On Pleasure

Kris Liu

Authors’ Background and Thesis

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Theodor W. Adorno

German philosopher, psychologist and composer, famous for critical theory of society. Adorno lived in the year of Nazi Germany and exiled to Los Angeles later. His background determined his general pessimistic views to cultural industry. On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening is an enormously influential piece in The Culture Industry. It discusses music in mass media and the forms we interact with music in our life. Pleasure in mass culture is a major concern to Adorno. He is ambivalent to the pleasure we received from popular music for it is a pseudo- pleasure in his term. He calls for the return of high music and high art, even though they might not be as enjoyable as the mass manufactured hit songs.

Laura Mulvey

British Feminist film theorist. She wrote Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, one of the most cited essays in media history. Using Freudian psychoanalysis to analyze the underlying psychological pleasure in traditional Hollywood cinema, she invented the term “the male gaze” and contextualize pleasure within the phallocentric regime.

According to Mulvey, pleasure of looking, more specifically pleasure of looking at women, can be unfold in two layers: scopophilia voyeurism and narcissism identification.

The first fold, scopophilia voyeurism, is the practice of projecting a “controlling and curious gaze” on other people as object, which forms a “voyeuristic phantasy”.

Secondly, the pleasure extend to a narcissistic one when spectators identify themselves with characters on screen, similar to how infants identify with the images in mirror as something bigger, stronger, more independent. This cinematic fascination is strong enough that leads to a temporary loss of ego, and it brings the audience back to their mirror stage again.

In a word, the first scopophilic voyeurism pleasure arises from looking at female characters on screen as an object, the second layer is pleasure comes from narcissistic identification with male protagonists as an independent person in control of the gaze.

Mulvey’s solution to counter this phallocentric way of film watching is the underground experimental films. In mid 19th century while Mulvey is writing, directors and artist started to discover and develop with all forms of cinema escaping from the classical Hollywood narrative model. She rooted for the destroy of pleasure, since the pleasure build on the male gaze is a problem for her as a feminist theorist.

Steven Shaviro

Shaviro, a contemporary American philosopher and academic, also a big film fanboy. As he said, he cannot resist the inducement of cinema. Shaviro recognizes the inability to contextualize the pleasure through psychoanalysis and semiotics theories, and he disagrees with the Hegelian structuralism equations to supresses the body.

He embraces the natural perception and raw sensation. He believes pleasure from image has relation to aestheticized, and has nothing to do with capacity of language or the process of signification. The perception that generate pleasure in film viewing for him is a new kind of perception liberated from representation, idealization, recognition and designation.

Realizing the immediacy of sensation from the speeds and delays of temporal duration, Shaviro stated we are all masochists in front of films, violently viscerally affected by this image and this sound.

“I am confronted and assaulted by a flux of sensations that I can neither attach to physical presences nor translate into systematized abstractions.” In this way, film produced a new automatism of perception that make psychoanalytic film theories obsolete.

For him, a wide variety of cinematic pleasures are predicated explicitly upon the decentered freedom from the constraints of subjectivity, a non-subjective perception.

Background and Definition

“pleasure”, the very sense of enjoyment we seek and receive when we encounter various kinds of media: going to a cinema, scrolling on social media page, or playing hit songs while cooking dinner. The discussion of pleasure in media history remains a major concern from Theodor W. Adorno’s Cultural industry written in 1944, Laura Mulvey’s influential and one of the most cited essay in cinema studies history, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, and continues to contemporary American philosopher Steven Shaviro.

Figuring out the “pleasure” in modern and precedented forms of media, whether it is psychological, physical, conscious, unconscious, sensory or critical, is essential to understand the fundamental relationship between human psychology and the technology of media, how media functions, and how media shapes our senses, bodies and experience in the world.

“Pleasure”, in context of media history, has always been a slippery term to define. Theorists using the word could refer to different senses of pleasure in their esssays. Adorno, constantly projecting an ambivalent view on “media”, or in his term, “culture industry”, describeds the pleasure we receive while listening to hit songs and any other mass culture product as pseudo- pleasure, which is a false sense of satisfaction being fed by consumerism cultural products at the age of capitalism.

For Mulvey, based on Freudian psychoanalytical theory, pleasure in media is always determined by phallocentric regime unconscious. It expands to scopophilia voyeurism or narcissistic identification, which we will discuss later.

Unlike Adorno or Mulvey who both project strong negativities on usage of media, Shaviro is more optimistic, or at least he does not deny the pleasure we gain from the inducement or temptation of media, especially films. For Shaviro, the effort to theorize psychological pleasure in media (through psychoanalysis or semiotics) is meaningless. Pleasure, particularly the bodily enjoyment, is something to embrace and surrender to. Trying to theorize or contextualize it is a betrayal to the original purpose of pleasure.

