Integral Manifesto Pt III(4) Integral Politics?/ Co-Creating Values and the Spheres of Appearance

Posted on May 12, 2009 by

Rather than looking at the cultural memes as discrete stages in either human development or cultural evolution, consider the diversity of human collectivities as constellations — constellations of geo-sociospace, technologies, and economies–  interacting together within a greater dynamic whole– the realm of human action. At the micro scale, in the level of its own internal processes, any particular constellation could be seen as emerging through adaptive dynamics between the three-fold domains constituting human action, those we have identified as geo-sociospatial, technological and economic. From the macro level view, these micro level processes are seen to give way to discrete spheres of appearances(the collectives commonly referred to as “red” or “blue”, “orange”etc…) that emerge through micro-macro-level adaptive interactions within the whole of human action.

For example, at the micro level 1) each constellation creates specific kind of spaces of appearances for subjects to emerge as subjects, who share a specific array of geo-social spatial orientations; and 2) each constellation creates specific kinds of enduring technologies; and 3) each constellation creates specific kinds of economic systems in inter-action and exchange. Each micro-scale constellation can be thought of having a unique “shape” with repsect to coordinates that specify the geo-sociospatial, technological and economic dimensions that give the constellation its unique “collective action shape.”

Constellations may be internally robust at the micro level, but need to be adaptively suited to emerge as a sphere of appearance at the macro level, much the same way as as individual subjects emerge qua subjectsat the level of the polis. A constellation might be internally adaptive with respect to its own members — a necessary bu tnot sufficient condition for its emergence to the macro level; since for a constellation to emerge at the macro level, its internal dynamics must also have some pre-adaptive capacities to adapt to the macro-level environment– selection pressures that operated among all spheres inter-acting at the macro level.

At the meta level, viewing the whole that is all of collective human action, the individual spheres of appearance give way to a meta-level system, which itself might be considered to have a certain dynamic shape that fluctuates in time, determined by the particular array of geo-sociospatial, technological and economic dimensions that have aggregated from each of the spheres of appearances whose dynamics are sufficiently adapted to contribute at this level. Viewed in this way, collectivities, constellations, spheres of appearance, as well as the sum total realm of human action, are seen as autopoietic, dynamically adapative systems whose enfolded components are actors in a collective field which is an enfoldment of geo-sociospace, technologies, and economies. In later posts I will show that these aspects of that collective “field” arise from certain types of collective action logics operating in a dynamic adaptive system.

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Integral Manifesto Pt III(3): Integral Politics? / Subjects as Actors

Posted on May 11, 2009 by

Books Discussed in this Section

Steve McIntosh (2007) Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution,  Continuum Books

Saskia Sassen (2004) Local Actors in Global Politics retrieved from http://transnationalism.uchicago.edu/localactorsinglobalpolitics.pdf

Saskia Sassen (2007) Deciphering the Global.Routledge, NY

McIntosh proposes a World Federation based on nation-states relinquishing their sovereignty and reinvesting in a higher, supernational organization empowered by a master lawmaking authority of a democratically enacted global constitution. The Federal level would have the power and the authority to mandate the subordinate governments with respect to their internal operations, especially with respect to human rights issues. Presumably, the master lawmaking authority would be composed of integral-consciousness level executive officers responsible for managing and coordinating operations in a tricameral structure, based on the US Constitution, which maintains a “balance of power” between branches — which McIntosh envisions as legislative, judicial, and executive. His legislative includes an economic house, a world senate, and a people’s house. His judicial branch includes a world federal court, a world citizenship court, and a global eco-environmental court. His executive branch includes a people’s, an economics, and a nations council. McIntosh claims that his proposed structure is firmly based in what Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry have identified “as the essential dynamics of evolution that are embodied in what they call the Cosmogenetic Principle. Because it appeals to McIntosh as the very basis of his work, the excerpt is woth quoting at length:

The Cosmogenetic Principle states that the evolution of the universe will be characterized by differentiation, autopoiesis, and communion throughout time and space and at every level of reality. These three terms — differentiation, autopoiesis, and communion– refer to the governing themes and the basal intentionality of all existence, and thus are beyond any simple one-line univocal definition. … Some synonyms for differentiation are diversity, complexity, variation, disparity, multi-form, nature, heterogeneity, articulation. Different words that point to the second feature are autopoiesis, subjectivity, self-manifestation, sentience, self-organization, dynamic centers of experience, presence, identity, inner principle of being, voice, interiority. And for the third feature, communion, interrelatedness, interdependence, kinship, mutuality, internal relatedness, reciprocity, complementarity, interconnectivity, and affiliation all point to the same dynamic of cosmic evolution.

These three features are not “logical” or “axiomatic” in that they are not deductions within some larger theoretical framework. They come from a post hoc evaluation of cosmic evolution; these three will undoubtedly be deepend and altered in the next era as future experience expands our present understanding.

The sequence of events in the universe becomes a story precisely because these events are themselves shaped by these central ordering tendencies– complexity, autopoiesis, and communion. These are the cosmological orderings fo the creative display of energy everywhere and at any time throughout the history of the universe.

I think this is a beautiful passage articulating deep insight into the dynamic display of the manifest universe, and I commend McIntosh for having highlighted this as a central sensibility in his work. Unfortunately, McIntosh’s analytic and autocratic tendencies– his intolerant and dominant temperament– doesn’t seem capable of truly honoring the vision of Swimme and Berry, who emphasize that these essential features are not logical or axiomatic … they are no deductions within some larger theoretical framework. Rather they are shaped by complexity, autopoiesis, and communion, which is on-going. McIntosh, on the other hand, wants to prescribe or prestate the very structures of interrelatedness, control what voices appear and what voices don’t appear, supress individual subjectivity of the larger populations, constrain the kinds of identities that self-commune, repressreciprocity throughtop-down authority, and remove the self-transformative potential of the dynamics through programmable and manageable structures that have no internal or external feedback loops to account for the kinds of  perpetual deepening and alteration that Berry and Swimme affirm.

Here is an alterative view that takes Swimme and Berry to heart:

Create a dynamic way for global governance architecture to evolve by designing phases of natural emergent properties of fully democratic and fully autopoietic actions of all participants.

