Postmodern mentality is highly ideological (practical): Sex sells and in order to do so it has to sell itself. TV is the main cultural medium, and the visual culture selected the body as the central object (a border line between the world and the inner world). If selling (advertising) sex defines pornographic, the culture of commercials could be examined as a para-porn.
Phenomena of spectatorship and theory of performance
(participant-observer, situation of a fake ritual). Film
interaction: watching TV as sexual intercourse. Psychological
v. physical (physiological). Zoom, cut -- my sexual expressions
(identification with camera).[2] Audio-visual (any social) activity
is sexual?
SUMMARY: Spectacle of the Body
Spectator is a natural (potential) pornographer: VCR,
surveillance cameras, camcorders and etc. Safe sex: VR sex,
mind-sex (now this fundamental principle became obvious). Porno
movies are the best representation of our PM status because they
are primitive. Sub-human and semi-human. Hyper- and super-human.
Those levels are all included in what we define as human. All are
used for cyber sexual intercourse.
If humans are social animals then porno (movies) are a good
illustration (proof) of this concept. The material is obviously
animalistic, but technology is human. Human animal is
domesticated animal through transformation of gender into sex?
PORN: Culture, pop-culture -- and marginal non-culture, which uses both (the classical culture absorbed by pop-culture). Ideology is the looks. We are seeing the World, we see us seeing the world (us in this world) -- what a picture!
[ mass culture is not CULTURE, but the opposite -- CIVILIZATION, the end of culture: read PostAmeriKa ]
INTRO
The powers. One of the first introductions to the free market and democracy in Russia was pornography... From the start the
Soviet State equated pornography with anti-Soviet propaganda
(Lenin). The materialism of the Soviet marxists was an
acknowledgement of sexual power and to control it anything sexual
has to be declared as anti-social. This cultural policy drove the
society into an aggressive, angry military nation. Our duality
(animalistic and angelic natures) is still present and by the
ideology of democracy made into a norm of Doublespeak.3 All the
seven mortal sins generated by the body are not sins in a world
of immortality of the Postmodern. Both worlds are present: mortal
and immortal, both standards are active, and -- make us all
hypocritical all the time. Porno is the control of (low)
non-human needs. Censorship: taboos -- social control (our social
contract against each other).
Pornography is a situation, a position, an attitude. Since it's a PERFORMANCE for public, or the Other, it's not being but acting, or pretend "being." We use the idea widely; it could be politics, any social performance. The sale.
Where is the border line? In relations with yourself, or public? Both?
The pornographic nature of our video culture is natural, since it's intended for a market, for consumption.
Strangers? No such things in paradise. Celebrities have no privacy and their privacy is the area of public interest.
"Without a family": new sexual situation. What is actually wrong ("immoral") in porno? That a man and a woman do it without purpose of reproduction (for pleasure only)? Our debates over pornography are an indication of our confused cultural stand, our fears of our desires, our own nature. Porno has no aesthetic value... why are suggestive (erotica) porno (sex scenes) in every movie? What do we protest against? Politically correct advocates (feminists) joined Christians -- what a coalition! Concern for children? Of course, if we don't know how to teach love, respect, family, we have to bar the physical aspect of being animals. Mind over matter -- we want total victory.
Paradise knows no sex? Oh hell -- watching sex without having it?
Porno: shall not desire the wife of your neighbor. The sin is
prevented. I didn't do anything, I only watched it. She is
nobody's wife, and you are not a husband in paradise.
"Let me tell you about our world," he pointed his finger at me, as if I was the world. "In our world you can't have it."
"Have what?"
"You can't have anything. You can see everything, but can't touch it. And when you touch it, you do not feel it. You can't taste it and even the smell is only an illusion. You can't even have yourself. Nothing is yours. not even your thoughts and your feelings."
"But who does have it?"
"Nobody."
