Rituales y Placer

Sasha Weitman, Pleasure Rituals DRAFT - DO NOT QUOTE - COMMENTS WELCOME 11/10/05
Que faisiez vous mon cher au temps de l'Algrie,

Quand Brel tait vivant qu'il habitait Paris?
Je chantais, quoique desol par ces combats,
'La valse mille temps' et 'Ne me quitte pas'
Refrain.
Honte cet effront qui peut chanter pendant
Que Rome brle, ell' brul', brl' tout l' temps
Honte qui malgr tout fredonne des chansons
Gavroche, Mimi Pinson
Le feu de la ville ternelle est ternel.
Si Dieu veut l'incendie il veut les ritournelles.
qui fera-t-on croir' que le bon populo,
Quand il chante quand mme, est un parfait salaud?
[Refrain]
from Georges Brassens, 'Honte qui peut chanter'1
PLEASURE RITUALS*
Sasha Weitman
For Francesco Alberoni
This paper is about the kind of gatherings which ordinary language designates social (social calls, social occasions, social get-togethers, social events), so as to distinguish
them from instrumental gatherings (committee meetings, dentist appointments, business
transactions, job interviews). The brunt of my focus will be on familiar, conventional,
small scale, innocuous, informal (but by no means formless) social encounters and their
associated activities, all of which are still very much with us. These include, to mention
just a few, sociable conversations, invitations and visits, parties and celebrations, society
games, joint vacations, intimate encounters and the like. I will be less concerned here with
the more novel forms of sociality sociologists have been documenting and theorizing recently, such as computer-mediated sociality, social networking and 'post-social sociality'
with objects, epistemological (science, technology) and other (music, wine, artworks, tourist sites).2 This said, however, my approach to the older, familiar forms of sociality has
benefited considerably from current theorizing about these newer forms, especially by sociologists associated with the pragmatic turn3, like Antoine Hennion, Laurent Thvenot,
Karin Knorr-Cetina and Kevin Heatherington. Since the term social has long since been
adulterated and turned into a catch-all word, especially by the social sciences, whereas
what I have in mind here is relatively specific and well delimited, I propose to designate
all such gatherings, and the activities associated with each of them, as relational pleasure
rituals4.
Why rituals? Why pleasure? Why relational?
These gatherings constitute rituals in the sense that, ideal-typically5, they are held
in their own especially set-aside times and places, are conducted at their own self-enhancing pace, proceed in accordance with their own inner logic, rules and scripts, and are performed in a mood and spirit all their own usually spirited, affable, light, playful, relaxed
and, above all, autotelic6, meaning that ritual activities constitute ends in their own right
rather than means in the pursuit of ulterior ends, that they are self-rewarding. In these as in
other respects, then, rituals contrast with the business-like way in which, ideal-typically,
the secular activities of Everyday Life are tended to.7
These gatherings are pleasure rituals in that they are consciously intended and conducted by those who organize them in order to satisfy the wish of participants to enjoy
themselves, to 'have fun', to have a good time, to have euphoric experiences.8 These
gatherings may be thought of as pragmatic regimes9 ruled by the Pleasure Principle, by
the Law of Enjoyment.10 These rituals, then, are not the sort of activities in which people
take part because they have to, or because they think they ought to. Rather, they partake in them out of desire - because they want to, because they feel like it.11
Pleasure rituals come in two broad classes, solitary and relational. Solitary pleasure
rituals are performed alone and are devoted to the cultivation of pleasures that can be obtained and enjoyed by oneself, with no input from live others.12 Relational pleasure rituals,
for their part, are engaged in with live others, and entail the pursuit and enjoyment of relational pleasures, that is, of pleasures that are unthinkable, let alone attainable, except from,
through, or together with live others.13 Examples of relational pleasures are recognition,
intimacy, trust, acceptance, charisma, desideration, belonging. Such experiences cannot be
self-bestowed: you can't very well grant your own self charisma, recognition, belonging,
admiration - unless, that is, you are delusional. By their very nature, then, the experience
of relational pleasures requires the engagement of one or more partners, preferably willing
and able partners. The present paper deals mainly with relational pleasure rituals. Since,
however, the expression relational pleasure rituals constitutes a mouthful and, moreover,
since these rituals often are seasoned with servings of solitary pleasures (food, drinks, music), I will call them simply pleasure rituals, to highlight the element of pleasure in them.
Mainstream anthropology and sociology have researched and theorized a great variety of rituals - of status transition (rites de passage), of commemoration, of role reversal,
of celebration, exorcism, of thanksgiving, contest rituals, piacular rituals, pilgrimages, and
many more. Curiously, however, these disciplines have never recognized pleasure rituals
as a distinct class.14 This is peculiar, given the sheer profusion and variety of these rituals,
given their ubiquity in human history and across cultures, given the keen interest and unflagging appeal they have had for the public at large and, last but not least, given the key
part these rituals play in the initial production, and subsequently in the periodic reproduction, of the most significant type of solidary relations in our era, to which I now turn.
Affect Relations and Pleasure Rituals
Social solidarity, understood as the force that binds humans into enduring groups
large and small, has been a leitmotif to some, it has been the leitmotif15 of sociology
from the dawn of the discipline. Various types of social solidarity may be analytically distinguished, depending on the type of force that binds adherents together. Thus, material interests produce interest solidarity (class solidarity), legal undertakings produce contractual solidarity, the division of labor produces functional solidarity (organic solidarity),
cultural commonalities produce ethnic solidarity (mechanical solidarity), categorical imperatives produce moral solidarity.
In our era, roughly since the early 19th century Romantics, one type of solidarity
has been rising in importance in the eyes of ever more people, and has come to be prized,
idealized and aspired to above all the others, that I propose to designate affect solidarity.
The defining characteristic of affect solidarity is those bound by it experience themselves
emotionally connected - as if, emotionally, they were linked like communicating vases. By
this I mean that they feel genuinely affected ('touched', 'moved') by significant turns in the
lives of their solidary others, as though these events had also happened to them. (Just think
of how parents feel on learning that their child has been injured, or has won a tournament.)
On such occasions, their responses surge directly from the seat of emotion (from the
heart, from the guts), unmediated by cerebral considerations having to do with interest
calculations, contractual constraints, moral obligations or the like.16
Relationships of affect solidarity hereafter affect relations tout court - have been
known to obtain (occasionally) between lovers, spouses, siblings, close friends, teammates, parents and children, medical personnel and patients, leaders and followers,
coaches and athletes, analysts and analysands, sports clubs and their fans, cities and their
residents, nations and their citizens. In ordinary parlance, several of these relations are often called love relations (maternal love, filial love, couple love, fraternal love, love
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of country) and I too will thus refer to them on occasion. But note that the kinds of love I
have in mind here are not of the agap (Boltanski, 1990) or the caritas type, but earthy,
earthly, pleasure-fueled kinds of love, the patron-saint of which is Eros, not Jesus. Again,
curiously enough, though mainstream sociology has studied solidary relations based on interests, morality, consensus, status, contract, functional complementarity, it has contributed relatively little in the way of cumulative theory of pleasure-centered love relations.17
A key question for would-be theorists of these relations - by no means the only
question, but the one that I have chosen to deal with here - is that of reproduction. This
question asks how, after they have been initially produced, affect relations subsequently
come to be reproduced? Or, in plainer English, how are feelings of love sustained over
time in relationships that started out as love relations?18 Important though this question
may be for social theorists, it is even more important for many ordinary people nowadays,
who often experience it keenly, even poignantly, as a personal existential problem of the
very highest order, this for two mutually reinforcing reasons. One, already mentioned, is
that for many nowadays, especially in the West, love relations have become a supreme
value and a lifelong aspiration.19 Thus, institutions like the family, friendship, the neighborhood, even relations in the workplace, all of which had once been founded upon and
sustained by material interests, contractual undertakings, hallowed tradition, sacred moral
obligations, and the like, have become in our era increasingly sentimentalized and idealized.20 The other, more immediate reason is that, when left unattended, affect relationships
seem particularly susceptible to deterioration over time. That is, each such relationship is
subject to endogenous processes of disenchantment, of disaffection, even of growing indifference. As a result of these corrosive processes, the emotions which members feel are the
raisons d'tre of their affect relationship tend to dissipate, leading eventually to the breakup of the relationship, or else to its commutation into a solidary relation of a qualitatively
less valued kind, now held together by mundane considerations having to do with material
interests (sunk costs), legal sanctions (substantial capital losses, alimony payments, child
support), moral constraints (for the sake of the children) , or the sheer force of inertia
(havent the strength to start from scratch all over again).
A common kneejerk response to this problem nowadays is to seek or to advise
therapy, which calls for identifying and neutralizing the built-in problems (structural,
personal, interpersonal,) responsible for this degradation of love (Mitchell, 2002). For
many people, however, therapy is viewed as a desperation measure, to be taken up, if at
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all, only in extremis, as a last ditch effort to salvage a relationship that appears virtually
beyond repair. They hope they will never reach this critical stage and, instead, go to significant lengths to keep alive their love for one another. One of the things they do in this
connection by no means the only one, to be sure - is to resort periodically to any of an
array of ready-made folk devices that are as-if especially designed for this very purpose:
they 'go out', take joint vacations, meet with friends, celebrate birthdays, make love. In
other words, they engage in precisely the kind of pleasure rituals this paper is about. It is
as if the widespread resort to these rituals stems from a widely shared intuitive belief to
the effect that just as love relations are born in pleasure, so their sustenance over time requires (among others) periodic re-infusions of pleasure.21
Hackneyed as this belief may be, it nevertheless strikes me as an eminently plausible and important proposition, and I have adopted it here as a working assumption in this
research program. The cardinal question of this program, then, will not be whether pleasure rituals do or do not serve to renew and sustain affect relations. Rather, starting from
the assumption that, when effectively performed, pleasure rituals do indeed have re-solidarizing effects on those who engage in them, the central question will ask how these rituals
manage to produce those effects. Providing empirically grounded, theoretically persuasive,
and practically serviceable answers to this question is the objective of the specialty I propose to call pleasure ritual pragmatics.22
The Pragmatics of Pleasure Rituals
As suggested by its designation, pleasure ritual pragmatics takes as its subject the
pleasure-producing practices, ranging from simple to elaborate, to which people resort periodically in order to enjoy themselves and, by the same token, to revitalize their affect relations.23 Its aim is to discover and to articulate the inner logic of these practices, regarded
from the vantage point of those who engage in them, especially those who do so with a
modicum of success.24 Thus, given a set of enduring love relations (among friends,
spouses, fathers and sons, teacher and pupils), pleasure ritual pragmatics enquires at length
and in painstakingly minute detail - since, as every working researcher knows, God Dwelleth in the Details - about the pleasure rituals in which the parties to such relations periodically engage, and by means of which they succeed, somehow, to contribute to the periodic
revival of their emotional bonds. Pleasure ritual pragmatics does not rest content with asking which pleasure rituals these parties engage in. Rather, for each class of such rituals, it
enquires what specifically these rituals entail, i.e. what they actually consist of, when they
are engaged in, where, how, how often, in whose company, in what spirit, in what sequence, in what settings, all the while paying special attention to the reflexions and elucidations, if any, effective practitioners give for practicing them specifically as they do. All
these questions are asked for one sole purpose: to gather the necessary data that will serve
as building blocks for beginning to construct, on a ritual-by-ritual basis, an increasingly
coherent pragmatic theory or, as Geertz (1974) proposed to call it, a clinical theory25 of
how these rituals actually work.
Consider conjugal families: it is a truism that when family members gather daily
round the dinner table to eat a lively, leisurely, enjoyable meal together, they are likely to
feel closer to one another than if they did not regularly partake in this or in any other such
family pleasure ritual. Likewise for couples: it is a truism that couples periodically engage
in sexual lovemaking and, when this ritual is perfused with pleasures, that it brings the
couple closer together, that it re-solidarizes the lovers, that it 're-enamorates' them, as Alberoni (2000) likes to put it. The same holds for long-time friendships: friends who get together regularly to engage in an enjoyable pleasure ritual (say, a bi-weekly bowling game
followed by an evening at their favorite pub) are more likely to reinforce and thus to sustain their friendship over the years than if they engaged in no such activities. Similar, and
similarly pedestrian, observations can be made with respect to numerous would-be solidary formations, like religious communities, school classrooms, neighborhood blocks, research labs, combat units,26 even academic departments. The intriguing, indeed the tantalizing question is, what exactly lies behind these and other such truisms? In other words,
precisely what is it that lovers ordinarily do, and precisely what is it that they experience,
in the course of their periodic rituals of lovemaking, as a result of which they succeed,
somehow, to re-'make' their love, and thereby to grant it yet another lease on life? The
same set of questions applies to family members eating and delighting one another round
their dinner table, to friends bowling together and having a few beers thereafter, and to
countless other such pleasure rituals in which solidary members engage regularly.
Note in passing three significant respects in which pleasure ritual pragmatics differs from most current ways of doing (academic) sociology.
The first is that, in contrast to mainstream sociologies, pleasure ritual pragmatics is
not primarily interested in how the population at large (or a representative sample of it)
practices pleasure rituals. It is relatively uninterested because the answer is virtually a
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foregone conclusion, namely, most people practice these rituals rather ineffectually, not to
say ineptly not excluding the author of these lines. Rather, pleasure ritual pragmatics is
mainly interested in how these rituals are practiced by amateurs of these rituals 27 - that is,
by those who are talented, seasoned and reasonably effective practitioners of these rituals.28 The rationale for this blatant, unapologetic 'sampling bias' is that the aim of pleasure
ritual pragmatics is to contribute to a constructive theory29 of the rituals in question, that
is, to a theory of the effective practice of these rituals.
It follows, second, that, faced with a specific class of pleasure rituals say, alpinism30 - the primary interest of the pragmaticist is not first and foremost in questions dear to
the scholarly (and scholastic) interests of much current academic sociology. In particular, a
pleasure ritual pragmatics is less drawn to questions having to do with the larger causal
contextual conditions (macrosocial, macrocultural, historical) in which the pleasure rituals
in question first emerged or in which these rituals continue to be practiced, or with the
functions, intended or unintended, these rituals have on other parts and aspects of society.
Third, it also follows from the above that pragmatists researching amateurs of
pleasure rituals will tend to position themselves vis--vis them much as ethnographers in
an alien culture position themselves vis--vis their informants, namely, as learners eager to
glean from these amateurs everything they can reveal, by word or by example, in the way
of telling experiences and pertinent object-lessons for the effective practice of pleasure
rituals. Such an attitude on the part of the researcher toward those whom s/he studies contrasts with the detached, disinterested, 'objective' attitude of garden-variety positivistic researchers toward 'subjects' and 'respondents'. It also contrasts, albeit to a lesser and less
grating extent, with the ostensibly humbler, more empathetic, but theoretically uncompromising attitude of Bourdieu-inspired practitioners of 'socioanalysis'.31
A Conceptual Framework for Pleasure Ritual Pragmatics
In what follows, I propose a conceptual framework (by no means yet a theory) which, I
hope, will prove serviceable to sociologists and anthropologists for thinking pleasure rituals and for doing research on them. At this stage, the best I can hope for is that this framework will be useful for the tasks of selecting, codifying and organizing the data researchers collect on pleasure rituals, whether by means of ethnographic observations or from
combing through promising documentary source materials32, so as to be in a position, subsequently, to theorize these rituals from a pragmatic perspective.
A phenomenological pragmatics. Suppose a specific class of pleasure rituals (say,

