Alienated Amusements: The Pleasures of Objective Enjoyment and Popular Narratives

Abstract

The current paper seeks to critically analyze the contemporary notion of enjoyment and its ideological hegemonic functioning within contemporary popular culture. The present critique will employ and elaborate upon Todd McGowan’s idea of a cultural turn in terms of a commandment to enjoy in association with Robert Pfaller and Zizek’s notion of ‘interpassivity’. All three of the theorists mentioned above are highly influenced by the thought of Jacques Lacan and his reworking of Freudian analysis of the human self and culture. I will argue that the capitalist commandment to enjoy is the direct cause of the condition of interpassivity underlying the operative function of popular culture. This is a state beyond passivity where even passive enjoyment is fetishistically relegated to the objects of desire. The more we move towards interactive and popular modes of narrative and symbolic mediation the more we become unaware of our passivity of response. My argument does not criticize the digital media alone but also the function of popular works of Literature and how they engender this particular form of enjoyment by presenting and propagating clichéd and watered-down images of cultural types which attempt at not moral standardization but rather the dissipation of socio-political anxiety for the sake of the smooth functioning of the capitalistic apparatus.