barthes' bliss as atopic, asocial, revolutionary

Originally written for weekly response to MS 148 reading, excertps from Barthes' The Pleasure of the Text

My reading of the Barthes excerpts deepened my understanding of the Fiske quote in the course description ("pleasure may be the bait on the hook of hegemony, but it is always more than this; it always involves an element that escapes the system of power.").

Pleasure "is at the conclusion of a very complex process of biographical, historical, sociological, neurotic elements (education, social class, childhood configuration, etc.)," Barthes writes (62). Thus it is the "bait on the hook of hegemony". Accepting pleasure that exists only within the confines of its creation, that is "comfortable", that "comes from culture and does not break with it" (14), is akin to accepting the hegemonic cultural and embedded oppressive power structures that delivered it. There's a quote in the hooks reading, a further quote of Anne Friedberg, that expands on this: "all recognition is itself an implicit confirmation of the ideology of the status quo."

On the other hand, I saw Fiske's "element that escapes the system of power" in Barthes' "bliss". More precisely than an "element" of plesaure, Barthes sees bliss as a "parallel force" in "incommunication" with pleasure (20). This is because bliss is experienced when the reader is "discomforted", "[unsettling] the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language." (14)

This bliss is experienced momentarily, only in the present moment: thus it exists necessarily outside of culture, "which is everything in us except our present." (22) It cannot even be reduced to a speakable form, Barthes writes, communicable only by producing something that invokes further bliss in further readers (22). Furthermore this bliss is "atopic" (23), "both revolutionary and asocial, and it cannot be taken over by any collectivity, any mentality, any ideolect..." (23)

In other words, bliss is "scandalous" and "revolutionary" precisely because it cannot be contained or subjugated by cultural and ideological systems, thus posing a threat to oppressive power structures -- more than bait on the hook of hegemony precisely because it can escape systems of power.

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Connecting back to the hooks reading, could "oppositional gaze" be taken as an example of readers seizing the power of bliss to oppose oppressive power structures? Is bliss what ensures Foucault's "[necessary] possibility for resistance" in any relation of power (hooks, 116)? When hooks describes Hall saying that "identity is constructed 'not outside but within representation'" (hooks, 131), is bliss what enables meaningful and counter-hegemonic identity construction via media? Regarding hooks' finding that Black women "contest, resist, revision, interrogate, and invent on multiple levels" in response to their exclusion from mainstream films, are these all examples of bliss being the element of pleasure that escapes from systems of power?

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To add a personal example to this exploration: I feel like I experienced bliss reading Ocean Vuong's "The Bull". When I let go of the patterns of thought and "serious pleasure" (referencing now Rutsky and Wyatt) pressuring me to make some intellectual remark about the poem, I could simply experience it in the present. The shift felt exactly as Barthes described ("unsettles the reader...brings to a crisis his relation with language..." and so on), leading to a moment of clarity about how I experience my masculinity and my desire for genderqueerness that is obviously contrary to heterocisnormative/transphobic/etc. structures deeply embedded in the ideology and culture I exist within. Of course as soon as I put that experience into writing it ceased to be bliss: it became Barthes' "pleasure", comfortably within the confines of culture, or Rutsky and Wyatt's "serious pleasure", academic and critical and devoid of creativity.

The way I got around this was again, eerily, as Barthes described: by attempting to reproduce the bliss that I experienced by producing a new text of bliss myself. When I wrote:

In the bull and the violence, the isolation, the crushing intensity of the utter lack of choice I have in my masculinity, something I can't run away from, can't turn away from, have to eventually "opened the door / & stepped out. Wind / in the branches" to meet what watches me persistently from the backyard, something that when I truly confront I find that I don't touch -- of course I don't touch, was it ever solid, real, physical in the first place? -- but reach into and find depths, an entrance, the shape of an animal, me.

I was precisely attempting to "speak 'in' [bliss], in its fashion, enter into a desperate plagiarism, hysterically affirm the void of bliss (and no longer obsessively repeat the letter of pleasure)." (Barthes, 22)

Thus texts of bliss, in this case poetry, have the power to open up spaces that defy power and hegemony.