the ritual of erotic sexual lovemaking) has been researched, and that its typical constitutive
rites have been duly identified, documented, named and inventoried. (Note in passing that,
in my terminology, 'rites' are the building blocks of rituals, and that they stand in relation
to rituals as, in semiology, signs stand in relation to syntagms.) The general way by which
I propose that each of these rites be analyzed is the method I call phenomenological pragmatics. By this I mean a set of procedures by which each rite is considered in terms of the
affective experiences it awakens in the participant who enacts it, and/or in those in relation
to whom it is enacted, all this in the context or, to be precise, in the frame (Goffman
1974) - of the ritual as a whole of which the rite in question is a component part. In terms
of analytical procedure, the proposed method is largely transposed from semiological
analysis as expounded by Barthes (1964). In terms of substance, however, the proposed
method differs from semiological analysis in that it does not ask what a given rite signifies, that is, what it means, what it represents, what it communicates in the context of the
ritual as a whole, as is the standard operating practice in semiology, in symbolic interactionist sociology, and in much cultural anthropology.33 Rather, phenomenological pragmatics asks what affective experiences the rite under examination expresses in those who
enact it, and/or what affective experiences this rite awakens in those in relation to whom it
is enacted.
Take, for example, the act of hand-holding by a couple. In the semiotics of Goffman (1971, ch. 5), hand-holding is a 'tie-sign', that is, a conventional, culture-specific gesture that signfies to all within visual range that two persons holding hands in public constitute a couple, with all that this implies in the way of accessibility to one another and to
others. To the phenomenological pragmatist, per contra, the same hand-holding constitutes
one of the gestural rites whereby the members of the couple express the emotional desire
of each to touch, to feel (to be 'in touch'), to grasp, to squeeze, to hold, to intertwine with
one another and/or to be touched, felt, grasped, squeezed, held by and intertwined with one
another. The two methods, semiotics and phenomenological pragmatics, are not incompatible with one another. On the contrary, they complement each other. Semiotics is concerned with meanings and with their communication via signs, whereas phenomenological
pragmatics is concerned with affective experiences, and their expression and their arousal
via rites.34
Equipped with this general methodological orientation, I now propose that pleasure
rituals be thought of as entailing the following inter-related yet analytically distinguishable
component aspects or phases, to be introduced below roughly in stepwise progression and
in order of ascending pragmatic importance. They are: an occasion, a chronotope, pre-ritual self-preparations, a moral infrastructure, and the pleasure fest. (There is also a post-ritual set of rites of re-entry into Everyday Life, but I shall skip them in this presentation.)
Let us consider each of these in turn.
An Occasion. By the occasion I mean the reason given to prospective participants
for holding a pleasure ritual. It may be a significant date in the life cycle of the individual
(like a birthday or an anniversary); or a significant turning point in the individual's biography (a promotion, the completion of a business deal, the move to new living quarters, a
long overdue divorce); or a significant date in the history of the group (a national holiday)
or in the yearly cycle (New Year, the start of spring, the great summer recess). It may even
be the sheer fact that much time has passed since the consociates last held a pleasure ritual.
Any of these can serve as a conventional, culturally sanctioned opportunity and excuse for
holding a pleasure ritual.35 For present purposes, the thing to retain here is that official occasions must not automatically be taken at face value, for they often serve many in the
population as culturally sanctioned grounds for engaging in pleasure rituals. Therefore,
and appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, it is often best not to view weddings as
status passage rituals, Purim, Mardi Gras, and the like as role reversal rituals, Independence Day as a ritual of national celebration, even when that is how these occasions are officially represented, and even if that is what they are authoritatively proclaimed to be by
duly certified academic sociologists and anthropologists.
Take, for example, the Passover seder ritual as it is celebrated by secular Israeli
Jews - as distinct from the way it is celebrated by their religiously observant confreres.
Even though, ostensibly, the seder is a religious ritual of commemoration (of the Israelites
liberation from slavery, of their exodus from Egypt and of their 40 years of wanderings in
the Sinai wilderness before gaining entry to the Promised Land), secular Israeli Jews celebrate the Passover seder as a pleasure ritual par excellence for the extended family and select guests, that is, as a ritual intended, designed and practiced to be enjoyed by all who attend it. Whence the largely cavalier attitude of Israeli secular Jews toward the explicit religious prescriptions and proscriptions concerning how to conduct this ritual. Should little or
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no enjoyment have been produced around the table, the seder is judged by participants to
have fallen flat, not to have succeeded. Other examples of ostensibly religious holidays
secular Israeli Jews routinely treat as occasions for pleasure rituals are weddings, Shabbat,
Rosh haShana, Sukkot, Hanukka, Pessach, Lag baOmer, Shavuot, even Yom Kippur
(dubbed Bicycle Holiday' in Tel-Aviv). A similarly pagan, irreverent, unabashedly pleasure-driven attitude toward official holidays has long since been in effect among many
secular Gentiles in the West, even more so than among secular Israeli Jews. Thus, they too
have appropriated and recycled ostensibly religious and national holidays into occasions
for holding pleasure rituals of their own. In the US, these include All-Saints Day (Halloween), Christmas (birth of Jesus), New Year (circumcision of Jesus and induction into the
Jewish people), Mardi Gras (Carnival), Thanksgiving, Independence Day, Memorial Day
and the like36.
A Chronotope.37 By this I mean the spatial-temporal setting in which the ritual has
been slated to take place, and whose manifest function, beside serving as a material platform for holding the event, is to actively generate and sustain the appropriate atmosphere
for the pleasure ritual to take place. The chronotope entails a general location and backdrop (the Tel-Aviv seashore), a particular locale (a specific beachfront caf), an especially selected temporal slot (Friday June 10, from dusk to dawn), a constructed stage
complete with a central surface (a dance floor) and secondary surfaces (lounging areas,
bars, secluded retreats), stage sets with props, decorations, furnishings, lighting, music,
mood-altering substances (delicacies, beverages, ambient fragrances), auxiliary personnel
(DJs, musicians, waiters, barmen, cooks), back regions, and, most important by far, a select cast of participants, all especially groomed, dressed and predisposed for the ritual at
hand. (More on this in the next section.)
The chronotope is the most conspicuous and intelligible component of the pleasure
ritual. It reveals itself at a glance to the participants from the moment of their arrival on the
scene (much as, when the curtain rises in a theater, a glance at the set design and the personages on stage transports the audience at once into the time, the location and the circumstances in which the plays action is about to unfold) and envelops them until their departure. Ideally, all the above-mentioned ingredients of the chronotope are best understood as
functional components of the dispositif38 deliberately set in place by the organizers with a
view to produce for participants the particular world or reality (in the phenomenologi-
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cal sense) in which the ritual will unfold. This reality contrasts, on the one hand, with the
paramount reality of Everyday Life but also, on the other hand, with the realities of alternative pleasure rituals - the reality of a concert hall being a far cry from that of an
amusement park, and both of these a farther cry still from the reality of a bordello.39
More precisely, the chronotope of a pleasure ritual is deliberately designed and
constructed to produce the following three effects on the participants: a semiotic effect
(Goffman 1959; 1974), to convey and sustain for one and all the intended definition of the
situation (this is a company picnic, this is a rock concert); an ambiance effect, to generate and sustain a ritual-specific affective atmosphere (of merry-making, of celebration) for
the ritual as a whole; and a conative effect, to induce and sustain in each individual participant a corresponding affective mood and 'motivations' (Geertz 1974: 96-98). These,
then, are the intended effects in terms of which I propose that the specifics of the chronotope be analyzed from the standpoint of a phenomenological pragmatics. My hunch is that
mines of valuable information (but also of dross) concerning specific design techniques by
which these and other effects are achieved via the chronotope can be found in the professional literature on architecture, interior design, set design (theatrical and movie) and public relations, as well by interviewing verbally articulate practioners of these trades.40
Three features of the chronotope may be noted before I proceed to the next facet of
the ritual. The first is that, strictly from a research standpoint, it is the easiest part of the
ritual to analyze and to make sense of from a phenomenological pragmatics standpoint,
not only because of its relatively static character - think of a discotheque, or of a vacation
resort, of a wedding hall before the arrival on the scene of the first guests - but also and
especially because all of its constituent features have been deliberately selected and stagecrafted to contribute to the production of the aforementioned effects.41 Second, from a material point of view, the chronotope is often the costliest part of the ritual - think of the cost
of staging a conventional wedding, a vacation abroad, even a festive office party. Third,
strictly from a pleasure ritual pragmatics standpoint, the chronotope is also often the most
dispensable or, better still, the least indispensable part of the ritual - just think of the
memorable parties people, especially the young, have been known to improvise in the
unlikeliest locations, at the drop of a hat and on shoestring budgets.
Pre-Ritual Self-Preparations. In a forthcoming "auto-ethnographic" essay42,
Yves Winkin (2005) relates and reflects upon his own yearly week-long stage-by-stage
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solitary journey on foot along the pilgrims' trail to St. Jacques de Compostelle. In order for
this and other such journeys to succeed, he writes, a "strong collusion" must exist between
the voyager and the "voyagiste", i.e. the tour operator (whom, incidentally, he characterizes as an "engineer of enchantment"). Thus, it is not enough for the voyagiste to do all he
can to facilitate the voyagers' journey (like providing them with useful maps, clear trail
markings, suitable lodging amenities every evening, eating and drinking places along the
way.) It is also necessary, indeed it is probably even more necessary for the voyager to set
out on the journey properly "conditioned" (mis en condition) in advance, much as in the
case of actors before going on stage.43 With this in mind, Winkin proposes that each such
journey actually consists of three journeys: a journey before the journey, the journey itself,
and a journey after the journey.
Generalizing this to all pleasure rituals, I propose that, likewise, each such ritual
entails a pre-ritual, the ritual as such, and a post-ritual. The present section deals with the
pre-ritual, which consists of the various and sundry exercises seasoned participants perform upon themselves as they prepare mentally, emotionally and otherwise, to take part in
the upcoming pleasure ritual. Two complementary kinds of such pre-ritual exercises may
be distinguished: anticipatory disengagements from the reality of Everyday Life, and anticipatory engagements44 into the particular reality of the upcoming pleasure ritual.
Anticipatory disengagements consist of the mental and other exercizes by which
prospective participants seek to shed and to leave behind their Everyday Life statuses and
respective roles, as they prepare themselves for the pleasure ritual. Or, to be more precise,
they seek to shed, from among their array of Everyday Life statuses and roles, those they
feel may interfere with their effective participation in the specific pleasure ritual they are
preparing for.45 Thus, magistrates, army officers or university lecturers may feel that appearing at certain pleasure rituals wearing these statuses on their sleeves, so-to-speak, will
likely cramp their own style as well as that of their potential ritual partners, and may otherwise interfere with the sort of interactions and the sort of experiences they hope to have
at the ritual in question.46 Along with the shedding of these statuses and roles, participants
also engage in exercizes to shake off some of the moods, dispositions and orientations that
adhere to those Everyday Life statuses, if their manifestation at the pleasure ritual is liable
to be felt by other participants as inconsiderate, even injurious. As we shall see in the next
section, these preliminary rites of social self-purification are necessary if prospective par-
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ticipants are to be in a position to contribute to the construction and maintenance of the

