Beauty, Sex, and the Banality of Pleasure

Probably you remember that Jeremy Bentham had a riff he called the "hedonic calculus." The idea was that you could figure out what the right thing to do was by calculating "units of pleasure." So for example, going out and getting drunk and dancing tonight would give you seven units of pleasure but cost you four pains tomorrow morning. Obviously you're coming out ahead of the game, and I guess we should conclude that you are morally obligated to get drunk and dance tonight. Bentham put a lot of intellect into making this apparently ridiculous approach plausible, and you've got to say that he did a surprisingly good job considering how hard it really is phenomenologically to calculate pleasures. Is the blast worth the hangover and perhaps the regret etc? Well it's hard to say, isn't it? And the answer's likely to be different last night and this morning.

You probably also remember the early attack on utilitarianism, or at least the attacks that Bentham and Mill themselves canvassed on the way to the argument. There was the "pushpin" objection, where the question that arose was whether a children's game called pushpin was as good as reading Milton if it yielded the same number of pleasure units. And then I remember Mill assaying the argument that hedonistic utilitarianism was a philosophy for pigs because it would seem that the best life was just grubbing for slop and enjoying the considerable pleasures that accompany such activity. Bentham and Mill disagreed about how to deal with this, if I remember rightly: Bentham bit the bullet and said that if the quantity of pleasure really was the same then pushpin really was just as good as poetry. Mill, on the other hand, tried to formulate a hierarchy of pleasures and say that some pleasures were better than others. And he appointed experts to judge about this: people who had experienced both the supposed pleasures of the mind and the pleasures of the body were to return from their safaris into ecstasy and tell us what to do.

A couple of hundred years of attacks on utilitarianism is plenty, but I want to focus here on the meaning of the word "pleasure." Let's think about some experiences: taking a hot bath; having sex; reading War and Peace; smoking crack. Now is there some one sensation that all these experiences have in common? Really think seriously about that for a minute. Well there's not. But all these experiences can be positively valued in the sense that they could be experiences we seek. Maybe that's all we mean by pleasure, in which case I guess various forms of hedonism would be trivial.

The thing is that "pleasure" is an ordinary-language term and not, or not only, a philosophers' term of art. And it seems to me that it indicates a sort of fuzzy generalized enjoyment into which you can lapse or relax; I think "pleasure" is the perfect word to describe the warm bath experience for example. Now on the other hand to say that sex is pleasurable is not exactly wrong, but it's also not exactly right. I want you to think about your most intense sexual experiences, and I think you'll see that "pleasure" is the wrong word. It's not that you "enjoyed" such experiences; it's that they were extreme experiences, what Bataille calls "limit experiences": or experiences "at the extreme limits of the possible." If you roll over in bed and say "I enjoyed that," it's almost a critique.

Very intense sexual experiences often experiment with taboos and their transgression. There is of course a rush in doing something one is not supposed to do. But the feeling that one gets as one lapses or is seduced or attacks one's way into the transgression is not pleasure, though perhaps pleasure is involved at some point at some level. Often sexuality plays with and in pain, for one thing. But my point really is the inadequacy of the terms "pleasure" and "pain" in the face of very intense experience.

Or let's try food. OK: the experience of eating a good meal is more or less a model of pleasure; even Mill and Bentham were on to that. And if you and I go to Baskin-Robbins for sundaes, we'll be having a pleasurable experience. On the other hand, good food or serious food is what we might call difficult. If you go to Thai restaurant and order hot, I wonder if you are doing it because eating extremely hot food is pleasurable. Well not exactly, if you follow me. I remember how long it took me to cultivate a taste for beer: I didn't keep drinking it because I enjoyed its bitterness. Or we might even think of the effects of beer (which is what I was actually seeking). There is a pleasure in being drunk, at least under certain circumstances, but just as often it is a complicated experience of self-medication in which your consciousness is dulled and you are seeking that. And it's not quite right to say that you're just seeking escape from pain either. What you're seeking is a kind of extreme experience that is really not about pleasure or pain at all.

My wife, who's a former heroin user, recently told me the story of the first time she shot up. She was with her friend Lowell and they got utterly sick; she says that they were laying on her front lawn puking their guts out. After that, she went back after that experience over and over again. If you think she was motivated by pleasure, then I think you don't really understand what substance abuse is like or why people do it.

Let's consider my friend Karmen McKendrick, the philosopher. Perhaps you know that she has wings scarred into her back. She had them made by cutting with razor blades, and they have to be re-cut every year or two. Now I wonder if you think that would be fun. And yet there's no doubt that she consciously decided to undergo that experience. In fact, trying to get an experience like that onto some little schedule of pleasures and pains, trying to slap the hedonic calculus on it is just utterly the wrong approach. You've got to get past the talk of pleasures and pains if you're going to get any decent view of this thing or of most things.

