Staging Integral Incompleteness as an Apocalyptarian

Or: real transdisciplinarity for para-academic in-betweenness

Trying to love the in-betweenness as such…

“The great metatheories about the interworld between perspectives, are both pointing to the need for a language, logic and social system that can work with, and re-secure, the endless regeneration of Spirit as the transhistorical implication of an utterly historical reality.”¹

“Being’s paradoxical surplus resists contentment in abstract universal and irreduction points towards each actor’s unique essence which cannot be explained away by conceptual domestications but must greet the idiocy of intimate strangeness, ontological singularity, and the inexhaustible concept.”²

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In January 2025, Layman Pascal and Bruce Alderman will be visiting The Portal for a month-long mediation orbiting the meta-theory and praxis of The Integral Stage. To learn more, or to get involved, see: The Portal. To get involved via Layman Pascal/The Integral Stage directly, see: Updates.

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There are arguably too many universal metatheories or big picture theorists today.  Conversely, there are not enough people thinking about singular difficult issues in the cracks of the real, where the universality of a metatheory meets its irreducible incompleteness.   I would argue that our problems today have little to do with developing a “theory of everything” and more to do cultivating a certain mode of being that knows how to exist in an indeterminate in-between space without burning out, exploding in a self-destructive spiral, losing faith or withdrawing into an isolated depression.  This issue is precisely, to reference Logic for the Global Brain, on the level of singular-universality.³  When we presuppose a “theory of everything” we are thinking in terms of a universality that covers all singularities; or to put it a bit differently: we are looking for a “big picture” that can coherently contain all of our “little stains”.  However, the truth of singular-universality is not that we must include all of our “little stains” in the “big picture”, but that our “little stains” constitutively disrupt the “big picture”.  Our challenge in this situation is simply how to live in such conditions?  How can I coherently exist as a world that is constantly being disrupted by little stains, both external to me, but also and perhaps more importantly, internal to me?  Is not such a task impossible?  Would not the “little stains” constantly disorient what I consider to be a stable and coherent life world opening me to the possibility of burn out, self-destructive spirals, loss of faith or isolated withdrawal?    

I know well the temptations of being sucked into a universal theoretical framework.  My doctoral thesis, Global Brain Singularity, succumbs to the temptation of universality, but only, in the end, as a process of imminently undermining it.  And my follow up book, Systems and Subjects, seeks the real challenge of subjectivity and singularity which can withstand a different kind of universality.  This kind of universality is a universality that has built within itself the capacity to be disrupted by singularities, not for the sake of disruption, but for the possibility that this disruption can actually be a key to something new that could not have been thought without the disruption, if I had instead tried to hide it within the coherence of a big picture.  To be direct: it is much easier and more pleasurable to live within a universal theoretical framework, than it is to commit to not only the thankless negativities of real practical work, but also the (often unreflexive) eruptions of religious jouissance that constitute the coming to life of singularities as such.  These eruptions of religious jouissance, I would argue, are at once the singular disruption of universal theoretical frameworks, as well as the singular basis for the construction of new universal theoretical frameworks (a strange loop).  

In this article I am going to be outlining the stakes of commitment to both the eruption of religious jouissance, as well as the subordination and mediation of that religious jouissance, to practical day-to-day negativities.  Only the unity between these two dimensions can give us a path forward in a time between worlds, or as navigators of the in-between space as such.  In order to engage that impossible task, we will need an “integral stage”, or should I say, we will need to “stage integral theory” in a way that it commits to a fundamental ontological incompleteness.           

First, some context for the audience that this article is aiming to engage: para-academics.  Para-academic signifies those who are either under employed, precariously employed, or unemployed in relation to academic institutions, or those who are working academically in various alternative contexts in today’s society.  Para-academic work emerges in the context of the “chronic crisis” of academic institutional realities.  I take this to potentially mirror the claims of political scientist Benjamin Studebaker in regards to the “chronic crisis” of neoliberal democracies.  Studebaker uses “chronic crisis” to make a distinction between stable states and acute crisis states.⁴  When we think about our institutions as oscillating in the binary of stable states and acute crises, we conceptualise a crisis as potentially an existential threat to the stability of the state.  For example, in the context of para-academic work, we might presuppose that a crisis in the institutional academic context signals its total breakdown into an online network form.  Here we are prone to get non-dialectical ideologies of “decentralisation”, that neoliberal “institutions” run by neoliberal elites are going through an acute crisis because they are “centralised” and cannot withstand the pressures of the online decentralised web form.  Here we are also prone to utopian ideologies about “decentralisation” about how the future is decentralised and that all centralised authorities will fall into the abyss of their acute crisis.  However, what if decentralisation is not a great liberation from the inside of corrupt and unjust neoliberal institutions, but hell itself?  The outside with no inside whatsoever?  Life with no justice whatsoever?    

Here Studebaker’s work on political institutions challenges any simplistic ideology that our current institutions are actually in an existential threat with the idea of “non-existential situational crises”.  With this idea Studebaker suggests something even more negative:⁵ 

“What if American democracy is in a structural crisis, but one that generates non-existential situational crises? I call this kind of structural crisis a ‘chronic legitimacy crisis’ or ‘chronic crisis’ for short.”     

What this means is that we should dramatically complicate our dualistic view between “stable states” and “acute crisis states” which runs at the core of “existence” and “non-existence” for a dramatically more disturbing view on becoming or evolution.  It is logically very Hegelian when you think about it.  In short: political institutions in all of their horrible inefficiency, cumbersome bureaucracy, and most importantly, the ambiguity of their centralised legitimacy, are here to stay.  And I am making the parallel claim about academic institutions: when we think that academic institutions are on the way out and that the new network form will come to dominate over and against them, we are mistaken.  What we are as “para-academics in a network form”, are a symptom of the “chronic crisis” of academia itself.  We are excessive symptomal stains of neoliberalism and not bright theorists with emancipatory universal pictures.  Perhaps the thought that we are bright theorists with emancipatory universal pictures is part of a necessary duping process (re: Lacan’s “non-duped err”), but if it is, then this article should serve as a cold reminder of our current state of “having been duped”.      