I. POMO BEING and His Postmodernist Body
Ideology is an emotional knowledge. Experiencing the data; I have to develop value judgement, relations with it. Science is boring, it's a bunch of facts. Ideology makes everything "human." Ideology is about YOUR position in relation to facts. Right and wrong, good and bad. Without ideology we wouldn't know if gravity is an evil thing, or when it's evil for us, humankind (or workers, male, female, etc.). Marxism saw everything from the worker's POV. In PM history everybody works. Body is a machine. Humanity is a machine (and a system). Communist ideology of PM is universal. ("Capitalists" as a class are defeated but they are
present in each of us, as our "dark side," ready to take over at
any moment if our ideological guards fall asleep). We defend
ourselves from ourselves. Everything is a weapon in our war with
the past, and everything, no matter how natural it was before,
has to be evaluated according to PM-us. In PM world everything is
a problem -- too much rain, and not enough rain. Death is bad,
too many old folks are burden for economy. Too much growth, not
enough, too fast, too slow, too high, too low, looks like
everything has the tendency to go wrong and we have to watch
everything, to monitor, to interfere, to fix...
Our biggest problem is that we are not sure what is right. We think we know. Whatever was right yesterday is wrong today, or could be wrong tomorrow. As a result what was right in the past is wrong, depending on interpretation of the present. According to this dialectic, one never can escape being wrong. The world
of ideology is a difficult place to live in (Oh, paradise!) --
basically, you're never right and always wrong. Paradise is being
right but hell is never satisfied. Compassionate knowledge is
very hysterical. Paradoxical logic of ideology keeps us in a
state of panic.
"But I have feelings, I have my desires," I looked at him, but he wasn't there. "Why? Why would I want something I can't have?"
"Yes, why would you need something you can't have?" He asked.
I didn't care if he was here or not, I needed my answers. I need to understand! Can you understand it?
"I understand," he said.
There was a long pause. Maybe a few minutes, maybe days, or even many years.
"And what will you do with your understanding?"
I do not know who said it, him or me. But there was no answer.
I. 1. NEO-PRIMITIVE FEELS: Body Passion Plays
Capitalism is pornographic in principle. Market. Period. Mind over body?
SUPER-POWER (MIND) AND SUPER-FEELINGS (TV)
24 hours moralization on 500 channels -- that's how I feel.
How do you feel when in the middle of the crowd you want to
"feel"? There are a few emotions designated to this big body --
seven? Two? Approval and disapproval.
Resurrected body lives on references to a real body. The
"first" body provides us with a crude emotional material. The
needs. On the basis of my need to sleep the "second" body creates
wants of sleeping. (Or is it "a need" on a basis of "a want"?) To
fall asleep is an instinct, but if we are now always moderately
tired, our sleeping engagements become cultural, staged. We
perform "sleeping" in social manner... There's an industry behind
culturated sleeping: from medications to late night tv.
Often the resurrected body has to force the physical body to
perform when the latter has no need for action. Thinking of being
hungry (lunch time) dictates the actual act of eating. How would
I know that I'm actually hungry when at any given moment I'm not
(not really) hungry?
We correspond to our physical bodies socially; the whole
society is involved in my relations with my organs. I have to
learn how to relate to my physicality: to be instructed when to
eat, to sleep, to have sex. Uncontrollable contract with my body
is a dangerous activity in paradise. Since it's a plentitude I
could eat, sleep or sex myself to death. I have to learn how to
chew, to swallow, to digest.
Nothing is natural anymore -- everything is a business, a big deal, a project, a job to do. My mind is constantly engaged in my physiologic (un-pure) life. I can eat without knowing the effect which this act could produce: would I get fat, get addicted, die sooner, would I gain respect of others (brand names), how would it work in combination with other products and activities I consume, etc. Everything is complex in paradise. It's a busy place to be in.
In "tv-land" I can't even laugh without instructions
(encouraged/measured/collective reaction through the canned
laughter). My smile could be politically incorrect, insensitive.
My emotions must be approved by the majority (of humans). The
identity of a mass man doesn't exit outside of his public
recognition. Fame became our cultural icon: public success is the
only success and measurement of identity. My emotions must be
technologized. Even dirty emotions (phone sex).