moral infrastructure at the pleasure ritual.
As for the anticipatory engagements into the special reality of the pleasure ritual,
these include, first, recalling and mentally rehearsing the mental and other techniques
(several of which Winkin [2005] gathers under the rubric of 'rites of denegation') by which
the participant has learned from past experience to ignore, bypass or otherwise neutralize
certain frame-disrupting events that, inevitably, pop up in the course of pleasure rituals.
Second, they include choosing and rehearsing the part (that is, the 'social type') each participant will appear in at the ritual, like the 'femme fatale', the 'coquette', 'the brooding,
melancholy romantic', 'the strong, quiet type'. Third, most important (and often also most
neglected) in the case of pleasure rituals, are the efforts by which each prospective participant tries to imagine what might delight the other participants expected to attend, so as to
come prepared to thus delight them. To paraphrase the famous saying by JFK at his inauguration, the technique here is to think not of what the pleasure ritual can do for you, but
of what you can do for the pleasure ritual.47
A Moral Infrastructure. Up to here, I have dealt with matters that precede the
actual gathering of the ritual participants. I now come to the gathering itself. By the moral
infrastructure, I mean a general condition of civility and of moral solidarity - of allaround conviviality, of affability, of mutual solicitude, of basic trust - without which
pleasure rituals cannot possibly take place, let alone achieve their sought-after euphoric effects. I call this moral condition an infrastructure for two reasons. One is that, like the submerged part of an iceberg, the bulk of it consists of conducts that participants refrain from
engaging in, so as not to risk offending fellow participants. In other words, most of this
infrastructure consists in effect of non-conducts, irremediably unobservable and unrecordable. The other reason is that many of these moral conducts, including the overt ones, are
performed so 'naturally', so automatically and are so taken for granted, that many of them
go unnoticed, not only by the participants, but also by the observers on the look-out for
them, since the observers too are socialized, habitus-driven creatures, just like those whom
they observe. Certain of these elusive moral conducts, though, pop into consciousness
when participants breach them, whether intentionally or not, thus provoking disruptions
(scenes, incidents) in the pleasure ritual. Though decried and roundly condemned by
participants, such breaches are welcome by students of these rituals Goffman relished
13
them and Garfinkel (1967) deliberately provoked them in his breaching experiments because they draw attention to tacit moral ground rules (Eisenstadt and Curelaru, 1976) - like
the rule of civil inattention (Goffman,1959) - which, otherwise, might have escaped the
attention of even the most perspicacious observers of our social mores.
Note that in contrast to the chronotope, the production of which is occasionally
farmed out to specialized agencies (a catering company, an impresario, the events office of
a hotel), in the last analysis the moral infrastructure of pleasure rituals must be actively
produced and continuously sustained by the participants themselves. In Garfinkel's terms,
it constitutes "an ongoing members' accomplishment". This accomplishment is performed
by the participants keeping up, from the start to the end of the ritual, a steady stream of
ritual considerations. These consist of the overt and covert displays of respect and of solicitude shown by the participants, first, toward their own presented selves (via what
Goffman called demeanors), second, toward other participants as they present themselves
(via what he called deferences) and, third, toward the ritual itself (via remedial interventions when disruptions occur).48 On closer analysis, it turns out that many of these considerations may be thought of as rites of social inclusion. These rites consist of all the things
people overtly do and say to make others feel included, and even more so of all the things
they carefully refrain from doing or saying, that might make others feel excluded.49
The overall accomplishment of the moral infrastructure that results from all these
rounds of overt and covert considerations is to provide the pleasure ritual with a kind of
safety net. Considerations achieve this by making participants feel that they can safely
shift into the appropriate festive mood of the pleasure fest by opening up, that is, by relaxing their defenses, exposing some of their vulnerabilities and daring to take potentially
embarrassing initiatives. They can now take these risks because they are confident that
they run no real risk of incurring verbal and other symbolic injuries at the hands of fellow
participants, and thus of being rudely jolted back into the Reality of Everyday Life.
All of which is but another way of saying that the moral infrastructure provides an
indispensable foundation for the festive part of the pleasure ritual, to which I now turn.
The Pleasure Fest, especially the Happening. Up to this point, I have dealt only
with parts of the ritual that enable the 'main event' of the pleasure ritual to take place. I
turn now to the core part of the ritual, the part that justifies designating it a pleasure ritual.
14
A cursory examination shows that this part too entails several facets: a program, the enactment of the program, and a hoped-for happening.
The program is simply what is on: it is what the gathering is ostensibly about.50
Thus, it is a masked party, a friendly game of poker with the boys, a stolen afternoon
with the lover in a discreet hotel, a luxury cruise in the Adriatic, an African safari. The
program, then, is a verbal shorthand for a familiar cultural scenario, that serves to convey
to participants, albeit grosso modo, the type of pleasure ritual in which they have been
called upon to partake, thereby enabling them to know roughly what to expect and not to
expect from it, and to prepare themselves for it accordingly.
To inept participants and to naive observers, the program is what the ritual is
about. For them, a festive dinner party is just that: a fancy supper to which guests have
been invited to partake, neither more nor less. In fact, of course, the program - like the
other parts of the ritual passed in review until here - is yet but another ancillary, another
catalyst, yet another part of the dispositif on which the pleasure ritual proper depends, but
not to be confused with it.
This, then, brings us at long last to the heart of hearts of the pleasure ritual, that is,
to the enactment of the program by the participants on hand and, more in particular, to the
hoped-for happening part of it. The most significant feature of the program is its sheer
minimalism, its open-endedness, its non-specificity.51 (This is all the more the case in our
age, in which informality and spontaneity are de rigueur.) Given this feature, the enactment of the program must necessarily consist of the unscripted, improvised interactions
freely engaged in by the participants. This means that every pleasure ritual constitutes in
effect an adventure, a concerted activity with an uncertain outcome. No one knows or can
possibly know in advance how it will turn out in the end. It all depends on whether or not
all these free, improvised interactions among the participants on hand combine somehow
to produce the hoped-for chemistry, the state of enchantment (about to be discussed)
that, in retrospect, will make participants remember the event as a success, a flop or something in between. Therefore, it is both appropriate and accurate to designate this hoped-for
but largely uncontrolled emergent property of the enactment part of the program as a
happening.52
From a pragmatic perspective, then, the key question before us is the following:
what does an effective enactment of a pleasure ritual entail, where the effectiveness is determined by whether or not the ritual succeeds in producing the desired happening? Need15
less to say, it is hardly my intention here to provide practical tips for turning the enactment
of the program into a memorable happening. Rather, my aspiration in these pages is much
more limited. It is to highlight, to conceptualize and to name the sort of ethnographic materials researchers should be alive to when observing, recording, describing and analyzing
pleasure rituals, for these are the materials that strike me as particularly pertinent and heuristic for, subsequently, developing a pragmatic theory of these rituals.
Program Enactment and the Happening. As they each set out, then, to enact their
chosen roles in the program of the pleasure ritual, participants are expected to assume two
complementary tasks, more or less simultaneously. One is to try to pleasure their ritual
partners. The other, just as important and no less challenging, is to make themselves amenable to being pleasured by their partners. One way of conceptualizing these rounds of
mutual pleasurings and mutual openings to being pleasured is to think of them as ritual seductions. As I use this term, seductions consist of the specific things participants say and
do in the course of these rituals - like tendering or inviting rapt attentions and solicitudes,
terms and gestures of endearment, compliments, flatteries, amusing stories, juicy bits of
gossip, enticing smiles, meaningful stares, silky caresses, long embraces - so as to awaken
each in the other and in themselves any of a range of euphoric relational emotions. I use
the term seduction advisedly - to refer to actions consciously or intuitively meant to draw
others out of the subjective state they had been in, and to draw them into another subjective state. Needless to say, I do not mean the term in the narrow, strictly sexual sense.
Even less do I use it, as did Baudrillard (1990), to heap moral indignation on actions
meant to lead astray and to entrap hapless innocents. No, by seductions I refer to the
strategems by which we try to nudge others out of the Everyday reality they are in, and
usher them into an enchanted reality, to be described shortly.
An analysis of the outward forms taken by these ritual seductions, discursive as
well as non-discursive, suggests that many, perhaps most of them, may be thought of as
rites of social inclusion. By these I mean ritual actions by which we make others feel included, and by which others make us feel included. The reader may recall that the considerations that constitute the moral infrastructure of the ritual were also characterized as rites
of social inclusion. What then is the difference, if any, between them? The answer is that
there are two broad ways of socially including others. One consists of doing all we can to
spare others from feeling excluded: this is accomplished by many of the considerations of
16
which the moral infrastructure is constituted. The other way is by undertaking actions that
positively make them feel included (like inviting them, embracing them, doing things with
them, elevating them): this, essentially, is what seductions accomplish. In an earlier paper
(Weitman [1998]), I proposed that seductions fall into five broad classes, namely,
(1) rapprochements53, whereby participants include one another by drawing ever
closer one to the other, physically, symbolically or otherwise;
(2) participations, where participants include one another by virtue of doing things
together, for example, by engaging in conversation, whispering one to the other, walking
together, dancing together, marketing together, and above all, living together (with all the
joint doings entailed by such co-habitation);
(3) possessions, where participants include one another by owning each other grasping, holding, embracing, pinning down, rivetting one another - and, conversely, by
allowing themselves to be owned - grasped, held, embraced, pinned down, rivetted;
(4) interpenetrations, where participants include one another by entering one another - intruding, probing, invading, even occupying one another's hitherto intimate spaces
- and, conversely, by welcoming and receiving the other - unveiling and opening their own
intimate spaces and letting themselves be entered, probed, invaded, and occupied - even
unto introjecting and incorporating the other into themselves; and
(5) mock-aggressions, where participants include one another by mounting gentle,
playful mock-attacks and, conversely, responding to these pseudo-aggressions with
equally gentle and playful mock-fleeings, mock-surrenders or mock-counterattacks54.
When effectively performed with partners in an appropriately receptive mood, rites
of inclusion can result in the welling up of euphoric relational emotions in the other as
well as in oneself, emotions that I propose to call passions of inclusion. By these I mean
overwhelming surges of desire to include the other, to be included by the other, or both at
the same time.55 Examples of euphoric relational emotions - of passions of inclusion - include:
intimacy, the heady experience of opening up to someone and of someone opening

