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| ISBN-13: | 9781785351563 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Collective Ink |
| Publication date: | 12/11/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 96 |
| Sales rank: | 967,984 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Enjoying It
Candy Crush and Capitalism
By Alfie Bown
John Hunt Publishing Ltd.
Copyright © 2014 Alfie BownAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78535-156-3
CHAPTER 1
Productive Enjoyment: Capitalism and Critical Theory
The work of art undertakes to produce entertainment in a responsible manner.
– Walter Benjamin
This chapter discusses how a great deal of enjoyment which appears to be radical and questioning of normative or dominant ideology can in fact serve those ideologies it aims to oppose. The chapter does this though a discussion of how critical theory is read and enjoyed. I hope the discussion can also shed light on other forms of enjoyment that are considered legitimate and even radical, so 'critical theory' operates as a kind of case study here. Though of course completely different forms, art-house film or acclaimed 'literary fiction' could have provided comparable examples. The chapter argues that despite the potential radicalism of the theory itself, it can be and often is enjoyed in a way that does nothing more than conform to the social injunction to enjoy that was discussed above as a way of establishing a subjectivity that suits modern capitalism.
Some of the categories that we might think of as legitimate enjoyment are independent film, art, theory and literature. These are all examples of enjoyment that we can be 'proud' to define ourselves by or enjoyment that carries 'cultural capital,' and all of them are value judgements. This is nothing new, and much academic study has been dedicated to showing this. They are all 'culture' in the way it was discussed by figures from Matthew Arnold in the 19-century to one of the fathers of literary criticism, F. R. Leavis, in the 1930s and 40s. Arnold famously defined culture as 'the best that has be thought or said,' and for Leavis there is a:
minority capable not only of appreciating Dante, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Hardy (to take major instances) but of recognizing their latest successors constitute the consciousness of the race (or of a branch of it) at a given time. Upon this minority depends our power of profiting by the finest human experience of the past; they keep alive the subtlest and most perishable parts of tradition. Upon them depend the implicit standards that order the finer living of an age, the sense [ ...] that the centre is here rather than there. In their keeping is the language, the changing idiom upon which fine living depends, and without which distinction of spirit is thwarted and incoherent. By 'culture' I mean the use of such language.
Leavis is much misunderstood and misused by those in literary studies who celebrate their own supposed progress from the ideas expressed here; Leavis is taken as the embodiment of the problematic endorser of the 'literary canon' that right-on literary critics like to imagine they have now moved beyond. As literary and critical theorists such as Terry Eagleton have long since pointed out, 'anything can be literature, and anything which is regarded as unalterably and unquestionably literature – Shakespeare, for example – can cease to be literature,' meaning that 'there is no such thing as a literary work or tradition which is valuable in itself, regardless of what anyone might have said or come to say about it.' Most universities teach this point to first-year undergraduate students as an introduction to theory, and there is nothing new in repeating it here in the context not only of literature but of a wider range of forms of enjoyment that seem to be culturally 'legitimate' in the same way that 'literature' is simply writing that passes some test of legitimacy. It is obvious that in some ways enjoyment has been canonized and organized in a similar way. The point that needs making is that unlike with literature and art, when it comes to what we enjoy, any value judgement we make is (at least usually) unconscious. As discussed in the introduction, Pierre Bourdieu's idea of 'taste' holds a key here, showing that whilst our taste is completely learned and culturally determined, we forget this and imagine that our taste is instinctive. What we see with the regulation of enjoyment is that we are not as free as we think from Leavis's 'backwardness.' In other words, when we choose what to enjoy, our unconscious mind is just as organized and judgemental as Leavis's conscious mind, but we are not in control of this judgement.
The chapter will now look at the enjoyment of reading in light of this, discussing critical theory as something one has to develop a taste for, and asking whether the enjoyment of it does not involve something like Bourdieu's idea of an enchanted experience in which we forget the cultural acquisition of our taste and enjoy the material as though we have a 'gift of nature' allowing us to enjoy it: an almost natural connection to what we enjoy. By calling this chapter 'productive enjoyment' I suggest that this enjoyment, though it aims to be non-conformist, can end up producing subjectivities that suit a capitalist and individualist agenda.