So one thing that is wrong-utterly and obviously wrong, it seems to me-is that hedonism is descriptive of human actions, that people are always or even usually motivated by in their actions by pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Descriptive hedonism is radically inaccurate in two ways. First it lumps experiences into the category of pleasures that are so varied and incompatible with one another that using one term to cover them all just makes a hash of them. And second, it's just flat-out wrong: people often or perhaps characteristically seek pain, or pursue experiences that are not clearly either pleasures or pains, or are both, or to which, simply, the vocabulary of pleasure and pain is radically inadequate.

Pleasure, let's face it, is banal. The simple pleasure of the Baskin-Robbins sundae is banal in comparison to the complicated experience of the beautifully prepared meal. The pleasure of the sundae is sweet, childish. I'm not against pleasure because I'm not against banality: you can't live without it. But what I am saying is that the concept of pleasure doesn't help us to understand our most interesting or intense experiences. That is a truth that has been known to all the great ascetics; they knew that in turning away from pleasure they were turning toward a whole range of intense experiences in which pleasure was not even in question. In the religious ecstasy that may be the ascetic's goal, or in the continual experience of self-overcoming that moves him toward that goal, pleasure is repudiated until it is simply no longer in question. One reaches precisely toward experiences of which pleasure is not even a dimension, and one values them in part precisely because it's not.

The ascetic's basic truth is that the experience of pleasure is mundane; that the intensity and reality of life in the body begins at the moment in which pleasure is repudiated. The ascetic regards pleasure in its banality as a distraction and a temptation, tries to reach the point at which pleasure does not even need to be repudiated because it is not in play at all, tries to make himself over into a creature for whom questions of pain and pleasure do not arise at all. It is often thought that pain itself is the goal of an ascetic, which seems strange and perverse enough. In fact, according to the hedonist, such a person is impossible or thoroughly self-deluded. But the ascetic in the best case or the most ascetic case is not seeking the experience of pain even as he flagellates himself or whatever; he's seeking to reach a state of elevation in which pleasures and pains don't count at all, don't motivate or avert, don't even finally enter into consciousness. You see? The ascetic seeks to transcend pleasure precisely on the grounds that pleasure is banal, seeks a state from which all banality, all easy answers, all fluffy sweet concepts, all cotton candy, have been eradicated. God is not about pleasure. In fact God is about self-mutilation, stigmata: about the human condition and its elevation or vaporization into a state in which the banal or mundane has been annihilated.

But the goal of the ascetic is also to return to the mundane, purged of his own banality. The world is both the arena of asceticism and its labor, its test, its combat. Asceticism continually brings you back into the world by expunging the escape into pleasure and pain. One responds to the world initially as primarily the source of pleasures and pains: nipple, anus: suck, shit: filling and emptying, full and empty, in need, satiation. But that is first of all too generalized a taxonomy of the world and of the self: so generalized indeed that it loses the world and the self and declines into a kind of phantasmic arena of experience in which all that is real about the world is its effect on consciousness, and all that's real about consciousness is its bifurcation into seeking and evading. Asceticism seeks to re-imagine or revive the world, seeks to discover and explore experience's complexity and multivalence, seeks to affirm it in its complexity and externality to will.

To be sure, this experience of the world as a profusion can itself motivate a flight, and it is not coincidental that asceticism is conceived fundamentally as a technology for the repudiation of the world or as a yearning to overcome the body. But it devotes itself to achieving that precisely by an intense experience of the body in the world and a rendering up of the human into a chaos to which the bifurcation of experience into pleasure and pain is irrelevant or insufficient.

It seems to me, as I guess it seemed to Plato (judging by the Symposium) that the fundamental erotic experience, the fundamental experience of desire or ravishment or being swept away, is the experience of beauty. And beauty has always been associated with pleasure. Santayana, for instance, defined beauty as "objectified pleasure." Well let us think about that, now that we've taken on board the idea that pleasure is banal. Beauty, insofar as it gives pleasure, is also banal, as we should certainly see for instance, in the history of twentieth-century visual arts and art music. The artists of the twentieth century, or the important ones, repudiated beauty as a seduction, as something too easy.

I think I read someplace that people are regarded as beautiful to the extent that their features are typical or average. That is, if you find out how wide the average person's eyes are apart, or how long an average person's nose is, it turns out that people who are regarded as beautiful are close to that. So Brad Pitt and Christy Turlington are beautiful in that way: their noses aren't too long or whatever. Now that's banal. What Brad Pitt and Christy Turlington engage, of course, is sexual desire. And all our experience of beauty is parasitic on the fundamental experience of desire.

But we have already seen that sex plays in and around pleasure in complicated and unpredictable ways. And the white-bread fantasy where you're doing it with Brad is only the most banal fantasy imaginable. Really I hope your fantasy life is a little more fucked up than that. But what we might say about beauty, to return it from the realm of the banal into our complicated experience is this: that what is beautiful is an object of desire and what is an object of desire is beautiful. In that case, banal beauties would comport with banal desires. But complicated, conflicted, or self-overcoming desires might correspond to more fucked-up and interesting beauties.

Some beauties are fearsome or noisome or destructive or painful or bewildering. Some beauties are wrong or hateful or terrible or impossible. Really the world as a system is beautiful in all those ways. The world as a whole can be the object of desire, indeed is the paradigmatic object of desire and of dread toward which and away from which we are living our lives.

