The Politics of Pleasure w/ Eric Wycoff Rogers and Zarinah Agnew
Sep 24, 2024
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Eric Wycoff Rogers, a community organizer and author of the Critical Hedonist Manifesto, joins Zarinah Agnew, a neuroscientist and guerrilla scientist, to delve into the politics of pleasure. They discuss how capitalism manipulates desire, promoting unsustainable consumption. Both guests advocate for critical hedonism as a transformative approach to pleasure that fosters community collaboration. They challenge current economic values and encourage a reimagining of pleasure to enhance well-being, social ties, and collective joy.
Capitalism drives individuals to pursue commodified pleasures, leading to personal dissatisfaction and societal competition for scarce resources.
The concept of critical hedonism redefines desires, encouraging collaborative and prosocial approaches to pleasure that enhance community well-being.
Creating accessible communal spaces is vital for fostering genuine interactions and shared joy, counteracting the isolating effects of consumer culture.
Deep dives
The Politics of Pleasure and Desire
A significant aspect of modern life is the inability to satisfy desires, leading to a constant pursuit that rarely yields lasting satisfaction. This cycle of chasing new goals and material possessions often distracts individuals from what genuinely fosters their well-being, resulting in detrimental personal and societal outcomes. Many desires, driven by consumerism, not only harm individual happiness but also create competition for limited resources, negatively impacting communities and the environment. Therefore, a shift toward a politics that acknowledges pleasure and desire as essential for well-being is crucial, aiming to redefine what is sought after in both personal and collective contexts.
Introducing Critical Hedonism
Critical hedonism emerges as a proposed framework to re-imagine pleasure and desire within a capitalist society, encouraging individuals to pursue joy in ways that are collaborative and socially beneficial. By critically assessing societal values regarding pleasure, this approach seeks to transform desires from being competitive and antisocial to becoming more communal and mutually advantageous. Engaging with critical hedonism allows individuals to rethink their aspirations and to base their desires on principled ethics rather than a systems of exploitation. This redefinition can enable people to seek outcomes that do not contribute to societal harm but instead cultivate shared joy and satisfaction.
The Influence of Capitalism on Desires
The impact of capitalism is pervasive, including within our own psychological frameworks around desire, pushing individuals toward an endless pursuit of commodified happiness. This pursuit can lead to destructive behaviors and a sense of inadequacy as societal pressures propagate a culture of insatiability, making it difficult to find true contentment. Many individuals find themselves trapped in cycles fueled by advertising and societal expectations, resulting in a disconnect from fulfilling relationships and genuine pleasures. By understanding this dynamic, people can begin to challenge these conditioned desires and advocate for experiences that foster true joy and connection.
The Structural Barriers to Pleasure
Numerous barriers inhibit access to authentic pleasure, including bureaucratic restrictions and economic systems that prioritize profit over communal well-being. As communal spaces diminish and consumer spaces dominate, the opportunities for genuine interactions and experiences shrink. This not only prevents individuals from accessing joy but also reinforces systems of inequality and exclusion, where only some have the means to partake in leisure and pleasure. Creating an abundance of accessible spaces is essential for rebuilding connections and fostering a culture of collective joy and satisfaction.
Building Community Through Consciousness Raising
Engaging in consciousness-raising groups can help individuals explore their desires collaboratively, ultimately leading to social change and shared understanding. These groups provide a platform for people to articulate their experiences and to collectively challenge societal norms surrounding pleasure and desire. By nurturing this social dialogue, participants can work together to reshape their desires, advocating for changes that reflect their true values and interests. Establishing bonds through these discussions can cultivate solidarity and empowerment within communities, allowing for more meaningful pursuits of pleasure.
The Collective Pursuit of Joy
Pursuing critical hedonism involves building communities that prioritize shared values and collective well-being, emphasizing that individual joy is interconnected with social freedom. As people come together to create spaces and experiences that honor mutual pleasure and satisfaction, they develop a sense of agency over their desires. This collective approach not only addresses individual needs but also nurtures relationships that resist exploitation and competition. Ultimately, through collaborative initiatives, individuals can create environments that foster genuine joy for all, leading to a more equitable and fulfilling society.
Capitalism’s addiction to growth doesn’t just show up in the external world. It can also be found inside us—in our manufactured desire for more and better. Not only do we have to keep wanting to keep the machine going, we have to keep wanting what is “scarce” and easily privatizable or commodifiable so that the capitalist class can continue to profit.
Critical hedonism(s) is an approach to pleasure and care that is critical of capitalism. It is a politics of pleasure that invites us to remake our desires to be less antisocial, competitive, and harmful, and to instead be more prosocial, collaborative and mutually beneficial.
The idea of critical hedonism(s) has been deeply studied and explored by our guests in today’s episode. Zarinah Agnew is a trained neuroscientist formerly at University College London, and then UCSF, a self-described guerrilla scientist, and part of the Beyond Return organization. Eric Wycoff Rogers is a historian, writer, community organizer, and designer currently based in London. Eric runs a thirdspace project in London, convenes a discussion series on the politics of pleasure, and is the author of the Critical Hedonist Manifesto.
This is Eric and Zarinah’s second time on the podcast, they joined us in 2022 to talk about Fully Automated Luxury Communism, which is a great compliment to this episode. This is also a great episode following our most recent conversation with Jason Hickel, Better Lives for All. Where that conversation focused on human needs, this one takes up the topic of human wants.
In this conversation, we explore what capitalism tells us to desire and why, we interrogate what is truly “cheap,” “expensive,” and “valuable,” and explore what it would be like to participate in a politics of pleasure based on critical hedonism(s)—creating conditions and opportunities for distributed pleasure that don’t cause harm to people or the planet. Finally, we are invited to learn about community gatherings and how to do the work of reclaiming and remaking pleasure.
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