This has all made me go back and crack open Barthes' "The Pleasure of
the Text," a treatise to be sure unsound in many places and many ways,
but still striking as a sort of trigger for further critical thought. I
fished out a passage which seems relevant:
"An entire mythology would have us believe that pleasure (and
singularly the pleasure of the text) is a rightist notion. On the
right, with the same movement, everything abstract, boring, political
is shoved over to the left and pleasure is kept for oneself: welcome to
our side, you who are finally coming to the pleasure of literature! And
on the left, because of morality (forgetting Marx's and Brecht's
cigars), one suspects and disdains any "residue of hedonism." On the
right, pleasure is championed /against/ intellectuality, the clerisy:
the old reactionary myth of heart against head, sensation against
reasoning, (warm) "life" against (cold) "abstraction": must not the
artist, according to Debussy's sinister precept, "/humbly seek to give
pleasure/"? On the left, knowledge, method, commitment, combat, are
drawn up against "mere delectation" (and yet: what if knowledge itself
were /delicious/?). On both sides, this peculiar idea that pleasure is
/simple/, which is why it is championed or disdained. Pleasure,
however, is not an /element/ of the text, it is not a naïve residue; it
does not depend on a logic of understanding and on sensation; it is a
drift, something both revolutionary and asocial, and it cannot be taken
over by any collectivity, any mentality, any idiolect. Something
/neuter/? It is obvious that the pleasure of the text is scandalous:
not because it is immoral but because it is /atopic/." (pp 22-23 in my
Blackwell edition)
Curious the use of "right" and "left" here in contrast to Sophie
Mayer's essay; while she doesn't use the words it would seem reasonable
to align the indigenous, sensual view with something leftist and the
homophobic/transphobic/capitalist view as rightist. Barthes on the
other hand seems to be writing about the right as advocate of
consumption and its certain kind of pleasure, and the left as socially
conscientious restraint and therefore more abstract mental faculties.
(If indeed his arguments make sense at all, which I do sometimes doubt,
but they are themselves a pleasure to read.)
--Knut
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