John Wagnon - Commodification of Integral Theory and Practice

[Wilber and Gafni - the Integral Club]

Over at Facebook, Bruce Kunkel asked a a pertinent question about the present and future of the integral project - we have had an excellent discussion around the topic. In this post at his Dignity and Disaster blog, John Wagnon expands on the comments he made in that thread.

I have only had time to make one comment on the thread, which I will include below.

Commodification of Integral Theory and Practice.

I wrote the following in response to a thread my good friend Bruce Kunkel stared on Facebook.

His status was:

"Is integral thought in danger becoming "clubby" and "orthodox"? Do you believe that integral thought and progress have the greatest opportunity for authentic fleshing out as open source? - as "radically free". Or do you feel that commercial gatekeepers/commodifiers to integral dialog and discussion is the right turn to make?"

Forgive the disjointed nature of this post. I wrote a lot on Bruce's thread and gathered it together here. Hopefully it makes some kind of sense. The last few paragraphs are new, so my friends from FB can just jump to the end.

The integral subculture can't skip stages, regardless of the individual development of some of the participants. Our social structure is Red/Amber - not even Orange. Consider whether the leaders of the integral subculture are beholden to any communal standards of ethics or behavior. Is there any body to which members of the integral subculture may appeal in case of dispute? There really isn't. We're kings, courts, and serfs. The kings cooperate because it suits them to. When it no longer suits them, they will go off on their own.

Perhaps the more relevant question is whether we can escape being a subculture. I'm not sure we can.

Getting to the point of critique is important. I have strong areas of disagreement with Wilber as well, however I'm probably not the best person to pursue the debate. More I am aware of them as i pursue applications. The metatheoretical view is very helpful to differentiating and contextualizing Wilber's work. I think it ends up being simultaneously more powerful and less powerful than many realize. Bonnie has said - and I follow some of her line of thought on this - that much of what she's doing was consciously and subconsciously implicit in Wilber's work all along. I think there's a lot of great work here to be done.

Still - that doesn't have much to do with the social holon that is the integral community. Our individual development, opinions, etc. do not necessarily determine how we interact. Its both a function of our individual social lines of development and the social structures we put in place. To the extent that we *are* putting social structures in place, they are pre-democratic, imho.

Read the whole post.

OK, so here are some of my thoughts on this topic (with a few slight edits from the original post):

basic observation: I came to integral in the early 1990s, when KW was still building his model, still open to a P2P ethic of knowledge acquisition (or so it seemed from the outside) - he was still willing to engage in conversation with critics or alternate models - when Integral Institute formed around 2001-ish, that seemed to end, and the inner circle became insular and incestuous - I think it's worth noting that many people Wilber originally chose have questionable pasts/presents (Gafni, Cohen, Beck, Kempton, various followers of Adi Da, et al) - and it seems to be ONLY those people who have remained as the "inner circle" (except for Beck), while the other very bright people involved in founding I-I have moved away to do their own thing, or continue doing it - in that sense YES, integral (at least the AQAL version) is very clubby and insular, and they love to pat themselves on the back while ignoring all the shadow stuff swirling around them

AND, there are many independent integral scholars, teachers, researchers doing a LOT of fine work that makes integral an open source project - some of us (and I count myself here although I have yet to produce anything of substance) are trying to find ways to bring integral into application rather then merely theory - Mark Forman and Elliott Ingersoll (and Andre Marquis) have done this admirably in psychotherapy, and it needs to continue with specific books on depression, anxiety, schizophrenia treatment in an integral model - people like Michael Commons and Sara Ross are doing great work in adult development and pointing out the weaknesses in Wilber's metatheory - Bonnitta Roy, Zachary Stein, and the various editors and contributors at Integral Review and Integral Leadership Review are also pushing the model forward - we need LOTS more of this work

right now, I-I still holds power in the integral landscape - the self-appointed right to say who is integral and who is not - when Wilber passes, as he must (we all do), that hegemonic power will crumble

in the meantime, we need to make integral a viable research field, doing a LOT of basic research in various fields implementing elements of the model - we need to apply for grants, publish articles in academic journals, and become teachers - and we need to do a lot of this without making reference to Wilber (who is not widely known or respected in academic circles) - but we CAN use KW's sources, like Kegan, Loevinger, Graves, et al, and bring in the people KW ignored or did not see, such as Jerome Bruner, Vygotsky, Ken Gergen, and more contemporary philosophers, post-postmoderns

we are the future of integral, if we are willing to step up

I have also made statements on this topic in an interview last summer with Jeremy Johnson at Single Eye Movement.