Life fights back dead universe (through light). Light & dead
(dark) matter. Dark = matter. Life (sex) = light + matter = film.
Sexual ontology of photographic process. Being and Nothing:
sexual view of the God's phenomena. Sex = image of conception?
You see, I am not telling it, the truth. Like the others before me I fear to say what I see. Did you notice that I call her "he"?
Yes, it was her.
Not goddess, but God. And not Devil, but a woman.
[ image ]
I. 2. GROTESQUE BODY
New sensitivity: class feelings, minority pride, group emotions. Being black, gay, woman, white male. Socialization of natural qualities, they have to be re-established; nothing is natural anymore. Natural is not natural in super-natural world.
Anything private which goes public must be big, grotesque. Therefore -- fragmented!
"Sense of deep satisfaction" (the seventh feeling), this almost gastronomical description of the Soviet language in American
media is a gastronomical sense of life.
COMMERCIAL BODY Eats -- taste it, try it, digest it! Mouth, teeth (tooth paste, brush), stomach, food and counter-food (medicine, exercise equipment), toilet paper (ass area). Washing body. Tools of enjoyment: car, toys. Entertainment forms are physiological -- terror, action, sex. Fast food and "basic" food (milk, meat, bread): they are advertised, so we would know what milk does!
Bakhtin: voices of the street (market) -- tv.
Pornographic nature of commercials: we watch them (the
performers of feelings) engaged in private acts (eating, kissing,
washing themselves). The old market didn't employ such
strategies.
"I am here," she said. "I am always here for you."
[ image ]
I.3. THE PRINCIPLES OF MONTAGE
SHOTS & CUTS: GETTING IT
"The minimum `distortable' fragment of nature is the shot; ingenuity in its combinations is montage." [5]
First is the technique of the frame. Later -- filmic diction. Framing is a selection and therefore Frame has two natural qualities: 1. to reflect one and only fragment of life, and 2. to ignore the rest. Everything we see is a result of choosing what to see -- and that means we don't see anything else. In fact, by focusing on one, we taking it out of it's natural context. Now, by putting two such shots together we create a new connection, we form a new reality (which you only see through camera). This ability to see (cutting the rest) makes viewing a process when we mostly don't see. Cuts are born out of nature of Shots. Parts instead of the whole.
"Everyone who has had in his hands a piece of film to be edited knows by experience how neutral it remains, even though a part of a planned sequence, until it is joined with another piece, when it suddenly acquires and conveys a sharper and quite different meaning than that planned for it at the time of filming." [10]
In article "The Structure of the Film" Eisenstein talks about special ability of so-called objective photographing process to portray "*an attitude toward the thing portrayed*."
[150] How?
"Let us say that grief is to be represented on the screen. There is no such thing as grief `in general.'" [150]
"We have long since realized that an attitude to a portrayed
fact can be embodied in the *way* the fact is presented. Even
such a master of "attitude" as Fran Kafka recognized physical
viewpoint as critical:
`The diversity of ideas which one can have, say, of an
apple: the apple as it appears to the child who must stretch his
neck so as barely to see it on the table, and the apple as it
appears to the master of the house who picks it up and lordly
hands it to his guest.'" [150-151]
Not WHAT but HOW! "Apple" could have many meanings. We "write" new reality by using "photographic" images of reality the way we want our viewers "to read" it on the screen.
Montage Effect (M-Effect) makes a viewer into a part of the
process, he is the one who links two shots.
No-space universe and dematerialization. The hyper-real
(Baudrillard) -- a real is a simulation of reality. Reality is a
code to be reproduced, inducing feelings of desire, experience,
knowing. Sex = experience which can't be codified?
First step: filming, taking a subject out it original position in life. But we do it in such a way that later when this shot will be positioned next to another shot, they will create a new meaning. In life 1 + 1 = 2, but 1 + 1 > 2 in cinema! Magic? The answer is that "1" in film is different from "1" without a camera. It's not an apple anymore, it's the apple. The formula should be seen as "camera -- apple = shot 1 + (director) + camera -- boy = shot 2 > hungry boy."
