An Architecture of Pleasure

As everyone is well aware, the norm and the rule in terms of what we get out of leaders and out of government in general is a combination of fear-mongering and lies. But of course, the fear-mongering and the lies, once analyzed and deconstructed, amount to a concealment and shrouding of sex and the masturbatory act. It is as simple and petty as that. As Foucault wrote, leaders and government are honed into the reality that “sex is located at the point of intersection of the discipline of the body and the control of the population.”

Sex has also historically been a very public issue, even though it gets swept under the rug as a result of all the fear-mongering and lies. Baths and spas, for instance, were “a very important place of pleasure and encounter, which slowly disappeared in Europe.” In Ancient Rome, there were “brothels, pleasure quarters, criminal areas, etc., and there was also one sort of quasi-public place of pleasure: the baths, the thermes.” It is commonplace that baths and spas exist “as a place of sexual encounters” but more importantly, baths and spas are “a sort of cathedral of pleasure at the heart of the city, where people could go as often as they want, where they walked about, picked each other up, met each other, took their pleasure, ate, drank, discussed…”

All in all: “Sexuality was obviously considered a social pleasure for the Greeks and the Romans.” Social relations in general “are understood as sexual relations.” Sexual relations “were located within social relations in the widest sense of the term.” And in turn: “The baths were a place of sociality that included sexual relations.”

Not only is a bath or a spa a commonplace feature of social life and social relations, but so is the brothel. As Foucault wrote: “The brothel is in fact a place, and an architecture, of pleasure.” There is a “sociality” to the brothel just as there is a “sociality” to the bath and the spa. And when we refer to baths and brothels as an “architecture” for a certain kind of sociality, what we mean is that baths and brothels are simply a given space within public life to engage in visceral social relations that are entirely sexual in nature.

And arguably, we are now entering into a “Dark Age” of sorts in terms of both political and social life just as Rome did after its collapse as a result of the fear-mongering and lies which eclipse and overshadow virtually everything in political and social life. But of course, the question is, why do fear-mongering and lies end up eclipsing and overshadowing political and social life? To borrow from John Mearsheimer: “Fearmongering occurs when a state’s leaders see a threat emerging but think that they cannot make the public see the wolf at the door without resorting to a deception campaign.”

Hence, leaders and government as a whole are engaging in a deception campaign against the American public because of a threat which they perceive but cannot express or identify openly and transparently to the public. Leaders and government as a whole cannot muster up the will to be straightforward and truthful about the threat which the government faces. The threat can be internal – I would contend that the biggest threat at the moment is the debt – or it could be external, or a combination of both internal and external. Regardless, the simple fact of the matter is that leaders have deflected the focus away from the basic truth of the overall situation towards a ‘deception campaign’ against the American public whereby even the most basic and essential mode of social life and basic social relations are repressed and suppressed.