Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex

5: Prurience and Postmodernism

5 Prurience and Postmodernism Affect and Contemporary Image Cultures War, as demonstrated in Chapter 4, intersects with the contemporary pornographic in a number of affecting ways. However, despite operating under a new name, engaging with highly contemporary events, and frequently circulating in technologically advanced virtual forms, it is worth noting that warporn is not an exclusively twenty-first century phenomenon . Indeed, Carolyn Dean’s work would appear to suggest that a certain conflation of discourses of war and pornography first manifests itself in the immediate aftermath of World War I: While it is true that eroticized violence was a predominant theme in underground pornography in England and North America during the nineteenth century, contemporaries generally viewed it as a manifestation of its authors’ and readers ’ weakness of moral will; its violence was one among many examples of the human susceptibility to sin which was evident in all pornographic material. After the Great War, however, there is a new continuity between the thematics of war and pornography, in which sexualized violence becomes the primary example of human moral failure. (61) It is not only in an abstract or general sense that pornography and war can be seen to be brought into conversation during that uniquely volatile historical moment. Several of the concrete examples that Dean provides resonate profoundly with contemporary definitions and manifestations 87 88 Beyond Explicit of warporn. Discussing a 1925 work by Georges Anquetil entitled Satan Conduit le bal, for instance, she notes: Trench journalists had already described the spectacle of dismembered corpses in macabre detail, but Anquetil implicitly eroticizes such images by juxtaposing flagellation scenes in brothels with anecdotes of war atrocities. The war is turned into a transnational brothel, another eroticized mise-en-scène in which the body’s private pleasure and pain become public affairs. (63–64) The “hybridization of war documentation and pornography” which characterizes today’s warporn (Jacobs 118), then, would seem to be at least partly indebted to an inglorious cultural legacy stretching back to the birth of modern warfare. Despite the existence and influence of such an inheritance, however, warporn often is discussed as if it is an entirely new development within representational culture, with Jacobs, for example, stating that “a new phase in netporn history has been written” with the circulation of such texts (9). Such claims of originality are entirely understandable, for much about warporn seems to lend itself to discourses regarding the contemporary age. It is easy to view warporn as somehow symptomatic of postmodern , image-driven cultures, and to associate it with those concerns about affect and the ethics of consumerism that typically characterize critical commentaries on such cultures. Brian Massumi has noted the following: There seems to be a growing feeling within media, literary, and art theory that affect is central to an understanding of our information- and image-based late capitalist culture, in which so-called master narratives are perceived to have foundered. Fredric Jameson notwithstanding, belief has waned for many, but not affect. If anything, our condition is characterized by a surfeit of it.1 (27) That is to say, affect is increasingly being positioned at the heart of characterizations and conceptualizations of the contemporary world. This recognition of the emphasis on affect within our culture is not always celebratory. Indeed, it is frequently somewhat suspicious, and can translate into specific anxieties about the consumer-viewer’s engagement with representations. Affect’s apparent primacy over belief comes to suggest 89 Prurience and Postmodernism not only the potential for a moral vacuum, but also a fierce desire to be moved by images—a desire so strong that it can lead to blind consumption . Such concerns are, as Jennifer Wicke points out, particularly obvious in apprehensive discussions of contemporary adult entertainment, for “All the valences of affect used to discuss consumer states of mind come into play with redoubled fervor and seeming relevance when translated into the arena of pornography consumption—satiety, passivity, absorption ” (68). Pornography, Spectacle, and the Generalized Affective Response Anxieties about the lure of images in the postmodern age are evident not only in scholarly and theoretical works, but in popular, artistic, and literary works as well. In Margaret Atwood’s depiction of a futuristic dystopia in Oryx and Crake, for example, the illicit but easily accessible images of virtual space are presented in such a way as to invite condemnation of some elements of our existing visual culture. Although the...