<<TRANSMATHOME

1.0

This chapter discusses the term pleasure as it is defined and analyzed within certain divided epistemes, following on from my earlier discussion of Foucault’s The Order of Things. Pleasure has been selected for this book as the first of three primary terms. My analysis will elucidate pleasure as a strategy toward a line of flight through viewing by an exploration of:

• Pleasure as an affect that exceeds a singular definition, both in its location in the corporeal self, and as an object for study.
  
  
• Pleasure as a term that goes beyond meaning only a binary opposite to such terms as pain or unpleasure.
  
  
• Pleasure as beyond visuality, hermeneutic ontology or other traditional modes of comprehension or knowledge.
  
  
• Pleasure as a line of flight for the viewer of horror films, when the above three reasons are implemented into thinking viewing practice.

Pleasure is highly volatile as a singular term both in its definition, and the modes by which it is described, within the human object of analysis. This chapter will discuss pleasure as it is described by neurophysiology, psychoanalysis and then take such definitions and place them alongside a more exploratory, speculative description (as opposed to definition) of pleasure felt from film viewing. I will discuss the potentials of pleasure existing as a result of traditionally negative terms, so that the definition of pleasure at its most basic and broad level will be questioned. Such negatives as disgust, pain, horror and fear will be analyzed as pleasurable despite their alignment with the negative side of any binary involving pleasure. These feelings or ‘affects’ (which alter embodied being rather than simply effecting being, in which being returns to its former state after such effect ceases) will be analyzed as constituting pleasure, forming a version of pleasure which is at once both and excessive of negative and positive in the traditional sense, rather than simply using the negative terms as a pleasure exclusive of any positive elements. This analysis also refuses to constitute traditional pleasure as opposed to an inverted subversive, post-structural or different pleasure. Negatives of pleasure will form part of pleasure rather than be opposed to it or be constitutive of it in a directly inverted way. Pleasure is seen as representing the interests of a subject. At its most basic level, pleasure is an exhibition of a subject who is in a ‘good’ state, a state of level being, happiness or any other clearly ‘positive’ term. For this reason pleasure alone seems to have less judgement value placed on it as representative of a particular subject; everyone experiences pleasure. It is seen as inescapable in neurophysiology, laying out all patterns for future experiences being either ‘bad’ or ‘good’. In psychoanalysis, pleasure is the basic aim for the self-preserving (narcissistic) psyche. In a basic pop culture incarnation, we do things ‘for pleasure’, which variously indicates fun, enjoyment, happiness, comfort, and even a state of nothing which is opposed to a state of angst, pain or tension. What we choose to ‘give’ us pleasure is where value is located, and also read as the exterior substance or element that constitutes who we are - which then leads to naming practices we use to achieve pleasure as ‘perverse’, perversion being the focus of chapter two.

Representing pleasure as something we have, achieve or which is given to us through a certain practice is a configuration deconstructed by re-figuring pleasure as a continuum, as a state which may be permanent, which may simply alter in quality (pleasure hence becomes qualitative rather than quantitative) and which may alter us along with its process. In its traditional configuration pleasure effects a base-level subject who returns, after such effect, to its former state. Pleasure here is a capital product which ‘works’ at effecting us, achievable in measure and as part of a clear equation where the subject plus a certain practice equals pleasure. This equation does not work because the subject does not necessarily return to a habitual predictable level of being after any and all effects upon it. Phantasizing this return undoes the done, un-thinks the thought and essentially suggests a reversal in time, which is of course impossible. The use of ‘affect’ in this book is part of a different processual representation of being (which will eventually be termed ‘becoming’ after Deleuze and Guattari) but here begins with a line of flight. Deleuze and Guattari advocate thinking ‘being’ as becoming, not singular but multiple, temporal, accounting for the trajectory of existence that cannot go back in time. Toward this becoming the body projects itself upon a line of flight, that is, upon a line that departs from and which is simultaneously opposed to the majoritarian form of being hu-man against which all subjects are measured as same or different, normal or not normal. Lines of flight have major elements that differentiate them from the simple opposition of self to majoritarian being. A line of flight is about speed, movement and setting off while opposition to the dominant takes as its prime motivator a correlative opposition to the majoritarian mode of being. Opposition re-anchors itself to traditional societal forms of being in every instant by continually referring to that which it opposes. [1] A line of flight takes something as a point of reference in order to project itself, but it is the movement toward the referent rather than any aim toward an end product that is the essence of a line of flight - flight is the term of momentum, and the line has no identifiable end. Deleuze and Guattari use woman as the first point of reference in a line of flight in A Thousand Plateaus, which is problematic for feminism. These problems will be most fully discussed in the conclusion. Here, however, the idea of a line of flight will be accepted as a tactic in order to express the potential of watching as pleasure and able to set the self off into a line of flight. Deleuze and Guattari use ‘Woman’ because as the primary divergent subject position from the majoritarian she exists as undefined but not entirely foreign, as in between or as tangible, material difference. Because women are denied traditional forms of power and self-definition in society they already represent a line of flight. Women must exist differently in society to majoritarians because they do not yet have the lack of oppression that do white middle class, able-bodied men. They therefore must exist as different forms of intensity, movement and specificity. Because woman is as yet undefined in her own terms, woman also exists in her intensities different to other women. She is at once representative of a line of flight and proliferating lines of flight with particular intensities and speed. Deleuze and Guattari state:

[The girl] never ceases to roam upon a body without organs. She is an abstract line or a line of flight. Thus girls do not belong to an age group, sex order or kingdom: they slip in everywhere, between orders, acts, ages, sexes; they produce n molecular sexes on the line of flight in relation to the dualism machines they cross right through. [2]

