metropolis m

If desire is tragedy and love comedy, where does that leave pleasure? Aaron Schuster presents his thoughts on a life of pleasure, in art and beyond.

Thinking

1. Oscar Wilde: ‘Pleasure is the only thing worth having a theory about.’ The Greeks might have said: ‘Theory is the only thing worth taking pleasure in.’ Or at least, that it is theory – thēoria, contemplation – that provides the highest, finest and most perfectly satisfying kind of pleasure. In Aristotle’s theology, God, the prime mover of the universe responsible for spinning the celestial spheres, is defined as noesis noeseoos, ‘thought thinking itself’, and is filled with a simple, eternal pleasure. A case of philosophical narcissism: the theorist has made God in his own blissful image.2. Sigmund Freud once remarked that he couldn’t read Nietzsche because he was ‘too interesting’. This is usually interpreted in terms of the classic anxiety of influence thesis, but we should take Freud here literally: it’s not concern over originality that blocks him, but excessive excitement. It’s just too good.3. Friedrich Nietzsche accused philosophers – a notoriously feeble and sickly breed – of hating the body, and of taking revenge upon it with their elaborate conceptual gymnastics and supreme valuation of the life of the mind. One of the most infamous texts in this regard is Plato’s Phaedo, where Socrates makes a plea for death as freeing the soul from corporeality and its evils. But Nietzsche was wrong: it is not out of asceticism or self-loathing that philosophers despise the body, but joy. A joy of thinking that is so great, they never want it to end. The same joy that Nietzsche himself writes of as wanting ‘deep, deep eternity…’. What does it mean to have a body? At its most basic, having a body means that you have to eat, to sleep, to go to the toilet, to exercise or at least minimally move about, to wash yourself, to visit the dentist when your tooth aches, and generally do all sorts of stupid time-consuming things that interrupt the activity of thought (it’s reported that Beethoven kept a piss pot by the piano so he wouldn’t lose time while composing). With respect to the infinite desires and obsessions that can seize hold of a human being, the body is but a hindrance, an obstacle, a breakdown. Anyone who has a great passion – not only philosophers, but artists, chess players, mystics, lovers – necessarily despises the body for the poor, limited thing it is.

Art

4. Jacques Lacan once made the strange comment that Finnegans Wake is a book that reads itself. ‘Read the pages of Finnegans Wake, without trying to understand – it reads itself. It reads itself … because one can sense there the enjoyment of he who wrote it.’ What does this mean? Put bluntly, reading Joyce’s novel is like being in the presence of someone who’s picking his nose or hooked up to his iPod: the novel is so absorbed in its own deeply pleasurable punning that it seems blithely ignorant of the outside world; i.e. the reader. If there is one literary masterpiece that gives the uncanny sense of having no need of a reader whatsoever, it is Finnegans Wake. One finds this curious idea of an object that enjoys itself also in the work of Pierre Klossowski. ‘There is nothing more living, I tell you, than the Louvre abandoned to itself at night’, he writes in The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and goes on to extol ‘the supreme pleasure of the work shining its radiance into space and recovering its own radiance therefrom’. In this case the ‘enjoyment of the artwork’ must be understood in the sense of the objective genitive: it’s the work that enjoys, not the spectator, who rather becomes the fascinated witness of its enchanted self-sufficiency. Instead of being thought of in terms of meaning, dialogue, communication, interaction, or any kind of mutual relation, the work of art is first and foremost a presence, a being vowed to its own sovereign joy. A tribute to the sheer autistic inwardness that belongs to every pleasure.

Antinomy

5. A lesson from psychoanalysis. On the one hand, human existence is riven by libidinal conflicts, frustrated by reality, and blocked by the imperatives of culture. This is what is typically referred to as Freud’s tragic outlook: desire is doomed to dissatisfaction and the search for pleasure fraught with insurmountable obstacles. Yet, on the other, psychoanalysis effects an unheard-of extension of the notion of ‘pleasure’, uncovering furtive and unsuspected satisfactions precisely where they would seem to be most absent. From the slips and foul-ups of everyday life to the catastrophic symptoms of mental illness, the pleasure principle is everywhere at work. Instead of satisfaction being impossible to attain, the opposite conclusion imposes itself: it’s impossible to avoid. Perhaps the best way to express this antinomy – that pleasure is both unattainable and inescapable – is to vary one of Freud’s famous phrases: ‘Men enjoy less than they imagine and far more than they think.’

