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1.1 An Introduction to Theories of Pleasure

The following section traces a brief genealogy of certain definitions of ‘pleasure’ within a historicized philosophical and modern psychiatric group of texts. The different epistemes produce alternative ways of understanding pleasure as an effect but almost all of the texts, regardless of discursive genre, retain the idea that pleasure is not an affect or an object but a measure. All the texts describe pleasure as a degree of being. This is so, whether the authors discussed in the following section see pleasure as something outside subjectivity which effects the subject on a psychical, libidinal or physiological level, or something inside the subject formed of an equation in the body of outside mixed with inside forces. This mode of discourse could potentially figure pleasure as progressive in its demand for the subject to exist in a state of constant flux, rather than fixed. However, the degrees of subjectivity, tension and effect that these discourses evince occur always within a rigidly bordered sense of available change rather than a continuum of speed, alteration and irreversible affect. At the center of this mode of thinking is a level degree zero that is figured as a balance between too much and not enough. This point of equilibrium is described as necessary for reasons which begin in the Hellenistic age with an inextricably moral and medicinal mandate, and evolve into modern medicine’s compulsory limits of agitation for a non-pathological body, to psychoanalysis’ mental health degree of no-tension and various other descriptions of pleasure. Most of these descriptions work pleasure as an equation that corresponds to the body’s levels of health, incarnated as another equation. A balance between these two equations and the effect pleasure has upon the self is considered the minimum means by which the health of the self is maintained. Even though pleasure is incarnated as degree in almost all of the texts I discuss, the way in which pleasure is figured varies greatly. It is for this reason that I engage with various epistemic definitions of the term. Although their basic understandings of the term ‘pleasure’ are sometimes similar, their modes of applying it to a body or to subjectivity elucidate great divisions. They all offer themselves, however, as a truthful version of the relationship with and effects of pleasure on the human.

In considering the life of the technophiliac subject’s pleasure - s/he who achieves pleasure from a television, film screen or computer - the limits of neurophysiology and psychoanalysis may hopefully be the springboard to a new imagining of the plural momentum of pleasure - whether pleasure is a single unified entity, among the subject’s own experience and among subjectivity in general, or whether it exists as multiplicity or molecularity, accessible only once in each form to each experience and each subject. The working definition of pleasure that will be used in this chapter is something of a ‘what pleasure is not’ rather than a concrete definition of what it is. But I cannot, of course, work with nothing so before the definitions of pleasure most preferred by the medical and psychiatric professions are discussed in the next section, a more cultural and perhaps less contentious definition will be discussed. I cannot offer my own definition of pleasure because it will limit the potential of the term. At a very basic level, I will suggest that pleasure is something, not necessarily a phenomenological experience, but some thing (thing being opposed to nothing rather than insinuating an object) which changes the idea of the subject in stasis. There is no level of ‘nothing’ in my opinion - pleasure seems to describe a subject altering from what it was before, but the ‘before’ is already an agitated assemblage of particular intensities. Pleasure is not simply something that affects, which suggests some outside force being ingested, clearly retaining boundaries of inside and outside. Pleasure is not that which causes because cause + effect = result, suggesting a capitalist demand for ‘product’. Like perversion or pain, or unpleasure, pleasure is, for now, simply something that changes the subject in some way.

Along with his archaeological excavation of the evolution of empirical discourses, Michel Foucault traced the changes that occurred in morality, Christian, pagan and medical opinions of the body and, specifically of activities that cause the body and the self to experience pleasure. Foucault unfortunately limits much of his discussion and his use of the word pleasure to the sexual realm, traversing occasionally to other realms of indulgence, such as food. His definition of pleasure as most often specifically sexual is not, for my purposes, sufficient in involving all the incarnations of the body and the self when they are in/with/experiencing pleasure. [4] For the moment, however, I choose not to specify whether the pleasure I am speaking of is with or without sexual connotations. I will tactically use Foucault’s terminology and ideas to encompass a great amorphic and unbound concept of pleasure in order to give the reader some ideas about the conditions that precede and formulate any concept of pleasure when it transforms from a corporeal feeling to a spoken experience. In particular, the pleasures of viewing a screen in television, film, video and computer are what I will use as a potential vehicle for re-thinking pleasure.