There is a general sense that the enjoyment of reading critical theory is not only legitimate but also radical and opposed to the normative structures in place in our capitalist society, as if the fact that someone enjoys critical theory shows that they are at some deep level at odds with capitalism. Enjoyment plays a key role in the construction of this appearance, since it is the fact that the material is enjoyed that adds the appearance of depth to the subjectivity doing the enjoying. Whilst reading and working on critical theory (without it mattering whether this is found enjoyable) is or can be an act of political resistance, it is when enjoyment comes in that the identity of the anarchist is established: if someone finds critical theory hard work and near-impossible to break into, or they 'don't get it,' they are perceived of (from within critical theory circles) as somehow conformist, whereas if one 'enjoys' critical theory they are imagined to possess that 'gift of nature' that makes them a radical subject at odds with 'the system.' Our ideas surrounding the enjoyment of critical theory and political resistance lead to the celebrated identity of the radical, which is another way of being a subject that suits capitalism (constantly enjoying and with a natural taste for what is enjoyed) and not the kind of subjectivity that much critical theory would like to promote at all. In his famous essay 'What is an Author?' Michel Foucault, a major advocate of Deleuze (discussed below), describes how capitalism, by imposing the identity and ownership rights that come with the label of 'author,' has limited the transgressive potential of the writer. With enjoyment, it is as if the reader acquires ownership rights too, seeing the text as their own and affirming their identity through it, reducing the transgressive potential of the reader too. Despite the reams of 'reader response theory,' no one seems to have quite made this point that the reader is similarly commodified.
Of course, critical theory can and does offer new ways of thinking about political and cultural structures that resist existing shibboleths in the language we have to discuss our political situation, and this is not in any kind of dispute here. The two examples of critical theory discussed here contribute to the exploration of how enjoyment in our society is rationalized and regulated, seeking alternatives to these structures. Without any criticism of the theorists discussed, the point is that the enjoyment of this critical theory indicates that the material is often consumed and enjoyed as a product in precisely the way the theories in question would oppose, and in precisely the way the structures that they attempt to resist would command. The two examples of theory discussed below should not be read as a commentary on those theorists themselves, nor as an attempt to contribute to academic work on these theorists, but as small 'case studies' of how their work is enjoyed in relation to a few of the key ideas that each theorist has developed. This analysis is partly about the study of enjoyment, but it is also about the enjoyment of studying. In these case studies, the theorists will be used against the grain of their own enjoyment to show that the systems of enjoyment that they help to make visible to us are so deeply entrenched that the enjoyment of their own texts is often dictated by these systems.
Case Study 1: Deleuze and Guattari
Some of the most enjoyable critical theorists to read are almost certainly Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Their texts, the most famous and popular of which are the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, are written in an enticing and creative style which feels both modernist and postmodernist, though they are careful to distance their arguments from the latter on certain points. Their theory could not be more directly against the individualist identities that suit capitalism, arguing (as the title of their collection suggests) that whilst the modern subject is instructed to think of itself as singular and individual, it is in fact completely schizophrenic, a multiple and split subject. This is an idea that helps to explore the function of enjoyment in the 21 century (see Case Study 2 of this section).
There is a definite connection between these enjoyable books and the theories put forward within them. For Deleuze and Guattari, subjects should be seen as 'desiring machines' which derive pleasure from plugging themselves into all sorts of other desiring machines, which can be anything from other humans to the natural world to cultural and media entertainment. Which machines we plug into is organized by our social discourse. For Deleuze and Guattari, the key way in which capitalism organizes its subjects is through an organization of desire. They argue that whilst desire exists outside of capitalism, it is not a desire for something until cultural factors and discourses map and channel desire into articulable and organized directions, turning unregulated desire into desire that serves the purposes of capital by directing it towards an object, making us desire things.
Much of Deleuze and Guattari's work, as indicated by their title Anti-Oedipus, makes a criticism of psychoanalysis on the grounds that psychoanalysis is guilty of normalizing a certain fixed structure of the subject and implying that this is the only way that a subject could be formed. In speaking of the subject as being structured in a particular way, psychoanalysis can be guilty of foreclosing on the possibility of the subject being formed in other alternative ways. A central idea for their discussion and for this argument is the idea of 'lack.' It is lack that makes us, as capitalist subjects, desire a multitude of things which we imagine on some level will fulfil us or prevent us feeling that we are lacking something. Even if we know the iPhone 5 will not really complete us, we still desire it as if it will.
Deleuze and Guattari's critique of psychoanalysis hinges on the fact that whilst psychoanalysis sees this lack as originary and all desire as a subsequent relation to this original lack (so that we desire the things we are lacking), Deleuze and Guattari see a possibility of desire that precedes any organization of the subject, arguing in opposition to Lacan that 'lack is a counter-effect of desire.' For them, desire comes first and is channeled and regulated so that it appears to be the result of lack. This is a very important point because for psychoanalysis the construction of the modern subject as a lacking being is the key part of its formation and all later experiences of enjoyment are in relation to this originary or formational lack. I will return to this in chapter 3 where psychoanalysis and enjoyment are discussed in detail.