Feelings

6. Of all pleasures, perhaps the most representative is hypochondria. The hypochondriac’s body is filled with painful and prickly sensations, of which he has an acute hyper-awareness: aching teeth, clammy skin, rapid heartbeat, burbling digestion, throbbing brainwaves…. Yet it is just this overt distress that is put to the service of a higher pleasure. Anyone who has seen a hypochondriac lost in endless complaining understands immediately the true meaning of enjoyment. It is in his devotion to analyzing and reporting his bodily ills, his enthusiasm for whining and moaning, that the hypochondriac’s pleasure resides, and not in any ‘good feelings’ per se. In the words of Georges Perros, ‘nothing proves that pleasure is a happy affair’.7. There is a wonderful short scene in Mel Brooks’s film The Producers (1968) where Max Bialystock, the crooked yet loveable theatre producer, is lounging in a little boat on a lake in Central Park with his accountant and soon to be partner-in-crime Leopold Bloom. As part of his attempt to seduce to him into his scheme, Bialystock has convinced the fastidious Bloom to take the afternoon off. It’s a beautiful sunny day, but Bloom’s having trouble relaxing. The usual neurotic complaints: he feels funny, something’s not right, but he can’t put his finger on it. When Bialystock suggests, ‘Maybe you’re happy’, Bloom reflects for a moment, then experiences a sudden conversion: ‘Yes, you’re right, I’m happy!’The truth of this scene is that far from being self-evident, feelings are often deeply ambiguous, even duplicitous. As strange as it may sound, it’s hard to know what our feelings actually feel like.

The 60s

8. If desire is tragedy and love comedy, where does that leave pleasure? Sterile and repetitive – like a good sitcom.9. One of the slogans of May ’68 was ‘Enjoy without obstacles’ (Jouissez sans entraves). But the image of pleasure that concerns us today is not that of ’68, but ’62. That is the genius of the television series Mad Men, set in the advertising world of Madison Avenue in the early sixties, just prior to the sexual, creative, and feminist revolutions. A portrait of a prelapsarian civilization still luxuriating in taboos, deeply buried secrets, traditional gender roles, and socially sanctioned intoxication – but also aware of its impending demise and suffused with a longing for a new and more open world: the fall out of sin. Compared with today’s antiseptic hedonism, where the greatest transgression imaginable is a mid-flight cigarette, the show’s chic tableau of chain smoking, afternoon whiskies, and casual sexual harassment entrances like a lost Inferno.

Future Prospects

10. Despite whirlwind advancements in all areas, modern science has yet to give us a new pleasure – such is the argument of Aldous Huxley’s 1931 essay ‘Wanted, A New Pleasure’. ‘As far as pleasures are concerned, we are no better off than the Romans or the Egyptians.’ The technical means of entertainment and its cultural shapes have certainly changed, but the underlying kinds of gratification – the human being’s pleasure-potentialities – remain depressingly constant throughout history. Is the body capable of attaining some hitherto unknown degree of bliss, or are the limits of enjoyment fixed and immutable, so that the species is doomed to a repetition of the hedonic same? Huxley hopes that a new drug might bring some originality to our pleasure repertoire. A real breakthrough, he explains, would be an intoxicant that transported its user to the heights of ecstasy and worldly well-being, while leaving him or her healthy and clear-headed the next morning. Yet even in this case, the novelty lies less in the experience per se – shamans and mystics have already perfected the paths of ecstasy, with the support of a whole religious apparatus – than its manipulability and easy availability: the promise of pleasure on demand, Huxley’s image of utopia. If he were writing today, Huxley would no doubt take an interest in ‘wire-heading’, pleasure directly induced by electrical stimulation of the brain. Even more than 60s pharmacology, will 21st century brain science succeed in bringing out the best of our neurons?