Moreover, the problems that we find in this network form are potentially even more devastating than the problems we find in the institutional context, not less.  The problems of recognition, attention, and basic survival only explode in this network form, they are not even addressed and resolved as potentials.  This does not mean we should disengage from the work, not at all, but it does mean that we must became more reflective about what actually our situation, condition and possibility really is.  In short: we should resist the temptation to utopianise the decentralised network form as in anyway emancipatory in relation to the institutional form.  If anything the decentralised network form is a kind of “limbo state” in relation to the “chronic crisis” of the institutional form.  At the same time — in the context of the chronic crisis of academia, which does entail a crisis of centralised legitimacy at its fundamental core, and which represents a microcosm of a problem spread throughout the whole of our political system — the network form is both necessary, and calling forth, the condition of possibility for a certain existential disposition.  This necessary existential disposition is what can potentially hold the intellectual social fabric together, as we get used to our new normal, that is, a normality of “chronic crisis” (and not an oscillation between stable and acute crisis states).  In the work of integral theorist Layman Pascal, who we will discuss in greater length in a moment, he has called this existential disposition for “chronic crisis” the necessity of “apocalyptarians”.⁶                 

As suggested above, my work has long been tarrying with this strange and confronting reality.  In this work, and specifically Global Brain Singularity, I have tended towards making sense of the broad level social pattern, using metasystem transition theory.⁷  While an educational theorist like Zak Stein has popularised the term “time between worlds”,⁸ metasystem transition theory can lead us to framing our world as between two distinct “metasystems” (which might as well be worlds).⁹  Here perhaps we should link the idea of being in a constitutive “chronic crisis” as a state of being stuck in “in-betweenness” (limbo), where we are not (again) breaking down from centralised to decentralised forms, but rather experiencing a chronic crisis of centralisation that has yet to constitute a new or other metasystem.  Broadly speaking, I think of our current metasystem transition (or chronic crisis, or in-betweenness) as organised in-between an industrial metasystem that relies on printing press like communications, and an informational metasystem that relies on digital or internet-mediated communications.¹⁰  Consequently, and as a kind of reflective response, I have organised my intellectual academic work as actively navigating this metasystems communication gap,¹¹ as opposed to either remaining faithful to the old system, or utopianising the decentralised alternatives.  What is needed in that specific in-betweenness is a type of faith in one’s existential drive that can help one endure burn out, self-destructive spirals, and isolated withdrawal (all of which are symptoms of the lack in the big Other).     

Practically speaking, this has resulted in the construction of Philosophy Portal, an extra-academic structure that attempts to teach the foundations of modern philosophical theory, as well as build an online community capable of thinking through the contemporary complexities of sexuality, community, and metaphysics.  We have taught comprehensively on philosophical greats, from Hegel and Nietzsche, to the core of psychoanalysis, from Freud to Lacan, to contemporary philosophical works that struggle with philosophy in the aftermath of psychoanalysis.  We have also led retreats and regularly build contexts for community events, so that para-academic figures can get more exposure for their work, and get real engagement with a living thinking community that actually benefits from this work.  The point here is that Philosophy Portal is neither a neoliberal institution, or a utopian decentralised collective.  Philosophy Portal is rather an existential disposition aiming to hold together some intellectual social fabric in the chronic crisis/time-between-worlds.  Or in (Layman) Pascalian terms, it is an “apocalyptarian” entity.  If I had a hope that transcended or rewarded the “courage of my hopelessness”, it would be that the work of Philosophy Portal somehow functioned as a bridge towards a new metasystem reinventing the legitimacy crisis of the neoliberal institution from within.  But that would be assuming I had a hope that transcended the “courage of my hopelessness”.     

All of this is to bring us to the work of Layman Pascal and Bruce Alderman, and the solidarity and connection I have had with the project that they have branded “The Integral Stage”.¹²  

First, a formal introduction: “The Integral Stage” is a metatheory-praxis platform, Layman Pascal is a feral philosopher and metashamanic character, and Bruce Alderman is a transdisciplinary integralist and transpersonal psychologist.  Pascal has characterised The Integral Stage as a “first draft” of the “liminal web”, and what is to be found on their “stage” is not only of theoretical import, but also of performative import, to the future work that needs to be done in this space.  Pascal is a clever, witty, and insightful individual who operates outside of any traditional institutional affiliation, and The Integral Stage has functioned to provide him with a larger outlet for his post-metaphysical speculative theory building, but perhaps more importantly, his interpersonal networking and community building.  Thus, in Pascal we find an interweaving of theory building and community building that focuses on non-duality, integral meta-theory, new shamanism, religious futures, developmental philosophy, and meta-progressive politics.  Alderman is a thoughtful, reflective and deep individual, who in contrast to Pascal, has operated as a theoretical generalist within institutional frameworks, never from the safety of a permanent position (which is usually only awarded to specialists), but rather as an associate or adjunct committed to knowledges and practices that have became unfashionable (e.g. transpersonal psychology), as well as that avoid or evade neat categorisation (e.g. integral theory).  However, Alderman’s work is also very active and alive outside of the institutional contexts, as he is not only a regular contributor to The Integral Stage channel, but also in many adjacent communities and networks (like Philosophy Portal, among others).       

