A Philosophy of Discomfort

Jacques Pezeu-Massabuau

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781861899033
• eBook ISBN:
  9781861899491
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

A hard chair, an irritating draught of air, an embarrassing conversation – all of these provoke in us a sense of discomfort. Normally we define ‘discomfort’ simply as a lack of comfort. But which came first, comfort or its lack?

A Philosophy of Discomfort explores the idea of comfort and discomfort as a historical and philosophical concept – a constant push and pull of opposing forces. Discomfort is a relative state, changing as the idea of well-being shifts through different epochs and cultures. Yet Jacques Pezeu-Massabuau claims that discomfort is of greater importance than comfort, even as we maintain the constant struggle to evade pains and privations.

He explores notions of comfort over time, and considers examples of housing and interiors, from Japanese homes to the Moroccan casbah and modern city apartments, in which aspects of discomfort – the physical lack of well-being – are tolerated and accepted. In so doing, he also unravels the myths of modern comfort. While instinct demands we avoid it, the author insists that we recognize discomfort as central to our existence. He suggests we should learn to utilize it in order to find our way to its opposite: be it pleasure, hedonism or well-being.

Imaginative and clearly argued, A Philosophy of Discomfort will help the reader understand and cope with the uncomfortable in day-to-day life, whether we manage to escape it, change it or tolerate it.

six

Discomfort Provoked

Images of Discomfort, Discomfort of the Image

There is a further incarnation of ill-being that we must consider. Far from being imposed on us, we seek out its most noxious and aggressive manifestations. It is no longer a question of practising a type of discomfort (for ourselves or others) whose conditions are already present; it is a question of provoking discomfort from a situation where it does not exist in order to gain satisfaction or advantage that would be unattainable without it. No matter the eventual consequences, the essential thing here is to mistreat ourselves.

History and anthropology have shown that premeditated acts of physical or moral suffering exist in every era and every society. The effect of this suffering seems to be a voluntary aggravation of discomfort that is remote to our understanding of it. There are different motivations for it, including spirituality, or a general principle of existence that can entail simple curiosity, environmental protection or the basic will to suffer. Extreme states of this anti-comfort sometimes uphold the most severe practices of mystical asceticism. Others, of a seemingly non-violent nature but still as irreducible, simply involve the banishment of material comfort. Still others, which are more damaging, involve the deliberate embrace of everything that threatens our peace and quiet. Certainly dreaming and meditation presuppose some sort of doubt about the individual and the world, and contemplation of the self can suppress a lack and give life meaning. But we can also cultivate this lack and all our imperfections for their own sakes, or simply just in order to see what happens.

Each culture has an art and a literature of excess – one that is mystical or carnal, or deals with passion or violence, eroticism or suffering – and it is always permissible to contemplate this art or read that literature, even if a part of us rejects it. Those who really devote themselves to it include artists, bibliophiles, hedonists, sadists, people with obsessive personalities, connoisseurs of rare sensations and sometimes (why not?) you or me. For most, pleasure is located on the narrow ridge where positive and negative aesthetic impressions intersect, such as in a writer’s prose or a painter’s choice of colour, and resides in the thrill we feel whenever we dive far off the shores of the true and the good that our sensible societies have marked out with the beacons of their norms.

This voluntary distress, like the unwanted aspects of discomfort, depends on images, but it depends solely on them. Whether they surface from the memory of paintings or from reading (which places fewer limitations on our fantasies), the ambiguous power of images is most effective here. Unlike other types of subjections, where representations drive and justify concrete manifestations (the asceticism of the morning jog or monastic privations, or the imposition of a uniform and unsophisticated habitat on the social body), these images require no material realization. In other words, images cease to be signs and become their own referent; they use their own power to affect our mental comfort. Who has not felt a certain distress when faced with the accumulation of torturous behaviour inflicted in the Marquis de Sade’s One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom? Or a quasi-physiological malaise at the depiction of a behaviour that our culture has trained us to regard as going against nature (or opposed to its own concept of nature)? We reassure ourselves with the idea that we would never encounter such excesses in our everyday lives, that their outrageousness confines them solely to verbal or pictorial expression. Nevertheless, these thoughts inevitably orient our fantasies towards their eventual realization, indefinitely delayed but compelling in the same way that evil is compelling.