Surrealism

11. According to the pronouncement of that soothsaying transsexual Theban Tiresias, if the pleasures of love were to be divided up in ten parts, one would go to the man and nine to the woman. Why did this upset Hera? As the story goes, Hera was so incensed by Tiresias’s judgment – and he should know, he spent seven years transformed into a woman, and a high-class prostitute no less – , she immediately took away his sight; Zeus compensated this curse by giving him the gift of clairvoyance. Knowledge of enjoyment, blindness and insight are thus knotted together in a way that only Greek myths can. But this still leaves open the question of Hera’s anger. One would think Tiresias’s verdict to be flattering; isn’t it a good thing to enjoy more? Unless Zeus had insinuated that man’s relatively meagre satisfaction is due to his seriousness: he’s too busy working at copulation to really enjoy it. In that case, what annoyed Hera, as a good Greek feminist avant la lettre, is the suggestion of feminine passivity. Man represents power and restraint, while only woman lets herself go: abandonment, loss, sensual transport are (stereotypically) feminine qualities that at the same time stand for pleasure as such. But there is another way of approaching the question. Let us imagine that Hera secretly agrees with the prophet (and her husband), but punishes him anyway for impiety, for divulging the secret, for profaning a mystery. This is also a familiar story: as creatures of simulation and masquerade, the nature of feminine enjoyment must remain veiled, enigmatic, unverifiable, unspeakable, even (we might speculate) for women themselves (late in his career Lacan invoked mystic ‘not knowing’ as a way of addressing feminine jouissance). Guillaume Apollinaire made use of this legend for his play Les mamelles de Tiresias (The Breasts of Tiresias), where the miraculous sex change of ‘Thérèse’ is represented by her two balloon breasts floating off. Its subtitle, ‘a surrealist drama’, is the first usage of what would soon become a blockbuster term.12. It’s easy to forget just how puritanical the surrealists were in their delirious praise of romance and Eros. Instructive here are Antonin Artaud’s interventions in the ‘Investigations on Sexuality’ conducted by the surrealists between 1928 and 1932, a series of roundtable discussions that read today like a mixture of frat house banter, Monty Python, and Kinsey report. It’s funny to see how out of place Artaud is in these exchanges (he participated in only half of one of the twelve sessions). His disgust for sexuality – ‘how far has it tainted your mind?’ he asks Benjamin Péret – actually provides him with a much more unbiased and scientific viewpoint than the surrealists who extol love for the ideal woman. In one memorable exchange, Artaud challenges Breton to address the topic of sexual pleasure divorced from any romantic preconceptions.ANTONIN ARTAUD: In speaking of sexual pleasure, Breton, are you only thinking of the physical aspect, or do you never think of the physical aspect, or is it that in the sexual act the mental pleasure you experience encompasses everything?ANDRE BRETON: I cannot conceive of any pleasure except normal pleasure.ANTONIN ARTAUD: That answer seems to me extraordinarily tendentious and arbitrary.ANDRE BRETON: Why?ANTONIN ARTAUD: We do not agree about a single word we’re saying. If we have to analyze every word, any discussion will be impossible.ANDRE BRETON: There must have been a misunderstanding over the sense of the word pleasure. If we are talking about orgasm in the strict sense, then I have no objection to taking the most objective approach.

Against Orgasm

13. The idea of a non-orgasmic sexuality got a big boost with the appearance of Robert Van Gulik’s 1961 study, Sexual Life in Ancient China. This important scholarly work proved a key reference for theorists of libidinal economy like Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Jean-François Lyotard, who were fascinated by its portrait of a seemingly ‘other’ culture of pleasure. In the various practices of coitus reservatus by which the man retains his semen and draws the feminine essence Yin into himself, energy circulates in variations of continued delight without the Westerner’s dramatic and sad climax. As Deleuze explains, if the ‘Western problem’ is ‘how to extract sexuality from genitality’, that of the Chinese is ‘how to extract sexuality from the orgasm’. He praises the Taoist sexual manuals – with their colourfully named erotic techniques like Still Bamboo Forest, Leaping Frog, Shivering Duck, etc. – for constructing a ‘field of immanence of desire traversed by flows’.One shouldn’t overlook another, rather different aspect of Chinese eroticism, also analyzed by Van Gulik; viz., the role of the courtesans. Instead of providing an easy means for sexual gratification, high-class prostitution was a way for aristocrats to escape from the incessant pressures of courtly sexual life. In a kind of odd twist, polygamy and the strict regimentation of sexual behaviour had the effect of making physical pleasure into a burdensome obligation, so that hired consorts offered a welcome respite from the nobleman’s conjugal duties. A particularly refined form of prostitution: you pay a woman for the pleasure of her company, at the end of which you’re not obliged to have sex with her.

