Pleasure

A reply to Alexander Nehamas's critique of my theory of aesthetic experience, this paper defends the crucial role of pleasure in the value of aesthetic experience and the necessity of such experience for a robust sense of aesthetic value. These points are made by noting the different varieties of pleasure, their multiple connections with critical interpretation and more immediate forms of understanding, and the difficulty of conceiving aesthetic value apart from actual or possible experience.

The article examines the role of time in the Mexican novels Pedro Páramo, by  Juan Rulfo and "Los recuerdos del porvenir," by  Elena Garro. It argues that while both books share common themes, such as insanity among the novel's primary female characters and its effect on their lovers, the question of how thought and memory affect their personal lives have yet to be explored.

Frustration is an emotional state produced by the surprising omission in quantity and/or quality of an appetitive reinforcer. The aversive properties of stressors, such as electric shocks, produce responses similar to those elicited by a state of frustration. In this set of three experiments, we assessed the effects of water immersion (WIM, in Experiment 1)—that is, a physical stressor—and first (in Experiments 1 and 2) and second trials of a consummatory extinction (cE; i.e., a surprising reward omission; in Experiment 3) on the sexual behavior of male rats, as compared with nonstressed animals. The results showed a sexual deficit in the animals subjected to either WIM or cE, relative to control subjects, although these experimental conditions differed in the component of the male sexual response that was affected. The present results accord with the fear = frustration hypothesis, and with Amsel’s frustration theory.

Coastal sites such as Cap D’Agde in Southern France are recognised as sites of overt and transgressive sexual expression.  The sexual activity exhibited at these sites is often considered to be deviant, yet this activity continues unfettered by regulation from municipal lawmakers.  When viewed as a space of material vitality, the site emerges  a material assemblage.  Not only this, but Coastal Sexuality emerges as a position of immanence which has the power to disrupt the transcendent construction of sexuality.  This position of immanence can be characterised as a moment of openness and tactile receptiveness between material bodies and the seductive eroticism of coastal terrain.  This openness can also be considered as an emergence of a materially immanent legal subject. 

"The paper deals with the apparent contradictions in sexual relationship, where, in some occasions, simultaneous co-existence of love and violence is being observed. The author mounts his arguments from Vātsyāyana’s Kāmasutra (6th C A.D.), especially in reference to a particular chapter, prahananayoga, where Vātsyāyana elaborated the logics behind such bi-polar cohabitation of violence and love-making.
Vātsyāyana observed (and also prescribed) some linguistic features involved in such sequences, though those phonetic features are still unnoticed by the professionals and are excluded from the standardized repertoire of grammatical texts. This exclusion is elaborated with Julia Kristeva’s concept of ‘semiotic order ‘(or Lacanian ‘Real’). This semiotic order has become a case of simulation, when it is deliberately being applied by the participants with an intention to extend act-pleasure-desire. The author of this paper noticed that, in case of Bangla Grammar, all these excluded marginal sounds were included by S.K. Chatterji in a school textbook of grammar (1939).
The psycho-social and political aspects of such cohabitation is also elaborated by the author without any universal truth-claims."

The present article illustrates Functional Analytic Psychotherapy through two case studies. One concerns a marital crisis and the other a treatment of female orgasmic disorder. Possible curative mechanisms in the therapist–client relationship are discussed. In the first case study, the relationship with the therapists offered opportunities for the woman in the couple to learn to express her needs clearly and to obtain collaboration from the other in the relationship. It also allowed the male partner to learn to interact in an open, non-defensive way. In the second case study, the therapist–client relationship offered in vivo learning opportunities concerning the game of give and take that characterizes an intimate relationship, including accepting initiatives and challenges from the partner.

"For more than a decade, new media has increasingly pervaded online societies and individual lives with obscene social expressions that are becoming commonplace in virtual communities. Internet users may inadvertently or permissibly acquire access to obscenities such as profanity and public nudity, and may even find themselves subscribing to social dialogues that challenge common or personal decencies.

