Sobre a ideia de divertimento e prazer na
atualidade
In our societies, we experience fabricated
leisure – a kind of planned ‘free time’ that is sandwiched between typically
unpleasant work times. And we are bombarded with advertisements that promise we
will have a great time if only we get the latest phone or the latest computer
game. Ours is a culture that, under the guise of consumption, actually counsels
the renunciation of enjoyment. In such a society, wants come apart from
pleasures. If you get an expensive car because that’s what you think your
status requires you to have, that is not the same as enjoying it. The
individual who succumbs to this idea does not relish owning the car. She just
thinks she must have and display it. We inhabit a world that devalues pleasure
while apparently serving it up in large doses. Rather than enjoyment playing a
central role in people striving to become otherwise than they are, our culture
works a strange ascetic turn. I am what I desire. I am what I consume. We are
absorbed in an existence as desiring and consuming subjects, living as though
we really are just those selves and no more.
In late capitalism, the subjective character of
enjoyment is appropriated into circuits of consumption. Philosophers have long
remarked the self-subjugating effects of peoples’ absorption in the standard
practices of their day, those taken to be ‘what everyone does’. In Being and
Time (1927), Martin Heidegger pointed out that ‘We take pleasure and enjoy
ourselves as they take pleasure.’ If you like an
activity because you have unthinkingly assumed an approving view of it from
others, does this still count as an authentic pleasure? An experience that
really feels good, feels good for you, as someone choosing
freely. But what feels purely subjective to us might actually be deeply
influenced by the contingent forms of feeling of our time – what our society
and families and workplaces tell us that we can legitimately feel. We have
a job on our hands to recognise how our ways of feeling and being are
historically and culturally shaped. — Enjoy!, Sandy Grant