Consequently, as far as I can tell, what is embodied in the unity of Pascal and Alderman is the unity of the tension that I have been articulating between, on the one hand, decentralised network dynamics, and on the other hand, neoliberal institutional form.  Here the implicit potential in their project is the capacity to avoid, on the one hand, the utopianisation of the network form (via Pascal’s “apocalyptarian” stance), and on the other hand, the capacity to work through the crisis of centralised legitimacy in the neoliberal institutional form (via Alderman’s generalist stance).  To be specific, when you combine Pascal’s extra-academic “network being”, which requires a certain existential apocalyptarian disposition to think in the cracks of the real, with Alderman’s “exception-within-the-institutional” being, which requires the patience to tarry with the illegitimacy of our current institutional authorities specialised justifications, you get a unique combination that is as performatively relevant as it is theoretically relevant.  How often do you find two theorists with independent projects of their own come together for a joint project that literally “transcends and includes” the other?  Perhaps we can even think of Pascal and Alderman as not just heirs to the performativity of a “Deleuze and Guattari”, but even holding the potential for its creative extension and expansion as a “post-Oedipal multiplicity of multiplicities”.  Why not?  While their work does not follow the academic line of contemporary continental theory, their project embodies it in an often more real way than many contemporary continental philosophers working in academia.  Moreover, we should always remember how figures who have become retroactively deified in continental philosophy (e.g. Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, etc.), were often marginal and fringe characters in their time, often subject to ex-communication and exclusion from major institutional research and funding bodies.       

In order to better understand the claim I am trying to make here, recall the context of the aforementioned metasystem transition navigating the legitimacy crises from an industrial printing-press mode of communication to an informational or internet-mediated mode of communication.  While the academic line of contemporary continental theory is safely within institutional confines, Pascal and Alderman as a currently living combinatorial and open-ended process might offer legitimately new visions and models for how to navigate in the cracks of the network-institution itself.  As a way of being they both sit at the edge of many different communities, models, perspectives and life worlds: they are in-betweenness itself.  In their creative drive, they offer a way to think about the future of podcasting and potentially also the relation between podcasting and book creation; they offer a way to think about the inherent links between theory building and community construction (often or as a rule neglected by mainline continental theorists), and they both work with core theory in a critical and a constructive manner, simultaneously (as opposed to one mode or the other).  This drive could bridge or make links between the apocalyptarian real of decentralised networks (and not their utopianisation) and the illegitimacy of centralised institutional structures exclusively promoting hyper-specialisation (and not their existential collapse).  

In the words of Pascal, this project is about building something wiser than either could accomplish individually.  In order to build such a structure, it is based not only on explicit theoretical agreement (e.g. the importance of Ken Wilber’s integral theory, for example), but more on an implicit subtle body energy that seeks to bring to the surface a vibe of playfulness and flexibility that is capable of birthing something new, something other than what we have seen is possible within traditional academic structures.  Thus, we not only avoid the utopian dimension of the network form, but perhaps also a way to think about what we should value in future generalist capacities of academic structures.  While para-academics in the network form are often not as structurally productive or as categorically enriched as their formal academic counterparts (although there are exceptions); those working in formal academia are often not as capable of more dynamic living speech and thought, or as innovative and experimental, as those operating within para-academic networks (although there are exceptions).  Moreover, this is not to essentialise the dominant characteristic of formal academicians or para-academicians: the characteristics of both are a feature of the modes of social production that dominate their practical day-to-day existence (formal academicians often have the safety and security to develop longer-form conceptual mediation processes; and para-academics are often on the edge of risky endeavours with no guarantees, forcing creative innovation).       

Beyond this larger context, what is the central goal of The Integral Stage specifically?  What is the vision and model and how can we learn from it in general?  While perhaps difficult to explicitly define, Pascal and Alderman’s work operates as a type of “integral” “cognitive mapping of communal affinities” between “different groups and projects whose work seems only implicitly connected”.  Pascal explicitly defines these groups and projects as oriented around an integrally incomplete transformation, with examples like: “Game B”, “Bildung”, “Dark Renaissance”, “The Whitehead People”, “The Bhaskar People”, “The Liminal Web”, “Emerge”, “Perspectiva” etc.  This list constituted by integral incompleteness goes on as an open-ended set without clearly defined inside or outside but perhaps by “surprising differences”.¹³  Pascal describes these transformational communities as disconnected but “harnessing similar cognition” that stands “before the meta-crisis”.  This “similar cognition” points towards a general openness to transdisciplinarity while the “meta-crisis” stands for all the various ways in which we perceive our current sociohistorical reality as fundamentally collapsing or at least transforming into something currently unknown and unintelligible, i.e. meaning, legitimacy, authority, ecology, economy, etc.  Here we might see labels like “meta-crisis” as an even broader concept for the aforementioned “chronic crisis” which applies to not only politics but also academia, business, community, family, psychology, and variously popularised by thinkers like Tristan Harris, Terry Patten, Jonathan Rowson, Daniel Schmachtenberger, and Zak Stein.  

Philosopher Slavoj Žižek has referred to the meta-crisis using terms like “problems of the commons” or “commons problems”, most notably in his book Living in the End Times.¹⁴  I have outlined these commons problems as involving the following dimensions: ecology (e.g. global warming), economy (e.g. income/wealth inequality), social (e.g. immigration/refugees), political (e.g. capitalist eclipse of democracy), technological (e.g. generalised automation) and biological (e.g. pandemics, transhumanism).¹⁵  For Žižek, these commons problems are a symptom of late-stage capitalism as the driving motor of social re-production within the industrial metasystem, which signifies the end of our common world.  What these symptoms represent is the breakdown of spatial links between individuals, families, communities of various dimensions (i.e. the end of our common world).  As a dominant political response, this can lead to social situations characterised by reactive populism, religious fundamentalism or capitalist reductionism in the disorienting confusion and wake.  Žižek suggests that we start thinking about the end of this world as met subjectively with patterns reflecting “stages of grief”:¹⁶