In using the term ‘pleasure’ toward transformative subjectivity, the reader may wonder why I have not chosen desire. Deleuze, in his article ‘Desire and Pleasure’ adamantly prefers to use the term desire, which he juxtaposes against Foucault’s preference for the term pleasure. In this article Deleuze paraphrases Foucault, “I cannot bear the word desire; even if you use it differently, I cannot keep myself from thinking or living that desire = lack, or that desire is repressed.” Deleuze adds “but for my part I can scarcely tolerate the word pleasure.” [5] Although my use of the term pleasure ultimately favors Deleuze and ideas of intensity and process over fixed subjectivity, my genealogical definition of pleasure is introduced through Foucault, however I will not utilize the term ‘pleasure’ in the same way as either of these two theorists. Foucault’s disdain for ‘desire’ comes from a very traditional, specifically Lacanian, psychoanalytic use of the term which does indeed present lack as the primary motivator of desire, and hence, desire as anti-lack or capital-ly full. Desire seems involved in a matrix of castration anxiety [6] when applied to subjectivity. There is also a sense of volition in the term desire, whether it is for the phallus, or anything else. Deleuze however sees desire as an agencement, what Brian Massumi in A Thousand Plateaus translates as an ‘assemblage’, of elements. Such a definition expounds desire from either being at one end of a polar structure of lack and satisfaction or lack and fulfillment. The most important use of the term ‘desire’ for Deleuze however is when he defines it as

process as opposed to structure or genesis; it is affect as opposed to sentiment; it is “haecc-eity” (the individuality of a day, a season, a life) as opposed to subjectivity; it is an event as opposed to a thing or a person. And above all, it implies the constitution of a plane of immanence or a ‘body without organs’, which is defined solely by zones of intensity, thresholds, gradients, flows. [7]

Deleuze covertly sees ‘pleasure’ as interrupting the “immanent process of desire; pleasure seems to be on the side of strata and organization... pleasure seems to me to be the only means for a person or a subject to ‘find itself again’ in a process that surpasses it. It is reterritorialization.” [8] In my argument it is only the use of terms, or each theorists’ subjective understanding of their precise and particular definitions, that causes the anxieties about one term over another. As Foucault and Deleuze point out, the terms ‘desire’ and ‘pleasure’ are more frequently than not interchangeable, and it is only when individual theorists examine their understanding of the particular implications of these terms that the problems and successes of the terms for theory may be elucidated. I do not have the same anxiety about the term ‘pleasure’ as Deleuze because I see implicit in Deleuze’s use of the term ‘pleasure’ a concept of mandatory satisfaction - in a similar way that Foucault despises ‘desire’ because it indicates lack which in turn demands fulfillment. Psychoanalytically this lack is never filled, which is what keeps desiring subjects desiring. The way in which Deleuze defines pleasure indicates something similar to lack because of its insistence on satisfaction - pleasure interrupts desire because it organizes equations of satisfied drives, hence completed or finished drives. Pleasure also allows subjectivity to return to its level state (or a new reterritorialized state) a concept, which I will later explicate, as rife within psychiatric, psychoanalytic and neurophysiological theory. Pleasure for Deleuze is something that happens and then subsides, or it is the cause of the subsidization of an affect or rupture in stable subjectivity or process. Deleuze’s anxieties about the term ‘pleasure’ conform to more traditional versions where pleasure insinuates pleasure at something or for something predictable but I understand ‘pleasure’ in terms of its antagonism towards those points Deleuze finds most troublesome. Pleasure is deterritorializing for me because it is a change in the state of being, or a forcing into something different from the moment before, often against a subject’s will or volition, rather than Deleuze’s anxiety towards its reterritorializing threat when pleasure is pleasure in something experienced before. I see pleasure as setting into action a process of becoming through such a change, rather than Deleuze’s configuration of pleasure as a state of re-finding oneself (or a reinstatement of being, a reterritorialization). I am adamant pleasure forces an individualization of moments, a scene of intense molecularization of self, sense and want, rather than an establishment of a recognizable place within a strata. This is so even when a repetition of feeling is aimed for. For me the term ‘desire’ insinuates subjectivity over haeccity because the excavation in theory of a subject’s desire then creates that subject (for example desire for a particular object choice before act or pleasure names that subject hetero- or homo-sexual). The object seems prevalent in desire moreso than in pleasure. Desire insinuates desire for while pleasure seems less autonomous and more ambiguous. Pleasure is important in this book because, like Deleuze’s incarnation of desire, it exceeds linguistics, it has no particular beginning or end, and it continually transforms the subject, thus any analysis of the experience would focus upon haeccity over subjectivity. [9] ‘Pleasure’ in this chapter is explored by addressing some of Deleuze’s anxieties about it, but my application of the term moves it toward a positive utilization. Such an application is involved with Deleuze’s direct command above for “zones of intensity, thresholds, gradients and flows” because pleasure here is posited as not always beneficial, pleasant, positive or satisfying and most importantly, something which the Cartesian mind cannot always consciously choose for its own extricated body. Desire for me suggests this kind of sentient control, a choice, while pleasure suggests a less conscious or demanded aim. The body after pleasure in this chapter is not returned, happy or satisfied but disrupted, irreversibly changed and affected. No term exists without a history or genealogy and history does not necessarily fall away in a consideration of temporal existence. In order to align with concepts of history opposed to concepts of ahistorical truth, I return to Foucault.