Here we arrive at the source of all discomfort: the power of images to communicate emotion. The fervour with which we accept, provoke and savour discomfort shows that its causes and manifestations rarely stem from outside sources, such as material constraints, cultural imperatives or the will of others. It is no longer an ill-being of exterior origin but one that is born in us, meaning that we can distance ourselves from it only if we do not welcome or deliberately cultivate it. Especially since on the other end of the chain, at the origin of the image, there exists another kind of longing. Isn’t its destabilizing power deliberate on the part of the artist? Or does it operate unknowingly and solely through the strength of its narration? Is there provocation or just the sheer pleasure of displaying? ‘I have always sought the means to make myself intolerable to my contemporaries’, declared Léon Bloy, much as Louis-Ferdinand Céline and so many others have also done. But isn’t this affected taste for scandal a kind of powerlessness expressed differently?

This is surely a false problem. A work of literature contents itself with its existence, offering itself to the reader’s own imagination, whatever the author’s intention. It is hardly the social revelations in Émile Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart or the apologetic aims of Blaise Pascal’s Pensées that seduce us. Reading François Mauriac’s novels (‘these beautiful venomous flowers’, as Kléber Haedens described them), observing the perversions of his bourgeoisie of Bordeaux remains optional. Still, the writer stylizes them in a sombre and harmonious prose that, despite his denials, generates suffocating and frequently depressing imagery.

Art exhibits similar ambiguity. According to Luis Barragán, ‘any architecture that does not inspire serenity is an error’. Matisse thought that painting should be like a ‘comfortable armchair’, and we generally demand that music open up a world of joy and peace. But isn’t this misguided? Hasn’t the true function of the artist at any given moment been to disturb our everyday life, to provide another meaning to sounds, colours, forms and the ‘language of the horde’? Isn’t art an essentially heterodox and disturbing means of expression? Returning to the comfort of home night after night is surely a condition of survival, but isn’t another demand of well-being the simulated violation of the tranquil happiness of existing? Haven’t we all felt the equivocal and scouring pleasure of certain sounds – Stravinsky or techno, it doesn’t matter – of colours – Soutine or Soulages – or of surprising architecture? And where fantasy is concerned, what might we say about Georges Bataille’s ‘divine ecstasy’ in ‘the erotic autopsy of a live woman’ or the painter André Masson’s Massacres, or even the scenes of torture and rape in Japanese manga?

The thresholds we cross from pleasure to deception, disturbance, repulsion or distress vary according to age, education or mood, and we know that each of these encounters hastens an anticipated clash. The soul’s discomfort arrives from three directions: the treatment, style, drawing or colour of a work instantly wounds our sensibility, regardless of the talent displayed or the content. But the latter suffices to offend our moral sense, as with Sade’s novels or engravings of a similar ilk. Finally, the plainly judged work devoid of talent disappoints our critical spirit. All told, personal culture and open-mindedness determine the degree of our embarrassment, even when tempered by habit; that is, by our generation. Claude Debussy ravaged our great-grandparents’ ears and Baudelaire or Cézanne were equally rejected in their time. This is the case for most true creators, even today. Confusion always incites curiosity, while justifying its attempts to influence nature and to solicit worry over unexpected and perhaps unhealthy things. Still, wished-for and cultivated discomfort only affects our soul and most of us refuse to take it further. One more step would lead us from desire to exaltation, from ill-being to pain, and from the spirit to the flesh.

Asceticism Past and Present

The aforementioned step – from desire to exaltation, from ill-being to pain, and from the spirit to the flesh – is one that leads to absolute anti-comfort. People who attempt to define themselves through such extremes alone never hesitate to take the plunge, while others implement rather less intense forms of ill-being in their defence of diverse ideals. However, it is always a matter of integrating into our physiology the literary or pictorial images with which we are presented, even if they are perhaps no more than exact descriptions. It is true that suffering is most frequently exalted without violence; it even poses as the enemy of violence where altruistic or religious ideas are concerned. The fascination exerted by these representations leads to a redoubtable kind of alienation since it entails the loss of all initiative to return to received sensations, images and ideas. And it subsequently affects speech, gestures and acts.

