Whether in the form of exclusive cruises, ridiculously cheap flights, binge watching, procrastination, or a love for plastic pop: guilty pleasures are ubiquitous. As familiar as it is by now, considerations of this strange mixture of enjoyment, shame, and regret are often mired in knee-jerk reflex. The KWI annual theme for 2024/25 thus aims to probe the operations of this central thought structure. How does individual desire result in public shame, stigmatizing some and displayed with relish by others? When the moralization of pleasure becomes a means of humiliation, gestures of distinction and class conflict are not far off; only at first glance do guilty pleasures belong to the private realm. More than ever, they have become an arena of societal and cultural dispute.
In the framework of aesthetic judgment, guilty pleasures have a chequered history, taking their current form only as a postmodern phenomenon: the term dates back to a magazine column in Film Comment launched in 1978, in which Martin Scorsese, Joan Rivers, or Slavoj Žižek presented favourite films with little regard for good taste. With fond enthusiasm, columnists devoted themselves to items that others waived off as too kitschy, too commercial, too popular. Today, style-conscious breaches of style can be converted into substantial cultural capital: someone who prefers science fiction to the bildungsroman dons the mystique of a supposedly subversive attitude, confidently sidestepping the canon of the well-educated middle class. Against this backdrop, it is no accident that formerly niche topics have developed into core disciplinary fields for the cultural sciences. At the same time, research has increasingly shifted away from the pioneering works of British cultural studies that took on the neglected culture of the working class.
Moreover, guilty pleasure conveys a political desire: the dark side of the pleasure principle that reveals itself in living out transgressive affects and enjoying domination and disparagement. Guilty pleasures in a wider sense include worldviews that do not suffer from a lack of freedom for the self and others, instead craving this lack as a form of “voluntary servitude” (Étienne de La Boétie).
With the annual theme for 2024/25, the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) Essen will do much more than investigate the negative reputation of guilty pleasures. We want to explore the entanglement of enjoyment and shame in order to determine its different forms, historical and cultural constellations, and functions.