These authors, following a chronological order, demonstrate how the perspectives and analysis on pleasure change across time, evolving while the forms of media expanding and developing.

Forms of usage

In order to elaborate on the forms of approaching pleasure, this section furthers discussion by synthesize pleasure to five common themes in media history: psychoanalysis, perception, masochism, sadism, fetishism and displeasure.

Use of Psychoanalysis

Pleasure commonly considered as a psychological state of mind, Freud’s influential methodology of psychoanalysis is a common approach adopted by media theorists. Regarding the use of psychoanalysis, theorists have distinct opinions, specifically Mulvey and Shaviro.

Laura Mulvey described her use of psychoanalysis as “political use of psychoanalysis”. She asserted that psychoanalysis is used to “discover where and how the fascination of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination already at work”. Being aware of the paradox of using the exact model shapes the visual pleasure to analyze and synthesize it in narrative films, Mulvey claims that her use of Freudian psychoanalysis is appropriate as a “political weapon”, because it helps to analyze the patriarchal society’s unconscious desire to cinema which otherwise would be invisible. Despite the paradoxical nature of psychoanalysis, it remains an useful tool to advance the cinematic pleasure in a systematic and intellectual way. More importantly, Freudian psychoanalysis particularly suits her case because the sexual difference undertone in his psychoanalysis, and Mulvey here is particularly interested in the pleasure comes from the femininity/female representation in films.

However, Shaviro, a more contemporary author, directly addressing Mulvey and also earlier yet influential semiotic media theory of Christian Metz (whose dealing with cinematic identification) , states their use of psychoanalysis is, in fact, problematic. Their psychoanalysis paradigm fails the purpose of their own theory commenting on media. In Shaviro’s opinion, Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema is more totalizing and monolithic than any films she discussed can achieve. Constructing the argument based on phallocentric psychoanalysis proves that Mulvey cannot avoid the very norms she tries to destroy or criticize. Shaviro asserts that Mulvey and Metz are afraid of immersing themselves to the ”insidious blandishments of visual fascination”.

Shaviro’s anti-psychoanalysis or semiotic tendency comes from his belief that film theory based on these two regime limit the readings and pleasure of film viewing experience.

According to him, because Mulvey and Metz’s essays’ enormous influence in media theory, they turned out to be a reinforcement of the critical and theoretical discourse on films. “psychoanalysis remains the sole and ubiquitous horizon of serious”. Shaviro’s Cinematic Body attempts to break the previous film theorists’ dependence on psychoanalysis (or semiotics), and tries to offer an alternative that allow the seriousness to produce without these two major but ancient pillar in media history.

Adorno, who asserts that the concept of music fetishism cannot be psychologically derived.”every ‘psychological’ aspect, every ersatz satisfaction depends on such social substitution.” Did not even adopt the psychoanalysis model for he believes the music at his day in America deos not even reach the level of psychology to produce pleasure. Pleasure to Adorno is more like a social construction than psychological outcome, which means that the use of psychoanalysis would be pointless. Noted that Adorno is writing in the age of world war 2, where he witnessed the use of films, music and all kinds of media as a political propaganda by the nation. Therefor pleasure to him is detached from psychology, or at least not this psychology like Mulvey or Shaviro is referring.

Perception of Pleasure (the gaze and regressive listening)

Writing regarding cinema in general, one aspect Shaviro and Mulvey cannot avoid is analyzing the looking relationship with film. Mulvey initiated the idea of “the male gaze” which set the milestone of feminism discussion on film. Extended from Freud, the spectators’ eyes looking at a movie screen are “controlling and curious gaze”. “the gaze” takes other people as subjects. Furthermore, the male gaze is the way of looking as a spectator function like a dominant male in control. It also means that the pleasure in looking can never be separated from sexuality. The male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly. Women in film are simultaneously on display and ready to be looked at. Female stars’ appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they connote a sense of “to-be-looked-at-ness”.

However, Mulvey also noted female characters’ visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line”. Rear Window would be a perfect example to illustrate her point. Every time Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) shows up, the narrative brings to a halt and herself becomes the subject to be looked at with her thousand-dollar-worth dress from Paris runway.

In this way, the gaze of the characters within the screen story and spectators within the auditorium overlaps on one erotic object: She. The two layers of looking are neatly combined without breaking the diegesis.

As Mulvey asserted that audience are associated with the male controllers’ gaze, Shaviro suggested we are associated with, in fact, the victims.

Shaviro understands visual fascination as a passive irresistible compulsion, and not an assertion of the active mastery of the gaze. In another approach, he disagrees with the “male gaze” because he thinks we, as audience, do not always have control of “the gaze”.