Here is a brief scenario of the kinds of actions/ architecture one might employ:

  1. Phase one designed as an introductory, exploratory and exploitative phase. Everyone on the planet would get a chance to participate in this global governance movement. People and organizations would basically self-organize to create caucus-like activity of various forms to organize subordinate level participatory bodies. Participants could choose to identify “merely” as individual global citizens, or as member-participants in any of conventional or newly emerging local-to-global coalitions that would emerge to exploit the new openings in the spaces of global appearance, new ways to articulate and voice individual as well as collective identity.
    • Nationhood
    • Ethnicity
    • Religion
    • Gender
    • Particular NGO or coalition of NGO’s
    • Economic Class
    • Trade Union
    • Any other type of representative coalition imaginable.
  2. Phase two consists of a second-order coalition of major alignments around significatn concerns or causes, out of which would emerge the 100 or so subordinate government bodies. This is the phase of increasing connectedness and increasing (augmenting) the political capital of phase one. Rules for participation in such bodies would be articulated and constituted by these “originary” bodies of the emerging global federation, similar to the rold of the thirteen original states of the USA. For example, participants might be able to re-align every 4-6 years or only in 8 year cycles. It would be important to understand that larger insitutions need longer lead times to change, so the temporal scale on which such actions occur, may very well be longer in scale than on more local or subordinate levels. However, there must be feedback loops which “structcurally couple” the two scales, such that these feedback loops be of very short duration and of appropriate scale to “reach” individuals within the insitutional domain who themselves should retain the capacity to engage rapidly changing concerns of their constituents. Phase two would be a prolonged period, in which the subordinate bodies would create and experiment with virtual reality and scenarios of the kinds of global decisions that would be made, with respect to real-life situations, if in fact these bodies had power and authority to do so, as opposed to alternative arrangements of authority. These virtual decisions would not only “prime” the system and develop scenario training, but also the global community would get a chance to imagine the effects that various alliances and levels of participation have on both global, regional and local levels, with the definition her of “loca” as one’s local identity in whatever one consider’s one’slocal affiliation, which might, paradoxically, be a globalized collective.
  3. Phase three might consist of re-examining the role(s) of the existing power structure and the extent to which these authorities would agree to relinquish certain domains over to an actual governance authority. This is the phase of conservation. The branches of the global authority would arise with respect to those domains that are relinquished one by one, or in groups that themselves collate into Spheres of Authority, as it became increasingly clear what emergent coalitions would supercede them. There might be provisoinal rules as t how these domains or branches would regulate themselves, i.e. they would have to prove that participation was open to all through democratic processes, and be able to prove self-evidently porous to individual participation to an acceptable degree. Or, a fully or quasi-independent “judiciary” body might be designed to perform audits and functionary inspection, as well as other bodies or architectures employed at even higher levels.
  4. Phase four would initiate after a significant majority of participation or dissolution of other power structures gave way to the global governance process and its newly emerged Spheres of Authority. This is the coming-to-agestage in which the process tendws twoard creating static structures that are no longer functionally emergent from dynamic and open participation. This is the phase that requires rejuvination from lower order dynamics, to off-set the prolonger previous periods of building increasingly conservation higher order structures. It may require the subversion, replacement, or overthrow of higher order structures that are no longer vulnerable to the internal or external feedback loops of participation of all subjects; or structures that have grown “closed” to such participation, or have grown impervious to their appearance. Guarantees for innovation, continual opening of spaces for newly emerging identities to commune in dynamic displays of new kinds of interconnectedness, would be requisite to create phases five, six, seven… These are the periods of release of previous interconnections, emergence of new identities through new patterns of collectivities, and re-configuration toward novel stages of exploration and exploitation.

The promise and possibilty of this kind of approach– an approach which facilitates the co-creative processes of actual people as both subjectw within and actors of socio-political spaces, and who are equally as well regarded and engaged as collective authors of our socio-spatial geographies– may seem idealistic or unrealistic to some readers. In reality, there is no need to overdetermine this process, since I have merely reframed as a future scenario the very processes that are re-shaping socio-political spaces today and which are precisely those that are resulting from people taking up their rightful roles — as they always do– a reult of the opening of the spaces of appearance– and co-authoring the epochal transformations that are cocurring around the globe today. For those aligned with the current structures and whose wolrdview is predicated on the scalar assumptions that the new must come up and through the pre-dominance of existing structures (such as the nation state) in a nested and hierarchical way– a worldview that would surely miss the new transformations– will experience these transformations as disruptive and disturbing, as the cycle of transformation dismantles old realities in the wake of the new. THe nation-state is cracking– along with the socio-spatial scales that are overdetermined by it, as Sassen tells us

The national as a container of social process and power is cracked. This cracked casing opens up a geography of politics and civics that links subnational spaces.

Increasingly, it becomes more problematic to fixate on the national as the primary unit of socio-spatial action, and the typical scalar assumptions from national to supranational to global that are built-up from it. This is not news to the global corporations and global financial organizations that have long ago deconstructed the nation-statefrom their lexicon of operational power, while simultaneously re-enforcing the notion of nation-stateand geopolitics as usual for its efficaciousness in power broking. With both positive and negative effects– many of which are enacted on global proportions– global strategic economic operations along with global capital, have carved a worldwide grid to accommodate millions of non-local actors who comfortably navigate and simultaneously create emerging socio-spatial geographies. Saskia Sassen describes two distinct types of “traffic” operating through this worldwide grid:

The organizational side of the global economy materializes in a worldwide grid of strategic places, uppermost among which are major international business and financial centers. We can think of this global grod as constituting a new economic geography of centrality, one that cuts across national boundaries and increasingly across the old North-South divide. It has emerged as a transnational space for the formation of new claims by global capital but also by other types of actors.

It is not only the transmigration of capital that takes place in this global grid but also that of people, both rich– i.e. the new transnational profession workforce– and poor- i.e. most migrant workers; and it is a space for the transmigration of cultural forms, for the re-territorialization of the “local” subcultures.

 Is this worldwide grid a relevant opening for human action? Is it, as Sassen asks, “also a space for new politics, one going beyond the politics of culture and identity while likely to remain embedded in it?”

One of the most radical forms assumed today by the linkage of people to territory is the loosening of identities from their traditional sources, such as the nation or the village. The unmooring in the process of identity formation engenders new notions of community of membership and of entitlement.

The forces of transformation of the local and the global are both to-down with respect to strategic operations of corporation and financial organizations, as well as bottom-up with respect to local actors and emerging socio-spatial geographies that operate at global levels. And like all other geographies that have come before them, they do not point to any fixed or absolute grid that somehow exists “out there in reality”, due to a type of “force major”, but are geographies of identity and mind, or in other words, they are co-created values arising in emerging socio-spatial geographies. As such they are complex human processesthat are at once impervious and porous to ever-changing degrees. Sassen creates the neologism “glocality” to describe the new framework of socio-spatial action, wherein the local is no longer nested exclusively within the global by an impenetrable rule of scalar relations, rather the appearance of the global in locality after locality — across scales — means that the global is becoming locally distributed. In other words, the space of the appearance of the global is becoming increasingly localized.

Simultaneous decentralized access can help local actors have a sense of participation in struggles that are not necessarily global, but are, rather, globally distributed in that they recur in locality after locality.

