2	Pleasure’s Dangers

… in the very temple of delight Veil’d Melancholy hath her Sovran shrine.

JOHN KEATS: ODE TO MELANCHOLY

The twenty-first-century Western world is dedicated to pleasure. Consumer society unfolds a dream of beauty, novelty and self-enhancement, an aesthetic universe in which display is everything. Billboards and neon, the snaking shimmer of motorways at night; music everywhere; on screen the delights of high cuisine and high fashion, the excitement of sport and the spectacle of pop concert, opera or religious celebration. Ceremonies that were once religious or political have been transformed into global entertainment, with audiences of billions watching Pope John Paul II’s funeral or the latest royal wedding. Virtually, if not actually, this world of pleasure increasingly pervades the whole globe, presided over by a pantheon of celebrities. These prance about their man-made Olympus, much as the gods and goddesses of the ancient Greeks and Romans presided in the centuries before Christ, and with the same colourful excess, fuelled by lust, greed, revenge and arbitrary authority. Everything is turned into entertainment in the society of the spectacle, including theatres of war. Economic collapse and austerity is the nightmare Other of the thrilling scene.

This millennial world is far removed from the rational world hoped for by the leaders of the Enlightenment and is no more ‘secular’ than the ancient, pagan world. It has even been suggested that the ‘secular’ idea of ‘consumer sovereignty’ and ‘the customer is always right’ actually has evolved from and remains dependent, philosophically, on deeply buried beliefs in the divine right of kings.¹

Today, as always, superstitions, beliefs and obsessions of all kinds flourish. For humankind, to state the obvious, is driven not by reason, but by passions and emotions resistant to the secular virtues of reason and balance.

The colourful world of pleasure incites and entices these passions. But passions are dangerous and reason continually struggles to keep them under control. It is therefore not surprising that this world, so hedonistic on the surface, does not rationally and reasonably accept pleasure as an unchallenged good.

The Shorter Oxford dictionary defines pleasure in terms of ‘what is felt or viewed as good or desirable … delight’; emphasising desire and its gratification. The entry quickly moves on, however, to ‘the indulgence of physical (especially sexual) desires or appetites; sexual gratification’; and then degenerates further to ‘the pursuit of sensuous enjoyment as a chief object of life or end in itself’. Pleasure is identified with ‘lesser’, bodily sensations. It is associated at best with the erotic and at worst with moral laxity and self-indulgence.

Cultural experiences are major sources and providers of pleasure. They are aesthetic and so are associated with sensation and often eroticism. Pleasure is seduction. At best it is amoral, unconfined by intellectual or moral critique. There is an implied division between pleasure and the spiritual dimension of life. It is the concrete, visual, aural and tactile nature of pleasure that is so dangerous, and cultural works, appealing as they do to the senses, readily become suspect. Because they excite and inflame the audience through the senses, their – possibly immoral – message seduces the viewer or reader; so that in the twenty-first century videos and computer games have been held responsible for crimes committed by the young, just as in the eighteenth century novels were blamed for female frailties.

The public discourse that surrounds pleasure of all kinds is therefore, unsurprisingly, highly moralising. The word, as thus defined, does not even cover the whole range of feeling to which it is applied. The pleasure you take in a hot shower or a good meal seems very different from that resulting from an intense erotic relationship, from listening to music or from watching a football match.

Figure 3: ‘The Swing’, painted by Jean-Honoré Fragonard: The ‘jouissance’ of the swing, together with the lost shoe and the view of the woman’s underskirts, signal the dangers and moral laxity associated with pleasure and suggest that the subject is a woman of easy virtue.

But pleasure is defined by its opposite in two different ways: pain is the opposite of pleasure and yet there are pleasures so intense that they come very close to pain. (Certainly to watch a football match that ‘your’ team loses is pain rather than pleasure.) Pleasure is also defined by another opposition: duty. If duty is the opposite of pleasure, then the dictionary definition of pleasure as pleasant, as hedonistic, seems appropriate. When pleasure becomes more intense it is likely to be shifted into a different dangerous category, of addiction or madness.

Duty represents reason and the control of feelings and appetites; it is a married person’s duty, for example, to reject the pleasures of adultery. Reason continually draws lines between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ forms of pleasure. Pleasures that are immoral or even go too far used to be denounced in religious terms as sins or crimes. In today’s more secular world they, or many of them, are as unacceptable as ever, but have been medicalised. Promiscuity, for example, once a sin, is today ‘unsafe’ behaviour that will damage your health, as is over-indulgence in food, alcohol and drugs.