1. Ideological denial (neoliberal capitalism will endure go on as it is)

2. Explosions of anger (desire to destroy the system creating horrific inequalities)

3. Attempts at bargaining (maybe the system can be saved via policy adjustments)

4. Followed by depression and withdrawal (defeated subject leaving the stage)

It is from this work that Žižek’s name often gets attached to Fredric Jameson’s belief that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”.¹⁷  Here perhaps we should see a project like The Integral Stage (as first draft of the liminal web) as embodying a space for the depressive subject of withdrawal, the space where defeated subjectivity leaving the stage of late capitalism (after denial, anger, bargaining, etc.), can rethink its world and conditions of possibility within the apocalypse (qua cultivating Pascal’s “apocalyptarians”).  This would put The Integral Stage firmly in line with other groups and projects in the liminal web wrestling with these conditions, with two notable examples here being Bram E. Gieben’s “Strange Exiles” project, as well as Julie Reshe’s “Negative Psychoanalysis” project.  For Pascal and Alderman’s The Integral Stage, there is a metatheory-praxis for this that includes a “trinity” of:

1. Bringing communities into conversation (via their podcast series)

2. Physical spaces for communion (via semi-regular in-person events)

3. Artificially enhanced network connectivity (beyond individual psyche/collective)   

In a commitment to all three dimensions of this formula working together there is the possibility for an “apocalyptarian persistence”, i.e. a social form that persists in apocalyptic social and political conditions.  Maybe that is as ambitious as we can be at this moment without succumbing to the temptations of an attentionalist late-stage capitalism.  Moreover, while not in any way utopian, the powers of the network form make many social and intellectual dynamics possible that are simply impossible in the institutional context.  Alderman notes that his work with The Integral Stage has allowed him to “get away with” many ventures that would be immediately blocked in institutional contexts, opening dialogical opportunities that shift cognitive blocks or that include those who would be constitutively excluded.  Perhaps the most obvious example of this in The Integral Stage’s work can be found when you consider their podcast series that specifically aims to highlight the work of censored voices (see: “Salon of the Banned!”).¹⁸  This podcast series inverts the transgressive exception to institutional law into a new real to be explored (breaking every “figure of the All” into the dimension of the “non-All”).

Of course, at this point it is perhaps necessary to bring to our more direct attention the proverbial elephant in the room: Pascal and Alderman’s work does rest on a theoretical framework that is often conceived of as a type of monstrous “meta-All”, the work of Ken Wilber’s “Integral Theory”.¹⁹  Does not Wilber’s work represent the exact opposite of what I claimed we needed at the beginning of this article?  Does not Wilber embody the figure of the universal meta-theorist who uses a totalising framework to avoid thinking the singular cracks of the real?  Arguably, yes.  Moreover, we can often see this danger repeat unconsciously in both the integral theorists who follow Wilber, and those that unreflexively transgress Wilber in repeating something similar under the banner of a similar project with a different name.  However, it is also important to note that Hegel’s legacy in the history of continental philosophy has struggled under a similar, albeit non-identical baggage, namely that he was perceived as a conceptual monster totalising all phenomenal experience with a master systemic dialectic.  This impression has only recently been rewritten, most notably in the rise of Žižek’s post-psychoanalytic reinterpretation of Hegel.  In this context, it is important to consider Pascal and Aderman’s background use of Wilber’s Integral Theory from the following perspective: Wilber’s generalist model did seek to include everything (a totalising “theory of everything”); however, Wilber himself was excluded from formal academic institutional realities and by formal academic institutional authorities of his day.  And thinking about this crack, namely: Wilber as a subjective crack in the system which is now in chronic crisis, may be worth our time, and specifically as it relates to the theory and performativity of The Integral Stage as a legitimate sublation of Wilber.  Precisely, this crack, or The Integral Stage as crack, could give us a deeper insight into how to think about the aforementioned gap between the decentralised network form and the neoliberal institutional form.    

As is well-known, Wilber was responding to the cynicism and nihilism of the postmodern condition with something that desires to go beyond the postmodern condition, a type of “new coherence” on the “other side” of “plurality”, “deconstruction”, and “multiperspectival” understanding.  In short: Wilber wanted to introduce a higher order One to a pluralistic landscape; a reconstruction in the void of deconstruction; and a collective directionality inclusive of multiperspectivity.  What is clear is that not only did the neoliberal institutional form exclude this as a potential, with it only finding home and reception external to the neoliberal institutional form, this symptom now haunts the neoliberal institutional form as its “chronic crisis”.  There is a way in which the neoliberal institutional form has fallen into a disintegrated plurality, deconstruction and multiperspectival specialisation that has no higher order link at all.  This basically leads to an intellectual religious crisis where we do not know why we are studying what we are trained as specialists to be studying in the first place, perhaps best exemplified in the symptom of Jordan B. Peterson’s post-academic clinical psychological “Wrestling with God” in the aftermath of the postmodern university.  What would it look like if the neoliberal institution took Wilber’s response seriously?  One tentative hypothesis that seems to be embraced by contemporary theorists and para-academics operating in the decentralised network and neoliberal institutional form, tends towards the label of the “metamodern”.  However, there are many major interpretational schisms in regards to how we might think of metamodernism, namely between what we might be tempted to call “cultural theorists” and “cultural practitioners”.  For our purposes, we are aiming at a metatheory-practice, and should consider both sides of the equation.  

