For The Turnstiles

Apropos of "integral ecology," you will want to get yourself a copy of The Bioregional Imagination. There are several valuable essays in it.

A few months back we learned about a forthcoming volume, Integral Ecologies: "a collection of essays, and it is being edited by me (Sam Mickey), Adam Robbert, and Sean Kelly. We are currently in the process of submitting a proposal to include it within the SUNY Press Series on Integral Theory."

Are there any signs of life at SUNY Press for the said Series on Integral Theory generally, or this volume in particular?

Perhaps of more relevance is the tendency in the "integral ecology" scene generally to effectively renounce the hyperbolic claims to singularity and superiority that are so characteristic of Wilber's work generally. "This is but one way to understand ecology among many," we now hear. This is progress in some respects, surely. Is it not a step back from one of the selling points of integral theory generally, that this represents the last and greatest and most complete paradigm available? The pluralism and the exceptionalism are terms in conflict here.

Well, how about it? What has changed?

Here is some new work.

Here is an essay in draft form on the role of a certain kind of poststructuralism in recent integral theory (looking specifically at appeals to Deleuze and Guattari).

Tangentially related thought: Integral Ecology is a book that clearly took some capital to produce. The Integral Life people are invested in this thing. It strikes me as a bit strange, going all-in on this particular wager: "evolution" is clearly the weakest link in the Wilberian chain, and so many of the claims in the ecology book are predicated on precisely that. How to explain this?

Very busy days and nights: finishing and defending a dissertation proposal, working on fellowship applications, teaching and grading and meeting with students, preparing some new work for publication, and facing some potentially challenging and potentially rewarding opportunities.

Soon I will rest. Until then, let us all be thankful for black coffee. Or this one instead for a smoother vibe and a slower accumulation.

Two more pieces up at Integral World now.

One is an informal question-and-answer section in which I attempt to address some common misunderstandings of the work I have done so far. I have to take responsibility for some of those misunderstandings, because I created them in the way I wrote those pieces. Some others, not so much. Read it here.

The second one concerns the work of the Comparative and Continental Philosophy Circle, which seems to be increasingly Wilberian in orientation (or at least affiliation). Their website certainly appears to have taken a page from Integral Life's style manual. Now, I very much appreciate the kinds of work that this Circle has set out to accomplish, as well as the congenial culture they have established. If this is criticism, it is friendly criticism.

I will have more to say later on what I mean by the word "sly" in this context. I mean it as a compliment, but I recognize that it may not be understood that way by all.

Apropos of "integral politics":

Alan Nasser's "How the Oligarchy Gets Politicized" gives a useful history of the contemporary. From this, it should be clear how Wilber's comments on the politics of left and right miss the essential; Nasser points to the real movement that Wilber's narrative cannot or does not account for.

While in practical terms Daniel Mroz's research is about training actors, if you read it in a slightly wider context, you see it sits at the intersection of two complex problems, that of embodiment and sociality and performance. I have just read two recent articles of his (you can find one of them here) and have come to the conclusion that he is making the kind of contribution that comparative thought can and should produce.

I very much look forward to reading Mroz' book The Dancing Word.

My essay "What Is Critical Integral Theory?" is now available at Integral World. This has been in circulation in draft form for a week or more. This revision benefited greatly from feedback offered by Joe Corbett.