Enjoyment ‘as a chief object of life’ is hedonism. In the contemporary world hedonism implies acquisition, consumption, the continual chasing after excitement. The classical hedonism of Lucretius and the Epicurean school was very different. This prescribed the maintenance of serenity, and freedom from excess. Lucretius, indeed, was critical of a life of constant seeking after new sensations and experiences: ‘such a life as we see all too commonly – no one knowing what he really wants and everyone forever trying to get away from where he is, as though travel alone could throw off the load’. For Lucretius, acceptance of the inevitability of death will free human beings of the ‘deplorable lust for life that holds us trembling in bondage to … uncertainties and dangers’. It is our ‘unquenchable thirst for life [that] keeps us always on the gasp’.²

Epicureanism recommended a ‘steady state’ pleasure, reliant on moderation and elimination of the fear of death. This is not so far distant from Freud’s view that desire was essentially a state of unpleasure and that the satisfaction of a desire returned the individual to stasis or nirvana.

The long Western tradition of suspicion of pleasure, which included the pleasures of culture, was already firmly in place in Plato’s The Republic, where the philosopher argued that representations were ‘two removes from the truth’. They represented reality, but did not actually constitute that reality, and were therefore, in a sense, agents of deception. Worse than that, poetry, say, encouraged the over-indulgence of emotions that human beings trained themselves to restrain:

A poet satisfies and gratifies … an aspect of ourselves that we forcibly restrain when tragedy strikes our own lives – an aspect that hungers after tears and the satisfaction of having cried until one can cry no more … When the part of us that is inherently good has been inadequately trained in habits enjoined by reason, it relaxes its guard over the other part, the part which feels sad … the same goes for sex, anger and all the desires and feelings of pleasure and distress which, we’re saying accompany everything we do: poetic representation has the same effect in all these cases too. It irrigates and tends to these things when they should be left to wither and it makes them our rulers when they should be our subjects.³

Long before the Enlightenment, then, Plato strongly distinguished between reason and feeling, very much to the detriment of feeling. It followed that poetry and other arts had no place in education. Poetry and drama were ‘lies’ (a view revived in eighteenth-century hostility to the developing novel form). There was no sense here that poetic and fictional works could produce insights and truths about life and human nature, even if not literally true. (Aristotle argued against this view, when in his Poetics he suggested that the emotions sustained by an audience when watching a tragedy or listening to music, had a purgative effect, purifying and uplifting the audience by the expression and resolution of emotions that might be upsetting in everyday life. This, for him, was ‘catharsis’.)

In excluding the arts as politically and morally dangerous, Plato prefigured future politicians, not least Lenin, who, according to Gorki, was united with the strictest Muslims in his rejection of music. For some Islamic traditions music is ‘un-Islamic’, taking the believer away from godliness; for Lenin it involved a fatal weakening of revolutionary resolve, softening the listener. He loved Beethoven, but said: ‘I am often unable to listen to music …[for then] I would like to stroke my fellow beings and whisper sweet nothings in their ears for being able to produce such beautiful things in spite of the hell they are living in.’⁴ Asceticism, for religious believer and revolutionary alike, must be the chosen path.

The modern debate on aesthetic judgement and whether or not it can be objective – whether there are general standards that can be applied to determine which works are ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than others – developed in the eighteenth century and was also concerned with the nature of pleasure. David Hume, in his essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, wished to ‘mingle some light of the understanding with the feelings of sentiment’ and, quite apart from issues of objectivity, to unravel the puzzle of why aesthetic experiences affect us in particular ways (views explored by Simon During, whose Modern Magic I discuss later). Other eighteenth-century writers – Joseph Addison and in particular Edmund Burke in his essay ‘Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful’, developed the distinction between the way in which beauty operates on us and the ‘sublime’, which refers to experiences, sights and music that seem to represent something greater than beauty, more awesome, even threatening and terrible. A tremendous, mountainous landscape, for example, can seem overpowering, reducing the human figure to nothingness, yet the experience of it can also be exciting, uplifting and inspiring. It is not unpleasurable.

