JACK HIPP
The moral virtues, then, are produced in us neither by nature nor against nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for their reception, but their complete formation is the product of habit.
—Aristotle1
Liberation and imagination joined together in concrete form in the fall of 2011 as the Occupy movement burst onto the world scene. Within weeks of the first protests at Zuccotti Park, thousands of people had appeared in hundreds of cities around the world, camping out together in protest of a social system that attempts to obscure its brutal inhumanity behind a shield of reason—a reason that engenders war and austerity for nations, and fear and poverty for individuals and communities. Making no demands and supporting no leaders, the protestors were united around a loose collection of ideologies and practices: their opposition to the 1 percent, their critique of economic inequality, their embrace of direct action and inclusive forms of democracy, and their rejection of standard modes of protest. A particularly evocative photo from Occupy depicts a protestor wearing a Guy Fawkes mask and holding a large blank sign. It is an image that is emblematic of an important new form of reason in the current evolution of human social consciousness—one that fundamentally negates the central terms of the system it confronts.
In this chapter I hope to illustrate how the sense of collective reason that George Katsiaficas describes as an emergent quality of the eros effect is mirrored by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson—two thinkers who argue, via cognitive science, that reason is an emergent quality of the embodied mind. I focus, in particular, on how the cognitive unconscious of the embodied mind is neurally restructured during moments of the eros effect. I then draw upon the work of Herbert Marcuse to help explain how this neurological restructuring helps to produce a new kind of subjectivity—one that moves us closer to realizing, concretely, the abstract ideals of human freedom. I close out the chapter by returning to the Occupy protestor with the Guy Fawkes mask and blank sign, providing a brief analysis of how this image gestures toward a new sensibility of resistance.
With the eros effect, Katsiaficas describes the crescendo of revolutionary social forces that periodically sweep across national boundaries as ordinary people take to the streets in large numbers, demanding radical changes in their day-to-day realities while simultaneously creating new social forms reflecting their genuine needs. During moments of the eros effect, “popular movements not only imagine a new way of life and a different social reality but millions of people live according to transformed norms, values, and beliefs.”2
Katsiaficas finds the most salient examples of the eros effect within “world-historic movements,” which are periods of crisis and turmoil on a global scale. These are relatively rare in history. In an early analysis, Katsiaficas identifies only a handful of such periods of global eruptions occurring since the American and French revolutions: 1848–1849, 1905–1907, 1917–1919, and 1967–1970.3 More recently, Katsiaficas has considered the disarmament movement of the 1980s; the wave of East Asian uprisings in the 1980s and 1990s; the revolts against Soviet regimes in East Europe from 1989 to 1991; the alterglobalization wave of the mid-1990s to early 2000s, including the antiwar protests that occurred on February 15, 2003; and the 2011 wave of protests and rebellions that included the Arab Spring and Occupy movement.4 In each of these periods, global upheavals were spontaneously generated, and “in a chain reaction of insurrections and revolts, new forms of power emerged in opposition to the established order, and new visions of the meaning of freedom were formulated in the actions of millions of people.” Katsiaficas contends:
The essential change which creates these leaps in human reality is the activation of whole strata of previously passive spectators, the millions of people who decide to participate in the conscious re-creation of their economic and political institutions and social life. Such spontaneous leaps may be, in part, a product of long-term social processes in which organized groups and conscious individuals prepare the groundwork, but when the political struggle comes to involve millions of people, it is possible to glimpse a rare historic occurrence, the emergence of the eros effect, the massive awakening of the instinctive human need for justice and for freedom. When the eros effect occurs it becomes clear that the fabric of the status quo has been torn, and the forms of social control have been ruptured. This rupture becomes clear when established patterns of interaction are negated and new and better ones are created.5
The many dimensions of activity that constitute the eros effect vary with the historical context in which it occurs, and no particular manifestation of the eros effect is like any other. Katsiaficas conceives of the eros effect as a tactic for radical, even global, change but is also skeptical about our ability to consciously will it into effect.
A significant new tactic in the arsenal of popular movements, the eros effect is not simply an act of mind, nor can it simply be willed by a “conscious element” (or revolutionary party). Rather it involves popular movements emerging as forces on their own as ordinary people take history into their own hands. The concept of the eros effect is a means of rescuing the revolutionary value of spontaneity, a way to stimulate a reevaluation of the unconscious and strengthen the will of popular movements to remain steadfast in their revulsion with war, inequality, and domination.6
Katsiaficas argues that the intuitive nature of the eros effect makes it opaque to scientific analysis. “The eros effect, arising as it does from the subconscious, cannot be verified scientifically.”7 This echoes George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s exploration into cognitive science and the problem of quantifying the rationality of the human unconscious within the framework of modern social science. In brief, Lakoff and Johnson assert that human reason is vastly richer than social modeling can conceive, and they oppose Western philosophy’s generally accepted notion that rational thought is literal, logical, conscious, transcendent, and dispassionate. Lakoff and Johnson tell us that everyday human reason does not fit this classical view of rationality at all. Most of ordinary human thought is metaphorical and, hence, not literal. It uses not only metaphor but framing, metonymy, and prototype-based inferences. It is not logical in the sense defined by the field of formal logic, and it is largely unconscious. It is also not transcendent but, rather, fundamentally embodied. In this view, imaginative aspects of reason—metaphor, metonymy, and mental imagery—are taken as central rather than peripheral and inconsequential adjuncts to reason and the literal.
