“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.)
June 4, 2008
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).
June 3, 2008
