Baudrillard: Needs and Pleasure

In order to prove the untruth of the correspondence between need and object or pleasure and consumption, Baudrillard locates the objects of consumption outside of the sphere of need and pleasure. Instead, Baudrillard writes, they act in a system of signs; objects act as a language system. The consumption of objects acts as a differentiating social signifier that confer status on the consumer individual. In doing so they “play exactly the same role as the set of distinguishing values played in previous times: the foundation of group morality (16).”

Advertising and commercials incessantly seek to locate desire onto consumer objects. Consumption rests on the scheme of broken and renewed promises, where desire is alternatively gratified and frustrated. The dislocation produced by ceaseless advertising creates the liminal space of desire. Here objects “serve as a fluid and unconscious field of signification (44).”

Dispelling the assumed connection between pleasure and consumption Baudrillard writes:

“Consumer behavior, which appears to be focused and directed at the object and at pleasure, in fact responds to quite different objectives: the metaphoric or displaced expression of desire and the production of a code of social values through the use of differentiating signs (46).”

In fact consumption is “group morality” which is imposed on the individual. It is a social function and a “system of communication.” It is therefore a system of constraint on the individual’s pleasure.

Pleasure in Consumption vs. Pleasure in Art

It seems as though the whole edifice of consumption rests on the individual’s free search for pleasure. Advertising and marketing would have the consumer believe in the possibility of fulfilling every need and desire, assembly lined designed to the individual. Business gurus tout the values of diversity and the broad range of options available to satisfy every need. Choices created by the detailed study of consumer psychology. Studies capable of identifying and creating those choices not even the consumers new they had. We choose between extra chunky, extra smooth, extra thin, and extra thick. Statistcs are compiled to discover the consumers pleasure and then, in a slight of hand, markets the profitable general as if to the singular.

This type of diversity is in reality misdirection. It is in fact a starkly limiting range of objects that are available through a starkly limiting amount of venues and distributors. The variety of colors, frames, and increasingly more and better accessories, wider and better interiors do not constitute a real choice when a truly different car is not allowed into the market. Electric cars, diesel cars, hydrogen cars. The reoccurrence of new models is a diversion from the possibilities of alternative cars or alternative forms of transportation. Less profitable alternatives are either unimagined or ignored.

When a value system is derived from the economy, business turns itself into metaphysics. It justifies its technique and its production by deriving its morals from the necessity of profit. No longer taking a transcendent system of values from religion, which has the ability to self justify life without recourse to a system of numerical gain, morals take their cue from business, which is very bad morality. Murray Bookchin would characterize it as grow or die.

The economic metaphor infiltrates every thing. Money, the base equalizer between unequal things, penetrates all thought. And as a result it is the basis of language. What we hold true is converted into the logic of capital.

Business values have in part been determined and influenced by the avante garde. Diversity, pluralism, schizophrenia, permanent revolution, rebellion, radicality, counterculture, self empowerment, the elemination of struture, senuality, these are the catch words of postmodernity. The decadence of counterculter that once constituted its rebellion from the status quo and its independence from the given facts is now a simple extravagance to the gargantuous excess and waste of the cooperate monstrosities who control every aspect of what we otherwise see, hear, buy, and eat. Art is incapable of battling its integration. By its thingness, its very objecthood, its sensuality, it appears to be more of the same voice of teachnologically mass marketed images. It tries to rupture the images of mass media but is incapabale of doing so with a media so comfortable with the technique of dislocation and fragmentation.

Any recourse to an image that is polished, fully rendered does not constitute an alternative either (the New Master championed by Donald Kuspit). The consumer society’s images are a balance between fragmentation, the montage, the unfinished and dislocated, while simultaneously the pure focus and full rendering of the photograph. Fragmentation and car body finish.
What constitutes difference is the small negotiations between the hand and finish. The way individuals peaks through objects. Yet such interpretations lend an alternative to art simply by location an alternative there. By finding them and co-creating difference with the artist.

Advertising fives the promise of pleasure while only making good in the act of purchase. Arts promise is change and liberation from the given world. Both promises are illusions and both pleasures are fictional. Both are only partially sensorial, only optical.

It is no wonder that so many artists found (and find) it necessary to interrupt pleaure and beauty and withhold them from the viewer. Where advertising offers a world of pleasure already available, art recognizes the illusion and seeks to render the impossibility of pleasure under the current condition.

Inertia

Microcosms store astronomical amounts of data. Dormant and unfinished documents. Copies of earlier drafts,. Objects, warehouses of surplus software. Hardware, simulated warehouse of baked goods, fried goods, raw goods. Tiny town storage units. People out numbered by objects, restraining the impulse to give them away. Dormant products, rowed, categorized, stuffed and sitting. For all the noise and movement the world is a still place.

