Tears for the non-westerner as the other

Re: integral ideologies 101 by Richard Carlson by Rich on Fri 16 Mar 2007 06:00 PM PDT Profile Permanent Link ( I am following up on these post after a dialog on the integral review forum which pertained to an article which absurdly charged Sri Aurobindo with racism. In fact it was not very difficult to turn this charge back upon itself, not only because it was not true, but due to the fact that the author of the article made a mistake characteristic of many eurocentric theorist; he abstracted only a portion of the discourse he was considering from the context of an entire non-european tradition which embodied it )

In reflecting on the manner in which European scholarship often appropriates the voice of the other (non-westerner) into its own theoretical regime one must look even beyond the differences between East and West or North and South as challenges posed to theory, (especially to those theories which seeks to integrate all directional integers into a synthetic context e.g. integral theory) Rather the problem posed to theory may be the very nature of theory itself and how it abstracts information from embodied contexts. What is especially problematic is how theory often fails to consider various forms of traditional practices within the context in which they were originally embodied.

In other words the main problem posed to theory (integral or otherwise) is how it abstracts embodied practices into its own theoretical framework for consideration. Earlier I have argued that one problem for euro-centric theorist is how to let the voice of alterity, of other cultures, of indigenous populations, speak for themselves while constructing their theory. How does the eurocentric theory allow indigenous people to speak for themselves through their own embodied practices. For once these practices become abstracted into a meta-context or theory the complexity of meaning as embodied are often diluted. The categories formulated through the theory are often simply incommensurable with the indigenous practices.

I am currently in dialog with a text of N. Katherine Hayles who considers just this type of problem as she reflects on the problems associated with defining humans as essentially information versus as embodied beings whose materiality can never be abstracted into cybernetic categories. Below she writes the following about the work of Pierre Bourdieu.