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Aug. 16th, 2008 01:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avevale_intelligencerWhat is enjoyment? The word as used covers a broad spectrum of sensation. At one end we might find the dull, passive contentment, really compounded more than half of inertia, with which one absorbs some experience which is not actually painful. A little further along, we have the feeling with which one listens to music while working, or watches television while eating; a sort of half-awareness that something nice is going on, a compromised pleasure. From there we progress to the sort of enjoyment that demands total concentration, the sort we give to a good new film, or a gourmet meal, or the conversation and company of a loved one.
But there is more than one dimension to this seemingly simple word. Without looking up the derivation, because I've just shifted six 25l bags of topsoil and lifting even one volume of my trusty OED is currently beyond me, it looks to me as if the word has something to do with putting joy into something rather than taking it out, with investing one's capacity for joy in an experience rather than expecting the experience to give one joy by its own efforts. Enjoyment in this sense would seem to be a more interactive thing than any of the kinds I've described above, and also to have an element of choice in it: the experience stays the same, but our reaction to it will depend on how much capacity for joy we are prepared to invest in it.
Obviously this does not mean that experiences do not have pleasurable or painful qualities of their own. It hardly matters how much joy one invests in the action of the dentist's drill; the experience is hardly likely to produce raptures, unless the dentist has some really good anaesthetic. In the case, however, of experiences designed to be pleasurable, this theory may go some way to explaining the vast differences of opinion that arise over such things, and the vehemence with which those different opinions are advanced and defended.
There is, it seems, not only choice but bargaining involved in this transaction. We each learn, as we grow and mature, to set criteria for the investment of our joy--as, for instance, so much care for factual accuracy, so much believable-sounding dialogue, so many large explosions, so many hot young men wearing very little and touching each other--and unless these criteria are satisfied, we choose to withhold our investment, and small wonder then that we do not find the experience pleasant.
The criteria we set may be bound up with our image of ourselves, of our status, or any other aspect of our outward personas, or conditioned purely by what we have found enjoyable in the past. They are, though, a willed choice on our part, and not an immutable fact of reality; we can decide to relax them, or indeed tighten them, at any time. This film is not "bad" merely because I did not invest sufficient joy in it, and the proof is that someone who did can equally find it "good." It may, indeed, be badly made in many ways, but as long as it satisfies someone's criteria for investment, it can never be dismissed as irredeemably "bad" in itself. (Of course, it frequently is exactly so dismissed. That, as they say, is the problem.)
I've almost run out of steam, but here's another thought; the more people invest their money in a bank, the more capital that bank has to guarantee loans and investments with, and the more investors it can attract. The more people invest their capacity for joy in something, the more capital that something has, and the more enjoyable it can seem to others. Joy, in this sense, is communicable. It can be given, and taken away.
Just a thought.
But there is more than one dimension to this seemingly simple word. Without looking up the derivation, because I've just shifted six 25l bags of topsoil and lifting even one volume of my trusty OED is currently beyond me, it looks to me as if the word has something to do with putting joy into something rather than taking it out, with investing one's capacity for joy in an experience rather than expecting the experience to give one joy by its own efforts. Enjoyment in this sense would seem to be a more interactive thing than any of the kinds I've described above, and also to have an element of choice in it: the experience stays the same, but our reaction to it will depend on how much capacity for joy we are prepared to invest in it.
Obviously this does not mean that experiences do not have pleasurable or painful qualities of their own. It hardly matters how much joy one invests in the action of the dentist's drill; the experience is hardly likely to produce raptures, unless the dentist has some really good anaesthetic. In the case, however, of experiences designed to be pleasurable, this theory may go some way to explaining the vast differences of opinion that arise over such things, and the vehemence with which those different opinions are advanced and defended.
There is, it seems, not only choice but bargaining involved in this transaction. We each learn, as we grow and mature, to set criteria for the investment of our joy--as, for instance, so much care for factual accuracy, so much believable-sounding dialogue, so many large explosions, so many hot young men wearing very little and touching each other--and unless these criteria are satisfied, we choose to withhold our investment, and small wonder then that we do not find the experience pleasant.
The criteria we set may be bound up with our image of ourselves, of our status, or any other aspect of our outward personas, or conditioned purely by what we have found enjoyable in the past. They are, though, a willed choice on our part, and not an immutable fact of reality; we can decide to relax them, or indeed tighten them, at any time. This film is not "bad" merely because I did not invest sufficient joy in it, and the proof is that someone who did can equally find it "good." It may, indeed, be badly made in many ways, but as long as it satisfies someone's criteria for investment, it can never be dismissed as irredeemably "bad" in itself. (Of course, it frequently is exactly so dismissed. That, as they say, is the problem.)
I've almost run out of steam, but here's another thought; the more people invest their money in a bank, the more capital that bank has to guarantee loans and investments with, and the more investors it can attract. The more people invest their capacity for joy in something, the more capital that something has, and the more enjoyable it can seem to others. Joy, in this sense, is communicable. It can be given, and taken away.
Just a thought.
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no subject
Date: 2008-08-16 04:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-17 03:39 pm (UTC)One thing --
This film is not "bad" merely because I did not invest sufficient joy in it, and the proof is that someone who did can equally find it "good." It may, indeed, be badly made in many ways, but as long as it satisfies someone's criteria for investment, it can never be dismissed as irredeemably "bad" in itself.
I will frequently say, after having seen a movie -- most recently about Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull -- that I enjoyed it out of all proportion to its actual quality. And, you know, I'm okay with that. I don't insist that everything I enjoy be the highest quality.
There's a line from a song my father used to quote: "After you've been eatin' steak for a long time / Beans, beans taste fine."