up to us, of accessing and being accessed, of penetrating and being penetrated;
recognition, the heady experience of having our special gifts and virtues noted, acknowledged and appreciated;
17
charisma, the heady experience of being made to feel like the Chosen One, the
Elect, the One and Only;
desideration, the heady experience of feeling desirable and desired, the feeling of
being wanted, coveted, lusted, ached for;
belonging, the heady experience of feeling in, of feeling part of;
acceptance, the heady experience of feeling welcome as is, totally, with no reservations;
trust, the heady experience of having full, unqualified confidence in the good will
of others toward us and, likewise, of thus being trusted by them;
vitality, the heady, electrifying experience, on coming into contact with others, of
revival, of coming alive56 from the relative torpor and flatness of Everyday Life;
levity, the heady (and all-too bearable) experience of the lightness of being, of
feeling carefree, insouciant).
Inasmuch as ritual seductions prove effective in stirring up relational emotions of
this kind57 (which is anything but a foregone conclusion58), I submit that the experience of
such emotions is capable of setting in motion59 inner processes, as a result of which participants find themselves emotionally entrained60 into a state of enchantment, to use an
expression favored by Yves Winkin61. The subjective shift into this state of enchantment is
precisely the happening participants hope will take place at these rituals but dare not expect from them, hence are always surprised and delighted if and when it does occur.
The state of enchantment is a liminal state better still, a liminoid state (Turner
1982) in which participants cease inter-acting tit-for-tat with one another and, instead,
start flowing together (Csiksentmihalyi, 1990), 'interflowing' (Bannister, 1968). This is
the state in which participants find themselves in sync, in relationship with one another
(Gilligan, 2002).62
In this state, participants may also cease feeling and behaving as self-possessed,
self-propelled, purposive 'actors' and, instead, begin to feel and to behave as part-active,
part-passive 'actants', to use a term promoted by Bruno Latour (1999) and Antoine Hennion (2000).
Likewise, in this state of enchantment participants cease giving pleasures and getting pleasures in return and, instead, they now find themselves in that wondrous and seemingly counter-intuitive relational state in which they experience the giving of pleasures as
18
the getting of even more bountiful pleasures. Indeed, in this state of enchantment, the very
distinction between giving and getting pleasures strikes our participants as anachronistic, out-of-place, inappropriate, absurd. Does a caress give pleasure to the caressee, or is it
the caresser who gets pleasure from it? The either/or form of the question is blatantly preposterous in the eyes of participants, all the more so when they are in this enchanted state.
Indeed, the same begins to apply now to an entire range of similarly invidious distinctions with which ordinary, everyday language abounds distinctions such as mind vs.
body, subject vs. object, serious vs. playful, rough vs. tender, earthy vs. sublime, crude vs.
refined, egoistic vs. altruistic, thinking vs. feeling, dominant vs. dominated, material vs.
spiritual, mature vs. puerile, conquest vs. surrender, rational vs. emotional. In the state of
enchantment, these and numerous other such putative binary opposites mix and merge into
each other some would say merge back into one another - and the alleged superiority of
either over the other strikes ritual participants as nonsensical, irritating, even offensive.
More generally, in this enchanted state participants feel increasingly at a loss for
words, wishing they had at their disposal a suitable anti-language(Halliday 1976) in
which to express themselves and with which to communicate and to relate with each other,
an anti-language rooted in, elaborated from and suited for the enchanted, elysean anti-field
they are now in - much as ordinary language is rooted in, was elaborated from and is
suited for the strife-ridden, agonistic fields of Everyday Life that Bourdieu never tired of
writing about. Whence the participants common inclination, in this enchanted state, to
shift from verbal language to poetic language63 or, more often (since poetry is hard to
come by), to kinesic-paralinguistic modes of communication. That is, they shift from discursive to non-discursive practices, in particular to a relational heteroglossia (Bakhtin
1986) of smiling, winking, ogling, giggling, laughing, touching, holding, embracing, hugging, snuggling, patting, caressing, smooching, squeezing, cradling, frolicking, dancing,
singing, and the like.
It is in this literally extra-ordinary, if short-lived and fragile, state of enchantment,
in which binary opposites find themselves reconciled and reunited, that our participants
too find themselves, volens nolens, re-finding and re-discovering one another, recognizing
one another, re-erotizing one another, re-desiring and re-attracted to one another, reunited
and re-solidarized one to the other.
19
These, then, are some of the terms of the tacit socio-logic of the festive and happening part of pleasure rituals, by means of which seasoned, experienced members intuitively seek to recreate, to revitalize and thus to reproduce their affect relationships.
Concluding Remarks
The rationale I gave for researching pleasure rituals is that people engage in them
not only for the sheer enjoyments they hope to derive from them, but also out of the
widely held, if tacit, belief that their joint enjoyment of these pleasures has the capacity to
revive and sustain their affect relationships. I now wish to add that it is not necessary to
buy into this solidaristic rationale in order to pursue in earnest a research interest in pleasure rituals.64 All that is required is to acknowledge the enduring appeal of these rituals for
ordinary people throughout much of history and in many cultures, and the no less enduring
(and bizarre) indifference to them by the mainstream academic social sciences, particularly
in the North-Atlantic zone of influence.65 Pleasure rituals, then, are well worth the best of
our sustained attentions and research efforts because, despite their ubiquity and their familiarity, they are still largely terra incognita, hence challenge us to make scientific sense
of them.
Among thle specific points made in this paper, the following may be retained:
Pleasure rituals constitute a distinct, familiar, recognizable class of focused encounters
They constitute conventional folk devices, ethnomethods for generating pleasures
The most salient pleasures to be had at these rituals are euphoric relational emotions
The experience of these emotions depends on the participants willingness and their
ability to awaken them in others, and to let others awaken them in their own selves
Organizers and participants alike relate to these rituals pragmatically, in terms of their
effectiveness (success) or their ineffectiveness (failure) to generate these emotions66
From what precedes, it follows that pleasure ritual pragmatics, the specialty by
which I propose pleasure rituals be researched and theorized,
is primarily a phenomenological pragmatics or, if you will, a pragmatics of experience
focuses on effective rituals and practitioners, however unrepresentative these may be
conceives of these rituals as dispositifs for evoking the euphoric emotions in question
sees most such devices as entailing an occasion, a chronotope, self- preparations, a
moral infrastructure and the pleasure fest
20
the chronotope provides the material support and serves to create and sustain a reality
effect that resolves into three specific effects - semiotic, environmental and conative
the moral infrastructure consists of participants keeping up a steady stream of overt and
covert considerations (toward others, toward their own selves and toward the ritual),
and provides the minima moralia that protects participants and the ritual from injurious
inconsiderations that risk catapulting everyone back into Everyday Reality
the pleasure fest entails a program, its enactment and a hoped-for happening. Given a
sheer barebones program, participants proceed to enact it via rounds of improvised interactions. The most significant of these consist of attempts at mutual seductions, by
means of which all seek to awaken euphoric emotions in one another. Inasmuch as they
succeed (never guaranteed, always a surprise), a happening takes place when participants find themselves shifting into a state of enchantment. In this state, they undergo
any of a range of specific changes of state - from inter-acting to interflowing; from being actors to being actants; from using ordinary language to requiring an anti-language;
most of all, from reciprocal pleasurings to each taking pleasure in their partners pleasures, as if the partners had been united into a single, supra-individual body.
The overall result of these and of related changes of state is that participants find themselves re-discovering each other, re-erotizing each other, re-attracted to each other, and
re-solidarized with each other.
So much for the specific points to be retained. I now turn to the more general
points.67 The first is that this paper has focused exclusively on pleasures and has called for
researching and theorizing pleasure-making practices. Sociology already has many students of society ('societologists') or of sizeable parts thereof ('middle range' sociologists).
It also has a sizeable minority of sociologists of sociality - interactionists, feminists, field
theorists, action theorists - but their work is mostly problem-centered (rape, incest, violence, exploitation, abandonment) and oriented to a moral sociology devoted to the alleviation of the miseries people cause to one another.68 What has been shining by its virtual absence is a sociology of pleasures and of pleasure-making practices. Sartre once wrote famously that 'Hell Is Other People'. True enough much of hell on earth is indeed other
people. But what about paradise? Isn't much of paradise, too, other people? Why should
the bulk of sociology be either descriptive or a sociology of hells on earth, and virtually
none of it a sociology of earthly gardens of eden and of how such gardens are cultivated
21
and sustained? Why, alongside a sociology of violence-ridden bourdieusian fields, should