The theory of embodied mind contradicts the Western philosophical tradition of “faculty psychology,” which posits that we have a faculty of reason that is separate from and independent of what we do with our bodies. In Philosophy in the Flesh, Lakoff and Johnson argue:
The evidence from cognitive science shows that classical faculty psychology is wrong. There is no fully autonomous faculty of reason separate from and independent of bodily capacities such as perception and movement. The evidence supports, instead, an evolutionary view, in which reason uses and grows out of such bodily capacities. The result is a radically different view of what reason is and therefore of what a human being is.8
Lakoff and Johnson theorize that our thoughts, including our most abstract notions and philosophical and moral systems, are comprised of conceptual blendings of complex metaphors, which are in turn based on primary metaphors that reside within our cognitive unconscious. This is not the Freudian realm of the repressed but, rather, the locus of all unconscious mental operations concerned with conceptual systems, meaning, inference, and language. The cognitive unconscious operates beneath the level of awareness, inaccessible to consciousness and operating too quickly to be focused on. Lakoff and Johnson suggest that at least 95 percent of these operations are forever beyond the grasp of our conscious minds.
When we understand all that constitutes the cognitive unconscious, our understanding of the nature of consciousness is vastly enlarged. Consciousness goes way beyond mere awareness of something, beyond the mere experience of qualia (the qualitative sense of, for example, pain or color), beyond the awareness that you are aware, and beyond the multiple takes on immediate experience provided by various centers of the brain. Consciousness certainly involves all of the above plus the immeasurably vaster constitutive framework provided by the cognitive unconscious, which must be operating for us to be aware of anything at all.9
Primary metaphors, which are foundational to most of our thinking, are acquired automatically and unconsciously through our everyday functioning in the world. These metaphors are neural connections, physically instantiated within our brains through a process that features the childhood conflation of subjective feeling and sensorimotor experience. As Lakoff and Johnson explain:
For an infant, the subjective experience of affection is typically correlated with the sensory experience of warmth, the warmth of being held. … Later, during a period of differentiation, children are able to separate out the domains, but the cross-domain associations persist. These persistent associations are the mappings of conceptual metaphor that will lead the same infant, later in life, to speak of “a warm smile,” “a big problem,” and “a close friend.”10
There are hundreds of such primary metaphors, according to Lakoff and Johnson.
Together these metaphors provide subjective experience with extremely rich inferential structure, imagery, and qualitative “feel,” when the networks for subjective experience and the sensorimotor networks neurally connected to them are coactivated. They also allow a great many words of sensorimotor experience to be used to name aspects of metaphorically conceptualized subjective experience.11
For instance, the sense of feeling emotionally “up” or “down,” or perceiving oneself as an “insider” or an “outsider,” involves inferential structures, deep-seated imagery, and a qualitative feel that help organize and communicate personal and/or collective experience. The same is true for seeing oneself as being part of a social “movement,” a “wave” of social change, or a long “march” toward freedom.
Categories are also central to how we think. As Lakoff and Johnson explain, all species have evolved to categorize based on their particular sensing apparatuses and their ability to move themselves and to manipulate objects—it is an inescapable consequence of our biological makeup. Human brains have one hundred billion neurons and one hundred trillion synaptic connections. Because there cannot be a one-to-one correspondence when information is passed from one dense ensemble of neurons to another over sparse connections, as is common in the brain, a fundamental categorization in mapping certain input patterns occurs across those connections to the output ensemble. Lakoff and Johnson find this kind of neural categorization to exist throughout the brain—up to the highest levels of which we can be aware.
Since we are neural beings, our categories are formed through our embodiment. What that means is that the categories we form are part of our experience! They are the structures that differentiate aspects of our experience into discernible kinds. Categorization is thus not a purely intellectual matter, occurring after the fact of experience. … It is part of what our bodies and brains are constantly engaged in.12
Our concepts also are neither literal nor disembodied, as traditionally conceived of by Western philosophy. “What we call concepts are neural structures that allow us to mentally characterize our categories and reason about them. Human categories are typically conceptualized … in terms of what are called prototypes. Each prototype is a neural structure that permits us to do some sort of inferential or imaginative task relative to a category.”13 Some of the neurally structured prototypes used in everyday reasoning include: typical and ideal cases (think of the typical husband versus the ideal husband), social stereotypes (like the heteronormative notion that a husband implies a female wife), and salient exemplars (well-known examples of husbands that we know personally or through stories, cultural myths, mass media, etc.). These insights transform our understanding of thought-and-experience. As Lakoff and Johnson state:
The concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect. They also govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities. If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical, then the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is a matter of metaphor.14
Primary metaphors are everywhere—and mostly invisible to our conscious awareness. However, according to Lakoff and Johnson:
The pervasiveness of primary metaphors in no way denies the existence of non-metaphorical concepts. … All basic sensorimotor concepts are literal. Cup (the object you drink from) is literal. Grasp (the action of holding) is literal. In (in its spatial sense) is literal.