For now what is important is that Deleuze and Guattari propose an experience of desire that is not to do with the subject and anything like its 'fulfilment,' which would be an idea of enjoyment based on the subject as lacking and of the things we enjoy as promising or simulating fulfilment (previous and many subsequent discussions of enjoyment have relied on this assumption). Instead, this experience of desire would break out of the structure of subjectivity given to us by capitalism. It sheds light on some of what we imagine to be 'productive' enjoyment, since this would be an enjoyment that is not only unproductive but completely against systems of production. In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari write:
Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject unless there is repression.
In short, for Deleuze and Guattari, once desire has an 'object,' once desire is for things, the subject is already formed and structured as a subject. Outside this structure would be a desire in which 'the subject is missing.' Though it is something of a jump to connect desire to enjoyment, it might still be possible to think of what a Deleuzian enjoyment would look like, an enjoyment in which 'the subject is missing.'
Deleuze and Guattari discuss the idea of a 'desire-delirium,' an unregulated experience of desire that is not a desire for something or directed towards an object, which would always be within a culturally mapped and organized subjectivity, but a moment where existing subjectivity is relinquished and 'missing.' In this light it might be possible to see the subject as an 'enjoying machine,' plugging into various other machines and experiencing what Deleuze and Guattari might call an 'enjoyment-delirium,' enjoyment that changes the subject or threatens its stability. There would be a danger, though, in thinking that this enjoyment could be outside capital or organization (since it is often when we think we are outside of ideology that it operates most powerfully on us) and even more of a danger if a divide is made between conformist and resistant enjoyments (since it would involve a value-judgement privileging one over the other). These risks aside, I later argue that the enjoyment we experience when watching 'Gangnam Style' might be thought of in this way as an enjoyment without a subject, but here the point is that the enjoyment of Deleuze's texts is often as far from this dream of an enjoyment without a subject as possible; the enjoyment of Deleuze often re-affirms the kind of subjectivity that Deleuze himself opposes.
Perhaps this can be thought of in terms of the enjoyment of the Deleuzian text itself. Deleuzian theory posits the idea of a limiting structure in which our desires are channeled and it proposes that we break out of these confines or at least open up the theoretical possibility of doing do. This is an oversimplified way of explaining Deleuze and Guattari's famous terms 'deterritorialization' and 'reterritorialization,' a breaking down of territorialized boundaries and confines acting on the subject and the openness to the formation of new structures in their place. For the reader, the experience of the text may mirror this (certainly if the text is working as Deleuze and Guattari might hope), and a feeling of enjoyment reading the text might have to do with a shift in subjectivity that the text aims not only to affirm but to achieve. It seems, on the one hand, that the way the theory is enjoyed is in perfect alignment with what the theory is expounding, and this point may go some way to explaining the popularity of Deleuze and Guattari both inside and outside of the academy. Enjoying Deleuze is seen by many as a breaking out of normative structures.
On the other hand, the points made above through Zizek ask that we look at this in yet another way. If Zizek shows that the main command of the superego is the command to 'enjoy,' then do we not see a conformation to this in our experiences of enjoying critical theory, a desire to enjoy the process of reading and working on theory, and a feeling that there might also be something radical in this enjoyment of working and reading? It is important to us that we should 'enjoy it,' but is this enjoyment really something we can positively invest in as a radical experience of shifting subjectivity? It may in some cases be just that, but it may also be (and perhaps at the same time) an enchanting experience of an individualist 'gift of nature' in which we forget that we have learned to enjoy the material and feel that it chimes with our identities and affirms our sense of a subject with radical potential experiencing a self-affirming affinity with the text. Most of the time when we enjoy Deleuze and Guattari we cannot say that 'the subject is missing' at all but that it is affirmed as a radical subject with legitimate taste.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Enjoying It by Alfie Bown. Copyright © 2014 Alfie Bown. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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Table of Contents
Contents
0. Introduction: Enjoying This,Enjoyment is the Key to Ideology,
1. Productive Enjoyment: Capitalism and Critical Theory,
Case Study 1: Deleuze and Guattari,
Case Study 2: Jean-Francois Lyotard,
2. Unproductive Enjoyment: 'A Culture of Distraction',
Case Study 1: The Candy Crush Saga,
Case Study 2: Football Manager Handheld,
3. Irrational Enjoyment: Jouissance and Enjoyment Studies,
Case Study 1: 'Gangnam Style' and Twerking,
Case Study 2: Game of Thrones, Brueghel and Bosch,
4. Conclusion: 'To Enjoy or Not to Enjoy' and Illegal Enjoyment,
Endnotes,