Comments on: On Pleasure

By: Shuaib

Shuaib — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 04:11:53 +0000

How does Barthes explication of pleasure account for pleasure in fiction and non-fictional text as well as linear and non-linear interactive text?

By: natalie

natalie — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 15:42:28 +0000

I find it so interesting that most of the people I know who really read Freud are people who study literature (even though I work with a bunch of psychologists). As someone in psycholinguistics, I hope my work is well-received in my own field, but how cool would it be if it had strange consequences in another field?

By: KF

KF — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 12:49:58 +0000

Sorry not to have taken your point before, Jeff—it’s taken me until now to fully process it, for whatever reason. More Barthes, indeed! And Roland Barthes is ideal, given the importance of identity construction and new approaches to the autobiographical in the project as a whole. Thanks!

By: jeff

jeff — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 18:39:46 +0000

Well...for me, part of this ongoing process has been not to reject consumption (texts, meanings, products as well) the way certain types of thinking profess. What I like about Barthes is how he thinks of consumption as a rhetorical process (as opposed to a Frankfurt critique). Empire of Signs, for me, is another nice example: consuming space. The Roland Barthes book: consuming identity. I’m not saying any of this is the direction; just a place to begin.

By: KF

KF — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 20:47:20 +0000

That’s precisely what’s got me started off down this road. What I’m trying to figure out is where to go from there…

By: jeff

jeff — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 19:23:02 +0000

"What I’m after is a critical theory of pleasure, and particularly the pleasure taken in the consumption of cultural texts.”

In The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes writes: “Imagine an aesthetic based entirely on the pleasure of the consumer.”

I think that’s a nice starting point for the theory you’re after.

By: KF

KF — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 21:12:47 +0000

Ooh, great suggestions. I hadn’t run across the Kaufman, but I’ll definitely look into it. And I knew I needed to plunge a bit further into D&G, but I wasn’t quite sure which text I should begin with. I’ll give them another shot.

But yeah, I think desire is (perhaps other than in D&G) associated with lack, as desire is always the longing for that which you do not have. That’s the thing that I think makes it an acceptable critical term; it’s the equivalent, with respect to pleasure, of the deferred gratification at the heart of Weber’s “protestant ethic” within capitalism. It’s okay to want, because wanting implies not having, or at least a pleasure that is eternally just out of reach. It’s interesting that desire (in the D&G model?) becomes associated with production, given the capitalist implications of that term…

By: Dennis

Dennis — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 16:58:36 +0000

Oh I would recommend to take a look at Deleuze and Guattarie’s Anti- Oedipus in this context. Is desire really associated with lack? Desire is pure production… in fact even the production of production

By: MC

MC — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 23:19:02 +0000

I found Eleanor Kaufman’s The Delirium of Praise (Johns Hopkins UP, 2001) helpful to think about the pleasures of reading certain writers’ work, and how that can generate into a critical practice. I’ve used it along with Barthes’ ‘grain of the voice’ essay (from Image, Music, Text) to describe some of the pleasures and affects of reading in scholarly life. There’s a link to the chapter here if you’re interested.

Reading Barthes more widely is a pleasure in itself…

By: Derek

Derek — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 15:12:16 +0000

Jeff Rice is teaching a graduate seminar on the rhetorics of pleasure this semester at Wayne State. Might be a few things on the syllabus that match up well with this line of inquiry.