"Yes. It is exactly what we do in the cinema, combining shots that are *depictive*, single in meaning, neutral in content -- into *intellectual* contexts and series." [30]
They are acting -- they don't perform, they can't eat if we
produce the show of eating (staged acts). They pretend. They show
the effects of products.
Feelings of resurrected body: it doesn't feel but thinks it
feels. Mental nature or resurrected emotions. Copies of feelings
must be framed, their social essence is their main value. Instead
of hunger we have "societal hungerness". Feeling of feeling --
that could be manufactured (intellectual property) and sold. Real
hunger has no need for commercials.
Consuming my own body.
"Anatoly?"
"I am here," I said.
"Nothing, I just wanted to know that you are here," she said.
[ image ]
Suicide and porno thoughts. "Memento moro." Love is borne out of
horror of death. Wisdom is a mortal enemy of love. Half-wisdom is
humanity. Half-animal, half-angel. Porno lives on my sense of
mortality?
Identification = remembering? imagining and fantasizing. It has
to be deconstructed first; identification with the parts of
another, not the Other.
Our humanized, civilized world became an emotional universe.
Dirty (ideological) minds are natural phenomena in the second
nature (history).
Actual sex is a negation of pornography? Pornography is an
anticipation of sex. Value and practical application. "Future
dimension" -- imagining yourself in this position. PORNO IS
IDEOLOGY OF SEX.
Historical value judgement. Non-linear perception (?). Dirty
emotions are always thoughts.
Sexually charged environment. The machine: sexual devil. Sexually
indifferent Greeks (observers). Soft and hard porno.
Physiological (penetration) act is prohibited, Why? Suggestive
(erotica) actions.
Sexual education: information instead of experience.
Porno is a part of education into transformation to adult world
(we even call it "adult movies").
No genders in paradise: resurrected bodies. Political Correctness: tri-sexual. The third sex -- neutral. Idea of conception is opposite to the idea of sex (Bible on the birth of Christ). There is no sin in paradise. Sex is enjoyable and therefore GOOD. What is bad? Absence of human relations within the sexual act? There must be no preferences in kingdom of love, in paradise all love everybody. Brother and sisters; ideological ground for homosexuality (love of a human, regardless of gender). Maybe un-natural in mortal universe, not in paradise. Should *personal* relations (preferences) be active at the restaurant, gas station, bank?
Spectatorship and Ownership: communism. Imagination and fantasy
property. Pretended ownership. (see Freud on spectatorship).
Sex is our invention, imposed presence of society within the
gender. Overcoming sex we do not arrive back to gender. New
(collective) bodies (montage). Collectivization of private parts,
visual organ donations. Nationalization of bodies.
Factual communal existence.
We were in bed and the TV was watching us. The whole world was watching. It's always on, 24 hours a day, day after day. No, I do not have a TV set in the bedroom, but it makes no difference, they are watching. Didn't you see us on your local channel making love? Oh, you missed it? Don't touch this dial, it will be on again!
[ image ]
II. SEEING AS CREATIVITY
Ontological basis of pornography: "seen" by a lusting eye (video culture). The world was always charged with sexuality. The dialectics of nature transformed into ideology of humanism, including sexualization. Super-moral (technological, post-modern) society makes any gaze into a lusting look. Society of spectacle and ideology of spirit: body is a product of imagination. Mind over body -- fight against the tyranny of body.
Seeing as (emotional) knowledge (experience, consumption --
because everything becomes signs, filming makes it into a
narrative, storytelling).4 Porno ideology: sexual self-conscience
= knowing selves, reflections. Self-awareness brings in elements
of performance (montage). Video culture is sexual (semi, or/and
hyper sexual) experience of living.
Filming and performance theory (from being to acting): everything
becomes public by virtue of record (recording). (Re) Presentation
of body (sex phone and immaculate conception), and representation.
CU idea; broken social distance. Camera violates personal space,
no borders.
