Acts: Theater, Philosophy, and the Performing Self

Pornography and Acting

147 Pornography and Acting Pornographic performance constitutes a philosophically riddling form of role-­ playing. Those who merely distinguish between authentic agency and artificial pretense are likely to altogether miss the problem. They would simply identify acting with pretending, and perceive pornographic acting—­ if it is acting—­ as no more than another kind of mimicry. From such a perspective , the philosophical questions raised by pornography are mostly moral in nature. They concern the moral desirability of pornography as such, or its desirability given the exploitative conditions underlying most of its production . But when analysed as imaginative embodied role-­ playing, pornography raises less familiar puzzles relating to performed agency rather than to its moral status. Does participating in a pornographic performance constitute acting? Does it make sense to claim that the performer goes through an entire array of sexual motions: foreplay, penetration, orgasm (surely the case for performing men, though doubtfully so for female performers)—­ and, still, is merely playing a role? Would, for instance, performing in a pornographic film amount to adultery if the actor were married? A response to such questions demands inquiring after the precise form of role-­ playing involved in performed sex, whether such performance takes place within a pornographic context, or in a non-­ pornographic one. The previous chapter discussed episodes in which genuine self-­ shaping through acting was rooted in a withdrawal from care. When the body is de-­ mechanized, some types of performance are exposed as potentially overestimating the extent to which an actor is free to dissociate performance from constitutive, identity-­ related values. All of the episodes discussed in the previous chapter concerned actors or acting students who perceive themselves as such. By contrast, pornography is a form of performance in which self-­ shaping through performed action is so immediate and obvious that the identification of the action as role-­playing itself becomes questionable. 148 acts 148 acts Pornography is the clearest example of the inability to maintain a distinction between role and identity, between performed act and genuine, self-­ determining agency, between representation and presentation. This chapter attempts to understand what makes such distinctions collapse. The first sections attempt to disentangle the unobvious relationship between pornographic role-­ playing and acting. I then proceed to de-­ automate the ascription of “exploitation” to porn, by bringing out porn’s surprising capacity to establish care rather than undermine it. Pornography’s self-­shaping capacity will then be examined, and several moral implications will be formulated. Is Pornography (sometimes) a Form of Acting? Porn is typically produced in a fast and careless industry. For this reason, any sampling of actual acting done as part of porn will probably reveal a hastily created performance that cannot compete in quality even with the most inferior mainstream films. Judging its status as acting by viewing such a sampling, one is likely to say that if porn does involve acting, then such oscillates between the merely substandard and the laughably pathetic. But how about patiently and thoughtfully produced porn? Can carefully rehearsed pornography—­if it were produced—­constitute acting? To answer this question, porn needs to be related to the definition of acting proposed earlier in this book, in which acting was associated with an intended artistic achievement. Values such authenticity, originality, commitment, inventiveness , attentiveness, depth of embodiment and inquisitiveness were claimed to figure in such achievement. If a well-­ off porn producer were to commission excellently trained actors, such values could be exemplified in a pornographic film—­why shouldn’t they? It is, nevertheless, difficult to dismiss the thought that there is something unsound about such a project: imagining good acting in porn is not self-­ contradictory; it is just bizarre. Quality of acting seems simply irrelevant. Granted, few would relish watching indifferent or bored performers. But this merely shows that the attitude of the performers can be important to the spectator. Yet attitude is not the same as acting. Straitjacketing pornography into an aesthetic frame suggested by the term “acting”—­and consequently relegating it into a second-­rate art—­is not our only (or most fruitful) option when attempting to pinpoint its precise form of embodied role-playing. Instead, we can more plausibly follow oth- Pornography and Acting 149 ers in regarding pornography as a practice in its own right, governed by its own conventions and objectives.1 What is this practice? I will employ the following definition: Pornography is a graphic (pictorial, cinematic, photographic, acoustic, staged...