Pornography, the Theory: What Utilitarianism Did to Action (review)

In her very difficult yet thought-provoking latest work Frances Ferguson asserts that Sadean pornography, the novel, and modern democracies are all features of what she calls "modern organized social life" that can be elucidated through an appreciation of Benthamite utilitarianism (Jeremy Bentham was, of course, a contemporary of the Marquis de Sade). Such an appreciation (contrary to the Foucauldian inclination to blame utilitarianism for institutional infringements on individual freedom) will lead us to understand, among other things, how modern democracy depends less on notions such as the social contract and the rights of man and more on rendering the individual's actions visible and thus available for evaluation. Such visibility requires contextualization within the limited time and space of socially structured public groups (for Bentham, typically, workhouses and classrooms), so that an individual's action can be evaluated in relation to and by others in that group. Action, in the Benthamite scheme, is an action only insofar as it is public, that is, visible and evaluated within a structured context. This new utilitarian and modern "representational technology" is especially remarkable in that it replaces belief with information, a noteworthy achievement, since belief is so often based in unexamined histories and habits that are not available for public evaluation and end up causing individuals much more harm than good.

Utilitarianism's advantage, observes Ferguson, lies in how it afforded "the possibility for a new form of social recognition" detached from property ownership, family history, or even any accounting for "personal character" (2). Freed from such burdens, a person could attain "upward social mobility" by competing to perform actions in such a way as to be most highly evaluated for them by other group members (3). Occupied with the immediate present, utilitarianism disarmed prejudice because "what one saw people do would replace what one might expect people to do" (5). Utilitarian structures were, as Bentham understood them, "democratic in that they admitted all comers" who would be both evaluators and evaluated. These same structures were not "liberal in that they restricted the range of choices," given their well-defined spatial and temporal limitations, but these very limitations and this rigidity are what allowed the envisioning of value (20). More clearly a disadvantage, perhaps, is that the individual would have "no existence independent of that environment," meaning these specific limitations (5). And a point Ferguson herself does not raise directly (nor Bentham, for that matter) is the problem of the individual who, because of history and prejudice, is always already barred from the workplace or the school, as was so long the case for women and racialized others, for example. The question of access is nonetheless the one deemed most important by Ferguson, and the novels she selects for analysis in her study (by Sade, Flaubert, D. H. Lawrence, and Bret Easton Ellis), along with Catherine MacKinnon's argument against pornography, provide the means for identifying utilitarian structures as well as for challenging these structures by bringing their focus to bear precisely on the question of access, "the ability to enter and leave modern disciplinary structures" (25).

Ferguson opens her study with an analysis of Catherine MacKinnon's highly controversial argument against pornography, contending that both critics and advocates of the argument miss a crucial point, which is that, historically, pornography "directly participated in various highly public social systems that gave a shape to what might otherwise be the impalpability of action itself" (xv). In not seeing this connection MacKinnon and her commentators also fail to appreciate how pornography offers up sex as a publicly visible action readily available for evaluation as a "process of hierarchy and ranking" (35). This process, Ferguson suggests, is an indispensable feature of modern social structures that is not acknowledged often enough. These structures, however, cannot do the work MacKinnon wants them to, for though equal access to the structures is ideally sought, the structures themselves do not and cannot "enact equality" because they...