Concepts of subjective experience and judgment, when not structured metaphorically, are literal; for example, “These colors are similar” is literal, while “These colors are close” uses the metaphor Similarity Is Proximity. … Without metaphor, such concepts are relatively impoverished and have only a minimal, “skeletal” structure. A primary metaphor adds sensorimotor inferential structure. … [and] such structure is considerably multiplied when two or more primary metaphors are combined to create complex conceptual metaphors.15
Without such metaphors, abstract thought is virtually impossible.
Our most fundamental concepts—time, events, causation, the mind, the self, and morality—are multiply metaphorical. So much of the ontology and inferential structure of these concepts is metaphorical that, if one somehow managed to eliminate metaphorical thought, the remaining skeletal concepts would be so impoverished that none of us could do any substantial everyday reasoning.16
An important conclusion of research in cognitive studies is that moral reasoning is imaginative and depends fundamentally on embodied metaphorical understanding. In Moral Politics, Lakoff points out that “morality is not all metaphorical and nonmetaphorical aspects of morality are what the system of metaphors for morality is based on. Nonmetaphorical morality is about the experience of well-being. The most fundamental form of morality concerns promoting the experiential well-being of others and the avoidance and prevention of experiential harm to others or the disruption of the well-being of others.”17 Experiential well-being (and its lack or denial) provides the grounding for our moral metaphors. It is better to be strong than weak, beautiful than ugly, clean than dirty, up than down, and so on. And because our notion of what constitutes well-being is widely shared across cultures, much of our pool of metaphors for morality is also widely shared. Here, Lakoff and Johnson expand the scope of this moral dimension of reason.
Real human reason is embodied, mostly imaginative and metaphorical, largely unconscious, and emotionally engaged. It is often about human well-being and about ends determined by human well-being. Since morality concerns well-being and since our conceptions of morality arise from our modes of well-being, morality enters into human reason most of the time. It not only affects the choice of ends, but also the kind of reasoning done in achieving those ends. Rationality almost always has a major moral dimension. The idea that human rationality is purely mechanical, disengaged, and separable from moral issues is a myth, a myth that is harmful when we live our lives according to it.18
According to Lakoff and Johnson, metaphor is traditionally understood as a matter of words rather than thoughts—a deviant language outside the boundaries of conventional speech, poetical in nature, and merely expressing preexisting similarities between words. Cognitive theory, by contrast, places metaphor at the center of human consciousness and, therefore, of reason itself.
Whether reason is embodied and whether metaphor is conceptual may sound like obscure pedantic issues. They aren’t. They cut to the deepest questions of what we as human beings are and how we understand our everyday world. If you hold the traditional views about metaphor, then you inherit views about what reality is, what truth is, how language is connected to the world, whether we can have objective knowledge, and even what morality is.19
These a priori philosophical views of reality are based on a correspondence theory of truth in which the world is seen as separate from the human mind, and language is understood as being “true” when it corresponds to the “really existing facts of the world.” But a cognitively responsible theory of truth, by contrast, recognizes that the truth of the world is relative to our embodied means of comprehending it.
Lakoff and Johnson consider the most important task of a cognitively responsible philosophy of language to be the reshaping of our metaphorical realities. “Given that language never just fits the world, that it always incorporates an embodied understanding, it becomes the job of the philosophy of language to characterize that embodied understanding accurately and to point out its consequences.”20 Moral judgments based in metaphor are implicit in every aspect of our culture, and it is vital to be consciously aware of them. Political and economic ideologies are framed in metaphor and can hide aspects of reality. For instance, labor is a resource, time is money, argument is war, and dozens of other metaphors neurally encode socially constructed categories of domination and obscure their categorical negations—and they do so in the most visceral way.
In his solo work, Lakoff has applied the theory of embodied mind to the metaphorical architecture girding the conservative and liberal mindsets in US politics. He locates the political distance between these worldviews in the moral difference between two opposing models of the family—the conservative “strict father” and the liberal “nurturing parent,” which are metaphorically extended as models of governments, representing coherent political ideologies instantly recognizable to any casual observer of US politics.
Strict father morality is founded on the notion of moral strength, which must be built through discipline and self-denial, and in which self-indulgence is seen as immoral.
The metaphor of Moral Strength is a set of correspondences between the moral and physical domains:
•Being Good is Being Upright.
•Being Bad is Being Low.
•Doing Evil is Falling.
•Evil is a Force (either internal or external).
•Morality is Strength.21
The Moral Strength metaphor has two very different aspects. First, it is required if one is to stand up to some externally defined evil. Second, it itself defines a form of evil, namely, the lack of self-discipline and the refusal to engage in self-denial. That is, the metaphor for Moral Strength defines forms of internal evil.22
Lakoff points out that this conception is seen by those who give it high priority as a form of idealism that imposes a strict us/them moral dichotomy, with important entailments: The world is in a war between good and evil; to face evil and remain good requires moral strength acquired through self-discipline and self-denial; failure to acquire moral strength is itself immoral because one who is morally weak will eventually commit evil, so self-indulgence and lack of self-control are forms of immorality. Evil must be fought ruthlessly; it does not deserve respect—it deserves to be attacked. Anything that promotes moral weakness is immoral.