Addison called this ‘agreeable horror’. In Immanuel Kant’s work this idea develops a moral grandeur. Kant maintained the distinction between the sublime and the beautiful. The appreciation of each, though, required a disinterested judgement. The true recognition of beauty was not kinaesthetic and did not involve desire. That sensation Kant described as merely ‘agreeable’. Beauty brought pleasure, but the sublime something more elevated and spiritual. This was one way of distinguishing between ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ pleasures.

Only in pure, disinterested contemplation did aesthetic judgement achieve freedom: ‘taste in the beautiful may be said to be the one and only disinterested and free delight; for with it, not interest whether of sense or reason, extorts approval’. Once the enjoyment of art was defined as a pure form of contemplation, poets and painters no longer threatened the moral stamina and backbone of the impressionable. At the same time universal standards of taste were retained to save the audience from sinking into subjectivism.

In his Critique of Judgment, Kant also maintained a gendered distinction between the sublime and the beautiful:

The beautiful is directly attended with a feeling of the furtherance of life and is thus compatible with charms and playful imagination. On the other hand, the feeling of the sublime is a pleasure that only arises indirectly, being brought about by the feeling of a momentary check to the vital forces followed at once by a discharge all the more powerful, and so is an emotion that seems to be no sport, but dead earnest in the affairs of the imagination. Hence charms are repugnant to it; and since the mind is not simply attracted by the object, but is also alternatively repelled thereby, the delight in the sublime does not so much involve positive pleasure as admiration or respect.⁵

Here, Kant’s language seems unintentionally to challenge his commitment to lofty detachment; and many feminists have pointed out that gendered distinctions have remained at the heart of aesthetics and art history.

The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard took the debate further and in a rather different direction when he set the aesthetic against the ethical and religious dimensions of life. It may be an oversimplification to understand his discussion of these spheres as a Hegelian theory of stages, progressions towards a higher state, but Kierkegaard does seem to have identified the aesthetic with the surface of life, with the immediate. The aesthete searches for the next thing, the newest excitement, and there is nothing more than surface. The aesthetic life involves the pursuit of the evanescent and going with the flow along the surface of life, possibly also an inability to discriminate. There is no sense that spirituality or deep emotion can be expressed aesthetically. Harvie Ferguson suggests that irony is the typical mood of Kierkegaard’s understanding of the aesthetic, since irony refuses to take up a moral stand; its main preoccupation to expose the arbitrariness inherent in the apparently fixed order of everyday life.⁶

Kierkegaard was critical of the Romantic Movement, which elevated art and the passions – and often-extreme experience – into a source, or even the source of meaning in life. This was one response to the shattering of the cosmic order as it had been understood before the Enlightenment and which Shakespeare had expressed in Troilus and Cressida:

     The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre

     Observe degree, priority, and place …

     And therefore is the glorious planet Sol

     In noble eminence enthron’d and sphere’d …

     but when the planets

     In evil mixture to disorder wander,

     What plagues, and what portents, what mutiny …

     Divert and crack, rend and deracinate

     The unity and married calm of states

     Quite from their fixture! Oh! When degree is shaked

     Which is the ladder to all high designs,

     The enterprise is sick …

     Take but degree away, untune that string,

     And hark! What discord follows …

     Then every thing includes itself in power,

     Power into will, will into appetite;

     And appetite, a universal wolf …

     Must make perforce a universal prey

     And last eat up himself.

This world picture, which had given an orderly meaning to the relationship between the individual self, the state and the universe, could not withstand the onslaught of the scientific work of the astronomers and scientists of the late eighteenth century. Chaos replaced the order of the cosmos as hitherto understood and, argues Ferguson, ‘was … powerless to reconstruct a meaningful totality from the fragments in which it had cast reality’. The work, for example, of the astronomer William Herschel (who discovered the planet Uranus) threw into doubt the above picture of a cosmos limited in size and only a few thousand years old, whose fixed stars were relatively close to the earth (which accounted for their astrological influence). A vast ‘deep space’, the Milky Way, the possibility of the existence of thousands of suns and worlds, made the certainties of Christianity seem inadequate in the face of a universe so vast and a world so small and insignificant. Few astronomers of the time would have accepted that they were atheists, but

the growing sense of the sheer scale of the universe, and the possibility that it had evolved over unimaginable time, and was in a process of continuous creation, did slowly give pause for thought … [and] … put the Creator at an increasingly shadowy distance.⁷

The Romantic Movement responded by suggesting that art alone could offer

to the bewildered observer of modern life a form-giving structure into which its chaotic but finite content could be poured. Art, as Friedrich Schiller and other German and English Romantics insisted, provided a new mode of unification for modern experience. The aesthetic provided … an ‘immediate’ unity through which life could be grasped and shaped.