there not also be a sociology of elysean fields? Why should sociology, like East European
socialist states, consider unbearable the lightness of being? This paper, then, calls for the
elaboration of a pleasure-centered sociology in addition to not in place of the currently
existing problem-centered sociologies.
The second point general point to be retained is that the principal pleasures this paper has concentrated on are relational emotions, as distinct from the solitary pleasures obtainable from inanimate objects. I have nothing against Latourian objectual relations. Indeed, some of my best friends are objects, like my mountain bike and my fountain pen. It
is just that I, and many others like myself, were attracted in the first place to a career in sociology because we thought it would permit us to do for a living and on a full-time basis
what we would otherwise be doing as a hobby, namely, observing and reflecting upon
people's relations with one another, in particular their emotional inter-relations. I doubt
that many of us were drawn to sociology because it gave us a chance to research subjectobject relations and object-object relations, however important these may in fact be. Latour (200_) found it amusing to characterize as 'baboon sociology' this fuddy-duddy professional bias of ours, and so did I, since there is a sizeable grain of truth in this caricature.
Having said that, I'd rather continue as a sociologist of humans-qua-baboons than turn into
a sociologist of thingumajigs.
The third point worth retaining is that relational pleasures are constructed. People
make these pleasures or, to be precise, they endeavour to make them happen. In other
words, relational pleasures neither materialize out of thin air, like manna from heaven, nor
can they be infallibly engineered. What can be done, by people with the pertinent knowhow69 and resources, is put into place relatively effective pleasure-making dispositifs, and
hope for those pleasures to take place, to come about. This paper calls for a pragmatic sociology of how this is done.
The fourth and last point to be retained follows from the third. It is that some people (and
organizations) are far 'better at' producing pleasure-making dispositifs than are others.
Though such effective pleasure-makers are a small and unrepresentative minority, it is on
them, on their pleasure-making know-how and on their pleasure-making practices that the
brunt of research attention should be trained. This is because it is they, not the population
at large, who are the real repositories of the funds of know-how that will serve as building
blocks for the elaboration of a pragmatic theory of pleasure-making.
22
APPENDIX: OUTSTANDING ISSUES

