]A sublime pornography: if
they could do it, these guys would be swallowed up whole within
the prostitute. An exaltation with death? Perhaps, but at
the same time they are comparing and commenting on the
respective vaginas in mortal seriousness, without ever smiling
or breaking out in laughter, and without ever trying to touch
- except when playing by the rules. No lewdness, but an extremely
serious, infantile act borne of an undivided fascination
with the mirror of the female organ, like Narcissus' fascination
with his own image. Beyond the conventional idealism of the
strip-tease (perhaps there might even be some seduction here),
pornography at its most sublime reverses itself into a purified
obscenity, an obscenity that is purer, deeper, more visceral. But
why stop with nudity, or the genitalia? If the obscene is a matter
of representation and not of sex, it must explore the very
interior of the body and the viscera. Who knows what profound
pleasure is to be found in the visual dismemberment of mucous
membranes and smooth muscles? Our pornography still
retains a restricted definition. Obscenity has an unlimited future .
But take heed, it is not a matter of the deepening of a drive ;
what is involved is an orgy of realism, an orgy ofproduction .
A rage (perhaps also a drive, but one that substitutes itself for
all the others) to summon everything before the jurisdiction
of signs. Let everything be rendered in the light of the sign,
in the light of a visible energy. Let all speech be liberated and
proclaim desire . We are reveling, in this liberalization, which,
in fact, simply marks the growing; progress of obscenity. All that
is hidden and still enjoys a forbidden status, will be unearthed,
rendered to speech and made to bow before the facts. The real
is growing ever larger, some day the entire universe will be real,
and when the real is universal, there will be death.
Pornographic simulation : nudity is never anything but an extra
sign . Nudity veiled by clothing functions as a secret, ambivalent
referent. Unveiled, it surfaces as a sign and returns to
the circulation of signs: nudity de-sign. The same occurs with
hard core and blue porn : the sexual organ, whether erect or
open wide is just another sign in the hypersexual panoply.
Phallus-design . The more one advances willy-nilly in sex's veracity,
in the exposure of its workings, the more immersed one
becomes in the accumulation of signs, and the more enclosed
one becomes in the endless over-signification of a real that no
longer exists, and of a body that never existed. Our entire body
culture, with its concern for the "expression" of the body's
"desires," for the stereophonics of desire, is a culture of irredeemable
monstrosity and obscenity.Hegel: "Just as when speaking of the exteriority of the human
body, we said that its entire surface, in contrast to that of
the animal world, reveals the presence and pulsation of the
heart, we say of art that it has as its task to create in such a way
that at all points of its surface the phenomenal, the appearance
becomes an eye, the seat of the soul, rendering itself visible
to the spirit ." There is, therefore, never any nudity, never any
nude body that is simply nude; there is never just a body. It
is like the Indian said when the white man asked him why he
ran around naked: "For me, it is all face." In a non-fetishistic
culture (one that does not fetishize nudity as objective truth)
the body is not, as in our own, opposed to the face, conceived
as alone rich in expression and endowed with "eyes" : it is itself
a face, and looks at you. It is therefore not obscene, that
is to say, made to be seen nude. It cannot be seen nude, no
more than the face can for us, for the body is - and is only
- a symbolic veil; and it is by way of this play of veils, which,
literally, abolishes the body "as such," that seduction occurs .
This is where seduction is at play and not in the tearing away
of the veil in the name of some manifestation of truth or desire .
The indistinction of face and body in a total culture of appearances
- the distinction between face and body in a culture
of meaning (the body here becomes monstrously visible,
it becomes the sign of a monster called desire) - then the total
triumph in pornography of the obscene body, to the point
where the face is effaced. The erotic models are faceless, the
actors are neither beautiful, ugly, or expressive; functional nudity
effaces everything in the "spectacularity" of sex. Certain
films are no more than visceral sound-effects of a coital closeup;
even the body disappears, dispersed amongst oversize, partial objects.