The aesthetic is, in part, a grasping of this immediacy.⁸

The importance of art seemed to grow and the role of the artist was magnified by ideas of genius as his role changed. Art increasingly challenged the status quo. Artworks differentiated themselves from vulgar, philistine bourgeois taste by not only exploring forbidden subject matter, but by flouting the rules of beauty and elegance. In the twentieth century, art itself became less orderly with the development of schools of modernism and movements such as Dada and Surrealism, which privileged unintentional and absurdist juxtapositions and discovered meaning in accidental ‘found objects’. Yet although these might seem to have emphasised the arbitrary, Surrealism was not ironic, since for André Breton, for example, the apparently unintentional did have a hidden meaning. Meanwhile, in music, harmony was overturned and the fine arts rejected realism in favour of abstraction. Much of this work was a deliberate refusal of the pleasure traditionally expected from cultural works.

In the 1950s this modernism – the work, for example, of Jackson Pollock – became the poster for the individualism of the ‘free world’; that is, the United States and Western Europe challenging the conformity of the Communist bloc. Unknowingly, artists who had thought of themselves as radical (in the 1930s, Jackson Pollock had been close to the Communist Party and involved in the New Deal artistic projects) were incorporated into a massive CIA propaganda project.⁹ In following decades, art became politicised in a different way with the rise of the New Left, the anti-racist struggles, the movement against the Vietnam War and women’s liberation.

This period, the 1960s and 1970s, gave rise to a new intellectual project that sought to theorise the burgeoning political movements. Developing out of, but then moving away from, Marxism, philosophers who came to be known as structuralists and post-structuralists developed the body of theory that eventually attracted the label of postmodernism. Among these, Roland Barthes, the influential French semiotician, returned to the issue of pleasure and he was able more usefully to distinguish between the moderate, ‘steady state’ pleasure advocated by the Epicureans, and the intense pleasure sought by the Romantics and which was closer to those sentiments Kant had considered sublime.

For this second kind of pleasure Barthes used the French term jouissance.¹⁰ Jouissance tends in French to be used in relation to the moment of orgasm; it is a climactic, explosive moment. Richard Miller translated jouissance as ‘bliss’, but this doesn’t adequately convey the violence of the event. Barthes insists that jouissance is something striven towards but not predictable, not to be counted upon. It is the search for a space where there is ‘the possibility of a dialectic of desire, or an unpredictable jouissance: the knowledge that the dice have not [yet] been thrown, that there is the possibility of a game’. Jouissance, in other words, is an unpredictable, fleeting moment (and is very much the sort of ‘pleasure’ experienced by a fan when watching ‘his’ team). It is a gamble. The search for it involves risk and, for Barthes, seemingly, the forbidden, for he uses the metaphor of what is usually thought of as a deviant as well as a dangerous form of solitary sexual pleasure, jouissance being like ‘that untenable, impossible, purely romantic moment, experienced by the libertine at the culmination of a daring arrangement whereby he cuts the cord by which he is hanging at the moment of orgasm’. In distinguishing pleasure from ‘jouissance’, Barthes not only acknowledges that the word ‘pleasure’ covers too wide a range of experience and that a more differentiated vocabulary is required; he also focuses on the emotions and feelings of the pleasure seeker (audience), and rejects both connoisseurship and social analysis as adequate if used exclusively as tools in the understanding of art and its effects.

The political project of postmodern cultural studies to rehabilitate popular forms took a particular feminist turn when women researchers deliberately focused on despised ‘feminine’ forms of work such as embroidery and other crafts and on popular forms that, it was assumed, particularly appealed to women, such as television soap operas and romantic fiction. There were tensions. To be a feminist was necessarily to take a political view of culture and to assess positively only those cultural experiences that advanced or seemed to advance the position of women. To do this, however, was ironically, like Adorno and Horkheimer, to judge culture in terms of its political effects; and this could easily fall into the trap of elitism, feminists guilty of suggesting that other women, who enjoyed popular culture, were suffering from false consciousness.