Identification as an illusion of privatization of public and
publicity of private. If Totalitarian State excludes pornography, the Total Society embraces erotica, makes it work for total socialization of individual. Sexual revolution didn't liberate but suppressed sexuality (?) even further. My last property is mind or body? My control or control over me? An illusion of the triumph of the flesh -- resurrected body is safe, clean, pure; sexless?
[ image ]
III. THE GAME OF SEEING IT
Pornographic essence of the *act of seeing*. Witnessing? Secrecy? P. is humanization of sexuality. With others like me. Why? Humanization of sex (controlling gender).5 First step is to suppress it, second -- to liberate (emancipate). Processing gender through sexual sensibility. Trivia (intercourse) and mystery of love (conception). Gender is for reproduction, sex is
for socialization. Classical world (Greeks): open body, not
grotesque. Christianity: separation of body and mind =
foundations for sexuality.
Freud on spectatorship:
"The spectator is a person who experiences too little, who feels that he is a `poor wretch' to whom `nothing of importance can happen,' who has long been obliged to damp down, or rather displace, his ambition to stand in his own person at the hub of world affairs; he longs to feel, and to act, and to arrange
things according to his desires -- in short, to be a hero. And
the playwright and actor enable him to do this by allowing him to
*identify himself* with a hero. They spare him something, too.
For the spectator knows quite well that actual heroic conduct
such as this would be impossible to him without pains and
sufferings and acute fears, which would almost cancel out the
enjoyment. He knows, moreover, that he has only one life and that
he might perhaps perish even in a *single* such struggle against
adversity. Accordingly, his enjoyment is based on an illusion; that is to say, his suffering is mitigated by the certainty that, firstly, it is someone other than himself who is acting and suffering on stage, and secondly, that after all it is only a game, which can threaten no damage to his personal security." (305-306)
SEEING YOURSELF (identification through body parts, the easiest):
Observer (indifferent) v. Spectator (involved). Sex knows no
observation,; it's a spectacle by nature. Sexual universe
(gravity) makes a viewer into as participant. Universality.
Transforming activity into a ritual (?) and spectacle.
Porno as expression of theory of relativity; viewer is a part of
the event. Seeing is participation. Concept of sin (mental act).
Spectator is a position (and a state of mind). Inflicted desire, desire for desire?
Identification comes from a desire of participation, being in
action, to become a part of the act. In PM world any action is
never neutral, any event has emotional gravity. To substitute
yourself with the agent of actor (role, character?) we use
*imagination*. Event is always dramatic (changes, contact) and
desire for experience attracts. WATCHING the act make it a
fiction, since we are not physically participating in the act.
Fiction is real, as a thought of action is a reality of our
emotional experience. The difference between seeing and doing is
in different needs for different experience. God creating and God
seeing the creation -- two (?) pleasures. Seeing is a desire of
pleasure, doing is pleasure itself? (Being and Acting). Hope for
pleasure is no less powerful than pleasure itself (?)
Experiencing imaginary pleasure could be even stronger than
having it. Drama comes with anticipation of an event, not with
the event itself. Accident in itself is non-dramatic. We
stretch the time, we make an event present in two times:
present and future.6 We double it. This is the beginning of
aesthetics (always starts on moral level of judgement).
[ image ]
IV. APPLIED SEXUALITY
Advertising and Propaganda (of living, philosophy of being alive). Porno feelings (new emotions, too human, ideological) and authorship (auto-erotica of being).7 Porno debates are the most expressive aspect of our hypocritical morality. Legitimate sexual connotations in advertizing and objections to "open" sex pictures. SEX SELLS EVERYTHING, INCLUDING SEX.
Regarding of their intentions I manipulate myself by watching it.
I -- receiver (viewer), and I -- sender (translator) for
I-receiver (2) -- participant. 1 -- director, 2 - medium. They
don't play me, I do it myself. I make it into a message to
myself, and I act on this message.
