archetypal?) one.In short: some versions of integral theory embrace a "perennial philosophy" of "ancient wisdom" as an idealized value structure, and see deconstruction as a threat to said value structure, much as certain of my undergraduates see deconstruction as a threat to their brand-preference identities. In my view, this isn't much different from romantic reverence for Great Men of the Past (with a twist of Orientalism as a nod to Aurobindo). posted by DGA at 11:10 AM