The body wakes and moves out the kinks of rest through the habit of waking and moving and the kinks. Coffee to rouse from dormancy as the inertia of consumption takes over. These objects or bodies move out of having moved. The guns fire out of having fired. The factories make out of having made. The consumer works having worked.

The catastrophic stakes of slowing down increase as the system of consumption increases its strangle hold on the individual. Ever more specialized objects with more and more specific functions. Increased consuming potential in proportion to increased goods and their conditioned obsolescence. Narrowing limits on public behavior. Increased focus on personal ownership. Division, atomization. Increased institutionalization of every aspect of life mediated by more complicated objects. Technological problems are solved with more advanced technology. Systems of management become more invisible, transparent, as power hides beneath a surface play of images. Hiding mass manipulation and criminal injustice in the third world. Torture, abuse, environmental destruction.

Inertia takes over with the rousing of an object or a body from its dormancy. In a simulated and unreal world that scatters and disorients from a conception of time, that blinds one from a context in the simulation of perpetual now and the perpetual availability of goods, images, pleasure. A simulated world that atomized individuals into private corners and into anonymous collectives, and then continues to reproduce these conditions. Dislocation takes an appearance of fact. Consumers learn to value the conditions of pleasant slavery. This a world of pleasant echoes that deny the presence of the originating sounds. Inertia reigns supreme as the new condition of faceless, ubiquitous power, and whose subjects reproduce as the real, and not as the memory of movement.

Pleasure, a Value

“Simply, a day comes when we feel a certain need to loosen the theory a bit, to shift the discourse, the ideolect which repeats itself, becomes consistent, and to give it the shock of a question. Pleasure is this question. As a trivial, unworthy name (who today would call himself a hedonist with a straight face?), it can embarrass the text’s return to morality, to truth: to the morality of truth: it is an oblique, a drag anchor, so to speak, without which the theory of the text would revert to a centered system, a philosophy of meaning (64).”
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

Pleasure moves the text. It is an embarrassment that halts the interpretive closure of a work. It keeps interpretation alive within the work of art (It keeps the world alive by refusing its final interpretation).

In few discourses is pleasure a value. Yet in art pleasure is a value.

Art is disruptive because it accepts pleasure. It is adverse to the notion of pleasure that reigns elsewhere.

Displeasure is treated like an ethical experience to be embraced (endured). Displeasure finds itself linked to noble causes. Barthes states it explicitly, “Pleasure is continually disappointed, reduced, deflated, in favor of strong, noble values: Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, Joy, etc(59).” Pleasure in art argues against this notion of truth. An embarrassment to most, art affirms the smallishness of pleasure.

Here a duality is set in place and I trace my own line of associations made between: realism, truth, the ugly, displeasure.

(Displeasure, a form of self-hatred, is treated like a virtue. Displeasure, often-unhealthy narcissism, is treated like heroic individualism.)

Pleasure in the Ugly and in the Beautiful

Aesthetic pleasure that comes from a representation of unpleasant things is based on distance and comfort. The unpleasant content is a fiction. The image is cathartic, we escape from real horror.

Representations of beauty cause disappointment. The viewer experiences it as mere representation.

Guilt accompanies pleasure in the ugly (I have escaped the tragedy of pain), longing in the beautiful (if only that were true).

Beauty as gendered

Gender is textually exhausted. Any attempt to define its characteristics are old and boring, a sign of backwardness. The excess of gender bending texts, texts designed to disrupt any sense of gender roles as a natural state, reveal that gender is merely a conditioning, an artifice.

To try and characterize a sex smacks of conservatism, the hope to preserve a past when roles where assumed to be stagnant.

To define a gender evokes a stereotype, not a person. It evokes the archetype. A list of characteristics: nuturing, tender, sensuous, etc.

Gender archetypes, like all archetypes, describe a platonic mirror world, a fiction available to describe both males and females. Gendered characteristics have always described both/neither of the person world (which is full of individuals).

As we construct a notion of gender, or a notion of non-differentiated gender, the new ideal, we use the characteristics of a historically predetermined gender to write this new one, to make ourselves. We make gender out of the historically available fragments.

When we deal with historical conditions that created gender we understand they never described anyone only culture with its aesthetic of control, usually masculine control.

The construction of the feminine explains the male’s self construction. Where the feminine was imposed, the masculine conceived.

Beauty was femaled and othered.

