From: andrew john richardson Date: Wed, 5 Apr 1995 05:15:31 -0400 Subject: That City Life article in full ... >From City Life (Manchester mag) Mar 29-Apr 13 p.4 "Good luck, you're on your own from hereon in" - Rick NOTHING NEEDS MORE JUSTIFICATION THAN PLEASURE -In the first of an irregular series of articles, The Fall's MARK E. SMITH marries cheese with Barthes' 'jouissance' and Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky to pleasurable effect- Pleasure is spontaneous and exists in the realm of the individual. To study pleasure may lead to that pleasure's destruction. Pleasure is not innocent, it concerns consent, negotiation and hegemony. Pleasure links the individual to the social via the science of representation - which assumes a certain consciousness. For example, 'Irish jokes' assume that the Irish are thick. Jokes such as this relate to concepts of inferiority, they are reproduced to confirm control over Women, Blacks, the Irish, etc. Jokes turn women into objects - this is called being 'ironic'; this is known as the social nature of pleasure... As is cheese, for example. What is cheese? Camembert is the most electric of cheeses. There is no notification in Gogol's work about the difference between 'Cheshire' cheese and 'Stilton' cheese - philosophers are mute on this point. For example, 'blue' cheese contains natural amphetamine - why are students not informed about this? In present societies, pleasure, not including cheese, functions within certain restrictions and prohibitions, and the basis for any form of liberation lies in breaking the links between pleasure and power. Entertainment is not neutral, but activated by the dominant culture. Representations, wherever they may come from - TV, books, songs, poetry - construct the consciousness. If we watch the same representations continually, we see the world in the same way...the way 'The Man' wants us to see. The text of pleasure is one which comforts and reassures, it confirms our values and identity. Pleasure in this sense could be called reactionary, because it is opposed to progress or reform. What is needed more than ever are radical texts (and more information on different cheeses): texts (Film, TV programmes, Novels, Plays, Poems, etc.) that fracture the harmony between the reader, observer, listener and the text, and allows for a critique of ideological assumptions. Such texts (what Barthes called 'Jouissance') impose a sense of loss, and discomforts the audience. They (unfortuneately for some) can cause unsettling distancing that verges on boredom - they unsettle the audiece's cultural/historical/psychological expectations. Texts of jouissance expose the links between the text, the institution that creates it and the political/economic climate. Such texts are those which incur censorship and force MPs to say "That play, song, programme should never have been broadcast and should be condemned" - their creed is more cheese! Such texts fracture the nature of the normal. But the nature of the conventional changes with time: and because such texts are produced, the conventions are challenged and changed. Political/economic climate is always a major factor in producing convention, not radical texts. Eisenstein, possibly the greatest film-maker ever, is not the greatest film-maker ever, because Orson Welles is - or so the Great Western Man tells us. Eisenstein was, and is, disregarded as Russian and unfashionable. When he was allowed to go to Hollywood by Stalin, it was because Stalin hoped he wouldn't come back. Eisenstein's films fractured the normal, he was 'too difficult' and individualistic for revolutionary Moscow: Hollywood thought the same and didn't use him. He was too intellectual for the US and so everyone got Welles' films instead, because they were comfortable and normal. Eisenstein thought of himself as a renaissance man, a great all-rounder: he compared himself to Da Vinci! He considered himself a great philosopher, scientist, engineer. He theorised and published many books on film; he spoke English, Japanese,Chinese, German and Italian, and was one of the first to attempt a synthsis of Freudian psycho-analysis, Marxism and cheese on film. Because of his expulsion from Russia, he didn;t make any films for 10 years. By the 1930s he was back in Russia, making Alexander Nevsky, which was promptly banned. Nevsky was about the 13th century Teutonic invasion of Russia and the film was seen as anti-fascist in the light of the Nazi-Stalinist pact. Subsequently, however, Germany invaded Russia during the Second World War: Alexander Nevsky was released and became a patriotic block-buster... But why, oh why, did Nevsky not mention the light texture of Stilton? Mark E. Smith