Week 8
2/27/17
WC: 371
1) [in regard to acquiring complete total pleasure] “Though Foucault is speaking as an individual, his words resonate in a culture affected by anhedonia – the inability to feel pleasure. In the United States, where our senses are daily assaulted and bombarded to such an extent that an emotional numbness sets in, it may take being “on the edge” for individuals to feel intensely.” (Hooks 1992: 377)
2) “I think that pleasure is a very difficult behavior. It’s not as simple as that to enjoy one’s self. And I must say that’s my dream. I would like and I hope I die of an overdose of pleasure of any kind. Because I think it’s really difficult and I always have the feeling that I do not feel the pleasure, the complete total pleasure and, for me, it’s related to death. Because I think that the kind of pleasure I would consider as the real pleasure, would be so deep, so intense, so overwhelming that I couldn’t survive it. I would die.” (Hooks 1992: 370)
3) “Commodity culture in the United States exploits conventional thinking about race, gender, and sexual desire by “working” both the idea that racial difference marks one as Other and the assumption that sexual agency expressed within the context of racialized sexual encounter is a conversion experience that alters one’s place and participation in contemporary cultural politics.” (Hooks 1992: 367 )
4) “The seductive promise of this encounter is that it will counter the terrorizing force of the status quo that makes identity fixed, static, a condition of containment and death.” (Hooks 1992: 367)
5) “The three girls hold the corsets in various states of tightening, as though they were proffered to the customer who wants to try them on. Thus, the visual code of the image is “incomplete,” waiting for the consumer’s own body to fill it out.” (Tompkins 2012: 154)
6) “Bernhard leaves her encounters with the Other richer than she was at the onset. We have no idea how the Other leaves her.” (Hooks 1992: 380)
News Article:
http://thehill.com/homenews/news/321495-george-w-bush-i-dont-like-the-racism
How someone perceives success can make them fail when they have already succeeded. The assigned texts discuss a theme of the assimilation of race, ethnicity, and skin-color with sexuality in the context of Roland Marchand’s theory of the social tableaux. The first quote regarding American anhedonia in the context of acquiring total pleasure reminds me of the raw, unsatisfied settler-colonist hunger for the Other. As white people seek to be changed by the Other, their perception of their desire to feel intensely is not consciously recognized as undergoing a process of personal change. As the consumer adapts their identity to the change they undergo (by habituating the behavior), a new feeling of hunger takes place as described in the second quote. Foucault describes his perception of the ultimate pleasure as something that would be so deep, so intense, and so overwhelming that he could not survive it and would die. The attention to the sense of self in Foucault’s rhetoric implies that it is so good, if you try and extract more pleasure from it by looking at it through the lense of you, it would be too much and you couldn’t survive it or you would undergo so much change the old perception of you would die.
The third quote articulates a theme of emotional shortcuts that seem to resist the problem but end up supporting it. The assumption of sexuality being an effective means to alters one’s place and participation in contemporary cultural politics reinforces racialized sexual encounters and is a fallacy of thought similarly described by Roland Marchand’s theory of social tableaux. The final quote captures the uncertainty in the consequence of this one-sided initiative. The quote by Tompkins provides an example of Marchand’s theory. As the user engages with the interface (if the interface is not an ad, it sadly is their perceived “reality”) and metaphorically tries on the skin of the Other as clothing, the return to whiteness becomes increasingly more rewarding. This, in combination with sexualizing the Other, helps maintain a dissatisfied status quo as described in the fourth quote listed. The news article I chose this week, “George W. Bush: I Don’t Like the Racism”, shows a political figure of the Republican party trying to capture the unawareness of the white male by expressing his disgust for the stickiness he is inhabiting.
Works Cited
Hooks, B. (1992). Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press.
Tompkins, K. W. (2012). Racial indigestion: Eating bodies in the nineteenth century. New York: New York University Press.