In The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality Volume 2 Foucault traces the alterations in attitudes about sexuality, pleasure and the body’s ‘constancy’ in formulating a subject’s idea of its ‘self’. From ancient Greek authors through Christian intervention, Foucault compares these attitudes to certain ‘modern’ scientific and moral attitudes, which came into being in order to describe knowledge of the ‘body in pleasure’. His focus on the Greeks emphasizes the fallacy in believing the ancients to be amoral and un-self-regulating simply because the acts they used as vehicles towards pleasure were more diverse and would be deemed, after the Victorians, perverse. Foucault’s major point is that, to the Greeks, act or object was not as important a moral consideration as temperance, or moderate intensity. Pleasure, in this instance predominantly sexual but not exclusively so, was a degree of intensity rather than the more modern incarnation of a product. Whatever act or object assisted the self in experiencing pleasure was sanctioned as long as the level of pleasure was not considered immoderate. Pleasure was quantitative not qualitative. Foucault writes,

What differentiates men from one another, for medicine and moral philosophy alike, is not so much the type of objects towards which they are oriented, nor the mode of sexual practice they prefer. Above all it is the intensity of that practice. The division is between lesser and greater: moderation or excess. It is rather rare when a notable personage is depicted, for his preference for one form of sexual practice or another to be pointed up. [10]

Georges Canguilhem, in his historical and contemporary discussion of the genesis and meaning of pathology juxtaposed against the ‘normal’ affirms this idea of quantitative excess as detrimental in his exploration of the earlier physiologists Auguste Comte and Comte’s reading of Broussais. According to the ‘Broussais Principle’ pathology of the body was measured rather than identified, as a result of degrees of physiological normalcy.  Independent and unique pathology and nosology did not exist in the theories of Comte and his contemporaries. Like pleasure and its existence not as some ‘thing’ but as degree of what was already present, actual human physiology was incapable of anything it did not already present, only of excesses or serious diminution of the ‘normal’ (temperate) condition. Canguilhem offers as example another Broussaisian, Bichat, thus:

Bichat’s hostility toward all metrical designs in biology was paradoxically allied with his assertion that diseases must be explained in terms of the definitely quantitative variations of their properties, with the tissues which make up the organs serving as a scale. “To analyze precisely the properties of living bodies; to show that every physiological phenomena is, in the final analysis, related to these properties considered in their natural state and that every pathological phenomena derives from their increase, decrease or alteration, that every therapeutic phenomenon has as its principle the return to the natural type from which they had deviated; to determine precisely the cases where each one comes into play… this is the general idea of this work”. [11]