Bastard media content perverts the underlying root mechanics of acceptable media language and behavior enough to qualify as explicitly obscene, profane or culturally illegitimate. Some new media and Internet ventures qualify by affording the global creation and deployment of virtual environs where, due to such contentious content, common or personal sensibilities are challenged, compromised or waived.

This research considers the rhetorical and ethical issues arising from new media bastardizations, including use and deployment of personal Web cams as unregulated interactive erotic devices within free virtual chatrooms and other online communities, and the extreme proliferation of explicit profanity as accepted public extension of the human voice as transcribed across the Internet, primarily extended in personal diary or expressed in free community Web blogs or interactive chatrooms.

It further considers the concepts of the cyberslut and Web whore, and the current mass exodus towards amateur online exhibitionism through archivable, reproducible, virtual artifacts of the obscene.

Such communication modalities appear to occur within niche audiences where the envelope is pushed on free expression in an open virtual space, raising legitimate concerns about the erosion of cultural sensibilities and integrities for the first-time visitor, as well as for long-time lurkers, regulars, and fellow actioneers.

As bastard media goes unquestioned or unchallenged, ethical issues result from the integration of the illegitimate with the legitimate, failure of the public to timely react, restrictions on software and network controls, and the overall virtual promulgation of unregulated, irreversible freedoms of expression."

"While extremism of the Islamic Jihad movement is on one side of the global power wheel, bashing away at the fabric of democratic societies, constant pounding of Jihadist ideology through the media equally punishes participants of these societies.

Media viewers are often forced to fight back the only way they can, and often as a means of self-preservation, by turning the media off or switching media outlets. Many people resort to letters to the editor, Web blogs, and political rallies to try to change their world.

Somehow, things always seem to maintain balance. That is, until the next global blows come from a radical Islamist and the media carrying his message. Baudrillard said correctly in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place that there is no war without the media, echoing Marshall McLuhan as McLuhan’s ideas meld into the fabric of digital culture.

The irony of the situation is that with each new bludgeoning media message comes the masochistic urge to want to hear more, get hit more, be more and more astonished. Each polarizing moment comes through the television or video screen with new compelling horrors, promises that predict no end to destruction, and a devastating impact on those persons helplessly caught between the media and its terrorists.

Slavoj Zïzek in The Plague of Fantasies contends that our experiences in cyberspace are making us psychotic because we don’t have “the Master,” or ordering of the symbolic, to tell us what we really want. For Zïzek, with the limitless options available in cyberspace, and without this Master, which offers “protection,” we move out of freedom to the only available alternative, the realm of the psychotic.

Since, for Zïzek -- and Guy Debord, borrowing from Georg Hegel -- resistance must operate within the symbolic order, there is nothing outside but psychosis. So where is the person caught between the media and its terrorists to go for safety? What can the spectator do to protect her/himself and those who are part of his inner circle? Is turning off the radio or television akin to stepping outside the symbolic order? Is the only alternative the lifestyle and destiny of the Unibomber? Is the televised place of symbolic order between the media and its terrorists actually one of safety?

People are not free to shut themselves off from the media, not without consequences. Yet the consequences of being caught in the middle of the psychological war waged equally by terrorists as our enemies and the media as our allies is surely not being conducted without taking its toll, perhaps in the form of neuroses. For Zïzek, participating in cyberspace leads to psychosis, yet there are no psychosocial definitions for participating in electronic media of radio and television, no known adverse effects.

The space occupied by the global media as multinational conglomerates is the binary opposite of the space occupied by terrorists as rogue, rhizomic wanderers, and the rest of the globe’s inhabitants are caught in between the two. We are caught between their oppositional ideologies, between their tactical methods, and also between an extreme suggestion that the two are in a collusion, between their symbiotic relationship, between their dependence upon one another.

The extreme stance by the media to participate in every terrorist declaration buys into the extreme stance by terrorists whereby they expect such participation, and since there is little to no balance from the only side which is capable of exerting balance, we are caught in the middle, shutting off our televisions for the Internet, and, at the risk of sounding extreme, nursing a global neurosis with the pleasures of impending psychosis."