So anyway, this is how can we set beauty and art free from banality and philosophy: detach desire from pleasure. Really desire is multiple, contradictory, patinated, and distressed. You can desire pleasures, you can desire pains, and most often you desire sensations that are neither pleasures nor pains. We've still got to decouple desire from Aristotelian practical rationality, in which we organize our life for ends construed as constituting happiness. You know and I know that desire is impractical and irrational and that its objects use us as much as we use its objects; its objects seek us as much as we seek its objects.

Now if we start rethinking beauty along these lines funny things happen. For one thing, much of the art of the twentieth century might turn out to be beautiful. A famous example of unbeautiful art is Picasso's Guernica: all those bodies being blown into distorted smithereens. It's a post-cubist rendering of a post-cubist scene: its horrifying distortion creates an objective correlative of the distortion it seeks to capture and convey. OK. Well, you know what?: someone wanted those people to be torn to bits. And Picasso wanted to paint it. And we want to experience Guernica maybe because we too want to see people torn to bits and here we get to do it at a safe distance in representation. And we want the Picasso too: imagine what would happen if the thing came up for auction.

You know beauty is about as sick and perverse as we are, because beauty is articulated in our desires. Look in the back of the Village Voice or the NYPress and see what it is that people want sexually: they want to copulate with monsters, maybe. The hermaphrodite body or "she-male" is a favorite style of pornography and prostitution: we want to enter the interstice and have it enter us: that is our desire and hence that is the beautiful.

And now I want to think about what happens to art when we release desire and hence beauty from banality. Picasso's beauty is a disturbed beauty or a distressed beauty and a complicated or disgusting beauty. But whatever kind of beauty it is, it is the beauty of a master. Picasso as is well known had a dictatorial streak: he was a "master" in the various twentieth-century acceptations of that term. His aesthetic lionized power was an expression of Picasso's own mastery of the form which he imposes on us: as we look at his work, he is our master. I think one might say the same of many of the figures of high modernism in all the arts, whether it's Wallace Stevens or Arnold Schoenberg. The beauty these figures achieve is correlated precisely with the scope of their will: they create beauty out of and as power. They are virtuosos of their media, and though a gesture may be apparently random it is always recovered into an overweening intentionality.

But along with the evolution of mastery in twentieth-century art we had the sly development of art that was an easing or an abandonment or a destruction of constraint. These two strands correspond to two conceptions of freedom: Picasso is free in the sense that his external reality assumes exactly the form he desires and dictates. The other sort of freedom involves conforming your will to what is, or rather, letting go of will into the world. The first is a kind of ascetic discipline, the second is an asceticism of ecstatic self-abandonment. I have in mind, for example, surrealist poets who engaged in "automatic writing"; or Andy Warhol who simply drew our attention in a slightly altered way to objects already in homes or in our popular culture; or John Cage, who tried to make music out of random sound, tried to let music occur rather than "compose" it.

I suggest that conceptions of beauty and desire float with changes in the technologies that articulate our environment: distribute it into objects and collect it into a living space. And I suggest that the decisive detachment of beauty and desire from pleasure will occur under the auspices of what are now called "information technologies." My model here is the computer virus. Think about the relation of the "I Love You" virus to its maker: he designs it, makes it live, writes its code.. But once he sets it free it simply grows exponentially in what are entirely unpredicatable or massively chaotic accumulations of events. I think that is what will happen to art and to the artist: art will eventually be something we make and then set free to occur rather than something we master. It will be something no one knows or controls: a massive gathering and distribution of events that expands explosively or contracts and disappears.

Already this is happening. I used to be a master of the "mix tape." I had all the albums and I would take all the best songs or I would find a theme and then I would put the songs together in a highly intentional order. But I don't do that anymore. Now what I do is load 101 cds into the player and hit "random." A computer generates a running order out of the materials I assembled. Maybe the juxtapositions are felicitous, maybe they're not, but either way they cannot be anticipated. It's the technology that creates the possibility of such a work of beauty.

It's like if you loaded a set of words into a computer with maybe a grammar program and maybe not and then made the first hundred juxtapositions your next book. See, maybe that would look boring or stupid or repetitive. Well then, you've got to go in and write a bunch of new code. And when it starts coming up with shit you love, then you're done. You're still making something, but it's also making you. You make and release and read and then make. You interrupt the structure of practical rationality or the pursuit of pleasure and find a viral beauty, a beauty that is its own thing and that exists both within and outside of the pleasure/pain continuum.

So that's where I want us to go, that is a final release from the oppressions encoded in western art and ethics: we make that release by allowing things to become. At that point, our arts resemble and merge with natural systems, which grow or consolidate or collapse by chaotic and systematic uncontrolled interactions. See? Then our arts are themselves living things, themselves organic systems. And at that point our arts are like ourselves; as perverse and fucked up and cool as people are: beautiful as the perfect hermaphrodite.

Crispin Sartwell