THE FIVE FINGERS OF SOCIAL DESIRE
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Yet recognizing the historicity and sociality of our social desires does not
imply that we should rationalize or reduce such experiences to behaviors that
are operative, biologically determined, or merely socially constructed to fulfill
some adaptive function. Appreciating the socio-erotic does not entail that we
become self-conscious each time we engage in meaningful activity, wringing
the poetry out of each experience by analyzing its rational and political
implications. To be sure, there are some experiences that are degraded by
in-the-moment analysis: The poetry of sexuality, artistic expression, and
parental love, for instance, may be compromised by constant appeals to critical
self-reflection. What makes a particular song beautiful or pleasurable is often
the ability to temporarily lose or suspend self-awareness, allowing the self to
dissolve into a delicious rhythm, However, it is naive and perhaps even
dangerous to think that because we can suspend awareness of the rationality
or history underpinning such experiences, because we can shift awareness
away from what it is that makes us label a particular song, face, or mountain as
beautiful, that those inscriptions of what is beautiful stand outside the realms of
rationality or history.
Assertions of irrationality or intuition as epistemologically more authentic
or immediate than reason are predicated on the myth that reason is the opposite
of intuition. However, intuition often constitutes a pre-reflexive expression of
rationality: when intuitions are right, they reflect historically grounded insights
that we have rationally cultivated about the world; when they are wrong, they
often reflect more about ourselves and our unconscious desires, Intuitions can,
indeed, often be wrong and destructive: Whereas Hitler intuited that the Jews
were a sub-human enemy to the German Heimat or homeland, and
anti-abortionists intuit that fust trimester fetuses are babies’ that should be
protected, there exist many men who intuit that their wives are unfaithful, and
deserve a beating. Conversely, many intuitions, defined as irrational, or
pre-rational, are often grounded in highly refined bodies of local knowledge. So
often throughout the history of the patriarchal and colonial West, ‘women’s
intuitions’ and indigenous ‘folk knowledge’ are cast as irrational to dismiss
highly rational understandings of human behavior and natural processes.
The Enlightenment’s failure to transcend misguided and solipsistic views
of rationality, views that often dismissed the rational knowledge of the
marginalized, may inspire us to cultivate new ways of approaching questions
of rationality so central to feminist and subaltern epistemology. As we reject
reductive discussions of rationality, we may engender epistemological options
beyond appeals to spirituality and intuition. The idea of the socio-erotic
represents an embodied and historical approach to questions of meaning,
connectedness, sensuality, development, and moral opposition. A rationally
informed social desire, a desire informed, provides a radical new approach to
such crucial questions, so central to die social and ecological struggle. The