Canguilhem uses this prevalent model of pathology as affected normalcy as an introduction against which he later argues. However his aim to locate a drive within medicine to cure, begins with the exposure of medicine as wanting to reform. Medicine’s drive to return to ‘normalcy’ sick states of being holds up as desirable a single example of that which the discourse deems acceptable as a state of being. Canguilhem evinces the alignment of early physiology with theories of pleasure located around a return to a ‘normal’ equilibrium and a healthy state.  Pathology is inextricable from physiology in the same way that pleasure is inextricable from the flesh in traditional discourse, most particularly in Foucault’s analysis from the Greeks to the Victorians. [12] The study of pathology and physiology and the study of pleasure’s relationship with the body both focus on quantifiable measures but without the potential for transformation that a focus on quantity (to do with time) rather than quality (to do with space and the object in space) could offer. Physiology and pathology work within a system that requires time only within a space. Because the degree of variation in physiology and pathology is not one that evolves forward but one that works within a rigid measurable space and simply traverses backwards and forwards along the measure, the subject moving in time can never exceed the limits or borders of the measurable space. It is never an ‘unknowable’ or limitless space or time but a conflation of time and space to a precise parameter of possibility. Both physiology and what I shall term the ‘history of desire’, refute the unbound momentum of pleasure. Quantitative measure not only eradicates any ability to theorize pleasure as independent but retains, in both discourses, an adamant beneficial ‘state’ of normalcy which claims not to be driven by a moral or subjective code but a physiologically, (and hence supposedly ‘truthfully’) system of temperance. Illness comes to refer not simply to a ‘wrong’ state of being, but rather an extreme version of something found within normalcy. Canguilhem states

To define the abnormal as too much or too little is to recognize the normative character of the so-called normal state. This normal or physiological state is no longer simply a disposition which can be revealed and explained as fact, but a manifestation of an attachment of some value. When Bégin defines the normal state as one where ‘the organs function with all the regularity and uniformity of which they are capable’, we cannot fail to recognize that, despite Broussais’s horror of all ontology, an ideal of perfection soars over this attempt at a positive definition. [13]

Perfection, both in medicine and in the history of desire, is not something to aspire toward or aim to attain, as it is in certain other discourses. Unlike the case in religion or athletics, the perfect state in medicine and desire is something necessary rather than optional, something which is forced upon the subject as the subject’s own responsibility rather than a goal admittedly set up by the given discourse towards which the subject looks for guidance. Perfection masquerades as the minimum necessary state for corporeal well-being, and the term normal in both medicine and desire is a degree zero level of being which I shall discuss further on. However because normal is degree zero rather than a ‘thing’ it can claim no value judgement. It does not suggest a super-human in morals or flesh; it instead demands a regulation of subjectivity that is compulsory for the good of the subject, not the good of the discourse that prescribes it. A level state of being is demanded of the subject and a point of beneficial equilibrium both in pleasure and in the physiological flesh is necessary rather than suggested.

The bound continuum of normalcy and health clearly exhibits how easily the point of ‘normal’ could alter through time, but precisely where the alteration passes from normal to pathological or excessive is unclear. If pleasure is not a ‘thing’ and healthy desire is not through specific act or love-object then how is the system structured? This emphasis on something far less tangible than object or act leads to the question, how was the level of excess measured? Foucault points to the Greeks’ use of the concept of self, the idea of ones own subjectivity and the success one has in mastering this subjectivity, in moderating the needs of the flesh and of privileging higher epistemological pursuits. So there was, theoretically, no need for outside regulation or for the subject itself to renounce anything, as the Christian tradition encourages. The subject instead was put into a master/slave relationship with itself and in order to feel master of its own self, the subject regulated its slavery to its desire. [14] Nothing therefore, theoretically, was prohibited; only over-use or indulgence in something. This contrasts with the modern idea of forbidden desire versus sanctioned desire, that certain acts or objects are simply unacceptable in any situation as vehicles for pleasure. The main vehicle for pleasure in this book is horror films and the traumas they depict, traditionally at best low-art and at worst, implicitly bad for the mental stability of the subject. Horror films are either ‘bad for you’ or banned when referred to in a negative manner. But modernity is somewhat reverting in its ‘pop’ cultural regulation of the self, an activity which continues as subjects are lulled into believing they always have ‘choice’ over their activities. They simply have to moderate whatever they choose. Where certain things are forbidden, other things, even those that are good for us are condemned the moment they become excessive, indulgent or intensely consuming.