By this metaphor, providing birth control for teenagers or clean needles for intravenous drug users is immoral because teenage sex and illegal drug use are seen as resulting from moral weakness—that is, a lack of self-control.23 To provide such services is therefore evil. A morally strong person can “just say no” to sex and drugs; those who can’t are immoral, and immorality is evil and must be punished. Desire, in this metaphor, is seen as temptation, and what is needed to overcome temptation is will—the willpower to exercise control over the body. The opposite of this self-control is self-indulgence, a concept that makes sense only if we accept the central metaphor of “moral strength.”24
Strict father morality assumes that the world is dangerous and difficult, and that children are born bad and must be made good. The father, as the authority, must impose this moral construct on the family through punishment and by his own example as a paragon of moral strength, that is, by being upright, having backbone, standing up to evil, and not backing down.25 But Lakoff points out that moral people are not literally upright, and becoming immoral is not literally falling—that evil is not a literal force that can make an upright person fall. These concepts are taken from the physical domain and applied to morality through metaphor. This metaphor is grounded in a fact about experiential well-being—that it is better to be strong than weak. But its quality as a “natural” metaphor does not mean it is literally true, nor does it disqualify other metaphors as alternate centers of coherent systems of morality.
The “nurturing parent” model, by contrast, is based in empathy and holds nurturance as the central metaphor of morality. It assumes that the world is basically good and can be made better, and that children are born good and parents can help make them better. The nurturant model sees morality as an issue of self-development, and it involves fair distribution and happiness and comprises categories of moral strength, moral growth, moral boundaries, moral authority, retribution, and restitution—all of which are grounded in empathy and nurturance. The nurturing parent model stresses fairness and social ties and is most recognizably expressed in the political sphere as the ideal of the “social safety net.”
Lakoff’s analysis was, in part, a goad to liberal sensibilities in US politics following the congressional defeat of the Democrats in 1996 and, later, Al Gore’s loss to George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential election. He encouraged liberals to examine the categories implicit in their policy views and make the metaphorical connections necessary to develop a coherent framework of shared values that would unite their base in an “embodied” body politic capable of articulating a consistent worldview based on the morality of nurturance, and eliciting similar cognitive responses as conservatives do with concepts like “family values” or “law and order.” He considered this to be an issue primarily of “cognitive framing,” pointing out that to use the language of a particular moral or political conceptual system reinforces that system, and that the Democratic failure to reframe the debate, outside the categories and concepts of the conservative worldview, was a major factor in both 1996 and 2000.26
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 the eros effect, everyday people demonstrate their latent potential to live as “species beings,” reconfiguring their metaphorical universe as they embody its new categories and impress them within their societies.32 Therefore, such slogans as “We are the 99%,” “We are all Egyptian now,” and “Que se vayan todos!” (They all must go!) are not just words, not just pithy summations of one’s radical politics. Rather, these slogans represent a restructuring of one’s historically shaped “instinctive nature” or, in Lakoff’s terminology, one’s neurally structured cognitive unconscious. This helps explain the intense feeling that people experience when participating in spontaneous mass rebellion. People’s brains are being rewired, literally.
Unfortunately, the eros effect recedes and the instinctual changes that are so liberating in the moment tend to revert back toward a previous state of (political/existential) equilibrium. Here, Marcuse’s notion of the psychic Thermidor,33 which describes the retreat of popular consciousness following moments of revolutionary advance, becomes evident as neurologically instantiated modes of repressive thought reexert their cognitive power against the newly formed categories. And so, with 95 percent of the heavy lifting of categorization occurring beyond the reach of our conscious minds, it is unsurprising when we take great bounds forward only to take a few steps back. But these erotically charged categories persist long beyond their incandescent moment, as their concrete realities are instantiated in our brains and woven into our societies. As Katsiaficas says of the world-historic movements with which the eros effect is so strongly associated, “even in failure they present new ideas and values that become common sense as time passes.”34
Two examples can help elicit a sense of the various points of contact between the embodied mind and the eros effect.
During France’s near revolution of May 1968, the slogan “All Power to the Imagination” was emblazoned on walls, and the famous photograph of a young couple kissing at the barricades represented the titanic force of eros joining in the struggle for a liberated world. In Paris, students occupied their schools, instituting a curriculum of revolution, and workers shut down factories, reopening them again with management locked outside the gates. Millions of people refusing to continue with their daily lives as before embodied the exhortation “Be reasonable, demand the impossible!” In these leaps of imagination among participants who demanded and momentarily lived qualitatively different existences, it was said, “Once their eyes are open, people are not about to close them again: their passivity and dependence are negated, annihilated, and nothing but a force that breaks their will can re-impose the passivity and dependence.”35
Entrenched categories were smashed and new ones came to the fore as participants became the creators of their social reality. There was a significant moment early in the uprisings when the actions of protestors transcended familiar categories, and an overarching categorical sense of imagination and possibility was experienced and lived. On May 10, named the Night of the Barricades, thirty thousand students were trapped by police while marching on the prison that held their comrades. The neighborhood in which they were surrounded is officially known as the Latin Quarter, but it was promptly renamed “The Heroic Vietnam Quarter.” The students erected dozens of barricades and pried up cobblestones to be used as missiles, evoking the dreamlike slogan “Beneath the cobblestones, the beach.” They fought with the police throughout the night, declaring that “politics is in the streets.” This action galvanized public support across France, and within three days a million people were marching across the country. Two weeks later, nearly the entire French economy was on strike and President Charles de Gaulle was on the verge of resigning.
