The philosopher Jesse Prinz, in his book Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion, notes — following research by Kent C. Berridge — that “liking and wanting are actually dissociable and… reside in different neural systems.” At least in the case of rats, “the liking system involves the shell of the nucleus accumbens, the ventral pallidum, and the brainstem region. Wanting involves the dopamine projection system from midbrain to nucleus accumbens.” As a result of this dissociation:
if one creates a lesion in the wanting system of a rat, the rat will not eat. It will starve to death. But if you force the same rat to eat agreeable food (e.g., something sweet) it will display behavior that suggests it enjoys the experience. It likes food, but it doesn’t want food. Conversely, one can stimulate the wanting system to achieve wanting without liking. A rat in this condition will eat everything you give it, including food that it dislikes. It will gorge itself on foods that cause it to display aversive reactions at every bite. Berridge compares this to addiction. Addicts often pursue their drug of choice even after that drug no longer induces pleasure.
Now, leaving aside the sadism of such experiments, and my own lack of knowledge about how much of this can be transferred physiologically from rats to human beings, the comparison of wanting without liking to addiction (or at least, to one sort of addiction) makes a great deal of sense. But what, then, about the reverse? Is there a human analogue for liking without wanting?
I’d suggest that, if wanting without liking is an addictive state, then liking without wanting is an aesthetic one. “Liking without wanting” is more or less what Kant means when he says that aesthetic pleasure is “disinterested.” I am pleased by a certain combination of colors or sounds, by a certain narrative, etc., without being concerned one way or another as to whether whatever is being represented by such colors or sounds or narrative lines exists in actuality. (In many cases, I might well positively not want the thing from whose representation I take pleasure to actually exist — this would be the case with horror novels and films, or with stories about charismatic characters who would certainly harm or kill me were I to meet them in real life). And this may well happen — for me it often happens — in “real life” as well as in the contemplation of works of art (e.g., I might find some person’s sexuality likeable or pleasurable, despite my not having any wish to actually have sex with that person).
The horror of a rat starving to death amidst food it likes, because it doesn’t want to eat is, I think, a good emblem of the aesthetic — or at least of one aspect of the aesthetic. And it explains, perhaps why so many people on the Left have a basically anti-aesthetic stance (“the aestheticizing of politics [i]s practiced by fascism. Communism replies by politicizing art”).
However, I think that we should affirm aesthetics as liking without wanting, if only because this is a good antidote to the bombastic exaggerations of theories of desire. I refer here equally to Lacanian theories of desire as lack, and Deleuzian/Guattarian theories of desire as production. Both sorts of theories of desire take wanting, even when divorced from liking, very seriously — desire is either the labor of the negative or the actual process of production. Both sorts of theories of desire tend to marginalize, or leave little room fo,r nonproductive play — which is to say, they leave very little room for the wayward pleasures of aesthetics, even if they exalt certain great works of art.
We might think here even of someone like Roland Barthes, who exalts works of “bliss” or jouissance while denigrating works of pleasure. Barthes is especially interesting here because he is definitely an aesthete, but an avant-garde modernist one, who only loves art when it is difficult and repellent. Barthes associates the art of which he approves with desire (wanting, even when it is without liking) rather than with the aesthetic state of liking without wanting.
In conclusion, I will note that all three of the attitudes I have been describing have their roots in Kant. Desire as lack or negativity comes of course from Hegel, who erects his system by abusively revising the Transcendental Dialectic in Kant’s First Critique. Deleuze & Guattari’s theory of desire producing the real comes directly (as they themselves note) from the Second Critique. Both of these positions emphasize wanting; they may both be contrasted with the liking without wanting that, as I have already noted, is theorized in the Third Critique.