Yule Heibel’s Post Studio © 2003-2009

Did you see/ do this?

November 23, 2003 at 7:28 pm | In yulelogStories | 10 Comments

It’s Sunday and I haven’t blogged for some days. I started this one on Friday night, when I had lots to do, thinking it would be one of those quickie “Did you see this one?” blogging moments. But it turned into a way-too-complicated topic, Saturday was busy, too, as was the evening, and so was Sunday all freaking day, and now it’s still busy, but I’m going to hit the “submit” button. This is an unfinished blog entry, consider it a bunch of entrails from which you can draw your own conclusions, but by all means read the Martin Amis review I point to first. Anyway, I began the “did you see this?” like this: Two items via Arts and Letters Daily: Did you read Christopher Caldwell’s review of Martin Amis’s new book, Yellow Dog? According to the reviewer here, Amis takes pornography apart by being pornographic himself. And while I’m not sure I want to read Yellow Dog, it’s probably recommended reading for any who think porn is just one more “cool,” “free,” “freaky — loosen up!” consumer item. From the review:

It is Amis’ point that with the digital proliferation (and the widening cultural acceptance) of pornography, sexual equilibrium has become even more elusive. Pornography’s hidden viciousness is that it wreaks its worst damage on those who follow that most noble of precepts: “Know thyself.” (…)
But those who reach this knowledge through porn are less lucky [than one of the main characters who reaches it through the ministrations of his real-life mistress]. The king’s assistant, Brendan “Bugger” Urquhart-Gordon, assumes he’s asexual until he watches a movie in which an actress tricked up to look like the pubescent princess is violated (”Brendan attended to the ordeal of his own arousal. You’d better hope that this doesn’t happen, he thought, when you’re watching the one about the oversexed undertaker, the coprophagic pigfarmer, the ladykilling ladykiller …”). Since much modern porno involves recherch� sex acts and twisted relationships, men (it is always men) who are turned on by it are left with only two self-destructive choices: perversion, if they give in to their desires; self-deception, if they resist them. Porn-enhanced masturbation, as described here, is an actual addiction; for Clint’s sessions, the term “self-abuse” is not metaphorical:

He knew that the distance between himself and the world of women was getting greater. Each night, as he entered the Borgesian metropolis of electronic pornography—with its infinities, its immortalities—Clint was, in a sense, travelling towards women. But he was also travelling away from them.

As readers of Time’s Arrow will remember, Amis is at his most brilliant when exploiting paradoxes like these, those moments when life seems to make as much sense if it’s run backward or turned inside out. As when Karla White says of herself and other X-rated stars: “When we watch porno, we fast-forward through the sex to get to the acting.” Or when the gangster Joseph Andrews describes Britain’s postwar economy: “Things opened up beautifully after the war, with all the austerity.”

Check out the full review, it’s really interesting. A while ago I surfed around a bit on some of the sites (like erosblog) where porn is just another fun thing to indulge. Naomi Wolf was getting skewered (no pun intended) for her argument that (real) women can’t compete against the spectacles set before porn-viewing men. How silly of Naomi, the bloggers said; any man would prefer a real woman, they said. What a bunch of stupid dopes these people are, I thought: they prove that human intelligence can be in very short supply. Amis’s argument is far more complex than the erosbloggers: he has gone the route of “know thyself,” and is willing to show us what an aporia pornography is. And by the way, Wolf is really smart:

By the new millennium, a vagina—which, by the way, used to have a pretty high “exchange value,” as Marxist economists would say—wasn’t enough; it barely registered on the thrill scale. All mainstream porn—and certainly the Internet—made routine use of all available female orifices. [more...]

Georges Bataille, the brilliant marxist theorist obsessed by heterogeneous sex, might agree; his solar anus is a veritable pot of gold in the eros-sphere, while the vagina is but a cheap trick. The other item that really caught my attention this last week: Jean-Paul Sartre is making a comeback. Sartre’s dialectical critiques deserve another look, especially today when we sometimes think we can “fix” something by piling an exacerbation, an excess, an addition on top (”fix” the status of women, say, by exacerbating girliness or “sexiness” or beauty products). For example, let me reach back to the 80s and my own studies of Existentialism. Researching an article on post-World War II French modernism, I came across Sartre’s critique of Surrealism, subsequently published as What is Literature? The essays first appeared in Les Temps Modernes, the Paris magazine started by Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in 1945. Here Sartre argues (in 1947) that Surrealism failed really to destroy anything (including bourgeois morality), despite its emphasis on shocking or discombobulating the viewer:

Quite the contrary; by means of the symbolic annulment of the self by sleep and automatic writing, by the symbolic annulment of objects by producing evanescent objectivities, by the symbolic annulment of language by producing aberrant meanings, by the destruction of painting by painting and literature by literature, surrealism pursues this curious enterprise of realising nothingness by too much fullness of being. It is always creating, that is, by adding paintings to already existing paintings and books to already established books, that it destroys.

A year earlier (1946), Simone de Beauvoir published her essay Pour une morale de l’ambiguit� in the same magazine. She analysed the Existentialist paradox that it’s necessary to destroy in order to exist. Using the example of spontaneous street celebrations after the Liberation of Paris from the Nazis in 1944, De Beauvoir noted that people were affirming their existence through (reckless) celebration. At the time, some cautioned against the (irresponsible) joy expressed in these festivals by reminding people of the very real problems facing them. De Beauvoir argued back that in the very sense of choosing to celebrate — regardless of possible negative consequences — there is attached to the confirmation of one’s being (expressed through celebration) a component of destruction in which existence is confirmed. The morality of Being is the morality of saving; there, one hoards in order to attain the immutability of in-itself. The morality of existence, however, implies squandering; one knows that one’s existence is linked to destruction. It sounds a bit like Amis’s dialectical turns, and I can’t help but be pleased by a renaissance of critical theory that possibly shows another way to (#1) dissect pornography the way Sartre dissected Surrealism and (#2) get a different (if troubled) perspective on political violence.