A lesser-known but just as dramatic situation occurred across Korea in May 1980, when a series of large student protests of the dictatorship had been quelled by the government’s threat of violence and the institution of martial law—except, however, in the city of Gwangju, which had a history of radical resistance. There, fifty thousand students marched in a defiant, torchlight procession. The dictatorship responded by sending paratroopers to terrorize the population with bayonets, clubs, boots, and unimaginable brutality. The people refused to submit, and over the next two days, they used, among other things, baseball bats, hammers, and Molotov cocktails to battle riot police and paratroopers to a standstill. On May 20, tens of thousands had assembled in the city center, and by evening there were over two hundred thousand participants (in a city of only seven hundred thousand). Suddenly, nine city busses and over two hundred taxis appeared together on the main avenue. People surged in together with the convoy, resolutely advancing on the army lines. This time, when the soldiers attacked, the entire city fought back.
This became known as the Gwangju People’s Uprising, and participants recast themselves as the minjung—those exploited and marginalized people fighting for democratization and freedom. According to sociologist Choi Jungwoon, the minjung “referred to a large number of people, everyone except monopolistic capitalists and their mercenaries: it included the endless throngs of people gathered on Guemnam Avenue on May 20th. These people from different walks of life were a community of absolute love, ‘where words were not necessary.’ ”36 According to Choi, “In this absolute community, citizens confirmed their greatness, blessed each other, and experienced an absolute liberation from all social bondages and constraints. At this moment, many citizens were plunged into such an extreme ecstasy that they would not have minded dying right then and there, and the struggle changed into a festival.”37
As the rebellion unfolded, the sense of this “absolute community” inspirited daily rallies of up to one hundred thousand people in the central square, renamed Democracy Plaza, which became the heart of the resistance. As chronicler Lee Jae-eui describes:
All walks and classes of people spoke—women street vendors, elementary school teachers, and followers of different religions, housewives, college students, high school students, and farmers. Their angry speeches created a common consciousness, a manifestation of the tremendous energy of the uprising. They had melded together, forging a strong sense of solidarity throughout the uprising. For the moment the city was one.38
Student/worker associations formed and struggled over tactics, goals, and issues. Moderates wished to surrender arms and bargain with the government, but the radical “struggle faction” prevailed, vowing to carry the fight to the end as the army prepared to retake the city, thus ensuring with their deaths that events would be recorded in history books as a people’s uprising rather than as another set of riots and civil disturbances. Although the fighters lost the day against the army’s ferocious assault, the promise of victory was eventually fulfilled when, decades later, high-ranking perpetrators of the massacre, including the former president, were convicted and sentenced, and the initial date of the uprising, May 18, was honored as a national memorial day. In 1997, Mangwol-dong cemetery, where the bodies of the slain had been unceremoniously dumped by the government, was elevated to the status of national cemetery.39 Most significantly, the Gwangju People’s Uprising ensured the eventual democratization of the country and provided the spark that ignited the wave of people power uprisings that swept across East Asia in the years to follow.
These examples highlight the dynamic of destroying and creating neurally structured categories of the cognitive unconscious. It is in this dynamic that the eros effect and the embodied mind join together. The eros effect is defined by those moments in which previously entrenched categories are suddenly negated, and new categories of living emerge. The creation of these new categories of resistance, rebellion, human solidarity, and love are a function of imagination liberated from the constraints of a repressive reality. In this process the collective reason of the eros effect joins the “imaginative rationality”40 of the embodied mind in a form of liberatory reason grounded in our bodies, the world, and history.
The content of these erotically-and-cognitively driven moments, in their radical negation of the given and projection of the possible, is also captured in Marcuse’s reformulation of the foundations of Freud’s reality principal, specifically, how it appears in Greek mythology. Marcuse, in differentiating between “the biologic and the socio-historical vicissitudes of the instincts,”41 discerns between two kinds of instinctual repression in humans: basic instinctual repression, which is the modicum required to cohabit within a civilized society, and surplus repression, which involves “the restrictions necessitated by social domination.”42 In a society where domination prevails, instinctual drives toward joy and pleasure are channeled through the creation of false needs and desires—for example, sexual energy becomes commerce and pornography, camaraderie and solidarity are diverted into xenophobic nationalism, and ecological appreciation and communion become manicured suburban lawns and day trips to the zoo. Acting upon these false needs and desires then perpetuates the overall system—which is to say, we participate in and contribute to the maintenance of our own domination.