[Whereas] … much of the conceptualization of the local in the social sciences has assumed physical/ geographic proximity and thereby a sharply defined territorial boundedness, with the associated implication of closure, … [and] a strong tendency to conceive of the local as part of a hierarchy of nested scales …

To a very large extent these conceptualizations hold for most of the instantiations of the local today, more specifically, for most of the actual practices and formations likely to constitute the local in most of the world. But there are also conditions today that contribute to destabilize these practices and formations and hence invite a reconceptualization of the local that can accommodate a set of instances that diverge from dominant patterns. Key among these current conditions are globalization and/ or globality as consitutive not only of cross-border institutional spaces, but also of powerful imaginaries enabling aspirations to transboundary political practice even when the actos involved are basically localized.

 What is therefore needed from a conceptualized Integral Politics, are just these kinds of “powerful imaginaries” that “enable aspirations to transboundary political practice”– we need conceptual designs that do not merely rationally accommodate the steamy emergence of transformation through convenient categories of scale, since as Sassen and her students demonstrate, “diverse types of research and theorization … show that confining characteristics and locations of that epochal transformation to the self-evident scale of the global and to self-evident supranational institutions is profoundly inadequate.” Rather we need an Integral Politics that is less concerned with shaping the future into known categories and frameworks, and more capable of a kind of midwifery through what Sassen calls for as “an expansion of the analytic terrain and interpretive tools for studying the global”:

… the significant dislocations we are living through signal the need for new concepts and framings. … It is a pattern that breaks with the typical approach in the literature, which has been to start with the self-evident scale of the global, … That approach has made important contributions, but is ultimately a partial view of the larger transformation.

In sharp contrast to the prevailing scholarship, the starting point… is a thick, complex, messy environment where the global needs to be detected, decoded, discovered, and then constructed as an object of study. This type of approach asks what it is we are trying to name with the term globalization. Each recognizes that we are living through a transformation that, though partial, is epochal.

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Integral Manifesto Pt III(2): Integral Politics? / Integral Reality Framework: A Topology of Worldspaces

Posted on May 6, 2009 by

Books Discussed in this Section

Steve McIntosh (2007) Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution,  Continuum Books.

Neil Brenner (2001)  The limits to scale?  Methodological reflections on scalar structuration, Progress in Human Geography 25, 4 pp. 591-614 / retrieved from http://sociology.fas.nyu.edu/docs/IO/222/2001.Brenner.PiHG.pdf

What McIntosh is most proud of in his book, is his three-fold contribution to theory: 1) the contours of the integral reality framework, 2) the importance of the spiral of development, and 3) the evolutionary imperative of global governance.  Taking the best of his ideas together, amounts to an interesting hypothesis of worldspaces and their scalar relations– in other words, a topology of worldspaces. Although he has contributed some variations on original integral ideas, his work remains close to the foundational framework of “mainstream” integral, and so I propose to evaluate some of his tenets and the presmises of “mainstream” integral theory — as the fundamental “topology” of mainstream integral theory. In turn, this topology might be considered a geography of worldspaces derived from two fundamental assumptions about scalar relations: 1) that units are related exclusively in a transcend and include manner with lesser parts giving rise to greater wholes and systems comprised of nested sets or holons; and 2) that these holons (scalar units) scale along an evolutionary trajectory according to a pre-ordinate teleology. The IHDP paper on scalar relatins and human development identifies the relations in this sort of typology as a “constitutively inclusive nested hierarchy.” Indeed, the very concept of  holon  signifies exactly this: a unit in  a constitutively inclusive nested hierarchy. One can easily impose a teleological imperative onto a typology such as this, but doing so offers no proof that our assumptions about the categories, units, and relationships of scale are driven by that teleological imperative. Given some logical analysis, it is easy to see that without the prior assumption of scale, the conclusion is not derivable; but with the prior assumptions, the conclusion seems inevitable. In other words, once we step into the integral reality framework, there is no real debate about the “actual” consequences we “see” from evolution– the premises fall neatly into their conclusions.

However, when we are dealing with a topology of worldspaces, we are dealing with functioning socio-spatial processes that themselves are constructs of the individuals who themselves are responsible for the continual maintenance of as well as transformation of the internal relations of their scalar framework. Integral topology, as McIntosh conceives it, depends solely on an external absolutist framework (transcend and include hierarchies), and therefore relationships internal to that framework are considered to be static, pregiven or fixed. This may or may not be a satisfactory framework for describing “reality”, but with respect to living systems and human action in particular, involving subjects and agents who simltaneously act out, act through, and act on the relations of their inconnections, integral topology as it currently stands lacks the capacity to capture all the richness and depth of sociospatial process which scale internally and qualitatively as well. Re-quoting from Brenner’s IHDP working paper:

Processes of scalar structuration do not produce a single nested scalar hierarchy, an absolute pyramid of neatly interlocking scales, but are better understood as a mosaic of unevenly superimposed and densely interlayered scalar geometries. For, as Allan, Massey and Cochrane indicate, ‘… different kinds of social process have very different geographies and they do not all fit neatly into the same set of nested hierarchies.

A critique as severe as this might suggest that integral geography should be abandoned altogether. However, we can improve on the basic cartography that iSD lays out through a more sensitive and sensible approach. FOrst this requires us to be sensitive to the idea that the new geography is a dynamic sociospatial process, and we must view participants as true actors inside this sociospatial procss that simultaneously constitutes the “units” of the map as well as its morphogenetic field– a field that is always in the process of shaping and mapping. Secondly, our analysis of sociospatial space must include those very values we espouse that must be internal to the syste. This is problematic for McIntosh who espouses the values of non-ethnocentricity, democracy, and natural evolution, but whose analytic method systematically builds up a governance system based on exclusion, autocracy, and programmable approaches to the spiral of development. If our analysis is to be valid according to our values (rather than merely according to onto-theo-logics in service to our rational(ego)-centric cravings), we will derive a governance which enacts those very values we espouse, namely, a governance that is inclusive and open, participatory and representational, and based on a truly non-judgmental interpretation of the course of evolution. Thirdly, an integral geography of sociospatial dynamics, must finally come to terms with the difference between evolutoin based on the Darwinian model, and evolution confused with developmental models (as is the case with spiral dynamic’s base- the work of Clare Graves). Developmental models are predicated on an enduring individual as an entity of being that does not get replaced through successive stages of development. As cultures develop, as the human species develops sociospatially– there is no single enduring entity that pertains over time.  Furthermore, it is a stretch of the imgination to consider that social, technological and cultural development within human groups proceeds through the same dynamics as speciation in the Darwinian sense — since even if one day the reproductive patterns of humans are constrained by sociospatial distance, it is far from clear that “developmentally fixed” discrete structures would result. Even if we presume to conflate the terms — individual development on the one hand, and evolutionary speciation on the other– the dynamics are not the same. In fact, one might argue that the dynamics proceed in opposite directions — toward preservation of form through change in the case of development; and toward emergence of novel forms across system dynamics, in the case of evolution.

One might consider the vMemes of Spiral Dynamics not as structural stages of development nor as evolutionary forms, but as unique constellations– subsystems as it were, within the totality of human action , arising as particular variants of geo-social space, technological innovation, and economic systems.

