pleasure & context

"You will need to contextualize the piece that is the source of your pleasure..."

This sentence (quoted from Anne's email) has reminded me of all of the objects, performances and practices that have brought me pleasure over the course of my lifetime and the fact that the types of things that bring me pleasure have profoundly shifted. The fact that within the short contexts of our lives our tastes and pleasures shift dramaticallly, for me, is an interesting piece of evidence that highlights the relativity of pleasure and its dependence on context.

A focus on context when describing something pleasurable, to me, foregrounds the fact that pleasure is generated and mediated through social contexts. This disrupts the notion that beauty or pleasure is intrinsic, that pleasure can be embedded within a text or an object. The connection between pleasure and context is one that I think we are all somewhat aware of at particular moments; yet, often it is easy to be swept away by the textual qualities of what we find beatiful while forgetting about the cultural values and ideologies that have positioned us to marvel at the beauty of certain texts and not others.

Given all of this, I find it peculiar that one could describe something beautiful or that has been pleasurable without contextualizing it. Anyway, now for my own description of an experience with a text that I found pleasurable.

I went to the Louvre this summer and although I was most looking forward to seeing a painting by Ingres, the texts I found most beautiful were probably the small tablets of cuneiform displayed in the Richelieu wing and the northern corner of the Sully wing. The tablets themselves--the color of earth, small and unimposing--are such great examples of texts that clearly have become pleasurable and beautiful because of social context. Because of our growing and deemed important history of writing, these texts, are now honored. I didn't expect that I would be struck by these texts in the way that I was. I didn't expect I'd spend more time looking at them and thinking about them than I would anything else. But I did. I thought about how the scripts were so efficient yet imperfect. I thought about who got to learn to write in the time these texts were made and how this impacted the current work I do with writing. I thought about how differently text looks and acts now. And, perhaps most importantly, I thought about how insignificant these texts would be had history gone in a different direction.

I want to conclude with a brief aside. I want to say that the things I feel most passionately about--the things I want most to find pleasure in--are not the things that are immediately most pleasurable to me. What I mean by this is that I while I certainly cannot erase my own social positioning and training as to what is beautiful (and these are the things that strike me as pleasurable most immediately), I've been trying to be more thoughtful about why I think those particular texts give me pleasure over others. Most importantly, I've been trying to think about why particular texts give me less pleasure and how I might re-see those texts as doing other types of work.