Marcuse, in sifting through these complexities, leans on and then eclipses Freud. For Freud, basic instinctual repression constitutes the reality principle within which bounds we are compelled to abide (as a hedge against a presumably brutal human nature unchained). By contrast, Marcuse recognizes what he calls the performance principle as the historically situated form of a reality principle that organizes the forces of surplus repression, encoding them in its cultural mythologies and archetypes.
If Prometheus is the culture-hero of toil, productivity, and progress through repression, then the symbols of another reality principal must be sought at the other pole. Orpheus and Narcissus (like Dionysus to whom they are akin: the antagonist of the god who sanctions the logic of domination, the realm of reason) stand for a very different reality. They have not become the culture heroes of the Western world: theirs is the image of joy and fulfillment; the voice which does not command but sings; the gesture which offers and receives; the deed which is peace and ends the labor of conquest; the liberation from time which unites man with god, man with nature.43
For Marcuse, the truth of these repressed concepts is preserved in the aesthetic dimension of human experience.
Under the predominance of rationalism, the cognitive function of sensuousness [the domain of Eros] has been constantly minimized. In line with the repressive concept of reason [the domain of Logos], cognition became the ultimate concern of the “higher,” non-sensuous faculties of the mind. … Sensuousness, as the “lower” and even “lowest” faculty, furnished at best the mere stuff, the raw material, for cognition, to be organized by the higher faculties of the intellect. … Sensuousness retained a measure of philosophical dignity in a subordinate epistemological position; those of its processes that did not fit into the rationalistic epistemology … became homeless. Foremost among these homeless contents and values were those of imagination: free, creative, or reproductive intuition of objects which are not directly “given” …44
The discipline of aesthetics installs the order of sensuousness as against the order of reason. Introduced into the philosophy of culture, this notion aims at the liberation of the senses which, far from destroying civilization, would give it a firmer basis and would greatly enhance its potentialities. … It would harmonize the feelings and affections with the ideas of reason. Operating through a basic impulse—namely, the play impulse—the aesthetic function would “abolish compulsion, and place man, both morally and physically, in freedom.” It would harmonize the feelings and affections with the ideas of reason, deprive the “laws of reason of their moral compulsion,” and “reconcile them with the interest of the senses.”45
Marcuse imagines a future unfolding of human instinct where “work can become play, where Logos and Eros are reunited, where Nature and humans lovingly embrace each other.”46 In Marcuse’s image of Narcissus reconsidered, we find a compelling turn toward this potential future. First, he quotes Freud regarding the phenomena of primary narcissism, “Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself the external world. The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling—a feeling which embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world.”47 Marcuse continues:
The striking paradox that narcissism, usually understood as egoistic withdrawal from reality, here is connected with oneness with the universe reveals the new depth of the conception: beyond all immature autoeroticism, narcissism denotes a fundamental relatedness to reality which may generate a comprehensive existential order. In other words, narcissism may contain the germ of a different reality principle: the libidinal cathexis of the ego (one’s own body) may become the source and reservoir for a new libidinal cathexis of the objective world—transforming this world into a new mode of being.48
The rationality of the embodied mind and the cognitive unconscious fulfill this description without reserve, as it is our own reflection, seamlessly articulated in nature, that we regard in our metaphorical constructions of the world. As we consider ourselves in its light, Narcissus’ mirror becomes the portal through which we join nature (external and human), and the manufactured subject/object dualities of a repressive reality disappear. Behind the scrim of instrumentalist metaphor, our truest human potential exists in imagination, waiting impatiently as we embody and demonstrate its concrete reality within ourselves, perhaps most spectacularly during episodes of the eros effect, as our cognitive unconscious expands within its instinctual categories of love and solidarity. These moments of the eros effect, in their brightest aspect, connect us instantly to this unified reality—which is always right beside us in possibility. As Lakoff and Johnson say in reference to the subject/object unity that joins us with nature, “as embodied, imaginative creatures we never were separated or divorced from reality in the first place.”49
The world has been deeply scarred by the ideology of domination. It is to the radical overthrow of its metaphorical bulwark of justification, which is inscribed on our brains and bodies and permeates everyday power relations,50 that a living, immanent critique must turn. Both the embodied mind and the eros effect suggest that the struggle against deeply ingrained patterns of domination isn’t eternal; but they also suggest that the concepts and categories of a repressive reality must be shattered before we can develop the “sensibility” necessary for long-lasting, revolutionary change. According to Marcuse, this new sensibility “expresses the ascent of the life instincts over aggressiveness and guilt, [and] would foster, on a social scale, the vital need for the abolition of injustice and misery and would shape the further evolution of the ‘standard of living.’ ”51 Such a sensibility “emerges in the struggle against violence and exploitation where this struggle is waged for essentially new ways and forms of life.”52
In a rare utopian speculation,53 Marcuse writes, “The advent of a free society would be characterized by the fact that the growth of well-being turns into an essentially new quality of life.”54 He recognized this dynamic happening in the 1960s New Left movement, which was in the intense thralls of the eros effect, creating new institutions and human relations that rejected and negated the culture of domination and embraced the life instincts. Referring to the young radicals as “the militants,” Marcuse writes:
In proclaiming the “permanent challenge” (la contestation permanente), the “permanent education,” the Great Refusal, they recognize the mark of social repression, even in the most sublime manifestations of traditional culture, even in the most spectacular manifestations of technical progress. They have again raised … the specter of a revolution which subordinates the development of productive forces and higher standards of living to the requirements of creating solidarity for the human species, for abolishing poverty and misery beyond all frontiers and spheres of interest, for the attainment of peace. In one word: they have taken the idea of revolution out of the continuum of oppression and placed it in its authentic dimension: that of liberation.55
Marcuse’s words prefigure the transformative potential of the erotically effected cognitive unconscious. Although most of our metaphorical universe is deeply established by the interaction between our bodies/brains, our currently existing societies, and the physical world, we still have considerable cognitive flexibility to reconceptualize and embody an alternative world. Cognitive science reveals the neural and linguistic routes by which an embodied human reason evolves, and moments of the eros effect demonstrate the concrete dimensions of liberated, sensual collective reason. Combined, they help us understand how new subjectivities arise in accord with incrementally “revised instincts” and a coming-to-consciousness as a species. In the glare of global inequality, imperialist wars, and ecological catastrophe, the joining of reason-and-nature, of logic-and-emotion, is happening just at the moment when such a qualitative leap in consciousness has become urgently necessary.
