One way in which my re-engagement with phenomenology has been productive is in thinking about pleasure. In particular, it has helped to shift my emphasis away from motivational hedonism and the assertion that we are perpetually seeking to optimize our experience of pleasure (though I do still believe this to be the case), towards an emphasis on the way in which consciousness is primarily a hedonic experience in addition to being an “intentional experience.” In other words, my concern with pleasure is rooted in the fact that we engage with hedonic concerns on a continual basis — such as every time we shift in our chair for a better position, stop to adjust the temperature, reach for a snack, try to decide how much longer we can continue to work, or reflect on how we feel about what we are reading. It is my hope that framing my interest in pleasure in terms of phenomenological experience rather than motivational hedonism will serve to appease some of the resistance that I have encountered towards considering human actions through this lens.
Another point of resonance that I have found between my engagement with pleasure and phenomenology is the attention that is given to a distinction between physical and mental events. Husserl (in Moran and Mooney 2002:90-92) derives this distinction from the psychologist Brentano, and uses it to argue that the pleasure to be found from certain objects, such as “a battle of centaurs, seen in a picture or framed in fancy,” is not located in the objects themselves but is derived from an intentional experience of said objects. Husserl does recognize, however, that not all experiences are intentional, such as being burned by fire, such that he also implicitly recognizes the existence of non-intentional experiences of pleasure. Thus, Husserl (implicitly) distinguishes between the intentional experience of pleasure as a mental “feeling” versus the non-intentional experience of pleasure as a physical “sensation.”
In my own engagement with pleasure I have relied upon semiotics to think through this distinction between physical and mental pleasure. For example, among the three major types of signs that were identified by Pierce, icons, indexes, and symbols, I use indexes and symbols to talk about physical and mental pleasure respectively. (I do also use icons to distinguish a particular experience of pleasure, but that is not relevant here.) Just as an index refers to a sign that has a spatiotemporal relationship with that to which it refers, physical pleasure also has a spatiotemporal relationship with its cause, such as the pleasure that is derived by scratching an itch; and just as a symbol refers to a sign that has a contingent relationship with that to which it refers, mental pleasure also has a contingent relationship with its cause, such as the pleasure that is derived by completing a puzzle. Thus, indexical pleasure, which I also refer to as biological pleasure, is the same as the non-intentional experience of pleasure as a physical “sensation,” and symbolic pleasure, which I also refer to as cultural pleasure, is the same as the intentional experience of pleasure as a mental “feeling.”
In itself, this is not particularly remarkable. I raise this parallel in part out of my own pleasure (no pun intended) at finding this resonance between conclusions I have arrived at in my own thoughts and concerns present in the early beginnings of phenomenology. It is also helpful to find support for this distinction I had already been making (which, I realize, is also not particularly remarkable in itself) in an existing theoretical framework.
However, one terribly important point this distinction between biological and cultural pleasure does raise is the issue of the “anarchic body,” which “can multiply, distort, and overflow the meanings, definitions, and classifications attached to experiences, and in this sense … is capable of discursively undefined and unintelligible pleasures” (Oksala 2004:112). Poststructuralists are quick to point out the way in which all of our experiences are culturally mediated. What is left out of this assessment, though, is the way in which all of our experiences are also biologically mediated.
Another distinction that is rarely made apparent is the degree to which an experience is culturally mediated. A good example of this is the constant concern I have observed, among Americans at least, with whether or not one is ill. Individuals will sit and reflect on the sensations they are experiencing in an attempt to discern whether they are ill or not, and what illness they are stricken with if they conclude that they are ill. These sensations are certainly mediated by culture at all points, but my goal here is to call attention to the degree of cultural mediation that takes place at the point when one considers whether or not they are ill versus the point at which they are diagnosed with a particular illness, either by themself or by someone in the medical profession. I argue that there is a marked difference between the level of direct cultural mediation that occurs at the outset, when one is working through the process of semiosis to interpret the experience that they are having and this mediation is weak, versus the level of direct cultural mediation that occurs once a diagnosis has been made, and this mediation is strong. A similar process can be found with the respect to the shift in the degree of cultural mediation that comes to bear upon us before and after we discover the “meaning” of a curse word, as well as the process that many go through when they shift from the initial discovery of how pleasurable it is to stimulate their genitals to the meaning this experience is imbued with once it is understood to be “masturbation.”
Thus, the distinction between indexical/biological pleasure and symbolic/cultural pleasure, or physical and mental experiences more generally, is a site to explore the way in which experiences are both biologically and culturally mediated, or bioculturally mediated, which, as of yet, appears to be underinterrogated and undertheorized. What is at stake here is a nuanced and robust consideration of the way in which the body comes to bear upon our negotiated experience of culture. For instance, this distinction between biological and cultural pleasure allows for a consideration as such of the disconnect that some individuals experience when they have come to accept the dominant hedonic discourse on the pleasurability of sexual relations with the opposite sex, yet find that their body does not produce the expected pleasurable sensations, which in turn calls for a reassessment of the hedonic discourse that this individual has come to accept. This distinction also allows for a consideration of the mutual experience of pleasure at both a biological and cultural level, such as when an individual has a pleasurable sexual experience, where it is not only the “actual” sex that is pleasurable but also the idea of having sex that is pleasurable.
Husserl, Edmund. 2002. “Consciousness as Intentional Experience.” In The Phenomenology Reader. Dermot Moran and Timothy Mooney, eds. London: Routledge.
Oksala, Johanna. 2004. Anarchic Bodies: Foucault and the Feminist Question of Experience. Hypatia 19(4): 97-119.
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