Perversion

14. Marquis de Sade: ‘A pleasure shared is a pleasure halved.’ The pervert’s credo.15. How to maximize your enjoyment of crackers.1 First, engage the company of a beautiful woman. Tell her nothing of your plan for the evening, except that it will be ‘different’. Then reserve two rooms, one a luxurious suite in the finest hotel in town, the other a crappy single in a run-down flophouse. A few hours before you pick up your date, purchase several heads of lettuce and a large quantity of cucumbers, green onions, celery, tomatoes, etc. In addition buy 10 litres each of Roquefort, French, Russian, Thousand Island, and Oil & Vinegar dressings. Go to your room in the flophouse, pull off the covers, and proceed to make a large salad in the bed. Check that there’s no lettuce on the floor, replace the covers, and hide the 50 litres of salad dressing in the closet. Dress sharply, in the manner of a waiter at a fancy restaurant, then go pick up your date. Drive her casually to the flophouse. Along the way, engage in light conversation, try to make her curious about your plan for the evening. When you arrive, take her quickly to the dumpy room and ask ‘By the way, what salad dressing do you prefer?’ Once she has told you, pull back the bedcovers to reveal the crisp green salad. You must now coax her to lie down in the bed. She will probably be reluctant, but you must convince her that it is all right – use arguments like ‘Salads are good for you’. When she’s in the bed, take out the salad dressing of her choice and with great flair pour it over her body. Once you’ve emptied the whole 10 litres, snap your fingers and say ‘Crackers!’ Begging her forgiveness, you explain that you’ve forgotten the crackers and have to run to the store; tell her not to move a muscle. Race out of the flophouse, drive to the store and buy a box of crackers – not fancy crackers, but a modest box of saltines. Drive to the luxurious hotel and go directly to your suite. Put the crackers on the nightstand beside the bed, take off your clothes, and get under the covers. Now turn the lights off, and nibble the crackers one by one. You will derive a maximum enjoyment from them. 16. The paradox of perversion is that pleasure is intensified precisely by not giving into to it. The pervert (typically male) stands for clarity of consciousness and consummate self-control; he arranges his pleasures like a theatrical performance, with himself as lead actor, director, and front row spectator. The satisfaction thus derived is less sensual than theoretical: perversion is a mental thing, and the pervert a kind of detached experimentalist of Eros. The scenarios he devises may be extremely refined, full of wit and irony, along with great cruelty (towards others and himself). But behind the pervert’s dazzling aestheticism typically lies a more desperate negative motivation. According to the standard cliché, perversion is something ‘dirty’, but if there’s one thing the pervert cannot tolerate it’s precisely the messiness and confusion of ‘normal’ sexual pleasure, the disappearance of the ego in an anonymous play of drives and organs, the impersonal machinery of bodies. He rather clings to self-consciousness just at the moment when it ought to slip away, and derives an exquisite delight precisely from this tension: the joy of both playing the game and keeping himself on the outside, uncompromised. A real pervert wants his sex to be immaculate and orderly. Like Sartre said of Baudelaire, he made love with his gloves on.Notes1 I paraphrase here the brilliant comedy sketch ‘How to derive the maximum enjoyment from crackers’ (1964) by American guitarist, composer and writer Mason Williams. Ed Ruscha made a book of photographs, Crackers (1969), based on the text, and later a short film, Premium (1971). Jonathan Monk remade this film as Chinese Crackers in 2006.