Total managed pleasure that removes the self — the Entertainment's logic as consumer critique
echoes
From: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
- Early text: cruise advertising as "authoritarian—near-parental,"
making "a diabolically seductive promise"; "The promise is not that you can
experience great pleasure, but that you will"; "That they’ll micromanage
every iota of every pleasure-option so that not even the dreadful corrosive
action of your adult consciousness and agency and dread can fuck up your
fun. Your troublesome capacities for choice, error, regret, dissatisfaction,
and despair will be removed from the equation." [sec. 4]; and the closing
hypnosis set-piece, staged as the week's "ridiculously apposite symbolic
microcosm": entertained subjects constructing "fantasies so vivid that the
subjects do not even know they are fantasies. As if their heads were no
longer their own." [sec. 13]
- IJ echo: The samizdat/Entertainment as the limit-case of exactly this —
an engineered pleasure so total that it removes the viewer's agency, choice,
and self (the catatonic, will-less watchers; the Medical Attaché; the
entertainment-casualties). The cruise essay states, as consumer-culture
critique, the precise promise the Entertainment keeps literally and
lethally: pleasure that dissolves the troublesome adult self.
- Weight: prefiguration