Tags: Integral, Philosophy, commercialism, Commodification, John Wagnon, Dignity and Disaster, integral theory, Bruce Kunkel, community, open source, Ken Wilber, AQAL, Single Eye Movement, integral club, Integral Institute

Mark Robinson - The Privatization of Neuroscience: The University, The State and the Moral Aims of Science

This is an interesting guest post by Mark Robinson (Princeton University) from the Somatosphere blog. Robinson takes a critical look at the merging of neuroscience and corporate interests.

The Privatization of Neuroscience: The University, The State and the Moral Aims of Science

This post was contributed by Mark Robinson (Princeton University).

From New York Times Op-ed pieces to educational toys for toddlers, the culture of neuroscience has far exceeded the confines of the laboratory. Anthropologists and others have traced neuroscience's entry into the everyday - the courtroom, the pharmacy, the boardroom and the clinic. Yet, a more subtle transformation around neuroscience has escaped comment. At the research university, now entrenched in collaboration with private industry, an important transition is afoot.

Across the U.S. and Europe, universities have started something called ‘translational neuroscience centers’ - part of larger shifts at the university such as growing commercialization and changes in prioritization and funding. Translational neuroscience aims to move beyond the theoretical advances of basic neuroscience and to focus on creating applications such as-- drugs, medical devices and diagnostics. While industry-university collaboration has a long history, translational science makes its patent-aspirations and corporate entanglements explicit by sidelining concerns about objectivity and undue influence. But the emergence of this kind of academic work is more than merely a product of the intermingling of academic knowledge and market logics. With fieldwork underway among translational neuroscience communities in northern California, I’ve been attentive to the relationships on which this collaborative practice relies.

Long before science and technology studies (STS) turned to the laboratory as an ethnographic object, anthropologists had traced the ways that knowledge production was embedded in and dependent upon the social. Accordingly, the phenomenal growth of translational neuroscience is not without context: The adoption of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980 allowed universities to patent scientific and technological inventions that occurred through public (federal) money. Since Bayh-Dohl, universities have become patent obsessed. Northwestern University, for instance, made $700 million dollars from the sale of royalties to a pharmaceutical group in 2007.

President Obama's stimulus plan included an increase of 3.2% allotted to the National Institutes of Health - a major funder of neuroscience research. The funding was framed with the idea that neuroscience research might translate into jobs and economic uplift. Neurotechnology (brain-based devices, drugs and diagnostics) is projected to be a $145 billion industry. Thus, translational neuroscience requires and invites a way of thinking about neuroscience in relation to its capacity for translation into other agendas. This ethos is part of how universities and scientists have begun to think about neuroscience (and other fields). At one biotechnology conference, I observed strategy discussions about how to make university research more conducive to private investment. Here, university neuroscience has become envisioned as a space of market discovery. Encompassing everything from obesity to depression, the widening scope of what is considered a ‘neurological disorder’ has meant an explosion in the market potential of neurotechnologies. A group of investors, scientists and companies converged to propose to congress a National Neurotechnology Initiative. A key contention in the proposal is that the United States “Must Lead the Neurotechnology Revolution.”

Translational neuroscience in the U.S., broadly viewed, indexes sets of relationships; between science and the market; between neuroscientists and investors; between the University and the State; and between a relatively new science and it’s various publics. In all these contexts one finds a sustained rhetoric about neuroscience’s potentials - to save lives, stimulate the economy, create personal wealth, advance science, and to restore the U.S.’s dominance in science. As universities begin to openly acknowledge drug discovery as part of their mission, the “bridge” represented by translational science and medicine is inevitably a two-way street. The priorities of funders and the financial opportunities entailed are likely to affect not only the priorities of research, but also the ways in which that research is understood, culturally and ethically, by those who carry it out.