These subordinate systems are not to be considered part of an evolutionary or developmental trjectory that enfolds prior forms into more recent forms, or that enfolds parts within a greater whole. Rather, they should be considered as co-creative partners, enacting human action — participatory agents in hte larger, ecological whole or holistic generative process of human action, whose essential dynamic is exactly this: to enfold (geo)social, cultural and technological relationships into robust (with respect to coherence and endurance) and resilience (with respect to novelty and change) units in response to internal and external adaptive processes of transformation. These three aspects of an integral sociospatial geography– subjects-as-actors, co-creating values, evolution and enfoldment– are considered in the next sections.

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Integral Manifesto Pt III(1): Integral Politics? / Action Beyond Reason and Reason Beyond Sensibility

Posted on April 11, 2009 by

Books Discussed in this Section

Steve McIntosh (2007) Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution,  Continuum Books.

Bruno Latour (1999) Pandora’s Hope: Essays of the Reality of Science Studies, Harvard University Press.

Toward the end of his book Pandora’s Hope, Bruno Latour asks

How sensible is it to cry for Reason when faced with the horrors we witness every day?

The more your own opinion tends toward the affirmative, the more on board you might feel with the usual offerings from “mainstream” integral politics arguing for an integral version of Global Governance. By “mainstream integral” I am referring to integral thought based primarily on Ken Wilber’s AQAL model incorporated into a Spiral Dynamics worldview (often labelled iSD).]  Like the idea of the polis,this sensibility — that Reason and Rule go together — is rooted in early Greek thought. It appealed to Socrates, the summa qua non of the vita contemplativa– who neither labored, worked, nor partook of the unruly sport of the Sophists (those original politicians), and who, in the famous dialogue of the Gorgias gives this vehement rant against the Sophist Callicles that Latour relates in his book

In fact, Callicles, the expert’s opinion is that co-operation, love, order, discipline, and justice bind heaven and earth, gods and men. That’s why they call the universe an ordered whole, my friend, rather than a disorderly mess or an unruly shambles. It seems to me that, for all your expertise in the field, you are overlooking the point. You have failed to notice how much power geometrical equality has among gods and men, and this neglect of geometry has led you to believe that one should try to gain a disproportionate share of things.

It may be worthwhile to compare Socrates’ statement with one from Steve McIntosh’s new book– a primer on Integral Consciousness with emphasis on integral politics:

Without its championing of the movement for global governance, the integral worldview fails to offer the type of powerful new solutions that the previously arising worldviews have provided. But when the new insights of the integral worldview are applied through this political platform, their power to produce lasting cultural evolution becomes evident. Just as the moral superiority of democracy over feudalism served to convince many to adopt the values of the modernist worldview, so too will the evident moral superiority of global governance over a world of sovereign nations operating in a state of nature eventually convince many that the integral worldview is the way forward.

Latour might just as easily be speaking about McIntosh, in his commentary comparing Socrates to the writer Steven Weinberg (whose name I have substituted in the following act):

What these two quotations have in common, across the huge gap of centuries, is the strong link they establish between the respect for impersonal natural laws, on the one hand, and the fight against irrationality, immorality, and political disorder on the other. In both quotations, the fate of Reason and the fate of Politics are associated in a single destiny. … The common tenet is that we need something “inhuman” … [for McIntosh, the natural laws of evolution and the spiral] that no human has constructed; for Socrates, geometry, whose demonstrations escape human whim– if we want to be able to fight against “inhumanity.” To sum up : only inhumanity will quash inhumanity. 

 Not surprisingly, many reader will cry “Foul! Surely the ancients’ emerging belief in the power and promise of geometry is not the same as our trust in the power and promise of the evolutionary spiral!” In effect, however, the two are parallel phenomena, stemming from common assumptions. From the vantage point of modernity, we can surely see that geometry belongs to a different domain than politics; and for the same reasons, that both are the products of scalar constructions, the one a geometry of physical spaces, the other, iSD a geography of worldspaces. But since neither of them rests on the central conviction of the space of appearance– neither of them emphasize the power and promise of authentic political action.

The error in connecting Reason with Politics, stems from a series of insufficiently examined assumptions embedded in the culture of science and scientism which confuses the open space of the body politic with the closed halls in which experts and professionals assemble to conspire towards a politics of Reason. This would make for a democracy with an intolerant and dominant temperament. The speech acts in the open space of the body politic are quite different from those that occur around specific bodies of knowledge. Latour proposes four conditions to free politics from scientism. He writes

… the first specification of political speech is that it is public and does not take place in the silent isolation of the study or the laboratory.

From the point of view of the governors of the body of knowledges, the body episteme, the speech acts of the body politic represent defects, weaknesses, and inaccuracies. The ideas of the body politic arrive disarranged, and tend toward discordance– they are not system-ically assembled. Furthermore, in the open space of the body politic, speech acts are discontinuous and indeterminate– they do not standardize. Therefore, Latour’s second specification is

… that political reason cannot possibly be the object of professional knowledge.

Although political action requires attention to the body politic as a whole, this kind of attention requires a special genius of its own– the ability to embrace all of the parts without generalizing, which is another term for reducing uniqueness. Generalization is a contraction of the polis, a closure of the spaces of appearance, through a process of coarse-graining until there is only a cacophony of background voices in which no single voice can be heard.

This is what Socrates recognizes under the name of a good and ordered cosmos in the qualities required of the expert technician. “Each of them organizes the various components he works with into a particular structure and makes them accommodate and fit one another until he’s formed the whole into an organized and ordered object.

The third consideration Latour points out is

not only does political reason deal with important matters, taken up by many people in the harsh conditions of urgency, it also cannot rely on any sort of previous knowledge of cause and consequence…

In this sense, political reason is no reason at all, since it is foremost action. From the point of view of action, Reason, like Hamlet’s soliloquy, is an interregnum. The dispensation of action without the benefit of expertise or recourse to rational analysis, greatly disturbed Socrates in the Gorgias — yet how accurate his definition of positive attributes of the kind of democracy his fellow Greeks were inventing — attributes that Latour greatly admires

How moving to see, by returning to the past, how close these Greeks still were to the positive nature of this democracy that remains their wildest invention. Of course “it does not involve expertise,” of course “it lacks rational understanding”: the whole dealing with the whole under the incredibly tough constraints of the agora must decide in the dark and will be led by people as blind as themselves, without the benefit of proof, of hindsight, of foresight, of repetitive experiment, of progressive scaling up.

