December 30, 2007
And Now, 'Pleasure Now!'
Now, finally, back to the matter of Session 68 here at the MLA, “Pleasure Now!”
As you may recall, I pledged on Thursday to solve the mystery of that session title, which appeared in the program without so much as a blurb, tag line, or emoticon for explanation.
“Is an insurrectionary hedonist movement brewing here on the windy shores of Lake Michigan?” I wrote at the time. I thought I was being cheeky.
So imagine my surprise when I shuffled into the crowded session on Thursday night and immediately heard the words, “on-campus guerilla vegetable gardens.”
And was that a manifesto projected onto the wall? Yes. Yes it was.
“What has happened to our pleasure in the wake of our critical generation’s work at critiquing power?” began the manifesto.
“PLEASURE NOW! calls for us to reassess the disciplinary habits that our generation has been so vital to articulating,” it went on. “These practices have exposed the brutality of dehumanization; they have taught us to be critical of oppressive and exclusionary systems. … But somehow they have also engendered a professional culture of cynicism and exhaustion.”
“What if our resolute denial of pleasure feeds the problems we so grimly confront?” said Joanna Brooks, a professor of English at San Diego State University and the moderator of the session, now reading the manifesto out loud. “PLEASURE NOW! is our experiment to test that hypothesis.”
After the recitation, four scholars delivered “provocations” to the audience, calling for do-it-yourself lifestyles and a return to the “pleasure of close reading.”
They referred to the contemporary “speed up” in scholarly output and workloads as a prime pleasure-killing force. But they also hinted at another problem closer to home for leftist critics. Namely: Scholars who analyze literature as if they are performing autopsies on the workings of power can get pretty dreary.
Is something wrong when reading literature becomes a performance of displeasure? That seemed to be one of the guiding questions among the scholars at “Pleasure Now!”
So there you have it — an “insurrectionary hedonist movement,” just like I predicted. Well, not exactly. But I wasn’t too far off.
jgravois | Posted on Sunday December 30, 2007 | Permalink