Take the example of the party. It might seem paradoxical to compare it to asceticism, but both share the capacity to disturb through rites of transgression. The French term s’éclater (to burst) and the idea of it (the Dionysian spirit that permits us to lose ourselves) express this chaotic liberation of energies, this occasional desire for auto-violent experiences and a certain drunkenness that always involves temporary but voluntary negation of essential cultural values. More precisely, exalting the Other, which is the dimension of derision, the orgy and of profanation, involves a negation of the visible and ‘noble’ aspect of culture, as Mikhail Bakhtin brilliantly analysed in reference to Rabelais. The use of some drugs submerges the consciousness and leads to atypical behaviour, causing a generalized liberation of control over the senses that certain types of music can also encourage. This type of collective exaltation is neither ill-being, well-being nor blind provocation, but it leads its followers into an excess of real or pretend pleasure whose role is to offer the (false) comfort of forgetting.

It is precisely the opposite – the fierce will to preserve in memory – that is at stake for those who recommend the new comfort of austerity in the name of the present devastation of our environment. The sole aim of eliminating the causes of ecological cataclysm drives them, even though the current state of science would hardly permit us to turn back the course of industrial progress and history. In its most extreme form, this new evangelism preaches the sacrifice of commodities that rely on polluting energy sources (but which we no longer know how to do without) and the recourse to others, presented as natural (water, sun, wind, sea), to heat, wash and light ourselves or prepare our food. Only management on a planetary scale, whose long process has barely begun, and national politics can master a situation that has become objectively frightening. Every individual approach becomes a Utopia, as attested by the image of the strict environmentalist freezing alone by candlelight in front of their fireplace and sleeping on a thin layer of bedding. This is a candidly futile image, and it would amuse us if only it did not express such profound distress together with such a respectable ideal.

Despite the undeniable gravity of these problems, this ideal is riddled with traps. Multiple diversions stalk the sincere and generous because dual deception is at large. While ecology constitutes a science, as Philippe Pelletier reminds us in his book L’imposture écologiste (The Ecological Masquerade), environmentalism is just an ideology and the environmental movement is something else, although both claim the status of the former. But this (voluntary) semantic confusion accompanies another, which it masks and constantly tries to justify. Environmentalism refers more or less to a natural order that encompasses the social or intellectual realms, and which marks a clear fundamentalism. Such conviction – which encourages the undeniably planetary character of the danger and the need for planetary remedies – opens the door to all sorts of doctrines and directions (romantic, conservative, biological, political, sometimes racist or imperialist), all in the name of environmental protection. Such positions frequently present the primacy of nature over culture as dogma and reason (and even the opposite of this in nature or of the historical into the eternal, which Marx stigmatized), or the rejection of anthropocentrism and rationalism (in the name of individuation, decentralization and neo-spiritualism, which also accompanies the neo-modernism I mentioned). These positions can be easily distorted into refusals of progress in general, to pessimism and, since there remains nothing left, to a philosophical or religious sectarianism whose excesses we are familiar with. The physical discomfort and tradition that certain environmentalists predict is minimal when compared with the discomfort caused by these ideologies.

We shouldn’t confuse this modern (and possibly dangerous) primitivism with the sincere taste for the antique and worn or unfinished. The Japanese writer Jun’ichirō Tanizaki asserts in his book In Praise of Shadows that ‘living amongst objects whose lustre has been soiled with grime calms the heart and the nerves’. Earlier, Montaigne wrote of the ‘intent, consent and complacency in nourishing oneself with melancholy’ (II-20) and considered that ‘beggars have their splendour and sensual pleasures, just like the wealthy’ (II-13). We are dealing here with an aesthetic of imperfection and denial that is as old as mankind. It is present in every civilization and arises from a classical reversal of norms in favour of a dissident conception of certain values: of beauty (like the ‘shabby chic’ style of home decoration); but also, when this reverse aestheticism replaces a simple cult of material discomfort, of well-being. In other words, a reasoned practice of anti-comfort.

It is at the intersection of this aestheticism with ugliness that a specific purging function of art intervenes. An example is the potential malaise caused by the fantastic bestiaries made by Romanesque sculptors. The mission of these deformed beings was undoubtedly to make evil spirits tangible for the monks and nuns who were susceptible to profane desires. Symbolized in this way and exhibited in the plain light of the sanctuary, their own interior monsters emerged and disappeared, inoffensive. Dragons, pygmies and the cynocephalus belong to the realm of the night but when manifested in this manner they attest to the existence of divine light. They too are also creatures of God, obedient to him, so that the joy of grace flows from the discomfort of the soul focused on steadily contemplating them in order to eliminate evil.