Q1. Isn't frivolous, not to say indecent, to focus on pleasure rituals when much of
the world's population is best by so many miseries, many of them afflicted by other people? Moreover, isn't it also singularly impolitic to thus divert attention from these miseries
and from their perpetrators by calling attention to pleasure rituals, thus aiding and abetting
these perpetrators by providing them with yet another source of opium for the masses?
A1: No claim is made or implied here that pleasures should be at the top of the list
of priorities engaging the best efforts of sociology and anthropology. But pleasures do exist. They are attainable, albeit sporadically and in small doses. They are highly prized virtually by all but the most ascetic, other-worldly types. Hence they too merit a place in the
sun of mainstream sociology and anthropology, from which they still await recognition.
Short of such a recognition, this entire domain is forsaken and allowed to be taken over by
non-disciplinary area studies (leisure studies, cultural studies, gay studies, etc.) and, far
worse, by countless self-proclaimed media experts and by the commercial interests that relentlessly feed on the unquenchable popular thirst for these matters.
Q2. Don't you think you may be greatly overrating the importance of the element
of pleasure in the preservation over time of affect relations? What about other elements,
such as equality, equity, interdependence, mutual respect, mutual loyalty, fairness, considerateness, attentiveness, helpfulness, solicitude, reliability?
A2. Pleasures have been given pride of place in this paper, first, because of their
neglect until now by the bulk of sociologists and anthropologists, not because I think that
pleasures are more important than all those other elements, but because they are important
and because it is high time for us to stop underestimating, overlooking, ignoring or trivializing them, their pursuit and their importance in and for social life. Second, no less important, I am inclined to think that the experience of pleasures is the key to understanding the
special enduring social bonds that I call emotional (or affect) solidarity, both how they are
produced in the first place, and how they are subsequently reproduced.
Q3. You claim that people engage periodically in pleasure rituals in order to revitalize their bonds of bonds of love. Is there any evidence to support this claim?
A3. I know of no such evidence. But it strikes me as a self-evident truth, the kind I
would feel embarrassed gathering evidence to support it empirically.
23
Q4. You assume that relational pleasures are more gratifying, more fulfilling than
solitary pleasures, those obtained through the commerce with objects (including live sex
objects), and that the effects of the former are more enduring and more consequential than
those of the latter. Is there any evidence for this?
A4. Not that I know of. But this belief is well-nigh axiomatic for me as a sociologist, part of my professional credo. Contrary, for example, to Knorr Cetina, I am inclined
to believe that even when we think that we are attached to an object - including to an allconsuming epistemological object like high-particle physics or basic social theory - this
objectual attachment is undergirded by a deeper attachment still, namely, to our reference
colleagues from whom we get (or hope to get) meaningful feedback to our work, in the
form of professional attention, recognition and esteem, as well as other relational rewards
like prestige, respect and admiration we hope to get from friends, relatives, neighbors,
even from the public.
Q5. Your text is replete with references to 'pleasure' and kindred terms like 'desire,
'euphoria', 'seduction', 'enchantment'. (All you lack are references to 'happiness'!) You may
think these evocative terms have rhetorical power. But scientifically-inclined readers relate
to such terms sceptically, suspecting them to gloss over contents that require careful specification, rather than being swept under these sweeping terms.
A5. I quite agree with the spirit of the critique, but do not think that it applies to
my work here. As I think and make use of, say, the term 'pleasure', it is a broad umbrella
category, under which are gathered a range of particular euphoric emotions, each of which
is specifiable and requires to be specified as clearly and precisely as possible. On pp. 1819 above, I named and gave succint characterizations of a number of such experiences.
Q6. Don't you think that all your intellectual cogitations about emotional experiences risk spoiling our ability to experience and to enjoy those euphoric emotions that you
discuss here? Aren't such experiences best left unverbalized and undiscussed, in the interest of preserving our ability to fully enjoy them?
A6. Contrary to a widespread popular belief, I don't think so. In fact, I am inclined
to think that the opposite is the case. Sports fans do not tire of 'cogitating' about their favorite sports. Ditto for amateurs of wine, cheese, cooking, music, opera, movies, travels,
novels. The cultivation of these and many other such hobbies is frequently accompanied
by 'intellectual' reflexions, conversations, occasionally even by written note-taking. Thus
24
the savoring of pleasures does not seem any the worse off for being accompanied by reflexions about them. On the contrary. I think such reflexions have a magnifying effect on
the enjoyment of the pleasures in question.
Q7. You call your way of conceptualizing pleasure rituals 'ideal-typical'. Though
you try to explain this is in note 4, could you elaborate on this further? In particular, why
is conflict entirely absent from your conception and theory of these rituals?
A7. Ideal-types refer to social arrangements social actors aspire to and strive for (in
given historical circumstances), as these arrangements are modelized by the sociologist. In
the case at hand, pleasure rituals are procedures whereby participants seek to produce the
conditions likely to induce in them and their partners the kind of pleasures they hope to
experience. Overt or covert conflicts are built-in features of conflictual fields. Not so in
elysean fields like pleasure rituals, which is precisely why I dubbed them 'anti-fields'. For
these are better still, they are intended to be - quintessentially collaborative, mutualistic
enterprises. Even spirited contests (tennis, boxing, touch football) entail a substantial
amount of tacit collaboration between the contestants, even of personal solidarity among
them. When collaboration ceases (e.g. because of 'foul play' by one of the parties), solidarity disappears and rancorous conflict is liable to break out and 'turn ugly', derailing the
pleasure ritual.
Q8. Why do you propose researching pleasure rituals via the practices and experiences of "seasoned practitioners" of these rituals? Why not research these rituals as would
any of today's mainstream sociologies? For example, why not perform sample surveys of
the population at large to enquire who engages in which pleasure rituals, how often, with
whom, with what expectations, with what degree of satisfaction, and correlate these variables with independent and dependent variables? Or why not enquire, as would a functionalist or a critical sociologist, about the ulterior effects of pleasure rituals on other parts
or features of society? Or why not study, as would a historical sociologist, the conditions
in the past that first gave rise to today's pleasure rituals? Or why not ask, as would a comparative-historical sociologist, whether, how and why pleasure rituals vary across historical periods and different societies, qualitatively as well as quantitatively?
A8. Needless to say, all these forms of Problemstellung are legitimate and, as you
claim, among the standard ways in which questions are posed by mainstream academic
sociologists today. But they all address issues that are of interest mainly to scholars. That
25
is, they are the sort of questions that interest to those who dwell within the walls of academia, but are off the wall if you excuse the pun - for the mass of ordinary people who
spend their lives outside those walls. What interests ordinary people, as well as academics
in the extra-mural aspects of their lives, are practical existential issues. People interested in
building cabinets are interested in learning from veteran cabinet makers how to build cabinets; they are hardly interested in the historical circumstances that gave rise to cabinetmaking or in what a representative sample of the population knows about cabinet-building.
What ordinary people are interested in mainly is to learn about pleasure rituals from the
cumulative experiences of seasoned and effective practitioners of such rituals. How else
explain the large and ever-growing number of books, magazine articles, internet sites, and
radio and TV programs devoted to dispensing 'expert' advice on pleasure rituals of every
conceivable kind? Whence my proposal that serious sociological and anthropological research focus first and foremost on the practices of seasoned, effective practitioners.
Q9. On what specific pleasure rituals have you based the general conceptual framework you have adumbrated in these pages?
A9. It has been inspired largely (though by no means exclusively) from the extensive analysis I performed on one such pleasure ritual, the erotic sexual lovemaking of a
couple (Weitman 1998; 2004). The application of this scheme to other, less steamy pleasure rituals will likely require revisions, perhaps extensive and far-reaching revisions.
Therefore, what the research program on pleasure rituals calls for is a collective and multipronged effort to assemble a corpus of documentary materials on a range of such rituals,
so as to enable us to compare, codify and integrate the findings of these analyses into an
ever more coherent, more comprehensive, more compelling and more serviceable body of
pragmatic theory of pleasure rituals and also, hopefully, of the affect relations these rituals serve to sustain.
Q10. It is not clear what kind of theory you have in mind when you claim that
your objective is to "theorize" pleasure rituals and their affect relations. What form will
such theory take? And what will such a theory be good for?
A10. This is the most challenging question of the lot, if only because at this stage it
is the most difficult for me to answer clearly and firmly. What I can say at this stage is that
since the theory to which I aspire is a pragmatic theory of these rituals, it should be based,
first of all, on a solid empirical foundation made up of extensive, nearly exhaustive inven26
tories of techniques (rites) reported and explained by effective practitioners of these rituals. The techniques in question are those of effective chronotope design and construction;
of effective self-conditionings in preparation; of effective establishment and maintenance
of a sound moral infrastructure; and, most important, effective techniques for producing
the euphoric experiences and, hopefully, the state of enchantment, that justify calling these
practices pleasure rituals. Once an extensive, nearly exhaustive inventory or corpus of
such techniques has been collected (marking the end of the data collection phase of the research), the next step is to subject all these techniques to analysis, which entails aggregating all these techniques into a finite, clearly defined set of classes.70 The next step is to
proceed to theorize these classes. What does this last operation entail? All I can say at this
stage and I do so tentatively - is that, for me, theorizing these categories can take one or
both of the following two forms: syntagmatic and paradigmatic.71 The former, more familiar to anthropologists, consists of seeing if and how these classes of techniques form a
'system', albeit in a loose, Geertzian sense of the term.72 The second, more familiar to sociologists, is to think of each of these classes of techniques as part of a larger 'paradigmatic
series'73 (Barthes, 1960) of such techniques, used in many domains other than the pleasure
ritual under examination. Winkin (2005), for example, reports on some of the techniques
he has developed over the years to rid himself of the (to him) irritating presence in his
field of vision of other voyagers on the path, before as well as behind him. The particular
techniques he uses belong to a larger class of techniques solo travellers resort to avoid the
company of other travellers. This small class of techniques belongs to a larger class still of
techniques by which people avoid one another in all walks of life. One such larger class of
avoidance techniques is those Merton (1968) gathered under the rubric of 'insulation from
visibility'.
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31
* Acknowledgments. [PROVISIONAL] Francesco Alberoni, Edith Astruc, Jerme Bourdon,

