Gut feeling

I'm surprised by how often I encounter appeals to our guts. The instructor in my yoga class repeatedly invokes intuition, guts, a knowledge deeper and truer than reflection. A group of women yesterday (celebrating a daughter's onset of menses) frequently appealed to something like a body truth, again, a knowledge surpassing the intellect.

These local appeals to the gut resonate with a strong theme on the contemporary right: the grizzly mama's who know it in their gut, George W. Bush's similar gut knowledge. The latter instance, in particular, exemplifies the potential for the gut to err. But such gut mistakes are rarely acknowledged. What we know with our gut, perhaps like earlier epoch's common sense, is supposedly the truth that can counter, correct, and guide our mistaken intellects.

In the 70s, appeals to embodied feeling, a truth beyond the intellect, were important for feminist critiques of the academy. They exposed (while reinforcing) the operation of the binary of thinking and feeling in so-called Western thought. Of course, feminists weren't the only ones to engage in this critique of the intellectuals; movements against racism and class-based elitism also rightly brought out not only the privileged position of intellectuals but the way this privileged produced site-specific thinking, speaking, and understanding.

I think that in our current setting the gut is appealing as a source of truth because of the decline of symbolic efficiency. From the massive distrust of financial, governmental, and media institutions, to the uncertainty regarding meaning, fact, and resonance in multiple contexts, most of us are uncertain about what to think--is our food laced with chemicals that are killing us? is the planet facing changes that will radically alter human life? Unclear about meaning, folks look for what is real and they locate what is real in their guts.

A challenge for communists is finding ways to validate some gut feelings while at the same time providing techniques for critically assessing these feelings without asserting intellectual superiority. In our hypermediated environments, our enclaves, our malls, our desperation, in these setting our guts can go wrong (no wonder we are obese). Just like overdosing on sugar and fat can distort our guts, so can overdosing on ideology distort our perception (case in point, my unfortunate repetition of drug war rhetoric here). Guts can be wrong.

Comments

[Jocelyn]

i like this topic, i often think about this idea. i guess what i would add is, it all depends on who is doing the intuiting, now doesn't it. i clearly get yer point about "common sense" and "intuition", i think some of my favorite work on this is by Drucilla Cornell, if i remember correctly. and she and others are right to make this point, however, i also think there is something to be said for doing some intuiting--i think hegel made a statement that this is a sign that thought is going on (or at least ideally); for example, i suspect the teabaggers are up to no good, i imagine many who read this blog might agree; [though there may be a kernel of truth in their rage]. so, i think that there may be times when it is appropriate to assert one's "intellectual superiority" over the feelings or thoughts of others--or maybe not intellectual superiority but rather superior assessment of a given situation, cuz sometimes yer just right, ya know, and well... the teabaggers are misguided. there is truth in this. of course "our guts can go wrong", but i maintain, we also need not fear (or evade) our intuition either. many great academic treatises begin with, "i suspect...",--afterall.

[Demet Evrenosoglu]

what you have written on "feeling of gut" somehow reminds me of Kant's interesting work of "WHat is orientation in thinking?" There Kant starts with the question of how we orient ourselves geographically. We divide the horizon which sets the extent of our experience of earth to 4 directions of north south east west, yet Kant claims that before the difference of these directions “I must necessarily be able to feel a difference within my own subject, namely that between my right and left hands”. This internal feeling provides the means for making sense of one’s experience of the external world. If one were to ignore this feeling, this would mean a complete loss of orientation. It is an orienting feeling - something both internal and external. Both rooted in the subject and it also situates the subject in the world; its experience always exceeds the limits of inner subjectivity. In a sense then it necessarily involves the sense of commonness. So I think it is very interesting to consider whether and how we might formulate the gut feeling as an orienting feeling in this fashion.
By the way, Jodi hello from Istanbul.

[Jodi]

Jocelyn--maybe the problem is with the separation between gut and intellect, as if there could be one without the other. The "I suspect" that appears as the first step in thinking, then, could be a marker of their merging.

Demet--great to hear from you! It was really fun talking to you in Istanbul and I hope we keep in touch. I love the way you draw out the feeling of handedness, the orientation feeling. How are you thinking about this with respect to commonness? That's an interesting move.