“It is not the gaze that demands images, but images that solicit and sustain – while remaining indifferent to- the gaze.” This is how Shaviro describes the looking relationship functions in Andy Warhol’s Blowjob and Empire. In film, there’s no functional mastery of the gaze for Shaviro. In terms of film watching experience, Mulvey described that sitting in a completely dark auditorium seeing a story world unfold on screen gives voyeuristic pleasure by satisfying the looking into a private world. Shaviro, in contrast, argues that sitting in the dark theatre, isolating himself from the rest of the audience, cuts off the possibility for normal perception. His gaze is “arrested by the sole area of light, a flux of moving images.” This is a wholly passive process opposite to the controlling gaze that Mulvey suggested.

Despite the disagreement, bear in mind that Shaviro’s work published decades after Mulvey’s, the cinema industry had significantly changed, many alternative films and genres has been explored and emerged, which gave them a different scope in writing.

The gaze to Mulvey is a bearer of socopophilia pleasure; an ideological artifact, while for Shaviro it is the simple passive practice of sitting in a theatre and receiving information on the screen.

Since they already show diverse perspective on cinematic perception, it is understandable for them to show a sharp distinction to the following discussion on sadism and masochism.

Adorno, writing much earlier, concerns about music, and focus on the discussion of listening in music. “Regressive listening” is the term he used to describe the sensory relationship in the modern American context. It is a low level of listening that is neither intellectual nor artistic. It is purely sensory and not focused. It is a consequence produced by machinery of distribution, and particularly by advertising. Regressive listening confirms the joy of repetition. Adorno noted “regressive listeners behave like children. Again and again and with stubborn malice, they demand the one dish they have once been served”. Adorno, like Mulvey is criticizing the receiving process of media. The bodily perception is problematic to them.

Pleasure and Masochism

Both Shaviro and Adorno compared our encounter to mass media with the masochism nature of the experience, yet interestingly their views are completely different.

Shaviro, as he said, cannot resist the inducement of cinema, he describes his bondage to images as a masochistic one, and all the others should be too.

The spectatorial experience is almost always masochistic due to the condition of “meta-phsycical alienation and ideological delusion”. By that he means when we are sitting in a dark cinema theatre, passively receiving the information unfolding on screen, we already took the masochistic position because we are alienated and excluded from other things happening around him. Shaviro loves being masochistic in front of medias because he believes it is a new possibility of arguing cinematic experience. To him, the pleasure derived from media is inseparable from body, and our body is always a masochistic one when watching a film.

Adorno, similar to Shaviro, describe the mass culture as a “masochistic one”. Writing with the first handed experience in post-war German, he witnessed how media can be used as a political propaganda like how fascists’ regime are spread by UFA. He stated that the masochism comes of the sacrifice of individuality. “the doing of everybody else does. “This masochistic tendency cannot be isolated from the standard production of consumption goods. And media as part of goods produced in the system, leads to a manipulation of taste. Adorno compare the pleasure and fascination in media to “a prisoner who loves his cell because he has been left with nothing else to love”. This example implies Adorno’s negative view on masochistic nature of media, which place a stark contrast between him and Shaviro.

Mulvey offers a distinct view from the other two, claims that masochism’s pleasure is not generated from the audience directly, by enforced by female characters on screen. In Vertigo for instance, Judy Barton(Kim Novak), unwillingly transformed by Scottie to a Madeleine look-alike in an almost sadistic way. Her masochism “make her an ideal counterpart to Scottie’s sadistic voyeurism”, and that comes the visual pleasure. To Mulvey, the pleasure in more precisely related to sadism than masochism, which we will expand the discussion later.

Mulvey suggested that in conventional Hollywood cinemas, pleasure comes from the sadism nature of audience projecting “the male gaze” on the female protagonist. The sadism acts of recognizing oneself as the main male actor. The sadism of the audience lies precisely through the association with voyeurism. The spectators are in control of the gaze and they are demanding, the demand for a story, they demand something happens, they demand a good ending, they demand punishment or forgiveness. Therefore, this sadism relation does not simply lie in the fetishistic scopophilia, but also in the narrative itself.

Hitchcock’s Vertigo as a handy example, Judy Barton does not only present in an erotic way to satisfy the sadistic male gaze, but also, She falls off the rooftop in the end, punished by the fraud she did.

Pleasure and Fetishism

All three theorist shares an interest in fetishism in pleasure, but they demonstrate it differently.

For Adorno, the fetishistic pleasure of listening comes from the repetition. One thing to note is that Adorno almost always use pleasure negatively. According to Adorno, the fetishism in music takes possession of the public valuation of music voice for the necessity to evaluate art. In order to evaluate the quality of an intangible artifact like music, people need to hang on some standard, in the case of music, it's the voice.