Ignoring the use of women in particular as a line of flight here (it will be addressed fully in the conclusion) we can replace it with the term pleasure and similar qualities are evident. Pleasure roams upon a body without organs – that is, a body that does not exist as hierarchical or arboreal signified strata. In this chapter, I will discuss pleasure in both psychology texts and in neurophysiology texts as referring to completely contradictory spaces and places on the body and in the flesh. Pleasure in all of its theoretical incarnations deconstructs the arboreal signified body while trying to cement its most important signifiers – the brain and the genitals – because pleasure cannot be theorized as referring exclusively to these two organs. Pleasure does not belong to age, sex, or kingdom but defies ordering, also evinced in its contradictory incarnations in the differently ordered texts under discussion in this chapter. Pleasure transgresses dualism by blatantly refusing to choose between the binaries into which it is forced. Horror films are used as an elemental inclusion in the line of flight movement because they are emphatic about the crossing of dualism in reference to pleasure. Below I will perform a practical application of this theory by imagining a viewer in front of an extreme horror film in order to elucidate the transgression of dualism - pleasure as involving and referring to pain, disgust, and a roaming affect which de-stratifies the flesh into trembling, volatile affect. Affect is the projection that could see the flesh hurled upon a line of flight. Both perversion and death are terms that also fit well as potential lines of flight and they will coexist with, rather than stand as evolutionary from, pleasure. These three terms, through the use of horror film, can be the minute and domestic starting point to an enormous transformation in the theorization of a potentially possible (rather than purely theoretical) becoming.

Affect insinuates permanent change, a certain open-ness of the subject to experience(s) which will necessarily alter it from the moment before, and an unpredictable quality of being always in time and momentum rather than fixed in space and nature. Within this schema affect suggests the affect of self by self, so the essence of being is in itself fractured, seen often in illness but certainly in horror or pleasure, sex or fear. The body’s own capacity to affect ourselves, is not binary (inside versus outside, pleasure versus no pleasure, sick versus well) but intensely multi-forceful and inundative. Effect affirms fixity of being by suggesting the subject exists at a static level, is effected and then returns after the effect to its former level. Any change or alteration is construed as ‘learning’ within an epistemophilic structure of being, as evolutionary progress towards transcendence rather than radical irreversible change. Pleasure exists as a non-exclusionary term, potentially affect-ive of all beings and hence at its introduction not immediately relevant only to certain types of persons. It does, however, exceed subject types in its potentially infinite incarnations. Pleasure is explicitly corporeal within medical epistemes, although the brain, where much of the theory of anatomical pleasure is isolated, could be seen as the organ of ‘mind’. It is psychically autonomous in psychoanalysis and transcendental in the analysis of aesthetics, where pleasure is found in ‘reading’ film, painting or literature rather than reacting viscerally to it. Pleasure in its different epistemic incarnations not only spans all subjects but also all topographical layers of subjectivity – including but not singularly intellectual, corporeal, visceral, sexual, ascetic. When cross-analyzed through different genres, pleasure for this book becomes a useful first line of flight through its fluidity, both in definition and in its limitless plateaus for potential affect of subjectivity.

In this chapter my focus is threefold. First I will discuss the nature of epistemic divides in discursive practices which seek to locate pleasure. These divides both regulate modes of practice and emphatically estrange certain definitions, even if those definitions refer to the same term - for example the term pleasure will be referred to in terms of physiology, psychiatry and neurology as well as incarnated in the practice of watching film. This theme of juxtaposing identical terms defined within different epistemes, introduced in the discussion of The Order of Things will be prevalent through the entire book.

My second focus is on the nature of a physiological or corporeal alteration, which I wish to utilize as a means to alter the ways in which embodied subjectivity can be theorized and experienced. Using pleasure as a way to identify a momentum that affects a wholly corporeal/psychical change is a way in which a change in subjectivity, and hence a permanently transforming subject, may be identified. My intention is not to theorize the nature of that changed body, only to identify the changing body unto itself, in order to theorize an embodied subject-in-process. The identification of an embodied subjectivity is not juxtaposed against static, sealed and complete bodies or subjects. Instead, subjectivity as material momentum conforms to the general aim of this book - to formulate a methodology that may be used toward a mode of becoming over traditional theories of being.

My third focus is to take the term ‘pleasure’ and analyze the traditional value judgements of it both empirically - through theories of its effects on the body - and (psycho) aesthetically - deeming pleasure as always being attractive, primarily sexual and beneficial to the integrity of subjectivity. My contention is that pleasure is not essentially the opposite of its immediately referred to binary terms, such as unpleasure or pain, with their negative value. I do not aim to compress the binaries, but rather elucidate their interdependence in order to suggest a means of doing away with terms that are necessarily defined only in opposition to one another. [3] The ‘nature’ of pleasure is unpredictable - neither always ‘good’ nor ‘sexual’ - and most usefully applied when it elicits change, transformation and the beginning of thinking embodied subjectivity toward becoming. I have chosen to focus on pleasure before the other two major terms for transformation – perversion and death - because it is the most general, and possibly for this reason most multiply defined, or undefinable. Pleasure is also the most molecular in potential movement. Its ethical implications are not as immediate or as pressing as the other two terms because pleasure is democratically effective of all subjects; whereas death may be repressed and perversion repudiated. Most subjects would embrace pleasure as that which effects them by whatever means, thus  pleasure is useful by way of an introduction to terminology that span many disparate discourses, and which offers for every body a line of flight.

<<TRANSMATHOME|NEXT>>