Addicts within the phenomena of addiction prevalent in the US are the new Greeks in their obsession with those who cannot regulate the self in the face of the object or act of addiction. Exercise addicts, sex addicts, food addicts and any other phenomena taken beyond a certain, hazy acceptable point is a potential site for losing the self in the face of the desired object. [15] This modern pathology is a co-joining of the Victorian disdain for certain objects, and the Greek’s anxiety about taking pleasure too far. Ironically as soon as modernity pathologized certain ‘addictions’ the factor of pleasure seemed to disappear and the self suddenly becomes victim, or to paraphrase the Greeks, slave to its addiction. Pleasure is replaced by pain, a necessary result of the loss of ‘self’.

For the Greeks pleasure can be constructed as a degree which effects the self. It is not a solid entity, which can be visualized or tangibly grasped, nor is it a completely intangible phantasy of effect that escapes study and pathologization. Foucault points out the definition of pleasure as intensity or degree was the same for “medicine and moral philosophy alike”. [16] The division in discourse, which exists today between, for example, the pleasure of seeing art versus the pleasure which biologists can locate and articulate within the seratonic, dopominic and other chemical emissions of the human brain, was not so distinct. [17] The Greek body and its desire for acts of pleasure was an ontological object where the effects of excessive pleasure were medically threatening to the self for the same reasons as they were morally or philosophically threatening. This may have something to do with the absence of the Cartesian mind/body split in the Hellenistic world, but the ancients did have divisions of discourse, [18] this was simply not one of them. This does not mean that all pleasure was figured the same in Greek ideology. But pleasure was not divided clearly into sections depending on who theorized it.

Desire as a concept related to pleasure was almost indivisible from the pleasure it aimed to achieve in ancient Greece. Foucault states:

In the experience of the aphrodisia… act desire and pleasure formed an ensemble whose elements were distinguishable certainly, but closely bound to one another. It was precisely their close linkage that constituted one of the essential characteristics of that form of activity. Nature intended… that the performance of the act be associated with pleasure, and it was this pleasure that gave rise to epithumia, to desire, in a movement that was naturally directed towards what ‘gives pleasure’. [19]

In certain ways this resembles the construction that both modern biology and the human sciences articulate in reference to experiencing of pleasure. Pleasure is seen as something, which, once experienced, formulates a desire for repetition of the act. In Greece this was almost a unified entity, an organism of experience. The terms pleasure and desire, though distinguishable, seem to have little, if any, independent life. They certainly suggest one another and the relationship between them is almost cyclical. The existence of a primary or first term does not seem evident. Each of the terms indicates the others and so forth. However the gap between the terms in modern thought is vast. Traditionally we desire to achieve pleasure, and pleasure achieved cements our desire for repetition, but not as an organism of desire/pleasure, simply as a subject desiring an isolated capital act, with aim, beginning and end.

Modern subjectivity is availed of a quotient of pleasure. Desire, act and pleasure, especially in biological and psychiatric discourse, are three terms frequently imagined with quotients between them, and an objective of equilibrium is the definite aim of the equation. Neither is this entirely untrue of the Greeks. The use of pleasure was a health and well-being issue. The notion of expenditure, [20] one not entirely dissipated in modern thought, posed a threat, in particular to the male. [21] While the expulsion of sperm was good for the existence of the species, too much was liable to put the body system out of balance and leave the self in a precarious state. A ‘normal’ amount still managed to put the self in the state of dejection that follows coitus, [22] a large amount leads to death. [23] Foucault elaborates:

Although the volume is small - proportionally larger, however, in men than in animals - living creatures deprive themselves of a whole portion of the elements that are essential to their own existence. One sees how in certain instances… the misuse of sexual pleasure might lead to death. [24]

In this instance the ‘death’ Foucault speaks of is most probably ‘masculine’ death. This notion of equilibrium seems one of the few points that remain constant in the use of the term pleasure from the Greeks to modern biology and psychiatry.

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