From the cultural theory side, it could be helpful to think about the way, following cultural theorist Greg Dember, metamodernism forces us to consider the value of subjective interiority or felt experience.²⁰  This valuation of subjective interiority or felt experience as an existential disposition has to be situated in the conflict or tension between a modernist conviction (of the One, reconstruction, clear directionality) and a postmodern relativity (of plurality, deconstruction, multiperspectivity).²¹  In short, what is a “metamodern cultural product” for Dember is the existential disposition that can oscillate between the two of modernist conviction and postmodern relativity, with one’s centre of gravity inverting when one becomes too captured by one side or the other.  In that sense, someone like Jordan B. Peterson and his “Wrestling with God” as a cultural product, could be seen as an unironic return to a modernist disposition, where he attempts to reintroduce the reconstructed One with a clear direction as a reactive symptom of postmodern plurality, deconstruction and multiperspectivity.  In contrast to this disposition or cultural product, perhaps we need to look to those communities, like those being mapped by Pascal and Alderman, that are capable of the oscillation holding the tension between the two.  If we do not, we could too quickly turn the one (modern) or the other (postmodern) into a scapegoat.  To simplify to the extreme: the modernist would tend towards the construction of a singular One that unironically knew the way (e.g. we need to re-establish Judeao-Christian civilisation as the core of our traditional values); and the postmodernist would tend towards the deconstruction of any singular One that sincerely knew the way (e.g. we need to deconstruct the Judeao-Christian civilisation as the core of traditional values as oppressive and simplistic); whereas creatively holding the tension between the two could bring something new.  

From the cultural practice side, it could be helpful to think about the way Pascal thinks about the importance of the subjective side of Wilber’s quest (again as a subjective crack that may call forth the need for sublation).  Pascal emphasises that Wilber not only wrote books that supported modelling beyond postmodernity, but more importantly, he lived out his theory as a religious way of life way forcing him into both facing his own performative contradictions, as well as re-inventing himself in reflecting on those very performative contradictions.²²  Pascal suspects that from thinking through this subjective side of the equation, we might see Wilber’s work as pointing towards a theory that builds into itself the intrinsic validity of each perspective and the real antagonism between differences as something that can birth novel essences.  In other words, even if Wilber’s Integral Theory model can too easily and quickly become a closed “One-All”, Wilber’s performativity in life, and the way he engaged theory-building activities, was in a sense “metamodern” as a cultural product in the way that he worked with the inherent tensions between the One and plurality, deconstruction and reconstruction, multiperspectivity and clear directionality.  While this quality is indeed missing also in most people building “universal theoretical models”, I think this quality is certainly present in the performativity of The Integral Stage.²³  One of the things I have appreciated the most in my engagements with both Pascal and Alderman is the way they can weave their own “One”, “construction” and “perspective” with “the other” in a way that is genuinely transformative and not just a performative larp.  We need more sincere performativity that can embody the direction of these emotional tensions.                 

However, while we can rationally justify The Integral Stage’s “meta-madness” as stemming from a “second-order Wilberian method”, the real potential in Pascal and Alderman’s use of Wilber’s Integral Theory can be found if we pay closer attention to its historical sociopolitical results, namely: its attempts to build a “theopolitical” network beyond institutional academic work.  Here one of the key dimensions of Wilber’s work, and one of the key reasons academia rejected it, was that it was explicitly religious.  This religiosity was not just theoretical, including a focus on religion as a historical and global phenomenon, but also practical: “Integral Centres” were more like monasteries than universities.  Today, the aspects of Wilber’s theory that are embraced by academia tend to include the metatheory building but exclude this religious dimension, which at the same time might be necessary for practical projects, as “lived theory” is what makes something truly “theological”.  However, as Alderman notes, there are a lot of reasons to be cautious and critical, and it is for this reason that perhaps, from a philosophical perspective, we must think of the religious dimension of Wilber’s work but from the perspective of its spectacular failure.  In short: Wilber attempted to build “Integral Centres” in a extra-academic network that not only failed to gain institutional recognition but collapsed in on itself.  What does this failure and collapse teach us about the tension between decentralised networks and centralised institutions?  Do monasteries in decentralised networks need a more centralised structure?  Do centralised institutions need contact with a more decentralised monastery life?  Do both dimensions need “shamanic” subjects in the “night of the world” that can oscillate between the two?    

Here Alderman’s reflections on Wilber’s project stem from the perspective of his personal involvement with this network building.  He suggests that those attempting to embody a new religious post-postmodern sincerity, that included within itself a rational skepticism, started to become more and more skeptical of their founder (Wilber), as well as their own sincerity.  This dimension could be intimately connected to the mega-theoretical-practical problem of the “big Other”, that is organising a community around a stable and fixed figure as a “subject supposed to know”.  The challenge is not easy to resolve: human beings tend to organise themselves around leader figures, but then the entire community is dependent on this big Other as a kind of stand-in or supplement to God.  Thus, the community or network is fragile in its dependence on such a figure.  But at the same time, communities or networks do not seem to be able to form any higher order structure or coherence without such figures.  The lesson here is not, as Pascal notes, that Wilber should have never started the extra-academic project, but rather that we, para-academics, should learn from the historical failure and not be so naive as to think that our performativity as a universal theory builder is capable of really embodying a new extra-academic network beyond the neoliberal institutional form.  Moreover, and to repeat the opening challenge of this article, the main need here is not a master theory builder, but rather the capacity for real theorists to be able to think in the gaps and the cracks of the real.  In this case: we need to think about the gaps/cracks of both the necessity of leadership, as well as the coordination between leaders, and the vanishing of leaders (something where, again, Pascal and Alderman’s project potentially helps us).