Eric Cohen, Randall Collins, Murray Davis, Shlomo Deshen, Eva Illouz, Fred Inglis, Diana
Luzatto, Dean MacCannell, John Markoff, Jozef Niznik, Ray Oldenburg, Allan Silver, Moshe
Shokeid, Iddo Tavory, Oleg Vetlugin, Norbert Wiley, Fred Willener, Yves Winkin
ENDNOTES
"What did you do my dear at the time of Algeria/When Brel was alive and living in Paris?/Though sorried by all this strife, I sang,/'La Valse mille temps' and 'Ne me quitte pas'/[Refrain]Shame on this
smart-ass who can sing while/Rome is burning, burning, burning all the time/Shame on he who, despite
all, hums ditties/To Gavroche, to Mimi Pinson//The fire of the Eternal City is eternal./If God wants fires,
he wants ditties./Who is going to believe that the good people,/When they sing in spite of it all, are real
creeps?" (Brassens, 1993:365-366)
2
On each of these see, respectively, Rutter and Smith (2000), Wittel (2001), Knorr Cetina (1997; 2001),
Hennion (1999; 2001), Hennion and Teil (2004), Albertsen and Diken (2004), Yves Winkin (1998; 2005).
3
Schatzki, Knorr Cetina and von Savigny (2001)
Semantically, social (in the ordinary sense of the term) = relational + pleasurable. Until recently I called
these rituals socioerotic, in the generic sense of erotic, not in the narrow sexual sense. I dropped this designation as part of an effort to remove potential sources of misunderstandings, there being more than enough
of these as it is.
5
Virtually all that follows is deliberately formulated here in ideal-typical terms. This is not because of a
Pollyannish, conflict-free worldview on my part, but because of considerations having to do with the requirements of pragmatic theory-construction applied to pleasure rituals. As I use this Weberian concept, the
ideal-type is more than a pure type. It refers to an arrangement people aspire to and strive to attain or live
up to. It is literally an ideal-type,i.e., an ideal people actively seek to realize. Geertz (1974, __) renamed the
ideal-type a model-for, as distinct from a mere model-of. The task of ideal-typical theorizing is to discover
and to articulate the inner logic and the constitutive features of this model-for, for those who pursue it are
only mootly aware of what, exactly, they are pursuing, be it Sovereignty, Democracy, Community, Socialism, Capitalism, Cosmopolitan Citizenship, Political Islam, and the like. In the case at hand, my task will be
to spell out the inner logic and the key constitutive features of relational pleasure rituals as an ideal contemporaries aspire to and actively pursue. Note that Weberian ideal-type theorizing is a precursor of contemporary French pragmatic regimes theory. (See note 9 below.) The same can be said of the (unheeded) call, back
in the 1960s, for a normative theory of culture by Selznick and Jaeger (1964).
6
I found this term in Csiksentmihalyi (1990)
In my usage, Everyday Life is close to the interest- and power-driven lifeworlds Bourdieu theorized as
'fields'. For a similar conception, see Alberoni (1983, ch. 6)
8
Goffman (1961) used euphoric to mean pleasurable, gratifying, enjoyable not in the more ordinary
language sense of elating. My own usage of euphoric is closer to the latter, and is meant to designate highly
fulfilling experiences. More on these on p. 21 below.
9
This important concept - also referred to as action regimes- was advanced by Laurent Thvenot and
Luc Boltanski as a major corrective for what they took, correctly, as a distinctly reductionist tendency in
Bourdieus field-theoretical approach. For an exposition of pragramatic regimes, see Thvenot (2001).
10
I have analyzed the ritual of amorous sexual lovemaking in such terms in Weitman (1998).
11
Note the contrast between this pleasure-centered conception of rituals with that proposed by Durkheim,
"ritual is action in relation to the sacred". That is probably why Roger Abrahams (1987), the anthropologist
of folklore, prefers that pleasure-governed gatherings be designated festivals and festivities, while rituals be reserved for serious, consequential events (solemn, ceremonial, laden with symbolism). I would have
gladly called these rituals libidinal - libido being desire in Greek - but refrained from doing so for the same
reason I (reluctantly) dropped my earlier designation of them as socioerotic rituals: so as to avoid all-too
32
predictable misunderstandings, there being more than enough of these as it is. (I have also seen a reference to
them as 'festal rituals'.)
12
Examples of solitary pleasure rituals: savoring a croissant and espresso over the morning paper, luxuriating in a warm bath, bike-riding along undulating country roads on a glorious spring day, reading an
absorbing novel, sailing the skies in a glider, piano-playing, horse-riding, working on a gratifying piece of
writing (as I am doing at this very moment). Note, however, that certain ostensibly solitary pleasure rituals
turn out on close examination to constitute quasi-relational rituals, in that entail inner interactions with
imaginary others, or with one's inner alterego. Thus, my writing of this paper appears to be a solitary
pleasure ritual. Actually, however, I am engaged in an intense, continuing dialogue with imagined potential
readers. In the absence of the latter, this writing would become utterly senseless.
13
The key difference between imagined others and live others is that the former are our own constructions ('figments of our imagination'), while the latter also have a life and will of their own. Where live others
can surprise us and often do, for better or for worse - imagined others ordinarily cannot. On the importance
of the element of the unexpected in pleasure rituals, see below pp. 17-21.
14
Likely because such a trivial and frivolous topic is unbecoming to a science as imbued as ours with the
importance of being earnest. Insofar as pleasure rituals have been researched (eg carnivals, festivals), it is
mostly in para-disciplinary area studies such as folklore studies, leisure studies, tourist studies, consumer
studies, gay studies, media studies and cultural studies. Having said this, it should be noted that such rituals
have been central to a tenacious subterranean current in French social thought variously dubbed pagan,
primitivist, surrealist, tribalist, irrationalist - that reached its high watermark with the establishment by
Georges Bataille and Andr Breton in the early 1930s of the Collge de sociologie and the publication of the
review Acphale. For a recent book on the Collge de sociologie, see Michle Richman (2003.) In the last 23 decades, Michel Maffesoli (1985; 1988) has been a representative of this current in France.
15
Solidarity (from Lat. solidum, firm, concrete) refers to 'solid', enduring relations, better still, to relationships (McCall et al, 1970) Virtually by definition, solidary relations give rise to groups, large and small,
whence the key position of solidarity in sociology understood as the science of groups. For a succint but authoritative overview of the centrality of solidarity in sociology, see Shils (1956). For more on this, see note
63 below.
16
Recently, relational psychoanalysts have been designating this state of emotional connectivity by terms
such as intersubjectivity, affect permeability, empathic linkage, direct affect resonance and affect
contagiousness (Mitchell (2001). Closer to home, sociologists Gomart and Hennion (1999) have proposed
the term passions (as distinct from actions) to designate such semi-involuntary responses.
17
Occasionally, sociologists have made significant sallies into the subject of love, like Bauman (1998,
2003), Beck & Beck-Gernsheim (1995), Blau (1964), Bourdieu (1998), Collins (2004), Goode (1959), Illouz
(1996), Luhmann (1986), Seidman (1991), Simmel (1984 [orig. 1921), Swidler (2001) and have come up
with significant insights in the course of so doing. But, with the outstanding exception of Francesco Alberoni
(1996) - who is as well known in non-English-speaking countries all around the world as he is virtually unknown in English-speaking countries - no sustained, cumulative body of research or of systematic theory on
this subject has as yet accumulated either in sociology or in anthropology.
18
A related question asks about the conditions of the initial production of love relations, of the phenomenon of "falling in love". Actually, a fair amount of research and theory have accumulated on this question,
notably in the sociology of courtship and marriage and in that of social movements. The best work of synthesis on this subject that I am aware of is Alberoni (1992), and is organized around Webers seminal idea of
the nascent state'. Recently, Alberoni (2000) has presented a short but suggestive paper in which he grapples with the question of what explains the ability of some couples, and the inability of others, to remain in
love with one another.
19
Ulrich Beck and Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim, in The Normal Chaos of Love (London: Polity, 1995)
went so far as to proclaim couple love the new religion, no less, of the current era.
20
The classic work on the cultural-historical trend toward sentimentalization of intra-familial relations is
Philippe Aris' Centuries of Childhood (1962). For a caustic critique of this trend, see the pages Milan Kundera (1993 [orig. 1990], 275-321) devoted to the ideal of Homo sentimentalis.
33
21
On the importance of pleasure, see Carol Gilligan (2002), The Birth of Pleasure. (I take this title to be
an upbeat feminist rejoinder to Nietzsche's brooding masculinist Birth of Tragedy.) Needless to say, even if
pleasure rituals are necessary for the sustenance of love relations, they are by no means sufficient to achieve
this end. A more comprehensive theory of the sustenance over time of love relations would require that attention also be trained on how the parties behave toward each other during the long intervals of Everyday
Life between their pleasure rituals. If, during these prosaic intervals, they conduct themselves in ways that
corrode or otherwise seriously damage the emotional ties between them, then no amount of pleasure rituals
are likely to repair or to compensate for these damages.
22
Murray Davis (1967) suggested philemics to designate this much needed, as yet inexistent specialty, in
his splendid, pioneering but all too little-known first book.
23
What I call pleasure rituals is overlaps with what Alberoni (2000) calls revitalizing institutions.
24
Inept practitioners are of relatively little interest to the pragmatist, except insofar as their faux pas can
draw attention to telltale features of pleasure rituals that, otherwise, might remain invisible to all, even to the
most perspicacious observers.
25
For an exposition of what is a clinical theory, and how it differs from other ideas about social science
theory, see Geertz (1974).
26
On the specific pleasures that bind the soldiers to their work and to one another in elite counter-insurgency IDF combat units, see Samimian-Darash (2004). On this, see also Kaplan (200_)
27
In this vein, Antoine Hennion (1999, 2001), Frances foremost contemporary researcher of musical
practices and an outstanding practitioner of pragmatic sociology, focuses his researches on seasoned music
lovers in France, so as to learn from them the variety of techniques by means of which they seek to optimalize their musical experiences. Lately, he has extended his interests with Emilie Gomart (1999) to seasoned
drug users, and with Genevieve Teil (2004) to wine lovers. Until a more suitable term is agreed on, he proposes to provisionally designate all fans, aficionados and other Feinschmeckers by the term amateurs (Hennion, 2005).
28
Incidentally, I would not be surprised if it turned out that many such seasoned amateurs are found in
the ranks of the more modest classes of the population, not only among the well-off and the well-to-do.
29
By "constructive" I mean useful for purposes of practicing effective pleasure rituals. It is not to be confused with "social constructionist" or "social constructivist" as these terms are currently used in the field. For
an elightening discussion of these concepts, see Latour (2002).
30
See Simmel's "The Alpine Journey"
31
On this delicate issue, see the revealing methodological appendix "Comprendre" by Bourdieu (1993).
In this respect, Bourdieu stood in relation to sociology as Freud stood in relation to psychology, and Marx in
relation to political economy.
32
See in this regard the very promising methodology of "auto-ethnography", combining participant observation, phenomenological introspection, and sociological and methodological reflexions on both, as practiced by Yves Winkin in the domains of tourism, urban leisure sites, and sponsored public relations events.
Another who practices this eminently sensible modus operandum, according to Winkin, has been Marc Aug
(1986). Though different, this mode of doing research is consistent with that practiced by Hennion (2004).
33
In this respect, the outstanding exception in cultural anthropology was Victor Turner and a select band
of colleagues (Turner and Bruner, 1985).
34
It follows that, methodologically, what I call phenomenological semiotics has a certain affinity to human ethology (Konrad Lorenz) and to analytical psychology (Freud et al).
35
Carl Schmitt, evidently not a buff of pleasure rituals, wrote caustically of subjectivized occasionalism, the tendency by German youth of his time to 'subjectivize' official occasions and turn them into sentimental pleasure rituals. See on this Hetherington (1998, 77-78 and passim).
36
For a contrary view, see the recent call by Amitai Etzioni (200_) to reclaim national and religious holidays and rededicate them to the larger communitarian project of re-moralizing society.
34
37
I appropriate this term from the literary theory of Bakhtin (1986) who meant by it the spatial-temporal