In applying to politics a “context of truth”, “mainstream” integral politics reproduces Socrates’ category error. The role of reason is to in-form politics; yet reason alone has no capacity to re-form the body politic. The body politic re-presents, by allowing for, by opening the space of appearance for, innumerable presences, the “who-I-am” that announces itself through subject-to-subject encounter, the limiting quantum of action. Given the appropriate space of appearance, this body politic, this re-presentation that occurs, occurs in a thoroughly spontaneous and ad-hoc manner, which Latour describes as a kind of “fermentation process”

The stunning beauty of the Gorgias is that this other context [other than the context of facts, reason and truth], is clearly visible in the very lack of comprehension Socrates displays for what it is to re-presentthe people. I am not talking here about the modern notion of representation that will come much later, and that will itself be infused with rational definitions, but about a completely ad hoc sort of activity that is neither transcendent nor immanent but more closely resembles a fermentation through which the people brews itself toward a decision– never exactly in accordance with itself, and never led or commanded or directed from above.

How drastically this sensibility differs from the sensibility of integral theorists like McIntosh who writes

Others who have considered the future evolution of global governance believe that such global systems will not arise in a formal way through the ratification of a constitution, but rather through the gradual accumulation of treaties, nongovernmental organizations, trade agreements, and global economic institutions. However, while the incremental accumulation of issue-specific global systems is generally positive, I do not believe that we can achieve the full benefits of a world federation … without the effective implementation of democratically enacted global law with jurisdiction over individual persons. Even if such jurisdiction over individuals is limited by the mandate of restricted federal authority … for global law to be effective, nation-states will be required to relinquish some degree of their presently unrestricted sovereignty. And the only was that nation-states will likely be persuaded to give up some of their sovereignty is under a scenario wherein their relinquished sovereignty becomes reinvested in a higher authority. That is, to bring about the bright promise of a world without war, oppression, environmental degradation, or human suffering, a world federation will have to me adequately empowered – empowered by the master lawmaking authority [emphasis mine] of a democratically enacted global constitution.

McIntosh writes with a weighty sense of self-assurance, which comes from the fact that his arguments are all well reasoned, and firmly based in what he terms “the integral reality framework.” Within this framework, McIntosh can prove that political reason, effective-action, jurisprudence, and the rights of higher authorities scale up like nested sets in a transcend and include manner– from the microscale of consciousness, through scales of cultural values, to the global scale of a world federation (and even on to the nature of Spirit– the scope of which is outside this paper). His framework, the AQAL/iSD grid, is the geometrics of integral. To his credit, McIntosh writes of the possibility that “pushing power up” through the advent of a global constitution would allow for more power to be “pushed down … to the level of the people;” and he claims that this “power down” should empower and strengthen traditional cultures to “better develop their own forms of modernist cultures– the kind of homegrown modernism that would complement and preserve the uniqueness and evolutionary genius of their own particular versions of traditionalism;” but at the same time, paradoxical to what his values may seem to be, he asserts

But when we contemplate forming a union that encompasses the large populations of the Third World, from and integral perspective we can see that a simple one-to-one vote system would likely create major problems. If global law were to be made by a world legislature elected exclusively by a population size [a curious euphemism for "majority vote"] this would effectively hand over power to the large populations of the Third World. And because these populations are still largely centered in traditional consciousness, the ethnocentric morality that generally characterizes this level of development would make for  predictably one-sided laws.

So much for the “evolutionary genius” of the Third World’s own forms of modernist culture. To be sure, we would not want to cede global authority to a federation of ethnocentricllay-minded folk. Might not it be ethnocentric in any sense of the word to assert the following?

Thus a significant challenge for any would-be global democratic [democratic, that is, without either a one-to-one or majority vote] entity is to provide a certain degree of protection and insulation for modernist economies and modernist and postmodern cultures from the now significantly larger populations centered in traditionalist consciousness and below.

McIntosh recommends a tiered approach to membership in a world federation which precludes nations that do not have a requisite degree of modernist consciousness or that have not yet become democratic. Democratic in what sense? Presumably, not in the sense of one-man-one-vote, nor in the sense of majority rule, nor apparently in the sense that all participants are allowed a space of appearance– for under these conditions, the world federation itself does not pass muster. McIntosh seems to confuse democratic with demographic when he describes a tricameral federalism of checks and balances that is designed to

provide for democratic representation of all people within the federation while preventing the more populous countries from completely controlling the government and redistributing the world’s wealth and since economic development roughly traces the development of consciousness [a spurious assumption!] the disparities in wealth must be given sufficient insulation to prevent the natural course of evolution …

Of course, in his case, McIntosh’s economic demographies are prescribed by the evolutionary prime directive, namely “the principle which recognizes that every stage of the spiral of development needs to be nurtured and respected,” except that along the way we need to cut and paste entire populations on whom the “natural “evolutionary spiral depends (if there really is such a thing) according to an absolutist and elitist and ethnocentrist framework we have fashioned so carefully as to be rational, perhaps, but not sensible.If what remains after several tiers of segregation is still tagged as a democracy, it will most certainly be one with an intolerant and dominant temperament.

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Integral Manifesto Pt II(4): Subjects & Surrogates / Power, Tolerance and Democracy

Posted on April 11, 2009 by

Books Discussed in this Section

Pauli Pylkko (1998)  The Aconceptual Mind. John Benjamins Pub. Co. Philadelphia

Such musings concerning micro-scales of intersubjectivity offer a diverse range of hypotheses on the nature of power, tolerance and democracy, and their roles with respect to human action. For example, it may be true that the kinds of non-Western a-conceptual experiences that Pylkko alludes to represent important variations in the processural orders of the articulation of subject from pre-subjective centers in the genesis of a cognitive occasion. If so, the very notion of the subject-to-subject encounter as being the limiting quantum of freedom would be called into question by the quandary of just what constitutes the subject, Western variations of which would not be available to those people or communities of people whose worldviews are constituted by differing variations in the scale, nature, agency and sovereignty of any so-called “subject.” This would make the idea of exporting Western style democracy which evolved from the Greek notion of the polis — despite its noble appeal to the space of appearance of the subject as well as potential subjects in a participatory and potentially liberating manner– deeply problematic. This would make for a democracy with a latently intolerant temperament.

As another example of this tentative  “hypothesis of the subject” reconsider the quote from above wherein Pylkko notes

Therefore experiential centers which are not yet full-fledged subjects cannot be separated from one another by a crisp conceptual cut. The experience in which they float is aconceptual, and because aconceptual experience doesn’t yet recognize separate individuals, it has a peculiar collective nature [emphasis mine].

This curiosity leads to the hypothesis that pre-individuated centers might not only have transcendental qualities beneath, behind, or below the level of the subject, but also transcendent qualities above, beyond, or over the level of the subjects as a kind of supersubject– which for the most of us today remains an interesting hypothesis, but is an emerging notion gaining credence with the digital information and internet culture and in new-age consciousness-raising circles, as for example, the title of Michel Bauwens’ article on peer-to-peer spirituality, The Next Buddha will be a Collective. Were this notion of supersubject to be reified into the structures of consciousness such that its onto-theo-logics were enfolded into the cognitive occasion of individual subjects, then it might be the case that in the brave new age of tomorrow, “subjectivity” itself– the abilit or capacity to be a subject– will have become as experientially inaccessible in this hypothetical tomorrow, as the pre-subjective origins are considered to be inaccessible today. If so, we have merely chased the tail of our philosophical snake– Heidegger’s inner-Being– with its own head– Zarathustra’s outer-Being. This would make for a democracy with an overly dominating temperament.