Since it's only visual my real hunger could not be satisfied and
would only increase. If actually I would have physical
satisfaction, I would lose my interest.8 Separation (viewing)
from the act makes it desirable. *Alienation effect*[9] makes the
act memorable, visible, significant, bigger (perception) than
actual experience, more attractive. Actual experience makes me
too involved and not capable of being in two places at once,
turns me into an animal.
[ image ]
V. TEN COMMANDMENTS of ENTERTAINMENT
POMO is pornographic by its nature.
In paradise sinister feelings are accepted and considered as
good. Thoughts became visible, they have to be realized
(actualized) in order to be controlled.
Porno shadows of mass media. Suggestive (without showing the IT;
erotic language). Montage deconstructs (expropriation of body,
visual ownership), editing (reconstruction), camera is in a
position of power. Close-ups. Screen events are bigger then real
ones. The subject is action and the act. (Composition ABC). And
this is a moral act (watching), a social challenge.
The past:
Old Japanese prints, Indian mirrors, Persian pictures --
*reflecting on experience*? Imitations are sweeter than reality?
Does Imagination have sexual origins? (dreams).
Signs.
Child doesn't "read" them. No frame, no need, no use value. No
interest = no identification. Gender without/before sex.
Actually, the picture is only a stimulus. I can have my viewing
experience by recalling it, imagining, thinking -- which makes me
total generator of the message? More so, it could be triggered in
my mind without my conscience effort.
Does it mean that performance structure is build in me and the
visual text is only to activate it to the full extent?
Visual Sex (porno) is socialization of private parts, the last
remaining of personal (and private) property (body). Right of
privacy? Paradise is ruled by the communist god (no ownership = no
individual). Exposing sex relations is turning them into
collective property. Mutual funds. American idea of privacy =
creating a value > to exchange, to trade, to give and get.
Visible (knowledge = power), they are taken away from me
(copyright?). The society (technology) becomes an intermediary
between the sexes. This "humanization of the animal nature in us
is the resurrection of nature, control over the desire for
reproduction (we have no need for it any more, we can reproduce
ourselves technologically).
[ image ]
*porno* (prostitute), per-sell. Graphic of sex for sell, selling. (Webster)
Every show is a sale (propaganda), everything public (social
relations are distribution of property and selling-buying
dealings) has taste of pornography. Emphasizing the qualities of
living (being alive) (Closeups, again are the contacts and have
all the elements of sexual relations). Advertising is married to
sex.
The Resurrected needs *subjectification* -- techniques through
which the person initiates an active self-formation. "Operations
on [people's] own bodies, on their own souls, on their own
thoughts, on their own conduct." [11 Foucault Reader].
[ image ]
VII. SEX FACTORY: TV INTERACTION
Production of desire. The Teaser. Cultural machine that
control/produce the want. Promise, America is a land of promises,
the place of final solution.
McDonalds commercials are "child pornography" -- the natural is
enlarged, exaggerated, natural becomes super-natural.
Not only sex is against the gender but sexuality is against Sex;
alienation of the body (mine and the other). Tamed sexuality
instead of banned sexuality. Tyranny of the body (sex is only one
of many aspects of body powers).
Man + woman = social body (controllable). Socializing animal in
me, self-enslavement (double slave). Everything is a censorship
(self-censorship), we have a name for it -- mind.
Sexuality as a political apparatus: control through sexuality and
control of sexuality (to self-control).
If everything is political, everything is sexual, i.e. ideological. "Architecture of Eden" is building the opposites.
Separation: light and darkness, energy and matter, hot and cold,
and etc. Duality of creation, tension, conflict. Sex is
nature's power game.
The sexual revolution: *fabricated sexuality* (manufactured)
could be accepted, it normalized, controlled sexuality (porno
politics). Sexuality > to assure sexlessness. Induced desire
(Marx on needs) insures that every member of society is connected
(included) with the rest.
WORKS CITED
_Bakhtin Reader_
Eisenstein, Sergey. _Film Form_
_Foucault Reader_
Freud, Zigmund. _Psychotic Characters on Stage_
Beller, Jonathan. _Cinema_
... filmplus.org/POV/paraporn.html
