Is Derrida Construct Aware?

A comment I left on a thread by Edward Berge on Open Integral. Berge quotes from Gary Hampson's new piece in Integral Review. Gary argues that Derrida is construct aware using Suzanne Cook Greuter's developmental self-identity scheme.

That would put Derrida roughly altitude wise (if Hampson is right) in the turquoise to indigo levels not the green postmodernist wave Wilber for example normally places Derrida within. It's an interesting piece--other fronts covered than just the Derrida one--but overall I think the Derrida aspect of the thesis is wrong.

I've received negative marks in some quarters for saying there are positive elements (lasting truth elements) to Derrida. More than just "questioning assumptions". That he has a detailed injunction that exposes evidence otherwise un-noticed. But it is not post-green in nature. It is certainly not, in my view, construct aware.

You can read SCG's own take on construct aware and her own levels here. See especially the articles titled: Nine Levels of Increasing Embrace and A Detailed Description of Action Logics.

Here's my comment to Edward (edit note I misspelled Gary's last name as Hampton in the original comments. It is actually Hampson. Mea culpa. It is corrected in my copy and paste here):

Edward,

Thanks for the link. I read the article. It had some good points. But I think on the argument about Derrida Gary Hampson is wrong.

I think the problem stems from this idea that green is relativist. And relativist is taken to mean that the person can not make any judgments or believes in no better/worse. No one can actually do that. There is plenty of vertigo in postmodernism and a difficulty in some to make clear distinctions, but eventually pushed people come down on a side.

Hampson says that Derrida is no relativist therefore he’s not green. He’s right he’s not total relativist (who is) but wrong that he is post-relativist. The issue is post postmodern not post-relativist. i.e. He needs a cross-paradigmatic systematic view which I do not find in Derrida. And I’ve read a lot Jacques.

Because green means (in the relativist or so-called deconstructive phase) an overturning of the previous hierarchies to install new hierarchies. The hierarchy of the underside. Not the loss of hierarchy altogether. I see Derrida much more in light of say Levinas in this sense.

But I don’t see it as integral/second-tier (much less construct-aware) because it is still held to the same basic winner take all view. It’s still one hierarchy over another, just whose on top and bottom is reversed. It doesn’t question the co-arising of the terms and the way in which (construct-aware) such hierarchies are themselves products of a limited injunction, a function of the limitation of the worldsapce within which they arise.

For example in Glas, Derrida famously argues that Hegel’s insane sister precedes her rationalist brother. Without sister then no brother. Without feminine then no masculine. And without craziness no rationality, implying that perhaps Hegel himself with his uber architecture of the mind was the crazy one.

Or his piece with Habermas on 9/11 where he talks about how everyone else views the event through the lens of a changed post 9/11, especially post Cold War World. He argues that its actually the return of the absent (over present): the mujihadeen trained by the Americans in Afghanistan versus the Soviets. It’s the Cold War coming back for him.

Again reverse the traditional hierarchy and make a new hierarchy.

I think Derrida is actually quite sharp, in fact even within that level a genius. But he is not construct aware.