Universities have little to do to convince constituencies of neuroscience’s value. In a context of a tumultuous economy and budget cuts, occasions emerge in which to interrogate the value of universities and academic work. Neuroscience in the university has become a key object in a larger debate about useful and productive knowledge. The simultaneity of the ‘humanities crisis’ and the shift towards translation is no coincidence. Yet, the value of neuroscience is also about its capacity as an entry-point into the market - for universities, for investors, for the State and as evidence for claims about the moral and material value of knowing.


Mark Robinson is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University and a visiting scholar at the University of California Berkeley’s Science, Technology and Society Center. He is presently in the field.

Tags: Mark Robinson, Somatosphere, The Privatization of Neuroscience, University, State, Moral Aims of Science, neuroscience, translational neuroscience, commercialization, Psychology, research, brain, Science, commercialism

William Irwin Thompson on Avatar and the Obama Administration

Excellent article, even if I disagree with parts of Thompson's view. Another great column from Wild River Review.

Fortunately, I have not seen this film, and never had any attention of doing so. Me and about three other people on the Earth.

COLUMN - THINKING OTHERWISE - AVATAR: When Technology Displaces Culture

by William Irwin Thompson

"We Irish think otherwise" Bishop Berkeley

* I am indebted to Karen at Oddity Journal for this wonderful image of the tesseract.

When printed manuscripts were first introduced, they appeared as incunabula and were made to look like medieval hand-illuminated vellum rather than printed paper. When new Victorian hand guns were introduced, they were covered with vines and made to look more like a plant than an aggressive weapon. When the new technologies were all displayed in the Great Exhibition of 1851, the building in which they were displayed, the Crystal Palace, looked like the greenhouse of a great country estate.

Crystal Palace

The nineteen-thirties Broadway musical song, "My Funny Valentine" by Rogers and Hart became a signature piece for Jazz musicians in the fifties. Over 1300 different versions of it have been performed, the most famous of those being the versions by Miles Davis and Chet Baker, and, for the next generation, Keith Jarrett. The thirties popular song became to avant garde fifties Jazz musicians what the traditional folk song had been for Dvořak and Ralph Vaughn Williams.

When television was introduced in the early fifties, it became filled with old black and white Westerns of Gene Autry and Hopalong Cassidy.

So it is often the case that the content serves as camouflage for a novel structure. This is a perfectly natural process in evolution, which can take an ancient gene or organ and rework it into a new function or ability. "Eyes are largely built from building blocks designed for other things. The lenses of vertebrates use proteins that bacteria developed to deal with stress; the flexible guanine mirrors that make a cat's eyes glow in the dark provide gas-proofing for the swim bladders of fish." (See Simon Ings, "An Eye for the Eye," Nature, Vol . 456, Nov. 20, 2008, 304-309).

The idea that there is form on the one hand and content on the other comes from a mentality we owe to literature. But technology is now our culture, and so McLuhan was right: the medium is the message. Our gadgets of TV, netbook computers, cell phones, BlackBerries, and iPods are not instruments to express a culture; they are a culture; they are the culture.

McLuhan also pointed out that each new technological extension is an amputation. If we have cars, we do not walk to the corner store. Artificial intelligence, therefore, is part of our oft-noted American dumbing-down process and has served to make humans less intelligent. I am old enough to remember a better educated high school culture and recall a time when Americans weren't so dumb as to make Sarah Palin the most successful non-fiction writer in publishing history.

So it was natural on James Cameron's part to take a collection of movie clichés from Dances with Wolves and Star Wars as well as other memes spliced in from the Hollywood gene pool that John David Ebert pointed out in his Blog Cinema Discourse and use them as the basis for his technological tour de force, Avatar, which has become the greatest earning movie in history.

Avatar's success like Sarah Palin's, is owed to its superficiality. Even the addition of 3D could not hide the movie's lack of depth. With clichéd plot and stock characters, Cameron was not making a film version of a novel, but another Western as a moral allegory of the military industrial complex versus the Gaian tree-huggers of the New Age.

