In Sri Aurobindo’s case, the transformation is not simply narrated in a text, but a lived experience

Of Syntheses and Surprises: Toward a Critical Integral Theory

Daniel Gustav Anderson INTEGRAL REVIEW 3, 2006

Given the prevailing world order, the business of an immaterial theory is the active, ongoing work of unplugging subjectivity from the complex of late capitalism’s desiring-machines. As the purpose of this criterion is to ensure the Integrality of a given theory, an explication of it will begin with Aurobindo. While he did not reject the more-than-Miltonic role Cousins assigned to him as a potential world-teacher, Aurobindo used his writing of Savitri primarily as a means of transformation, of becoming, for himself.29

Deleuze and Guattari30 give a precise mapping of this process, according to which a multiplicity or collective "brings a becoming-molecular that undermines the great molar powers of family, career, and conjugality" (p. 233)—the social forms held in place by the strange songs of ideology, such as the fictional "traditional" family or fictional "traditional" marriage, to give two live contemporary examples of instances of ideology as Zizek defines them. To generalize, becoming is transformative in nature, therefore potentially destructive, and potentially liberating.31 The challenge Deleuze and Guattari describe is to become something other than a belligerent bullet-brained fantasy-enforcing machine.

Deleuze and Guattari give a series of negations that help explicate what becoming is not. First, it is not a "correspondence of relations," nor a "resemblance, an imitation, or at the limit, an identification" (p. 237). "To become is not to progress or regress along a series. Above all, becoming does not occur in the imagination" (p. 238). In other words, this is a horizontal rather than a vertical, transcendental process, although its significance lies in its vertical (destratifying) potential. "Becoming produces nothing other than itself […] a becoming lacks a subject distinct from itself" (p. 238).

Thinking of animal mimicry: the animal one becomes is not a real animal, but the process of becoming-animal has a reality to it. In Aurobindo’s case, the question is not whether he did or did not in reality become the prophet of the divine Mother, but rather the point is that he experienced (recontextualized) himself as such, became it, by the mediation of his writing practice. In this sense, critical Integral theorists should become prophets against Empire.

The positive definitions Deleuze and Guattari offer for becoming are equally evocative: "Becoming concerns alliance" rather than filiation (p. 238)—like symbiosis between heterogeneous species, or the relationship between a teacher and collection of students. "Becoming is involutionary, involution is creative" (p. 238), where involution is understood to be something other than evolution. "Becoming is a rhizome, not a classificatory or genealogical tree" (p. 239). These koans can be solved by looking at how becoming works, through the example of becoming-writer.

According to Deleuze and Guattari, "becoming-animal always involves a pack […], a multiplicity" (p. 239)—in short, a culture. 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).