Beauty defined as decadence/ pleasure /decay, is no ideal against the central value of efficiency. Modernity, at least the branch of modernity with a strict sense of logic and rationality, reduces, seeks essence.

Beauty is propositional. Has no essence. Refuses definition. Offers pleasure without shame. Celebrates.

The feminine contains a slew of metaphors we can use as a frame of reference. The feminine is a convenient repository of meanings, but the gender of the maker does not matter. Because the feminine was defined by and against the masculine, it becomes a useful tool in defining the masculine metaphors that perpetuate violence. It also becomes the masculine metaphor’s alternative. However, we’re no longer talking about people but about gendered texts.

Courbet, Realism, and Vulgarity

 

In considering the connection between disgust and reality Courbet came to mind. Courbet was the creator of the realist movement in art. Though the movement is called Realism it is initially a misleading term. Courbet did not paint with anymore visual accuracy than a great many of his predecessors or many of his successors. (Consequently there is a great retrospective of Courbet’s at the Met going on right now that I got to see. However they do not have the Burial of Ornans or the big studio self portrait)

 

Indeed after Courbet the Impressionists thought of themselves as seeing reality freshly, realistically, without the artificial fetters of the past. All that to say an objective view of “reality” is always in question. Yet Courbet is father of the term. So what conditions did Courbet’s art fulfill in order to merit the term “reality?”

 

Perhaps some these are obvious: Courbet refused the sentiment or metaphysical representational motifs popular in his day. Instead Courbet painted his own local populace intending to show them without fetters in all their rags, poverty, and quiet dignity.

 

Through out art history reality (and sometimes revolution) is paired with dirt. Caravaggio hundreds of years before Courbet’s Stone Breakers or Burial at Ornans would paint his Madonna with dirty feet and a bloated body outraging the viewers of his day, Death of the Virgin. Similar complaints were laid against Courbet and his representation of nude women. I’m sure that I am missing a lot of history in between but I’m just trying to make a quick case, Joseph Beuys would materials like dirt and rust and fat. Beuy’s work would smell breaking down common sensory limitations of an artwork and making it confront the audience (an experience of disgust?) More recently Anselm Keifer’s paintings have dirt in them, as well as being representations of  earth.

 

The representation of dirt and the confluence of disgust and reality reveals an interesting tie in the notion of reality as something base, mute, and well, dirty. Might dirt also be a veiled reference to feces too. Think Chris Offeli’s Madonna? Might Offeli be aware of the connection between Caravaggio’s dirty virgin and his own black elphant dung Madonna, the Holy Virgin Mary? 

 

 

Courbet has a famous quip, “Show me an Angel and I’ll paint one.” In his desire for fidelity to reality Courbet refused to paint an angel. (I can’t think of a religious scene Courbet did paint). Courbet is the father of Realism because of his turn to the common, the vulgar, the ugly.

 

Disgust

The gooey and sticky need no names; the foul smelling needs no analysis and defies analysis. The disgusting allows us no distance from reality. It is a threat that gets at ya with an intensity no pleasurable thing can.

         

Winfried Menninghaus, author of the book Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, traces the literary, as well as philosophical history of disgust and its connections to an aesthetic of ugly.

 

For Freud, Menninghaus writes, “disgust is the direct opposite of a simple natural given (2).”

  A cultures reaction to disgust is not conditioned only by biology but by a conceptual framework. For Freud disgust is a symptom of the repression of sexual desire. For one disgust sustains the family structure. Disgust is part of a system of libidinous checks. It works to limit sexual activity in exchange for labor and productivity. Because of this the sexual drive must overcome the disgust taboos placed on the body, and sex becomes perverse activity. Yet this only works to intensify the pleasure and relegates pleasure to a private experience.

 

 

Perversity, disgust, and pleasure all converge. Freud’s theory sets up the collusion of disgust and pleasure. And this becomes a central problem to an aesthetic of ugly. When a viewer takes pleasure in the representation of something ugly how can this be accounted for? And how is one to take its moral imperative seriously if one enjoys the work not for its moral rightness but for its physicality? It would mean either rethinking the divide between pleasure and morality, or rethinking the moral imperative in works of art that are tough and brutal like the ones we’ve been talking about Dubeffet and Goya.

           

For Nietzsche disgust is connected to the sexual as well. The Dionysian is the true bestial nature of the amoral human. One of Nietzsche aphorism was “We reevaluate disgust (9).”

Before Nietzsche Kant would describe ekel (disgust) as a positive value meant to instruct. Disgust was useful in teaching a culture what was appropriate and what was not. However, this was also a way of insureing class division and racial seperation. If the poor and the foreign could be “proven”to be aesthetically disgusting then power could be stabilized.

