First I was diverted by "The Literary Freud," which I naively thought would be a quick read. It turned out to be densely theoretical, with a broad range of references. Its penultimate chapter tempted me even farther away from the above-mentioned satisfactions. Entitled "The Ontology of the Pornographic Image" (by way of allusion to Andre Bazin's seminal essay "The Ontology of the Photographic Image") this chapter attempted to provide a Freudian-Lacanian rejoinder to various academic scholars of porn, most of whom were themselves operating heavy theory under the influence of psychoanalysis. Meisel's arguments are interesting, though mostly unpersuasive. Perhaps his most original contribution to the now firmly established scholarly field of "porn studies" is to claim that the money shot is a figure of the mother and child in which each has become both subject and object. Of his other arguments -- that porn "does not block or mediate desire" but instead "intercepts desire at its infantile roots, reconstituting object-relations rather than representing them"; that "what pornography presents at any given moment is not a mediated account of someone else's sexual activity, but a vivid projection of the masturbator's own fantasy life in paradigmatic form"; that transgressive porn (gay, bondage, S/M), frequently lauded as resistant to dominant power-structures, in fact requires and ultimately reinforces the rules it seems to subvert; and that the reason porn can't be art or literature has to do not with complexity or intellectuality or craft but rather that the latter "is a series of screens" that "swerves from capturing the infantile sites of pleasure that lie behind" those screens, whereas "like psychoanalysis, pornography removes these screens, exposing what is behind them" -- none constitutes a significant step beyond the existing scholarship. In fact, at least one crucial citation on the topic (Leo Bersani's "Homos") is embarrassingly absent.
But reading this chapter did inspire me to finally go ahead and knock out the literature on porn that's been sitting on my shelf for the last couple of years. I started with the book that now stands as the origin of academic inquiry into the topic of porn: Linda Williams' 1989 "Hard Core."
In many ways this text is now outdated both theoretically and historiographically. A book originally published almost 20 years ago is of course no longer current as a cultural history of the genre. Neither DVD nor the internet (as we know it) existed when the book first hit the market. Fascinatingly, the section that seems the most out-of-date is the 35-page epilogue Williams added for the 1999 second edition, in an attempt to update the text. Giving short accounts of the flourishing of the porn industry in the final decade of the millennium, and of the simultaneous diversification of interests represented by '90s porn tapes (e.g. "upscale yuppie porn," "gonzo fetish porn" etc.), she then proceeds to miss the boat entirely by presenting a lengthy yet uninteresting account of her experience with the flash-in-the-pan medium of interactive porn CD-ROMs, while mentioning the internet only very briefly and the (admittedly new) DVD format not at all.
As is perhaps to be expected, the book is much stronger when addressing moments that had already passed at the time of writing. Her analysis of early stag films reveals that these movies aimed at arousal rather than satisfaction. Many viewers might have masturbated while watching them (historians have little way of knowing for certain), but according to Williams the films seem designed primarily as substitutes for foreplay rather than for intercourse -- that is, to get the almost exclusively male viewers horny rather than (as is typically the case with the porn of today) to get them off. To anyone interested in early cinema, observations such as these are invaluable.
As I mentioned, the theory here is also a bit passé. One thing that Meisel's book does well is to add to the growing swell of voices discrediting the Foucault of the 1980s. By this I mean not Foucault's own 1980s work, but the way in which all his work was assimilated into the English-language academy during that decade. In fact, most of today's voices are now attempting to show that the 1980s reception of Foucault missed the point, and so to "rescue" Foucault in one way or another. One group of such voices insists, as does Meisel, that Foucault, traditionally interpreted as hostile to psychoanalysis, actually amounts to a perfectly logical extension of the project of "Civilization and Its Discontents." (Another group is the Deleuzians, but since A: I'm not sure exactly what they're arguing, B: many of them are much better with computers than I, and C: many of them are vindictive sons-of-bitches -- I plan to leave them well enough alone.) Consequently Williams' Foucault in this book is precisely the Foucault that I have come of age reading snidely dismissive articles about; when she wrote her book, the currently popular Foucault had in English not yet been born. Thus her model for the redemptive reinvention of sex is founded on a drastically undertheorized and internally inconsistent (from our point of view) glorification of polymorphous perversity; and while her writing about the imbrication of power and pleasure may be seen as a step in the right direction (toward the new Foucault, away from the 80s Foucault) it's still not quite adequate.
I hate spending a few days reading a seminal theoretical book only to realize that it has provided me only with a certain foundation for understanding the work that has now superseded it. I need to get a little bit more up-to-speed about porn than "Hard Core" has brought me. Consequently I feel that it would be appropriate to postpone your narrative satisfaction a bit longer. Those continental philosophy books recede farther into the hazy distance of my future reading, and looming monstrously in my path: Laura Kipnis's "Bound and Gagged."
No comments:
Post a Comment