The Whirlpool Theory: Towards a Psyschosociology of Revolution

Through the technique of content analysis and the inductive reasoning of grounded theory, this paper puts two original ideas on the table: The Revolutionary Reason and the Whirlpool Theory. To operationalize qualitative data obtained over four years of semi-structured interviews, participant observations and (auto)ethnographies conducted in Colombia, Spain, Egypt, and Sweden, more than 4,500 labels from NVivo R1 software and quantitative coincidence analysis were used. Furthermore, two loans from physics (from fluid dynamics and classical mechanics) were adapted to create a theoretical model that allows the explanation of issues related to body, mediations, spatiality, performativity, and violence in studies on resistance, social movements, revolutionary praxis, and social transformation. The Whirlpool Theory proposes the existence of an emotional/libidinal centre that, as a social technology, organizes an immanent transformative drive that we call revolutionary reason.

I am developing an original explanation based on data that accounts for an emotional, drive-oriented and identity centre that operates as the origin and destination of political action and that, I want to demonstrate, is cooked in the inner core of every human being. The strength and stability of this center are what the Whirlpool Theory explains and what will have to be determined more precisely in later studies. This paper proposes an innovative parallelism with three postulates of fluid dynamics and classical mechanics: the dynamic pressure of turbulent or laminar flows (vortices, swirls, and whirlpools) on the one hand and the potential energy and kinetic energy on the other. Through these parallelisms, I was able to observe that the distance of the observed practices, phenomena, and moments with respect to the centre wards off the possibility of transformation, while proximity facilitates it. The political negotiations between transformation and reaction form a logarithmic spiral gradient that can be traced by our model.