 

Disgust was a means towards developing cultured, refined, tastes and high standards. Nietzsche came to see these refined moral standards, reinforced by notions of disgust, as false morals. Disgust needed to be reevaluated so that what was disgusting was no longer viewed as negative and marginal but as essential and truthful.

           

In much of the discourse that Menninghaus traces disgust acts as either positive or negative but always as an experience that transcends or contaminates the symbolic order for unmediated experience.

 

In Both Neitzsche and Freud disgust is antisocial and against the status quo. The disgusting is tied to the sexually liberating and therefore to pleasure.

 

The confluence of pleasure from the ugly becomes a problem for an aesthetic of ugly that chooses the ugly and despicable for reasons of moral outrage.

 

Menninghaus, Winfried Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong Sensation

State University of New York Press, Albany NY 2003.

Beauty and Ugliness

Dubuffet’s work and language carry an undercurrent of moral judgment that often accompanies aesthetics of ugly, while an aesthetics that seeks beauty is often accused of escapism and hedonism.

Dubuffet also commented that the distinctions between the categories of ugliness and beauty are western concepts. He sees questions of beauty or ugliness as irrelevant to primitive art or art brut. Arthur Danto in his book the Abuse of Beauty would agree beauty was not “the point of most of the world’s great art (36).”

How can I then justify using the terms ugliness or beauty if they were part of a false hieractical system? Or if questions of beautiness or ugliness are limiting concept provided by a Eurocentric view of art?

The problem with the two terms is that I risk reducing art into binary categories, essentializing artists and making their works easy, ignoring their paradouxes. I want to use ugly and beauty as helpful terms in an understanding of art. The categories are contingent, but are useful in describing an artist’s tone and intention, not in perpetuating a simple duality. Herbert Marcuse in The Aesthetic Deminsion writes, quoting Adorno, “‘even the cry of despair…still pays its tribute to the infamous affirmation’ and a representation of the most extreme suffering ‘still contains the potential to wring out enjoyment (66).’” In other words, both extremes carry their own contradiction within them. Beauty contains seeds of decay and the ugly the chance of redemption.

Dubuffet’s Aesthetic

“The secret is to a thing badly. If you serve someone spinach that is cooked the way it should be, no one notices or remembers that they have eaten spinach. Whereas if you burn it, it shocks their taste buds and they become immediately aware that it is burned spinach and they gain new insights into the characteristics of spinach, etc (23).”
-Jean Dubuffet

Dubuffet’s intention was to shock the viewer out of normal visual experience or to extend his metaphor the normal palette. He saw his art as a reaction against both the good tastes of academic traditional art and also the refined, esoteric tastes of the avant-garde. Dubuffet saw himself as radically democratic. Through the appropriation of a common vernacular he avoided the elitism of the avant-garde, with its obscurity and complexity. But he also saw himself as radically individualistic. His willful raw, unfinished, “badly” made images were meant to offend good taste and the common preference for the sentimental and picturesque.

By over (or under) cooking his paintings Dubuffet hoped that the experience would cut through all pretense to an experience of raw, unmediated matter. This constitutes in large part his turn from academic finish to physical gritty surfaces and crude draftsmanship (see the blog entry about craft below).

Dubuffet sought subject matter that was both banal and crude. He thought of himself as a realist directly engaged with the world, devoid of artifice and the restraint that characterized western culture. “Painting operates, through signs which are not abstract and incorporeal like words. The signs of painting are much closer to the objects themselves (18).”

Dubuffet rejected the categorical, analytic thought that was integral to western thought. In his attempt to reject the obscurity and categories of Occidental culture Dubuffet turned to the art of the insane and “primitive” art.

In his attempts to reject western culture Dubuffet was unable to avoid adopting the rhetoric of irrationality and naiveté with which the west characterized primitive art. But Dubuffet did see primitivism as a healthy alternative to the artificiality and linguistic dependence that was a distinctive feature of western thought. He would, however, romanticize the “irrationality” and “madness” he found in art of the insane and “primitive”. He saw insanity as a way of getting closer to reality instead of the loss of reality and the escape into fiction and delusion that so often accompanies clinical forms of insanity.

Though much of Dubuffet’s thought came under critical suspicion and notions of the raw and the unmediated as well as notions of authenticity were called into question Dubuffet was also able to expand the cannon of art, calling previous forms of art to be reevaluated and reappreciated. It allowed a whole new supply of signifiers into the discourse, signifiers of innocence and humor and crudeness.

Rowell, Margit Jean Dubuffet.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York 1973.