The pleasure in literature, on the other hand, can produce bliss.īarthes nails this distinction down by offering more negative words about mass culture: People’s pleasures, in other words, are based on fake things, on stereotypes, not literature. Delights of caste…pleasure, perhaps bliss, no”(38). (38).īut in the midst of all this, language remains: “An islet remains: the text. The People? Here all the magical or poetical activity disappears, the party’s over, no more games with words: an end to metaphors, reign of the stereotypes imposed by petit bourgeoisie culture. Can that be a class eroticism? What class? The bourgeoisie? The bourgeoisie has no relish for language, which it no longer regards even as a luxury, an element of the art of living (death of “great” literature), but merely as an instrument of decor (phraseology). I am intersted in language because it wounds and seduces me. Would he distinguish, then, between a Charlie Chaplin and a Seth Rogen – between one schlemiel and another? Aren’t they both products of mass culture or is Charlie Chaplin closer to language than Rogen? After all, Barthes, Benjamin, and Arendt found something blissful and “new” in Chaplin. In language, Barthes finds pleasure and bliss. Recently, when I picked up Roland Barthes’ Pleasure of the Text, I found two aphorisms that speak to a unique relationship and experience he has with language, one that mass culture cannot experience. While an artist like Andy Warhol embraced mass culture and turned to pop art for meaning, many other artists felt that any turn to mass culture was a form of betrayal.

Who doesn’t love mass culture today? Millions of people watch Netflix, surf the internet, and occasion Facebook and Twitter to experience a daily dose of mass culture.

Barthes pleasure of the text