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ECOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
social desire articulated through the poetic prose of James Baldwin reflects a
highly rational mind capable of articulating compelling arguments against racism
and heterosexism in a language of sensuality and profound emotion. Baldwin’s
creativity cannot be explained as a simple energy, force, or drive, but as an
expression of a particular relationality: a meditation upon a rich matrix of social
and political relationships that Baldwin observed, lived, and reflected upon in a
particular place and time in history. By describing the social desire of Baldwin as
a merely intuitive expression, we miss the profoundly historical, rational, and
relational nature of this artist’s work.
Articulated through the language of the socio-erotic, we may see
moments of sensual desire in Baldwin’s prose: a relational desire for a quality
of mutual recognition that countered racism, classism, and heterosexism.
Baldwin expressed a rational desire for association in his discussions of
brotherhood, unity, love, and compassion. Yet again, rather than represent
essential intuitions or an expression of spirit, we may recognize within the
genius of Baldwin the ability to seamlessly join a critique of political and social
structures with a plea for a sensuous expression of human compassion and
unity. Baldwin’s reflection upon his own thirst for creativity, sensuality, and
knowledge as a young black man in Harlem in the 1940s, a desire that sent
him to (he public library, to the pulpit, and into the arms of young men,
represents not an irrational spiritual drive or intuition but a highly rational and
historically situated expression of a relational differentiative and developmental
desire. In turn, Baldwin’s writings against racism represent sensually articulated
expressions of oppositional desire, a desire that is impassioned and marked by
an undeniable logic:
At bottom, to be colored means that one has been caught in some
utterly unbelievable cosmic joke, a joke so hideous and in such bad
taste that it defeats all categories and definitions. One’s only hope of
supporting, to say nothing of surviving, this joke is to flaunt in the
teeth of it one’s own particular and invincible style. It is at this
turning, this level, that the word color, ravaged by experience and
heavy with the weight of peculiar spoils, returns to its first meaning,
which is not negro, the Spanish word for black, but vivid, many
hued.. .the rainbow, and warm and quick and vital,.. life?1
To attribute Baldwin’s genius to spiritus denies the distinctly embodied,
historical and human quality of this work. By identifying Baldwin’s genius as
an expression of social desire, we may reclaim an appreciation of the human
potential for making liberatory, creative, and meaningful connections out of the
matrix of social relationships themselves. We may indeed describe Baldwin’s
work as socio-erotic.