The fetishism comes from the isolation; the fetishism comes from the repetition. That said, the fetish of music torn away from the real meanings of music, which far from the meaning of the whole. The highlight has been transformed into a “conglomeration of irruptions”. The climax is repeated over and over angina and the organization of the whole has lost its significance. Combining with mass culture and the masochism placed within it, repetition also occurs in the domain that “the same things show itself in many ways”. The prevail presence of one subject lead to the fetishism and stimulate a sense of pleasure through the repetitive exposure to the senses. Alienation and sensory pleasure produces fetishism.

Mulvey, like Adorno, is not the biggest fan of fetishism in media, nor the pleasure comes with fetishism. Like other arguments produced by Mulvey, she believes the heart of fetishism in the media is the phallocentric regime at work. Women are the fetish object. Continue using the Freudian modes of psychoanalysis and following the castration anxiety, the two options to evade from this anxiety in narrative cinema are either: devaluation, punishment or saving the guilty object; or fetishism the object so that it completely disavowal the castration and it becomes reassuring and not dangerous any more. The latter one, named by Mulvey as “fetishistic scopophilia”, can be understood as the beautiful appearance of the object (female stars in the film), so they become pleased and satisfying to watch. The eroticising and focusing on a female stars’ heels, dress, lips or the bun on Madeleine’s head. As Mulvey stated, the ultimate example of fetish scopophilia would be Sternberg’s movies, where “the powerful look of the male protagonist is broken in favour of the image in direct erotic rapport with the spectator.” In this way, female stars are no longer the bearer of guilt but a perfect fetish object which is made for close-ups in every angle, and incite fascination and pleasure.

Shaviro is directly criticizing Mulvey’s view on fetishism, claims in her account, “the fetishism fascination has been pushed to the point where they explode.” As he explains “the cinematic mechanisms that objectify and fetishism women’s bodies are not the consequence of phallocentrism; rather, it is phallocentrism.” In Shaviro’s analysis of Blue Steels, the fetish fascination in film are reversed, the gun associated with the female protagonist is fetishized, which does not obey Mulvey’s rule of narrative cinema.

The fetish pleasure to Shaviro is something purer, as basic as film watching per se. By using examples of French New wave director Godard who specialized in making a detached film watching experience, he further elaborated his point on fetishistic pleasure.

The presentation of image generates fetishism. Godard’s extreme close-ups last for a long time to suspend our gaze. The shot of coffee without any narrative importance or representational significance is simply an image that “mutely and fascinatingly soliciting our attention.” We, as spectators, are simply compelled to these images for their strange aesthetic appeal. This fetishistic nature generated by this type of filmmaking is considered as a pleasure to be enjoyed and immersed by Shaviro, but not criticized like Adorno or Mulvey asserted.

Displeasure in pleasure

It is inevitable to discuss the opposite of pleasure in order to understand pleasure, and they might not in contrary to each other. Displeasure for Mulvey is an essential alternative of film viewing. For her, breaking normal pleasurable expectations is the only way to conceive a new language of desire, which is something she called passionate detachment. As Mulvey’s whole discussion of pleasure is based on phallocentric ideas, it is not hard to identify why she is anti-pleasure in narrative cinema. Pleasure, for Mulvey, is something to destroy. She upholds the underground film that is reluctant to “the male gaze”, like Andy Warhol’s film which is boring rather than pleasing to watch. One thing Shaviro and Mulvey agree on is the Warhol’s film. Shaviro praised Warhol’s film for his cinematic apparatus does not respond to any structural logic of subjectivity and described them as” machines for inducing and implanting voyeuristic effects.”

According to Shaviro, the sensory pleasure, the loss of control of one’s body is a part of the pleasure in losing ourselves in a completely dark auditorium. The true pain for media theory for Shaviro probably comes from the effort to theorize and contextualize cinematic pleasure, especially in the dominant regime of psychoanalysis or semiotics.

Adorno stated that ”the new phase of the musical consciousness of the masses is defined by displeasure in pleasure.” As he explicitly said “the words ‘enjoyment of art’ sound funny”. Pure art forms are not produced for enjoyment. Displeasure comes with the intelligence and seriousness of high art. He and Mulvey, are rooting for a way to approach media that detached from pleasure.

Reference

Mulvey, Laura. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Columbia University Press, 1986.

Adorno, Theodor W., “on the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening”, THE CULTURE INDUSTRY, 1972.

Shaviro, Steven. “Film Theory and Visual Fascination”. Cinematic Body, University of Minnesota Press, 1989.