An example was Ien Ang’s critique of an influential defence of romantic fiction, Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance. Radway presented herself as an enthusiastic reader of romantic fiction, who used ethnographic interviews to investigate its meanings for its consumers. But the aim of Radway’s book, argued Ang, ‘is directed at raising the consciousness of romance reading women, its method is that of persuasion, coercion even’. ‘Real’ social change can only be brought about, Radway seems to believe, if romance readers would stop reading romances and become feminist activists instead.

Ien Ang objects to the absence of ‘any careful account of the pleasureableness of the pleasure of romance reading … of pleasure as pleasure’. She agrees that ‘the ideological consequences of [romance fiction] and its consumption should be a continuing object of reflection and critique’,¹¹ yet her argument implies that ‘pleasure as pleasure’ is a sufficient criterion by which to judge a work. This certainly refuses to see pleasure as problematic, but if pleasure is taken as the sole and only touchstone of experience it becomes difficult to condemn murder, torture and cannibalism, since these give pleasure to at least some of their perpetrators. So pleasure cannot be a guarantee of the acceptable and we are back with the problem that has dogged the whole of Western culture.

In the last decades of the twentieth century Kant’s sublime seemed to resonate with the aesthetic of ugliness that was not only an aspect of modernism and the avant-garde, but also of mass culture with its violence, excess and, often, deliberate rejection of any traditional notion of beauty. Indeed, traditional beauty became inescapably kitsch as it was massified and vulgarised by Hollywood, advertising and the cosmetics industry into standardised and banal forms.

On the other hand, the way in which mass culture was appreciated went wholly against the Kantian idea of detachment, as researchers, by identifying the sources of identification and idealisation that mass cultural forms provided, justified the passions of audiences and fans for particular music, television, film and sport. The belief in an objective set of aesthetic criteria, whereby cultural works could be judged in relation to one another and placed in some kind of hierarchy, had by now long been abandoned by critics, although not by the population at large, who seemingly unaware that they are committing sins of elitism or cultural universalism, continue to judge entertainments in terms of good or bad, better or worse.

In this world of cultural relativism those who enjoy, say, classical music, have become little more than another niche interest group. They do not call themselves fans; that term is for ‘middle’ and ‘low’ brow culture. Instead they are ‘aficionadas’, ‘cognoscenti’ or ‘connoisseurs’, foreign terms that reclaim their disinterested and contemplative enjoyment for respectability. Yet these enthusiasts turn out to be as emotionally involved in the art they love as the most shameless ‘Trekkies’ or football fans:

When BBC Radio Three played the complete works of Bach (the ‘Bachathon’), readers wrote of being addicted to [the composer], and of physical withdrawal and emotional dependency… Bach enthusiasts on the [BBC] message board confessed to their total immersion in the text, the merging of fantasy with reality, the delusional behaviour that the … critics of popular culture have so often deplored.

Fans took sides; comparing Bach with Beethoven to the latter’s detriment or trashing the ‘frivolity’ of Mozart as against the grandeur of the master of Leipzig.¹²

Scholarly research is even itself a kind of fandom. But this ‘must be disavowed, because passionate attachments … pleasure in mere assertions of value and arguments that primarily justify emotional investments are not phenomena that can typically be tolerated in academic spaces’.¹³

Artistic culture is a source of knowledge as well as a source both of pleasure and of ‘jouissance’. The emphasis in scholarly – and also more popular – approaches may have shifted from the quality of the work to the response of audiences, but both are necessary. Neither is likely to diminish the controversial nature of what gives us pleasure, what thrills and moves us. These passions remain suspect because they are not, or are not wholly, within state or religious control. Even if commercial interests ultimately control them, they may partially escape the cage of mediated society.

Much of culture is transient. Today’s brilliant best-seller may be a dusty period piece in 50 – or five – years’ time. On the other hand, cultural artefacts that have survived down the centuries, relics of the past that we still cherish, constitute the only form of eternal life we know. Their relative durability, their survival itself, is a source of faith in the human spirit. Emotional involvement should show us that the aesthetic contemplation of these concrete objects and our emotional involvement in them is far from being a shallow and ‘merely’ hedonistic search for pleasure.

In a mysterious entry in his The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin wrote: ‘the eternal … is far more the ruffle on a dress than some idea’.¹⁴ This is part of a fragment in which Benjamin also remarks that ‘truth’ is not just ‘a contingent function of knowing’. Truth, in other words, is not abstract and cerebral. It is by implication imagistic and concrete (although that is not exactly what Benjamin says). And it is because art is concrete, visceral, aesthetic, that it reaches beyond the immediate and superficial.