Now in reflecting the real of this failure, we need to consider more deeply even Wilber’s theoretical work as a symptom that has recoiled from its own radical modernist core.  I recently discussed with philosopher Raphaël Liogier, author of Khaos: The Betrayed Promise of Modernity, who notes that in striving to be “post-postmodern” (or even “metamodern”), we too quickly forget the philosophies of self-transcendence which grounded the promises of the modern in the first place, as well as our inability to embody them to their logical conclusion.²⁴  Liogier suggests that we actually cannot really go “beyond” the modern project because the modern project at its core was self-transcendence (shifting the beyond from an other world to this world).  This could help us understand why signifiers like “post-modern” and “meta-modern” retain their basic fidelity to the “modern”.  In terms of the modern philosophies of self-transcendence that Liogier suggests represent modernity, he suggests everything from the radical theology of Jakob Böhme to the dialectical philosophy of Georg Hegel.  Liogier furthermore suggests that this core towards self-transcendence ultimately led to the global tensions of modern capitalism and communism, from which we have now recoiled in horror.  We also see this recoil in horror in the performativity of a Jordan B. Peterson’s pseudo-modernism, in the sense that, communism and its failure is the ultimate enemy qua scapegoat, and traditional conservative reactionism towards a clear unified One in the form of identitarian allegiance to Judeao-Christian values, becomes reproduced in a hypercapitalist form.   

In this context, can we think of both Wilber’s theory-praxis, excluded from academia, and a failure as a theopolitical network, as caught in this impossible tension between capitalism and communism?  Here academia finds itself as a social mode of production quasi-safely guarded by the capital nation-state (and its chronic crisis), and the decentralised network finds itself as a social mode of production unable to stably reproduce higher order community without regression to dogmatic fundamentalism or some figure of the big Other.  In this tension, Pascal’s own relationship to Wilber’s theory includes an important dimension that is designed to keep the decentralised network alive, while avoiding the problems and pitfalls of regression to fundamentalism under the figure of a big Other.  Pascal’s work and performativity is designed to break any figure of a One-All or master universal theory builder with the emphasis on unrepeatable experiential singularities of figures like Kierkegaard or Osho.²⁵  Pascal also weaves within his positive relation to Wilber the creative foundation of continental philosophy (from Hegel and Nietzsche to Whitehead and Heidegger), instead of presupposing integral theory itself as a self-sufficient foundation.  

What we gain in these Pascalian connections is less an emphasis on one grand system or one grand theory builder that is going to save us from ourselves in late-capitalism via the emergence of a magical socialist community, and more a deeper attention to the strange unity of speculative cognition, personal interrelating, and the difficulties of the unfolding of the negative when one’s universality contains within itself subjective singularities.  Here the “death” of the “integral grand system” may function in an analogous way (although not at all in a reductive way) to the theology of Christian Atheism, where grief around the “Death of God” opens one to an “other community” (an other form of interrelating that does not depend on one master figure or signifier).  In tarrying more deeply with the practical sociohistorical failure of Wilber’s Integral communities project, we should stay with Žižek’s Christian Atheist notion that any emancipatory theopolitics is condemned to an oscillating unity between “religious enthusiasm” and “practical day to day negativities”.²⁶  This has both positive and negative relations to Wilber’s Integral Theory and its contemporary actualisation in the work of The Integral Stage.  On the negative side, while Wilber’s work perhaps too quickly jumped towards a extra-academic network of “Integral Centres” in a type of theological “religious enthusiasm” which burned its members own sincerity; we can say positively that the academic institutional realities and authorities that excluded Wilber often did so on the basis of their own repressed theological core.  That is to say that Wilber’s universal philosophical system building represents a symptom of his own time’s relation to post-modernity on the question of the theological, and more precisely, the inability to come to terms with the Death of God.  

Pascal and Alderman’s work here stands in an interesting positionality as it actively embraces the theological and the religious, not only without becoming dogmatic, but also in an embrace of lack that centres the grief of the Death of God.  However, although there are certainly strong affinities, we should definitely not be too quick to strictly identify The Integral Stage as a Christian Atheist project.  Alderman suggests that the religious or theological dimension of The Integral Stage is something that attempts to experiment with an approach that they call “trans-lineage”.  Here trans-lineage emphasises a process capable of holding multiple incommensurable practices and contradictory pathways with fidelity, in order to see what might emerge on the other side.  To be specific, they are trying to avoid both a multiplicity that becomes a bland universal pluralism obfuscating difference, and also avoid a one that becomes a dogmatic exclusionary universality unable to tarry with real antagonism.  In this sense, their work avoids the aforementioned trap that Liogier emphasises in focusing on the self-transcendent spiritual core of modernity that constitutively breaks the traditional pre-modern understanding and forces us into processes of open-ended transformation.  From The Integral Stage perspective, I think it is fair to suggest that whether or not Christianity, as the religion that most dramatically centres the Death of God, should be privileged in this global pluralist constellation of spiritualities in incommensurability and contradiction, is perhaps something that we can only find out through experiential experimentation.       

In this distinction we actually find what we might want to nominate as the key difference between Wilber’s Integral Theory project and Pascal and Alderman’s The Integral Stage: non-closure.  For The Integral Stage nothing is “totally closed off”, they remain faithful, not to closing the gap, but to staying with the gap as a “non-emptiness” or as a “virtual void” paradoxically full of the conditions of possibility for meaningfulness.  In this gap we find the unique and uncategorizable qualities that allow for an inherent transgressiveness, a philosophical play with the magic of words, and a performativity that can not only withstand, but can make creatively productive, real antagonism.  What is so important then about understanding The Integral Stage’s project is the capacity to encounter and at the same time moves beyond what appears to be impossible impasses between different philosophical theories and communities.  Where many encounter impossible impasses, Pascal and Alderman attempt to observe the fault lines and explore what might be growing out of those very fault lines.  Perhaps in this context we should conceive of the possibility of The Integral Stage, not simply the completion of Wilber’s network of Integral Centres, but rather the affirmation and the staging of an “Integral incompleteness” that could birth a network capable of even transcending that very signifier for a new domain of speculative cognition.

