Poetics of a basic instinct

Instinct as a common place in audiovisual narratives

Abstract

The article proposes to investigate how the notion of instinct not only traces a conflictive zone, oriented to solve a borderline between human and animal, but also organizes of a whole cultural framework that thinks about the existence of otherness. Starting from the category of poetics (Bakhtin, 2008[1975]) and its concretion of world models that are sustained in artistic texts (Lotman, 1990), this study seeks to underline the historical conventions and the ideological marks that build the "basic instinct" as a fragment of an imaginary, which insistently guides aesthetic operations, such as massive audiovisual narratives. Our objective is to evaluate, in a semiotic-cultural key, the social re-accentuation of the term instinct, without losing sight of the memory plots that recall discurses of natural sciences and psychoanalysis. On account of this, we will problematize recent fictions that work as a reading map in order to reflect on how the cultural system interpellates societies from an instinctive field: it hierarchizes subjectivities, t orders practices and regulates ethical aspects. We will recover, finally, the hypothesis of Valentin Voloshinov (1999[1927]): an instinct that would come as a paradigm of an expeditious solution that, appearing strongly in moments of historical-social crises. In this sense, the introduction of this problematic category not only exhibits the porous threshold where biological baggage and social order develops as the central conflict in fictional subjectivities, but also shows recent sociopolitical transformations that art is putting in the center of its scenes.