Wednesday, July 22, 2009

The advent of The Mother & Sri Aurobindo

[However, following Marx, we can also ask ourselves what is historically possible for us in the actuality of time. Something, I think, often missed by certain Neo-Marxist thought was his attentiveness to the issue of historical possibility. If Marx spent so much time analyzing the nature of contemporary economy, the role of technology in his current moment (to use one of Mel’s favorite words), new institutions like the factory that had come into being, this wasn’t simply to reveal the presence of exploitation, but rather because he discerned in these new formations the emergence of new historical possibilities. The Structure of Possibility
from Larval Subjects by larvalsubjects
My gripe with a lot of Neo-Marxist thought is that it lacks attentiveness to the analysis of constrained structure of possibility in the historical moment. Instead it dreams of an ex-ceptional subject that escapes all constraints of the situation (demiurge?), or an event that departs from all constraints of situations. If I have been led away from hermeneutic and semiotic based approaches to these social and political questions, then this is because I believe the solutions to our problems lie in becoming conscious of the enabling power of constraint. But this requires a form of analysis that refuses theoretical abstraction and is willing to look at the actual networks being formed, the impersonal life of technology (and I do not use this term pejoratively), the new forms of economy and social relation. We must resist the urge to be princes in castles in control of armies and look at all the engineering links that characterize a situation and define its field of possibility. Only in this way does it become possible to determine what acts have the potential to generate new attractor states and basins of attraction.]

[Moreover, whatever spiritual case can be made for an atemporal "nation-soul," as Sri Aurobindo brings out in The Ideal of Human Unity, its emergence in any recognizable form is only within history, through events which often seem accidental. As such, continuities and disjunctures are both to be understood as aspects of a progressive becoming, whose inner drift is only apparent to the highly trained yogic eye. DB Re: Sri Aurobindo's Integral Education in Contemporary Higher Education Debashish Science, Culture and Integral Yoga Tue 21 Jul 2009 02:45 PM PDT]

Imprisoning "emergence" within the ambit of history is drab anthropocentrism surmounting which is the basic idea behind the advent of The Mother & Sri Aurobindo. [TNM]

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