But like ivy vines on the iron legs of Victorian sewing machines, the moral allegory itself is yet another level of camouflage. The Great Spirit and the natives are the products of a computerized entertainment technology. Disney may have pioneered this territory in which the cute animatron figures of Disneyworld are controlled by an invisible technological complex, but the film Avatar, like Fantasia before it, is one of those works of popular culture that mark a transformation of the polity. Fantasia marked the end of the authority of high culture and used classical music and the poetry of Goethe as camouflage for the structure of pop culture's takeover. How many Americans now have ever heard of Goethe or realize that The Sorcerer's Apprentice is one of his poems?

In Avatar, Cameron has presciently given us a description of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party. Although we naïve liberal progressives thought we were voting for a change from the military industrial complex of Bush and Cheney, Obama has proved himself to be its loyal avatar sent among us to win our trust and trick us out of our votes. Now as President, he has not only "reached across the aisle," but shifted sides as he first rescued the banks through Geithner and Summers, then rescued the medical insurances companies, and is now ignoring our mass unemployment, suffering, and economic stagnation to ask for Giga billions to shore up the military and keep the imperial war machine going against the Islamist natives fighting the Great Satan of Uncle Sam.

Read the whole righteous rant.

Tags: William Irwin Thompson, Avatar, Obama, THINKING OTHERWISE, AVATAR, When Technology Displaces Culture, Wild River Review, cliche, film, culture, culture, films, commercialism, media, Marshall McLuhan, form, content

The narrative of enlightenment as consumer commodity

Open Integral posted this before I could get around to doing so, for which I am grateful. There is an interesting discussion going on in the Gaia Integral Postmetaphysical Spirituality pod.

The discussion originated around the teleconference being led by Craig Hamilton, founder of Integral Enlightenment and found member of Ken Wilber's Integral Institute. One could just as easily plug in Genpo Roshi or Bill Harris or Andrew Cohen (and here) - all of whom are associated with Wilber.

Here is the post from Open Integral. I agree with him, in part, but I am one of those who criticizes Wilber and the insular nature of I-I, and yet I am still going to the conference this year. There is no other group, aside from Integral Review and the Arina Foundation, that has the resources to put on a conference.

The narrative of enlightenment as consumer commodity

There’s an interesting discussion on the above topic in a thread by that name at Gaia’s Integral Postmetaphysical Spirituality pod. Craig Hamilton’s conferences came up in this regard. Someone mentioned that while they didn’t approve of his marketing methodology they nonetheless would participate because of some of the presenters. I replied:

This goes to my point above, that sometimes we have to give up some valuable stuff to effect change. Yes, Hamilton brings together some key voices that might make a difference. But those voices, by participating in his conference, offer tacit approval to his commodified method. And many folks then also assume this is the proper way to proceed in the spiritual marketplace. I’m even wondering if those valuable presenters like Swimm, by participating, aren’t subconsciously influenced by such participation and such methods come to be seen as a necessary evil within a commodified culture, that we have to use such measures to reach people in the first place but once we do then we’ll change methodology. Unfortunately in the process we get corrupted and the methodology doesn’t change.

That’s why I boycott I-I and things like the Integral Conference. Yes, there are many people that go to these that challenge Wilber, even on issues such as this commodification. But the conference itself is promoted with such methods and financially supports I-I, which supports such methods. And by attending and participating we tacitly support such measures, measures that will continue because they are receiving support, even if one talks opposition.

What’s the alternative? Those that oppose such methods might form their own integral organization and conference and market themselves in a different way. But I-I has done all the work, it’s just easier to go to theirs, we don’t have the resources, maybe we can change it from within etc etc. To walk our talk is the hardest challenge imaginable. And we all know this has to be done because I-I is not going to change in this way, ever, even after Wilber is gone.

Now go read the thread at Gaia - non-members cannot comment, but it is still interesting. Here is the original post.

Reading the post on the Bulletin Board about the upcoming teleconference organized by Craig Hamilton, I am struck and dismayed yet again at the ongoing commodification of the idea of 'enlightenment' or 'awakening' in the Integral scene.

