Spontaneous Combustion by Jason Del Gandio AK Thompson

Author:Jason Del Gandio,AK Thompson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2017-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

IMAGINATION IN REVOLT

Lakoff’s analysis is insightful for revealing connections between the neurally structured metaphors of the cognitive unconscious, the visceral reactions that evoke a sense of experiential “truth,” and the construction of political worldviews. But Lakoff’s analysis is itself necessarily constrained by the impoverished state of US politics—the conservative/liberal divide is its own metaphorical universe, very different from that of Tahrir Square, Zuccotti Park, or the streets of Ferguson and Baltimore.

Despite the limitations of Lakoff’s political focus, his theory of embodied mind and cognitive unconscious resonates with Katsiaficas’ Marcusian-inspired understanding of freedom and liberation. In brief, Katsiaficas, following Marcuse, argues that humans instinctively aspire toward freedom, but such aspirations are always historically shaped and contextualized. Moments of the eros effect, in which people are acting upon and fighting for their freedom, emanate “from the instinctual reservoir, the collective unconscious, and [are] a form of sublimation of instinctual drives into erotic channels of human solidarity.”27 Eros, the life instinct that moves us toward joy and freedom, is “eternally emergent,” but the particular form in which it takes shape is relative to the surrounding conditions.28 In other words, eros, and moments of rebellion that it inspires, is historically situated, always and already. There is a certain reflexivity between one’s society and one’s erotic drive toward freedom: Society influences the manner by which eros takes shape, and eros shapes the nature and direction of society. Within this dialectic Marcuse finds an organic foundation for liberation:

To the degree to which this foundation is itself historical and the malleability of “human nature” reaches into the depths of man’s [sic] instinctual structure,29 changes in morality may “sink down” into the “biological” dimension and modify organic behavior. Once a specific morality is firmly established as a norm of social behavior, it is not only introjected—it also operates as a norm of “organic” behavior: the organism receives and reacts to certain stimuli and “ignores” or repels others in accord with the introjected morality, which is thus promoting or impeding the function of the organism as a living cell in the respective society. In this way a society constantly recreates, this side of consciousness and ideology, patterns of behavior and aspiration as part of the “nature” of its people, and unless the revolt reaches into this “second” nature, into these ingrown patterns, social change will remain “incomplete,” even self-defeating.30

This helps explain why the new categories created during moments of the eros effect resonate so deeply—because they reach into this “instinctual structure” and fulfill categories of life that are denied as a condition of repressive societies. As Katsiaficas states,

Though secular, such moments metaphorically resemble the religious transformation of the individual through sacred baptism in the ocean of universal life and love. The integration of the sacred and the secular in such moments of “political eros” (a term used by Herbert Marcuse) is an indication of the true potentiality of the human species, the “real history” which remains repressed and distorted within the confines of “prehistoric” powers and taboos.31

During moments of

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