PREFACE
Traditionally, art scholarship and aesthetic theory have taken a chaste stance toward physical pleasure. Eighteenth-century philosophy clearly distinguished aesthetic pleasure – as an effect of intellectual experience and basis of critical value judgment – from lust that is purely carnal. Immanuel Kant thought the judgment of beauty rested on a “disinterested pleasure” that, despite its immediacy, implied a reflection on the object that set it apart from the pleasures afforded by food, drink, or sex. Since sexual desire would lead to instrumentalizing others for one’s own erotic “appetite,” Kant considered it particularly questionable.
The preference for art that ranks intellectual experience above the experience of pleasure is also widespread in the domain of artistic production and the processes of symbolic, cultural, and economic value formation in which it is bound up. Pierre Bourdieu has argued that the aesthete’s rejection of carnal enjoyments is a way of distancing the chaos of human physicality. A progressive creative practice, Amelia Jones argues, must accordingly resort to strategies of “distanciation” to displace and provoke the spectator, making them aware of the process of experiencing the work and precluding their identification with the illusionary functions of representation. Jones objects to this rigorous division between bodily pleasure and intellectualized contemplation, which, she writes, rules out the possibility of art as both sensual and conceptual, both erotic and politically critical.
Pleasurable bodily sensations are thus associated with a loss of critical thinking; they appear as a base impulse that is said to possess no political agency. Contrary to such dismissal, the present issue of TEXTE ZUR KUNST seeks to identify the critical potential of pleasure in its very carnality and immediacy. Although pleasure is typically felt to be a deeply personal and inward experience, it is fundamentally premised on our being-affected and so points up the relationality and incompleteness of our bodies. This suggests a capacity to spark unforeseen connections in the social sphere that owe their existence not to the quest for some sort of “inner truths” but to the momentary intensification of bodily sensations.
The latter is the focus of Tim Dean’s contribution, which zooms in on an explicit scene in Garth Greenwell’s novel Cleanness in which the protagonist breaks from his usual position and takes the dominant role. Dean demonstrates how binary opposites – subject/object, active/passive, pleasure/pain – are undermined by sexual intensity and how conventional boundaries of intelligibility are transgressed. The joys of such transgression are programmatic in the erotic practice of sadomasochism, in which unequal distributions of power are consensually enacted to gratify each participant’s desires. Jill H. Casid has moderated a roundtable in which Michelle Handelman, Angelo Madsen Minax, and Sami Schalk discuss the emancipatory potentials of BDSM and the political significance of crip sex, Black joy, and brown jouissance. The latter is a concept Amber Jamilla Musser has coined to describe the radical energy unleashed by carnal pleasure that transcends the constraints of sovereignty and subjectivity in white and patriarchal hegemonic power structures. For TEXTE ZUR KUNST, Musser illustrates these spaces of possibility with examples from contemporary art and culture. Jacques Lacan, whose theoretical legacy Musser grapples with, also comes up in the interview with Jamieson Webster. In a conversation with Anna Sinofzik, the psychoanalyst discusses ideas from her autotheoretical essay collection Disorganisation & Sex and underscores the inextricable entanglements of the sexual and the political.
In the 1970s, feminist theorists who found a great deal of inspiration in concepts from psychoanalysis, and especially in Sigmund Freud’s reflections on Schaulust (scopophilia), turned their analytical acumen to visual gratification. Laura Mulvey proposed, with Freud, that the means of visual representation inevitably resulted in the objectification of women and called for the destruction of all (patriarchal) visual pleasure. Yet this framing of sexual pleasure as fetishistic attachment, Susanne Huber writes, has long saddled it with negative associations of lack and pathological obsession rooted in the colonial context in which the concept of fetish originated. Nonetheless, Mulvey’s call came to be enshrined as one of the organizing principles of feminist art and theory, which has argued that potentially pleasurable representations of women’s bodies invariably risk reproducing sexual reification. In his close reading of a work by Joan Semmel, Christian Liclair illustrates how the artist’s nude self-portraits of the 1970s may be seen as an attempt to undercut the idea of a unilateral subject–object power dynamic.
Moreover, Liclair’s contribution also demonstrates how male art historians tamed the traditional female nude in order to dissociate the aesthetic sublime from the obscene. The assumption underlying this effort that sexually stimulating art will impair the intellect unexpectedly echoes in Douglas Crimp’s 1989 critique of homoerotic art in the face of the AIDS epidemic. As Ryan Mangione suggests, Crimp’s argument manifested a binary model of representations of sexuality, which were either ideologically valuable as supporting a militant politics or turned out to be escapist and hence subservient to the powers that be. The danger that our lust can fall prey to capitalist processes is also a concern in Beate Absalon’s essay, which shows how neoliberal paradigms of efficiency and self-optimization creep into the sexual.
When art critics go see an exhibition, they primarily hope for intellectual stimulation. But as JaBrea Patterson-West experienced when she encountered Somaya Critchlow’s nudes, the flush of desire can open up fresh perspectives as well. Invoking Barbara Smith, one of the pioneering thinkers of Black lesbian criticism, the author emphasizes the resistant momentum inherent in lesbian desire that can help dismantle the predominant white heterosexual gaze.
In a post-humanist perspective, the embodied human subject is not the sole linchpin of transgressive pleasure. The role that material objects might evolve to play in stories of erotic encounters is suggested by Itziar Barrio’s image spread for this issue. The textual fragments in her visual essay act as the key movers of a nonlinear narrative that, like all captivating stories, comes with desire, lust, bodies, and lost pants.
Translation: Gerrit Jackson