Enjoying It by Alfie Bown

Author:Alfie Bown [Bown, Alfie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78535-156-3
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2015-12-10T16:00:00+00:00

Even here the bias is implicit. It is as if already existing and constant structures of gender, class, race etc. explain and shape contemporary societies and everyday lives. The course asks how existing ideas of gender affect sports, but not how sports affect existing ideas of gender. These courses might explore how Beyoncé shows us the truth of an idea developed in gender studies, but they seem unlikely to see popular culture and everyday enjoyment as something itself challenging and transformative to our social world.

There is evidence that this ‘university discourse’ is by no means confined to the university itself, a point Lacan makes clear too. Much of the media seems to function with the logic of the university. A 2015 article in The Guardian featured seven philosophers or philosophy lecturers discussing a chosen philosophical idea in relation to a film. Whilst the philosophers, in most cases, were not particularly guilty of simply using the chosen film to prove an already existing point (though some were bordering on it), the title of the article was: ‘I watch therefore I am: seven movies that teach us key philosophical lessons.’45 The choice of title shows the acceptance of a certain relationship between philosophy and the world around it, a relationship that is one-way: the films reflect and prove philosophical ideas, allowing them to retain their status and relevance but without insisting those ideas are themselves changed and challenged.

This book has been about the regulation and rationalization of enjoyment, and it has shown how the more culturally acceptable enjoyment of high-brow literature and apparently ‘irrational’ or ‘useless’ enjoyment of mobile-phone games in fact work side-by-side to organize our pleasure. In a way, both can be seen as the arm of the master’s discourse. Neither, then, can be described as ‘resistance to oppressive power struggles,’ but there may be another alternative, an enjoyment that serves a more radical purpose.

In the psychoanalytic concept of ‘jouissance’ we might find what we are looking for. For Lacan, jouissance is an enjoyment that has no apparent purpose. In English translations of his work the word is usually kept untranslated because whilst it does mean ‘enjoyment,’ it also suggests a specifically self-destructive kind of sexual enjoyment or compulsion and should be thought of as separate from general ideas of pleasure. Jouissance is enjoyment that we cannot quite see, imagine, or measure the value of. There is no more accurate summary of this complex concept of jouissance than that given by Dylan Evans:

It is only in 1960 that Lacan develops his classic opposition between jouissance and pleasure, an opposition which alludes to the Hegelian/Kojevian distinction between enjoyment and pleasure. The pleasure principle functions as a limit to enjoyment; it is a law which commands the subject to ‘enjoy as little as possible.’ At the same time the subject constantly attempts to transgress the prohibitions imposed on his enjoyment, to go ‘beyond the pleasure principle.’ However, the result of transgressing the pleasure principle is not more pleasure but pain, since there is only a certain amount of pleasure that the subject can bear.

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