To map all knowables objectively, an ambitious and Aurobindian project

Anderson: Of Syntheses and Surprises INTEGRAL REVIEW 3, 2006

Aurobindo was without doubt among the more cultured Anglophone writers of a generation that included James Joyce and T.S. Eliot32—he contained a multiplicity—but more significantly, he had built a culture around himself, through correspondence and the ashram that grew around him in Pondicherry that made becoming possible for all connected with it.

Becoming-animal, one of the more conspicuous versions of becoming Deleuze and Guattari present, has little to do with literal animals in this context, except by analogy; in one sense, it is a cipher for becoming-writer. Deleuze and Guattari’s examples are strictly literary, inclusive of Kleist (Penthesilea’s becoming-dog), Melville (Ahab’s becoming-whale), Kafka (Gregor’s becoming-insect).

In Aurobindo’s case, the transformation is not simply narrated in a text, but by his own account a lived experience verifiable by a knowledgeable reading of his writings, which makes his case qualitatively unique. For this reason, he is the picture of the writer-sorcerer in Deleuze-Guattarian diction: "[I]f the writer is a sorcerer, it is because writing is a becoming" (p. 240)...

32 The reception history of Aurobindo’s poems in the Commonwealth and in the United States should be a productive point of study for postcolonialists. How is it that this most English of writers, more English perhaps than the English, still has an ambivalent position in the canon of literature in English?...

In fact, Gurdjieff’s view of history more closely corresponds to Walter Benjamin’s than that of Aurobindo. Consider Benjamin’s famous image of the "angel of history"...

Conclusion: While the surprise of critical intervention is a break and a local disintegration, it is neither a discontinuity nor a global disintegration. I promote Ziporyn’s technique of transformative recontextualization as an immaterial alternative to evolution as presented in synthetic Integral theories—a practice that pursues "second-tier" thinking to its logical conclusion.36 The doctrine of the Lotus Sutra, according to Ziporyn, "is not some specific teaching about what the real is"—as is Wilber’s attempt in Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality37 to map all knowables objectively, an ambitious and Aurobindian project—"but just the act of opening up and revealing, of bringing teachings together so they are revealed to be versions of one another, one may say of teaching per se, that is, the ultimate teaching" (p. 91)...

36 One may speculate at this point that an upcoming generation of integral thinkers may need to read Aurobindo, for example, in a manner analogous to approaches to Spinoza taken by theorists such as Deleuze, Antonio Negri, and Etienne Balibar—which is to say a recontextualization of the immanent or "immaterial" impulses that saturate the best of Wilber’s thought into the interface between subjectivity and the machinery of late capitalism. This is not to suggest that Deleuze, Negri, or Balibar have necessarily revealed the final word on Spinoza, but to illustrate Ziporyn’s point that "just the same content, when ‘opened up’ […], suddenly reads differently without having changed in the least" (2004, p. 93).