Whatever the face, it remains inappropriate, for it
breaks the obscenity and reintroduces meaning where everything
aspires to abolish it in sexual excess and a nihilistic vertigo.
At the end of this terrorist debasement, where the body (and
its "desire") are made to yield to the evidence, appearances no
longer have any secret . A culture of the desublimation of appearances:
everything is materialized in accord with the most
objective categories. Apornographic cultureparexcellence; one
that pursues the workings of the real at all times and in all places.
A pornographic culture with its ideology of the concrete, of
facticity and use, and its concern with the preeminence of use
value, the material infrastructure of things, and the body as the
material infrastructure of desire. Aone-dimensional culture that
exalts everything in the "concreteness of production" or of
pleasure - unlimited mechanical labour or copulation. What
is obscene about this world is that nothing is left to appearances,
or to chance. Everything is avisible, necessary sign. Like
those dolls, adorned with genitalia, that talk, pee; and will one
day make love. Andthe little girl's reaction : "My little sister, she
knows how to do that too. Can't you give me a real one?"
From the discourse of labour to the discourse of sex, from
the discourse of productive forces to that of drives, one finds
the same ultimatum, that ofpro-duction in the literal sense of
the term . Its original meaning, in . fact, was not to fabricate, but
to render visible or make appear. Sex is produced like one
produces a document, or as one says of an actor that he performs
(se produit) on stage.
To produce is to materialize by force what belongs to another
order, that of the secret and of seduction. Seduction is, at all
times and in all places, opposed to production. Seduction removes
something from the order of the visible, while production
constructs everything in full view, be it an object, anumber
or concept .
Everything is to be produced, everything is to be legible,
everything is to become real, visible, accountable; everything
is to be transcribed in relations of force, systems of concepts
or measurable energy ; everything is to be said, accumulated,
indexed and recorded . This is sex as it exists in pornography,
but more generally, this is the enterprise of our entire culture,
whose natural condition is obscene: a culture of monstration,
of demonstration, of productive monstrosity.
No seduction here, nor in pornography, given the abrupt
production of sexual acts, and the ferocity of pleasure in its
immediacy. There is nothing seductive about bodies traversed
by a gaze literally sucked in by a vacuum of transparency ; nor
can there be even a hint of seduction within the universe of
production, where a principle of transparency governs the
forces belonging to the world of visible, calculable phenomena
- objects, machines, sexual acts, or the gross national
product.
The insoluble equivocalness of pornography: it puts an end to
all seduction via sex, but at the same time it puts an end to
sex via the accumulation of the signs of sex. Both triumphant
parody and simulated agony - there lies its ambiguity. In a sense,
pornography is true: it owes its truth to a system of sexual dissuasion
by hallucination, dissuasion of the real by the hyperreal,
and of the body by its forced materialization .
Pornography is usually faulted for two reasons - for
manipulating sex in order to defuse the class struggle (always
the old "mystified consciousness") and for corrupting sex (the
good, true sex, the sex to be liberated, the sex to be considered
amongst our natural rights) by its commodification. Pornography,
then, is said to mask either the truth of capital and the infrastructure,
or that of sex and desire. But in fact pornography
does not mask anything (yes, that is indeed the case). It is not
an ideology, i.e., it does not hide some truth; it is a simulacrum,
i .e., it is a truth effect that hides the truth's non-existence.
Pornography says: there must be good sex somewhere, for
I am its caricature. In its grotesque obscenity, it attempts to save
sex's truth and provide the faltering sexual model with some
credibility. Now, the whole question is whether good sex exists,
or whether, quite simply, sex exists, somewhere - sex as
the body's ideal use value, sex as possible pleasures which can
and must be "liberated ." It is the same question demanded of
political economy: is there "good" value, an ideal use value beyond
exchange value understood as the inhuman abstraction
of capital - an ideal value of goods or social relations which
can and must be "liberated"?