A Note: On Apocalyptarian In-Betweenness 

Sex, death, grief, impossibility.  These dimensions in ourselves are here to stay and para-academics need them to build.  We must learn to love sex, not as a pluralistic multiplicity of immediacies, but as a commitment to intensity and passion in our speech with the other.  We must learn to love death, not as an end point that we reach in old age, but as something that is alive in the grief of the failure of our big ideas and projects that we thought would change the world.  We must learn to love impossibility: the zero-level condition of neoliberal culture is the temptation of immortality without impossibility, as if impossibility was an obstacle for us to conquer as we enter into an immortal being.  What if the opposite is true?  What if immortality only opens to us in the grief and death of our own most intimate impossibilities?  Fantasies of a university position or any position within a well functioning institutional framework are often driven by a desire to escape the sexual intensity and passion of speech with the other, an escape from death as what is present in the grief of whatever is currently failing for us now, and ultimately an escape from the impossibility that structures the total tragedy of our shared social condition.

Layman Pascal’s call for the “Apocalyptarian” is a call for all of this.²⁷  He suggests that “meta-integralists” are precisely those “disruptive stains” I reference at the beginning of this article: befriending instability, pressure, intensity, weirdness, surprise that disrupts the entire coherent frame of our life world, learning to surf in imperfection.  His challenge: “can we consciously assimilate this weirdness or not?”²⁸  If we do not we can easily fall into mass psychosis that makes becomes obsessed with inexistent connections designed to make us feel whole and complete where there is nothing but a dreadful lack of which we are ungrateful; self-sabotage and self-destructive spirals where we desire the failure of the other more than even our own success.  This is in fact what often greets us in the real cracks of the decentralised network, not a utopian heaven free of centralised bureaucracies and their superficial legitimacies, but rather just a hellscape of human nature without constraint.  In short, without rising to the challenge of our moment we risk an ontological flooding that makes impossible any real ontological design, where picking sides, creating scapegoats, and unreflectively enjoying pseudo-oppositions becomes our only real joy.

What do we all want in the core of this situation where we are flooded by our own inability to assimilate the weirdness?  We just want the other world to arrive and to take away this time between worlds.  We want the other world to arrive so that we can grow into a world that does not have to face the irreducible in-betweenness of our moment.  But what if the only way for an other world to arrive is to embrace the in-betweenness without any guarantee?  Maybe our time is not for an other world to arrive and replace the old fallen world, what if that other world is for our children (if we have any) or our children’s children (if they have any)?  Or what if “time-between-worlds-ness” is the new normal, and those capable of embodying such a disposition are planting the seeds of some future unknown tree structure?  If so, only allowing deep heartbreak for the world that we wanted but that only remains as a haunting, that only remains as a virtual “to come” that never arises.  We have to check the form of our own attention that is desperately and unconsciously waiting for the notification, not that our post was liked or that we received some form of real engagement, but that we have been saved from this in-betweenness for the other world.  Can we turn that dimension of our attention into something that loves the inexistence of the other world, the something that loves the other whose only greeting is a disruption of what we thought we wanted?  Or that loves being unrecognised, unacknowledged?    

To cultivate from the place of that attention, we will need Alderman’s advice: to see education as transitional work.²⁹  Education is not a work from A to B (from not having a certain secure/safe position in an institution to having a secure/safe position in an institution where we are finally recognised and respected); but the work of A/B itself.  That is why “apcalyptarian in-betweenness” does not only require The Integral Stage (although it does), and does not only require Philosophy Portal (although it does), but requires a real network of transitional educators as a “post-Oedipal multiplicity” that are speaking and thinking from the place of welcoming that disruptive stain as opposed to covering it away; it requires a real network of transitional educators that are outside and inside the institution, that can write books and articles, engage long-form podcasts and blog articles, host retreats and communions, can think high theory and get real practically, can network intergenerationally and for the long-term, inclusive of negative affects, heart break, disappointment, and even betrayal.  While it may sound impossible, and while it may even be impossible, it is nevertheless here in seed form.  The seed form of such individuals and collaborators and networks is actually here if you know where to look and if you are willing to not only take a leap into the unknown, but to faithfully stay there (the unknown) when you find it.   

Alderman might suggest that this is the place of the necessity of “integral grammatology”.³⁰  What is “integral grammatology”?  Alderman’s idea is that we need to look at traditional metaphysics and philosophical traditions, not as firm and stable grounds for thinking, but as parts of speech that obscure slippery and ambiguous middles where relational dynamics actually form the fabric of existence.  This means that while it may be necessary to build up a foundational understanding in Plato or Descartes or Hegel or Whitehead (as parts of speech), that no resting on such foundations can ultimately help us escape the real of relationality where things get messy irrespective of metaphysical identifications.  This is arguably suggesting that Alderman’s integral grammatology makes the move from metaphysics through the transcendental turn and ultimately to the zone of speculative cognition.  In this zone we find relations are constantly tarrying with a constitutive in-betweenness of complexity, ambiguity and doubt, of strange and uncanny eruptions of excess, of not only the external givenness of reality, but of our own subjective position.  

In this sense, Alderman’s integral grammatology does not only point to the fact that we lack (a grand unified theory etc.), but also to the fact that at its most basic, we struggle with the excess and surplus of being (that we live on even after the Death of God, or the loss of our shared world).  The excess and surplus of being resists any and all abstract universals that would contain it, a real that Alderman nominates with the idea of “irreduction”.³¹  Irreduction points to the opposite of our reductionist tendencies, that each actor erupts as a unique essence that cannot be explained away or subsumed under conceptual domestications.  Moreover, irreduction points towards a difficult reality for academics (and para-academics): each actor’s eruptive essence contains an absolute idiocy manifesting as intimate strangeness, an ontological singularity evading definition, inexhaustible as an incarnate glory of otherness.  This is perhaps the core of the aforementioned religious enthusiasm which is both a source of universal systems as well as a disruptive element in relation to any universal system.  What irreduction forces us to confront is an “erotics of self”, the self-transcending power that we might find at the core of the modernist promise, as well as at the core of the modernist betrayal (following Liogier).  This erotics of self is at once rhizomatic, distributed throughout a network of unmediated subjectivity, and a vertical tension, pointing upwards towards the glorious potentials of an other world.  When we say we are at a time between worlds or when we say that we must love the in-betweenness, it is to say that the results of historical erotic selves has fallen, and to love the tension of the process of building again is now our time to think and claim as our own.  