matrix that engenders the characters and the plot of works of fiction.
38
I adopt this felicitous concept from Gomart and Hennion (1999).
39
For an enlightening analysis of the complex relationship between the particular reality of focused
gatherings and the larger reality of Everyday Life, see Goffman (1961)
40
For richly insightful and abundantly documented social science analyses of spaces used for staging
pleasure rituals, see Shields (1990) and Hetherington (1998).
41
On constructed sites of pleasure rituals in contemporary Western societies, see Oldenburg (1989).
Oldenburg calls thes sites third places, neither home and nor the workplace. Third places include American
bars, French bistros, English pubs, Bavarian beer-halls, caf-bookstores and the like. Another, more recent
analysis of sites of sociality is Hetherington (1998).
42
See on this footnote 31 above.
43
Hennion (1999) has also written extensively on this subject, in relation to musical practices.
44
These concepts are modelled on the concept of 'anticipatory socialization' (Merton 1968a, 319-325).
45
In the case of the sexual ritual, Murray Davis (1973, ch. 1) refers to this phase as the "lascivious shift
out of everyday life", and to the accompanying role-sheddings as "disrolings". Subsequently, in ch. 2, he
proceeds to refer to what I call anticipatory engagements as "sensual slides into erotic reality". . .
46
Needless to say, in a fuller treatment this proposition would have to be variously qualified. Thus, how
much participants can shed their Everyday Life social statuses at a pleasure ritual is a function, among others, of whether their role partners at the ritual are also their role partners in Everyday Life (for example, at
office parties). Likwise, whether participants feel the need to shed their Everyday Life status at the pleasure
party is a function of whether there is inequality in the Everyday Life statuses of the participants: the lesser
these differences, the less is there a felt need to shed the Everyday Life statuses in preparation for a pleasure
party. That is probably why the organizers of pleasure rituals intuitively prefer inviting guests of equal social
standing, and leave out guests of a lower standing.
47
I know of someone exceptional in this respect, who spends days wondering what would be a suitable
gift to bring to a birthday celebrant, and in formulating different of the wishes she will write on the accompanying birthday card.
48
In sociology, the chief grammarian of these moral rites was Erving Goffman, and their leading social
historian Norbert Elias. For a more recent comprehensive analytic survey of such rites, also collected from
manuals of etiquette, see Dominique Picard (1995, 1998).
49
For more on this theme, see Weitman (1973).
50
What I call here the program corresponds roughly to what Goffman (1967) designated as the frame.
51
Take, for example, a dinner party. Nowadays, virtually the only formally explicit role expectation from
the program at such a party is that, on being told that dinner is ready, the participants will move to the dining
room table, take their seats around it and start eating what they are served. Everything else they do before,
during and after the dinner is left entirely up to them. Paradoxically, the more informal the program, the
more certain participants will feel ill-at-ease, embarrassed and oppressed by it, especially those who lack the
pertinent habitus dispositions to perform competently in this seemingly free, easy-going, innocuous social
game. On the shift from formality to informality in social relations in Western societies, Wouters (1986).
52
In his essay "Fun in Games", Goffman distinguishes between "the game" and the "gaming" aspects of
the games people get together to play, like chess, poker, and the like. The game refers to the enactment of the
formal rules of the game (which a duly programmed computer can enact as well as a live person, or even
better), whereas gaming refers to all the informal, largely improvised ad hoc enactments by the players while
they play their game. Inasmuch as the players derive any "fun" from their encounter, it is from their gaming,
not from the game proper., Likewise, Hennion (2001) writes of the moments of surprise that music lovers
hope for and occasionally manage to experience in the course of their musical practices. The same applies to
amateurs (fans, aficionados) of boxing contests, corridas, football matches, athletic meets, cycling races many of these unfold more or less without surprises, hence are disappointing. (Perhaps the gradual shift of
35
allegiance by fans from amateur to professional sports may have been motivated by the hope that the latter
are less likely to disappoint than the former, despite the many ostensible drawbacks of professionalism in
sports.)
53
Edward Hall (1966, chs. 11, 12) might have called them proxemic rites.
54
In the pleasure ritual of sexual lovemaking, for example, lovers playfully nibble rather than viciously
bite one another, they gently scratch without scraping one another, they embrace without suffocating one another, they kiss without causing hematomas. The inclusion here consists of demonstrably not aggressing the
mate, even when the latter's vulnerabilities are exposed and defenseless, and of reserving real aggressions for
outsiders, for the non-included. The classic ethological work on the uncanny morphological similitude between aggressive behavior and rituals of love is Lorenz (1963).
55
Conversely, many ritual considerations turn out on analysis to be subsumable under the broad rubric of
overt and covert actions to avoid arousing passions of exclusion. For more on this, see my paper Intimacies:
Toward a Theory of Social Inclusion and Exclusion (Weitman 1973).
56
Weber (19??) designated this experience 'the nascent state', and Alberoni (1992) constructed an elaborate theory of the genesis of couples and of social movements on and around this foundational experience.
57
Some of these euphoric relational emotions coincide or overlap with those that Abraham Maslow
(1971) variously designated as peak-experiences, plateau-experiences, B-values (where B = being). For
a more extensive presentation of some of these experiences, cf Weitman The Appeals of Sex (2004, as yet
unpublished in English). On the re-solidarizing effects of these experiences, see Love and Self-Change"
(Weitman 2000). Note that some of these experiences are not necessarily as intense or dramatic as suggested
by qualifiers like euphoric and peak. They may also be low-key, mellow, soothing, without for that reason being any less gratifying, meaningful and solidarizing for those who experience them.
58
It should be emphasized that, alluring though they may be, seduction attempts are most unpredictable,
risk-laden affairs. Thus, would-be seducers always run the risk of being rebuked by the opposite party (for
any of a range of reasons). As a result, they are liable to feel humiliated, insulted, enraged, smouldering with
resentment (passions of exclusion), even unto flooding out, the expression by which Goffman (1961) referred to instances in which participants completly lose their cool and fly into a ritual-shattering fit of rage,
of crying, and the like. All of which is but another way of saying that the outcome of pleasure rituals can be
not only ineffective, but exceedingly unpleasant and injurious, the very opposite of what had been hoped
from them. Having said this, this built-in uncertainty is itself, according to Goffman (1961), one of the
sources of the appeal and excitement these rituals can generate.
59
That is why I call these experiences emotions rather than feelings - because of their built-in potential for setting in motion affective reactions, including chain reactions.
60
The expression is from Collins recently published Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton University
Press, 2004), and is meant to convey that participants find themselves swept up and carried away by the rites
in question, as when certain kinds of music make them feel like tapping their feet, of swaying or humming
along, of dancing to the music, of marching in step.
61
Yves Winkin (e.g. 1993, 1998, 2005) has written several stimulating texts on the ethnography of 'engineered' enchantment, especially on tourist sites and sidewalk cafs as sites of enchantment. Carol Gilligan
(2003) has drawn a useful (if invidious) contrast between enchantment and romanticism. Recently, Norbert
Wiley (2000) has been analyzing enchantment at the cinema..
62
Gilligan (2002) draws a telling distinction between "being-in-relationship" with one or more others and
"having a relationship" with them.
63
On the relation of poetry to ineffable extremes of pleasure, see the classic piece by Ernest Schachtel
(1949). Gomart and Hennion (1999) discuss a related set of shifts under the rubric of passings.
64
A significant trend has appeared in recent sociology, that discerns in our time a long-term secular decline (and fall?) of enduring solidary relationships - the concepts of disembedding, individualization, liquidity have been used in this connection (Beck [2003], Giddens [1994], Bauman [200_] Sennett [1998]
and a concomitant rise of new forms of sociality and attachments. Bauman (2003), for example, has been
writing caustically about the rise of 'liquid love', and the decline under conditions of liquid modernity of earlier, more enduring forms of (solid) love. Karin Knorr-Cetina (1999) has been proposing that we have en-
36
tered an era of post-social sociality in which enduring solidarity relations are now being forged with objects (rather than with people), in particular with epistemological objects, as part of the rise of the 'knowledge society'. Antoine Hennions work (1999, 2001) may also be situated in this trend, for when he writes of
the sociology of attachment, he too has in mind enduring relationships to pleasurable objects (music, wine,
drugs), not to other persons or to groups. (The same goes for his colleague Bruno Latour.) Andreas Wittel
(2001), for his part, has proposed that we are entering an era of network sociality, in which short-lived but
intense relations are in the process of replacing the older, enduring relationships. Significantly, however, all
these newer relations also require pleasure rituals for their initial production and for their subsequent reproduction, perhaps even more so than long-term, institutionalized affect relationships.
65
Social scientists in Mediterranean countries (France, Spain, Italy, Greece) seem to have shown greater
interest in rituals of this type (fairs, festivals, carnivals, spectacles, meals) than have their counterparts in
countries on the North Atlantic. There are also elaborate ancient cultural traditions of a pragmatics of pleasure in the Near East, the Middle East and the Far-East (e.g. Turkey, Arabia, Persia, India, China, Japan). The
same may also hold for many cultures in sub-Saharan Africa (cf. Gorer [1962]) and in Latin America (Cuba,
Columbia, Brazil).
66
These rituals are manifestations of what Marcuse (1955) called 'Libidinal Reason'. It is not true that
pleasure rituals are not instrumental. They may not be instrumental for ulterior ends. But, to those who engage in them, they are instrumental for attaining euphoric experiences. What could be more instrumental,
more 'rational' than that?
67
Many issues arise in the course of the reading of this paper, that must have raised doubts in the minds
of readers, including of supportive readers. For those interested in a brief discussion of some of these issues,
I have added an appendix in the form of an imaginary Q&A session between my alterego and myself.
68
For two outstanding, if very different, examples, of such a moral sociology, see Bourdieu et al (1993)
and Illouz (2003).
69
Significantly, in French the knowhow in question is called savoir-vivre. See in this connection Picard
(1995, 1998)
70
A well-known example of such a work of classification (aka codification) is the classification by Merton (1968b, 424-433) of the stratagems wherby role players seek to resolve or minimize the problems structurally built into their role-sets. Another, even better known, is his classification of stratagems of adaptation
to anomie (Merton 1968).
71
These terms are inspired from the semiological method as it was elaborated by Roland Barthes (1960).
72
See in this regard the series of articles on 'religion as a cultural system', 'ideology as a cultural system',
'art as a cultural system', 'common sense as a cultural system', some of which are reprinted in Geertz (1974).
73
A paradigmatic series is a class made up of a series of items (here, a series of techniques), all of which
have a significant property in common.
37

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Sasha Weitman, Pleasure Rituals DRAFT - DO NOT QUOTE - COMMENTS WELCOME 11/10/05

Que faisiez vous mon cher au temps de l'Algrie,

A phenomenological pragmatics. Suppose a specific class of pleasure rituals (say,

ticipants are to be in a position to contribute to the construction and maintenance of the

intimacy, the heady experience of opening up to someone and of someone opening

belonging, the heady experience of feeling in, of feeling part of;

and sustained? Why, alongside a sociology of violence-ridden bourdieusian fields, should

APPENDIX: OUTSTANDING ISSUES

gious Values and Peak Experiences . London: Penguin Books.

Social Processes (pp. 86-118). Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin.

* Acknowledgments. [PROVISIONAL] Francesco Alberoni, Edith Astruc, Jerme Bourdon,

Schatzki, Knorr Cetina and von Savigny (2001)

I found this term in Csiksentmihalyi (1990)

See Simmel's "The Alpine Journey"

I adopt this felicitous concept from Gomart and Hennion (1999).

See on this footnote 31 above.

For more on this theme, see Weitman (1973).

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