THE FIVE FINGERS OF SOCIAL DESIRE
119
and personal sensual pleasure. We need to develop a new language of desire,
offering ourselves a broader palette of colors to paint ever finer shades of
meaning, subtlety, and nuance. Thinking through the sodo-erotic represents
one step toward developing this language, moving us toward a greater fluency
in the language of freedom itself. We need to rationally fall in love with what is
potentially most empathetic and progressive within sodal relationships. By
focusing on the quality of relationships to self, others, and to the rest of the
natural world, we move away from appeals to universalizing essences, to
articulate crudal cultural meanings and sodal relationships. Trusting ourselves
to think compassionately, organically, and relationally, we may take the apple
of knowledge into both hands and bite down hard.
Notes
1. Benjamin Barber, in his book
Jihad, vs. McWorld, elaborates upon the idea of McDonald's
as a metaphor for the mood and mechanism of ‘advanced’ capital. For Barber, the parallel
emergences
of
global
capital
and
religious
fundamentalism
complementary threat to democracy itself. See Barber,
represent
a
paradoxically
Jihad v. McWorld (New York: Random
House, 1995). Also, for a truly stimulating discussion of the meaning of service economy in an
era of 'flexible accumulation, see David Harvey’s
The Condition of Postmodemity (Cambridge:
Blackwell, 1990).
2. Max Weber initiated a century-long discussion of the idea of 'disenchantment'. The term
're-enchantment' was popularized by students of Weber, members of the Frankfurt School
including
Max
Horkheimer,
Theodore
Adorno,
and
Herbert
Marcuse.
Both
terms
have
subsequently captured the imaginations of a range of theorists engaged in postmodern and
ecological discourse, thinkers searching for a way to talk about the erosion of meaning and
ecological integrity within modem and postmodern capitalism.
3. See Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier,
Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience
(London: AK Press, 1995).
4. The question of'mystery' has dominated much discussion in feminist and ecological circles.
Rightly dismayed by reductive analytical reasoning that reduces phenomena to meaningless
fragments in the pursuit of'rational knowledge', many thinkers have advocated embracing the
idea of 'mystery' as a way to point to moments of irreducible meaning. Such discussions have
led
to
pleas
to
put
'mystery'
back
into
politics
as
a way
to
're-enchant'
an
otherwise
instrumental political practice. For a brief discussion of 'mystery', see Ynestra King,
Necessity of History & Mystery," in
5.
The
modem
transmogrification
"The
Woman ofPowei" 1988.
of
Eros (a pre-Olympian deity who,
born
of
Chaos,
personnified love in all of its aspects) into an 'energy' or ‘Life Force' is most closely associated
with Sigmund Freud. Modeling the human psyche after the steam pump, Freud described the
psychic world as a mechanism analogous to a series of pressure chambers activated by the
fluctuating
pressure
narrative of
and
release
of
steam
energy.
Freud
transformed
the
mythological
Eros into this mechanistic model, establishing Eros as a 'steam-like' impulse,
energy, force, or drive that would propel social behavior. Also, for a more historical and
social discussion of Eros, see Herbert Marcuse,
Eros and Civilization (Boston: The Beacon
Press, 1955). Although Marcuse retains the energistic approach to Eros taken by Freud, he
pioneered a discussion of Eros as a potentially constructive social impulse.
6. According to Nicholas Xenos, it is within classical liberal theory that we first see an explicit
theory of scarcity associated with ideas of need, desire, individualism, and capitalism. See
Nicholas Xenos,
Scarcity and Modernity (New York: Routledge, 1989).
7. For a discussion of the emergence of sexual discourses in Western history, see Michel
Foucault,
History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1980).
8. For a critical examination of technology within contemporary ecological discourse, see
Murray Bookchln,
RtbEitchauling Humanity (London: Cassell, 1995).