Such cognitive flexibility in the face of domination is evident in the scene of Occupy that opened this chapter. The Guy Fawkes mask, a long-held symbol of protest, is simultaneously cartoonish and impish, gesturing toward an insider/outsider dichotomy—those who are in-the-know versus those who are targeted for protest. The very use of a mask suggests collective anonymity, not simply as a mass movement but also as a rejection of one’s subjectivity that has been targeted and constructed by an inhumane system. Meanwhile, the protestor’s blank sign has nothing to say because the system to which that protest appeals has no eyes, ears, or mind to read, hear, or understand the language that heralds a different world. The system is a metaphorical universe of greed, self-interest, and private wealth and property; it is a grammar that excludes not only collective need and gain but collective joy and pleasure; it is a self-referential language incapable of thinking beyond itself (hence, Marcuse’s analysis of “one-dimensional society”).56 But the blank sign signifies vastly more than words could convey—a statement that the future is not foreclosed, an invitation to imagine (and embody) something different, a comprehensive indictment of the system’s global criminality, a vivid illustration of the endless possibilities for creating a better world. The ability to read and understand the details of these extralinguistic metaphors may be inhibited by the smoke and mirrors of the culture of domination; given the fact that only 5 percent of the workings of our own brains are available to consciousness, this would be unsurprising. But to the extent that our bodies live out, if even only partially and momentarily, new metaphors of resistance and liberation while challenging and invalidating those of domination, we are preparing the ground for the next pulse of the eros effect. The cumulative effect of millions of bodies-and-brains united in their desires—for freedom, the fulfillment of true needs, and the unification with nature that is already happening just below the surface—is unstoppable. So the eros effect will continue to arise, becoming stronger as our project for liberation matures and more and more voices speak new words/worlds into existence. What we create through this struggle is eloquently summarized by Marcuse:
Not merely self-determination and self-realization, but rather the determination and realization of goals which enhance, protect, and unite life on earth. And this autonomy would find expression not only in the mode of production and production relations but also in the individual relations among men [sic], in their language and in their silence, in their gestures and their looks, in their sensitivity, in their love and hate. The beautiful would be an essential quality of their freedom.57
1. This quote appears in different forms. I chose the translation found at http://izquotes.com/quote/6823. For a more formal source, albeit a slightly different translation, see Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. David Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 23, lines 24–26.
2. George Katsiaficas, “The Eros Effect,” personal website, 1989, http://www.eroseffect.com/articles/eroseffectpaper.PDF.
3. George Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968 (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 6.
4. See, for instance, George Katsiaficas, “Eros and Revolution,” Radical Philosophy Review 16, no. 2 (2013): 491–505 (503), doi: 10.5840/radphilrev201316238; and George Katsiaficas, Asia’s Unknown Uprisings, Volume 2: People Power in the Philippines, Burma, Tibet, China, Taiwan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Thailand, and Indonesia, 1947–2009 (Oakland: PM Press, 2013), 365–366.
5. Katsiaficas, Imagination of the New Left, 10.
6. Katsiaficas, “Eros and Revolution,” 494.
7. George Katsiaficas, “From Marcuse’s ‘Political Eros’ to the Eros Effect: A Current Statement,” chap. 3 this volume, 61.
8. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 17.
9. Ibid., 11.
10. Ibid., 46.
11. Ibid., 59.
12. Ibid., 19 (original emphasis).
13. Ibid., 19 (original emphasis).
14. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 3.
15. Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 58–59 (original emphasis).
16. Ibid., 128.
17. George Lakoff, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 41.
18. Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 536.
19. Ibid., 118.
20. Ibid., 334.
21. Lakoff, Moral Politics, 72.
22. Ibid., 73.
23. Ibid., 74.
24. Ibid., 75.
25. Ibid., 75. Obviously, this “father” need not be gender specific.
26. See Lakoff, Moral Politics, and George Lakoff, Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (White River Junction: Chelsea Green, 2004).