The emergence of such a conceptually scaled Overman is neither inevitable or impossible, and might become latent and  eventually a “preconstitutional” (that is, an onto-theoretical structure) component of experience, and this can result from either of two directions– either from the hyper-reification of the microscale of Being, or the hyper-reification of the superordinate scale of Being. on the microscale end, we might as easily argue for a supersubject that is composed of  the peculiar collective of aconceptual experiential centers across boundary conditions of human individuals, and posit an experientially coherent and intentional supersubject that “lives in us just as it lives elsewhere at the same time, too”, as Pylkko has written

From this perspective, there is not much point is saying that one subject inhabits on body-brain. Rather, every subject’s being is distributed onto a social network, and therefore onto several brains and bodies, too. … A subject can inhabit more than one brain, and a brain can be inhabited by more than one subject.

Just as easily as imagining a supersubject as arising from the ontological ground of pre-individuated subjects that constitute the subject’s aconceptual primordial origins, we might imagine a supersubject as arising from the opposite end of the spectrum: from a future scenario in which pre-unified subjects belong to the ontological ground that constitutes the supersubject’s a-transconceptual primordial origins. In the meantime, in this more than opportune moment in history, we still have a choice. or so it seems.

The moral of this story, I suppose, is that we can purposely fashion democratic acts from some fundamental qualities of the subject, and a morally-saturated expectation of an authentic subect-to-subject encounter; and that may well have both liberating effects and constitute the limiting quantum of freedom in human action. However, this is only possible if we avoid adding onto the real and actual occasions of human en-act-ments of democracy– the real deal, not the ideal– according to its vibrant and living place in the vitae activae– we must avoid adding the categorical errors of an onto-theoretical democracy, wholly or partially embedded in unexamined assumptions of scale.

Perhaps the most we can make of a democracy is to fulfill the pledge of creating spaces of appearances, come what may. This is what Pylkko determines to be “the best that democracy can offer to us,” namely, “variety, perpetual change, tolerance and such struggle which enhances and allows variety to flourish.” But the reason why we seem to have come to this point of non-conclusion, is due to the fact that we have limited our notion of the “space” of appearance, to the aspect of extension, and as a result required of our “pre-subjects”, our “subjects”, and even our “supersubject” to arrange themselves along certain identifiable scales of sovereignty. If to this limited notion of space as extension, and the sovereign forms that appear to “take up space,” we allow the more crucial notion of space as “openness” or better yet, it’s corollary verb “openning,” then we might recover something of our initial premise, and the propositions which follow from it.

We have merely to substitute for purposes of discussing the microscales of subjectivity, the series “personal-local-regional-national-planetary” for the series “pre-subject-subject-supersubject” in the premise to derive the following, parallel propositions:

If among the spheres of intersubjectivity– this is also true, then the realm of human freedom is not assured by the pursuit of sovereignty of any kind– presubjective, subjective or supersubjective– rather, freedom is defeated whenever the conviction of sovereignty prevails.

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Integral Manifesto Pt II(3): Subjects & Surrogates / Intersubjectivity- A Timely Interjection

Posted on April 7, 2009 by

Books Discussed in this Section

Sean Hargens , Intersubjective Musings: A Response to Christian de Quincey’s “The Promise of Integralism” retrieved from http://wilber.shambhala.com/html/watch/042301_i.cfm

Pauli Pylkko (1998)  The Aconceptual Mind. John Benjamins Pub. Co. Philadelphia

Bonnitta Roy (2006) A Process Model of Integral Theory, from Integral Review Journal, Issue 3 at www.integral-review.org

It might be helpful at this point to clarify the meaning of intersubjectivity with respect to our inquiry. As a reference I will use the five-fold schema that Sean Hargens identifies (as gleaned from Wilber’s writings) in his online article Intersubjective Musings. In it, Hargens presents 5 dimensions of intersubjectivity, each with their own important distinction and meaning, and together which encompass the territory of the intersubjective.

1. Intersubjectivity-as-spirit: the transcendental quality of all relationships that allows for any dimension of intersubjectivity to manifest. The only reason that two subjectivities can touch simultaneously (co-presence) is that they are ultimately only one Subject.

We can restate this from a generative process point of view, rather than from an absolutist or transcendent point of view, and adapt this meaning of intersubjectivity to the following process version:

The reason why co-presence is possible (that two subjectitivies can touch simultaneously) is that they are primoridally not-two; that is, they generate from a prior whole.

With respect to our inquiry, this generative process involves the authentic subject-to-subject encounter (the quantum of human action) as the re- enact- ment of this primordial inter-face.

2. Intersubjectivity-as-context:the context created by multiple intersubjective structures (i.e. meshworks) which are constitutive of the subject and create the space in which both subjects and objects arise (e.g. physical laws, morphic fields, linguistic, moral.,cultural, biological, and aesthetic structures). These cultural contexts, background and practices are nondiscursive and inaccessible via direct experience.

Human action as defined in this inquiry is related to the space of appearance– the “who I am” which makes itself known, explicit and public, by “showing up” through word and deed. Furthermore, this “showing up” is an inter- act between subjects. Considering that Hargens’ description of meaning #2 of intersubjectivity-as-context posits structures that are both nondiscursive and inaccessible — are we to presume that these do not “show up” in human action– in that space of appearance as described in this inquiry? Furthermore, considering that meaning # 2 relates to the ontology of the subject– what relevance does it have to the realm of human action, in the Greek sense of the word?

3. Intersubjectivity-as-resonance: the occurrence of “mutual recognition” and “mutual understanding” between two holons of similar depth. Within this dimension there are Worldspace and Worldviews.

a. Worldspaces: ontological resonance between two subjects who share emergent domains (e.g. physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual).  Here, mutual recognition is simple co-presence prior to reflection (precognitive).

b. Worldviews: epistemological resonance between two subjects who share a level of psychological development (e.g. archaic, magic, mythic, rational, and centauric). Here mutual understanding is co-presence via cognition, which complexifies with development. This is the cognitive component of a shared worldspace.

“Mutual recognition” is a prerequisite for human action. The I-Thou encounter is essentially intersubjectivity-as- resonance in the first sense (a) that Hargens identifies as worldspaces. The original Greek notion of the polis is such a world space. The crucial challenge in all political action, is the tremendous capacities and promise that appears in these resonant shared worldspaces, which can show up despite co-emerging dissonant worldviews. From this sense of intersubjectivity (#3) one might conclude that while a fundamental requirement of human actions the opening of a shared worldspace, ideological intolerance results when the ultimate conviction of human action also entails the notion of securing resonant worldviews entering any given worldspace– which, according to Hargen’s own definitions, entails an epistemological intolerance. Sharing then becomes an ethical term, entailing human plurality.

