THE FIVE FINGERS OF SOCIAL DESIRE
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Tk Socio-EROTic: TowarcI An InFormecI DesIre
The five dimensions of desire provide a way to talk about qualitative
dimensions of reality without appealing to spiritual or purely intuitive
explanations, a way to translate that which is conventionally called spiritual
into that which is erotic. Yet such an approach requires a re-thinking of
vernacular understandings of meaning that are commonly contrasted against
the idea of reason. In a world of capitalist rationalization, a world that reduces
social and ecological relationships to standardized units of profit, it is tempting
to appeal to ideas of sacredness or spirit to convey the poetry of life,
dimensions of reality that cannot be reduced to instrumental or linear reason.
However, when we equate all that is rich, deep, and intensely meaningful with
that which is not rational, we conflate rationalization with rationality, failing in
turn to recognize moments of organic rationality and history within what is
usually invoked as spiritual. We fail to realize that we can use reason to create
structures and ways of being that are intensely meaningful in the most
cooperative and liberatory sense.
Again, the desire to assert a dimension of life that cannot be bought, sold,
or biologically determined moves us to embrace the idiom of spiritus rather than
that of rationality or cooperative relationality. Believing that rationality is
inherently reductive, we posit the poetry, sensuality, and inter-relatedness of life
as a kind of universal essence or energy that flows through the world, a kind of
activating principle that is beyond history or reason. Yet there are other more
relational, rational, and historical ways to describe moments of holism, ways to
articulate instances in which the whole cannot be reduced to a mere sum of its
parts. The idiom of the sodo-erotic provides a way to point to such qualitatively
irredudble moments, re-configuring the dimensions of sodal desire as sodal
rather than spiritual or intuitive, rational rather than irrational, historical rather
than universal, and common rather than sacred.
The sodo-erotic, then, provides a way to talk about that which is rational
and irredudble, that which is poetic and rational, historical, and sodal. Sodal
desires are marked by moments of rationality or logic that are reflective of die
historical, sodal, and political contexts in which they emerge.2^ In this way, the
sodo-erotic is not a universal, irrational essence or spirit; rather, it represents a
way to talk about a range of sodal desires that are informed by and answerable
to historically situated cultural practice. Moving beyond essentialist ideas of
spirits, energies, forces, or drives, we may uncover the most meaningful and
sodal implications of cooperative relationality itself.
As sodal creatures, than, our most meaningful and cooperative sodal
yearnings are marked by an underlying rational, historical, and relational logic.
When partidpants in the civil rights movement yearned for social justice, for
example, such yearnings were not a priori, or instinctual. Instead, they reflected
historically rooted and rational understandings of what ideas of ‘race5, ‘justice5,
and ‘injustice5 meant during the post-war period of post-slavery America. The