Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography

Notes

Notes Chapter 1 1. http://rulesoftheinternet.com/index.php5?title=Main_Page. 2. The history of pornography is more complex than one sentence can possibly convey. Some of these historical developments and connections are addressed in the following chapters, but this is not primarily a book on the histories of pornography. For such treatises, see Hunt (1996), Kendrick (1996), Williams (1989), O’Toole (1998), and Sigel (2005). 3. See Jacobs (2007) and Jacobs et al. (2007) for discussions of fringe, niche, artistic, activist, and subcultural online pornographies. 4. This is partly the case because artistic and experimental pornographies speak to the interests of scholars studying porn while such rapport may be more difficult to establish with commercial and mainstream agents. Florian Cramer (2006, 134) argues that the “interests of art and commercial enterprise, of artists and sex workers , of sex industry and cultural criticism seem to blend into each other” as porn performers present in academic seminars and researchers analyze their works. As Cramer points out, this leads to a general lack of conflict, and the potentially provocative elements of such interactions disappear from view. 5. It is not warranted to categorize the work of scholars such as Richard Dyer (1993), Annette Kuhn (1994), or Stuart Hall (1997) with notions of mirroring or judgment. Considerations of popular media’s ability to move and touch its audience cut across Dyer’s work, while Kuhn exemplifies self-reflexive scholarly agency, and Hall remains very much concerned with the mutually constitutive forces of material realities, histories and systems of representation, and ways of perceiving oneself and others. The tradition of British cultural studies that these scholars represent is not alien to an understanding of representation as a question of both meaning and doing (Abel 2007, 58), and it does not obtain unaffected objectivity. In The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations, Dyer points to the limitations of “word politics” that focus on discourse and the social construction of reality. Such 264 Notes work has broken with “tendencies to think of reality as out there, separate from consciousness and culture,” but it risks considering words and discourses as all that there is and “forgetting that words and discourses are attempts to make sense of what are not themselves words and discourses: bodies, feelings, things” (Dyer 1993, 9–10). This is not a representationalist take on images and words as separate from the world but is one interested in how they matter and the material and emotional consequences that they have. By emphasizing the effects of cultural images and the analytical and political work concerning them, Dyer addresses the emotional, embodied, and extralinguistic (an emphasis that is also evident in his more recent work on film music). Although it would be possible to trace representationalist echoes in the separation of bodies, feelings, and things as not discourse (for, following Barad via Foucault, discourse is not merely a question of language but one of material conditions), I take it to mean that there is more to the world than language and words—for example, feelings and bodies—that we interact with and that matter (an antirepresentationalist claim). 6. Realizing this to be the case, Abel identifies the critical practice as one moving “through the work that representation does.” Because it is impossible to break away from figuration and narrative, such practice “may perhaps be best thought of as the preconscious of representational criticism—representational criticism operating at a different speed or on a different level of intensity” (Abel 2007, 28). 7. This, again, is as much about forgetting as about remembering. Sara Ahmed (2008) argues that for authors to claim that corporeality has been reduced to social constructivism, critics need to ignore earlier scholarship on embodiment, materiality , and biology. The move to affect necessitates a move “from.” What we are assumedly moving away from tends to be depicted in simplified terms as caricature (Ahmed 2008, 36). As Hemmings (2005, 555) eloquently puts it, in “the search for ‘the new’ that bears no resemblance to the past, the identifying features of that past are inevitably overstated, and the claims for that new embellished in ways that must at the very least fall short of rigorous.” 8. This is also the case with Abel’s (2007) proposal for a critique “after representation ” that shifts attention away from semantics, representation, mediation, and meaning and toward affective, asignifying intensities. Contrary to his mode of masocriticism that heeds the “irreducible singularity” of the event (of the image), “representationalist judgement itself begins from...