4. Intersubjectivity-as-relationship: the way we identify with and have relationship with other subjects and objects. Within this dimension there are at least three types of relationships:

a. It-It relationships: an objective subject in relation with an objective object.

b. I-It relationships: a subject in relationship with an object (or subject seen as an object).

c. I-I relationships: a subject in relationship with a subject. This last subdivision has two general forms, either solidarity or difference.

i. Relationship-as-solidarity: relating to another subject because they mirror your values, ethnicity, gender, or nationality, etc.

ii. Relationship-as-difference: relating to another subject as a subject despite the fact that they are different from you in important ways.

This meaning (#4) Intersubjectivity-as-relationship turns out to be what was previously described as the field of orders and sets of rules that generate economies, geographies, technologies. Economies are primarily (a) It-It relationships, wherein subjects are viewed as “objective swarm phenomena” with respect to objective measures. Technologies are primarily (b) I-It relationships, wherein subjects and objects are enfolded, as Latour proposed. I-I relationships (c) are related to geographies of various kinds (physical, social, cultural, geneological, biological, etc…) that define and frame identity through boundary conditions and, as Hargens points out, can either constitute solidarity (tending toward cooperation) or difference (tending toward conflict). Most of what is considered the political arena today, focuses on this last sub-meaning of intersubjectivity-as-relationship; although ignoring the other crucial components of intersubjective arisings, is responsible for much of our failures and has resulted in immensely damaging consequences.

Until the postmodern era, meaning #2, intersubjectivity-as-context was unknown (and unknowable); but in modern times, through many rounds of inquiry and action,  it became clear that whenever we modernists refer to, whatever we refer to as the “human subject”, entails something that is already preconstituted by and enmeshed in, pre-subjective “structures.” This greatly disturbed Heidegger, whose conviction was getting at the authentic Dasein experience. Intersubjectivity # 2 by definition precludes such an experience as Heidegger imagined. In similar ways, and for similar reasons that modern technology worried Arendt, the Western Gestell of techne, embedded in a scientivistic and objectivist ontology, along with its exclusivist policies and colonial appropirations, greatly worried Heidegger– both she and he were seriously concerned that something was going terribly wrong. Today we live with (and in) the global consequences– some relatively good, some relatively bad– of this technological and scientivistic moment-um. If we take a strong position on meaning # 2, how is it possible for humans to wrestle out from the self-perpetuating system wherein structures laid down in the past, continue to reinforce each other through successive generations which arise not only preconstituted by these structures, but also in such a way that these structures are nondiscursive and inaccessible via experience? This I believe is the immediate challenge and primary significance of human action today.

The depths and reach of these structures prejudice not only our perspectives, values, and beliefs– as if that were not enough– but also constrain the linguistic tools we use to reason and think, and thereby constrain the types of speech-acts available to us in the choice field of human action. These embedded structures (which are the same as unexamined assumptions, except that the postmodern claim is that they are also unexaminable) are also responsible for the tremendous rift between worldviews that separate subjects–often even those who already shared a common worldspace. Heidegger imagined a radical cut could be achieved by the individual subject through a kind of direct, a-conceptual, a-theoretical, a- ontic, authentic experience with Being. He imagined that such a transcendental experience might revitalize the self and liberate existenz– the human conditioned– into the infinite openness of Being. In the process, he disavowed Being of the fundamental richness of all subjectivity–namely, that it is both singular and plural, and the fundamental essence of the subject-to-subject encounter, namely, that it requires no mediator.

Pauli Pylkko’s The Aconceptual Mind tells us that things are much different than Heidegger thought– that although Heidegger might have caught the right scent, he went (too far) down the wrong track. Pylkko reminds us that the very concept of “subject” is itself interwoven into the western technological Gestell, and our experience of our own “subjectivity”  or “intersubjectvity” is part of that which is embedded in (supposedly nondiscursive and inaccessible) structures of consciousness. In one sense, given the theme of this inquiry, we might consider this a question of scale– What are the boundary conditions that we use to delimit an entity such that it is a “subject”; versus what we might consider to be a pre-subjective surrogate, or a trans-subjective collective? This is a question of scale in a very fundamental sense. How does our lexicon scale the pre-subject to the subject to the supersubject?

In order to investigate this question, Pylkko rejects Heidegger’s categorical dichotomy of the authentic and inauthentic experience–claiming rightly so, that Heidegger’s distinction demands too deep a cut such that one type of experience (i.e. the so-called authentic one) remains distinct in both identity and category than another (a conventional experience). Rather, Pylkko argues,

The description of extreme cases should be related to regular cases, and every adequate view should allow extreme experience to grow continually from regular experience. But similarly, a view which is able to deal only with regular cases and would exclude intensive experience as something purely anomalous or irrelevant would be equally inadequate.

Pylkko proposes a type of scalar arrangement, a framework involving centers of experience on different levels; such that one level entails a conventional experiential center (the “subject”) while another lower, deeper or more primordial level entails a different experiential center (a pre-subjective surrogate). The pre-subjective surrogate and the subject are not discontinuous entities, rather they are processurally related forms that arise in experience, such that pre-subjective centers give rise to actual subjects through a process of iteration and reification.

Unique experience is originally, not only aconceptual, but a-subjective. It doesn’t acknowledge the subject of perception, action and thinking, until suitable repetition creates presubjective experiential centers within the a-subjective experience, and these centers become sufficiently articulated in order to adopt such a controlling attitude towards the rest of experience which characterizes the full presence of the subject. After some self-organization, these centers are able to create the impression that their experience is structured into relatively permanent conceptual hierarchies and perspectives which include minimally some identity and causality conditions upon  which the impression of time and space is founded.

According to Pylkko, the emergence of even these pre-subjective centers entails relations between other such centers, and may constitute what Hargens calls the “transcendental quality of all relationships that allows for any dimension of intersubjectivity to manifest,” which may be, according to this meaning of intersubjectivity, its most fundamental manifestation:

The pre-subjective experiential centers emerge gradually from agnostic relations in which they are engaged with other emerging centers. These agnostic relations can be viewed as games … . When the game situations with which an experiential center is engaged gradually evolve and become more complex, the center of experience becomes more structured, complicated and persistent, and eventually, the center experiences itself as something that is, due to its peculiar perspective, separated from others.

Pylkko’s process ontology of the subject creates a scenario in which the fully articulated subject becomes extracted, not ontologically, but experientially from the ground of inter-being(s), and as a result, “experience is saturated with isolation.”

… the isolation of subjects from one another, the isolation of  pre-subjective experiential centers from one another (before the emergence of full subjectivity); and finally, the isolation of the subject from its a-conceptual origin.