27. Katsiaficas, “Eros and Revolution,” 500.
28. Katsiaficas, “From Marcuse’s ‘Political Eros’ to the Eros Effect,” 68.
29. My own gut-felt reaction to Marcuse’s history-bound sexism tends to prove the point he is making here.
30. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1969), 20. I should note, too, that Marcuse’s comments accord with Lakoff and Johnson’s model of three levels of embodiment: phenomenological, cognitive unconscious, and neural. The phenomenological level is consciousness—our awareness of our own bodies and states of mind, which is where we experience the qualitative “feel” of life, and which also hypothesizes a level of nonconscious structures that make possible our conscious experience. Next is the cognitive unconscious, the massive portion of the iceberg below the visible tip of consciousness, and the place where the instincts operate unseen. Finally is the neural level, which is cellular and inaccessible to us. See Philosophy in the Flesh, 102–104.
31. Katsiaficas, Imagination of the New Left, 6 (original emphasis).
32. “Through the eros effect, new insight can be derived into human nature and the understanding of the rational/emotional dichotomy which forms the substratum from which theories of collective behavior are articulated. Looked upon as the self-formation of the human species, the process of social change can be understood as different than a natural process. Soviet Marxists, of course, emphasize the historical role of labor in this process. More recently, Habermas (1971) has explained the role of communication and Herbert Marcuse (1972) the role of art in the transformation of the human species into a species being. The eros effect is derived from a similar understanding—the understanding that revolution constitutes another domain through which the human species emerges from its naturally conditioned evolution and becomes a species-being.” Katsiaficas, “The Eros Effect,” 12.
33. Although Marcuse does not use the exact phrase in Eros and Civilization, it does contain a good explanation of the psychic Thermidor: see Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 90–92. Katsiaficas also provides a good explanation: “Even in moments of revolution, Marcuse argued, our own personalities limit our possibilities, a reality he discussed with me through the concept of the psychic Thermidor. (Thermidor was the month of the French revolutionary calendar during which reaction set in.) Psychic Thermidor refers to an internally conditioned reaction which revolutionaries suffer, a syndrome Marcuse accounted for in the changed material conditions of advanced capitalism: ‘The economic and political incorporation of the individuals into the hierarchical system of labor is accompanied by an instinctual process in which the human objects of domination reproduce their own repression. … The revolt against the primal father eliminated an individual person who could be (and was) replaced by other persons; but when the dominion of the father has expanded into the dominion of society, no such replacement seems possible and the guilt [of revolting against the system] becomes fatal.’ ” George Katsiaficas, “Afterword, Marcuse as an Activist: Reminiscences of His Theory and Practice,” in The New Left and the 1960s: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Vol. 3, ed. Douglas Kellner (New York: Routledge, 2005), 192–203 (200).
34. Katsiaficas, Imagination of the New Left, 8.
35. Roger Gregoire and Fredy Perlman, Worker-Student Action Committees: France, May’68 (Detroit: Black and Red, 1991), 42.
36. Choi Jungwoon, The Gwangju Uprising (Paramus: Homa & Sekey Books), 37.
37. Quoted in George Katsiaficas, Asia’s Unknown Uprisings, Volume 1: South Korean Social Movements in the 20th Century (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), 162.
38. As quoted in Katsiaficas, Asia’s Unknown Uprisings, Vol. 1, 182.
39. See Na Kahn-chae, “Collective Action and Organization in the Gwangju Uprising,” in South Korean Democracy: Legacy of the Gwangju Uprising, ed. George Katsiaficas and Na Kahn-chae (London: Routledge, 2006), 47–66.
40. Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 193.
41. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 35.
42. Ibid., 35
43. Ibid., 161–162.
44. Ibid., 180–181.
45. Ibid., 181–182 (all emphases in original).
46. Katsiaficas, Imagination of the New Left, 229 (original emphasis).
47. Marcuse, quoting Freud, as cited in Eros and Civilization, 168 (original emphasis).
48. Ibid., 169.
49. Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 93.
50. As Lakoff and Johnson state, “The cognitive unconscious is a principal locus of power in the Foucaultian sense, power over how we can think and how we can conceive of the world.” Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 537.
51. Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 31.
52. Ibid., 33.
53. “Up to now, it has been one of the principal tenets of the critical theory of society (and particularly Marxian theory) to refrain from what might reasonably be called utopian speculation. Social theory is supposed to analyze existing societies in the light of their own functions and capabilities and to identify demonstrable tendencies (if any) which might lead beyond the existing state of affairs. … I believe this restrictive conception must be revised, and that the revision is suggested, and even necessitated, by the actual evolution of contemporary societies. The dynamic of their productivity deprives ‘utopia’ of its traditional unreal content: what is denounced as ‘utopian’ is no longer that which has ‘no place’ and cannot have any place in the historical universe, but rather that which is blocked from coming about by the power of the established societies.” Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 13.
54. Ibid., 14.
55. Ibid., 11.
56. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press).
57. Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 52.
I would like to thank Jason Del Gandio for valued insights, comments, and assistance.