Monday, December 14, 2009

Pleasure as productive force

From Jean Baudrillard, "Beyond Use Value":
In the process of satisfaction, he valorizes and makes fruitful his own potentialities for pleasure; he "realizes" and manages, to the best of his ability, his own "faculty" of pleasure, treated literally like a productive force. Isn't this what all of humanist ethics is based on -- the "proper use" of oneself?
Our assumption of the market-based ethics of turning things to account, of consuming efficiently, means we want to make our enjoyment of goods count, or matter, beyond the pleasure itself -- we experience the productivity of it as pleasure, and without that sense that our enjoyment will be in some larger sense useful ,setting an example, reinforcing cool, etc., we no longer actually enjoy things.

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