The Critique of Pleasure (Immediacy & Interpretation Part 2)

1. Pleasure-Seekers, Pleasure-Critiquers

2. Rationality as the Mediation of Pleasure

3. Critical Structures as the Mediation of Excitement & Pleasure

Pleasure-Seekers, Pleasure-Critiquers

Pleasure-seeking & pleasure-critiquing are two polar positions which together function as a becoming of the immediacy & interpretation of pleasure, which is to say a higher stage of analysis of the immediate impulse & the cool analytic distance. In reality, impulses aren’t so immediate, & cool analytic distance is not so cool, & much is psychologically at-stake in this tension. The pleasure-critical position appears in sexual relations as well as systemically in politicians, mediating society’s desire. The position of the pleasure-seeker tends to meet the position of the pleasure-critiquer.

The critique of pleasure is itself an enjoyment, but as it is not a release, which in psychoanalytic term is the release of a build up of excitement, it is not a pleasure itself. It is the diametric opposite, a build up of excitement which is itself the ground for pleasure.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the pleasure of going outside with a mask, when should this end, should it ever end, should it ever have begun, can be looked at as a mediation of not just pleasure, but of the critique itself. Thus a critique of critique is born, producing its contradictory excitement in the name of pleasure.

Rationality as the mediation of pleasure

Rationality creates the flowers of its own production in the group mediation of pleasure & the critique of pleasure. In sexuality, the discourse between a couple (or thruple or whatever) becomes the mediation of desire. The challenge of a relationship is to create something that maintains its structure after orgasm. The orgasm is the release of tension & the basis for understanding pleasure as the release of excitement, like the taking off of the mask during a viral outbreak.

The “Good Cause” of anti-masking during the early-days of the pandemic involved a rational dimension of excitement & pleasure mediation, developing truths regarding the limits of masking, as well as myths regarding the COVID-19 virus & its structures. This process should be known as a flower of rationality, whether or not you believe the anti-mask position to be good or not. Anti-Maskers during the COVID-19 pandemic early days could not simply access pleasure, since they can not simply feel pleasure, they are caught in the pure critique of pleasure of masking when it is appropriate, since there is now something at stake beyond pleasure, which is to say the Good Cause itself.

The Good Cause of the relationship & the ethics of sexuality are our most personal, individual mediations, which we immediately feel the consequences of. From here, & going into society, & back into the ethics of the sexual, we find mediation after mediation of pleasure & the critique of it, as well as a discourse between people in romantic relationships. The personal is political & the political is personal, but all is the mediation of sex or pleasure. Freud knew this. All give birth to something like a Critical Structure, which is to say a mediatior of pleasure via critique & a giving-in to pleasure.

Critical Structures as the Mediation of Excitement & Pleasure

As a result of the inevitable tension between immediate impulse & immediate desire & the supposed cool, distant analytical interpreter who thinks of actions beyond the immediate impulse or intuition, Critical Structures have emerged prior to our own births, which we then have to come to a relation with.

Capitalism, which is to say a contract-based exchange of money in order to liquidate efforts & to make-things-happen can be understood as a critical structure which mediates pleasure. To think beyond capitalism is to make improvements on the current model of exchange & production. The critics of capitalism will note, that if you try to do this, it can still be called capitalism, & if indeed by definition capitalism can not be moved beyond until a world revolution occurs in production, then those critics are indeed right.

To make-things-happen, we invest ourselves in Critical Structures, such as romantic or work relationships. We decide which structure mediates our values & our sense of right & wrong, & unconsciously, our desire, & we move towards it. This can be a political view as well, a Critical Structure which mediates conflict in the precise way we would like to see it mediated, with each individual following certain rule-sets.

Each family, each job, each politician, takes on through themselves a critical structure, which to say the critique & involvement in pleasure. Immediacy & Interpretation & the tension involved in them gives birth to the flowers of Rationality. A Rationality as it exists in the world is a higher form of our own rationality, & analysis of it is both a build up of excitement in its critiques, & a release of tension in its acceptances. Philosophy itself emerges as a sort of discipline of pleasure-critique & mediation, which like psychology, gives the promise of understanding the ground of its critique. While there is a neuroscientific, neuronal understanding of pleasure via dopamine, it can be understood more directly when we use abstractions such as pleasure & its critique.

The question we now arrive to is the analytic one: how does this provide the pleasure of release, & how does the critique of one pleasure build up the ground for a different pleasure (or possibly the same pleasure).

In my psychotherapeutic practices, people often end up in romantic relationships which either oppose or repeat early childhood experiences. This can be understood as a Critical Structure, which is a mediator of excitement & pleasure. The challenge historically & culturally is to think in these terms of mediation.

How does Trumpism mimic the pleasure of segregation, if at all? Does it really? Or does it even mimic the pleasure of Martin Luther King Jr. in the minds of those who participate in it? When we critique it, we assert our ground is more substantial, but ultimately there is power in the world for each Critical Structure of pleasure & a critique of pleasure.

Each political ideology is also an investment in a Critical Structure, thus can function like drugs. To change such a thing is to go through withdrawal. There is also the actual withdrawal of one mode of Critical Structure into the next. More often, we “taper,” we reduce the dose of the drug or find something else, the teenage Libertarian capitalist turns into a Marxist, they still must think political economy. It is a Critical Structure of intellect, which is a pleasure & the critique of pleasure.

To think of our Good Causes in this way may seem like a cynical endevour, but in fact it is the way to understand the psychological ground of ourselves & those Critical Structures we find ourselves at odds with.