Spring Break
Relocating Pornography Post-9/11
by Rob Baum
Issue date: 12/1/08 Section: Fall 2008
activities; contextualization of the seen/viewed as a framed image; identification, based in the mysterious retrieval of memory. To this definition of seeing I add the perhaps
contentious claim that art, pastoral and documentary photography alike generate the type of responses common to the viewing of pornography; in fact, as the documentary
British Sex comments, "Art is often the word used to cover up that something is pornographic".2 What this means in the context of post-9/11 viewing is only slightly moderated, or modulated, from its pre-9/11 context: prior to 9/11 documentary photography
could also be said to be pornographic. But the attitude towards this viewing, the prolification of images, their frequent reproduction and swift dissemination, have
1 Berger, Jon. Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting Service, 1972).
2 British Sex, in an episode broadcast in New Zeland on 7 October 1999.
changed the reach and therefore the power of the image. Issuing from the United States and iconographic of the "new (post-9/11) America," these images have swept what is felt as an American force. Thus some images have assumed a centrality in the global imagination not possible before.
The visual field yields a plenitude of material not packaged, purveyed or self-identified as pornographic. Historically, pornography exists as a pre-occupation of active
spectation: without viewers' complicit and sexualized viewing pornography ceases to exist. Traditional pornography has backed its way into intellectual discourse, a result
of boundary shifts between low and high culture, a rejection of feminist claims to superior morality, and the embrace of sexuality as an academic study. This movement engendered a relocation of pornography from imperialist to literary discourses and a demand for the reassessment of what constitutes "pornography" in a postmodern arena. I suggest the removal of pornography altogether from moral discourse, and its radical re-evaluation outside sexuality. Further opening the arguments of Roland Barthes1 and Christian Metz2 on still photography and pornography, I propose that pornography is as positional and elastic as gender, as subject to taste as any other culture,
contentious claim that art, pastoral and documentary photography alike generate the type of responses common to the viewing of pornography; in fact, as the documentary
British Sex comments, "Art is often the word used to cover up that something is pornographic".2 What this means in the context of post-9/11 viewing is only slightly moderated, or modulated, from its pre-9/11 context: prior to 9/11 documentary photography
could also be said to be pornographic. But the attitude towards this viewing, the prolification of images, their frequent reproduction and swift dissemination, have
1 Berger, Jon. Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting Service, 1972).
2 British Sex, in an episode broadcast in New Zeland on 7 October 1999.
changed the reach and therefore the power of the image. Issuing from the United States and iconographic of the "new (post-9/11) America," these images have swept what is felt as an American force. Thus some images have assumed a centrality in the global imagination not possible before.
The visual field yields a plenitude of material not packaged, purveyed or self-identified as pornographic. Historically, pornography exists as a pre-occupation of active
spectation: without viewers' complicit and sexualized viewing pornography ceases to exist. Traditional pornography has backed its way into intellectual discourse, a result
of boundary shifts between low and high culture, a rejection of feminist claims to superior morality, and the embrace of sexuality as an academic study. This movement engendered a relocation of pornography from imperialist to literary discourses and a demand for the reassessment of what constitutes "pornography" in a postmodern arena. I suggest the removal of pornography altogether from moral discourse, and its radical re-evaluation outside sexuality. Further opening the arguments of Roland Barthes1 and Christian Metz2 on still photography and pornography, I propose that pornography is as positional and elastic as gender, as subject to taste as any other culture,
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posted 3/14/10 @ 7:44 PM EST
interesting article, but there could be two different points on that topic
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