In that building in the in-betweenness as such Alderman suggests there is not just chaos but the possibility for the discovery of a real ethical compulsion towards the good, not as an abstract universal, but as triggered by the enigmatic presence of the other’s creative eruption.³²  Perhaps the source of the good that we know as abstract universal was once discovered in the singularity of an enigmatic presence of the other that terrified us or alarmed us?  Perhaps the source of the good emerges from the singularity that teaches us about the unity of sameness and difference, of immediacy and mediation which opens onto a process without end or conclusion, or onto a process riddled by endings and conclusions opening us again to a new beginning?  Alderman calls such spaces the spaces of “wild knots” that are constantly being tied and untied in the intricate interconnectedness of each individual.  In order to navigate such a landscape of knots Alderman suggests a disposition that privileges listening over explanation and theory building, almost as if he is tempting us to bring the disposition of the psychoanalyst outside of the clinic.  While this may all seem abstract, I think that my calling in podcasting, as well as the disposition I try to hold in The Portal, is one where I am constantly being tied and untied, and where listening is the very source of the material where I may naturally stumble upon the right response (indeed listening to the works of Alderman and Pascal is the very source of this article itself, where I was forced to untie myself in order to enter the spaces of the other’s wild knots).

In the end, Alderman suggests to us that “integral grammatology” is less concerned with the metaphysical system and more concerned with the underlying structures of the unconscious (again, outside of the clinic).  To work in the in-betweenness is to work with the other as one’s own unconscious, as the unconscious is not just one’s own tormented inner depths, but also the unknown of the external other, the social outside, and the constant surprise that it evokes and either challenges us or forces us to confront.  Is all this nonsense?  Is all this metamodern cope?  Is all of this a failure to embody the professional performativity demanded of the institutional structures?  Maybe.  Or, in the words of Layman Pascal, maybe it is a “tragically optimistic” or an “optimistically tragic” way to live into the “endless regenerational of spirit as the transhistorical dimension of an utterly historical reality”.³³      

1. Pascal, L. 2024. From Mediation to Meditation and Back Again. In: Logic for the Global Brain. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 90.

2. Alderman, B. 2023. Education In/As Transition. Logic for the Global Brain Conference. https://philosophyportal.online/science-of-logic-conference (accessed: Jan 4 2025).

3. Last, C. 2024. Foreword: Perfect Opposition. In: Logic for the Global Brain: Singular Universality as Perfect Opposition.  Philosophy Portal Books.  p. 11-33.

4. Studebaker, B. 2022. Legitimacy crises in embedded democracies. Contemporary Political Theory, 22, p. 230–250.

5. Ibid.

6. Pascal, L. 2022. Apocalyptarians. or: What the F*%K is Soolionensius??? https://substack.com/home/post/p-48483356 (accessed: Dec 26 2024).

7. Last, C. 2020. Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution, and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer.

8. Stein, Z. 2019. Education in a Time Between Worlds: Essays on the Future of Schools, Technology, and Society. Bright Alliance.

9. Last, C. 2020. Human Metasystem Transitions. In: Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution, and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer. p. 67-81.

10. Last, C. 2020. Control Dynamics of Human Metasystems. In: Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution, and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer. p. 83-96.

11. There are other dimensions to it, mostly notably including energy and control, which I am not addressing here.

12. For reference, the public collaborations we have staged thus far orbit themes ranging from Hegelo-Lacanianism to Nietzscheanism to religious lack to magic and tantra.

13. Pascal, L. 2024. From Mediation to Meditation and Back Again. In: Logic for the Global Brain. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 97.

14. Žižek, S. 2011. Living in the End Times. Verso Books.

15. Last, C. 2020. Global Commons in the Global Brain. In: Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer. p. 120.

16. Žižek, S. 2011. Living in the End Times. Verso Books.

17. Žižek, S. 2024. LARGER THAN LIFE. https://slavoj.substack.com/p/larger-than-life (accessed: Dec 26 2024).

18. Salon of the Banned (Playlist). The Integral Stage. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKQlJulRFruo9otaEqXuYcS1jpwvjim_V (accessed: Dec 27 2024).

19. Wilber, K. 2001. A Theory of Everything: An integral vision for business, politics, science and spirituality. Shambhala Publications.

20. Dember, G. 2024. Say Hello to Metamodernism!: Understanding Today's Culture of Ironesty, Felt Experience, and Empathic Reflexivity. Exact Rush Multimedia Publishing. p. 2.

21. Ibid.

22. Pascal, L. 2024. From Mediation to Meditation and Back Again. In: Logic for the Global Brain. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 89.

23. Ibid. p. 93.

24. Liogier, R. 2024. Khaos Project. Philosophy Portal. https://youtu.be/JpnI5tDF5_A?si=6zDH4fXAD-v9l4QE (accessed: Dec 13 2024).

25. Pascal, L. 2024. From Mediation to Meditation and Back Again. In: Logic for the Global Brain. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 90.

26. Žižek, S. 2011. Christian Atheism: How to be a Real Materialist. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 202.

27. Pascal, L. 2022. Apocalyptarians. or: What the F*%K is Soolionensius??? https://substack.com/home/post/p-48483356 (accessed: Dec 26 2024).

28. Ibid.

29. Alderman, B. 2023. Education In/As Transition. Logic for the Global Brain Conference. https://philosophyportal.online/science-of-logic-conference (accessed: Jan 4 2025).

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid.

33. Pascal, L. 2024. From Mediation to Meditation and Back Again. In: Logic for the Global Brain. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 90.