This leads, in Pylkko’s words, to a situation of strong nostalgia to which every subject is doomed. This is part of the subject’s conditioned existenz– but not part of the subject’s Being;for even though the subject experiences itself as being isolated from both its pre-subjective centers as well as other subjects,

… from the point of view of the a-conceptual experience, this  is no clear-cut at all!

That the subject lives in this state of isolation and nostalgia (“as if the stormy ocean of a-conceptual experience had separated the solitary dwelling place of the subject from other subjects”) has required of the subject, the creation of external forms of communication that lay down avenues of connectivity to re-establish the domain of shared intersubjectivity in the world of fully articulated subjects. The subject’s inability to see that this external framework is a re-cognition of, or a reflection of, conditions of inter-being that have never been severed, gives rise to the impression of an irrevocable gap across which two subjects never touch; and generates the intense drive of modern man to make concrete those language structures and meaning structures upon which he mistakenly believes his true intersubjectivity lives; and when these culturally embedded forms fail to close the gap in such a way as to eliminate that sense of isolation and its nagging existential nostalgia, the differences inherent in those forms with which man had originally hoped to bond him with others, becomes his prime evidence for intolerance.

The aporetic quality of such a dialogue stems from the situation in which the fully articulated subject is construed to be a structure, an entity, while the pre-subjective centers are steeped in processural change. One might merely say that the “subject” is nothing but an experiential center when viewed from a structural framework; or alternately, that pre-subjective experiential centers are nothing but what we conventionally refer to when we refer to a “subject” except we are witnessing the processural nature of its moment-to-moment arisings. The problem with a structural approach, is that it creates separations and contingencies that cut too deep into the fabric of process; while the difficulty with a process approach, is that it creates ontological narratives that are often off the mark, and oftentimes overly dramatic. In the process narrative of experiential centers giving rise to full-blown subjects, there is an uncomfortable intrusion of a conventional clock– the arrow of time that sets midnight at the level of interbeing, and noon at the level of intersubjectivity. This gives us the impression that the pre-subjective center of experience is ontologically prior because the case can be made that it is ontogenetically prior. This is a serious category error that process philosophy is prone to. At the level of the pre-subjective, there is no temporal domain, since the temporics of the subject arise inextricably and inimically as a condition of its structuration as a fully articulated subject. Therefore the narrative of the process of the subject’s arising cannot be ontologically based in a temporal framework that depends upon the subject’s perspective.

Rather, as I (Roy) have argued elsewhere, the subject arises as a cognitive occasion, in which pre-emergent levels are enfolded into each other as the subject emerges. These levels includ Pylkko’s primoridal experiential centers, the awareness of an external body and object(ive) world, and other subjects. The fully articulated subject arises with the event of subjective unification, in which the “subject” is imputed as an entity– the “being” that stands in for its own “becoming.” The arrow of time which fixes a local here and now for the subject, belongs to this process of enfoldment, such that “deeper” levels are experienced as greater, prior wholes– an experience that I have referred to as “the ontological dimensioning of reality.” How the various levels are laid down as the cognitive occasion articulates, determines the over-arching ontology in which the subject is based (biased)– but there are no absolute rules that overdetermine either the kinds of levels that articulate, or the relative “order” of their emergence. Therefore, it is important, when narrating from a process view, to remember that for each cognitive occasion there are levels that are related as greater, prior wholes, but no particular level can be considered absolutely prior– no particular condition can be considered a priori as having a higher ontological status. This position, more than Pylkko’s own narrative, satisfies his a-onto-a-theo-logical standards.

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Integral Manifesto Pt II(2): Subjects and Surrogates/ The I-Thou

Posted on March 27, 2009 by

Books Discussed in this Section

Martin Buber (2008) I and Thou, Hesperides Press

Hannah Arendt (1958)  The Human Condition, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago

Bonnitta Roy (2006) A Process Model of Integral Theory, from Integral Review Journal, Issue 3 at www.integral-reivew.org


In a very real sense, the central subject in a political act is not an individual subject, but a subject-to-subject actant. Not unlike Latour’s equation of humans and non-humans enfolded into each other, in an authentic encounter, aka a political act, subjects are enfolded into each other as an I-Thou. The notion of I-Thou-ness is not specifically a relational one, since this is a situation of complete reflexivity, parody and equanimity– whereas for two thing to be related, there must be a third term namely the scale of their relatedness. In an authentic I-Thou encounter, there is no third term. Of this encounter, Martin Buber has written

Beyond the subjective and this side of the objective, on the narrow ledge where I and Thou encounter each other, is the realm of the in-between. This reality, whose discovery has begun in our day, points the way for coming generations, leading beyond both individualism and collectivism.

This I-Thou enfoldment might be considered to be vis-a-vis the intersubjective realm, a reconstitution of the originary, primordial process described by Roy that, along with layers of affect, image, body and world, also enfolds the sense of “other” in the microgenetic series of the cognitive occasion that is responsible for the primary unification of these pre-subjective levels into the “unified subject.” In this sense, it is a re-cognition of a pre-subjective inter-face “between self and other,” in the special case where “self and other” are pre-subjective surrogates of the conventional level, standard meanings, of “self” and “other.” At its most fundamental level, this subject-to-subject encounter is a re-en-actment of a prior, pre-subjective occasion, in which the surrogate subject allows (acknowledges, accepts, invites) “otherness,” the surrogate other, in inimical communion as a vital and necessary step to achieve union as a “self”– in other words, as a necessary component of the question “who am I?” Normally, the pre-subjective component of every moment-to-moment arising of cognitive occasions remains unconscious, hidden in the preconstitutional components of self. Occasionally, this pre-subjective, a-conceptual “experience” revitalises itself through intense I-Thou encounters in which something of the below, beneath, behind the self-other formulation discloses its originary aspects. Still, even at the level of fully formed subjects, the subject-to-subject encounter continues to provide essential components of the individual subject’s question of the “who I am,” as the Greeks fully understood. According to Arendt,

Action and speech are so closely related because the primordial and specifically human act must at the same time contain the answer to the question of every newcomer: “Who are you?” This disclosure of who somebody is, is implicit in both his words and deeds. …

[Moreover] … it is likely that the “who” which appears so clearly and unmistakably to others, remains hidden from the person himself, like the daimon in Greek religion which accompanies each man throughout his life, always looking over his shoulder from behind and thus visible only to those he encounters.

According to Arendt, it is this special quality of the subject-to-subject encounter which distinguishes authentic human action versus the instrumentalization of human deeds. This space of human action– “the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word, namely, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things, but make their appearance explicitly”– is not a comfort zone. On the contrary, “the conviction that the greatest that man can achieve is his own appearance and actualization is by no means a matter of course.”

[both homo faber and animal laborans] will inclune to denounce action and speech as idleness, idle busy-bodyness and idle talk, and generally will judge public activities in terms of their usefulness to supposedly higher ends– to make the world more useful and more beautiful in the case of homo faber, to make life easier and longer in the case of animal laborans.

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