In the thread on Magical Thinking in Integral Theory, Kela expounded beautifully on what I will call the Narrative of Enlightenment:

“First, and perhaps foremost, is the idea that meditation and/or spiritual practice causes or brings about something called “enlightenment.” Now, by enlightenment we often mean something specific; it may have slightly different nuances to its sense. Generally, though it means some kind of permanent change in the individual. These changes range from minor to profound depending upon the definition of enlightenment, but typically the profound changes are emphasized. One typical definition would have it that it means the appearance of a permanent, direct cognition, via intuition or some other means, of an ultimate reality of some kind — a continuous, intimate and non-occluded apprehension of the “ground of being,” the “supreme godhead,” the “mystical void,” or whatever: samyak-sambodhi; the supreme kensho; sahaja samadhi, etc . It also usually means a supreme sense or experience of absolute redemption, supreme bliss and happiness, ultimate peace, and absence of existential suffering or angst: release, moksha, nirvana, kaivalya.”

It seems to me that the idea of 'enlightenment' as originally conceived in the early Jain, Buddhist, and Yoga traditions was an idea of release from suffering and even physical existence, by people who were exposed to a greater degree of physical suffering, material deprivation, and insecurity than most people in the industrialized west have experienced. Over time as these traditions evolved, the narrative of enlightenment became more about “a supreme sense or experience of absolute redemption, supreme bliss and happiness, ultimate peace, and absence of existential suffering or angst”; as in Mahayana & Vajrayana Buddhism, or Kashmiri Shaivism.

As the narrative of enlightenment has been introduced into the materially prosperous modern & postmodern cultures of America & Europe, in unison with growing disillusionment with our own religious and spiritual traditions, has it been fundamentally changed? Has the subtext in our approach become the driving consumer affirmation, obtain this and your life will be complete?

I will admit that this was the idea that drove my own spiritual striving for a decade or so. I see it as the driving force behind KW, Andrew Cohen, & Craig Hamilton's high profile campaigns to appeal to the spiritual marketplace. My former teacher Saniel Bonder has been a shameless enlightenment salesman. I also believe it is the reason seekers have put up with so much abuse at the hands of Da, Andrew Cohen and others. 'Evolutionary Enlightenment' is tailor made for the American religion of progress, optimism and denial.

I would be interested to hear whether others feel that this narrative of enlightenment has motivated their own search. I would also be interested to hear about alternative narratives to the spiritual search for enlightenment.

joseph
samadhi whore

Tags: Integral, culture, commercialism, Enlightenment, narrative, consumer commodity, Open Integral, Gaia, Genpo Roshi, Bill Harris, Andrew Cohen, Craig Hamilton, Integral Enlightenment, Holosync, Big Mind

Short Film - Yoga, Inc.

Interesting . . . competitive yoga?

Yoga, Inc.

Release Year: 2007

Duration: 58 min

Availability: Worldwide

Related: Health, Religion & Spirituality, Sports & Hobby

Yoga has transformed from an ancient spiritual practice into a competitive, commercialized, multi-million dollar industry. And for a practice rooted in renunciation, yoga sure is making some people very rich. Can yoga survive this war between the sacred and the profane with its good karma intact?

Esak Garcia is a star on the burgeoning competitive yoga circuit, racking up cash prizes and edging ever closer to snagging an endorsement deal. But Esak’s ultimate goal is the Olympics, a dream instilled in him by his guru, Bikram Choudhury. Bikram’s supporters applaud his crusade to have yoga recognized as an Olympic sport. His detractors are horrified. It’s typical of the controversies that surround the ‘Bad Boy of Yoga’. Bikram has also copyrighted his popular yoga style. Those who teach ‘Bikram yoga’ without playing by his rules are hit with crippling copyright infringement fees. So a group of yoga studio owners take Bikram to court to pose an important legal question; can anyone ‘own’ yoga?

In today’s yoga world only the marketplace has real meaning, where everything is up for grabs, from yoga shoes to chakra panties. The new mantras are Standardize and Supersize. In the race to cash in yoga chains (‘McYoga’?) are popping up everywhere, putting the smaller studios out of business. No wonder purists are scratching their heads. Is nothing sacred?

Greed, lust, ego and the search for enlightenment all come together in this original, irreverent portrait of spiritualism and capitalism colliding head on.

Tags: films, yoga, culture, commercialism, Yoga Inc., Esak Garcia, competitive yoga, Bikram Choudhury