But these days most of us simply find them aesthetically unpleasant and so satisfy our spiritual needs with more serene practices, although in some cases these may still be abusive. Take certain forms of abstinence, the most common of which is fasting. Almost all religions prescribe some degree of abstaining from food so as to purify the body and soul. Why should we take pleasure in this perishable flesh when more elevated joys await us, especially since this spiritual asceticism often goes hand in hand with the concept of food hygiene? In the name of both these ideas Gandhi described in his autobiography how he kept to a vegetarian diet in England, then in India, reading books that strongly encouraged this. He drank only water, abstaining even from milk. Pushed to extremes, this form of bodily deprivation invites death, but we will return to that point later.

But we can see that the exaltation of going without – food and all other fundamental necessities for existence, including air or light – extends beyond the limits of personal taste, reaching the stricter domain of need and principles. I can fulfil my fantasy of sleeping on a hard surface or practise even more painful physical punishments if I so wish. I can also do it in the name of an aesthetic ideal or a moral obligation that I have adopted. I submit myself to these trials because they originate from someone else’s will and are imposed on me, even if it then becomes my own will. Finally, it becomes acceptable to me to practise them on myself or on others for the sole reason that, in my eyes, suffering – my own or that of others – has taken on a positive value.

Exalted Discomfort – At the Edge of the Abyss

In his poem Vowels Arthur Rimbaud attributed to the letter ‘i’ the colour red, the most imperious colour, and richest in connotations (red has more than 500 qualifiers in French). These connotations can be divided into two distinct families where the sources and ingredients of happiness and its contrary can be found. The following, in no particular order, relate to the former: valour, warmth and tenderness, imperial majesty or Christian redemption, compassion, the Red Cross, wine and festivities, the joys of childhood. The malevolent side is equally rich in connotations: blood, carnage, war, impure passions and the flames of hell, fire and financial difficulties. Our choice or rejection of this hue in interior decoration and dress is dependent on our inclination towards either of these series of images.

The Rimbaldian vision stems clearly from the latter: the linear trace of the ‘i’ (here horizontal) turns into a mouth that draws out female laughter, but from these beautiful (and red) lips occasionally gushes a spurt of blood and the hilarity evoked is that, taunting or cruel, of anger (i-re). From the outset, the colour is supported by the plural noun pourpres (crimsons), suggesting countless nuances, to which other images in the text attribute the most harmful connotations. This includes the last: ivresses (raptures/drunkenness) qualified as penitent, that some have interpreted as the joyful repentance of a ‘binge’ pursued to the point of regret, but this negates the preceding suggestions. One only needs to imagine a torture scene to grasp the extent to which the poet’s broken images – the spilt blood, anger, penitence, raptures, uncontrollable agitation or mad laughter – can be coherently integrated into the overarching image of cruelty that unites executioner and victim in a reverence for suffering, the violence of which ends up confounding them, just like in Greek tragedy.

We cannot go on without sketching out the distribution of the pathological and the normal. Both result from a given society’s choice to express its common expectations in a specific natural and historical context. A norm (or rule) serves to ‘straighten’ those objects or facts that are not yet integrated are expected to adhere to it. The norm is only defined in relation to facts or ideas that escape it because they are judged to be of a pathological nature. Normal individuals compare themselves to others who are not normal; normality is only constituted under the threat of abnormality. Since the pathological implies a lack of social adaptation, the normal can only be something positive in a society. The extent to which these definitions escape ethnic or historical comparisons is clear: sexual practices or the particular mutilations that some impose on themselves are judged in our time as bestial and fanatical while in another time and place they may be seen as beneficial. Normal and abnormal are only decided on in reference to a specific time in a specific civilization.

Consider the ideas and practices that surround death. Forgetting that leaving this world is as natu...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• one Discomfort Refuted
• two Feeling Discomfort
• three Discomfort Dominated
• four Discomfort Practised
• five Discomfort Denied
• six Discomfort Provoked
• seven In Praise of Discomfort
• eight My Discomfort is My Culture
• BIBLIOGRAPHY